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Nor was the reign of the younger more glorious or fortunate than that of the elder Andronicus. He gathered the fruits of ambition; but the taste was transient and bitter; in the supreme station he lost the remains of his early popularity, and the defects of his character became still more conspicuous to the world. The public reproach urged him to march in person against the Turks; nor did his courage fail in the hour of trial, but a defeat and a wound were the only trophies of his expedition in Asia, which confirmed the establishment of the Ottoman monarchy. The abuses of the civil government attained their full maturity and perfection; his neglect of forms, and the confusion of national dresses, are deplored by the Greeks as the fatal symptoms of the decay of the empire. Andronicus was old before his time; the intemperance of youth had accelerated the infirmities of age; and after being rescued from a dangerous malady by nature, or physic, or the Virgin, he was snatched away before he had accomplished his forty-fifth year. He was twice married; and as the progress of the Latins in arms and arts had softened the prejudices of the Byzantine court, his two wives were chosen in the princely houses of Germany and Italy. The first, Agnes at home, Irene in Greece, was daughter of the duke of Brunswick. Her father † was praise. The sole reign of Andronicus the younger is described by Cantacuzene (1. 2, c. 1-40, p. 191-339) and Nicephorus Gregoras (1. 9, c. 7; 1. 11, c. 11, p. 262-361).

+ Agnes, or Irene, was the daughter of duke Henry the Wonderful, the chief of the house of Brunswick, and the fourth in descent from the famous Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony and Bavaria, and con queror of the Slavi on the Baltic coast. Her brother Henry was surnamed the Greek, from his two journeys into the East; but these journeys were subsequent to his sister's marriage; and I am ignorant how Agnes was discovered in the heart of Germany, and recommended to the Byzantine court. (Rimius, Memoirs of the House of Brunswick, p. 126-137.) [In the Chronicle of Conrad Botho (Leibnitz. Script. Bruns. tom. iii. p. 370), it appears that Agnes, the daughter of Henry the Wonderful, was married to the "Hertogen von Karmicien" (duke of Carinthia), and that her sister, Alheit (Adelheid, Adelaide), was the wife of Andronicus, "des koniges sone to Greken." Botho was a citizen of Brunswick in the fifteenth century. He wrote in the old Saxo-German dialect, and his Chronicle was printed at Mentz in 1492 by Faust's son-in-law, Peter Schöffer. Leibnitz (Preface to tom. iii. p. 10) considered it to be in general a good authority, and a source from which subsequent historians and genealogists have largely drawn. The extensive alliances of the House of Brunswick, by descent or marriage, which may there be seen, do not warrant the term of "petty

a petty lord in the poor and savage regions of the north of Germany;t yet he derived some revenue from his silver mines; and his family is celebrated by the Greeks

lord" here applied to its duke. Andronicus, on the eve of his marriage, boasted that his intended father-in-law was one of the most eminent and distinguished princes of his country (Cantacuzene, 1. 1, c. 11), between which and Constantinople there was sufficient intercourse (Ib. 2. 4) for the connections of its royal and imperial families to be at least as well known as the house of Savoy, from which Andronicus took his second bride.-ED.] * Henry the Wonderful was the founder of the branch of Grubenhagen, extinct in the year 1596. (Rimius, p. 287.) He resided in the castle of Wolfenbuttel, and possessed no more than a sixth part of the allodial estates of Brunswick and Luneburgh, which the Guelph family had saved from the confiscation of their great fiefs. The frequent partitions among brothers had almost ruined the princely houses of Germany, till that just, but pernicious, law was slowly superseded by the right of primogeniture. The principality of Grubenhagen, one of the last remains of the Hercynian forest, is a woody, mountainous, and barren tract. (Busching's Geography, vol. vi. p. 270-286. English translation.) The royal author of the Memoirs of Brandenburgh will teach us how justly, in a much later period, the north of Germany deserved the epithets of poor and barbarous. (Essai sur les Mœurs, &c.) In the year, 1306, in the woods of Luneburgh, some wild people of the Vened race were allowed to bury alive their infirm and useless parents. (Rimius, p. 136.) [The strong prejudices of this royal author allowed him to write in no other language than French, and constitute him no impartial or satisfactory authority respecting aught that appertains to his native land. If we find in Germany the Lüneburger Heide, so also that wild and thinly peopled tract has on its northern side the fertile and well-cultivated plains of Holstein, and to the south all the beautiful and productive valleys around Eimbeck and Göttingen. These last formed part of the territories of Henry the Wonderful. The "Vened race were the Slavonian Wenden, or Wends, for whose progress in Germany see ch. 41 and 42, vol. iv. p. 389. 445. In Lüneburg they were overpowered by the Gothic population, whose princes ruled, and were occupied in civilizing, the country. See the Chronica Slavorum (Leibnitz, Script. Bruns. tom. ii.) and the Chronicon Luneburgicum (Ib. tom. iii. p. 176. 219, &c.). If any rare traces of barbarism like that referred to still remained, they are not to be considered as characteristic of the times. At that very period, the reigning duke was "de gude Hertoge Albrecht," whose administration improved his subjects and promoted their commercial intercourse with Hamburg and Lubeck, in connection with the Hanseatic league.--ED.]

