solicit aims for the support of their dignity and the defence of their capital.

CHAPTER LXII.-THE GREEK EMPERORS OF NICE AND CONSTANTINOPLE.-ELEVATION AND REIGN OF MICHAEL PALEOLOGUS.-HIS FALSE UNION WITH THE POPE AND THE LATIN CHURCH.-HOSTILE DESIGNS OF CHARLES OF ANJOU.-REVOLT OF SICILY.-WAR OF THE CATALANS IN ASIA AND GREECE.-REVOLUTIONS AND PRESENT STATE OF ATHENS.

THE loss of Constantinople restored a momentary vigour to the Greeks, From their palaces, the princes and nobles were driven into the field; and the fragments of the falling monarchy were grasped by the hands of the most vigorous or the most skilful candidates. In the long and barren pages of the Byzantine annals,* it would not be an easy task to equal the two characters of Theodore Lascaris and John Ducas Vataces,† who replanted and upheld the Roman standard at Nice in Bithynia. The difference of their virtues was happily suited to the diversity of their situation. In his first efforts, the fugitive Lascaris commanded only three cities and two thousand soldiers; his reign was the season of generous and active despair; in every military operation he staked his life and crown; and his enemies of the Hellespont and the Mæander, were surprised by his celerity and subdued by his boldness. A victorious reign of eighteen years expanded the principality of Nice to the magnitude of an empire. The throne of his successor and son-in-law Vataces was founded on a more solid basis, a larger scope, and more plentiful resources; and it was the temper, as well as the interest, of Vataces to calculate the risk, to expect the moment, and to insure the success, of his

*For the reigns of the Nicene emperors, more especially of John Vataces and his son, their minister, George Acropolita, is the only genuine contemporary; but George Pachymer returned to Constantinople with the Greeks at the age of nineteen. (Hanckius de Script. Byzant. c. 33, 34, p. 564-578. Fabric. Bibliot. Græc, tom. vi. p. 448, -460.) Yet the history of Nicephorus Gregoras, though of the fourteenth century, is a valuable narrative from the taking of Constantinople by the Latins. + Nicephorus Gregoras

(1. 2, c. 1) distinguishes between the ožeĩa öpμn of Lascaris, and the tuorália of Vataces. The two portraits are in a very good style.

VOL. VII.

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ambitious designs. In the decline of the Latins, I have briefly exposed the progress the Greeks; the prudent and gradual advances of a conqueror, who, in a reign of thirtythree years, rescued the provinces from national and foreign usurpers, till he pressed on all sides the imperial city, a leafless and sapless trunk, which must fall at the first stroke of the axe. But his interior and peaceful administration is still more deserving of notice and praise.* The calamities of the times had wasted the numbers and the substance of the Greeks; the motives and the means of agriculture were extirpated; and the most fertile lands were left without cultivation or inhabitants. A portion of this vacant property was occupied and improved by the command, and for the benefit, of the emperor; a powerful hand and a vigilant eye supplied and surpassed, by a skilful management, the minute diligence of a private farmer; the royal domain became the garden and granary of Asia; and without impoverishing the people, the sovereign acquired a fund of innocent and productive wealth. According to the nature of the soil, his lands were sown with corn, or planted with vines; the pastures were filled with horses and oxen, with sheep and hogs; and when Vataces presented to the empress a crown of diamonds and pearls, he informed her, with a smile, that this precious ornament arose from the sale of the eggs of his innumerable poultry. The produce of his domain was applied to the maintenance of his palace and hospitals, the calls of dignity and benevolence; the lesson was still more useful than the revenue; the plough was restored to its ancient security and honour; and the nobles, were taught to seek a sure and independent revenue from their estates, instead of adorning their splendid beggary by the oppression of the people, or (what is almost the same) by the favours of the court. The superfluous stock of corn and cattle was eagerly purchased by the Turks, with whom Vataces preserved a strict and sincere alliance; but he discouraged the importation of foreign manufactures, the costly silks of the East, and the curious labours of the Italian looms. "The demands of nature and necessity," was he

*Pachymer, 1. 1, c. 23, 24. Nic. Greg. 1. 2, c. 6. The reader of the Byzantines must observe how rarely we are indulged with such precious details.

accustomed to say, "are indispensable; but the influence of fashion may rise and sink at the breath of a monarch;" and both his precept and example recommended simplicity of manners and the use of domestic industry. The education of youth and the revival of learning were the most serious objects of his care; and, without deciding the precedency, he pronounced with truth, that a prince and a philosopher are the two most eminent characters of human society. His first wife was Irene, the daughter of Theodore Lascaris, a woman more illustrious by her personal merit, the milder virtues of her sex, than by the blood of the Angeli and Comneni, that flowed in her veins, and transmitted the inheritance of the empire. After her death he was contracted to Anne, or Constance, a natural daughter of the emperor Frederic the Second; but as the bride had not attained the years of puberty, Vataces placed in his solitary bed an Italian damsel of her train; and his amorous weakness bestowed on the concubine the honours, though not the title, of lawful empress. His frailty was censured as a flagitious and damnable sin by the monks; and their rude invectives exercised and displayed the patience of the royal lover. A philosophic age may excuse a single vice, which was redeemed by a crowd of virtues; and in the review of his faults, and the more intemperate passions of Lascaris, the judgment of their contemporaries was softened by gratitude to the second founders of the empire. The slaves of the Latins, without law or peace, applauded the happiness of their brethren who had resumed their national freedom; and Vataces employed the laudable policy of convincing the Greeks of every dominion, that it was their interest to be enrolled in the number of his subjects.

