"Archbishop, let us die here, you and I": Quoted in Rosado Llamas and Lopez Payer, La Batalla de las Navas de Tolosa, 146.
A cross appeared in the sky: Perhaps the strangest miracle concerns what happened after the battle: the archbishop of Toledo maintained that the thousands of Muslim dead did not bleed or rot, thus sparing the Christian victors from pestilence.
One source speaks of the Andalusis on the wings of the formation running away: This appears in Arnold Amaury's letter to the Cistercians. Given his interest in exaggerating the prowess of the Christian army, this detail might be trustworthy, as it suggests demoralization as the victor rather than any feat of arms.
Others say that the soldiery's discontent: See Rosado Llamas and Lopez Payer, La Batalla de las Navas de Tolosa, 157—61.
"Therefore ask Valencia what is the state of Murcia": Abu al-Baqa al-Rundi, "Lament for the Fall of Seville," in Olivia Remie Constable, ed., Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 221.
The Spaniards, alive to their history: This is my opinion. In my travels in the Mediterranean basin in the past twenty-five years, I have yet to visit any country except Spain where almost everyone—from waitress to tour guide through barkeep and bus driver—can hold forth at length about the past. The people of its cities celebrate Moors and Christians festivals with undiminished enthusiasm. In scholarly circles the discussion of Spain's singular history has been lively as well. From the 1940s on historians Americo Castro and Claudio Sanchez-Albornoz battled through their books about the meaning of Spain: the former argued that the mixing of creeds and peoples was the hallmark of the peninsula's past; the latter, that the Christian mission of Spain, unbroken from the time of the Visigoths, was paramount in a centuries-long quest for unity. It is an interesting debate, at the center of contemporary concerns about celebrating either diversity or homogeneity. In the Spanish context, the Christian myths surrounding El Cid and Pelayo of Asturias have been sustained to the present day. See J. N. Hillgarth, "Spanish Historiography and Iberian Reality," History and Theory 24 (1985), 23-43, reproduced in Hillgarth, Spain and the Mediterranean in the Later Middle Ages (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). This witty and informative essay also speaks of the traditional self-image of Spaniards: "In 1629 there appeared a Libro de las cinco excelencias del espanol. These five 'excellencies' were passionate zeal for religion, military glory, purity of lineage, the monarchy, and extreme generosity. From the point of view of most non-Spaniards and even of some contemporaries inside Spain these virtues appear as fanaticism, one-sided pride, lust for dominion, rodomontade, and vulgar ostentation" (24).
the provincial government of Jaén announced: "El museo de la Batalla de Las Navas de Tolosa abrira sus puertas en 2006," ElPais, July 9, 2004.
CHAPTER 8: THE SEA OF FAITH
"furious with indignation and wrath": Quoted in Geoffrey Regan, Lionhearts: Richard I, Saladin, and the Third Crusade (New York: Walker, 1998), 190.
"Then in the haughty presence of the Sultan . . .": Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy: Paradise, trans. Mark Musa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 5:108—09 (Canto XI, 100—05).
eleventh-century Syrian poet: Abu Ala'a al-Ma'arri (973—1057), a one-eyed poet, sometimes called the Heretic, came from the town of Ma'arat al-Nu'man, later the scene of cannibalism during the First Crusade.
"It is a sign of God's love for us . . .": Andrew Palmer, Sebastian Brock, and Robert Hoy-land, eds. and trans., The Seventh Century in the West-Syrian Chronicles (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1993), xxi, quoted in John V. Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 37.
Hulegu, influenced by two of his Nestorian Christian wives: Erik Hildinger, Warriors of the Steppe: A Military History of Central Asia, 5oo B.C. to 1300 AD. (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 1997), 148—49. Hulegu, a Buddhist, had had a Nestorian mother as well.
a historian of genius: Ibn Khaldun stands out as a giant among historians, from any period. An empiricist rather than a speculative philosopher, but nonetheless a devout Muslim, he possessed an intellectual rigor that led him to some conclusions that were far ahead of his time, prefiguring Marx and other materialists. For example: "The basic causes of historical evolution are in fact to be sought in the economic and social structure" or "The differences which are seen between generations in their behaviour are only the expression of the differences which separate them in their economic way of life." See M. Talbi, "Ibn Khaldun, Wal al-Din Abd al-Rahman B. Muhammad B. Muhammad B. Abi Bakr Muhammad B. Al-Hasan," in Encylopedia of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1971), 3:825-31.
the virtues and vices of asabiyya: Francesco Gabrieli, "Asabiyya," in Encyclopedia of Islam (Leiden: Brill, i960), 1:681.
undisputed in Muslim doctrine: A full exposition of Islamic attitudes toward Jesus can be found in Kenneth Cragg, Jesus and the Muslim: An Exploration (Oxford: Oneworld, 1999).
