On September 5, with the new Frontier Army fully organized and the situation stabilizing, Vitus led the field army south.
When the army reached Niš, an envoy from Ragusa caught up with them and requested an audience with the emperor.
Previously, Venice and Hungary had collected a combined annual tax of twenty-four thousand, amounting to forty percent of Ragusa's revenue. The crushing tax burden had brought the commercial city-state to its knees.
Vitus was kindhearted. He waived taxes for the next two years and would collect twenty-five percent annually thereafter. As long as the money was sufficient, he could not be bothered to meddle in its internal affairs.
With Ragusa's affairs settled for the moment, he turned his attention to Albania.
With Ragusa's submission and Serbia's liberation, Albania's land borders were now surrounded by the Eastern Roman Empire.
Since the previous year, Skanderbeg had exchanged letters with Grgur and Hunyadi, but his army had remained within his own borders and had not fought the Eastern Roman Empire's forces.
The Privy Council had drawn up an operational plan: deploy forty-five thousand Army troops and spend a year pacifying this rugged mountain country.
The situation in the Western Mediterranean could brook no delay, so Vitus abandoned the campaign plan.
The regime was riven by intense internal conflicts. If Skanderbeg launched an invasion abroad, he could only summon nobles with whom he had close ties, limiting the force he could assemble to perhaps several thousand men.
Once they faced a defensive war, however, their internal conflicts would ease, allowing Skanderbeg to launch a full mobilization. His total strength was estimated at fifteen to twenty thousand.
Skanderbeg's fighting style was flexible. He would assign second-line troops to hold strongpoints, then personally lead his elite troops through the mountains, exploiting his home-ground advantage to ambush