Andronicus III. was a shade better than the incapable old man whom he
 supplanted. Though he was given--like all his house--to treachery and
 deceit, and though his life was loose and luxurious, he was at any rate
 active and energetic. He may be described as a weak reflection or copy of
 Manuel Comnenus, being a mighty hunter, a bold spear both in the
 tournament and on the battle-field, and a great spender of money. If he
 had not the brains to keep his empire together, he at any rate fought his
 best, and did not sit apathetically at home like his grandfather while
 everything was going to rack and ruin.
 
 Nevertheless, Andronicus III. was destined to see the termination of the
 process which had begun under Andronicus II.--the entire loss of the
 Asiatic provinces of the empire to the Turks. It was now with the Ottomans
 almost exclusively that he had to deal; the other Seljouk hordes had no
 longer any marchland along the shrunken frontier of his dominions.
 
 These new foes of the empire deserve a word of description. Othman, the
 son of Ertogrul, was a vassal of the Seljouk Sultan of Roum, who had been
 granted a tract in the Phrygian highlands under the condition of military
 service against the Greeks. His fief lay in the north-west angle of the
 great central plateau of Asia Minor. Behind it lay the rolling country of
 hills and uplands already occupied by the Seljouks. Before it were the
 Bithynian mountains, with their passes protected by forts, and garrisoned
 by local militia, till the day when they were so perversely stripped of
 their defenders by the action of Michael Paleologus. Othman, and his
 father Ertogrul before him, owned nothing in the hills, nor could they
 have pushed on if Michael had not made the way easy for them. But after
 1270 the native militia was gone, and the followers of Othman, instead of
 having to face an armed population, fighting to protect its own fields,
 found to oppose them only inadequate garrisons of regular troops at long
 intervals.
 
 Othman's life covered two series of great events, the disastrous reign of
 Andronicus II. at Constantinople, and in Asia Minor the no less disastrous
 break-up of the power of his own suzerain, the Sultan of Roum. In 1294,
 Gaiaseddin, the last undisputed sovereign of the Seljouk line, fell in
 battle against rebels; and in 1307, Alaeddin III., the last prince who
 claimed to be supreme Sultan, died in exile. This made Othman an
 independent prince; but he did not take the title of Sultan, contenting
 himself with the humbler name of Emir.
 
 Othman's field of operation from 1281 to 1326 was the Byzantine borderland
 of Bithynia and Mysia. He was by no means the strongest of the Seljouk
 chiefs who made a lodgement within the borders of the empire, and it took
 him twenty years before he conquered one large town. His wild horsemen
 harried the open sea-coast plain of Bithynia again and again, till at last
 the wretched inhabitants emigrated, or acknowledged him as their
 sovereign. But the towns, within their strong Roman walls, were
 unassailable by the light cavalry which formed his only armed strength.
 The siege of Prusa [Broussa], the capital and key of the region, lasted
 ten years. The Turks built a chain of forts around it and gradually made
 the introduction of provisions more and more difficult, till at last a
 large force was required to march out every time that a convoy was
 expected. At length the inhabitants could find no advantage in spending
 their whole lives in a beleaguered town undergoing slow starvation. Prusa
 surrendered in 1326, and Othman heard of the news on his death-bed. The
 Turkish frontier now once again touched the Sea of Marmora, which it had
 not reached since the Crusaders thrust it back inland in 1097.
 
 The reign of Othman's son Orkhan, the second Emir of the Ottomans, almost
 coincided with that of Andronicus III. All that the one lost the other
 gained. Orkhan's life-work was the completion of the conquest of Bithynia,
 which his father had begun. He took Nicomedia in 1327 and Nicaea in 1333,
 with all the surrounding territory, so that Andronicus retained nothing
 but Chalcedon and the district immediately facing Constantinople beyond
 the Bosphorus. Only once did he have to meet the Emperor in pitched
 battle; this was at the fight of Pelekanon in 1329. Andronicus was wounded
 early in the day, and his army, deprived of its leader went to pieces and
 was severely beaten. After his recovery from his wounds the Emperor never
 faced the Ottomans again.
 
