person, or at least to the government, of the old emperor; and it was only in the provinces, by flight and revolt and foreign succour, that the malcontents could hope to vindicate their cause and subvert his throne. The soul of the enterprise was the great domestic, John Cantacuzene; the sally from Constantinople is the first date of his actions and memorials; and if his own pen be most descriptive of his patriotism, an unfriendly historian has not refused to celebrate the zeal and ability which he displayed in the service of the young emperor. That prince escaped from the capital under the pretence of hunting; erected his standard at Adrianople; and, in a few days, assembled fifty thousand horse and foot, whom neither honour nor duty could have armed against the Barbarians. Such a force might have saved or commanded the empire; but their counsels were discordant, their motions were slow and doubtful, and their progress was checked by intrigue and negotiation. The quarrel of the two Andronici was protracted, and suspended, and renewed, during a ruinous period of seven years. In the first treaty, the relics of the Greek empire were divided; Constantinople, Thessalonica, and the islands, were left to the elder, while the younger acquired the sovereignty of the greatest part of Thrace, from Philippi to the Byzantine limit. By the second treaty, he stipulated the payment of his troops, his immediate coronation, and an adequate share of the power and revenue of the state. The third civil war was terminated by the surprise of Constantinople, the final retreat of the old emperor, and the sole reign of his victorious grandson. The reasons of this delay may be found in the characters of the men and of the times. When the heir of the monarchy first pleaded his wrongs and his apprehensions, he was heard with pity and applause; and his adherents repeated on all sides the inconsistent promise, that he would increase the pay of the soldiers, and alleviate the burdens of the people. The grievances of forty years were mingled in his revolt; and the rising generation was fatigued by the endless prospect of a reign, whose favourites. * [Among the leaders of the party were Synadenos, a man of rank and talent; and Sir Yanni (Evpytávvng), son of a Cuman chief who had entered the imperial service, and received a title of knighthood, which, according to Pachymer (ii. 347), had been adopted from the Latins by the Byzantine court. See Parisot (Cantacuzène, Homme d'état et Historien, Paris, 1854) and Finlay, ii. 513.—ED.] and maxims were of other times. The youth of Andronicus had been without spirit, his age was without reverence; his taxes produced an annual revenue of £500,000, yet the richest of the sovereigns of Christendom was incapable of maintaining three thousand horse and twenty galleys, to resist the destructive progress of the Turks.* "How different," said the younger Andronicus, "is my situation from that of the son of Philip! Alexander might complain, that his father would leave him nothing to conquer: alas! my grandsire will leave me nothing to lose." But the Greeks were soon admonished that the public disorders could not be healed by a civil war; and that their young favourite was not destined to be the saviour of a falling empire. On the first repulse, his party was broken by his own levity, their intestine discord, and the intrigues of the ancient court, which tempted each malecontent to desert or betray the cause of rebellion.† Andronicus the younger was touched with remorse, or fatigued with business, or deceived by negotiation; pleasure rather than power was his aim; and the licence of maintaining a thousand hounds, a thousand hawks, and a thousand huntsmen, was sufficient to sully his fame and disarm his ambition. Let us now survey the catastrophe of this busy plot, and the final situation of the principal actors. The age of Andronicus was consumed in civil discord; and, amidst the events of war and treaty, his power and reputation continually decayed, till the fatal night in which the gates of the city and palace were opened without resistance to his grandson. His principal commander scorned the repeated warnings of danger; and retiring to rest in the vain security of ignorance, abandoned the feeble monarch, with some priests and pages, to the terrors of a sleepless night. These terrors were quickly realized by the hostile shouts, which *See Nicephorus Gregoras, 1. 