Читать книгу The Destruction of the Greek Empire and the Story of the Capture of Constantinople by the Turks - Edwin Pears - Страница 13

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REIGN OF ORCHAN: STRUGGLES WITH EMPIRE; ITS SUCCESSES AND REVERSES; INVASIONS OF TARTARS. REIGN OF MURAD: DEFEAT OF SERBIANS AND BULGARIANS BY TURKS; BATTLE OF COSSOVO-POL AND ASSASSINATION OF MURAD.

The death of John, in 1391, is a convenient period to resume the narrative of the progress of the Turks.

Othman had died the year after the capture of Brousa, in 1326. He had succeeded in making his division of the Turks the most formidable in Asia Minor, in conquering or absorbing the Seljukian Turks, in destroying many flourishing cities and strongholds on the Black Sea, in entirely preventing the reorganisation of the power of the empire in the north-west portion of Asia Minor, and, above all, in organising a fighting race into a formidable army.

Reign of Sultan Orchan, 1326–1357.

His successor was his son Orchan. Nicaea is only distant four or five hours from Brousa, and had hitherto been able to resist all attacks by the Turks. Its population was fairly secure within its extensive and strong walls; the beautiful lake of Ascanius adjoins one side of it, and furnished a constant supply of water and of fish. Once, indeed, an emperor had sent up a fleet to assist a great army of Western Crusaders, and to receive from their hands the city which they were about to capture from the Seljuks.85 Orchan laid siege to it, and its citizens defended themselves with courage until relief came. Cantacuzenus and his sovereign hastily gathered together an army, and acting upon the advice of the imperial Grand Huntsman Godfrey, the bearer of the illustrious name which had won its first renown in the Crusade before this very place, successfully drove back the Turks. Unfortunately, on the evening of the same day, a panic seized the imperial troops, and the enemy, taking advantage of it, struck hard, captured the baggage, changed the panic into a rout, and captured the great and important city in the very hour of its triumph.

Master of the two cities, Brousa, a natural stronghold which had been strengthened by successive emperors, and Nicaea, whose ancient reputation and importance as the City of the Creed had been increased by its having served during two generations as the rallying place of the exiles from Constantinople during the Latin occupation, Orchan now assumed the title of sultan, made Brousa his capital, and struck the first Ottoman coins to replace those of the Seljukian sultans.

During his reign of thirty-two years he enlarged the territory occupied by the Ottomans, and greatly improved their national organisation. While constantly engaged in war, and though not less bent on conquest than his father, he neglected no opportunity of inducing the Christian subjects of the empire to come under his rule. He took care that the taxes levied were less than those paid in the empire. Although by this time Turkish armies were probably almost exclusively Moslem, Orchan formed one of his best regiments out of Christians who had voluntarily entered his service.

Orchan was far from obtaining uniform successes against the empire. He was often and bravely opposed by the imperial troops. In 1329, a large army, which had been transported into Thrace in a fleet of seventy ships, was destroyed near Trajanopolis, and most of the Turks were either killed or reduced to slavery. In 1330, a new invasion into Thrace of Turkish cavalry was defeated, and fifteen thousand Turks were slain. Orchan’s attempt in the following year to capture Ismidt failed, and he was obliged to sue for peace. In spite of these disasters, he was always able within a few months to assemble new armies, and to renew the struggle. Already he had succeeded in exacting tribute from nearly the whole of Bithynia. His troops, within two years, invaded Macedonia, Euboea, and Athens, and while Cantacuzenus was with difficulty holding his own against them, another army met Andronicus the Third in Thrace, and took possession of Rodosto—an army, however, which the emperor shortly afterwards destroyed.

New recruits were continually making their way across the Dardanelles or the Marmora into Thrace, until, in 1336, the Turkish army in that province met with disaster in an unexpected manner. A band of Tartars from the north made a descent upon them when they heard that they had been successful in a raid upon the Christian population and were carrying off an enormous mass of booty.86 Three months after the departure of the Tartars a new descent into Thrace was attempted by the Turks. Once again the Greeks were successful, and, in the same year, an army which ravaged the environs of Constantinople was destroyed and the Turkish fleet which brought them captured.