"O you People of the Book . . .": Quoted in Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, The Holy Land (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 86.
the head of Cluny: Peter the Venerable (1092-1156).
the lush forest of medieval Christian polemic: The scholarship on the subject is similarly lush. Of particular value for my summary of the slanders were Tolan's Saracens; Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Oxford: Oneworld, 2000); and Philippe Senac, L'Occident medieval face a Vlslam (Paris: Flammarion, 2000).
the use of concealed magnets: This claim was made in Chanson d'Antioche, an epic of the First Crusade by an unknown author. Alexandre Eckhardt, "Le cercueil flottant de Mahomet," Melanges de philologie romaine et de litterature medievales offerts a E. Hoepffner, Publication de la Faculte des Lettres de l'Universite de Strasbourg, fasc. 113 (1949), 77-88, quoted in Tolan, Saracens, 121.
deflower the Virgin Mary: The claim was made by Eulogius, the most famous of the martyrs of Córdoba,. Quoted in Tolan, Saracens, 93.
A thirteenth-century chronicler of Leon: Lucas de Tuy, in his Chronicon mundi, quoted in Tolan, Saracens, 182.
five friars were executed in Marrakesh . . . "to long for death for Christ . . .": Tolan, Sarcens, 218, 220.
Frederick was a polyglot artist: Dante called him "the father of Italian poetry."
an adept at oriental panache: "He [Frederick] traveled with a harem guarded by eunuchs, and with a menagerie which included camels, lions, panthers, white bears, monkeys and other animals. He had an enormous elephant, a gift from the sultan of Egypt, which was guarded by Saracen attendants. His bodyguard was composed of Sicilian Moslems, and he was accompanied by Ethiopian trumpeters and Moorish dancers and jongleurs." Joseph E. Strayer and Dana C. Munro, The Middle Ages (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1959), 334.
saw in him the Antichrist: Bernard McGinn, Anti-Christ: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 152—57. Frederick's reputation as the Beast was particularly strong among the followers of Joachim of Fiore, a thirteenth-century sect particularly popular among the more extreme elements of the Franciscans.
excommunicated for delaying his expedition to Outremer: He was supposed to have joined the Fifth Crusade of 1519 but delayed his departure for ten years to settle dynastic matters. Pope Gregory IX, a kinsman of Innocent III who freely treated Frederick as the Antichrist in his pronouncements, excommunicated him out of exasperation.
such borrowings from the Arab funduq: David Abulafia, "The Role of Trade in Muslim-Christian Contact During the Middle Ages," in Francoise Micheau, ed., Les relations des pays d'Islam avec le monde latin: Du milieu du Xe siecle au milieu du XIIF siecle (Paris: Jacques Marseille, 2000), 304. Also useful in summarizing research on Christian-Muslim trade in the Mediterranean was the almost identically named: Georges Jehel and Philippe Racinet, Les relations des pays d'Islam avec le monde latin: Du Xe siecle au milieu du XIIF siecle (Paris: Edition du Temps, 2000).
"Ah! What a great good fortune . . .":
Ramon Llull, Libre delgentil et los tres savis (Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men), prologue, in A. Bonner, trans, and ed., Doctor Illumi-natus: A Ramon Llull Reader (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 90, quoted in Tolan, Saracens, 264.
On March 2, 1354, an earthquake flattened the fortress town: John Julius Norwich, Byiantium: The Decline and Fall (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 320.
