year of his age; and his weakness was protected by the first and
most deserving of the Greeks. The long and cordial friendship of
his father for John Cantacuzene is alike honorable to the prince
and the subject. It had been formed amidst the pleasures of
their youth: their families were almost equally noble; ^21 and
the recent lustre of the purple was amply compensated by the
energy of a private education. We have seen that the young
emperor was saved by Cantacuzene from the power of his
grandfather; and, after six years of civil war, the same favorite
brought him back in triumph to the palace of Constantinople.
Under the reign of Andronicus the younger, the great domestic
ruled the emperor and the empire; and it was by his valor and
conduct that the Isle of Lesbos and the principality of Aetolia
were restored to their ancient allegiance. His enemies confess,
that, among the public robbers, Cantacuzene alone was moderate
and abstemious; and the free and voluntary account which he
produces of his own wealth ^22 may sustain the presumption that
he was devolved by inheritance, and not accumulated by rapine.
He does not indeed specify the value of his money, plate, and
jewels; yet, after a voluntary gift of two hundred vases of
silver, after much had been secreted by his friends and plundered
by his foes, his forfeit treasures were sufficient for the
equipment of a fleet of seventy galleys. He does not measure the
size and number of his estates; but his granaries were heaped
with an incredible store of wheat and barley; and the labor of a
thousand yoke of oxen might cultivate, according to the practice
of antiquity, about sixty-two thousand five hundred acres of
arable land. ^23 His pastures were stocked with two thousand five
hundred brood mares, two hundred camels, three hundred mules,
five hundred asses, five thousand horned cattle, fifty thousand