Download PDF | Byzantium Between The Ottomans And The Latins By Nevra Necipoglu
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BYZANTIUM BETWEEN THE OTTOMANS AND THE LATINS
This is the first detailed analysis of Byzantine political attitudes towards the Ottomans and western Europeans during the critical last century of Byzantium. The book covers three major regions of the Byzantine Empire — Thessalonike, Constantinople, and the Morea — where the political orientations of aristocrats, merchants, the urban populace, peasants, and members of ecclesiastical and monastic circles are examined against the background of social and economic conditions. Through its particular focus on the political and religious dispositions of individuals, families, and social groups, the book offers an original view of late Byzantine politics and society which is not found in conventional narratives. Drawing on a wide range of Byzantine, western, and Ottoman sources, it authoritatively illustrates how late Byzantium was drawn into an Ottoman system in spite of the westward-looking orientation of the majority of its ruling elite.
NEVRA NECIPOGLU is Professor of History at Bogazici University, Istanbul. She has written numerous journal articles on late Byzantine society, economy, and politics, and edited Byzantine Constantinople: Monuments, Topography and Everyday Life (2001).
Acknowledgements
This book grew out of my doctoral dissertation submitted to the History Department of Harvard University in 1990. In the course both of the evolution of the dissertation and of its transformation into a book, I benefited from the guidance and support of numerous individuals and institutions.
My deepest gratitude goes to Angeliki E. Laiou — an exemplary teacher, thesis supervisor, colleague, and friend — who has been an endless source of inspiration and wisdom through all these years. Without her encouragement and continued interest, this project might have taken even longer to complete the transformation from thesis to book. The late Nicolas Oikonomidés deserves particular mention for the many invaluable suggestions as well as the enthusiastic support he provided up until his much regretted death in May 2000. To Thor Sevéenko, who introduced me to the intricacies and mysteries of Byzantine Greek, I extend my very special thanks for his instruction, encouragement, and genuine interest in my work. Along the way, I was fortunate to have stimulating discussions with and to receive invaluable guidance, comments, references, offprints, or, during moments of despair, much needed personal support and encouragement from a number of friends and colleagues, among whom I warmly acknowledge Michel Balard, Iréne Beldiceanu-Steinherr, Faruk Birtek, the late Robert Browning, Melek Delilbasi, Marie Theres Fégen, Thierry Ganchou, Selahattin Hakman, Halil Inalcik, Mahnaz Ispahani, David Jacoby, Cemal Kafadar, Michel Kaplan, the late Alexander Kazhdan, Klaus-Peter Matschke, Cécile Morrisson, Giilru Necipoglu, Soli Ozel, Yesim Sayar, Kostis Smyrlis, AliceMary Talbot, Betiil Tanbay, and Elizabeth Zachariadou. I am also grateful to my colleagues at the History Department of Bogazici University, as well as to my graduate students, who contributed to the completion of this book through their moral support and enthusiasm in things Byzantine. Furthermore, I wish to thank Elif Cakin for her help in drawing the maps. Finally, I would like to express my lifelong indebtedness to my parents Ulkii and Hikmet Necipoglu, for they were the ones who sparked both my general interest in history and my particular curiosity for the Byzantine past of Istanbul on the occasion of our memorable visits to the Hagia Sophia and other historic sites of the city in my childhood days.
Material support for this work was provided by generous grants from a number of institutions. The Department of History and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University supplied grants throughout the writing of the dissertation. A Junior Fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks during 1986-7 afforded me the first opportunity to engage in full-time research directed towards my topic. Much subsequent groundwork was laid once again at the same institution, where I spent the academic year 1993-4 as a Fellow in Byzantine Studies. I hereby would like to extend my thanks to all the members of the Dumbarton Oaks community, in particular to Irene Vaslef and Mark Zapatka of the Byzantine Library, who created a warm and friendly atmosphere that was most conducive to productive work on both occasions. Owing to the initiative and encouragement of Nusin Asgari, I also spent a profitable month at Oxford as a Martin Harrison Memorial Fellow in the summer of 1995, which enabled me not only to utilize the abundant resources of the Bodleian Library, but to enjoy as well the hospitality of Mrs. Elizabeth Harrison. Further work on the book was undertaken during leave as a visiting professor at the University of Paris I in the spring of 2002. I am grateful to Michel Kaplan for his kind invitation and to the staff members of the Byzantine libraries of the Sorbonne, Collége de France, and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique for their assistance.
