Byzantines were perhaps more concerned than most medieval people with
the insecure business of measuring time and defining authority. There
was not much they could do about either, but naming is a taming of the
forces of nature and anarchy, and placed the humblest in relation to the
stability of God. Byzantines called this order taxis. They craved taxis all
the more in the fifteenth-century anno domini (ad), because for orthodox
Christians, who counted by the anno mundi (am), it was, quite simply,
the end of the secular world. For subjects of either, or both, emperor and
patriarch in Constantinople, the world was created on 1 September 5508
bc. Gennadios II Scholarios (1454–6, 1463, 1464–5), Sultan Mehmed II’s
(1451–81) first patriarch after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman
Turks on 29 May 1453, put matters in cosmic proportion by foretelling
doomsday on 1 September 1492, the end of the seventh millennium am.
In 1393, the first year of the last century of the world, Patriarch Antony IV
(1389–90, 1391–7) put matters in taxis. Grand Prince Vasilii I of Moscow
(1389–1425) had remarked that although there was a church, there did not
seem to be a credible emperor in Constantinople. The patriarch replied: ‘it
is not possible to have a church without an emperor. Yea, even if, by the
permission ofGod, the nations [i.e. theTurks] nowencircle the government
and residence of the emperor . . . he is still emperor and autocrat of the
Romans – that is to say of all Christians.’1
The truth was that in 1393 the Ottoman Sultan Bayazid I (1389–1402),
who had in 1389 won his throne and the vassalage of Serbia on the battlefield
of Kosovo, annexed Bulgaria and was preparing to encircle the government
and residence of Manuel II Palaiologos (1391–1425) in Constantinople, a
blockade only broken when the sultan was captured by Timur at the battle
of Ankara on 28 July 1402.2 TheMongols, however, soon left Anatolia, but
not before reviving the nexus of emirates from which the Ottomans had
sprung in what is now Turkey. Thrown into civil war until the emergence of
Mehmed I (1413–21), the Ottomans regrouped in their most recent Balkan
conquests, giving Byzantium a half-century’s respite. By 1453 the City was
far from being a bulwark of the west against the hordes of Asia: indeed, the
reverse. In secular terms theOttoman state already ruled far more orthodox
Christians than did the Byzantine emperor. It was as a European ruler, based
in the Balkans, that Sultan Mehmed II finally took Constantinople as a
preliminary to his conquest and reconquest of Anatolia, which occupied
the rest of his reign.
The Ottomans were not a people but a dynasty; nor did their Muslim
subjects then call themselves Turks. Patriarch Antony used the term ‘nation’
(Greek ethnos, Latin natio) pejoratively to describe such barbarians – but he
did not call himselfGreek either, let aloneHellene, which meant an ancient
pagan. He signed himself, in Greek, as ‘Our Moderation, Antonios, elect
of God, archbishop of Constantinople the New Rome, and ecumenical
patriarch’. Today we call his flock Byzantines. But this is as helpful as calling
the French Lutetians, after the classical name of their capital in Paris. So
far as Antony was concerned, he and his flock were Christian subjects of
the first Constantine’s New Rome. Hence use is made of their own selfdenominator
of ‘Roman orthodox’ to describe them in this chapter.
In the fifteenth century, the Byzantines still called themselves Romans,
synonymous with Christians; inGreek their church was termed catholic, or
ecumenical. But Emperor John VIII Palaiologos (1425–1448) had to appeal
for support to an older Rome and another catholic church against the encircling
Turks. John would have been surprised to find himself described in
the Latin version of the subsequent decree of the union of the churches as
‘emperor of the Greeks’, for he had subscribed to it in purple in Florence
on 6 July 1439 as ‘in Christ God faithful emperor and autocrat of the
Romans’ – his sprawling signature is in Greek.3 But the emperor was
emphatically ‘Roman’ and his people soon confirmed their orthodox identity
too – by generally rejecting the Council of Florence.
This discussion of time and title may sound antiquarian today, but is vital
to an understanding of the identity of the Roman orthodox in the fifteenth
century. It coincided roughly with the ninth century of the Muslim era,
when the Ottomans first named Byzantines for what they were: subjects
of a church that had survived an empire, called ‘Rum’, or Roman. The
definition holds to this day, most vividly when a villager in north-eastern
Turkey explains that ‘This was Roman country; they spoke Christian here.’
If this chapterwere limited to the political history of theByzantine empire
in the fifteenth century, it would be halved by the fall of Constantinople in
1453 which indeed resounded in the west, where historians have made that
date one to remember, without quite explaining why. In truth, the change
of municipal government in Constantinople was important, not so much
in the west as to those whom it principally involved: the Roman orthodox.
The arrangements made between sultan and patriarch in 1454 may have
been shadowy, but they introduced a new order, or taxis, which ensured
the future of those Roman orthodox incorporated in later conquests of the
Morea and the Pontos. Their internal politics still depended on who said
what at Florence in 1439, but Roman orthodox bonds which survived the
conquest were older and simpler: those of patronage and patris – homeland.
This chapter therefore concentrates on the Roman orthodox in the last
century of their world: 6901–7000 am (1393–1492 ad). It concentrates on
four homelands, based on Thessaloniki, Mistra, Constantinople and Trebizond.
It must exclude other orthodox – whether Greek-speaking or not
– who lived under ‘Italian’ rule along the Adriatic coast and in the Aegean,
Dodecanese and Cyprus.4 It excludes Albania, Bulgaria, Serbia, andHerzegovina
and southern Bosnia, as well as the lands north of the Danube
which emerged fromthe fourteenth century as posthumousByzantine states
and were to adopt the very name ‘Romania’: Wallachia and Moldavia.5 It
must even exclude the peoples of the Crimea, whom Mehmed II made
tributary in 1475, turning the Black Sea into an Ottoman lake: Khazars,
Armenians and Karaite Jews ruled by Crimean Tatar khans, Roman orthodox
princes of Gothia and Genoese consuls in Caffa.6
By the end of the century only two eastern Christian rulers remained
wholly independent of the Ottoman empire. Ethiopia had subscribed to
the Union of Florence in 1439, but its Solomonic king, the negus Na’od
(1478–1508) had an orthodoxy of his own. Moscow had rejected the terms
of Florence, so was orthodox enough; Grand Prince Ivan III (1462–1505)
had even married the niece of Constantine XI Palaiologos (1449–53), last
emperor in Constantinople. But New Rome did not grant Russia its patriarchate
until 1589, on the grounds that Old Rome had forfeited the title,
and Moscow could enter the bottom of the list as Third Rome.7
At the end of the seventh millennium in Constantinople, PatriarchMaximos
IV (1491–7) was spared the embarrassment which faces all who foretell
a day of judgement which comes and goes without incident, for by 7000
am most Roman orthodox had adopted the western computation of 1492
ad. Instead, he could say with more conviction than had his predecessor,
Antony, a century before, that while since 1453 it was demonstrably possible
to have a church without an emperor, it was now possible to have a church
with a sultan – indeed for the orthodox a sultan was preferable to a doge
or pope. PatriarchMaximos urged the republic of Venice to grant the same
rights and freedom of worship to Roman orthodox in the Ionian islands
as were available inside the Ottoman empire, while the Roman orthodox
church in Cyprus had to wait until 1571 and the Ottoman conquest of the
island before regaining its autonomy.8 Under Sultan Bayazid II in 1492, the
identity, survival and even prosperity of the Roman orthodox were more
assured than they had seemed to be in 1393, when Bayazid I had threatened
an emperor in Constantinople.
World History
