70 DESTRUCTION OF THE GREEK EMPIRE of four metropolitan sees, and he suggested that as a condition of the Union of the Churches the Turks should be expelled from Asia Minor. The pope recognised the desirability of such an attempt as keenly as many of his successors, but saw that the condition was impossible. Death of Andronicus on his death, in 1341, left a son, John ^cus°the Palaeologus, who was then nine years old. His mother, Keign of Anne of Savoy, was a woman of ability and energy. Canta- John (1341 cuzenus was associated with her as regent. He held the to 1391), . ° . Cantacu- dignity of Grand Domestic, and in the later years of his life to 1 !^!) 842 wrote a clear and able statement of the history of his own times. He had been, as we have seen, the intimate friend of Andronicus and his great supporter when the grandfather of the same name endeavoured to exclude him from the throne. He had been named by his friend and patron as the guardian of John, but the widow of the emperor was from the first jealous of her co-guardian and never worked sympathetically with him. He tells us that from the death of Andronicus he was constantly urged to occupy the imperial throne and that he as constantly refused. He undoubtedly possessed the con- fidence of a large majority of the nobles. There was a gene- ral recognition that, in the existing state of the empire, it was unwise to leave the government in the hands of a boy and of a foreign princess. Ducas expressly states that Cantacu- zenus ultimately allowed himself to be proclaimed emperor because his friends urged him to take the reins of government from the hands of a woman and a child and because the empress and the senate were unjust and unfair to him. 1 In 1342 he was proclaimed joint emperor under the style of John Cantacuzenus. During the thirteen years of his reign, which lasted till 1355, the history of the empire is in the main one of civil war and consequent decadence. Distrusted by Anne, the mother of the boy emperor, his difficulties were increased by the turbulent character of his ward, whom his mother could not, or would not, restrain from wilfulness which led him even in early youth into debauchery. The result was that 1 Ducas, i. 6.
