"my situation from that of the son of Philip! Alexander might "complain that his father would leave him nothing to conquer: alas! my grandsire will leave me nothing to lose." But the Greeks were soon admonished that the public disorders could not be healed by a civil war; and that their young favourite was not destined to be the saviour of a falling empire. On the first repulse his party was broken by his own levity, their intestine discord, and the intrigues of the ancient court, which tempted each malecontent to desert or betray the cause of rebellion. Andronicus the younger was touched with remorse, or fatigued with business, or deceived by negociation pleasure rather than power was his aim; and the licence of maintaining a thousand hounds, a thousand hawks, and a thousand huntsmen, was sufficient to sully his fame and disarm his ambition. Andronicus abdicates the A.D. 1328, Let us now survey the catastrophe of this busy plot and the final situation of the principal actors.10 The age of Andronicus The elder was consumed in civil discord; and, amidst the events of war and treaty, his power and reputation continually decayed, government, till the fatal night in which the gates of the city and palace May 24. were opened without resistance to his grandson. His principal commander scorned the repeated warnings of danger; and, retiring to rest in the vain security of ignorance, abandoned the feeble monarch, with some priests and pages, to the terrors of a sleepless night. These terrors were quickly realised by the hostile shouts which proclaimed the titles and victory of Andronicus the younger; and the aged emperor, falling prostrate before an image of the Virgin, despatched a suppliant message to resign the sceptre and to obtain his life at the hands of the conqueror. The answer of his grandson was decent and pious; at the prayer of his friends the younger Andronicus assumed the sole administration; but the elder still enjoyed the name and pre-eminence of the first emperor, the use of the great palace, and a pension of twenty-four thousand pieces of gold, one half of which was assigned on the royal treasure and the other on the fishery of Constantinople. But his impotence was soon exposed to contempt and oblivion; the vast silence of the palace was disturbed only by the cattle and poultry of the neighbourhood," which roved with impunity through the solitary courts; and a reduced allowance of ten thousand pieces of gold" was all that he could ask and more than he could 10 I follow the chronology of Nicephorus Gregoras, who is remarkably exact. It is proved that Cantacuzene has mistaken the dates of his own actions, or rather that his text has been corrupted by ignorant transcribers. b 11 I have endeavoured to reconcile the 24,000 pieces of Cantacuzene (1. ii. c. 1) with a And the washerwomen, according to Nic. Gregoras, p. 431.-M. b Cantacuzene mentions 12,000.-S. hope. His calamities were embittered by the gradual extinction of sight; his confinement was rendered each day more rigorous; and during the absence and sickness of his grandson, his inhuman keepers, by the threats of instant death, compelled him to exchange the purple for the monastic habit and profession. The monk Antony had renounced the pomp of the world: yet he had occasion for a coarse fur in the winter season; and as wine was forbidden by his confessor, and water by his physician, the sherbet of Egypt was his common drink. It was not without difficulty that the late emperor could procure three or four pieces to satisfy these simple wants; and if he bestowed the gold to relieve the more painful distress of a friend, the sacrifice is of some weight in the scale of humanity and religion. Four years after his abdication Andronicus, or Antony, expired in a cell, in the seventy-fourth year of his age: and the last strain of adulation could only promise a more splendid crown of glory in heaven than he had enjoyed upon earth.12a His death, A.D. 1332, Reign of the younger, Nor was the reign of the younger, more glorious or fortunate than that of the elder, Andronicus. 13 He gathered the fruits of ambition; but the taste was transient and bitter: in the supreme station he lost the remains of his early popularity; and the defects of his character became still more conspicuous to the world. The public reproach urged him to march in person against the Turks; nor did his courage fail in the hour of trial; but a defeat and a wound were the only trophies of his expedition in Asia, which confirmed the establishment of the Ottoman monarchy. The abuses of the civil government attained their full maturity and perfection: his neglect of forms and the confusion of national dresses are deplored by the Greeks as the fatal symptoms of the decay of the empire. Andronicus was old before his time; the intemperance of youth had accelerated the infirmities of age; and after being rescued from a dangerous malady by nature, or physic, or the Virgin, he was snatched away before he had accomplished his the 10,000 of Nicephorus Gregoras (1. ix. c. 2); the one of whom wished to soften, the other to magnify, the hardships of the old emperor. 