ABSTRACT
From the perspective of political history, the final two hundred and fifty years of the Byzantine experience can strike the casual reader as little more than a sorry spectacle of accelerating fragmentation, disintegration and decay. The structure of the Byzantine empire had in fact begun to fracture before the Fourth Crusade arrived in Constantinople, as evidenced by the secession of Bulgaria and Serbia in the mid-1180s, the rise of independent lordships in Cyprus, the Peloponnese and western Anatolia from the 1180s through the early 1200s, and the establishment of the 'empire of Trebizond' in the Pontus in April 1204. In Asia Minor, the chief Hellenophone successor state was the so-called 'empire of Nicaea'. Given the nastiness of the conflict that had unfolded between 1421 and 1424, the Ottomans could hardly help but regard Palaiologan Constantinople as a liability, the direct absorption of which was by now, if not before, a prime desideratum.
