The World of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  139. Turks preparing to attack Rhodes, 1480, from William of Caoursin’s account, 1483.

  17. The Ottoman advance in Asia Minor and the Balkans.

  The draining Italian wars (1494–1559) pitted Italian states and the major powers of continental Europe against each other, further compromising crusade diplomatic solidarity and political will. Combatants, such as Genoa, Florence, Milan and Naples, felt no compunction in allying against Venice or with the Ottomans. In 1500 the Polish king Jan Olbracht (1491–1501) voiced widely shared suspicions that Venice itself habitually sought to shirk its responsibility by ‘searching for ways to transfer the war from their lands to ours, if they can’.15 The Venetian-Turkish treaty of 1503 effectively acknowledged the Ottomans as legitimate political partners and rivals. The efforts of Leo X at the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–17), the issue of a crusade bull (1513), church taxation and indulgences (1517) generated some short-lived diplomatic momentum, expressed in the general European pacification agreed at the treaty of London (1518), and the despatch of two French flotillas to the east in 1518 and 1520. However, the Lutheran schism, the renewal of the Italian wars, and the persistent armed rivalry of Francis I of France (1515–47) and Charles V (1500–58) of Spain (1516–56), Naples (1516–54) and Germany (1519–58) prohibited any concerted response to the new surge in Ottoman aggression under Selim the Grim (1512–20) and Suleiman the Magnificent (1520–66).

  140. Suleiman the Magnificent at the battle of Mohacs, 1526.

  Sultan Selim’s conquest of Syria, Palestine and Egypt (1516–17) created an eastern Mediterranean territorial empire not seen since seventh-century Byzantium, stretching from the Danube to the Sahara, although the rise of the Shi’ite Safavid Empire based in Iran and Iraq prevented the reunification of the Fertile Crescent while offering western powers a potential new ally. Selim’s conquests made the whole Mediterranean basin a war zone between Ottomans, their allied privateers and pirates, and the Venetians, Hospitallers and Habsburgs under Charles V. Over the next two centuries, the Habsburg–-Ottoman contest played out from Tunisia to Austria, punctuated by wars and truces. In central Europe, Belgrade fell to the newly emboldened and resourced Ottomans in 1521, most of Hungary after the crushing Turkish victory at Mohacs in 1526. Vienna was unsuccessfully besieged by the Turks in 1529 and Austria attacked again in 1532, with the seat of action settling across the middle Danube. At sea, the main theatres of confrontation included the Aegean, Adriatic and the narrows between Sicily and Tunisia. Rhodes fell in 1522, the Hospitallers being relocated further west on Malta in 1530. The Ottoman victory over a papal-Habsburg-Venetian fleet off Prevesa in Epirus in 1538 gave supremacy in the eastern Mediterranean until their heavy defeat at Lepanto in 1571, a setback balanced by their conquest of Cyprus the same year. Charles V did succeed in capturing Tunis in 1535, which was held until 1574, and Malta successfully resisted a sustained Ottoman siege in 1565.

  141. The battle of Lepanto.

  Such shifting intercontinental engagement encouraged dialogue, exchange, even alliance, as well as hostility. With both sides grappling with the problems of managing large fissiparous empires, Ottoman-Habsburg truces were agreed in 1533 and 1545. Iberian crusading energy was increasingly focused on the western Mediterranean, north Africa and the east Atlantic. A defining moment came in 1536 when Francis I allied with Suleiman I against Charles V, the first of a series of such treaties. In 1542–4, naval cooperation saw a Turkish fleet joining the French in besieging Habsburg-held Nice and being allowed to use Toulon as a base. In such circumstances, Pope Paul III’s hope in 1544 that the Council of Trent he was summoning would initiate a new anti-infidel crusade showed the tenacity of the ideal allied to a level of wishful thinking that lacked credibility even in Catholic circles.16 Growing economic stability and prosperity in the Ottoman Empire stimulated local, regional and international commerce regardless of faith, politics or persistent formal papal trade embargos. Venice secured an Ottoman truce in 1573 that stuck for seventy years; Spain, since 1556 separate from the empire, followed suit in 1580. In central Europe a recrudescence of war between 1593 and 1606 ignited embers of crusade enthusiasm in the west, for example in France, as did the Ottoman conquest of Crete (1669) and the central European Holy League from 1683 to 1699. However, in Habsburg lands the crusade remained chiefly a device to raise money.