Some of the material in this book has been discussed or has appeared in different versions in the following publications: “Ottoman merchants in Constantinople during the first half of the fifteenth century,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 16 (1992), 158—69; “Economic conditions in Constantinople during the siege of Bayezid I (1394-1402),” in Constantinople and its Hinterland, ed. C. Mango and G. Dagron (Aldershot, 1995), pp. 157-67; “Constantinopolitan merchants and the question of their attitudes towards Italians and Ottomans in the late Palaiologan period,” in Polypleuros nous: Miscellanea fiir Peter Schreiner zu seinem 60. Geburtstag, ed. C. Scholz and G. Makris (Munich and Leipzig, 2000), pp. 251-63; “The aristocracy in late Byzantine Thessalonike: a case study of the city’s archontes (late 14th and early 1sth centuries),” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 57 (2003), 133-51; “Social and economic conditions in Constantinople during Mehmed II’s siege,” in 1453. H dAwon tns KewvotavtivovtroAns Kal Nn uEeTaBaon amd TOUS UETAIGVIKOUS OTOUS VECoTEPOUS KPdVOUS, ed. T. Kioussopoulou (Iraklion, 2005), pp. 75-86.
Note on transliteration
In general, I have employed a Greek transliteration of Byzantine proper names and technical terms. However, some common first names have been rendered in their modern English form: for example, John, not Ioannes, and Constantine, not Konstantinos. By the same principle, for well-known place names I have generally preferred the use of conventional modern English spelling: for example, Constantinople, Athens, and Coron. For proper names and technical vocabulary pertaining to the Ottomans, on the other hand, modern Turkish orthography has been used.
The topic and the sources
This book is a study of the political attitudes that emerged among different segments of Byzantine society in response to the Ottoman expansion. Its principal aims are, first, to categorize these attitudes with regard to specific groupings among the urban and rural populations of the Byzantine Empire (e.g. the aristocracy, merchants, lower classes, ecclesiastical and monastic circles) and, secondly, to explore the underlying social and economic factors, besides the more apparent political and religious ones, that played a role in the formation of political attitudes. In an atmosphere of extreme political and military instability marked by a number of civil wars and foreign invasions during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, people from different segments of Byzantine society in different regions of the empire sought by various means to secure their best interests in the face of the rapidly expanding Ottoman Empire. How they reacted to the Ottoman advance, the kinds of solutions they sought, the preferences they developed with respect to foreign alliances, and the local factors that played a role in regional variations are complex issues that merit careful investigation. In themselves, the options that were available as far as foreign political orientations are concerned were perhaps limited, consisting of either a cooperation with the Latin West against the Ottomans, or an accommodation with the Ottomans, or, in rejection of both, the maintenance of an opposition to the Ottomans by means of the empire’s own resources and capacities.’ What is, however, more complex and of greater interest for the purposes of this study is the links that can be established between specific individuals or groups, their political dispositions, and their socioeconomic interests. Through a multilayered comparison of the views embraced by different groups within a given urban or rural environment and those embraced by members of the same group across different regions of the empire, the aim is to present political attitudes in all their complexity and ambivalence.