 After conquering Bithynia, Orkhan subdued his nearest neighbours among the
 other Seljouk Emirs, and then turned to organizing his state. This was the
 date of the institution of his famous corps of the Janissaries, the first
 steady infantry that any Eastern power had ever possessed. He imposed on
 his Christian subjects in Mysia and Bithynia a tribute, not of money, but
 of male children. The boys were taken over while very young, placed in
 barracks, educated in the strictest and most fanatical Moslem code, and
 trained to the profession of arms. Having light horse enough and to spare,
 Orkhan taught the Janissaries to fight on foot with bow and sabre. They
 were well drilled, and moved in compact masses, which for many ages no foe
 proved competent to sunder and disperse. So thorough was the physical and
 moral discipline to which the Janissaries were subjected, that it was
 almost unknown for one of them to turn back from his career and relapse
 into Christianity. To keep them firm in their allegiance there acted not
 only the military and conventual discipline to which they were subject,
 but the dazzling prospect of future greatness. The Ottoman sovereigns made
 it their rule to select their generals and governors, their courtiers and
 personal attendants from the ranks of the tribute-children. It was
 calculated that more than two-thirds of the Grand-Viziers of Turkey, in
 the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, had begun their career
 as Janissaries.
 
 The first generation of the "New Soldiery" [for such is the meaning of the
 word Janissary] grew up to the military age during the latter half of the
 reign of Orkhan, and it was he who first utilized them on the European
 shore of the Bosphorus.
 
 Andronicus III. died in 1241, and left his shrunken dominions to the risks
 of a minority, for his son and heir, John III., was only nine years of
 age. If anything had been wanting to aid in the destruction of the empire,
 it was the arrival of such a contingency. The usual troubles soon set in,
 and the inevitable civil war was not far off.
 
                               
 
   John Cantacuzenus Sitting In State. (_From a Contemporary MS._) (_From
          "L'Art Byzantin." Par C. Bayet. Paris, Quantin, 1883._)
 
 
 The evil spirit of the time was John Cantacuzenus, the prime minister of
 the deceased emperor. He was a clever, shifty, intriguing courtier, with a
 turn for literature, but had the abilities neither of a general nor of a
 statesman. However, he had read the tale of the rise of the Paleologi to
 some purpose, and had resolved to imitate the career of Michael VIII. Now,
 as in 1258, there was the best of chances for an unscrupulous minister to
 make himself first the colleague and then the supplanter of his young
 master. Cantacuzenus did his best to repeat the doings of Michael on
 Michael's great-great-grandson. He bribed and intrigued, made himself a
 party in the state, and prepared for a _coup d'etat_ when the time should
 be ripe. Unfortunately for himself, Cantacuzenus was not of the stuff of
 which successful usurpers are made. He had his scruples and superstitions,
 and showed a fatal habit of procrastination which always led him to act a
 day too late. The Empress Dowager, Anne of Savoy, succeeded in raising a
 party against him, and when he threw off the mask and declared himself
 emperor he found himself unable to seize the capital, though he mustered
 an army under its walls. Finding that he was playing a losing game,
 Cantacuzenus took the usual step of calling in the national enemy to aid
 him. It was for the last time that this was done in Byzantine history, but
 never before had the result been so fatal. The usurper summoned to his aid
 first Stephen Dushan, the king of the Servians, and a little later the
 Turkish princes from across the Aegean--Orkhan the son of Othman, and his
 rival, Amour, Emir of Aidin.
 
 These allies kept the cause of John Cantacuzenus from destruction, but it
 was by destroying the empire that John had coveted. King Stephen entered
 Macedonia and Thrace, and occupied the whole countryside, except
 Thessalonica and a few other towns. He then pushed further south,
 conquered Thessaly, and made the despot of Epirus do him homage. The
 Byzantine government retained little more than the capital, and the
 districts round Adrianople and Thessalonica. Most of this country was lost
 for ever to the imperial crown, and it seemed as if a Servian domination
 in the Balkan Peninsula was about to begin, for Stephen moved south from
 Servia, made Uscup in Macedonia his capital, and proclaimed himself
 "Emperor of the Servians and Romans."
 
 It would perhaps have been well for Christendom if Stephen had actually
 conquered Constantinople and made an end of the empire. In that case there
 would have been a single great power in the Balkan Peninsula, ready to
 meet the oncoming assault of the Turks. But Dushan was not strong enough
 to take the great city, and to the misfortune of Europe he died in 1355
 leaving a realm extending from the Danube to the pass of Thermopylae. But
 his young son Urosh was soon assassinated, and the Servian Empire broke up
 as rapidly as it had grown together. A dozen princes were soon scrambling
 for the remnants of Stephen's heritage.
 