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The assertion of Tacitus, that Germany was destitute of the precious metals, must be taken, even in his own time, with some imitation. (Germania, c. 5. Annal. 11. 20.) According to Spener (Hist. Germanice Pragmatica, tom, i. p, 351), Argentifoding in Hercyniis

as the most ancient and noble of the Teutonic name. શ્રી After the death of this childless princess, Andronicus sought in marriage Jane the sister of the count of Savoy,† and his suit was preferred to that of the French king. The count respected in his sister the superior majesty of a Roman empress; her retinue was composed of knights and ladies; she was regenerated and crowned in St. Sophia, under the more orthodox appellation of Anne; and at the nuptial feast, the Greeks and Italians vied with each other in the martial exercises of tilts and tournaments.

The empress Anne of Savoy survived her husband; their son, John Palæologus, was left an orphan and an emperor,

montibus, imperante Othone magno (A.D. 968) primum apertæ, largam etiam opes augendi dederunt copiam: but Rimius (p. 258, 259) defers till the year 1016 the discovery of the silver mines of Grubenhagen or the Upper Hartz, which were productive in the beginning of the fourteenth century, and which still yield a considerable revenue to the House of Brunswick. [Germany was destitute of precious metals in the days of Tacitus, because they were hidden and unknown. "Quis enim scrutatus est?" is the question asked in the first of the abovequoted passages; and the second records the fruitless attempt of Curtius Rufus to explore veins of silver "in agro Mattiaco." Yet in that very district, a part of Hesse Cassel, near the university of Marburg, the copper and silver mines of Frankenberg are now profitably worked, and gold is found there in the sands of the Eder. It cannot be affirmed, though it is probable, that these had been discovered before Dietrich or Theodoric, a king of those Franks who did not accompany Clovis, built the town of Frankenberg in 520. But there can have been no other inducement for Charlemagne to establish a mint there in 804 or 810, and to grant the place many peculiar privileges, which it received at the same time. That a Barbarian people should be ignorant of such treasures concealed beneath their soil, is not more surprising than their want of skill to plant the vines and fruittrees which its surface was adapted to rear. The use of its salt-springs, as we have seen, was better known to them. (Vol. iii. p. 99.)-ED.] * Cantacuzene has given a most honourable testimony, dir Γερμανῶν αὕτη θυγάτης δουκὸς ντὶ Μπρουζουγκ (the modern Greeks employ the vr for the 8, and the ur for the B, and the whole will rend in the Italian idiom di Brunzuic), τοῦ παρ' αὐτοῖς ἐπιφανεστάτου, καὶ λαμπρότητι πάντας τοὺς ὁμοφύλους ὑπερβάλλοντος τοῦ γένους. The praise is just in itself, and pleasing to an English ear.

Anne or Jane, was one of the four daughters of Amedee the Great, by a second marriage, and half-sister of his successor Edward count of Savoy (Anderson's Tables, p. 650). See Cantacuzene (l. 1, c. 40——42).

