The World of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  The Ottoman Turks

  The origins of the Ottoman Empire lay in the fragmentation of political power in the Balkans and Asia Minor during the thirteenth century. From the Danube and Adriatic to the Taurus Mountains, new or attenuated older lordships jostled for survival and expansion. After 1204, the Byzantine Empire had dissolved into successor principalities at Nicaea (then after 1261 Constantinople as capital of an enfeebled restored empire), Epirus and Trebizond; Frankish statelets in Attica, Boeotia and the Peleponnese; Venetian possessions around the coasts and on the islands of the Aegean and Ionian Seas; independent Bulgarian and Serbian kingdoms; and Hungarian penetration south of the Danube into Bosnia and Wallachia. The collapse of the Seljuk sultanate of Rum in the later thirteenth century similarly opened Asia Minor to competitive Turkish emirates sustained by banditry, privateering and service as mercenaries: Aydin, Menteshe and Tekke in western Asia Minor; Karaman in the south-east; and the Ottomans in the north-west, well placed to take particular advantage of political disruption in the neighbouring Byzantine Empire. As well as control of territory and tax revenues, at stake was regional trade, which directly involved Italian powers.

  Western attention initially focused on the emirate of Aydin’s piracy operating from the Aegean port of Smyrna (Izmir). The threat to Venetian, Hospitaller and Byzantine interests provoked papally sponsored naval leagues in 1332–4 and 1343–5: Smyrna was occupied (1344–1405) and a crusade mounted by Humbert, Dauphin of Vienne (1345–7), which proved a damp squib. In contrast, by the 1330s, the land-based Ottomans under Osman and his son Orkhan (1326–62) had extended their territory from the region around Bursa to the Sea of Marmora, the Bosporus and Dardanelles. By the 1340s, Orkhan was employed by the Byzantine emperor John VI Cantacuzene (1345–54) against his rivals for the Byzantine imperial throne, giving the Ottomans the opportunity to occupy the Gallipoli peninsula, capturing Gallipoli itself in 1354, the beginning of a European land empire that lasted until the early twentieth century. Subsequent Ottoman progress in Thrace produced contradictory Byzantine responses of alternating alliance and confrontation. Western reactions were complicated by the competing ambitions of Venice and Genoa. While a limited campaign by Count Amadeus VI of Savoy in 1366–7 recaptured Gallipoli and a few Black Sea ports, the Ottoman conquest of the Balkan interior continued from Thrace (Adrianople/Erdine, taken c. 1369, becoming their capital) northwards into Serbia and south into Greece. By the end of the century, the Ottomans had redrawn the political map of the whole region. After overawing the Serbians at the battle of Kossovo in 1389, through conquest, alliance, direct lordship and client rulers, the Ottomans controlled the Balkans from the Danube to the Gulf of Corinth, threatening both Hungary and Constantinople. The Ottoman victory over French crusaders and Hungarians at Nicopolis in 1396 confirmed a new hegemony.

  132. Turks defeating Christians, from Sercambi’s Luccan Chronicle, late fourteenth century.

  The Ottoman threat to western Christendom dawned only slowly. Most of the early victims were Orthodox not Catholic Christians. The confused politics of Byzantium, Latin Greece and the Orthodox Christian Balkans presented few clear strategies, Urban V’s elision of Mamluks and Turks in promulgating the crusade in 1363 revealing characteristically limited understanding.2 The naval expeditions and costal raids of 1332–67 in Greece and Asia Minor failed to confront the Ottomans’ land-based power or their access to the sea, where they were regularly assisted by the Genoese, eager to seize advantage from the Venetians whose post-1204 maritime empire the Ottomans were dismantling. The idea of a mass land crusade in coalition with local Christians was never fully realised.