12 See Nicephorus Gregoras (1. ix. 6, 7, 8, 10, 14, l. x. c. 1). The historian had tasted of the prosperity, and shared the retreat, of his benefactor; and that friendship which "waits or to the scaffold or the cell should not lightly be accused as "a hireling, a prostitute to praise." b 13 The sole reign of Andronicus the younger is described by Cantacuzene (1. ii. c. 140, p. 191-339 [ed. Par.]), and Nicephorus Gregoras (1. ix. c. 7—1. xi. c. 11, p. 262351). 16 His two wives. forty-fifth year. He was twice married; and as the progress of the Latins in arms and arts had softened the prejudices of the Byzantine court, his two wives were chosen in the princely houses of Germany and Italy. The first, Agnes at home, Irene in Greece, was daughter of the duke of Brunswick. Her father 14 was a petty lord 15 in the poor and savage regions of the north of Germany : yet he derived some revenue from his silver-mines; 17 and his family is celebrated by the Greeks as the most ancient and noble of the Teutonic name. 18 After the death of this childless princess, Andronicus sought in marriage Jane, the sister of the count of Savoy;19 and his suit was preferred to that of the French king 20 The count respected in his sister the superior majesty of a Roman empress: her retinue was composed of knights and ladies; she was regenerated and crowned in St. Sophia under the more orthodox appellation of Anne; and, at the nuptial feast, the Greeks and Italians vied with each other in the martial exercises of tilts and tournaments. 14 Agnes, or Irene, was the daughter of duke Henry the Wonderful, the chief of the house of Brunswick, and the fourth in descent from the famous Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony and Bavaria, and conqueror of the Slavi on the Baltic coast. Her brother Henry was surnamed the Greek, from his two journeys into the East: but these journeys were subsequent to his sister's marriage; and I am ignorant how Agnes was discovered in the heart of Germany, and recommended to the Byzantine court. (Rimius, Memoirs of the House of Brunswick, p. 126-137.) 15 Henry the Wonderful was the founder of the branch of Grubenhagen, extinct in the year 1596. (Rimius, p. 287.) He resided in the castle of Wolfenbüttel, and possessed no more than a sixth part of the allodial estates of Brunswick and Luneburg, which the Guelph family had saved from the confiscation of their great fiefs. The frequent partitions among brothers had almost ruined the princely houses of Germany, till that just, but pernicious, law was slowly superseded by the right of primogeniture. The principality of Grubenhagen, one of the last remains of the Hercynian forest, is a woody, mountainous, and barren tract. (Busching's Geography, vol. vi. p. 270-286, English translation.) 16 The royal author of the Memoirs of Brandenburg will teach us how justly, in a much later period, the north of Germany deserved the epithets of poor and barbarous. (Essai sur les Moeurs, &c.) In the year 1306, in the woods of Luneburg, some wild people of the Vened race were allowed to bury alive their infirm and useless parents. (Rimius, p. 136.) 17 The assertion of Tacitus, that Germany was destitute of the precious metals, must be taken, even in his own time, with some limitation. (Germania, c. 5; Annal. xi. 20.) According to Spener (Hist. Germaniæ Pragmatica, tom. i. p. 351), Argentifoding in Hercyniis montibus, imperante Othone magno (A.D. 968) primum apertæ, largam etiam opes augendi dederunt copiam: but Rimius (p. 258, 259) defers till the year 1016 the discovery of the silver mines of Grubenhagen, or the Upper Hartz, which were productive in the beginning of the xivth century, and which still yield a considerable revenue to the house of Brunswick. 18 Cantacuzene has given a most honourable testimony, v d'in Trquaviv aurn θυγάτηρ δουκὸς ντὶ Μπρουζουὴκ (the modern Greeks employ the vr for the δ, and the μπ for the 6, and the whole will read in the Italian idiom di Brunzuic), Tou Tag' aurois ἐπιφανεστάτου, καὶ λαμπρότητι πάντας τοὺς ὁμοφύλους ὑπερβάλλοντος τοῦ γένους [1. 1. c. 10, tom. i. p. 52, ed. Bonn]. The praise is just in itself, and pleasing to an English ear. 19 Anne, or Jane, was one of the four daughters of Amedee the Great, by a second marriage, and half sister of his successor Edward count of Savoy (Anderson's Tables, p. 650). See Cantacuzene (1. i, c. 40-42). 20 That king, if the fact be true, must have been Charles the Fair, who in five years (1321-1326) was married to three wives (Anderson, p. 628). Anne of Savoy arrived at Constantinople in February 1326. Reign of John Palæologus, A.D. 1341, June 15 The empress Anne of Savoy survived her husband: their son, John Palæologus, was left an orphan and an emperor in the ninth year of his age; and his weakness was protected by the first and most deserving of the Greeks. The long and cordial friendship of his father for John Cantacuzene is alike honourable to the prince and the subject. It had A.D. 1391. Fortune of John Cantacuzenus. been formed amidst the pleasures of their youth: their families were almost equally noble; 21 and the recent lustre of the purple was amply compensated by the energy of a private education. We have seen that the young emperor was saved by Cantacuzene from the power of his grandfather; and, after six years of civil war, the same favourite brought him back in triumph to the palace of Constantinople. Under the