This chapter completes the survey of Roman identity during the period before the Ottoman conquests with a look into the fifteenth century. By the early years of this century, Frankish power and influence had shrunk to the Venetian and Genoese islands and mainland harbours (like Modon and Coron in the Peloponnese), Florentine Athens and the shrunken principality of Achaia clinging to the west of the Peloponnese. Byzantine Roman rule was similarly much reduced to Constantinople and its hinterland, Thessaloniki and the despotate of Mistra in the Peloponnese. Byzantine Roman life and hopes were now dominated by the Ottoman threat. Along with all other states in the Balkans, by the last decade of the fourteenth century, the empire of the Romans had become a vassal state of the evergrowing Ottoman empire. This subordinate status was underlined in 1393 when the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I summoned all his vassals, including the new emperor of the Romans, Manuel II Palaiologos, to a council at Serres in Macedonia. From this point on it was abundantly clear that the Ottomans had set their hearts on Constantinople, and over the next eight years the Byzantine Romans struggled to survive and to find some support against this potent threat. The Ottomans established a blockade of Constantinople in 1397 and by 1399 their encirclement of the City was complete. The Byzantine Romans looked to their fellow Christians in the west, and in 1399 Manuel II set out on a tour of western Europe to enlist aid against the Turks.