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 104 DESTEUCTION OF THE GEEEK EMPIEE to attempt to recover any of the cities or territories which he had conquered in Europe. When he had broken the strength of the rebel emirs he crossed rapidly back into Thrace and near Adrianople defeated a combined army of Hungarians, Serbians, and Bulgarians. Two years after- wards, in 1366, an army of fifty thousand Serbians endeavoured in vain to drive Murad out of Adrianople. The lowest degradation which the empire had yet reached was when the miserable John consented to become the tributary of Murad in order that he might enjoy his remaining posses- sions in Europe. In 1373 he formally recognised the sultan as his suzerain, bound himself to render him military service and to give his son Manuel as a hostage. 1 The only palliative which can be offered for John's con- duct is that he felt resistance to be useless. The empire wanted peace. The cities and towns had been devastated, not merely by successive wars, civil and foreign, but by the terrible Black Death, a plague which since 1346 had demanded everywhere its large quota of victims. He had seen Turkish armies defeated, but everywhere and always reappearing in greater numbers than ever. Asiatics were in overwhelming numbers on every side. The Egyptian Moslems had captured Sis, the capital of the Lesser Armenia, in 1369. Not only was every district in Asia Minor over- run with Turks, but they had penetrated Europe at many points. Bands of them had been left in the country when the armies, invited into Macedonia or Thrace or crossing over for plunder, had withdrawn. ' For my part, I believe,' says Ducas, 'that there is a greater multitude of them between the Dardanelles and the Danube than in Asia Minor,' and although Ducas wrote three quarters of a century later, his remarks are applicable to the reign of John. He describes how Turks from Cappadocia, Lycia, Cilicia, and Caria had sailed into Europe to pillage and to ruin the lands of the Christians. A hundred thousand had laid waste the country as far west as Dalmatia. The Albanians from being a large nation had become a small one. The Wallachs, 1 Chalc. i. 51, and Phrantzes, i. 11.