The efforts of Orchan were more successful in Asia Minor. A division of his army had laid siege again to Ismidt, and the inhabitants, in order to avoid imminent Nicomedia taken (1337).starvation, surrendered. The acquisition, in 1337, of this city, the most important seaport on the Asiatic side of the Marmora, and the head, then as now, of all the roads leading from the capital to every part of Asia Minor, Persia, and Syria, was of the utmost importance.

During the stormy joint reigns of John and Cantacuzenus (1342 to 1355), the empire was attacked both by Tartars on the north, and by the Turks in Asia Minor. The Bulgarian and Serbian kingdoms had both gained strength during the Latin occupation at the expense of the empire, and were ready to avail themselves of the aid alike of Turks and Tartars in their endeavours to capture territory from the empire. When, in 1342, Cantacuzenus was attacked by the Bulgarians, a division of the Turks, whose emir had taken the title of sultan of Lydia, was induced to come to his aid. Twenty-nine thousand arrived at the mouth of the Maritza, the ancient Hebrus, and with their aid a temporary relief was afforded; but for some reason, possibly a severe winter, they withdrew to Asia Minor. The Bulgarians on this occasion were not aided by the Tartars, probably because the latter were occupied in the Crimea, and throughout what is now southern Russia, in fighting the Genoese, who had blockaded the northern coast of the Black Sea. Apocaukus, the rival of Cantacuzenus, succeeded in the following year in hiring a Turkish fleet and army. Both sides, indeed, in the civil war then going on, as well as the Bulgarians and Serbians, never hesitated to increase their armies by employing Turks or Tartars as auxiliaries.

When, in 1344, Cantacuzenus promised his daughter Theodora in marriage to Orchan, he received at once the aid of a body of five thousand Ottoman Turks, and this number was increased when the marriage took place, two years later. But the young emperor John met him with another body of Turkish auxiliaries. Orchan would have made short work of John; for in an interview which took place with much ceremony and cordiality at Scutari to congratulate his father-in-law on his second coronation, he appears to have decided upon following the Turkish method of getting rid of a rival to the throne of his father-in-law. Cantacuzenus, however, would not sanction assassination. Orchan apparently could not understand any such scruples, and shortly afterwards sent a number of Turks to the capital on a pretended political mission, but really with the object of aiding Cantacuzenus by murdering John. The elder emperor, as soon as he learned the design, at once put his foot down, and declared that he would not permit John to go outside the palace except accompanied by him.87

In the attacks by Stephen, the kral of Serbia, who had taken the title of emperor of the Serbians and the Greeks, or emperor of Serbia and Romania—for both forms are used—Orchan once more sent troops to aid his father-in-law. In the struggles which took place at this time between the Genoese and the Venetians, Orchan aided the first. When the emperor wished to employ both, he was obliged to concede to the Turks a stronghold on the Thracian Chersonese. They, however, always proved to be dangerous allies, and the inhabitants of the whole northern coast of the Marmora were so harassed by them that great numbers deserted their farms and fled to the capital or elsewhere.

It was in 1355 that Cantacuzenus left the government in the hands of John. His policy and his influence had been directed towards coming to an agreement with the leading group of Turks—that, namely, ruled over by his son-in-law. Almost the last act before his withdrawal was to persuade Orchan and his son, Suliman, to give up the cities in Thrace which the Turks had occupied, on his behalf, during the struggle with John.88 Orchan, on his part, was to all appearances disposed, on the retirement of Cantacuzenus, to be on friendly terms with John, and, in consequence, each party assumed the attitude of an ally. It may be suggested that if a policy of friendliness had been continued, the Turks might have been content with their territory in Asia Minor. But such a solution was not possible. The Turkish nomad warriors, to whom the cultivation of the soil was distasteful, required new lands to roam over, and wanted new territories to plunder. The arable lands, which had supported large populations, were too small for nomad shepherds, and the latter were always being pressed forward to the north and west by a constant stream of immigrants behind them. Indeed, in the year when Cantacuzenus abdicated, Suliman, the son of Orchan, had to lead his armies and defend his territories against a newly arrived horde of Tartars in the north-east of Asia Minor. His successful defence was, at the same time, one more blow against the empire, for in this campaign he succeeded in Angora taken (1354).capturing the important stronghold of Angora, which commanded the great highroad to Persia.