"a prodigy of decay": Jason Goodwin, Lords of the Horiion: A History of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Henry Holt, 1999), xiv.
a "Byzantine commonwealth" of religious and cultural expression: Dimitri Obolensky, The Byiantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe 600—1453 (New York: Praeger, 1971), chaps. 7—n.
deeply smitten: Norwich, Decline and Fall, prefers "besottedly in love" (302).
we can be certain only that the principal leader of the Serbian armies: For a thorough examination of all the sources, see Thomas A. Emmert, Serbian Golgotha: Kosovo, 1389 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), a superbly researched monograph that separates what can be known from that which seems simply invented.
whom some historians unkindly believe to be a total fabrication: On this nettlesome matter, see Noel Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 68-74. After a lengthy examination of the matter, he is led to conclude, almost comically: "Without further evidence, the precise truth may never be known. But in the present state of knowledge, it is reasonable to think that Murat was in fact killed by someone, quite possibly a Hungarian, whose name either was, or sounded like, or was later adapted into, or meant the same as, Milos Kobilic" (74).
Kosovo's Shakespearean cocktail: Andre Gerolymatos, The Balkan Wars: Conquest, Revolution, and Retribution from the Ottoman Era to the Twentieth Century and Beyond (New York: Basic Books, 2002), chap. 1, for the interplay of the Kosovo myth and the events leading to the First World War.
the easing of the common man's feudal burden: Goodwin, Lords of the Horiion, 20. Goodwin has a nice passage: "Dusan of Serbia had let his lords exact two days' labour a week from their peasants. Under the Ottomans . . . peasants were only expected to work three days a year for the local spahi; beyond that small impost, and the tithe they paid as Christians amounting to ten per cent of their income, they were undisturbed in either their religion or their cultivation. . . . Peasants came back, if they had ever really left, to discover that all the weight of Balkan feudalism—the requisitions, corvees, serfdom, droit de seigneur—the whole bitter panoply of warriors in their castles and helpless villagers clustered at their foot, had been swept away. Turkish overlordship came even to the Orthodox as a kind of liberation."
the cause of boundless heartbreak: Philip Mansel, in his Constantinople: City of the World's Desire, 1453-1924 (London: Penguin, 1997), quotes a Balkan lament (17):
Be damned, O Emperor, be thrice damned
For the evil you have done and the evil you do.
You catch and shackle the old and the archpriests
In order to take the children as Janissaries.
Their parents weep and their sisters and brothers too
And I cry until it pains me;
As long as I live I shall cry,
For last year it was my son and this year my brother.
"How Happy Is He . . .": The translation, and an explanation of this Kemalist republican motto, is found in Hugh Pope, Sons of the Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkic World (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2005), 90.
the Genoese trading city of Galata: Also called Pera, from the Greek for "beyond."
an immense host of warriors from Wallachia, France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain, and England: See John Freely, Istanbul: The Imperial City (London: Penguin, 1998), 167.
exceeded all of their predecessors in the pursuit of atrocity: Regarding Timur's ferocity, there are, as in every subject of history, revisionists, notably Jean-Paul Roux, Tamerlan (Paris: Fayard, 1994).
Ibn Khaldun came away impressed with Timur's thoughtfulness: M. Talbi, "Ibn Khaldun, Wal al-Din Abd al-Rahman B. Muhammad B. Muhammad B. Abi Bakr Muhammad B. Al-Hasan," in Encylopedia of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1971), 3:825-31.
which later legend made into a cage: Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople 1453 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 42. According to that legend, Beyazit killed himself by smashing his head against the golden bars of the cage. It is uncertain how he died, but suicide is a good hypothesis.
Olivera, was relieved of her clothes: Repeated in most standard histories of this time, this story of poor Olivera (also called Despina) seems less incredible, given Timur's proclivities, than the fate of her husband.
decided to turn around and march across the world to conquer China: Timur never made it. He died en route, aged seventy-two.
CHAPTER 9: CONSTANTINOPLE 1453 AND KOSTANTINIYYE
The Ottomans ineffectually besieged Constantinople in 1422: The eighteen-year-old Murad, just having ascended the throne, cut his warrior teeth on this unsuccesssful siege. It lasted from June 10 to September 6.
after prudently having his infant stepbrother drowned in his bath: This was done, according to the Greek chronicler Michael Ducas, on Mehmet's order while he was comforting the child's mother on the grief she felt at the death of the sultan. Franz Babinger, whose monumental work of 1953, Mehmedthe Conqueror and His Time, trans. Ralph Mannheim (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), forms the basis of much of our knowledge of Mehmet, states that Mehmet's action inaugurated the Ottoman custom of having one's male siblings strangled upon acceding to the throne (65—66). Later historians differ on Mehmet's responsibility in starting the custom, citing such examples as Beyazit at Kosovo. Whatever the origin, the custom thrived in a gruesome fashion—at some successions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, scores of siblings and half-siblings were killed. A silken cord was used to strangle them so as not to shed royal blood.