 The other allies whom John Cantacuzenus called in were the Turks Amour and
 Orkhan, and on them he depended far more than on the Servian. He took over
 into Thrace a large body of Turkish horse, and allowed them to harry the
 country-side and carry away his subjects by thousands, to be sold in the
 slave-markets of Smyrna and Broussa. But the depth of John's degradation
 was reached when he gave his daughter Theodora to Orkhan, to be immured in
 the Turk's harem. Thrace was rapidly assuming the aspect of a desert under
 the incursions of the Ottoman mercenaries of Cantacuzenus, when after six
 years of war the party of the Empress Anne consented to recognize the
 usurper as the colleague and guardian of the rightful heir. A hollow peace
 was patched up, and the two Johns could take stock of their dilapidated
 realm [1347]. The net result of their civil war had been that Macedonia
 and Thessaly were in Servian hands, and that Thrace was utterly ruined by
 the Turks. There was nothing left that could be called an empire; all that
 remained was Constantinople and Adrianople, the town of Thessalonica and
 the Byzantine province in the Peloponnesus. Cantacuzenus certainly
 deserves a notable place by the side of Isaac and Alexius Angelus, as the
 third of the great destroyers of the Eastern Empire.
 
 But his evil work was not yet done. For seven years he ruled in
 conjunction with John Paleologus, waging an unsuccessful war against
 Servia in the hopes of winning back Dushan's conquests. But in 1354 the
 young emperor, having attained the age of twenty-four, resolved to assert
 himself, and took arms to dethrone his guardian. Cantacuzenus resisted,
 and sent over to Asia for the troops of his son-in-law Orkhan, who crossed
 into Thrace and drove the adherents of the Paleologi out of several
 fortresses. But a night surprise from the side of the sea put John
 Paleologus in possession of Constantinople, and by a fortunate chance he
 got Cantacuzenus himself into his hands. The usurper was, in accordance
 with the usual practice, tonsured and placed in a monastery; by
 exceptional good fortune he was spared the loss of his eyes, and was able
 to spend the remainder of his life in writing a history of his own time.
 
 But it was of little use to sweep away Cantacuzenus while Orkhan's Turks
 were in Thrace. The Ottomans had come as auxiliaries in the war, but they
 were resolved to stop as principals. Suleiman, the son of Orkhan, seized
 Gallipoli for himself, filled it with Turkish families, and made it a
 permanent settlement. This was the first Ottoman foothold in Europe, but
 it was not long to remain isolated.
 
 In 1359 Orkhan died, and his successor, Murad I., determined to cross over
 into Europe, and try the fortune of his arms. John Paleologus was not a
 worse man than his immediate predecessors on the throne, but thanks to
 Cantacuzenus he had far less resources than even they had possessed. Two
 years of fighting sufficed to put Thrace in the hands of Murad from sea to
 sea. A decisive battle in front of Adrianople in 1361 was the finishing
 stroke, and the empire became a mere head without a body; its last
 home-province had been lopped away, and beyond the walls of Constantinople
 no land acknowledged John V. as sovereign save the district of
 Thessalonica and the Peloponnesus.
 
 Why Murad I. did not finish the task he had begun, and take Constantinople
 itself, it is hard to discern. Its walls were still formidable, and the
 Genoese and Venetians could still protect it on the side of the sea. But a
 siege pressed firmly to an end must at last have triumphed over the mere
 inert resistance of stone and mortar, unsupported by an adequate garrison
 within. However, Murad preferred to press on against worthier adversaries
 than the weak Paleologus, and spent his life in incessant and successful
 wars with the Servians, the Bulgarians, and the Seljouk Emirs of Southern
 Asia Minor. In a reign of thirty years he extended his borders to the
 Balkans on the north, and annexed large tracts of Seljouk territory from
 his brother Emirs in Asia Minor.
 
 John Paleologus was his humble vassal and slave. After a vain attempt to
 get help from the Pope, this emperor without an empire resolved to make
 what terms he could, and rejoiced when he found that Murad was prepared to
 grant him peace. The Turk was a hard master, and rejoiced in giving his
 vassal unpalatable tasks. Best remembered among the tribulations of John
 is the siege of Philadelphia. That place had preserved a precarious
 independence after all the other cities of Byzantine Asia fell into the
 hands of the Turkish Emirs. Being far away in the Lydian hills, it lost
 touch with Constantinople, and had become a free town. Murad, wishing to
 subdue it, compelled John V. and his son Manuel to march in person against
 the last Christian stronghold in Asia. The Emperor submitted to the
 degradation, and Philadelphia surrendered when it saw the imperial banner
 hoisted among the horse-tails of the Turkish pashas above the camp of the
 besiegers. The humiliation of the empire could go no further than when the
 heir of Justinian and Basil Bulgaroktonos took the field at the behest of
 an upstart Turkish Emir, in order to extinguish the last relics of freedom
 among his own compatriots.