In a letter to Pope Urban, Petrarch spoke with approval of the policy of using the Ottoman menace to stamp out the Eastern heresy. ‘The Osmanlis are merely enemies,’ he wrote, ‘but the schismatic Greeks are worse than enemies. The Osmanlis hate us less, for they fear us less. The Greeks, however, both fear and hate us with all their soul.’[287] These words of Petrarch epitomize the feeling between the Eastern and Western Churches during his own day, and, if what one can see with his own eyes in Jerusalem and elsewhere is a fair example, up to the twentieth century.[288]
If the European nations regarded the adherents of the Orthodox Church (the term Greek in its religious sense must be taken to include all the Balkan races) as ‘worse than enemies’, that is, than the Osmanlis, it is equally true that the Osmanlis found from 1350 to 1500 that the hatred of the Balkan races for the Latin Church was their most potent ally, not only in the actual conquest, but in reconciling the conquered to their fate. One does not want to detract from the genius of the early Ottoman sovereigns and from the reputation for superb fighting ability so honestly won by the Ottoman armies. But it must not be forgotten that each separate race in the Balkans preferred the rule of the Osmanlis to that of their neighbours, and that the one point in which the Balkan races were of the same mind was that Ottoman domination was preferable to that of the Hungarians and the Italians. For every crusade was a scheme for religious propaganda and territorial aggrandizement, in just the same spirit as in modern times the nations of Europe have exploited the misery of Ottoman Christians for the purpose of securing concessions.
In spite of the fact that John Palaeologos was informed by the Patriarch Philotheus that a mixed council of clergy and government officials, presided over by the empress, had been held in June 1376, and had decided against the reunion of the churches,[289] John persisted in his negotiations with the Pope. Urban did all that he could to facilitate the visit of the Byzantine emperor to Rome.[290] But at the same time he was writing to the Venetians and to the Dalmatian cities to protect the Catholics of Cattaro against the Serbian and Albanian heretics,[291] and was encouraging Louis in his suicidal campaign against the Bulgarians.
