The Palaiologan Dynasty

The last Byzantine dynasty ruled for 192 years, longer than any other, over an empire that shrank in that time from a regional power to a single city and a few islands. It is the period of Byzantine history that is least read and, in some ways, most interesting: a state in continuous decline that nevertheless produced the finest painting, the sharpest theology and the most original scholarship of the whole millennium.

The paradox is genuine and has a partial explanation. Political weakness pushed Byzantine energy into other channels; contact with Italy and the Islamic world intensified as the empire lost the ability to keep either at arm’s length; and the aristocracy, no longer able to invest in provincial estates it could not defend, spent its money on churches, manuscripts and mosaics. The Chora church and the frescoed churches of Mystras belong to a state that was going bankrupt.

Recovery: Michael VIII, 1259–1282

The dynasty began with a usurpation. After the Fourth Crusade took Constantinople in 1204, the Byzantine political tradition survived in three successor states, of which the strongest was the empire of Nicaea in western Anatolia. Michael Palaiologos, a general from one of the great military families, made himself co-emperor there in 1259 alongside the child John IV Laskaris, won a decisive victory over a western coalition at Pelagonia the same year, and in July 1261 a small Nicaean force found the walls of Constantinople undefended and walked in.

Michael entered the city in August, had himself crowned in Hagia Sophia, and shortly afterwards had John IV blinded. The patriarch Arsenios excommunicated him for it, and the resulting Arsenite schism divided the church for forty years. His reign is treated separately in Michael VIII Palaiologos.

His foreign policy was defensive and expensive: buying off Charles of Anjou, who was assembling an invasion from southern Italy, and accepting union with Rome at the Second Council of Lyons in 1274 to deprive Charles of papal support. The union was rejected by almost everyone in the empire and abandoned after Michael’s death. The cost of holding the west at bay was paid in the east, where the Anatolian frontier troops were neglected — the frontier from which the Ottomans would emerge.

Decline: The Civil Wars

Two civil wars did more damage than any foreign enemy.

The first, from 1321 to 1328, was fought between Andronikos II and his grandson Andronikos III. It settled nothing except that the younger man won, and it taught both sides that Serbian, Bulgarian and Turkish troops could be hired for use against other Byzantines.

The second, from 1341 to 1347, was worse. It pitted the regency for the child John V against John Kantakouzenos, the ablest statesman of the century, and it entangled itself with the hesychast controversy in theology and with a genuine social revolt in Thessalonica, where the Zealot movement held the city against the aristocracy for seven years. Kantakouzenos won by importing Ottoman troops under Orhan, to whom he married his daughter Theodora. In 1354 those allies took Gallipoli after an earthquake destroyed its walls, and the Ottomans had their first permanent foothold in Europe.

The Black Death arrived in Constantinople in 1347, in the middle of all this, carried on Genoese ships from the Black Sea. Kantakouzenos, who wrote a history of his own times, described the epidemic in prose deliberately modelled on Thucydides and lost his own son to it.

Vassalage

By the 1370s the empire was paying tribute to the Ottoman sultan and supplying troops for his campaigns. John V went to Rome in 1369 and personally submitted to the pope — a private conversion that changed nothing — and was later detained in Venice for debt. His son Manuel II spent 1399 to 1403 touring western Europe to beg for help, wintering in Paris and spending Christmas 1400 at Eltham Palace with Henry IV of England, who gave him money and no soldiers.

The empire was saved for fifty years by an outside event. In 1402 Timur destroyed the Ottoman army at Ankara and captured Sultan Bayezid, who had been besieging Constantinople. The Ottoman succession war that followed bought Byzantium a generation. Manuel used it well, recovering Thessalonica and rebuilding the defences of the Hexamilion wall across the Isthmus of Corinth, and left his son advice that turned out to be exactly right: keep the Ottomans divided, never provoke them, and do not expect the west to come.

The Last Attempt at Union

The final effort to buy western help with church union was made at the Council of Ferrara–Florence in 1438–1439. Emperor John VIII went to Italy in person with the patriarch and a large delegation, including the scholars Bessarion and Gemistos Plethon. The council produced a decree of union that conceded the Latin position on the filioque, purgatory and papal primacy, signed by almost all the Greek delegates.

