is
broken fortunes. A base majority bowed and retired; and his trusty band
was diminished to two thousand, and at last to five hundred, volunteers.
The _cral_, [28] or despot of the Servians received him with general
hospitality; but the ally was insensibly degraded to a suppliant, a
hostage, a captive; and in this miserable dependence, he waited at the
door of the Barbarian, who could dispose of the life and liberty of a
Roman emperor. The most tempting offers could not persuade the cral to
violate his trust; but he soon inclined to the stronger side; and his
friend was dismissed without injury to a new vicissitude of hopes and
perils. Near six years the flame of discord burnt with various success
and unabated rage: the cities were distracted by the faction of the
nobles and the plebeians; the Cantacuzeni and Palaeologi: and the
Bulgarians, the Servians, and the Turks, were invoked on both sides
as the instruments of private ambition and the common ruin. The regent
deplored the calamities, of which he was the author and victim: and his
own experience might dictate a just and lively remark on the different
nature of foreign and civil war. "The former," said he, "is the external
warmth of summer, always tolerable, and often beneficial; the latter is
the deadly heat of a fever, which consumes without a remedy the vitals
of the constitution." [29]

[Footnote 271: Cantacuzene asserts, that in all the cities, the populace
were on the side of the emperor, the aristocracy on his. The
populace took the opportunity of rising and plundering the wealthy as
Cantacuzenites, vol. iii. c. 29 Ages of common oppression and ruin had
not extinguished these republican factions.--M.]

[Footnote 28: The princes of Servia (Ducange, Famil. Dalmaticae, &c.,
c. 2, 3, 4, 9) were styled Despots in Greek, and Cral in their native
idiom, (Ducange, Gloss. Graec. p. 751.) That title, the equivalent
of king, appears to be of Sclavonic origin, from whence it has been
borrowed by the Hungarians, the modern Greeks, and even by the Turks,
(Leunclavius, Pandect. Turc. p. 422,) who reserve the name of Padishah
for the emperor. To obtain the latter instead of the former is the
ambition of the French at Constantinople, (Aversissement a l'Histoire de
Timur Bec, p. 39.)]

[Footnote 29: Nic. Gregoras, l. xii. c. 14. It is surprising that
Cantacuzene has not inserted this just and lively image in his own
writings.]

The introduction of barbarians and savages