From what has been said above, it ought to be clear that this is not a study of late Byzantine politics as such. It has not been my intention to investigate the institutions and structures through which political choices were negotiated and implemented in the late Byzantine world. My main objective is to explore Byzantine attitudes towards the Ottomans and western Europeans, focusing on the political and religious views of individuals, families, and social groups, which previously have not been investigated adequately. Thus the reader should not be surprised to find that certain aspects of the political history of late Byzantium which seemed to have little relevance for an analysis of political attitudes have been overlooked in this book. It might have been worthwhile, for instance, to concentrate on the political process itself, which would have required an in-depth analysis of the role of the emperor, the imperial family, the aristocracy, the populace, and the clergy and monks in the politics of the late Byzantine Empire, as well as a discussion of the structure of the aristocratic family and how it affected Palaiologan imperial politics. But such themes would take us well beyond the parameters of the present study and constitute the subject matter of an entirely different book.
For the sake of convenience the attitudes corresponding to the three options enumerated above could be labeled as pro-Latin/anti-Ottoman, pro-Ottoman/anti-Latin, and anti-Latin/anti-Ottoman. But such labels, when used without qualification, conceal the nuances and variations involved in the formation of political attitudes. In the present work, the terms “pro-Ottoman,” “pro-Latin,” “anti-Ottoman,” and “anti-Latin” are used most of the time to designate people who actively supported or opposed the Ottomans or the Latins. An effort is made to avoid these terms as much as possible in cases when the Byzantines showed an inclination to favor one or the other foreign group out of other considerations, such as in order to put an end to a siege or war, or so as to overcome hunger, famine, and/or poverty. It is preferable to speak in these cases of conciliatory attitudes or of attitudes of accommodation, and to try to outline the specific circumstances that led people to adopt particular political positions. Another term whose meaning and use require some explanation in advance is the word “Latin.” In Byzantine texts the word appears both as a collective designation for adherents to the Roman Catholic faith, and as a term describing people from specific political entities in the West, such as the Venetians, the Genoese, or the Navarrese. In this study the term is used in the latter sense primarily — that is, in reference to western European powers, and especially, but not exclusively, in reference to Italians, with whom many Byzantines had close economic and political contacts in the Palaiologan period. Following Byzantine practice, however, it is sometimes used in a predominantly religious sense as a synonym for “Catholic” as well. In either case, the context in which the term “Latin” appears reveals the sense in which it is being used if its specific meaning has not been pointed out.
Reduced politically, administratively, and economically, the Byzantine Empire in the late Palaiologan period had neither sufficient strength nor the means to resist the Ottomans on its own and consequently needed the assistance of foreign allies. In addition to the military pressure of the Ottomans, the weak and decentralized empire of the Palaiologoi faced the economic pressure of the Italian maritime states, which controlled much of its trade at this time. Furthermore, the appeals of the Byzantine state to the West for a joint military venture against the Ottomans were by necessity often addressed to the pope, who alone had sufficient influence and authority to unite and mobilize the diverse powers of Christian Europe towards such an enterprise. Yet on each occasion the Byzantines appealed to the papacy, they encountered the recurring response that the centuries-old schism that separated the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox Churches had to be healed first, through the return of the latter to the former’s fold. Such, then, was the dual challenge that Byzantium faced from the Ottoman and Latin worlds during the late Palaiologan period.
In terms of chronology, this study covers the pivotal period from the early 1370s, when Byzantium became a tributary vassal of the Ottomans, to 1460, the year in which Mistra and the so-called Despotate of the Morea fell to the forces of Mehmed the Conqueror. Geographically, it focuses on three major areas of the Byzantine Empire: Thessalonike, Constantinople, and the Morea.* Some general problems are addressed throughout the book with the purpose of establishing links between political attitudes and socioeconomic factors. These include, first, the impact of Byzantine— Ottoman military conflicts on economic and social life in the two cities mentioned above, and their influence on the political orientation of different segments of the urban population. Secondly, within the context of rural areas encompassing the environs of Thessalonike and the province of Morea in the Peloponnese, the social and economic consequences of the loss of major productive Byzantine territories to the Ottomans are considered, with special emphasis on the political behavior of the landed aristocracy. The position of the members of ecclesiastical and monastic circles with regard to the Ottomans and the Latins constitutes another theme that is embedded in each individual treatment of the geographic regions named above.
