Empire of God, page 33
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656 Baldwin II Porphyrigenitus, Byzantine emperor, Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Baldwin-II-Porphyrogenitus.
657 Deno John Geanokoplos, Emperor Michael Paleologus and the West, 1258-1282, (Braunfell Books, August 31, 2022), 23.
658 Ibid., 26.
659 Ibid.
660 Ibid., 74.
661 Ibid., 77.
662 Ibid., 84.
663 Ibid., 100.
664 Ibid.
665 Ibid.
666 Ibid.
667 Ibid., 100-101.
668 Ibid., 101.
669 Ibid., 103.
670 Ibid., 138.
671 Ibid., 139.
672 Ibid., 148.
673 Ibid., 149.
674 Ibid.
675 Ibid.
676 Ibid., 151.
677 Ibid.
678 Ibid., 158-9.
679 Ibid., 167.
680 Ibid., 172.
681 Ibid.
682 Ibid.
683 Ibid.
684 Ibid., 173-4.
685 Ibid., 174.
686 Ibid., 219.
687 Ibid., 220.
688 Ibid., 222.
689 Ibid.
690 Ibid.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Seeds of Destruction
Shaky Ground
The empire was restored, but it could not be said to be in robust health. When Michael VIII died in 1282, his oldest son became Emperor Andronikos II Palaiologos. Andronikos was twenty-three and reigned in Constantinople for forty-five years. While many monarchs whose reign was that long presided over serene periods of stability and calm, Andronikos was not among them. His tenure on the imperial throne was instead one of long, slow decline, much of it brought about by Andronikos himself.
Andronikos didn’t set out to weaken the empire, but he did act decisively to reverse a great deal of what his father had done, and many of these actions ended up having that baneful effect. Soon after taking the throne, he repudiated the union with Rome. This did not weaken the empire in itself, as the union was already a dead letter with the pope’s excommunication of its foremost champion, Andronikos’s father, but it did constitute a recognition of the grim reality: the Roman Empire was now among those whom the Western powers considered to be adversaries. The same states to which Alexios I Komnenos had looked for help just a century before—when he sent envoys to the council of Piacenza to ask the pope for soldiers—now saw the Roman emperor as a rebellious schismatic and usurper.
This couldn’t have come at a worse time. The crusader threat was receding, but the peril from the warriors of jihad was rising. While the empire had prevented the jihadis from advancing into Eastern Europe for six centuries, the Western Europeans did not regard this as a service for which they, too, should be grateful. The crowned heads of the various Western European states saw the Roman Emperor as the schismatic and hence illegitimate “king of the Greeks,” rather than as a brother Christian whom they should aid. The condition for that aid was that the Romans accept what they considered to be an alien creed, an illegitimate alteration of the faith that they believed had been the cornerstone of their survival for so long.
Thus isolated, Andronikos compounded his problems by making a series of unwise decisions. Faced with a depleted treasury, he introduced new taxes and further devalued the hyperpyron, the already devalued replacement for the nomisma that Alexios I Komnenos had introduced in 1092. This gave the Venetians, who were always looking for a way to supplant the empire, an opening: they introduced a superior rival coin that soon became the preferred currency for trade in the entire Eastern Mediterranean region. Andronikos was in no position to challenge the Venetians and get into a trade war: such a conflict could all too easily become a hot war, and Andronikos knew that the empire did not have the might to emerge victorious against the Republic of Venice and its allies, who could possibly include Charles of Anjou and the crusaders in Greece.
To neutralize all these threats, Andronikos pursued diplomacy. His wife Anna had died in 1281; in 1284, he married Yolande of Montferrat, daughter of the Marquis of Montferrat, who was the principal claimant to the throne of the Latin Kingdom of Thessalonica. That crusader kingdom had passed from the scene in 1224, but the marquis’s ongoing claim was a manifestation of the crusader resolve to recapture all the land that had once been part of the crusader domains. The marriage signified a recognition that the territory of the old crusader kingdom was legitimately part of the Roman Empire.691 In 1285, Charles of Anjou died, his dream of entering Constantinople and becoming Roman Emperor unfulfilled. Andronikos then concluded a truce with the Venetians, which made him feel so secure that he cut costs by disbanding the small navy that his father had assembled. Charles assumed that he could rely on the Genoese for naval power, but that, of course, depended upon continuing good relations with the Genoese and the unsupported assumption that the Genoese would fight loyally for the Romans should they be called upon to do so.
The hazards of these policies became even clearer in 1294, when Genoa and Venice went to war. Andronikos supported the Genoese, but they concluded a treaty with the Venetians in 1299, and the Venetians were angry that Andronikos had sided with their foes despite the 1285 treaty between Venice and the empire. The Genoese were out of the conflict, but the Venetians continued their war with the Romans, a war that Andronikos had neither the resources nor the will to pursue. In an October 1302 peace treaty, the Romans ceded possession of several Aegean islands to the Venetians and agreed to give them seventy-nine thousand hyperpyra.692
When his increased tax revenues allowed Andronikos to revive the military, he did so primarily by hiring mercenaries, increasing the urgency of the question of loyalty. That question had come to the fore in 1293, when Andronikos sent his nephew Alexios Philanthropenos to command Roman forces against the Turks. Alexios won several victories and even recaptured Miletos on the southwest coast of Asia Minor. At that point, however, Alexios’s troops proclaimed him emperor, but he was not destined to pose a longstanding threat to Andronikos; whether or not the emperor had a hand in it, some soldiers of the empire caught and blinded Alexios.
