port against the Turks--was a healing of the schism. Yet each emperor who attempted to reach a compromise with the popes caused deep divisions and usually violent backlash from the religious majority.

In financial and economic matters, too, the emperors found themselves strangely at the mercy of the powers they had ousted. The might of Venice and Genoa in the east now meant that both traded with the empire on terms that can only be called exploitative. Meanwhile, landowners' support had increasingly been bought with privileges and tax exemptions, and this further reduced revenue. Impoverished, with a smaller and smaller territory to call their own and to tax, the emperors cut expenditure on defence and looked increasingly to Venice and Genoa for help with their military enterprises, thus getting dragged into the traditional rivalry between the two which now erupted in a series of wars, most of which were fought in Byzantine waters. Other mercenaries, from west and east, Christian and infidel, all compromised the direction of the empire and increased the need for money. A steady debasement of the coinage followed, and soon Byzantines were preferring the Venetian ducat as a more reliable medium of exchange.

The imperial title, too, had been diminished by exile from Constantinople. Although intrigue, dissent, and nights-of-thelong-knives were endemic to Byzantine rule, these tendencies grew after a period in which the title of emperor-in-exile had been contested. Michael VIII ( 1261-82), whose accession had been marred by the fact that he had blinded his co-emperor, the young John Lascaris, was deeply unpopular, especially with the ecclesiastics; his death saw a full-scale return to orthodoxy under Andronicus II. His long reign ended in open civil war over the succession ( 1321-8), at the end of which he was persuaded to abdicate. A further civil war broke out in the next generation ( 1341-7) at the death of Andronicus III, when again a factional rift between potential successors was accompanied by a religious controversy. The empire could ill afford these episodes of blood-letting in the face of mounting threats from both east and west. With the coronation as emperor of John VI Cantacuzene, long an adviser to the

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