Between the south and the north the difference was still immense, so deep that the effects of it can still be felt today. The Kingdom of Naples, under Robert and his flighty successor Joanna I, could boast an enlightened and cultivated court and two of the best universities in Italy: Frederick II’s foundation in Naples itself and the world-famous school of medicine, already more than five centuries old, at Salerno. Outside these centres, however, the land was dominated, just as in Norman days, by an irresponsible and obstreperous baronage. Sicily, under the house of Aragon, was less encumbered by feudalism and economically more coherent, but was otherwise permeated by much the same atmosphere of stagnation and inertia.
In the north, on the other hand, there is no escaping the sense of overpowering vitality. Gradually, as the fourteenth century progresses and the smaller city-states are drawn into the orbit of the larger, the great spheres of influence begin to appear: Venice, richer and more magnificent than ever, slowly outdistancing Genoa–by now her only serious maritime rival–and for the first time annexing important parts of the Italian mainland–Padua and Vicenza, Treviso and Verona–while still extending her influence beyond the Adriatic as one of the great powers of Europe; Milan, under the superb house of Visconti, flooding like a great tide over Lombardy and Piedmont and finally to engulf even Bologna, the centre of papal power in north Italy; and the Florence of Giotto, Orcagna and Andrea Pisano, her staunch republicanism foiling every attempt by a would-be despot, her great merchant bankers developing the art of international finance to undreamed-of levels of efficiency and sophistication. One of the advantages of Roman over canon law was that it made usury respectable; the way was now open for full economic growth and for the long-term credits which made possible the wealth and splendour that still dazzle down the centuries.
Across the centre of the peninsula and well beyond the effective control of their absentee landlord in Avignon, the Papal States succumbed in their turn to the prevailing fashion for despotism. The Este of Ferrara, the Pepoli of Bologna, the Malatesta of Rimini and their like might call themselves papal vicars and punctiliously acknowledge the suzerainty of St Peter, but within their respective cities their power remained absolute. Only in Rome itself, despite the attempts of the Colonna and their rivals the Orsini, was popular republican feeling strong enough to hold its own, but Rome was by now perhaps the saddest place in Italy. Deserted by the Popes, its principal raison d’être, its population reduced by malaria, famine and factional strife to a pitiable 20,000, the capital of Western Christendom had sunk to a level of degradation such as it had never before known. More than any other city, it now needed a leader who would focus its aspirations and restore its self-respect. At the moment of its darkest despair, it found one.
Cola di Rienzo, son of a Roman washerwoman, was a visionary, a fanatic, a superb showman and a demagogue of genius. In 1344, when he was thirty-one, he launched his campaign against the aristocracy of Rome, inflaming the popular imagination with his evocations of the city’s past greatness and his prophecies of its glorious rebirth. Such was his success that three years later, on the Capitol, he was invested with the title of Tribune and limitless dictatorial powers; then, summoning a ‘national’ parliament, he solemnly conferred Roman citizenship on all the cities of Italy and announced plans for the election of an Italian Emperor. But appeals for Italian unity, whether pronounced by a German prince or a Roman demagogue, were doomed to failure. By the end of 1347 not only the other cities but the Roman mob itself had turned against Cola and forced him into exile. Seven years later he managed to return, but the old magic was gone; the mob, fickle as always, rose against him almost at once. In vain he showed himself on the balcony of the Capitol, clad in shining armour and bearing aloft the banner of Rome; they only jeered the louder. Disguising himself as a beggar, he tried to flee, but the gold bracelets glinting under his rags betrayed him. Minutes later his body was hanging by the feet in a public square–a fate eerily similar to that which befell, in the mid-twentieth century, his closest and most successful imitator.
And yet, in his comet career, Cola had somehow managed to clear the minds of his fellow citizens of much of the cumbersome detritus of the Middle Ages and to give them a new awareness of their classical past. What he had accomplished in the political sphere was paralleled in the world of letters by his friend and supporter Francesco Petrarch. It was in 1341, only twenty years after Dante’s death, that Petrarch was crowned with the poet’s laurels on the Capitol, but in those twenty years lay all the difference between late medieval scholasticism and the humanism of the Renaissance. Petrarch had none of Dante’s gigantic vision, but his more slender genius led the way forward to a fresh, uncluttered outlook, based to some extent on the troubadour poets of Sicily and Provence but drawing its chief inspiration from the Latin authors of antiquity.
This new conception of the classical past as a signpost to the future led to a similar revival of interest in the literature of ancient Greece, long forgotten in the west and even in the Byzantine Empire largely neglected. This was principally the achievement of Giovanni Boccaccio, Petrarch’s most gifted disciple, who kept for three years in his house an aged Greek of disgusting personal habits, preparing one of the first–and worst–translations of Homer into Latin. But it is not for his classical scholarship that Boccaccio is now remembered. His Decameron is a comparatively youthful work, but with it he did for Italian prose what Dante and Petrarch had done for poetry, simplifying it, refining it and forging it into a new literary instrument. The style which he developed, racy and astringent, gave the Decameron a European reputation, starting a revived narrative tradition that can be traced through Chaucer and Shakespeare to La Fontaine and beyond.
To the Popes at Avignon, the impact of Cola di Rienzo and the success of the Decameron must have sounded a new note of danger. If the fullness of papal power were not soon reasserted in Italy, it would be lost forever. Cola’s return to Rome had coincided with the appointment of Cardinal Gil Albornoz as legate to Italy, with the express task of bringing the States of the Church back into the papal fold. This terrifyingly able Spaniard succeeded to the point where, in 1367, Pope Urban V ventured to re-establish himself at the Lateran. He received a vociferous welcome from the people of Rome, and soon afterwards became the first and last Pope to receive visits from both Eastern and Western Emperors. But he was an old man; he soon grew homesick and, in 1370, despite warnings from St Bridget of Sweden that a return to Provence would be fatal, the attractions of Avignon became too strong for him. St Bridget was right. Within a few weeks he was dead.