Mehmet, conversant in Turkish, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, and Latin: Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople 1453 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 56. Other sources claim he spoke only three or four languages.
biographies of Alexander the Great: Mehmet's tastes went beyond the great Macedonian, according to a western contemporary, Zorzi Dolfin, who wrote, "Daily he has Roman and other historical works read to him by a companion named Ciriaco of Ancona and another Italian. He has them read Laertius, Herodotus, Livy, Quintus Curtius, the chronicles of the popes, the emperors, the kings of France, and the Lombards." Quoted in Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror, 112.
this fleshy-lipped, starry-eyed scion: Giovanni Maria Angiolello was a Venetian taken captive while still a youth during the Turkish conquest of Euboea (Negropont), the long island off the eastern coast of Greece. He became a page at the court of Mehmet and was later freed. In his Historia Turchesa, published in 1480 and avidly read throughout Europe, he gave the following description of the sultan in middle age: "of medium height, fat and fleshy; he had a wide forehead, large eyes with thick lashes, an aquiline nose, a small mouth with a round copious red-tinged beard, a short thick neck, a sallow complection, rather high shoulders and a loud voice." Quoted in Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror, 424. Runciman, collating several contemporaneous descriptions of the man, writes that Mehmet was "of middle height but strongly built. His face was dominated by a pair of piercing eyes, under arched eyebrows, and a thin aquiline nose that curved over a mouth with full lips. In later life his features reminded men of a parrot about to eat ripe cherries." See Fall of Constantinople, 58.
one went as far afield as Paris and London: Manuel II Palaeologus, in 1400—01. He was the father of Constantine XI, the last basileus of the Byzantine Empire.
Peloponnesian province, Morea: The Latins had established an ephemeral province there following the carve-up of the Byzantine Empire after the sack of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade. The Byzantines, in the mid-thirteenth century, recovered it, and what was known as a despotate came to be centered in Mystras, near Sparta
. (Mystras, incidentally, is still a beautiful hillside covered with ruined Byzantine chapels.) The despots of Morea were usually of the ruling family of Constantinople and had almost complete autonomy from the capital. Another Greek holdout against the Ottoman advance was Trebizond, on the Black Sea coast of Anatolia, which had its own basileus.
Rome had lost much of its influence: The preceding century and a half had diminshed papal power considerably. For seventy years in the fourteenth century the papacy had resided in Avignon, each successive pope a Frenchman in the orbit, if not the puppet, of the French Crown. Then from 1378 to 1415 a period of confusion ensued as European monarchies backed different contenders for the throne of St. Peter. Poland, Hungary, Germany, England, most of Italy, and the Scandinavian countries plumped for the Roman candidate. France, Scotland, Spain, southern Italy, and France sided with the cleric chosen in Avignon. The period is known as the Great Schism, not to be confused with the similarly named break between Latin and Orthodox churches that occurred in 1054. Mercifully, the politics of the latter Great Schism lie outside the scope of this work; its harm to papal influence, however, is germane to the events of 1453, as the papacy could no longer rally Christendom to a martial cause.
successive conclaves that ringingly announced the rift to be at an end: The most important of these was the Council of Florence in 1439.
"Better a sultan's turban than a cardinal's hat": The attribution to Notaras may be unjust, since he fought bravely during the siege. And if he did say such a thing, he was disastrously wrong, at least with regard to his personal destiny. Mehmet, however eager to repopulate Kostantiniyye with Greeks, wasted no time in eliminating the civilian leadership of the defunct empire, Notaras included. One story of the days immediately after the conquest adds a personal, unsavory note to the bloody business of exterminating an elite: the sultan, on seeing Notaras' young son, immediately wanted the boy for his harem; on being rebuffed, the entire family was executed. Whatever the truth, it is known that a daughter, Anna Notaras, escaped the outrages immediately following the fall of Constantinople and lived out her life as a respectable noblewoman in Venice. Also, she is the heroine of Finnish novelist Mika Waltari's The Dark Angel (1952), a tolerably good tale of love between Latin and Greek set during the final days of Constantinople.
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