  142. A new dispensation: the siege of Nice by a Franco-Turkish alliance, 1543.

  Elsewhere, by the mid-seventeenth century the Ottomans, while still demonised as decadent violent tyrants, were regarded in terms chiefly of power, territory and trade, formalised in the English and French Levant companies. The Turkish policy of Louis XIV of France (1643–1715) in the 1660s briefly encouraged ideas of holy war before subsequently emphasising commercial cooperation and political advantage.17 Bulls continued to be issued. The cross could still be taken by individuals for personal penance and salvation. Association with the naval power of the Hospitallers on Malta always possessed a religious dimension, seen by some in terms of wider Roman Catholic revivalism. War in defence of the faith still appealed across the new confessional divides. Despite generations of alliance, French troops helped defeat the Ottomans at Saint Gotthard in 1664. Traditional rhetoric could strike chords across Europe’s nobilities, attracting recruits to defend Crete in the 1660s. However, as the seventeenth century drew to a close and attitudes towards the Turks slid from fear to contempt as the Ottoman military threat diminished, crusade institutions and idealism as tools in anti-Ottoman politics ceased to be relevant and slipped into complete disuse.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  NEW CHALLENGES AND THE END OF CRUSADING

  The Italian Wars (1494–1559), conquests in the New World (after 1492), the opening of a sea route to the Indian Ocean and southern Asia (from 1487) and the Protestant upheaval (from 1517) reshaped European culture, attitudes and politics. In an increasingly diverse religious universe, the crusade retained a place, for some still addressing urgent issues of conviction, salvation and identity. The Old and New Worlds could meet. Charles V paid for his capture of Tunis in 1535 with conventional church taxes and sale of indulgences (authorised by a papal bula de crozada) but also with loot from South America. For many Roman Catholics, the Protestant schism of the sixteenth century presented as serious a challenge to their concept of the right order of the world as did the Ottoman advance. Reformists rejected the crusade’s ideological basis in papal authority and the late medieval penitential system epitomised by the sale of indulgences, seen as materially corrupt and theologically wrong. Yet a sense of Christian solidarity in the need to combat the infidel Turk was shared. Protestant London celebrated the crusading victory at Lepanto in 1571; Luther condoned war to repulse the Ottoman. Yet, while its rhetoric thrived, not least at the papal curia, active crusading faded. The emotions and policies once the crusade’s preserve found expression elsewhere.

  This slow transformation was hardly predestined. In 1400 crusades featured prominently in the armoury of western Christendom across a wide range of conflicts. Crusading raised money and framed diplomacy, in tune with popular enthusiasm and elite chivalric self-image. The reign of Pope Eugenius IV (1431–47) indicated crusading’s vibrancy. The Council of Florence in 1439 secured the nominal union of the Latin and Greek Churches. The pope received treatises and pamphlets on the Ottomans and the recovery of the Holy Land. He welcomed representatives from the Coptic Churches of Palestine, Egypt and Ethiopia, and made approaches to minority Christian communities in Armenia, Iraq and Cyprus. Two Greeks with knowledge of the Turks were created cardinals, Isidore of Kiev and John Bessarion. Eugenius took an active role in the anti-Turkish crusade in 1439 and 1444, and issued crusade bulls for Castilian attacks on Granada and Portuguese attacks on Tangiers in 1437 and 1443.1 Dealing separately with Portuguese aggression along the coast of west Africa and in the islands of the western Atlantic, in 1436 he reversed an initial ban on force to coerce pagan natives (1434) after pressure from King Duarte of Portugal (143
3–8), a volte face allowing for the subjugation of pagan natives before conversion, a precedent later employed to devastating effect in the Americas. While invasions of north Africa were treated as extensions of the Iberian Reconquista, Atlantic pagans lived in regions that had never been part of Christendom and so did not easily fit canon law categories as legitimate targets for religious violence.2 Although in the Maghreb and the Atlantic the crusade and papal licences were subordinate to royal policy, they still demonstrated a role for the pope’s leadership after the challenges of the Great Schism, the rival claims to ecclesiastical authority by the representative church Council of Basel (1431–47), and the failed Hussite crusades of the 1420s. Tradition also acted as a cloak: Holy Land formulae covered the use of the term cruciata, which actually meant standardised sales of indulgences.3

