PETRUS POSSINUS TO THE READER
I. Behold, I pay out a debt not of old standing; and the second part of Pachymeres' history, which I had begun to owe two years ago, I now present—not too late, if one considers the mass of the work. It describes the twenty-six years preceding the empire of Andronicus Palæologus, whom the common people are accustomed to distinguish by the addition of "the Elder," to separate him from his grandson and not very harmonious colleague of the same name. This image of a most unhappy reign, formed by our historian, is—more by the nature of the subject matter than by the genius of the painter—like unto that Parrhasian creation of which Pliny testifies, the "demon" or "people" of Athens, so adumbrated by that supreme artist that their character and movements, though contradictory among themselves, nevertheless aroused in the viewer at a glance a single impression; the spectator would recognize in an instant one who was at once diverse and constant, irascible and placable, unjust and clement, glorious and humble, fierce and fugitive. By a similar example, while our author expresses the deeds of Andronicus in a sincere narration, he exhibits the man himself: on one side a most audacious scorner of religion, on the other most superstitiously fearful; for the most part solicitous for composing the discords of the Church, yet at times a most vehement disturber of the peace of the Churches established by so much labor from his father; sometimes frugal and sparing, immediately most lavishly prodigal; always most shrewd in devising the means to achieve what he wished, yet never anything but most imprudent in the choice of his counsels; frequently affecting in an extraordinary manner the reputation of being dutiful toward his household, yet not rarely raging with beastly impiety, violating most sacred ties without respect—inasmuch as he was not only not afraid to defraud the memory of his most loving and overly benevolent parent of due funeral rites, but even forced his widowed mother to condemn the judgment of her own husband, his father, in writing; and [forced] the spouse of the King of Hungary, his daughter, whose death—had she been most tenderly beloved—he would have lamented most softly, to be deprived of the honor of burial upon a light suspicion; and caused his brother, the Porphyrogenitus, to be carried about in a grilled cage and to wither away to death in a dire prison; yet, he would not hesitate to boast of a part of these very deeds as if they were illustrious exploits, displayed gloriously in boastful harangues. A
II. To such unstable morals of the prince, the state of the universal republic responded in a most constant—meaning most turbulent and calamitous—manner. The treasury was emptied, the people exhausted by constant and immense tributes, the endowments of palace ministers overturned, the leaders of the Church themselves reduced to shameful beggary; the fleet was utterly neglected, the garrisons of the frontier fortresses withdrawn, the terrestrial armies completely dissipated, the unarmed empire rashly exposed to provoked barbarians, and the sum of public protection and safety most inconsiderately entrusted to faithless savages and rapacious foreigners. From this, the necessary effects of such causes followed immediately: the devastation of provinces, the plundering of cities, the pillage, captivity, slaughter, flight of peoples, and a desolation of all that was subject to the Roman empire in both the Asian and European continents, the most sorrowful that was ever heard of; the royal city itself, whose ports and gates were always insulted with impunity by piratical fleets at sea and by the infested lines of thieving barbarians on land—the city itself, I say, the seat of empire, Constantinople, scarcely protecting its free spirit with wall and ramparts, [while] famine raged within, as did pestilence, the bloody furies of those fighting with the sword of sedition, earthquakes, dire fires, and divine plagues of that kind. These things compelled the most miserable citizens to doubt which fortune was less calamitous: whether that of those who had been led away into barbarian servitude, or that of those still under their ancestral roofs, seething with extreme terrors, and uncertain with agonizing anxiety as to by what misfortune they were soon to perish. B
