Cantacuzenos lived for thirty years in the monastery of Mistra, near old Sparta. It was long enough for him to see the irreparable injury that his ambition had caused to his country, and to realize how he had destroyed the people to rule over whom he had sacrificed every higher and nobler instinct. Cantacuzenos has had a fair trial before the bar of posterity. For many long years, far removed from the turmoil of the world, were spent in the building up of his brief of justification. He left a history of his life and times. So he pleads for himself. But even if we did not have the testimony of Gregoras, and of the archives of the Italian cities and of the Vatican, to supplement the story of Cantacuzenos, he would stand condemned by his own record of facts. Cantacuzenos had far more natural ability than Andronicus II and Andronicus III. During the long and arduous struggle to satisfy his personal ambition, he showed himself a keen, courageous, resourceful leader. At the beginning of his career he was in a position of commanding influence. His country was facing a crisis which would have called forth the best and noblest in one who loved his race, his religion, and his fatherland. But John Cantacuzenos loved only himself. The legacy of the widow and helpless child of the friend who had trusted and honoured him gave to Cantacuzenos the opportunity for developing true greatness in the fulfilment of that highest of missions--a sacred trust. But Cantacuzenos saw only the opportunity for taking advantage of a dead man’s faith. To say that Cantacuzenos was the cause of the downfall of the Byzantine Empire would be to ignore other forces working to the same end, and to put too great an emphasis upon the power of an individual human will to shape the destinies of the world. However, in the stage of world history, leaders of men are the personification of causes. We group everything around them. The character and acts of Cantacuzenos reveal the fatal weakness in the Balkan peninsula of his day. The Ottoman conquest was possible because there was no consciousness of religious or racial commonweal. How could this larger devotion, this larger sense of duty and obligation, be expected in men who were not influenced, much less constrained, by ties of blood and personal friendship? XIII Cantacuzenos ceased to be a factor in Byzantine affairs in 1355. But the Greeks could not rid themselves as easily of Orkhan. The Osmanlis had come to stay.