Andronikos then hired a contingent of Catalans to fight the Turks, but they refused to accept his debased hyperpyra as payment and revolted, fighting against the Roman forces instead of the jihadis. The Catalan mercenaries rampaged through Thrace and were even joined by the Turks they had been hired to fight. They pillaged the remaining European holdings of the empire, and meanwhile, a new Turkish dynasty—the Ottomans—had overcome the Seljuks and other rivals and was advancing virtually unopposed in Anatolia.
The humiliation of all these disasters led to a disruption of Andronikos’s marital bliss. His wife Yolande—whom he had given the Greek name Irene—apparently calculated that being the wife of a failed emperor of the Romans was a losing proposition and demanded that Andronikos grant Thessalonica—which she saw as her birthright—to her sons. Andronikos refused, whereupon Irene left Constantinople and set up her court in her city, effectively detaching it from the Roman Empire. She may have found Constantinople depressing; a traveler to the city early in the fourteenth century noted that “within the city there are sown fields and gardens,” a likely sign that the city was not as large as it once had been and that abandoned areas had been taken over for cultivation, “and many destroyed houses.”693
Andronikos, master of the once-great city, let her go. He was, of course, uninclined to go to war against his own wife and barely had the resources to do so even if he had so desired. When the empress died in 1317, the empire was able to recover the territory she cherished, but the damage had been done, and the weakness of the Roman Empire had once again been displayed before the world.
Andronikos did try to make up for its many deficiencies. He endeavored unsuccessfully to revive the navy and strengthen the army but was soon distracted by dynastic disputes within his own family that consumed the last years of his reign. Emblematic of the empire’s depletion and weakness at this point was the fact that in 1324, Andronikos called upon his old rival Alexios Philanthropenos—now in his late fifties and blind for a quarter-century—to lead an expedition to recapture the Western Asia Minor city of Philadelphia from the Turks. Improbably, Alexios succeeded, aided in no small part by the intimidating effect of his fearsome reputation.
That was all the glory of Rome that remained in this period. In 1320, Andronikos II’s son and co-emperor, Michael IX Palaiologos, died, making his grandson Andronikos III the heir apparent. The pious Andronikos II, however, had heard so many stories of Andronikos III’s libertinism that he refused to confirm the succession, whereupon Andronikos III took up arms against his grandfather and deposed him in 1328. Andronikos II Palaiologos died in a monastery in 1332, having inherited an empire that could have recaptured lost territory and emerged at the end of his reign stronger than it had been when he became emperor. Due to his financial and military mismanagement and political miscalculation, however, the empire’s illness now appeared terminal.
Reunion Again
Despite his best efforts, Andronikos III Palaiologos could not reverse the downward spiral. When the Turks took Bithynia, he reversed the policy of Andronikos II, just as Andronikos II had reversed the policy of Michael VIII: Andronikos III once again sought union with Rome. The new emperor sent a monk named Barlaam of Calabria to Avignon to make the case before Pope Benedict XII that a new Crusade was needed. Andronikos III knew very well what the price of this would be. Barlaam told the pope that force had not brought about a reunion of the churches, “since the Latins have subdued the empire, without subduing the minds, of the Greeks.”694
Barlaam noted that while the Romans would respect an ecumenical council, but “if they reprobate the decrees of Lyons, it is because the Eastern churches were neither heard nor represented in that arbitrary meeting.”695 He called instead for “the patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem” to be allowed to participate in “a free and universal synod.”696 However, he continued, “the empire is assaulted and endangered by the Turks, who have occupied four of the greatest cities of Anatolia. The Christian inhabitants have expressed a wish of returning to their allegiance and religion; but the forces and revenues of the emperor are insufficient for their deliverance: and the Roman legate must be accompanied, or preceded, by an army of Franks, to expel the infidels, and open a way to the holy sepulchre.”697
Barlaam declared that while “a general synod can alone consummate the union of the churches,” such a council could not be held until the patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem were freed from Muslim rule.698 He also pointed out “the Greeks are alienated by a long series of oppression and injury: they must be reconciled by some act of brotherly love, some effectual succor, which may fortify the authority and arguments of the emperor, and the friends of the union.”699 He reasoned that “if some difference of faith or ceremonies should be found incurable, the Greeks, however, are the disciples of Christ; and the Turks are the common enemies of the Christian name.”700 Accordingly, “It will become the piety of the French princes to draw their swords in the general defense of religion.”701 He called on the pope and the “powers of the West” to “embrace a useful ally, to uphold a sinking empire, to guard the confines of Europe; and rather to join the Greeks against the Turks.”702
Benedict XII, according to Edward Gibbon, responded with “cold and stately indifference,” addressing a letter not to the emperor of the Romans and his brother patriarchs of the East but employing appallingly demeaning language, referring to the emperor as the “moderator of the Greeks” and to the Eastern patriarchs as “the persons who style themselves the patriarchs of the Eastern churches.”703 In Constantinople, the Romans knew when they were being insulted, and nothing came of Andronikos III’s proposal.