It failed on arrival. The clergy and population of Constantinople repudiated it; the eastern patriarchs rejected it; Mark Eugenikos of Ephesus, the one bishop who had refused to sign, became a hero. The crusade it produced was destroyed by the Ottomans at Varna in 1444. The often-quoted line attributed to the Grand Duke Loukas Notaras — that he would rather see the sultan’s turban in the city than the Latin mitre — is reported by the historian Doukas and captures a real body of opinion, though whether Notaras said it is unknowable.

The Palaiologan Renaissance

Against this background the period produced:

• Painting. The mosaics and frescoes of the Chora, the fresco cycles of Mystras, Thessalonica and the Serbian and Bulgarian churches that followed Byzantine models. Figures move, landscapes have depth, narrative scenes are crowded and dramatic. The frescoes article treats the style in detail.
• Theology. The hesychast synthesis of Gregory Palamas, formally accepted by the church in 1351 and still the backbone of Orthodox spiritual doctrine.
• Scholarship. Editions and commentaries on Plato, Aristotle, the Greek mathematicians and astronomers. Maximos Planoudes, Theodore Metochites, Nikephoros Gregoras, Demetrios Kydones translating Aquinas into Greek.
• A revival of Platonism. Gemistos Plethon, teaching at Mystras, went so far as to propose replacing Christianity with a reconstructed Hellenic paganism, and made an impression at Florence that contributed to the founding of Cosimo de’ Medici’s Platonic Academy.

Much of this crossed to Italy with the scholars who left before and after 1453, as described in the transmission of classical learning and Bessarion and the Greek scholars of Italy.

1453

Constantine XI, the last emperor, inherited a city of perhaps fifty thousand people inside walls built for half a million, a treasury with nothing in it, and a young, determined sultan. The siege lasted from 6 April to 29 May 1453, and the account is given in the fall of Constantinople and Constantine XI Palaiologos.

The outlying fragments went quickly afterwards: Athens in 1456, the Despotate of the Morea in 1460, Trebizond in 1461.

How to Judge the Period

It has been conventional since Gibbon to read the Palaiologan centuries as a long humiliation, and the political record supports that. The correction worth making is that the people involved did not experience it as inevitable. They fought civil wars because they expected there to be an empire worth inheriting; they argued about the filioque because they believed the answer mattered more than the Ottoman army; they commissioned the Chora mosaics in the 1310s, when the empire had already lost most of Anatolia. A culture that is genuinely resigned does not do those things.

The Economy of a Shrinking State

The fiscal position of the restored empire explains most of its political choices, and it is worth setting out plainly.

Revenue collapsed on three fronts at once. Territory shrank, and with it the land tax that had always been the state’s principal income. Customs revenue went to the Italians: by the 1340s the Genoese colony at Galata, across the Golden Horn, was reportedly taking some seven times the customs receipts of Constantinople itself. And the coinage declined — the hyperpyron that Alexios I had stabilised lost most of its gold content across the fourteenth century and had ceased to be struck by about 1350.

The consequences compounded. An emperor without revenue could not pay soldiers, so he hired Turkish contingents against his own rivals, which brought Ottoman forces permanently into Europe. He could not maintain a fleet, so he depended on Venetian and Genoese shipping and could not enforce his own customs. He could not repair the walls, so the defences were patched by public subscription.

In 1343 the empress Anna of Savoy pawned the crown jewels to Venice to fund the civil war. They were never redeemed.

Reading the Period

Three writers carry most of the narrative, and all three are participants rather than observers.

George Pachymeres covers the reigns of Michael VIII and Andronikos II, is hostile to the union of Lyons, and is the principal source for the recovery of the city and the loss of Anatolia.

John VI Kantakouzenos wrote his own history after abdicating and becoming a monk. It is a self-justification of considerable literary skill, and it has to be read against Gregoras, who was on the other side of both the civil war and the hesychast controversy.

Nikephoros Gregoras wrote a Roman History covering the same decades from the anti-Palamite position, and the two accounts of the 1340s can be laid side by side to watch two intelligent men describe the same events incompatibly.

Add to these the Athonite monastic archives — the estate registers of the great monasteries, which document landholding, peasant obligations and rural society in a detail unavailable for any earlier Byzantine century — and the late period turns out to be, paradoxically, the best-documented one.

• Michael VIII Palaiologos — the emperor who recovered the city
• Constantine XI Palaiologos — the emperor who lost it
• The Fall of Constantinople — the siege of 1453
• The Council of Florence — the union that was signed and refused
• Mystras — the Peloponnesian capital of the last century
• Hesychasm — the theological argument that split the fourteenth century
• The Despotate of the Morea — the last Byzantine province