But Orchan and John, though nominally on friendly terms, distrusted each other, and indeed Orchan’s character and conduct compare favourably with John’s. When Halil, the son of Orchan and of John’s sister-in-law Theodora, was captured by pirates from Phocaea, at the head of the Gulf of Smyrna, and then in the occupation of the Genoese, it was with difficulty that John could be induced to join in the siege of that city in order to release his nephew. He endeavoured to make a bargain with Orchan before he consented to co-operate. Finally Halil was ransomed, Orchan and John each paying half of the amount. On his release the two rulers met, and at Chalcedon, the present Kadikeuy, John promised his infant daughter to Halil, and the two rulers swore to establish a perpetual peace.

In 1359 Orchan died. During the thirty-two years of his reign, he had planted the Ottoman state firmly in Asia Minor. The landmarks of its progress were the important cities of Nicaea, Ismidt, and Angora, each of which dominated a large tract of country. He had compacted the Turks together, had attracted to his rule many of those who had previously acknowledged other emirs, and every year of his reign had seen the number of Ottoman Turks increasing by defections from his rivals and by immigrants from the eastward. He was an able commander and an exceptionally good administrator. While Othman is the founder of the Turkish dynasty, Orchan is the sovereign who caused his people to be recognised as forming a separate nationality, and was thus the maker of the Turkish nation.

Sultan Murad the First, 1359–1389.

Orchan was succeeded by his son Amurath or, adopting the modern orthography, Murad. He was the younger brother of Suliman, who died two months before his father. The new sultan was not influenced by any tie of relationship with the imperial family. Moreover, the influence of Islam was now becoming much more serious than it had hitherto been. Mahometanism had become the religion of most of the Turks, and Murad, stimulated by a certain mufti, soon learned to become a fanatical persecutor of even his own Christian subjects. He increased the amount of taxes which they had to pay, and generally made their burdens heavy. But by far the heaviest of those burdens was caused by the organisation of the body of ‘New Troops’ established by Orchan and known as Janissaries. He decreed a law, said to be founded upon the sacred text of the Koran, that the Christians should be required to give to himself absolutely one in five of their children. From the boys thus obtained, he established the famous corps whose deeds were to make them for ever famous.89

At the commencement of his reign, Murad turned to conquest. The work of Orchan had been to establish and compact Ottoman rule in Asia Minor. That of his successor was mainly to carry out a similar policy in Europe. After capturing Heraclia on the Black Sea, he crossed over into Thrace and occupied Adrianople, seized Didymotica and Chorlou, overran the whole country between Constantinople and Bulgaria, and sent his ships to plunder the Greek islands. In return for the fanaticism with which they had inspired him, he promised that one fifth of the spoil captured by land and sea should be given to the mollahs. When the sale of Christian captives took place, he took care, says Ducas,90 that the young, the well set-up, and the strong men should be bought at a low price to be added to the Janissaries.

The few remaining Turkish emirs in Asia Minor whose territories had not been gained by the Ottomans joined forces to resist the new sultan. At the same time the Serbians, Bulgarians, and Hungarians, all of whom had become alarmed at Murad’s progress, declared war upon him. Compelled in 1363 to defend himself against the emirs to the east and south of his territories in Asia Minor, he was sufficiently strong to force the emperor to bind himself not merely to give aid to him in Asia but not to attempt to recover any of the cities or territories which he had conquered in Europe. When he had broken the strength of the rebel emirs he crossed rapidly back into Thrace and near Adrianople defeated a combined army of Hungarians, Serbians, and Bulgarians. Two years afterwards, in 1366, an army of fifty thousand Serbians endeavoured in vain to drive Murad out of Adrianople. The lowest degradation which the empire had yet reached was when the miserable John consented to become the tributary of Murad in order that he might enjoy his remaining possessions in Europe. In 1373 he formally recognised the sultan as his suzerain, bound himself to render him military service and to give his son Manuel as a hostage.91