  The Dukes of Burgundy

  Secular support for crusading rested on popular devotional practices, aristocratic cultural identification and memories of past heroics, sustained in visual and material culture, history and imaginative literature. Political dividends were pursued in western Europe most strenuously by the dukes of Burgundy, Philip the Good (1419–67) and Charles the Rash (1467–77), son and grandson of the commander of the Nicopolis crusade, John the Fearless (duke 1404–19), both eager to break the shackles of their non-royal titles to assert an independent authority commensurate with their wide territories and immense wealth. As dukes of Burgundy, counts of Flanders and descendants of Louis IX, they stood as legatees of the grandest crusade inheritances, which they exploited loudly even if their material aid failed to match their belligerent rhetoric and ritual investment.4

  Philip the Good sponsored intelligence-gathering trips to the eastern Mediterranean, such as Guillebert de Lannoy’s in 1421. He employed crusade experts such as Bertrandon de la Broquière (d. 1459), who scrutinised the Greek diplomat John Torcello’s crusade advice to Eugenius IV in 1439 and in 1457 published his own memoirs of his travels around the Near East in 1432–3, during which he had met Sultan Murad II.5 Another Burgundian courtier, Geoffrey of Thoisy, campaigned in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea between the 1440s and 1460s. He wrote a memorandum on anti-Turkish war in the early 1460s as did another Burgundian veteran of the Ottoman conflict, Waleran of Wavrin. Jean Germain, bishop of Chalon-sur-Saône (1436–61), acted as the Burgundian court’s resident commentator on crusade involvement from the 1430s to 1450s. He served as chancellor of the Order of the Golden Fleece, founded n 1431, which laid on the Feast and anti-Turkish Vow of the Pheasant at Lille in 1454. Another chancellor of the Order, William Filastre, bishop of Tournai, led crusade discussions with Pius II in the 1460s. For half a century, the Burgundian court entertained crusade planners, such as John of Capistrano, and voiced enthusiasm for proposals. Duke Philip played a prominent part in crusade diplomacy after the fall of Constantinople and in the 1460s. Church taxes were regularly levied and indulgences sold. Philip supported both Iberian and anti-Hussite crusading. Small squadrons of galleys were sent to Rhodes (1429, 1441, 1444) and Constantinople (1444–5), and a regiment despatched to Ancona to aid Pius II’s crusade in 1464. Duke Charles maintained the dynastic commitment that was continued by his grandson, the emperor Charles V, who combined the Burgundian crusade tradition with his Spanish reconquista inheritance.

  However, Burgundy’s failure to convert showy enthusiasm into effective policy suggested a changing role for crusading that now competed with parallel forms of civic devotion, with kingdoms proclaiming their status as new Israels, holy lands in their own right, their defence a moral priority. The Burgundian court’s engagement followed a ritualised pattern of diplomatic expectations. The dukes raised crusade money and promoted nostalgic fancies of recovering the Holy Land, yet declined major unilateral investments in conflicts in eastern Europe, the Adriatic or Aegean. France, England and western Germany always posed more immediate problems than the Turks. Burgundian rhetoric and emotion appeared driven by history not future conquests; John of Capistrano discussed the recovery of Jerusalem on his visit in 1454. The extent of popular engagement is hard to assess, although local recruitment initiatives bore some fruit in the 1450s and 1460s: for example, in March 1464, eighty men from Ghent took the cross.6 Even at court, commitment could appear divorced from mundane serious war planning. The Vow of the Pheasant (1454) represented displacement: theatrical ducal glorification not a policy to recapture Constantinople. This was not, as it could have been, a ceremony of taking the cross. Only a very few volumes among Duke Philip’s considerable collection of crusade texts even dealt with the Turks.7 The supposedly practical information contained in Broquière’s memoir of his Near Eastern travels was twenty-five years out of date. Escapist theatricals were not necessarily cynical or mendacious, but reflected only a general conceptual frame not a political revival.