Μόνοι γὰρ ἁπάντων ἀνθρώπων ὀνομαστότατοι βασιλεὺς καὶ pilóropoç. (Georg. Acropol. c. 32.) The emperor, in a familiar conversation, examined and encouraged the studies of his future logothete.

[This princess does not appear in the genealogical table of the house of Hohenstauffen, given by Koeppen after Von Raumer (p. 130). But we find there her two illegitimate brothers, Manfred, (called Mainfroy in a subsequent page), who, being appointed regent of Naples for his nephew Conradin, seized the sovereignty for himself in 1258; and the unfortunate Enzio, who after a short reign as king of Sardinia, was made prisoner by the Bolognese at Fossalto, in 1246, and kept in captivity till his death in 1272.--ED.]

Compare Acropolita (c. 18. 52), and the two first books of Nice

A strong shade of degeneracy is visible between John Vataces and his son Theodore; between the founder who sustained the weight, and the heir who enjoyed the splendour, of the imperial crown. * Yet the character of Theodore was not devoid of energy; he had been educated in the school of his father, in the exercise of war and hunting; Constantinople was yet spared; but in the three years of a short reign, he thrice led his armies into the heart of Bulgaria. His virtues were sullied by a choleric and suspicious temper; the first of these may be ascribed to the ignorance of control, and the second might naturally arise from a dark and imperfect view of the corruption of mankind. On a march in Bulgaria, he consulted on a question of policy his principal ministers; and the Greek logothete, George Acropolita, presumed to offend him by the declaration of a free and honest opinion. The emperor halfunsheathed his scimitar; but his more deliberate rage reserved Acropolita for a baser punishment. One of the first officers of the empire was ordered to dismount, stripped of his robes, and extended on the ground in the presence of the prince and army. In this posture he was chastised with so many and such heavy blows from the clubs of two guards or executioners, that when Theodore commanded them to cease, the great logothete was scarcely able to arise and crawl away to his tent. After a seclusion of some days, he was recalled by a peremptory mandate to his seat in council; and so dead were the Greeks to the sense of honour and shame, that it is from the narrative of the sufferer himself that we acquire the knowledge of his disgrace. The cruelty of the emperor was exasperated by the pangs of sickness, the approach of a premature end, and the suspicion of poison and magic. The lives and fortunes, the eyes and limbs, of his kinsmen and nobles, were sacrificed to each sally of passion; and before he died, the son phorus Gregoras. * A Persian saying, that Cyrus was the father, and Darius the master, of his subjects, was applied to Vataces and his son. But Pachymer (1. 1, c. 23) has mistaken the mild Darius for the cruel Cambyses, despot or tyrant of his people. By the institution of taxes, Darius had incurred the less odious, but more contemptible, name of Kárnλoç, merchant or broker. (Herodotus, 3. 89.) +Acropolita (c. 63) seems to admire his own firmness in sustaining a beating, and not returning to council till he was called. He relates the exploits of Theodore, and his own

of Vataces might deserve from the people, or at least from the court, the appellation of tyrant. A matron of the family of the Palæologi had provoked his anger by refusing to bestow her beauteous daughter on the vile plebeian who was recommended by his caprice. Without regard to her birth or age, her body, as high as the neck, was enclosed in a sack with several cats, who were pricked with pins to irritate their fury against their unfortunate fellow-captive. In his last hours, the emperor testified a wish to forgive and be forgiven, a just anxiety for the fate of John, his son and successor, who at the age of eight years, was condemned to the dangers of a long minority. His last choice intrusted the office of guardian to the sanctity of the patriarch Arsenius, and to the courage of George Muzalon, the great domestic, who was equally distinguished by the royal favour and the pubiic hatred. Since their connection with the Latins, the names and privileges of hereditary rank had insinuated themselves into the Greek monarchy; and the noble families* were provoked by the elevation of a worthless favorite, to whose influence they imputed the errors and calamities of the late reign. In the first council, after the emperor's death, Muzalon, from a lofty throne, pronounced a laboured apology of his conduct and intentions; his modesty was subdued by a unanimous assurance of esteem and fidelity; and his most inveterate enemies were the loudest to salute him as the guardian and saviour of the Romans. Eight days were sufficient to prepare the execution of the conspiracy. On the ninth, the obsequies of the deceased monarch were solemnized in the cathedral of Magnesia,† an Asiatic city, where he expired on the banks of the services, from c. 53 to c. 74, of his history. See the third book of Nicephorus Gregoras. Pachymer (1. 1, c. 21) names and discriminates fifteen or twenty Greek families, kai dσol ἄλλοι, οἷς ἡ μεγαλογενὴς σειρὰ καὶ χρυσῆ συγκεκρότητο. Does he mean, by this decoration, a figurative, or a real, golden chain? Perhaps both. + The old geographers, with Cellarius and D'Anville, and our travellers, particularly Pococke and Chandler, will teach us to distinguish the two Magnesias of Asia Minor, of the Mæander, and of Sipylus. The latter, our present object, is still flourishing for a Turkish city, and lies eight hours, or leagues, to the north-east of Smyrna. (Tournefort, Voyage du Levant, tom. iii. lettre 22, p. 365-370. Chandler's Travels into Asia Minor, p. 267.) [The modern Manissa represents the ancient Magnesia ad Sipylum. (Reichard, tab. v.) It contains 100,000 inhabitants, and is noted for

*