The Final 200 Years
Reconquering Constantinople proved a mixed blessing for Michael Palaeologos in midsummer 1261. While it allowed him to claim glory for restoring Byzantium, his small Anatolian-based Empire of Nicaea now had to somehow pay the huge city’s immense administration costs. The burden naturally fell to its farmers, whom under onerous taxation often welcomed the Muslim ghazi warriors who streamed in from the east as a better alternative to their co-religionists. In this manner Anatolia was almost completely lost by 1310.
News was little better on the European front; Serbia and Bulgaria had flourished in Byzantium’s sixty-year absence, and threatened what feeble manpower the Empire possessed. While the Emperors managed to occupy an area roughly coterminous with northern Greece for almost a century, most of it was subject to raids and pillages, often from Turks, and sometimes from their own family members.
The Palaiologos family who ruled until the end proved their own worst enemy, fighting five civil wars that destroyed what little was left of their territory and tax base. Money to fight with was tight; both the crown jewels and Imperial Navy were pawned off during the 1340s to pay their often Turkish mercenaries. Byzantium made itself an easy target for the growing Ottomans, who crossed into Gallipoli in 1354, and Adrianople and Didymoteichon fell to them within a decade.
The Empire's final sixty years consisted of increasingly frantic appeals to Western Europe for help (including Catholic-Orthodox merger offers) and gradual absorption of its territory by the Ottomans. Although the civil wars had largely ended, it was too late; Thrace was mostly lost by the 1420s, Thessaloniki in 1430. When the final assault on Constantinople came, its defense, though valiant, proved insufficient; it took until Tuesday, May 29th 1453 for the Roman Empire to finally end.
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