These broad issues provide the framework for the specific questions which are explored in particular chapters. Chapter 2 is intended to set the historical background through a discussion of major political developments of the Palaiologan era, including some of the long-term consequences of the Fourth Crusade, the expansion of the Ottomans in Byzantine territories and their methods of conquest, as well as the official Byzantine policy towards the Ottomans, the western powers, and the papacy. In Part I, which is devoted to Thessalonike and its surrounding countryside, chapter 3 begins by presenting a general outline of the city’s social structure, historical events, and the political attitudes of its inhabitants from 1382 to 1430. Chapters 4 and 5 supplement this overview with individual analyses of the social and economic conditions during three different administrations — Byzantine, Ottoman, and Venetian — under which the Thessalonians lived in the course of this period. With Part III we turn to Constantinople, the imperial capital. Chapter 6 examines the dissensions and rivalries within the Byzantine court, both among members of the ruling dynasty and among civil dignitaries, which opened the way for a considerable degree of Ottoman interference in the internal affairs of Byzantium during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Chapter 7 deals with the first Ottoman siege of Constantinople by Bayezid I, treating it as a case study for the specific economic adjustments, social tensions, and political responses to which a direct military threat from the Ottomans gave rise in the imperial city. In chapter 8 the dispositions of various individuals or social groups in Constantinople vis-a-vis the Ottomans, the Latins, and the question of Church union are set forth and analyzed within the context of the political, economic, and social developments of the last fifty years preceding the city’s fall to the Ottomans in 1453. The final two chapters of the book, constituting Part IV, focus on the Despotate of the Morea. They pick up some of the themes addressed in connection with the countryside of Thessalonike and provide a comparative basis for highlighting the local factors that played a role in the attitudes embraced by the empire’s rural populations within the realm of foreign politics.
This book is intended to close a gap in Byzantine studies, given that no comprehensive work has yet been undertaken on the political orientations of individuals or groups in Byzantine society during the period in question, even though several monographs are available on the political history of the late Byzantine Empire and its diplomatic relations with foreign states. There exist some specialized studies concerned with various aspects of the relations of Byzantium with the Ottomans and/or the Latins which take into account the political preferences of individuals or social groups, but the scope of these works is limited either chronologically, or geographically, or both. Such, for instance, is George T. Dennis’ excellent monograph on the independent regime of Manuel II in Thessalonike from 1382 to 1387.3 Klaus-Peter Matschke’s inspiring book on the battle of Ankara and its aftermath, too, covers a relatively short period between 1402 and 1422. Moreover, within the general framework of Byzantine—Ottoman relations, this particular period which coincides with the Ottoman interregnum is quite unrepresentative, being marked by intense political instability and internal dissension unprecedented at any other point in Ottoman history.* Perhaps the study that comes closest to part of the subject matter of the present book is an article by Michel Balivet entitled “Le personnage du ‘turcophile’ dans les sources byzantines antérieures au Concile de Florence (1370-1430),” which, as its title indicates, is restricted to evidence from Byzantine sources, does not go beyond the Council of Florence, and is constrained in scope and range.’ By contrast, the same author’s more recent book on the contacts and exchanges between the Byzantine and Turkish worlds, which spans the eleventh to the nineteenth centuries, offers a global view yet lacks for obvious reasons a detailed and systematic treatment of the vast period under consideration.° As for Speros Vryonis’ monumental book on the Turkification and Islamization of medieval Anatolia, this study focuses on a region that had by and large fallen out of the hands of the Byzantine Empire in the period treated by the present work.” Finally, much relevant material on Byzantine—Ottoman relations can be found scattered throughout the voluminous works of Halil Inalcik, as illustrated by the abundance of references to his studies in my footnotes.*
Concerning Byzantine—Latin relations, on the other hand, research over the last few decades has made important strides, particularly with regard to the social and economic aspects of the topic. This book, in fact, owes a great deal to the pioneering works of Michel Balard, Nicolas Oikonomides, and Angeliki E. Laiou which have laid the groundwork for demonstrating the commercial interests that linked part of the Byzantine aristocracy to the Italians in the Palaiologan period.’