That king, if the fact be true, must have been Charles the Fair, who in five years (1321-1326), was married to three wives (Anderson, p. 628). Anue of Savoy arrived at Constantinople in February, 1326,

in the ninth year of his age; and his weakness was protected by the first and most deserving of the Greeks. The long and cordial friendship of his father for John Cantacuzene is alike honourable to the prince and the subject. It had been formed amidst the pleasures of their youth; their families were almost equally noble, and the recent lustre of the purple was amply compensated by the energy of a private education. We have seen that the young emperor was saved by Cantacuzene from the power of his grandfather; and after six years of civil war, the same favourite brought him back in triumph to the palace of Constantinople. Under the reign of Andronicus the younger, the great domestic ruled the emperor and the empire; and it was by his valour and conduct that the isle of Lesbos and the principality of Ætolia were restored to their ancient allegiance. His enemies confess, that, among the public robbers, Cantacuzene alone was moderate and abstemious; and the free and voluntary account which he produces of his own wealth,† may sustain the presumption that it was devolved by inheritance, and not accumulated by rapine. He does not indeed specify the value of his money, plate, and jewels; yet, after a voluntary gift of two hundred vases of silver, after much had been secreted by his friends and plundered by his foes, his forfeit treasures were sufficient for the equipment of a fleet of seventy galleys. He does not measure the size and number of his estates; but his granaries were heaped with an incredible store of wheat and barley; and the labour of a thousand yoke of oxen might cultivate, according to the practice of antiquity, about sixtytwo thousand five hundred acres of arable land. His pastures were stocked with two thousand five hundred brood mares, two hundred camels, three hundred mules, five hundred asses, five thousand horned cattle, fifty thousand hogs,

The noble race of the Cantacuzeni (illustrious from the eleventh century in the Byzantine annals) was drawn from the Paladins of France, the heroes of those romances which in the thirteenth century were translated and read by the Greeks. (Ducange, Fam. Byzant. p. 258.) + See Cantacuzene, 1. 3, c. 24. 30. 36.

Saserna in Gaul, and Columella in Italy or Spain, allow two yoke of oxen, two drivers, and six labourers, for two hundred jugera (one hundred and twenty-five English acres) of arable land, and three more men must be added if there be much underwood. (Columella də Re Rusticâ, 1. 2, c. 13, p. 441, edit. Gesner.)

and seventy thousand sheep; a precious record of rural opulence in the last period of the empire, and in a land, most probably in Thrace, so repeatedly wasted by foreign and domestic hostility. The favour of Cantacuzene was above his fortune. In the moments of familiarity, in the hour of sickness, the emperor was desirous to level the distance between them, and pressed his friend to accept the diadem and purple. The virtue of the great domestic, which is attested by his own pen, resisted the dangerous proposal; but the last testament of Andronicus the younger named him the guardian of his son, and the regent of the empire.

Had the regent found a suitable return of obedience and gratitude, perhaps he would have acted with pure and zealous fidelity in the service of his pupil. A guard of five hun dred soldiers watched over his person and the palace; the funeral of the late emperor was decently performed; the capital was silent and submissive; and five hundred letters which Cantacuzene dispatched in the first month, informed the provinces of their loss and their duty. The prospect of a tranquil minority was blasted by the great duke or admiral Apocaucus; and to exaggerate his perfidy, the imperial historian is pleased to magnify his own imprudence, in raising him to to that office against the advice of his more sagacious sovereign. Bold and subtle, rapacious and profuse, the avarice and ambition of Apocaucus were by turns subser vient to each other; and his talents were applied to the ruin of his country. His arrogance was heightened by the command of a naval force and an impregnable castle, and under

In this enumeration (1. 3, c. 30) the French translation of the president Cousin is blotted with three palpable and essential errors. 1. He omits the one thousand yoke of working oxen. 2. He interprets the πεντακόσιαι πρὸς δισχιλίαις, by the number of fifteen hundred. 3. He confounds myriads with chiliads, and gives Cantacuzene no more than five thousand hogs. Put not your trust in translations! [This monition may be carried much farther-believe nothing without inquiry. Ludwig Schopen, who assisted in the Bonn edition of the Byzantine writers, and continued it after the death of Niebuhr, has observed that a MS. in the library at Munich, has xiiais, instead of dioxiniais, so that Cousin may have had an original of which his translation is correct.-ED.] + See the regency and reign of John Cantacuzenus, and the whole progress of the civil war, in his own history (1. 3, c. 1-100, p. 348-700), and in that of Nice phorus Gregoras (1. 12, c, 1 ; l. 15, c. 9, p. 353-492),

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