believed that a few days would terminate the war, already murmured at their losses; the succours from their mother-country were delayed by the factions of Genoa; and the most cautious embraced the opportunity of a Rhodian vessel to remove their families and effects from the scene of hostility."
and declare war, A.D. 1349. The peaceful counsels of the emperor having proved of no avail, the Byzantine fleet in the spring of the following year attacked Pera by sea, while the Greek troops assaulted its walls and ramparts. The attack, however, wholly failed; the Genoese carried all before them, and, crowning their galleys with flowers, they added to this insult the throwing, by means of their engines, of large stones into the very heart of the imperial city. To insults such as these even Cantacuzene could not submit; but, discerning clearly his own weakness, it occurred to him that other and known enemies of Genoa might do for him what he had not strength to do for himself: hence his appeal to Venice, as the great naval rival of Genoa, and a yet more fatal coquetry with the Turkish hosts, who by this time were in full possession of the wide plains of Asia Minor.
Nor were the Venetians slow to accept an offer likely to lead to the humbling of enemies so inveterate. The war assumed proportions nowise foreseen, and fluctuated for more than a century with alternate success, but with ultimate ruin to the Genoese, whose audacity had provoked it. During the whole of this struggle the eastern empire practically counted as nothing, and would, but for the intervention of the Venetians, have sunk into a province of Genoa. The connection, however, with the Turkish tribes led to more deplorable disasters, in that, owing to