In approaching a subject such as the present one, much depends on the kinds of primary sources used and their possible biases, and, in this particular case, on their position regarding the Ottomans and the Latins. It is, therefore, necessary to proceed with a discussion of the sources and the political attitudes they themselves stand for in order to be able to assess the reliability of the information they provide on the political attitudes of others. Among Byzantine sources, narrative histories ought to be mentioned first. For the period following 1370 there are the fifteenth-century histories of George Sphrantzes, Doukas, Laonikos Chalkokondyles, and Kritoboulos of Imbros, all written after the fall of Constantinople. Sphrantzes’ work covers the period from 1401, the year of his birth, to 1477, and is written in the form of annalistic memoirs. Sphrantzes was a court official who served the last three emperors of Byzantium and held administrative functions both in the imperial capital and in the Despotate of the Morea. He went on several diplomatic missions and embassies to the Ottomans, the king of Georgia, Trebizond, the Morea, and Cyprus. He also lived through the Ottoman conquest, first, of Constantinople and, then, of the Morea, after which he fled to the Venetian island of Corfu. Hence, Sphrantzes was a well-informed historian as well as an active participant in the events about which he wrote.’° During the conquest of Constantinople, Sphrantzes and his family were taken captive by the Ottomans, but soon thereafter he was ransomed and a year later secured the ransom of his wife as well. Yet his children, whom Mehmed II bought for himself, remained under Ottoman domination. His son John, accused of plotting to assassinate the Sultan, was executed at the end of 1453, while his daughter Thamar died of an infectious disease in Mehmed II’s harem in 1455." The hardships Sphrantzes and his family suffered at the hands of the Ottomans, his flight, twice, from Ottoman-occupied places, and his eventual settlement in Venetian Corfu indicate that he had no sympathy at all for the Ottomans. In addition to signs of his pro-western inclinations, Sphrantzes is also known, just on the eve of the fall of Constantinople, to have favored the implementation of the Union of Florence and the appointment of Cardinal Isidore of Kiev as patriarch of Constantinople, “in the hope that various advantages would come from him.”” Yet later, with the benefit of hindsight, he pointed to the Union of Florence as the major cause for the capture of the Byzantine capital and held this opinion at the time when he was composing his chronicle.%
Doukas, on the other hand, who lived most of his life in the service of the Genoese, first in New Phokaia, then on the island of Lesbos, not only fostered pro-Latin feelings but was also a staunch advocate of the union of Churches, which he viewed as the only policy capable of saving the Byzantine Empire. He, therefore, blamed the activities of the anti-unionists in Constantinople for the failure of the city before the Ottoman armies in 1453.'4 It is of interest to note that Doukas’ grandfather, Michael Doukas, had been a partisan of John VI Kantakouzenos in the civil war of 1341-7 and, following his imprisonment by John VI’s opponents, had fled from Constantinople and sought refuge in Ephesus with Isa Beg, the Turkish emir of Aydin. Doukas claims that his grandfather remained thereafter in the service of the Aydinoglu dynasty, foreseeing that the Turks would soon take control over the European territories of the Byzantine Empire, just as they had conquered Asia Minor."’ Yet, while the historian inherited his grandfather’s dislike of the Palaiologos dynasty of Byzantium,"® he chose a different course by orienting himself not towards the Turks but rather towards the Latins, and entering the service of the Genoese in their eastern Mediterranean possessions. Despite his firm pro-Latin stance, Doukas tries to be objective in his narrative, which goes down to the year 1462, finding fault at times with the Genoese, at times with the Venetians, but particularly in his account of the union controversy he cannot conceal his partiality and biases.