The only palliative which can be offered for John’s conduct is that he felt resistance to be useless. The empire wanted peace. The cities and towns had been devastated, not merely by successive wars, civil and foreign, but by the terrible Black Death, a plague which since 1346 had demanded everywhere its large quota of victims. He had seen Turkish armies defeated, but everywhere and always reappearing in greater numbers than ever. Asiatics were in overwhelming numbers on every side. The Egyptian Moslems had captured Sis, the capital of the Lesser Armenia, in 1369. Not only was every district in Asia Minor overrun with Turks, but they had penetrated Europe at many points. Bands of them had been left in the country when the armies, invited into Macedonia or Thrace or crossing over for plunder, had withdrawn. ‘For my part, I believe,’ says Ducas, ‘that there is a greater multitude of them between the Dardanelles and the Danube than in Asia Minor,’ and although Ducas wrote three quarters of a century later, his remarks are applicable to the reign of John. He describes how Turks from Cappadocia, Lycia, Cilicia, and Caria had sailed into Europe to pillage and to ruin the lands of the Christians. A hundred thousand had laid waste the country as far west as Dalmatia. The Albanians from being a large nation had become a small one. The Wallachs, the Serbians, and his own people, the Romans, had been completely ruined. Amid his lamentations over the evils inflicted by the invaders, his saddest thought and gravest source of complaint is that the victories gained by the Turks had been won by men who were the offspring of Christian parents, by Janissaries who were of Roman, Bulgarian, Serbian, Wallachian, or Hungarian origin. It is in the hopelessness of further resistance to such overwhelming forces that the only explanation of John’s acceptance of the position of a tributary prince is to be found.

The ruin of the South Serbians and Eastern Bulgarians of which Ducas speaks had really taken place. They had each ventured to declare themselves empires. With the indifference which characterises the Greek writers in regard to the conduct of other nations, they allude to rather than Battle of Harmanli, 1371.mention how that ruin had been brought about. In 1371, a great battle took place on the plains of the river Maritza which sealed the fate of the Eastern Bulgarians and of the Serbians who were in Macedonia. The three sons of the kral took advantage of the absence of Murad in Asia and, having collected an army of sixty thousand men, marched almost as far as Adrianople without opposition. While they were feasting in front of a bridge over the Maritza near Harmanli, fully assured of their safety by reason of their superiority in numbers, suddenly a night attack was made upon them by a small division of the Turkish army. It was soon joined by the entire army of seventy thousand Turks. Wild confusion was followed by a terrible slaughter. One of the three sons of the kral was killed and the other two were drowned in the Maritza. Hundreds of soldiers perished in attempting to cross it. The army was simply annihilated.92

To assist him in his conquest of Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Moldavia, Murad allied himself, in 1373, with the Tartars north of the Danube, and both prepared to attack these states.

Meanwhile in the troubles which arose in 1374 between John and his son Manuel on the one side and Andronicus the grandson of John by his eldest son of the same name, Murad exercised his right as suzerain. Shortly after Manuel was associated with his father, the two were ordered to accompany their lord on an expedition. It was during their absence that the eldest sons of the emperor and sultan, as already mentioned, either swore friendship and common action, when each succeeded to his father’s throne, or were considered by their fathers to have done so. It may have been believed that they had entered into a conspiracy to hasten such succession. Countouz, the obnoxious son of Murad, raised a rebellion against his father when he heard of his cruel resolve, but his troops passed over to the side of their sultan. He fled to Didymotica and joined Andronicus, who was also a fugitive from his father. Murad followed his son, and laid siege to that city. The inhabitants, pressed by famine, opened the gates to him. Countouz was blinded by his father, but Andronicus escaped; all the garrison was drowned and a large number of the inhabitants had their throats cut, Murad adding to his barbarity by compelling the fathers to be the executioners of their sons.93

