The only palliative which can be offered for John’s conduct is that he felt resistance to be useless. The empire wanted peace. The cities and towns had been devastated, not merely by successive wars, civil and foreign, but by the terrible Black Death, a plague which since 1346 had demanded everywhere its large quota of victims. He had seen Turkish armies defeated, but everywhere and always reappearing in greater numbers than ever. Asiatics were in overwhelming numbers on every side. The Egyptian Moslems had captured Sis, the capital of the Lesser Armenia, in 1369. Not only was every district in Asia Minor overrun with Turks, but they had penetrated Europe at many points. Bands of them had been left in the country when the armies, invited into Macedonia or Thrace or crossing over for plunder, had withdrawn. ‘For my part, I believe,’ says Ducas, ‘that there is a greater multitude of them between the Dardanelles and the Danube than in Asia Minor,’ and although Ducas wrote three quarters of a century later, his remarks are applicable to the reign of John. He describes how Turks from Cappadocia, Lycia, Cilicia, and Caria had sailed into Europe to pillage and to ruin the lands of the Christians. A hundred thousand had laid waste the country as far west as Dalmatia. The Albanians from being a large nation had become a small one. The Wallachs, the Serbians, and his own people, the Romans, had been completely ruined. Amid his lamentations over the evils inflicted by the invaders, his saddest thought and gravest source of complaint is that the victories gained by the Turks had been won by men who were the offspring of Christian parents, by Janissaries who were of Roman, Bulgarian, Serbian, Wallachian, or Hungarian origin. It is in the hopelessness of further resistance to such overwhelming forces that the only explanation of John’s acceptance of the position of a tributary prince is to be found. [Sidenote: Battle of Harmanli, 1371.]