  No longer dependent on a steppe nomadic economy and culture, the Ottoman polity was settled, confident and accommodating, centred on loyalty to the ruling dynasty and its religion, not on origins, ethnicity or past associations (‘Ottoman’ means follower of the dynasty’s semi-legendary Osman/Uthman). Thus anyone – Turk, Slav or Greek – could become an Ottoman, even, after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, members of the Byzantine imperial family. Although flaunting the ghazi (holy warrior) rhetoric of jihad, Ottoman policy revolved around secular dynastic power not Islamic mission. While Islam provided cohesion for the ruling elite, alliances were rooted in convenience not faith; subjects’ loyalty counted for more than their religion. The parallels between Ottoman and traditional Byzantine policies of accommodation and incorporation of neighbours, rivals and conquered peoples are striking. Communal boundaries were porous. The fifteenth-century Christian Albanian resistance leader George Castrioti (d. 1468) was a Catholic convert who had previously served Sultan Murad II (1421–51) as a Muslim and received a Turkish name, Scanderbeg (Alexander Bey). A future crusader at Nicopolis, the Frenchman Marshal Boucicaut offered to serve Bayezid I (1389–1403).3 The Ottomans began their European conquest as vassals and allies of the Byzantine emperor: rival Greek imperial families married into the Ottoman dynasty (Islamic polygamy proving of great diplomatic use). Christian Serbs fought for the Turks against crusaders at Nicopolis in 1396 and against the Turco-Mongol Timur at Ankara in 1402; Genoese fought with Murad II against crusaders in 1444; Christian allies stormed Constantinople alongside the Turks in 1453. Some Greeks preferred the tax rates of Ottoman rather than Byzantine rulers and even the monks at Mount Athos could argue in favour of the Muslim Turks against the heretical emperor John V Palaeologus (1341–76, 1379–90, 1390–1).4 The view peddled by crusade enthusiasts, despite the evidence of travellers, spies, merchants and diplomats, of uncompromising Muslim enslavement of embittered subject Christian people, ignored reality. Flexible self-interest contradicted rigid idealism as the Ottomans based their new empire in the Orthodox Christian Balkans not Muslim Anatolia.

  Regional support for western involvement was patchy at best. The Italian cities were guided by shifting competitive commercial advantage. Defence of the Frankish territories scattered across central Greece and the Peloponnese had never proved popular with western crusaders. The Slav princes, intent on autonomy, were suspicious of foreign interference from Roman Catholic powers, an obstacle magnified in dealings with the Byzantine Empire. Since 1274, the papal price for a crusade to help Byzantium was church union, a euphemism for Greek obedience to Rome, which consistently proved unacceptable to leaders of the Orthodox Church and their lay followers. Increasingly after 1204, the Greek Orthodox Church rather than the emperor provided the focus of Byzantine cultural identity, reinforced by the fourteenth-century Orthodox mystical Hesychast movement. The first reunion agreed at the Second Lyons Council (1274) to suit the diplomacy of Michael VIII Palaeologus (1261–82) against Charles of Anjou was rejected in 1282 by Andronicus II (1282–1328). Facing Ottoman overlordship and later conquest, John V offered reunion in 1355 and travelled to the west in 1369 to secure it, a journey copied by Manuel II (1391–1425) in 1400–1 and John VIII (1425–48) in 1423. Revived Ottoman power after 1420 persuaded elements of the Greek elite to accept church union at the Council of Florence in 1439, a deal that found little support from Greek Orthodox believers. The Union of Florence only served to alienate the Orthodox hierarchy from the last two emperors John VIII and Constantine XI (1448–53) and complicate crusade diplomacy with front-line Orthodox rulers. It was left to Mehmed II the Conqueror (1451–81) to restore the Orthodox patriarchate to Constantinople.

  133. Recruiting local Christians for Ottoman service.

  In any case, church union did not work; no grand crusade was forthcoming. Steady erosion of territory and revenue, accelerated by civil wars and the consequent presence of expensive foreign mercenaries such as the Ottomans, reduced Byzantium to military, economic and political dependency, hardly more than a client city state under Turkish sufferance or protection. Commercial prosperity, largely sustained by Italians such as the Ottoman-allied Genoese, shielded Byzantine elites while imperial government withered and the emperors faced bankruptcy. For much of the Greek Orthodox and Greek-speaking Mediterranean, the imperial writ was no longer valid. By the 1380
s, emperors had become tributaries and vassals of the sultan. In 1346, Sultan Orkhan had married a daughter of John VI; in 1358 one of his sons married a daughter of John VI’s nemesis John V. Manuel II, who cut a bedraggled figure as he traipsed around western Europe in search of aid in 1400–1, had served in the Ottoman army in the 1390s. The complexity and contradictions of Byzantium’s predicament were matched by the inability of western powers to respond. John V’s plan for a crusade in 1355 clashed with major campaigns in the Hundred Years War and papal crusades in Italy. A decade later, the Alexandria crusade diverted energies to the Levant, Amadeus of Savoy’s small crusade in 1366–7 excepted. The resumption of the Hundred Years War (1369) and papal schism (1378) further undermined military resistance to the Ottoman conquests; the western crusade of 1396 only temporarily distracted Bayezid I’s eight-year blockade of Constantinople begun in 1394. The walls of Constantinople proved more effective, at least until the Ottomans employed gunpowder in their siege armoury in the fifteenth century.

