CHAP. shame and loss from the walls of Croya, the castle and resiLXVII. dence of the Castriots; the march, the siege, the retreat, were harassed by a vexatious, and almost invisible, adversary;4 and the disappointment might tend to embitter, perhaps to shorten, the last days of the sultan.42 In the fulness of conquest, Mahomet the second still felt at his bosom this domestic thorn: his lieutenants were permitted to negociate a truce; and the Albanian prince may justly be praised as a firm and able champion of his national independence. The enthusiasm of chivalry and religion has ranked him with the names of Alexander and Pyrrhus; nor would they blush to acknowledge their intrepid countryman: but his narrow dominion, and slender powers, must leave him at an humble distance below the heroes of antiquity, who triumphed over the East and the Roman legions. His splendid achievements, the bashaws whom he encountered, the armies that he discomfited, and the three thousand Turks who were slain by his single hand, must be weighed in the scales of suspicious criticism. Against an illiterate enemy, and in the dark solitude of Epirus, his partial biographers may safely indulge the latitude of romance: but their fictions are exposed by the light of Italian history; and they afford a strong presumption against their own truth, by a fabulous tale of his exploits, when he passed the Adriatic with eight hundred horse to the succour of the king of Naples.43 Without disparagement to his fame, they might have owned that he was finally oppressed by the Ottoman powers: in his extreme danger, he applied to pope Pius the second for a refuge in the ecclesiastical state; and his resources were al nian; the former, 70 miles from Croya (1. i. p. 17), was contiguous to the fortress of Sfetigrade, whose inhabitants refused to drink from a well into which a dead dog had traiterously been cast (1. v. p. 139, 140). We want a good map of Epirus. 41 Compare the Turkish narrative of Cantemir (p. 92.) with the pompous and prolix declamation in the fourth, fifth, and sixth books of the Albanian priest, who has been copied by the tribe of strangers and moderns. 42 In honour of his hero, Barletius (1. vi. p. 188...192.) kills the sultan, by disease indeed, under the walls of Croya. But this audacious fiction is dis. proved by the Greeks and Turks, who agree in the time and manner of Amurath's death at Adrianople. 43 See the marvels of his Calabrian expedition in the ninth and tenth books of Marinus Barletius, which may be rectified by the testimony or silence of Muratori (Annali d'Italia, tom. xiii. p. 291.) and his original authors (Joh. Simonetta de Rebus Francisci Sfortia, in Muratori, Script. Rerum Ital. tom. xxi. p. 728. et alios). The Albanian cavalry, under the name of Stradiots, soon became famous in the wars of Italy (Memoires de Comines, l. viii. c. 5). LXVII. and death, A. D. 1467, most exhausted, since Scanderbeg died a fugitive at Lissus CHAP. on the Venetian territory.44 His sepulchre was soon violated by the Turkish conquerors; but the Janizaries, who wore his bones enchased in a bracelet, declared by this su perstitious amulet their involuntary reverence for his valour. Jan, 17. The instant ruin of his country may redound to the hero's glory; yet, had he balanced the consequences of submission and resistance, a patriot perhaps would have declined the unequal contest which must depend on the life and genius of one man. Scanderbeg might indeed be supported by the rational, though fallacious, hope, that the pope, the king of Naples, and the Venetian republic, would join in the defence of a free and Christian people, who guarded the sea-coast of the Adriatic, and the narrow passage from Greece to Italy. His infant son was saved from the national shipwreck; the Castriots 45 were invested with a Neapolitan dukedom, and their blood continues to flow in the noblest families of the realm. A colony of Albanian fugitives obtained a settlement in Calabria, and they preserve at this day the language and manners of their ancestors.46 tine, the last of the Greek em perors, 1448. In the long career of the decline and fall of the Roman Constan empire, I have reached at length the last reign of the princes of Constantinople, who so feebly sustained the name and Roman or majesty of the Cæsars. On the decease of John Palæologus, who survived about four years the Hungarian crusade,47 the A. D. royal family, by the death of Andronicus and the monastic profession of Isidore, was reduced to three princes, Constantine, Demetrius, and Thomas, the surviving sons of the emperor Manuel. Of these the first and the last were far distant in the Morea; but Demetrius, who possessed the domain of Selybria, was in the suburbs, at the head of a 44 Spondanus, from the best evidence and the most rational criticism, has reduced the giant Scanderbeg to the human size (A. D. 1461, No. 20. 