A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [349]
The feuds began with the pretensions of John Cantacuzene, who as chief minister bore the title the “Great Domestic” and served as regent for John V Paleologus, child heir to the throne. In 1341 Cantacuzene declared himself joint—in reality, rival—Emperor as John VI. Through ensuing years of civil war he maintained his hold by purchasing the services of the hardy, disciplined Ottoman forces. When, at Cantacuzene’s invitation, Sultan Orchan crossed the Hellespont in 1345, it was, in Gibbon’s knell, “the last and fatal stroke” in the long fall of the ancient Roman Empire.
Murad I, Orchan’s successor, gained a foothold on the European side with the capture in 1353 of Gallipoli, key to the Hellespont. Exactly 100 years later the Turks were to take Constantinople itself, but Cantacuzene, like other great actors in history, had no vision of the consequences inherent in his acts. Rather, to cement the collaboration with his new allies, he gave his daughter in marriage to Orchan in a Moslem ceremony, bridging the abyss between Christian and infidel without scruple—and without affecting his faith. Some years later, when forced to abdicate, the once “Great Domestic” became a monk and retired to write in cloistered calm a history of the times he had done so much to embroil.
Incurable discord at Constantinople gave the Turks the means to exploit their gateway at Gallipoli. Upon Cantacuzene’s abdication, his former ward, John Paleologus, regained the throne (which accounts for the alarming succession of John VI by John V) only to plunge into a vicious family struggle in which sons and grandson, uncle and nephew over the next 35 years deposed, imprisoned, tortured, and replaced one another in various combinations with Murad I.
While assisting the Paleologi toward their mutual destruction, the Turks, like a hand opening out from the wrist at Gallipoli, expanded through the Byzantine and Bulgarian dominions. In 1365 Murad advanced his capital to Adrianople (Edirne) 120 miles inside Europe. In 1371 he defeated a league of Serbs and Bulgars on the river Maritza in Bulgaria. John V henceforth held part of his empire, and the Bulgar boyars their territories, as vassals of the Sultan. In 1389 a new league of Serbs, Rumanians, and their northern neighbors, the Moldavians, attempted to stem the Turks but were defeated by Murad in the decisive Battle of Kossovo, the grave of Serbian independence. The Serbian Czar and the elite of his nobles were killed and his son forced to accept vassalship to the Sultan. Murad himself was killed after the battle by a dying Serb who, feigning to have a secret to tell the Sultan, stabbed him in the belly when Murad leaned over to listen to him. However, the Sultan left his successor, Bajazet, the strongest power in the region. In the 35 years since their crossing of the Bosporus, the Turks had overrrun the eastern Balkans up to the Danube and now stood at the borders of Hungary.
The division of their foes was the major factor in the Turkish advance. A legacy of bitter mistrust had separated Constantinople from the West ever since the Latin crusaders had penetrated the Eastern dominions. The old schism in Christianity between the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches left an implacable dispute over minor matters of ritual—the less fundamental they were, the greater the rancor—and made adversaries of the Balkan peoples. Bulgaria and Wallachia (the contemporary name for Rumania) and