  The Tunis Crusade, 1390

  Regular papal offers of crusade privileges from the 1360s onwards failed to ignite concerted action in the Mediterranean. Coastal raids and occupation of ports such as Gallipoli and Smyrna provided temporary help for local Frankish rulers, Italian merchants and the Hospitallers of Rhodes, but hardly challenged Ottoman land power. After an Anglo-French truce of 1389, the first revival of active anti-Muslim crusading was directed at furthering Genoese commercial interests. In 1389–90 the French government of Charles VI (1380–1422) agreed to a Genoese plan to seize the Tunisian port of al-Mahdiya following their capture of the island of Jerba off the Tunisian coast in 1388. Supported by indulgences from both Roman and Avignon popes and commanded by Charles VI’s uncle, Louis II, duke of Bourbon (1337–1410), the campaign assumed the character of a chivalric promenade rather than a serious attempt at conquest. Recruits included several English nobles, but numbers remained modest, perhaps 2,000 to 3,000 knights, infantry and archers, carried in forty Genoese galleys and transport ships.5 Lacking the support of church funds or government subsidies, the expedition was necessarily the preserve of wealthy aristocrats, eager to gild martial and social credentials. Although justified with indulgences and eulogised in the language of holy war, there appears to be no firm evidence of anyone taking the cross. Embarking from Genoa in July 1390, the Franco-English army besieged al-Mahdiya for nine disease-afflicted weeks before agreeing to withdraw. The chief consequence was a general re-establishment of long-standing commercial links between Genoa and the Hafsids of Tunis in 1391 followed by similar agreements with Venice (1392) and Pisa (1397). In image a noble crusading endeavour, in practice the Tunis expedition played a minor role in the shifting business relations that had united western Mediterranean trade across religious divisions for centuries. It sat outside the expansionist interventions into north Africa by Castilians and Portuguese backed by papal grants of crusade indulgences and money. Nonetheless, the Tunis expedition provided members of the Franco-English nobility with a chance to flex their sinews as holy warriors. Numerous al-Mahdiya veterans later fought in Prussia or joined the Nicopolis crusade six years later.

  134. The Tunis crusade under sail.

  The Nicopolis Crusade, 1396

  The Anglo-French truce of 1389 encouraged more elaborate crusading schemes, stimulated by the Ottoman threat to Hungary following their annexation of Serbia and by a transient mood of sentimental optimism at the English and French courts. Grandiose revivalist ideas incorporating the end of the papal schism, final peace between France and England, and the recovery of the Holy Land were circulated on both sides of the Channel by Philippe de Mézières, now living in Parisian retirement. French and English knights were recruited to Mézières’ New Order of the Passion (Nova religio passionis), which between 1390 and 1395 received the patronage of Charles VI (who went mad in 1392) and Richard II (1377–99).6 The influence of enthusiasts should not be exaggerated. In response to appeals from King Sigismund of Hungary (1387–1437), a plan was prepared in 1392–4 to relieve the Balkans, to be led by Charles VI’s brother, Louis, duke of Orléans, his uncle Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy, and Richard II’s uncle, John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster. Money was raised, troops commissioned and negotiations opened with Venice for a campaign expected in 1395. Indulgences were granted by Boniface IX (Rome, 1389–1404) and Benedict XIII (Avignon, 1394–1423), although, as in 1390, no one may have actually taken the cross.7

  The scheme soon shrank in scope amid rivalries around the mad king of France, Richard II’s progressive alienation of much of his higher nobility, a Gascon revolt against the English, Anglo-French diplomatic tensions, and difficulties coordinating with the Hungarians. Leadership devolved onto the Burgundians under the duke’s eldest son, John of Nevers: Louis of Orléans opted out and English participation, if any, was meagre. The whole army probably numbered only a few thousand, including a few hundred men-at-arms. Little could be expected from such a modest force. Leaving Burgundy in April 1396, the French travelled overland, reaching Buda, the Hungarian capital, late in July where they combined with Sigismund’s forces. Advancing down the Danube into Bulgaria, taking the frontier fortresses of Vidin and Rahova and massacring the defenders, the army reached Nicopolis (8–10 September) where Bayezid I (1389–1402) confronted them. True to his nickname, ‘Thunderbolt’, Bayezid had rapidly assembled a significant force of Ottoman levies and Serbian allies. His hurried arrival unnerved the French and Hungarians, who were forced into battle on 25 September. As so often in this period, poorly considered battlefield aggression ensured the destruction of French cavalry, while the Hungarians, deserted by their Wallachian and Transylvanian allies, fared no better. The Christian army was destroyed. French casualties were heavy, the captured, including John of Nevers, later ransomed for huge sums.