1463, No. 9. 1465, No. 12, 13. 1467, No. 1). His own letter to the pope, and the testimony of Phranza (1. iii. c. 28.) a refugee in the neighbouring isle of Corfu, demonstrate his last distress, which is awkwardly concealed by Marinus Barletius (1. x). 45 See the family of the Castriots, in Ducange (Fam. Dalmaticæ, &c. xviii. p. 348...350). 46 This colony of Albanese is mentioned by Mr. Swinburne (Travels into the Two Sicilies, vol. i. p. 350...354). 47 The chronology of Phranza is clear and authentic; but instead of four years and seven months, Spondanus (A. D. 1445, No. 7.) assigns seven or eight years to the reign of the last Constantine, which he deduces from a spurious epistle of Eugenius IV. to the king of Ethiopia. Nov. 1... A. D. 1453, May 29. LXVII. CHAP. party: his ambition was not chilled with the public distress; and his conspiracy with the Turks and the schismatics had already disturbed the peace of his country. The funeral of the late emperor was accelerated with singular, and even suspicious, haste; the claim of Demetrius to the vacant throne was justified by a trite and flimsy sophism, that he was born in the purple, the eldest son of his father's reign. But the empress-mother, the senate and soldiers, the clergy and people, were unanimous in the cause of the lawful successor; and the despot Thomas, who, ignorant of the change, accidentally returned to the capital, asserted with becoming zeal the interest of his absent brother. An ambassador, the historian Phranza, was immediately dispatched to the court of Adrianople. Amurath received him with honour and dismissed him with gifts; but the gracious approbation of the Turkish sultan announced his supremacy, and the approaching downfall of the Eastern empire. By the hands of two illustrious deputies, the Imperial crown was placed at Sparta on the head of Constantine. In the spring he sailed from the Morea, escaped the encounter of a Turkish squadron, enjoyed the acclamations of his subjects, celebrated the festival of a new reign, and exhausted by his donatives the treasure, or rather the indigence, of the state. The emperor immediately resigned to his brothers the possession of the Morea; and the brittle friendship of the two princes, Demetrius and Thomas, was confirmed in their mother's presence by the frail security of oaths and embraces. His next occupation was the choice of a consort. A daughter of the doge of Venice had been proposed; but the Byzantine nobles objected the distance between an hereditary monarch and an elective magistrate; and in their subsequent distress, the chief of that powerful republic was not unmindful of the affront. Constantine afterwards hesitated between the royal families of Trebizond and Georgia; and the embassy of Phranza represents in his public and private life the last days of the Byzantine empire.48 Embas sies of The protovestiare, or great chamberlain, Phranza, sailed from Constantinople as minister of a bridegroom; and the A.D. 1450 relics of wealth and luxury were applied to his pompous ap Phranza, ...1452. 48 Phranza, (l. iii. c. 1...6.) deserves credit and esteem. pearance. His numerous retinue consisted of nobles and CHAP. guards, of physicians and monks; he was attended by a band LXVII. of music; and the term of his costly embassy was protracted above two years. On his arrival in Georgia or Iberia, the natives from the towns and villages flocked around the strangers; and such was their simplicity, that they were delighted with the effects, without understanding the cause, of musical harmony. Among the crowd was an old man, above an hundred years of age, who had formerly been carried away a captive by the Barbarians," and who amused his hearers with a tale of the wonders of India,so from whence he had returned to Portugal by an unknown sea.51 From this hospitable land, Phranza proceeded to the court of Trebizond, where he was informed by the Greek prince of the recent decease of Amurath. Instead of rejoicing in the deliverance, the experienced statesman expressed his appre hension, that an ambitious youth would