Turkish expansion
The Byzantine Empire in 1355
John Cantacuzenus' relationship with the Turks had been based on
personal friendship with their leaders, among them Orhan, to whom
he gave his daughter in marriage. But once the Turks had set up
a base on European soil and had seen the possibilities of further
conquest, such relationships were no longer practicable. Stefan
Dušan, who very nearly realized his ambition to found a new Serbo-Byzantine
empire, was the only man who might have prevented the subsequent
rapid expansion of the Turks into the Balkans, but he died in 1355
and his empire split up. The new emperor, John V, hoped that the
Western world would sense the danger, and in 1355 he addressed an
appeal for help to the Pope. The popes were concerned for the fate
of the Christian East but guarded in their offers to Constantinople
so long as the Byzantine Church remained in schism from Rome. In
1366 John V visited Hungary to beg for help, but in vain. In the
same year his cousin Amadeo, count of Savoy, brought a small force
to Constantinople and recaptured Gallipoli from the Turks, who had
by then advanced far into Thrace. Amadeo persuaded the Emperor to
go to Rome and make his personal submission to the Holy See in 1369.
On his way home, John was detained at Venice as an insolvent debtor;
during his absence the Turks scored their first victory over the
successors of Stefan Dušan on the Marica River near Adrianople in
1371. The whole of Macedonia was open to them. The remaining Serbian
princes and the ruler of Bulgaria became their vassals, and in 1373
the Emperor was forced to do the same.
Byzantium became a vassal state of the Turks, pledged to pay tribute
and to provide military assistance to the Ottoman sultan. The possession
of Constantinople thereafter was disputed by the Emperor's sons
and grandsons in a series of revolutions, which were encouraged
and sometimes instigated by the Turks, the Genoese, or the Venetians.
John V's son Andronicus IV, aided by the Genoese and the sultan
Murad I, mastered the city for three years (1376 - 79). He rewarded
the Turks by giving back Gallipoli to them, and Murad made his first
European capital at Adrianople. The Venetians helped John V to regain
his throne in 1379, and the empire was once again divided into appanages
under his sons. Only his second son, Manuel, showed any independence
of action. For nearly five years, from 1382 to 1387, Manuel reigned
as emperor at Thessalonica and laboured to make it a rallying point
for resistance against the encroaching Turks. But the city fell
to Murad's army in April 1387. When the Turks then drove deeper
into Macedonia, the Serbs again organized a counteroffensive but
were overwhelmed at Kossovo in 1389.
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