Andronikos III did manage to revive the Roman navy to the extent that it was able to retake some Aegean islands from the Genoese and stave off any threat to Constantinople. He also restored Roman power in Thessalonica and another former crusader domain, Epiros. The losses, however, continued elsewhere. The new Serb kingdom seized numerous Roman holdings in the Balkans. In Asia Minor, the Ottoman Turks continued their inexorable advance.
When Andronikos III died in June 1341, his son John V Palaiologos was only nine years old. A court official named John Kantakouzenos, a close friend of Andronikos III’s, was named regent. Just three months later, Kantakouzenos left Constantinople in order to oversee preparations for war against the crusader holdings that still remained in Greece; while he was gone, he was overthrown as regent. A new civil war began.
The Hesychast Controversy
During the reign of Andronikos III, a controversy arose in the church that would come to define Orthodox Christianity as opposed to its Latin form and had political repercussions as well. The practice of hesychasm (“stillness”) had become widespread among the monks of Mount Athos and elsewhere. This involved, among other practices, rigorous self-denial and constant repetition of the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner,” which was based on a Gospel passage in which a blind man calls out to Jesus, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me” (Mark 10:47, Luke 18:38). The result was said to be an experience of the Divine Light that had come upon Peter, James, and John when they were with Jesus on Mount Tabor (Matthew 17:1–8, Mark 9:2–8, Luke 9:28–36). That is, they would do nothing less than see God: “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8).
As hesychasm grew in popularity, however, Andronikos III’s former envoy, Barlaam of Calabria, challenged it. He had been born in southern Italy in lands that had once belonged to the Romans and which still had a strong Orthodox Christian presence. But he had also been influenced by the Western theological system of scholasticism and attacked hesychasm as a heretical, for “no one has ever seen God” (John 1:18). He maintained that the light on Mount Tabor was not God but was created by Him, and mocked the hesychasts as omphalopsychoi: “people with their souls in their navels.”704
Defending the hesychasts was a monk of Mount Athos, Gregory Palamas, who taught that the hesychasts experienced the energies of God, which were distinct from His essence. No one could see the divine essence, but the divine energies could be experienced. In 1341, not long before his death, Andronikos III convened a council in Constantinople that declared that Palamas’s teaching was in accord with the Orthodox faith. The controversy continued for several more years, but in 1351, at another council that was considered to be the continuation of the 1341 council and others that had been held in the intervening years, the hesychasts won a total victory. John Kantakouzenos oversaw this council, and in doing so, performed an extremely valuable service: he prevented another schism in Orthodoxy, one that could have had disastrous consequences, particularly after the fall of the empire. The Romans entered Ottoman captivity unified in faith; had they not been unified, that turbulent and oppressive period would have been even worse, with the Ottomans playing one faction off the other.
In the years following the resolution of the controversy, Gregory Palamas was canonized and became one of the most important saints of the Orthodox Church, commemorated on the Second Sunday of Great Lent each year. Hesychasm and Palamas’s essence-energies distinctions became core elements of Orthodox Christianity.
The hesychast controversy resulted in Orthodoxy growing more mystically oriented, while in the West, Roman Catholicism continued with its scholastic influence to become so rationalistically oriented that many Orthodox Christians thought they were downplaying the spiritual aspects of the Christian faith, to their own detriment. The Latins for their part charged the Orthodox with indifference to what they saw as key theological distinctions. The two traditions grew even farther apart, as the identification of Barlaam with scholasticism also led to opposition to hesychasm becoming identified among some Romans with allegiance to the West.
Other allegiances were even more immediately troubling. The struggle for the regency had stalemated, but in 1345, John Kantakouzenos found a way out of the impasse. He offered the Ottoman sultan his daughter in exchange for help in the Romans’ civil war. Specifically, John needed assistance against his former ally, Stephen Dusan of Serbia, who had switched sides and joined his rivals in Constantinople. That would mean that Orkhan would not only get John’s daughter but a Turkish presence in Europe; the Turks duly arrived to help John Kantakouzenos and have not left to this day. Edward Gibbon notes that Constantinople “had often, in the lapse of a thousand years, been assaulted by the Barbarians of the East and West; but never till this fatal hour had the Greeks been surrounded, both in Asia and Europe, by the arms of the same hostile monarchy.”705
As for John’s daughter, Gibbon adds that the Turks promised that she could remain a Christian while taking her place in the sultan’s harem: “Without the rites of the church, Theodora was delivered to her barbarous lord: but it had been stipulated, that she should preserve her religion in the harem of Bursa; and her father celebrates her charity and devotion in this ambiguous situation.”706