not long adhere to the sage and pacific system of his father. After the sultan's decease, his Christian wife Maria," the daughter of the Servian despot, had been honourably restored to her parents: on the fame of her beauty and merit, she was recommended by the ambassador as the most worthy object of the royal choice; and Phranza recapitulates and refutes the specious objections that might be raised against the proposal. The majesty of the purple would ennoble an unequal alliance; the bar of affinity might be removed by liberal alms and the dispensation of the church; the disgrace of Turkish nuptials had been repeatedly overlooked; and, though the fair Maria 49 Suppose him to have been captured in 1394, in Timour's first war in Georgia (Sherefeddin, 1. iii. c. 50); he might follow his Tartar master into Hindostan in 1398, and from thence sail to the spice islands. 50 The happy and pious Indians lived an hundred and fifty years, and enjoyed the most perfect productions of the vegetable and mineral kingdoms. The animals were on a large scale; dragons seventy cubits, ants (the formica Indica) nine inches long, sheep like elephants, elephants like sheep. Quidlibet audendi, &c. 51 He sailed in a country vessel from the spice island to one of the ports of the exterior India; invenitque navem grandem Ibericam, quâ in Portugalliam est delatus. This passage, composed in 1477 (Phranza, 1. iii. c. 30), twenty years before the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, is spurious or wonderful. But this new geography is sullied by the old and incompatible error which places the source of the Nile in India. 52 Cantemir (p. 83), who styles her the daughter of Lazarus Ogli, and the Helen of the Servians, places her marriage with Amurath in the year 1424. It will not easily be believed, that in six-and twenty years cohabitation, the sultan corpus ejus non tetiget. After the taking of Constantinople, she fled to Mahomet. II. (Phranza, l. iii. c. 22). CHAP was near fifty years of age, she might yet hope to give an LXVII. heir to the empire. Constantine listened to the advice, which State of the Byzantine court. was transmitted in the first ship that sailed from Trebizond; but the factions of the court opposed his marriage; and it was finally prevented by the pious vow of the sultana, who ended her days in the monastic profession. Reduced to the first alternative, the choice of Phranza was decided in favour of a Georgian princess; and the vanity of her father was dazzled by the glorious alliance. Instead of demanding, according to the primitive and national custom, a price for his daughter, he offered a portion of fifty-six thousand, with an annual pension of five thousand ducats; and the services of the ambassador were repaid by an assurance, that, as his son had been adopted in baptism by the emperor, the establishment of his daughter should be the peculiar care of the empress of Constantinople. On the return of Phranza, the treaty was ratified by the Greek monarch, who with his own. hand impressed three vermillion crosses on the golden bull, and assured the Georgian envoy, that in the spring his gallies should conduct the bride to her Imperial palace. But Constantine embraced his faithful servant, not with the cold approbation of a sovereign, but with the warm confidence of a friend, who, after a long absence, is impatient to pour his secrets into the bosom of his friend. "Since the death of my mother and of Cantacuzene, who alone advised me "without interest or passion," I am surrounded," said the emperor, "by men whom I can neither love, nor trust, nor 66 esteem. You are not a stranger to Lucas Notaras, the 66 great admiral; obstinately attached to his own sentiments, "he declares, both in private and public, that his sentiments 66 are the absolute measure of my thoughts and actions. The "rest of the courtiers are swayed by their personal or fac"tious views; and how can I consult the monks on ques"tions of policy and marriage? I have yet much employ"ment for your diligence and fidelity. In the spring you shall engage one of my brothers to solicit the succour of 53 The classical reader will recollect the offers of Agamemnon (Iliad, 1. v. 144), and the general practice of antiquity. 54 Cantacuzene (I am ignorant of his relation to the emperor of that name) was great domestic, a firm asserter of the Greek creed, and a brother of the queen of Servia, whom he visited with the character of ambassador (Syropulus, p. 37, 38. 45). |