reign of Andronicus the younger, the great domestic ruled the emperor and the empire; and it was by his valour and conduct that the isle of Lesbos and the principality of Ætolia were restored to their ancient allegiance. His enemies confess that among the public robbers Cantacuzene alone was moderate and abstemious; and the free and voluntary account which he produces of his own wealth 22 may sustain the presumption that it was devolved by inheritance, and not accumulated by rapine. He does not indeed specify the value of his money, plate, and jewels, yet, after a voluntary gift of two hundred vases of silver, after much had been secreted by his friends and plundered by his foes, his forfeit treasures were sufficient for the equipment of a fleet of seventy galleys. He does not measure the size and number of his estates; but his granaries were heaped with an incredible store of wheat and barley; and the labour of a thousand yoke of oxen might cultivate, according to the practice of antiquity, about sixty-two thousand five hundred acres of arable land. His pastures were stocked with two thousand five hundred brood mares, two hundred camels, three hundred mules, five hundred asses, five thousand horned cattle, fifty thousand hogs, and seventy thousand sheep: 24 a precious record of rural opulence in the last 23 21 The noble race of the Cantacuzeni (illustrious from the xith century in the Byzantine annals) was drawn from the Paladins of France, the heroes of those romances which, in the xiiith century, were translated and read by the Greeks (Ducange, Fam. Byzant, p. 258). See Cantacuzene (1. iii. c. 24, 30, 36). * Saserus in Gaul, and Columella in Italy or Spain, allow two yoke of oxen, two drivers, and six labourers, for two hundred jugera (125 English acres) of arable land, and three more men must be added if there be much underwood (Columella de Re Rusticà, 1. ii. c. 13, p. 441, edit. Gesner). In this enumeration (1. iii. c. 30) the French translation of the president Cousin is blotted with three palpable and essential errors. 1. He omits the 1000 yoke of working oxen. 2. He interprets the πεντακόσιαι πρὸς δισχιλίαις by the number of fifteen hundred. 3. He confounds myriads with chiliads, and gives Cantacuzene no more than 5000 hogs. Put not your trust in translations! There seems to be another reading, xías [tom. ii. p. 185, ed. Bonn].-M. period of the empire, and in a land, most probably in Thrace, so repeatedly wasted by foreign and domestic hostility. The favour of Cantacuzene was above his fortune. In the moments of familiarity, in the hour of sickness, the emperor was desirous to level the distance between them, and pressed his friend to accept the diadem and purple. The virtue of the great domestic, which is attested by his own pen, resisted the dangerous proposal; but the last tes- regent of tament of Andronicus the younger named him the guardian of his son, and the regent of the empire. He is left the empire. His regency A.D. 1341; Had the regent found a suitable return of obedience and gratitude, perhaps he would have acted with pure and zealous fidelity in the service of his pupil.25 A guard of five hundred sol- is attacked, diers watched over his person and the palace; the funeral of the late emperor was decently performed, the capital was silent and submissive, and five hundred letters, which Cantacuzene despatched in the first month, informed the provinces of their loss and their duty. The prospect of a tranquil minority was blasted by the great duke or admiral Apocaucus; and to exaggerate his perfidy, the Imperial historian is pleased to magnify his own imprudence in raising him to that office against the advice of his more sagacious sovereign. Bold and subtle, rapacious and profuse, the avarice and ambition by Apocauof Apocaucus were by turns subservient to each other, and cus; his talents were applied to the ruin of his country. His arrogance was heightened by the command of a naval force and an impregnable castle, and under the mask of oaths and flattery he secretly conspired against his benefactor. The female court of the empress was bribed and directed; he encouraged Anne of Savoy to assert, by the law of nature, the tutelage of her son; the love of press Anne power was disguised by the anxiety of maternal tenderness; and the founder of the Palæologi had instructed his posterity to dread the example of a perfidious guardian. The patriarch John of Apri was a proud and feeble old man, encompassed by a numerous and hungry kindred. He produced an obsolete patriarch. epistle of Andronicus, which bequeathed the prince and people to his pious care: the fate of his predecessor Arsenius prompted him to prevent, rather than punish, the crimes of an usurper; and Apocaucus smiled at the success of his own flattery when he beheld the Byzantine priest assuming the state and temporal claims of the Roman pontiff. 26 Between three persons so different in their situation and by the em of Savoy; by the 25 See the regency and reign of John Cantacuzenus, and the whole progress of the civil war, in his own history (1. iii. c. 1-100, p. 348-700 [ed. Par.]), and in that of Nicephorus Gregoras (1. xii. c. 1-1. xv. c. 9, p. 353-492). 26 He assumed the royal privilege of red shoes or buskins; placed on his head a |