Produced by Turgut Dincer and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) THE DESTRUCTION OF THE GREEK EMPIRE The Destruction of the Greek Empire and the Story of the Capture of Constantinople by the Turks BY EDWIN PEARS, LL.B. Knight of the Greek Order of the Saviour and Commander of the Bulgarian Order of Merit Author of ‘The Fall of Constantinople: being the Story of the Fourth Crusade’ _WITH MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS_ LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON NEW YORK AND BOMBAY 1903 All rights reserved PREFACE My object in writing this book is to give an account of the capture of Constantinople and the destruction of the Greek empire. In order to make the story intelligible and to explain its significance I have given a summary of the history of the empire between the Latin conquest in 1204 and the capture of the city in 1453, and have traced the progress during the same period of the race which succeeded in destroying the empire and in replacing the Greeks as the possessors of New Rome. It may be objected that the task which I have set before me has already been accomplished by Gibbon, and that, as his chapter on the last siege of the city is carefully compiled and written with a brilliancy of style which he has nowhere surpassed, there is no need for any further study of the subject. My answer is twofold: first, that an important mass of new material is now at the disposal of any one who wishes to retell the story, and second, that Gibbon told it with a bias which makes it desirable that it should be retold. The historian of the ‘Decline and Fall’ had less than half the material before him which is now available, and the story of the siege deserves telling with more accuracy and completeness than either the authorities available to him or the scope of his monumental work permitted. It is true that Professor J. B. Bury, the latest editor of Gibbon, has, by the aid of scholarly notes and of careful research, enabled the reader to become possessed of many of the details regarding the siege which have recently become known, but he would be the first to admit that there is ample room for a fuller history of the siege than that given in the ‘Decline and Fall’ even with the aid of his valuable notes.[1] Gibbon himself regretted the poverty of his materials and especially that he had not been able to obtain any Turkish accounts of the siege.[2] The only eye-witnesses whose narratives were before him were Phrantzes, Archbishop Leonard, and Cardinal Isidore. If we add to their narratives the accounts given by Ducas and Chalcondylas together with what Gibbon himself calls ‘short hints of Cantemir and Leunclavius,’ we have substantially all the sources of information which were available when the ‘Decline and Fall’ was written.