III. That such a harsh retribution of an angry Deity was provoked by the crimes of those times, many have anxiously inquired; and Pachymeres, not hiding the fact that he himself was a curious investigator of this hidden matter, affirms it more than once. Let us reveal this mystery to them, and point out the beam which, because it is fixed in their own eyes, the blinded cannot see. A relapse into heresy, denying the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father together with the Son, a repeated schism, recurrent rebellion against the Roman Pontiff, the Vicar of Christ—these, Byzantines, are the crimes published by this work. Seek not other causes for the fatal calamities under which you groan, linked in such a continuous chain, and ever increasing in atrocity. However upright, gentle, and just your princes may seem, however composed your people, or grave and honest your clergy, there is one transgression, most effective in stirring up God’s hatred against you: the stubborn embrace of a reprobate dogma, and the obstinate contempt for the supreme ecclesiastical authority established by the very institution of Christ in Peter’s successor, the Roman Bishop. This is the Lernean swamp of your evils, the origin of your slaughters, the single source of all your misfortunes. Do you grieve that your most numerous armies, led in person by your Augustus, Michael the Younger, were—at one time in Asia, opposed by untamed barbarians, and at another, on the Western continent, faced by a few poorly prepared runaways—put to flight, terrified by panic, routed and destroyed? Divine Nemesis has terrified, dispersed, and ruined you, avenging the heresy and schism within you. Indeed, from the time you drove from the patriarchal throne John Veccus—a legitimate prelate, most learned, eloquent, and steadfast defender of the orthodox dogma concerning the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son—has your Church ever rested in even a shadow of tranquility? Did not Gregory Cyprius, whom you intruded in place of Veccus, fall headlong from his seat, crushed by constant agitation? Did not Athanasius, who replaced him, suffer the same? Did not John Cosmas suffer the same? And similar, nay worse, after he was restored against justice and law to a patriarchate rightly taken from him, was not the same Athanasius made most hostile and abominable to you yourselves? Why should I recount the savage, monstrous sects—raging with mutual quarrels against you and among themselves—the Arsenians, Josephites, Hyacinthines, and others, favoring now the parties of George Moschampar, now of Mark the disciple of Cyprius, now of Andronicus of Sardis, now of John of Ephesus, now of Nicetas of Dyrrhachium, now of Theoleptus of Philadelphia? What malice possessed those irreconcilably squabbling! What incurable fury was in those who, with irrevocable zeal, mutually infested one another! The very heavens, whose judgment you sought regarding your controversies at that meeting in Adramyttium through a certain superstitiously curious pyromancy—committing the writings of both sides to sacred flame—clearly declared that all your conventicles were equally hateful to God and the powers above.
IV. But we labor in vain to admonish those whom voluntary blindness prevents from seeing what is manifest. Let us rather draw this fruit from the reading of this history: that we should no longer doubt that God stirred up the power of the Ottomans to punish the contumacious schism and reprobate dogma of the Greeks who rule in the East. Almost immediately after Andronicus Palaeologus the Elder became master of the empire and turned its entire strength toward shaking and extinguishing the concord which his father Michael had established with the Apostolic See, tumultuous bands of brigands erupted from Persia into Christian lands. A leader of one of these, whom our people call Atman, and others name Ottoman, did not cease to rise from obscurity, need, and weakness, to become renowned, to grow rich, and to gather strength little by little. At length, having grown through many successes, as Pachymeres here records in scattered entries, and having become enriched with spoils, and having subdued castles, cities, and provinces to his dominion, he established a kingdom at Prusa, which he had seized in Bithynia, around the year of Christ 1300, the eighteenth year of our Andronicus’s reign. Ottoman’s son, Orchanes, who succeeded him in the kingdom about thirty years later as he was dying, having captured Nicaea, the second royal city of the Byzantine Augusti, and furthermore Nicomedia and the rest of its illustrious cities, then added to his empire lands taken from the Romans—Mysia, Lycaonia, Phrygia, Caria, and all regions reaching to the Hellespont and the Euxine. Under the auspices of this same man, who still reigns, his son Soliman, who died before his father, crossed into Thrace, being the first of the Ottomans to...
