Byzantine Greece - Ottoman Threat and Conquest

Ottoman Threat and Conquest

Meanwhile the Ottoman Turks were threatening the empire and in 1303 the Catalan Grand Company under Roger de Flor offered to help defend against them. The Catalans and Byzantines never trusted each other, and the Catalans, and then also the Genoese, attacked the Byzantines throughout Greece and the Aegean. The Catalans also pillaged Thessaly in 1309.

By the reign of Andronicus III Palaeologus, beginning in 1328, the empire controlled most of Greece, especially the metropolis of Thessalonica, but very little else. Epirus was nominally Byzantine but still occasionally rebelled, until it was fully recovered in 1339. Greece was mostly used as a battleground during the civil war between John V Palaeologus and John VI Cantacuzenus in the 1340s, and at the same time the Serbs and Ottomans began attacking Greece as well. By 1356 another independent despotate was set up in Epirus and Thessaly.

The Peloponnese, usually called Morea in this period, was now almost the centre of the empire, and was certainly the most fertile area. Mystras and Monemvasia were populous and prosperous, even after the Black Plague in the mid-14th century. Mystras rivaled Constantinople in importance. It was a stronghold of Greek Orthodoxy and bitterly opposed attempts by the emperors to unite with the Roman Catholic Church, even though this would have allowed the empire to gain help from the west against the Ottomans.

The Ottomans had begun their conquest of the Balkans and Greece in the late 14th century and early 15th century. In 1445, Ottoman-occupied Thessaly was recaptured by future emperor Constantine XI, at the time despot of Mystras, but there was little he could do against most of the other Ottoman territories. Emperor Constantine was defeated and killed in 1453 when the Ottomans finally captured Constantinople. After the fall of Constantinople, the Ottomans also captured Athens and the Aegean islands by 1458, but left a Byzantine despotate in the Peloponnese until 1460. The Venetians still controlled Crete and some ports, but otherwise the Ottomans controlled many regions of Greece except the mountains and heavily forested areas.