The History of the Renaissance World (87 page)

Ramesuan then returned to claim his father’s throne himself, after the eighteen-year parenthesis in his rule. His uncle had doubled the size of his kingdom; Ramesuan repaid the favor by executing his teenaged cousin, Borommaracha’s son and heir Thong Lan, in the traditional manner: placing him in a velvet sack and then beating him to death.
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Ramesuan then began a second war with the Khmer. His strategy was not simply to conquer the Khmer but to enfold the people themselves into the Thai. Captive Khmer—particularly if they were artists, writers, musicians, or high-ranking civil officials—were deported to Ayutthaya, where they were encouraged to continue their work. The Thai and Khmer cultures had already entwined around each other, during the years when the Khmer had dominated the valley; the Thai already used the Khmer writing system, had already borrowed Khmer ways of irrigating their crops. Now that the Khmer had diminished, the exchange continued: not just entwining but mingling, evolving into something new.
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The two families—the clan of his father, and the merchant tribe of his mother—were less inclined to mix. Until the end of the century, Ramesuan held the throne of his father; but his mother’s family waited, ready to seize their opportunity at the crown.

75.1 Conflict in Southeast Asia

A
LONG THE COAST OF THE
C
HINA
S
EA
, the Dai Viet and the Cham celebrated the departure of the Mongols by attacking each other.

Decades of territorial conflict over their common border ramped up, around 1360, into a full-scale war. Leading the fight was the warlike Che Bong Nga of Champa, known to the Dai Viet as the Red King. Like Ramathibodi of the Thai, his origins are obscure; all that we know is that, by 1361, he had roused the Cham into their first major assault on the Dai Viet. More attacks followed; and in 1369, Che Bong Nga managed to gain the imprimatur of the Chinese emperor on his kingship, a recognition that gave yet more energy to his attempts to conquer the Dai Viet.

In 1371, Che Bong Nga organized a massive sea invasion, landing his soldiers along the Dai Viet coast. They rampaged inland all the way to the capital city of Thang Long, which the Cham soldiers sacked and burned. Girls and young men alike were kidnapped and hauled back to Champa as slaves.
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Unable to halt the raids, the Dai Viet king abdicated and handed his throne over to his brother, Tran Due-tong. Far from rallying the country against the invaders, Tran Due-tong soon gained a reputation as a cowardly and greedy king; during one invasion, he fled from the capital city on a raft and waited at a distance until the Cham had retreated; to prepare for the next, he took all of his treasure up into the mountains and buried it so that neither the Cham nor his subjects would be able to get their hands on it.
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The Red King sacked Thang Long for a second time; and then for a third time. In all, he launched at least ten major campaigns against the Dai Viet. But despite his harassment of the Dai Viet and the apparent ease of penetrating to the capital, he was unable to take hold of it. He was resisted, fiercely, not by the kings of Dai Viet but by the chief general, Le Quy Ly, a soldier of Chinese blood who had risen through the ranks of the Dai Viet army to become its supreme commander.

Le Quy Ly led the long tiring years of resistance to the Cham, again and again driving back the invading army at enormous cost. In 1389, he suffered the greatest defeat of his career. Fighting on the Luong river, his soldiers were massacred, his officers scattered; he was forced to scramble away through the rough countryside with one of his surviving captains, who moaned, “The enemy is stronger than we are, and resistance is impossible!”
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But Le Quy Ly had been arming his soldiers with weapons imported from his Chinese homeland. The Dai Viet army had no vocabulary for these new weapons: they simply borrowed the Ming Chinese terms for them. In the next desperate engagement against Cham, a river battle in 1390, they carried
huochong
: a brand-new military technology, handguns sold by the Ming.

A defector from Cham’s ranks had, for a price, told them which of the river vessels carried the Red King, and the Dai Viet trained a hail of gunfire on it. Che Bong Nga died, pierced with a bullet. His army panicked and retreated. In a more traditional gesture, Le Quy Ly ordered his head cut off and taken to the capital city. With the Red King’s death, Champa’s brief flowering into a major power came to an end.
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Nine years later, Le Quy Ly usurped the throne of the Dai Viet.

The usurpation seems to have been born of frustration. For over ten years, he had watched the royal family fumble, retreat, and panic in the face of the Cham. The nation was bankrupt and demoralized; Champa’s armies had “crisscrossed [the country] as they might an empty land,” one of the chroniclers notes; the capital had been sacked again and again.
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The great general had married one of his daughters into the royal family, and in 1395 he convinced the sitting emperor Tran Thuan Tong, his son-in-law, to relinquish the throne to Prince An, aged three: the emperor’s son, grandson of the general. Le Quy Ly then executed the abdicated emperor and declared himself regent for his grandson.

The child obediently abdicated in 1399, aged seven, and relinquished the crown to his grandfather. Le Quy Ly changed his name to the Chinese Ho and began to claim descent from the legendary Second Sage Emperor Yu of antiquity. He even renamed the country itself: from Dai Viet, to Ta Yu, after Yu himself.
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The science of China had saved his country; now he intended to remake it.