8, c. 6. . The younger Andronicus complained, that in four years and four months, a sum of three hundred and fifty thousand byzants of gold was due to him for the expenses of his household. (Cantacuzen. 1. 1, c. 48.) Yet he would have remitted the debt, if he might have been allowed to squeeze the farmers of the revenue, [Sir Yanni was one of the I follow the chronology deserters. Finlay, ii. 515.-ED.] of Nicephorus Gregoras, who is remarkably exact. It is proved that Cantacuzene has mistaken the dates of his own actions, or rather that his text has been corrupted by ignorant transcribers. proclaimed the titles and victory of Andronicus the younger; and the aged emperor, falling prostrate before an image of the Virgin, dispatched a suppliant message to resign the sceptre, and to obtain his life at the hands of the conqueror. The answer of his grandson was decent and pious; at the prayer of his friends, the younger Andronicus assumed the sole administration; but the elder still enjoyed the name and pre-eininence of the first emperor, the use of the great palace, and a pension of twenty-four thousand pieces of gold, one half of which was assigned on the royal treasure, and the other on the fishery of Constantinople. But his impotence was soon exposed to contempt and oblivion; the vast silence of the palace was disturbed only by the cattle and poultry of the neighbourhood, which roved with impunity through the solitary courts; and a reduced allowance of ten thousand pieces of gold was all that he could ask, and more than he could hope. His calamities were imbittered by the gradual extinction of sight; his confinement was rendered each day more rigorous; and during the absence and sickness of his grandson, his inhuman keepers, by the threats of instant death, compelled him to exchange the purple for the monastic habit and profession. The monk Antony had renounced the pomp of the world; yet he had occasion for a coarse fur in the winter-season, and as wine was forbidden by his confessor, and water by his physician, the sherbet of Egypt was his common drink. It was not without difficulty that the late emperor could procure three or four pieces to satisfy these simple wants; and if he bestowed the gold to relieve the more painful distress of a friend, the sacrifice is of some weight in the scale of humanity and religion. Four years after his abdication, Andronicus or Antony expired in a cell, in the seventy-fourth year of his age; and the last strain of adulation could only promise a more splendid crown of glory in heaven than he had enjoyed upon earth.† * I have endeavoured to reconcile the twenty-four thousand pieces of Cantacuzene (1. 2, c. 1) with the ten thousand of Nicephorus Gregoras (1. 9, c. 2); the one of whom wished to soften, the other to magnify, the hardships of the old emperor. See Nicephorus Gregoras (1. 9, c. 6-8. 10. 14; 1. 10, c. 1). The historian had tasted of the prosperity, and shared the retreat of his benefactor; and that friendship which "waits or to the scaffold or the cell," should not lightly be accused as a a hireling, a prostitute to REIGN OF [CH. LXIII. Nor was the reign of the younger more glorious or fortunate than that of the elder Andronicus.* He gathered the fruits of ambition; but the taste was transient and bitter; in the supreme station he lost the remains of his early popularity, and the defects of his character became still more conspicuous to the world. The public reproach urged him to march in person against the Turks; nor did his courage fail in the hour of trial, but a defeat and a wound were the only trophies of his expedition in Asia, which confirmed the establishment of the Ottoman monarchy. The abuses of the civil government attained their full maturity and perfection; his neglect of forms, and the confusion of national dresses, are deplored by the Greeks as the fatal symptoms of the decay of the empire. Andronicus was old before his time; the intemperance of youth had accelerated the infirmities of age; and after being rescued from a dangerous malady by nature, or physic, or the Virgin, he was snatched away before he had accomplished his forty-fifth year. He was twice married; and as the progress of the Latins in arms and arts had softened the prejudices of the Byzantine court, his two wives were chosen in the princely houses of Germany and Italy. The first, Agnes at home, Irene in Greece, was daughter of the duke of Brunswick. Her father † was praise. * The sole reign of Andronicus the younger is described by Cantacuzene (1. 2, c. 1-40, p. 191-339) and Nicephorus Gregoras (1. 9, c. 7; 1. 