In 1379, as already mentioned, John and his son Manuel, who had been captured and imprisoned by his grandson Andronicus, escaped to Scutari and took refuge with Bajazed, the son of Murad. The sultan, after assuring himself that the inhabitants of Constantinople preferred Manuel to Andronicus, made a bargain with John and his son by which, in return for aid in restoring them, the empire should pay a large annual tribute, furnish a contingent of twelve thousand soldiers, and surrender to him Philadelphia, the last remaining city in Asia Minor which still acknowledged the rule of Constantinople. John and Manuel entered Constantinople by the

Adrianople Gate, and Andronicus escaped across the Golden Horn to the Genoese in Galata. Much as the two emperors may have regretted their bargain, Murad held them to it, Philadelphia surrendered, 1379. and they, Christian emperors, marched to Philadelphia, in order to compel their own subjects to open its gates to the Turks.

Everywhere the Moslem flood was becoming irresistible. The sultan of Bagdad, in 1376, invaded Armenia and took prisoners both its king and queen; at the other extreme of the empire the Turks were in Epirus and were holding their own in many parts of Morea. The Knights-Hospitallers surrendered Patras to them in order to purchase the release of their Grand Master. One of the few strongholds in Thrace which Murad had not hitherto obtained was Apollonia, the present Sissipoli, which, partly built on an island in the Black Sea and in an otherwise strong position, had so far avoided capture. It was taken, however, by Murad in 1383, and, as usual, its garrison was cruelly massacred. In 1385, Murad captured Sofia, and then sent two armies, one to take possession of Cavalla and other places on the north shore of the Aegean, and the other to capture Monastir and various towns in Macedonia. In the same year a Turkish army took Belgrade and pushed on to Scutari in Albania, taking possession of it and of other strongholds. In 1387, after a siege lasting four years, Salonica was captured.

The Serbians, by their defeat at Belgrade and elsewhere, were compelled to become the vassals of Murad, and, following his usual custom, the sultan compelled their kral in 1381 to send two thousand men to aid him in subduing a revolt of his brother-in-law, the emir, in Caramania, the ancient Cilicia. Many subjects of the empire had to render like military service.

On the return of the Serbians, their discontent was so great that the kral Lazarus, son of the famous Stephen, collected a large army and made an effort for freedom. But, though his armies succeeded in killing twenty thousand of the enemy, Ali Pasha compelled them again to submit to the Turkish yoke. The brave Serbians soon, however, recovered, First battle of Cossovo-pol, 1889.and Lazarus succeeded in making alliances with his Christian neighbours which promised success. In 1389, with a large army of his own subjects, of Hungarians, Wallachs, Dalmatians, and Albanians, he once more endeavoured to crush the common enemy. A decisive battle was fought on the Plain of Black Birds or Cossovo-pol, in what is now called Old Serbia.94 Murad and his son Bajazed were in command. The Christians broke the right wing of the Turks, but the issue of the battle was turned by the daring of Bajazed. Lazarus and his suite were taken prisoners, and the triumph of the enemy was complete. The latest historian of Serbia observes that as the battle on the Maritza in 1371 sealed the fate of the Eastern Bulgarians and of the Serbians in Macedonia, so did this battle of Cossovo-pol in 1389 determine that of the Northern Serbians and the Western Bulgarians.95

Assassination of Murad.

During or immediately after the battle, there followed a dramatic incident. A young Serb ran towards the Turkish army, and when they would have stopped him declared that he wanted to see their sultan in order that he might show him how he could profit by the fight. Murad signed to him to come near, and the young fellow did so, drew a dagger which he had hidden, and plunged it into the heart of the sultan. He was at once cut down by the guards.96 The Serbians, according to Ducas, did not know of the sultan’s death for a considerable time, and did not defend themselves with their usual courage. Lazarus was captured, and was hewn in pieces.