Chapter Seventy-Six

The Turks and the Desperate Emperor

Between 1352 and 1373,
the Ottoman Turks are invited across the Hellespont,
and the emperor of Byzantium loses almost everything

T
WO EMPERORS
now occupied the palace of Constantinople: twenty-year-old John V, son of Andronicus Palaeologus; and John VI, the former regent John Cantacuzenus, a man of nearly sixty.
*
Together, they ruled over a plague-battered city, a half-empty countryside, and a sadly shrunken empire: all that was left of glorious Byzantium was the old Roman province of Thrace, a handful of northern Aegean islands, and the city of Thessalonica, marooned on the coast with Stefan Dushan’s Serbian conquests all around it.
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It was a bleak picture, but young John V could see nothing but his own lack of power. His dominant co-ruler, John VI, had already handed parts of the empire over for his two surviving sons to govern: the remote southernmost tip of the Greek peninsula to the younger, the strategically valuable city of Adrianople to Matthew, his oldest.
²

In the summer of 1352, young John V marched recklessly into Matthew’s territory and laid siege to Adrianople. Matthew sent his father a plea for help; to supplement the thinned ranks of the Byzantine army, John VI asked his old ally Orhan of the Ottomans for help.

Orhan agreed, and sent over into Byzantium a whole detachment of Turkish soldiers, under the command of his own oldest son, Suleyman Pasha. In return, young John begged another dangerous enemy for help; he sent a message to Stefan Dushan, asking for reinforcements.

Dushan sent four thousand soldiers, and the Byzantine-Ottoman troops defending Adrianople lined up against the Byzantine-Serbian soldiers trying to conquer it. On the banks of the Marica river, right outside Adrianople’s walls, the Ottomans crushed the Serbs, and young John’s allies retreated. John himself was taken prisoner; the older John ordered him deported to Tenedos, a fifteen-mile-long island just off the coast of Asia Minor.

Claiming that he acted more in sorrow than in anger, John VI now declared his young co-ruler deposed and appointed his own son Matthew to be emperor in his place. But he had overstepped. His invitation to the Turks had not been a popular one, especially since (as Nicephorus Gregoras tells us) he had raided the churches and monasteries of Constantinople for enough gold and silver to pay them. When, after the battle, the Turks rampaged their way through the villages near Adrianople, taking what they pleased, he was widely thought to have given them permission. Even worse, Orhan’s son Suleyman Pasha had seized a fortress in Thrace—Tzympe, on the coast—and now refused to leave.
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Two hundred and fifty years earlier, Alexius Comnenus had invited Crusaders east to deal with the Turks and, in doing so, had made his empire vulnerable to their attack. John VI had invited the Turks west to deal with his fellow Byzantines, and had given them a foothold in his empire; Constantinople would pay the price for this decision as well.

John VI grew steadily more unpopular, the presence of the Turks increasingly irksome. In 1354, catastrophe threw its weight onto the Turkish side. On the morning of March 2, a massive earthquake shook the entire coastline of the Aegean Sea. The walls of Constantinople itself shifted and cracked. Throughout Thrace, houses and fortresses crumbled; some villages entirely disappeared. The city of Gallipoli, the key point for controlling passage over the Hellespont, was flattened. Thousands died; the survivors were lashed by fierce storms of alternating rain and snow.
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John VI launched relief efforts from Constantinople, but the Turks were already on their way. Suleyman Pasha, hearing of Gallipoli’s destruction, rounded up a massive crowd of Turkish soldiers and civilians and descended on the deserted ruins. They occupied the wrecked empty houses, repaired the walls, and claimed the city as their own. More Turks dispersed through the countryside, doing the same whenever they found a shattered village. It was a quiet and effective occupation, and they refused to leave.
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The Byzantine survivors expected their emperor to drive the squatters out, but John VI hoped to shift them through diplomacy instead. “Intelligent men do not go to war without first weighing the strength of their own forces against those of their enemy,” he wrote in his memoirs, justifying his refusal to fight. “These barbarians have great experience, great numbers, and great enthusiasm. . . . Our resources are by comparison minimal. Our army, once so brilliant and celebrated, is now poor and small; our public revenues are reduced to poverty and insignificance.”
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But when he appealed to Orhan, the Ottoman leader stalled. Young John took advantage of the situation; in November he escaped from his island and returned to Constantinople. The citizens welcomed him, shouting his name in the streets and demanding his return to power.

John VI buckled. On December 10, he abdicated as co-emperor of the Byzantine realm and handed all power over to the younger man. His abdication seems to have been a relief; he had been running the empire for over thirty years, and bad luck had dogged him the entire time. He entered the Monastery of St. George in Constantinople, and there he remained for the rest of his long life, finally dying at the age of ninety-one.
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Constantinople, now in worse shape than ever, was in the hands of John V. Aged twenty-three, inexperienced at war, he was facing the Turks on the east and Stefan Dushan of Serbia on the west. One or the other seemed likely to seize the city and the throne; but Stefan Dushan, gearing up the effort, suffered a massive stroke in December 1355 and died. He was only forty-seven, and had named no heir. His empire immediately split apart under battling successors.
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