While Sphrantzes and Doukas took as the theme of their histories the fall of the Byzantine Empire, the Athenian aristocrat Laonikos Chalkokondyles centered his work, covering the period 1298-1463, around the theme of the Ottomans and their rise to power. However, as far as Chalkokondyles’ political preferences are concerned, he can be described as neither pro-Ottoman nor pro-Latin. When composing his history during the 1480s, he still cherished the hope that the day might come when the Byzantine people would be reunited within a state ruled by a Greek emperor.’”? Chalkokondyles, who spent the years 1435-60 at the court of the Despots in Mistra, provides a detailed firsthand account of events in the Peloponnese. For the rest, his narrative, though useful, is filled with chronological inaccuracies and requires the aid of other sources.
Kritoboulos of Imbros, another aristocratic author, differs from the three historians discussed above in terms of both his political standing and the scope of his work, which is a partial account of the reign of Mehmed II covering the years from 1451 to 1467. In 1453 Kritoboulos, through embassies to the Sultan and to Hamza Beg, the governor of Gallipoli (Gelibolu) and admiral of the Ottoman fleet, arranged for the peaceful surrender of the islands of Imbros, Lemnos, and Thasos in order to prevent their capture by force. Shortly thereafter, Kritoboulos’ submission to the Sultan was rewarded by his assignment to Imbros as governor, a post he held until the island’s capture by the Venetians in 1466.8 He then fled to Ottoman Istanbul, where he wrote his history of Mehmed IH, whom he regarded as “the supreme autocrat, emperor of emperors... lord of land and sea by the will of God.””? In short, Kritoboulos was a representative of the group in Byzantium that opted for an accommodation and understanding with the Ottomans in the face of the political realities of the time, and that recognized Sultan Mehmed II as the legitimate successor of the Christian Byzantine emperors.
Besides the works of these four major historians, shorter works by Byzantine eyewitnesses to particular events have survived, such as an anonymous account of Bayezid I’s blockade of Constantinople (1394-1402),”° John Kananos’ description of the siege of the capital by Murad II in 1422,” or John Anagnostes’ account of the capture of Thessalonike by the same Sultan in 1430.” Since the last source is used extensively in the chapters on Thessalonike, its author merits a few words here. From what he writes, it appears that Anagnostes, a native Thessalonian, was not particularly fond of the Venetians who ruled his city during 1423-30 and seems to have shared the opinion of those who wished to surrender to Murad II’s forces without resistance.” In the course of the city’s conquest, Anagnostes fell captive to the Ottomans but soon afterwards regained his freedom along with many others by means of the money which the Serbian Despot George Brankovic offered for their ransom. The author then returned to the Ottoman-occupied city, even though he was to regret this later when, around 1432-3, Murad II began to institute a set of new policies, including the confiscation of religious and secular buildings, that hurt the interests of the Greek community in Thessalonike.** Finally, together with the more concise historical works used in this study, the Byzantine short chronicles ought to be mentioned as well, since one often finds in these brief and chronologically accurate notices invaluable information that is unattested elsewhere.”