  Popular Responses

  Evidence for social engagement with crusading came from the popularity of buying indulgences, now a bureaucratised international system of purchasing spiritual privileges of absolution, either immediate or on the point of death. Prices were not insignificant. In Germany around 1500 an indulgence cost about a week’s household expenditure. In 1501 in England, rates varied: on property, a sliding scale charged the richest 0.16 per cent of estimated income to 0.33 per cent for the least wealthy; on non-property income rates were more consistent at about 0.2 per cent, i.e. a few shillings to a few pounds. Money from other indulgence sales, such as those for the increasingly regular papal Jubilees (1450, 1475, 1500, etc.) could be diverted to the crusade or, more generally, to defence against the Turks. In England between 1444 and 1502 twelve such indulgence drives were conducted. Although receipts could be modest – hundreds rather than thousands of pounds a time in England – perceptions that large sums were being drained out of the nation became standard, especially in Germany.8 Indulgence campaigns quickly exploited the new technology of printing. Previously written on durable vellum, indulgence forms now appeared as printed pro forma sheets, with blank spaces kept for the names of the beneficiaries to be filled in by hand. The earliest surviving examples date from Mainz in 1454/55. Printers began producing them in batches of hundreds a day. In England from the 1470s, the top pioneer printers, William Caxton, John Lettou, Wynkyn de Worde and Richard Pynson, all took advantage of this lucrative staple of their business.

  143. Money being assembled to pay for indulgences.

  144. A Gutenberg indulgence from 27 February 1455.

  Printing accelerated the speed and widened the reach of the circulation of news, ideas and crusade texts: sermons, treatises, poems, popular songs, pamphlets, public correspondence, newsletters and devotional works. The new technology allowed for the inclusion of woodcut illustrations to add vivid immediacy and mould public perceptions. Whereas Cardinal Bessarion’s Latin Orationes (1471, see p. 409), prompted by the loss of Venetian Negroponte in 1470, attracted a print run of fewer than one hundred copies, William of Caoursin’s lively account of the siege of Rhodes (1480), also originally in Latin, with its array of striking woodcut images, became a best-seller, with editions published between 1481 and 1489 in Venice, Ulm, Salamanca, Paris and Bruges. An English translation appeared in London by 1484.9 Printing stimulated translation generally. In 1481, Caxton produced an English version (from the French) of William of Tyre’s account of the First Crusade (the first nine books) under the title Godfrey de Bouillon. Pynson published a translation of the early fourteenth-century encyclopaedic crusade treatise and Asian gazetteer, the Flowers of the History of the East, by the Armenian Hetoum of Gorigos in 1520. The Middle English romance, Capystranus, commemorating the 1456 defence of Belgrade, appeared in numerous editions, fragments surviving from 1515, 1527 and 1520.10 The first century of European printing massively increased the volume, availability and social reach of material on the crusade and the Turkish threat, reflecting what was believed to be popular. The literary confections of fifteenth-century Italian humanists appealed to a narrower audience than the more demot
ic, often garishly illustrated, front-line German pamphlets, the Turkenbüchlein and Flugschriften of the 1510s to 1540s.11 However, in their respective spheres, both offered debates on necessity, urgency, legitimacy, efficacy and conduct of crusading to social groups beyond traditional political, ecclesiastical and academic hierarchies.

  Despite the absence of regular mass cross-taking, the ceremony remained available in various different versions across Christendom. Innocent VIII (1484–92) included a revised formula in his Roman Pontifical that reflected current practice by describing the cross being taken ‘to assist and defend the Christian faith or the recovery of the Holy Land’.12 Cross-giving still featured prominently in high-profile fifteenth-century crusade initiatives, including Cardinal Carvajal’s legation to Hungary in 1455–61 involving John of Capistrano, and Pius II’s crusade.13 Crucesignati fought with the Hungarians against the Turks in 1458 and with Matthias Corvinus in Bosnia in 1464. Recruitment centred on towns, even if quite modest ones, such as Axel in the Netherlands. Individual examples of cross-takers continued. Some, such as two Norwich worsted weavers in 1499, were hardly grand.14 However, recruitment of non-professional troops scarcely met the needs of generals or politicians, a familiar gap between expectations and practice. The infrastructure to generate enthusiasm and stimulate anxiety remained available in liturgies, Masses and processions while crusading was still promoted as a metaphor for Christian behaviour.15 In Hungary in 1514 the tension between popular expectations and the reality of crusade politics even helped ignite social revolt. Recruited by anti-Turkish preaching, an army of cruce-signati from poorer marginal sections of the community, eager to believe the militant revivalist rhetoric, confronted the prudent caution of nobles more interested in diplomatic accommodation and crusade money and reluctant to divert their workforce from their lands.16 The ensuing atrocities and extremes of violence from both sides pointed to how the crusade could excite unrelated social tensions.