11, c. 11, p. 262-361). + Agnes, or Irene, was the daughter of duke Henry the Wonderful, the chief of the house of Brunswick, and the fourth in descent from the famous Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony and Bavaria, and conqueror of the Slavi on the Baltic coast. Her brother Henry was surnamed the Greek, from his two journeys into the East; but these journeys were subsequent to his sister's marriage; and I am ignorant how Agnes was discovered in the heart of Germany, and recommended to the Byzantine court. (Rimius, Memoirs of the House of Brunswick, p. 126-137.) [In the Chronicle of Conrad Botho (Leibnitz. Script. Bruns. tom. iii. p. 370), it appears that Agnes, the daughter of Henry the Wonderful, was married to the "Hertogen von Karmicien" (duke of Carinthia), and that her sister, Alheit (Adelheid, Adelaide), was the wife of Andronicus, "des koniges sone to Greken." Botho was a citizen of Brunswick in the fifteenth century. He wrote in the old Saxo-German dialect, and his Chronicle was printed at Mentz in 1492 by Faust's son-in-law, Peter Schöffer. Leibnitz (Preface to tom. iii. p. 10) considered it to be in general a good authority, and a source from which subsequent historians and genealogists have largely drawn. The extensive alliances of the House of Brunswick, by descent or marriage, which may there be seen, do not warrant the term of "petty a petty lord* in the poor and savage regions of the north of Germany; yet he derived some revenue from his silver mines; and his family is celebrated by the Greeks lord" here applied to its duke. Andronicus, on the eve of his marriage, boasted that his intended father-in-law was one of the most eminent and distinguished princes of his country (Cantacuzene, 1. 1, c. 11), between which and Constantinople there was sufficient intercourse (Ib. 2. 4) for the connections of its royal and imperial families to be at least as well known as the house of Savoy, from which Andronicus took his second bride.-ED.] * Henry the Wonderful was the founder of the branch of Grubenhagen, extinct in the year 1596. (Rimius, p. 287.) He resided in the castle of Wolfenbuttel, and possessed no more than a sixth part of the allodial estates of Brunswick and Luneburgh, which the Guelph family had saved from the confiscation of their great fiefs. The frequent partitions among brothers had almost ruined the princely houses of Germany, till that just, but pernicious, law was slowly superseded by the right of primogeniture. The principality of Grubenhagen, one of the last remains of the Hercynian forest, is a woody, mountainous, and barren tract. (Busching's Geography, vol. vi. p. 270-286. English translation.) The royal author of the Memoirs of Brandenburgh will teach us how justly, in a much later period, the north of Germany deserved the epithets of poor and barbarous. (Essai sur les Mœurs, &c.) In the year, 1306, in the woods of Luneburgh, some wild people of the Vened race were allowed to bury alive their infirm and useless parents. (Rimius, p. 136.) [The strong prejudices of this royal author allowed him to write in no other language than French, and constitute him no impartial or satisfactory authority respecting aught that appertains to his native land. If we find in Germany the Lüneburger Heide, so also that wild and thinly peopled tract has on its northern side the fertile and well-cultivated plains of Holstein, and to the south all the beautiful and productive valleys around Eimbeck and Göttingen. These last formed part of the territories of Henry the Wonderful. The "Vened race were the Slavonian Wenden, or Wends, for whose progress in Germany see ch. 41 and 42, vol. iv. p. 389. 445. In Lüneburg they were overpowered by the Gothic population, whose princes ruled, and were occupied in civilizing, the country. See the Chronica Slavorum (Leibnitz, Script. Bruns. tom. ii.) and the Chronicon Luneburgicum (Ib. tom. iii. p. 176. 219, &c.). If any rare traces of barbarism like that referred to still remained, they are not to be considered as characteristic of the times. At that very period, the reigning duke was "de gude Hertoge Albrecht," whose administration improved his subjects and promoted their commercial intercourse with Hamburg and Lubeck, in connection with the Hanseatic league.-ED.] The assertion of Tacitus, that Germany was destitute of the precious metals, must be taken, even in his own time, with some limitation. (Germania, c. 5. Annal. 11. 20.) According to Spener (Hist. Germaniæ Pragmatica, tom. i. p. 351), Argentífodince in Hercyniis |