Among the most important contemporary literary sources written by Byzantines are the works of Demetrios Kydones. The leading intellectual and statesman of his time, Kydones came from an aristocratic family of Thessalonike and started his political career as a partisan of John VI Kantakouzenos in the civil war of 1341-7. Following the latter’s abdication in 1354, he entered the service of John V Palaiologos and held the post of mesazon for the next thirty years during which he maintained a tight friendship with the Emperor’s son Manuel I, to whom he was initially assigned as tutor. Kydones, who from a religious, intellectual, and political standpoint identified strongly with the world of Latin Christendom, converted to the Catholic faith around 1357. In 1369 he accompanied John V to Rome and was closely involved with the Emperor’s own conversion to Catholicism, which was in accordance with Kydones’ belief that only a policy of rapprochement, political as well as theological, with the papacy and western European powers could save the empire from the Ottoman threat.** Concerning the Latins and Rome, he wrote, “from the beginning we were both citizens of, as it were, one city, the Church, and we lived under the same laws and customs, and we obeyed the same rulers. Later on — I don’t know what happened — we separated from one another.”’” Indeed, Kydones spent almost all his professional life trying to bring this separation to an end. He also appealed to the Venetian Senate for citizenship, which he was granted in 1391.78 Kydones’ writings, which include several hundreds of letters addressed between 1346 and 1391 to almost all the prominent figures of the period,”® “Apologies” documenting the evolution of his religious convictions,*° and speeches exhorting the Byzantines to unite with the Latins or other Christians against the Ottomans,* are invaluable sources that portray different aspects of the political climate of the Byzantine Empire in the second half of the fourteenth century. The correspondence of Manuel Kalekas (d. 1410), who was a pupil of Kydones, as well as a Catholic convert and a supporter of ecclesiastical union like his teacher, is of importance, too, in this respect.” Another contemporary of Manuel Kalekas who lived into the late 1430s and wrote letters, poems, and other short works was John Chortasmenos.*? He served as a scribe in the patriarchate of Constantinople and was a champion of Orthodoxy, in contrast to both Kydones and Kalekas. The monk Joseph Bryennios, too, was an ardent supporter of Orthodoxy, whose writings, like those of his contemporary Chortasmenos, are of particular interest not only as reflections of the anti-unionist position, but also on account of the information they bear on social conditions in the late Byzantine capital.3+
The writings of Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos occupy a significant place among the literary sources of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Since Manuel II’s views and policies regarding the foreign political and religious orientation of the Byzantine state are discussed in detail throughout the book, they will not be dealt with here. Suffice it to say that his letters and the funeral oration which he composed for his brother Theodore I (d. 1407) are rich in historical information, the latter specifically on the Morea, while his “Discourse of Counsel to the Thessalonians” is a short but important text that reveals the political tendencies of the citizens of Thessalonike in the 1380s.35
About Thessalonike another group of literary sources exist that are of a different nature than those discussed so far. These are the homilies of the metropolitans Isidore Glabas (1380-96) and Symeon (1416/17-29).3° The aristocratic origin and high rank of nearly all the aforementioned authors may have already prompted suspicions about whether the attitudes reflected in their writings were held by Byzantine society at large or whether these represent the views of a limited circle of intellectuals who had little understanding of or interest in the beliefs held by the common people of Byzantium. Evidence from homiletic literature provides a partial remedy to this fundamental problem since the preachings of the clergy were directed at the entire society and can therefore be expected to be more representative of the attitudes that prevailed among people of lower social rank. As to the particular politico-religious outlook of Isidore Glabas and Symeon, they both were proponents of an anti-Ottoman/anti-Latin position, even though Isidore, who witnessed the subjection of Thessalonike to Ottoman domination, adopted in the end a conciliatory attitude towards the Turks, while Symeon eventually came to accept the city’s transfer to Venetian rule as an act that prevented its betrayal to the Ottomans.”
