as the most ancient and noble of the Teutonic name.* After the death of this childless princess, Andronicus sought in marriage Jane the sister of the count of Savoy,† and his suit was preferred to that of the French king. 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.

The empress Anne of Savoy survived her husband; their son, John Palæologus, was left an orphan and an emperor,

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 fourteenth century, and which still yield a considerable revenue to the House of Brunswick. [Germany was destitute of precious metals in the days of Tacitus, because they were hidden and unknown. "Quis enim scrutatus est?" is the question asked in the first of the abovequoted passages; and the second records the fruitless attempt of Curtius Rufus to explore veins of silver "in agro Mattiaco." Yet in that very district, a part of Hesse Cassel, near the university of Marburg, the copper and silver mines of Frankenberg are now profitably worked, and gold is found there in the sands of the Eder. It cannot be affirmed, though it is probable, that these had been discovered before Dietrich or Theodoric, a king of those Franks who did not accompany Clovis, built the town of Frankenberg in 520. But there can have been no other inducement for Charlemagne to establish a mint there in 804 or 810, and to grant the place many peculiar privileges, which it received at the same time. That a Barbarian people should be ignorant of such treasures concealed beneath their soil, is not more surprising than their want of skill to plant the vines and fruittrees which its surface was adapted to rear. The use of its salt-springs, as we have seen, was better known to them. (Vol. iii. p. 99.)-ED.] * Cantacuzene has given a most honourable testimony, Γερμανῶν αὕτη θυγάτηρ δουκὸς ντὶ Μπρουζουγκ (the modern Greeks employ the vr for the d, and the μ for the B, and the whole will read in the Italian idiom di Brunzuic), τοῦ παρ' αὐτοῖς ἐπιφανεστάτου, καὶ λαμπρότητι πάντας τοὺς ὁμοφύλους ὑπερβάλλοντος τοῦ γένους. The praise is just in itself, and pleasing to an English ear.

+ 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 (l. 1, c. 40—42).

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.

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 been formed amidst the pleasures of their youth; their families were almost equally noble, 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,t 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 sixtytwo 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,

*The noble race of the Cantacuzeni (illustrious from the eleventh century in the Byzantine annals) was drawn from the Paladins of France, the heroes of those romances which in the thirteenth century were translated and read by the Greeks. (Ducange, Fam. Byzant. p. 258.) + See Cantacuzene, 1. 3, c. 24. 30. 36.

Saserna in Gaul, and Columella in Italy or Spain, allow two yoke of oxen, two drivers, and six labourers, for two hundred jugera (one hundred and twenty-five English acres) of arable land, and three more men must be added if there be much underwood. (Columella de Re Rustica, 1. 2, c. 13, p. 441, edit. Gesner.)

and seventy thousand sheep; 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 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 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 gratitude, perhaps he would have acted with pure and zealous fidelity in the service of his pupil.† A guard of five hundred soldiers 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 dispatched 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 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 arrogance was heightened by the command of a naval force and an impregnable castle, and under

* In this enumeration (1. 3, c. 30) the French translation of the president Cousin is blotted with three palpable and essential errors. 1. He omits the one thousand 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 five thousand hogs. Put not your trust in translations! [This monition may be carried much farther-believe nothing without inquiry. Ludwig Schopen, who assisted in the Bonn edition of the Byzantine writers, and continued it after the death of Niebuhr, has observed that a MS. in the library at Munich, has yiλiais, instead of dioxiniai, so that Cousin may have had an original of which his translation is correct.-ED.] +See the regency and reign of John Cantacuzenus, and the whole progress of the civil war, in his own history (1. 3, c. 1-100, p. 348-700), and in that of Nicephorus Gregoras (1. 12, c. 1; 1. 15, c. 9, p. 353-492).

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;* 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 were tempted by the name of freedom. By this powerful confederacy, the great domestic was assaulted at first with clandestine, at length with open, arms. His prerogatives were disputed; his opinion 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. 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

* He assumed the royal privilege of red shoes or buskins; placed on his head a mitre of silk and gold; subscribed his epistles with hyacinth or green ink, and claimed for the new, whatever Constantine had given to the ancient, Rome (Cantacuzen. 1. 3, c. 36. Nic. Gregoras, 1. 14, c. 3). Nic. Gregoras (1. 12, c. 5) confesses the innocence and virtues of Cantacuzene, 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 πράστατος τῆς τῶν ὅλων ἔδοξεν εἶναι φθορᾶς.

VOL. VII.

H

arise from the vehemence of his protestations, 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 permission 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 Cantacuzene 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 disguise 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. Constan tinople 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 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