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 meas. ure the size and number of his estates; but his granaries were heaped with an incredible store of wheat and barley; and the labor of a thousand yoke of oxen might cultivate, according to the practice of antiquity, about sixty-two thousand five hundred acres of arable land.23 His pastures were stocked with two thousand five hundred brood mares, two nundred 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 period of the empire, and in a land, most probably in Thrace, so repeatedly wasted by foreign and domestic hostility. The favor 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 testament of Andronicus the younger named him the guardian of his son and the regent of the empire. Had the regent found a suitable return of obedience and 22 See Cantacuzene, (I. iii. c. 24, 30, 36.) 10 23 Saserna, in Gaul, and Columella, in Italy or Spain, allow two yoke of oxen, two drivers, and six laborers, 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 Rusticâ, 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 προς 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, xiliais. Niebuhr's edit. in ioo. - M. gratitude, perhaps he would have acted with pure and zealous fidelity in the service of his pupil.25 A guard of five nundred soldiers watched over his person and the palace; the funera: 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 of Apocaucus were by turns subservient to each other; and his talents were applied to the ruin of his country. His arro gance 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 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 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 a 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 character, a private league was concluded: a shadow of authority was restored to the senate; and the people was tempted by the name of See the regency and reign of John Cantacuzenus, and the whole progress of the civil war, in his own history, (l. iii. c. 1-100, p. 348700,) and in that of Nicephorus Gregoras, (1. xii. c. 1—1. xv. c. 9, 353-492.) p. He assumed the royal privilege of red shoes or buskins; placed or his head a mitre of silk and gold; subscribed his epistles with nyacinth or green ink, and claimed for the new, whatever Constantine aad given to the ancient, Rome, (Cantacuzen. 1. iii. c. 36. Nic. Gre1. xiv. o. 3.) freedom. By this powerful confederacy, the great domestic was assaulted at first with clandestine, at length with open, arms. His prerogatives were disputed; his opinions slighted, his friends persecuted; and his safety was threatened both in the camp and city. In his absence on the public service, he was accused of treason; proscribed as an enemy of the church and state; and delivered, with all his adherents, to the sword of justice, the vengeance of the people, and the power of the devil; his fortunes were confiscated; his aged mother was cast into prison;* all his past services were buried in oblivion; and he was driven by injustice to perpetrate the crime of which he was accused.27 From the review of his preceding conduct, Cantacuzene appears to have been guiltless of any treasonable designs; and the only suspicion of his innocence must arise from the vehemence of his protes tations, and the sublime purity which he ascribes to his own virtue. While the empress and the patriarch still affected the appearances of harmony, he repeatedly solicited the per mission of retiring to a private, and even a monastic, life. After he had been declared a public enemy, it was his fervent wish to throw himself at the feet of the young emperor, and to receive without a murmur the stroke of the executioner: it was not without reluctance that he listened to the voice of reason, which inculcated the sacred duty of saving his family and friends, and proved that he could only save them by drawing the sword and assuming the Imperial title. In the strong city of Demotica, his peculiar domain, the emperor John Cantacuzenus was invested with the purple buskins his right leg was clothed by his noble kinsmen, the left by the Latin chiefs, on whom he conferred the order of knighthood. But even in this act of revolt, he was still studious of loyalty; and the titles of John Palæologus and Anne of Savoy were proclaimed before his own name and that of his wife Irene. Such vain ceremony is a thin dis 27 Nic. Gregoras (1. xii. c. 5) confesses the innocence and virtues of Cantacuzenus, the guilt and flagitious vices of Apocaucus; nor does he dissemble the motive of his personal and religious enmity to the former; νῦν δὲ διὰ κακίαν ἄλλων, αἴτιος ὁ πραοτατος τῆς τῶν ὅλων ἔδοξεν αι φθοράς, god 2013 She died there through persecution and neglect. — M. The Jo were the religious enemies and persecutors of Nicephorus -M guise of rebellion, nor are there perhaps any personal wrongs that can authorize a subject to take arms against his SOVereign but the want of preparation and success may confirm the assurance of the usurper, that this decisive step was the effect of necessity rather than of choice. Constantinople adhered to the young emperor; the king of Bulgaria was invited to the relief of Adrianople: the principal cities of Thrace and Macedonia, after some hesitation, renounced their obedience to the great domestic; and the leaders of the troops and provinces were induced, by their private interest, to prefer the loose dominion of a woman and a priest.* The army of Cantacuzene, in sixteen divisions, was stationed on the banks of the Melas to tempt or to intimidate the capital⚫ it was dispersed by treachery or fear; and the officers, more especially the mercenary Latins, accepted the bribes, and embraced the service, of the Byzantine court. After this loss, the rebel emperor (he fluctuated between the two characters) took the road of Thessalonica with a chosen remnant; but he failed in his enterprise on that important place and he was closely pursued by the great duke, his enemy Apocaucus, at the head of a superior power by sea and land. Driven from the coast, in his march, or rather flight, into the mountains of Servia, Cantacuzene assembled his troops to scrutinize those who were worthy and willing to accompany his broken fortunes. A base majority bowed and retired; and his trusty band was diminished to two thousand, and at last to five hundred, volunteers. The cral,28 or despot of the Servians, received him with general hospitality; but the ally was insensibly degraded to a suppliant, a hostage, a captive; 28 The princes of Servia (Ducange, Famil. Dalmaticæ, &c., c. 2, 3 4,09) were styled Despots in Greek, and Cral in their native idiom, (Ducange, Gloss. Græc. p. 751.) That title, the equivalent of king. appears to be of Sclavonic origin, from whence it has been borrowed by the Hungarians, the modern Greeks, and even by the Turks, (Leunclavius, Pandect. Ture. p. 422,) who reserve the name of for the emperor. To obtain the latter instead of the former is bition of the French at Constantinople, (Aversissement à l'Histoire de Timur Bec, p. 39.) * Cantacuzene asserts, that in all the cities, the pop lace were on the side of the emperor, the aristocracy on his. The populace took the opportunity of rising and plundering the wealthy as Cantacuzenites, vol. iii. c. 29. Ages of common oppression ard ruin had not extinguisked these epublican factions. — M. and in this miserable dependence, he waited at the door of The introduction of barbarians and savages into the contests of civilized nations, is a measure pregnant with shame and mischief; which the interest of the moment may com. pel, but which is reprobated by the best principles of humanity and reason. It is the practice of both sides to accuse their enemies of the guilt of the first alliances; and those who fail in their negotiations, are loudest in their censure of the example which they envy, and would gladly imitate. The Turks of Asia were less barbarous perhaps than the shepherds of Bulgaria and Servia; but their religion rendered them implacable foes of Rome and Christianity. To acquire the friendship of their emirs, the two factions vied with each other in baseness and profusion: the dexterity of Cantacuzene obtained the preference: but the succor and victory were dearly purchased by the marriage of his daughter with an infidel, the captivity of many thousand Christians, and the passage of the Ottomans into Europe, the last and fatal strokę in the fall of the Roman empire. The inclining scale was decided in his favor by the death of Apocaucus, the just though singular retribution of his crimes. A crowd of nobles or plebeians, whom he feared or hated, had been seized by his orders in the capital and the provinces; and the old pal 20 Nic. Gregoras, 1. xii. c. 14. It is surprising that Cantacuzene has not inserted this just and lively image in his own writings, |