Vasilief, A History of the Byzantine Empire

The fall of Byzantium

Manuel II (1391-1425) and the Turks

Page 11

The chief city of the Despotat of Morea, Mistra, medieval Sparta, residence of the Despot, was in the fourteenth century and at the beginning of the fifteenth a political and cultural center of reviving Hellenism. Here were the tombs of the Despots of Morea. Here John Cantacuzene died at a very advanced age, and here he was buried. While the condition of the country people made a contemporary, Mazaris, afraid that he himself would become a barbarian, at the court of the Despot, in his castle of Mistra, was a cultural center which was attracting educated Greeks, scholars, sophists, and courtiers. It is related that in the fourteenth century, at Sparta, there existed a school for copiers of ancient manuscripts. Gregorovius justly compared the court of Mistra with some courts of Italian princes of the Renaissance. The famous Byzantine scholar, humanist, and philosopher, Gemistus Plethon, lived at the court of the Despot of Morea during the reign of Manuel II.

In 1415, Manuel himself visited the Peloponnesus, where his second son Theodore was Despot at the time. The Emperor's first measure to protect the peninsula against future invasions was the construction of a wall with numerous towers on the Isthmus of Corinth. The wall was erected on the site of the rampart which in the fifth century B.C. the Peloponnesians had raised on the approach of Xerxes; this was restored in the third century A.D. by the Emperor Valerian when he fortified Greece against the Goths; and finally it was constructed again by Justinian the Great when Greece was threatened by the Huns and Slavs. In preparation for this same Turkish danger in the fifteenth century, the predecessor of Theodore had established numerous colonies of Albanians in some desert regions of the Peloponnesus, and Manuel II, who delivered his funeral oration, praised him for this precaution.

Previous / First / Next Page of this section

A History of the Byzantine Empire - Table of Contents

Next Chapter : John VIII (1425-1448) and the Turkish menace

Previous Chapter : The policies of Byzantium in the fourteenth century

Constantinople

 

Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/vasilief/manuel-ii.asp?pg=11