Vasilief, A History of the Byzantine Empire

The fall of Byzantium

Manuel II (1391-1425) and the Turks

Page 10

The situation in the Peloponnesus. In the last fifty years of the existence of the remains of the Byzantine Empire, the Peloponnesus, rather unexpectedly, attracted the attention of the central government. As the territory of the Empire was reduced to Constantinople, the adjoining portion of Thrace, one or two islands in the Archipelago, Thessalonica, and the Peloponnesus, obviously next to Constantinople the Peloponnesus was the most important part of the Greek possessions. Contemporaries discovered that it was an ancient and purely Greek country, that the inhabitants were real Hellenes and not Romans, and that nowhere else could be created a basis for continuing the struggle against the Ottomans. While northern Greece had already fallen a prey to the Turks and the rest of ancient Greece was on the point of succumbing to the Turkish yoke, in the Peloponnesus there arose a center of Greek national spirit and Hellenic patriotism, which was powerfully affected by a dream, delusive from the historical point of view, of regenerating the Empire and opposing the might of the Ottoman state.

After the Fourth Crusade, the Peloponnesus (or Morea) passed into the power of the Latins. At the beginning of the reign of the restorer of the Byzantine Empire, Michael VIII Palaeologus, the prince of Achaia, William Villehardouin, was captured by the Greeks and gave as ransom three strongholds; Monembasia, Maina, and the recently built Mistra. Since the Greek power in the Peloponnesus was slowly but continuously increasing at the expense of the Latin possessions, the Byzantine province which had been formed there became by the middle of the fourteenth century so important that it was reorganized as a separate despotat and made the appanage of the second son of the Constantinopolitan emperor, who became a sort of viceroy of the emperor in the Peloponnesus. At the end of the fourteenth century the Peloponnesus was mercilessly devastated by the Turks. Having lost all hope of defending the country with his own forces, the Despot of Morea proposed to yield his possessions to the Knights of the Order of Hospitalers of St. John, who at that time held the island of Rhodes, and only the popular insurrection at Mistra, capital of the Despotat, which burst out at this proposal, prevented him from doing so. The weakness of the Ottoman Turks after the defeat of Angora made it possible for the Peloponnesus to recover a little and to hope for better times.

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Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/vasilief/manuel-ii.asp?pg=10