His successor, Ourach, was only nineteen years old, a young man of mild character, with none of the stern qualities needed to carry out the warlike plans of his father. His vassal lords had not lived long enough under a centralized system to understand its advantages even under a weak ruler. Without the strong personality of Douchan, the empire and the titular dignity of Tsar were only shadows. Less fortunate than the tribe of Osman, where the line from father to son maintained in unbroken succession under strong personal rule the clear-sighted aims of the founder, the Servians could not resist the forces of disintegration. Their country was mountainous, and hence the people were kept apart in small, isolated communities. There was no longer a vigorous leader to resist the centrifugal tendencies imposed by petty ambitions and jealousies; and only for ten years after Douchan’s death did the external form of his empire last. As a barrier against the Turkish conquerors in Europe the Servians proved utterly ineffective. With the Slavs eliminated the brunt of resistance naturally fell upon the Greeks; but they were now only an emaciated remnant of a great and long enduring empire that had worn out the Arab and Saracen and had held the Slav at bay. After the fall of the Latin rule at Constantinople (1261), the city became the capital of the reconstructed Eastern Empire; but the scale of this restoration was much reduced from its original grandeur. There were four groups of imperial territories: the Asiatic possessions that had been controlled from Nicæa, economically important as trade centers, but not great in extent; in Europe, the capital and Thrace; some towns to the North, such as Adrianople, a part of Macedonia, the peninsula of Gallipoli, Chalcidice, and a part of Thessaly; certain islands in the Ægean, Rhodes, Lesbos, Samothrace, Imbros, and the Peloponnesus in Greece. These possessions, the feeble remnants of the realm once ruled by Basil the Macedonian, were surrounded by lands inhabited by numerous races. There were the Frankish lands in Greece, the Venetians in the Ægean, an independent Greek sovereignty in Epirus, Catalans in Thessaly, Genoese in the Black and Ægean Seas, and the parts immediately adjacent to Constantinople itself; the Seldjouk sultans at Iconium, and the autonomous empire of Trebizond. There were also the Slavic peoples in the Balkan peninsula, not to mention the more distant Christian kingdoms of Armenia and Georgia.