From the last decades of Byzantium, a large number of rhetorical, theological, and epistolary works by Byzantine authors have survived which shed some light on the question of political attitudes in Constantinople and in the Morea. The issue that preoccupied many intellectuals at this time was the controversial union concluded at the Council of Florence in 1439. Among works dealing with this issue, those by the anti-unionist leaders George-Gennadios Scholarios and John Eugenikos are very useful.3* We also have a somewhat apologetic account of the Council of Florence and its aftermath by Sylvester Syropoulos, the grand ecclesiarch of Saint Sophia in Constantinople, who accepted the Union at Florence, but upon returning to the capital renounced his act along with many others, including Scholarios.» On the opposite side, the writings of the partisans of union, most notably of Bessarion and Isidore of Kiev, who both became cardinals in the Roman Catholic Church, serve as a counterbalance to the anti-unionists’ views.4° Concerning the Morea, on the other hand, a letter by Cardinal Bessarion to the Despot Constantine Palaiologos and two advisory addresses by the eminent humanist and philosopher George Gemistos Plethon to Emperor Manuel II and to the Despot Theodore II are of particular interest.*t In these addresses Plethon proposes a reorganization of the Morean state as a solution to its social, economic, and political problems, upholding as a priority the salvation of the Greek race and of the empire by its own resources.**
Official documents constitute another major category of Byzantine source material in addition to the literary sources already discussed. Among these, the acts of the patriarchal tribunal of Constantinople, despite their essentially ecclesiastical character, offer important information directly related to the effects of the Ottoman expansion and to certain aspects of Byzantine—-Ottoman-lItalian social and economic relations. Most of this information bears primarily on Constantinople but is not always restricted to it since cases from the provinces were also brought to the patriarchal court from time to time. A second important group of Byzantine documents, concerned principally with socioeconomic conditions in rural areas, originate from the archives of Mount Athos.*4
The western sources for the period can also be broken down into two groups as literary and documentary. The first group includes accounts of travelers who visited the Byzantine Empire (e.g. Johann Schiltberger, Clavijo, Cristoforo Buondelmonti, Pero Tafur, Bertrandon de la Broquiére),* as well as eyewitness reports about particular events, most notably the accounts of the fall of Constantinople by the Venetian surgeon Nicolé Barbaro, the Florentine merchant Jacopo Tedaldi, or Leonardo of Chios, the Latin archbishop of Mytilene.4° While these narrative sources occasionally provide useful material, the second category of western sources, archival and diplomatic documents, have consistently been of utmost significance, both in terms of giving general information about the relations of Italian maritime republics with Byzantium and the Ottomans, and in terms of presenting concrete data on specific individuals. The latter include the deliberations of the Venetian Senate and other assemblies, summaries of which have been published by F. Thiriet; various documents from Venice and Genoa edited by K. N. Sathas, N. Iorga and others; or documents drawn up by Genoese notaries in Pera.” In addition, the account book kept by the Venetian merchant Giacomo Badoer, who was based in Constantinople during 1436-40, is an invaluable document that displays the commercial ties of many Byzantine aristocrats with Italians and the activities of a group of Ottoman merchants in the Byzantine capital.*8
Finally, there are a number of Ottoman sources that contain some details unavailable elsewhere and, thus, supplement the information gathered from Byzantine and western sources. Unfortunately, prior to the mid fifteenth century the Ottoman source material is relatively scarce.4? This is especially true for archival documents, only a small number of which predate the fall of Constantinople. As for the literary historical sources, almost nothing survives from the fourteenth century. Yet, of utmost importance is the work of the dervish-chronicler Asikpasazade (b. 1392/3?), which, though compiled during the last quarter of the fifteenth century, draws heavily upon an authentic fourteenth-century narrative (the menakibname of Yahsi Fakih) as well as other early Ottoman historical traditions, while for the account of events after 1422 its author relies mostly upon his personal experiences and contacts.°° The chronicle of Negri, written a little later towards the end of the fifteenth century, follows Asikpasazade to a large extent, but incorporates different sets of early Ottoman traditions as well, thus offering a certain amount of original and unique information. There also exists an anonymous text, probably by an eyewitness, celebrating Murad II’s victory over the crusaders at Varna in 1444, which is a significant and reliable source that complements the contemporary Christian sources on the events of 1443-4.° The history of Mehmed the Conqueror by Tursun Beg, a high government official who served the Sultan and who was presumably present at the siege of Constantinople, is of particular interest for us because of its detailed account of the city’s conquest.” Another contemporary source of Mehmed II’s reign, the verse chronicle of Enveri, also contains some useful details about the siege and conquest of Constantinople.*+ The Ottoman sources utilized in this study have been helpful above all for checking the accuracy of Byzantine and western accounts of certain events and for filling some important gaps in the information provided by Greek and Latin sources; however, one should hardly expect to find in them specific references to the political attitudes of particular individuals or groups within Byzantine society.®
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