Page:Destruction of the Greek Empire.djvu/107

 DYNASTIC STRUGGLES IN EMPIEE 73 capital, and though the empress had been warned that he was in the neighbourhood, she had taken no precaution to prevent his being admitted, believing, indeed, that the story of his being near was an invention to gain time so as to prevent the condemnation of a new patriarch who was known to be a partisan of Cantacuzenus and was then on his trial before a Council of the Church. The friends of Cantacuzenus were in possession of the Golden Gate and opened it to him and his band of a thousand trusted followers. He marched in triumph to the Palace of Porphyrogenitus. The empress, as soon as she heard of the entry, shut herself up in the Palace at Blachern and called to her aid the Genoese of Galata. "When the latter saw that the population were on the side of her rival, they refused to aid her. John advised his mother to treat, and after considerable hesitation she consented and articles of peace were agreed to. An amnesty was to be granted by both sides, and John was during ten years to permit Cantacuzenus to be the dominant ruler. Thereupon the latter proposed that his daughter Helen should become engaged to John, and, though the young man was unwilling, his mother accepted the arrangement. Helen was thirteen years old and her proposed husband fifteen. Peace and prosperity appear to have been anticipated from the cessation of civil war which it was hoped this marriage would produce. Europe, if not, as Gibbon asserts, i completely evacuated by the Moslems of Asia,' 1 was yet at peace with the empire. "Within its borders all parties were supposed to be reconciled, and at the church of Blachern (the bema of Hagia Sophia having been destroyed by an earthquake) a remarkable coronation service was held in May 1347. Two emperors, namely the young John Palaeologus and John Cantacuzenus, and three empresses — Helen, wife of the Palaeologus, Irene, wife of Cantacuzenus, and Anne of Savoy, the dowager — were crowned with 1 Vol. vii. p. 30, edition of Dr. J. B. Bury. The Tartars were still in the Balkan peninsula, and Orchan in 1347, probably just after the marriage of John, sent six thousand Turks to aid Matthew, son of Cantacuzenus, in fighting against the kral of Serbia.