stain Europe with blood. Thus Orchanes, having governed for twenty-two years, transmitted his realm to his son Amurates, whom he had left surviving; and he, by diminishing and restricting the Roman power in the regions subject to both cities—Callipolis and Hadrianopolis—enlarged and expanded Ottoman rule. From this man was born Bajazet, who snatched Thessaly, Macedonia, Phocis, Attica, Mysia, and Bulgaria from the Greeks. Tamerlane defeated and abducted Bajazet, under whose sons—Soliman, Musa, and Mahomet I—a brief, truce-like respite from evils refreshed the Byzantines, while God waited to see if they might repent. But because schism and heresy persisted there, a new avenger arose: Amurates II, son of the first Mahomet and father of the second. He conquered the great city of Thessalonica, though he was retarded from obliterating the Constantinopolitan empire by the Hungarian successes of John Hunyadi and the Epirote successes of Scanderbeg. For meanwhile, the most clement Lord willed to test one final effort to restore the Greeks to the Catholic communion and faith, having gathered the holy ecumenical Council of Florence around the year of Christ 1440, in which a new reconciliation of the Greek Church with the Latin was at last ratified. But when even from this, most of them again fell away, Mahomet II, son and successor of Amurates II, took Constantinople by force in the year of Christ 1453. With the ruin of the conquered city, he abolished the Eastern Empire after Constantine, eighth of that name, sixth in the order of the Palaeologi successors of Andronicus, and the last by fate, having clearly taken vengeance for the second convention with the Latins, which had been publicly initiated at Florence but rescinded by the Greeks—just as the sixth Ottoman in the continuous series of his ancestors had been divinely stirred to avenge the violation of the former convention made at the Council of Lyons.
V. A The first act of this most sorrowful tragedy for the whole world is played out as if upon a stage, with Pachymeres as the teacher in the work whose curtain we are now raising. Nowhere else would you find so candidly described and so simply revealed, by one who was privy and an eyewitness, the lordship, the vows, the undertakings, the designs, the crooked turns of the machines, the deceptive appearances of the pretexts, the secrets of the cunning machinations, and the crafty yet frequently unsuccessful attempts of those unpraiseworthy arts of this principality. George Gregoras covers only the highest peaks of these matters, and he is the only other Greek known to me who treats of this time; yet he is not an eyewitness to all of it, being younger than Pachymeres and not to be compared to him in dignity, nor equal in judgment—moreover, because of his excessive bias, having declared himself for the party of his friend the Elder against the Younger Andronicus, his zeal for the heresiarch Barlaam, his envy of the Acindynian faction (of which he was the standard-bearer), and his license in disparaging princes and monks, he deserved to be branded B with indelible marks of malice and falsehood by his own contemporary, Cantacuzenus; finally, even regarding Cantacuzenus he showed little deference, and he is a man whose neutral opinion cannot be relied upon by readers free from all prejudice, because he did not preserve with sufficient care his reputation for veracity, which is the soul of history, against the just suspicions of a style susceptible to passions and a venal intellect.
VI. C Therefore, prudent Reader, take this man Pachymeres as the sole suitable witness of the acts of Andronicus; and do not fear the harm that is deservedly prescribed for readers to avoid in the narration of successful crimes, lest they entice the unwary toward imitation. Here the crimes of Andronicus the Elder are divulged—crimes great, yet now being presented as an antidote to bitter and unpostponed vengeance, there being no danger remaining for those who know them. He is exhibited as a promise-breaker, a rebel against the Vicar of Christ, contumacious, abusive, and most ungrateful to the apostolic Roman Church; but at the same time he is shown to be most imprudent in every counsel, most unhappy in every undertaking, yielding to no enemy, however weak, and providing himself as a laughingstock against any adversary who dared to stand against him, always held in contempt with impunity D and mocked while incurring loss. His threats have had no weight, his decrees no constancy, his words no faith, his desires no success; he is the shadow of an emperor, the mask of a prince, the target of adverse fate, prolific in his own disgrace and ruin, long-lived for the perpetuity of misery; finally, he is the man of whom all posterity, mourning and detesting the final inclination toward irreparable destruction given to the empire of New Rome—once illustrious for ten centuries—will justly complain. These things, candid Reader, have occurred to me to preface for you at this threshold. For as to my method of translation, and the order and method of notation, I wish the things I mentioned at the beginning of the previous part to be understood here as well. Farewell.
Written at Rome, on the day before the Ides of January, in the year of Christ 1668.