The ignorant Balkan peasantry--especially the Slavic elements--prized their sons far more highly than their daughters. Recruiting for the army was a greater blow to them than recruiting for the harem. It was the strong, sturdy son who was chosen. This touched the pocket-book as well as the heart-strings. The Anatolian Greek, especially of the cities, had been deterred from becoming a Moslem more by a lack of eagerness to assume military obligations than by a zeal for his ancestral faith. The Macedonian Greek, the Bulgarian, and the Serbian regarded the bearing of arms as a natural obligation. Fighting was a part of living. Better the faith of Mohammed, then, than the loss of the son’s help with the harvest. That there were wholesale conversions to Islam as a result of the threat to apply the law of _devchurmé_ is a logical inference from the fact that Murad never mustered more than a thousand janissaries. III The Byzantine Empire did not recover, even temporarily, from the effect of Murad’s first campaign in Europe. The fall of Demotika and Adrianople, followed so closely by that of Philippopolis, removed within eighteen months the last hope of retrieving the fortunes of the empire. There were still many places remaining to the Byzantines in Thrace. But the surrender of the fortresses in the valleys of the Ergene and the Maritza had destroyed the military prestige of the Byzantines, and foreshadowed the speedy subjugation of the whole country. The loss of the revenues of Thrace and of the great plain south of the main Balkan range reduced the imperial treasury to dependence upon the port duties and city taxes of Salonika and Constantinople. For ninety years the shadow of the empire remained. But whatever power, whatever influence was left to the successors of Constantine, it was rather in western Europe than in the Balkan peninsula. The impress of one thousand and thirty years of continuous existence from the renaming of old Byzantium to the fall of Adrianople was too deep to vanish in a few years. The decay had been going on for centuries. The final extinction would of necessity take several generations. The complete abasement of the Byzantines is revealed in the treaty that John V Palacologos was compelled to conclude with Murad shortly after the capture of Philippopolis. In the fall of 1362 or the spring of 1363, John bound himself to refrain from any attempt to win back what he had lost in Thrace, either by a separate attack or by joining the Serbians or other enemies of the Osmanlis. In addition he promised to aid Murad against his Anatolian enemies, the Turkish emirs.[268]