  135. Bayezid I routs the infidels at Nicopolis.

  The Defence of Christendom

  The disaster at Nicopolis confirmed Ottoman power in the central Balkans while exposing the inadequacy of traditional crusade strategies and the problems of coordinating the defence of eastern Europe. Resistance to Ottoman advance now lay firmly with the frontier kingdoms of central and eastern Europe and Venice, supported by papal grants of indulgences and money with occasional recruitment of western troops. Urgency was deferred as Bayezid failed to capitalise on Nicopolis with further conquests along the Danube or by capturing Constantinople. After 1400, his priority to control Turkish emirates in Anatolia drew him into conflict with Timur the Lame (1336–1405) when the Turco-Mongol steppe ruler, whose Asiatic empire stretched from Mongolia to northern India and Persia, turned his attention to western Asia. In 1402, Timur defeated and captured Bayezid at the battle of Ankara, provoking two decades of Ottoman civil war and disintegration of their control over territories both in Europe and Asia Minor. Domestic political crises prevented western powers taking advantage: instability in Germany following the deposition of Sigismund’s brother Emperor Wenceslas in 1400; civil wars in France, over control of the mad king Charles VI, and in England in the aftermath of the deposition of Richard II (1399); continued efforts to end the papal schism, only finally achieved by the Council of Constance (1414–18) in 1417; the renewal of the Hundred Years War by Henry V of England in 1415; and the revolt of the Czech Hussites in Sigismund’s kingdom of Bohemia and the subsequent launch of crusades in 1420. The Anglo-French peace treaty of Troyes (1420) was accompanied by predictable talk of uniting to confront the infidel. A Flemish traveller, knight and diplomat, Ghillebert of Lannoy was sent east as a spy. However, Henry V’s death (1422), the long minority of Henry VI, the continuation of the French wars, and the concentration by Sigismund, now emperor, on the Hussites diverted attention away from eastern Europe where, under Mehmed I (1413–21) and Murad II (1421–51), Turkish rule was restored over much of the central Balkans. By the late 1430s, most of Serbia was again annexed, the Danube provinces of Hungary and Wallachia threatened, and a new siege of Constantinople begun (14
42). While fourteenth-century Ottoman rule had relied on delegated authority to Turkish governors, regional allies or clients, after the re-imposition of authority the empire became more highly centralised. Reassertion of control over the sub-Danubean Balkans took just a generation as the Ottomans began to employ cannon and naval power, with local responses conditioned by self-interest not holy war. The subsequent increase in Ottoman raids across the Danube and the prospect of Constantinople’s fall invited a new international effort.

  The Crusade of Varna, 1444

  Pope Eugenius IV (1431–7) took a serious interest in the eastern question. He secured advice from veterans, merchants and self-styled experts, some of whom identified the Ottomans as the chief threat. The nominal union with the Orthodox Church at the Council of Florence (1439) was followed by making two Greek clerics with knowledge of the Turks cardinals. In 1442–3 indulgences were issued, a fleet planned and a legate, Julian Caesarini (previously a legate on the anti-Hussite crusade of 1431), appointed to eastern Europe. Eugenius hoped to capitalise on the effective resistance to the Ottoman advance by John Hunyadi, voivode of Transylvania (1441–56; regent of Hungary, 1445–56). Although the new king of Hungary, Wladislav III of Poland (king of Poland, 1434–44; Hungary, 1440–4), had recent diplomatic accords with the sultan, he agreed the scheme. A coalition was assembled. The Venetians were to blockade the Dardanelles to prevent Ottoman reinforcements by sea, while Hunyadi led a Hungarian and Serbian army into Bulgaria. Initial coordination failed. Neither the Venetians nor a western fleet were on station when the first land attack began in the autumn of 1443. The operation was hampered by conflicting allied objectives. The Hungarians sought security of their frontiers; the Serbs the recovery of their independence. Neither supported Caesarini’s ambition to relieve Constantinople as they saw there was no Byzantine Empire left to revive, with much of the immediate European hinterland of Constantinople already substantially Turcified. Murad II had played on the allies’ divided expectations by offering peace terms, which George Brancovic of Serbia (1427–56) accepted while Wladislav of Hungary declined. These negotiations delayed the muster of the Christian army, allowing the Ottomans time to assemble their defence.