Urban had shown with painful clarity why the Papacy had been so long absent from its rightful home. All the Avignon Popes and most of their curias had been Frenchmen–notoriously unwilling travellers at the best of times–to whom the ruins of Rome, insalubrious and smelly, must have constituted little enough temptation. It would take a serious crisis in Italy if, after seventy years, the papal conscience was to be reawakened. That crisis was not long in coming. In the States of the Church Albornoz had been succeeded by a horde of grasping French legates who made no secret of being out for what they could get and soon drove the unhappy cities to a state of open rebellion. In doing so they did not hesitate to make use of the so-called Free Companies–bands of foreign mercenaries who, when not otherwise employed, roamed the countryside supporting themselves on protection money, highway robbery and blackmail. In 1375 one of the worst of these, the English Company of Sir John Hawkwood, was despatched by the legate in Bologna to lay waste the Florentine harvests. To the Italian cities it seemed that papal iniquity could be carried no further. A wave of rabid anticlericalism swept through Tuscany, Umbria and the Papal States, and by the end of the year no less than eighty towns had expelled their papal garrisons.
Away in Avignon, Gregory XI acted quickly and firmly. Florence, the ringleader of the rising, was placed under an interdict; all the Christian princes of Europe were commanded to seize Florentine goods wherever they might be found
and to sell all local Florentine merchants into slavery. These were fearsome measures, but they had no effect. Gregory saw that his only hope lay in an immediate return to Rome. Spurred on by the entreaties of St Catherine of Siena–carrying on where St Bridget had left off–he embarked with his reluctant curia at the end of 1376 and on 17 January 1377 made his formal entry into the city. It was a sad homecoming; in Florence his troops were taking hideous vengeance, while even in Rome his position was by no means secure. He was in fact seriously contemplating a return to Avignon when, fortunately for Rome, he died in the following year. The Romans had not always treated their Popes with particular affection or respect, but they were determined not to let them go again. ‘Romano lo volemo, o almeno italiano!’111 they shouted throughout the ensuing conclave, and they got what they wanted–up to a point. The new Pope, Urban VI, showed every sign of being mentally unhinged and indeed tortured at least four of his cardinals to death, but he was at least an Italian.
The period of the Avignon Popes marks the close of the Middle Ages. When Clement V left Italy the old order was dying, but little had yet appeared to take its place. Though the imperial throne was temporarily vacant, men still remembered the magnificent Frederick, and wept for Manfred and Conradin. Papal pride had been brought low. Scholastic philosophy had reached, with St Thomas Aquinas, at once its highest pinnacle and its logical conclusion. It remained only for Dante to sum up, in the Divine Comedy, the achievements and the failures, the wisdom and the blindness, the ideals, the hopes and the fears of medieval Italy.
Gregory XI returned to a land which, though in some respects unchanged, in others could never be the same again. Unity was as remote a possibility as ever: Guelf and Ghibelline, their original differences long forgotten, still hammered away at each other and the blood continued to flow as it always had, copious and unavailing. But seventy years without a Pope or an effective Emperor had removed the old polarities, and in 1347–48 the Black Death seemed to draw yet another curtain across the past and to expose the present yet more mercilessly to the winds of change. The secular, enquiring spirit which now spread over the land was not in itself new. Its roots went back to Roger of Sicily and his Greek and Arab sages, to Frederick and his falcons, to Manfred and his troubadours, to Arnold of Brescia and the scholastics, to the doctors and lawyers of Salerno and Bologna. But the fourteenth century had given it a new momentum–in the political sphere with Cola di Rienzo and the despots of the north, in the cultural with Petrarch and the humanists, in the theological with Marsilius of Padua–and at the same time the papal barriers that had so long blocked its progress suddenly disappeared. The Renaissance was under way.
CHAPTER XII
The Fall of Constantinople
When, with the fall of Konya to the Karaman Turks in 1308, the moribund empire of the Seljuks finally crumbled, many small Turkoman states–some of them hardly larger than the tribes they represented–rose from its ruins. Among them was that of a young warrior named Othman (or Osman) who after a whirlwind campaign had declared his independence as ruler of the extreme western end of Anatolia. This territory he governed wisely and well until his death in 1326, in which year his son and successor Orhan–who assumed the title of Sultan–conquered the city of Bursa and made it his capital.112 Three years later he captured the great Byzantine city of Nicaea (Iznik). Then in 1354 Orhan’s son Süleyman crossed the Dardanelles to capture the fortress of Gallipoli, which he converted into a permanent stronghold.
Here was the first Turkish base on European soil, and an invaluable bridgehead; almost at once, the Ottomans began their relentless progress. As early as 1359 an advance guard had reached the walls of Constantinople. Fortunately it was not large enough to constitute any immediate threat to the city, but the rest of Thrace, less well protected and exhausted by civil war, proved an easy victim. In 1362, Adrianople surrendered and became under the name of Edirne, Orhan’s European capital. Its position on the great road leading from Belgrade to Constantinople provided a perfect base from which to drive deeper into the Balkans; it also effectively isolated Constantinople from its European possessions. In every city and village that was captured, a large part of the native population was transported to slavery in Asia Minor, its place being taken by Turkish colonists.
That same year, 1362, saw the death of Orhan. He was succeeded as sultan–Süleyman having died of a fall from his horse two years before–by his second son, Murad, who soon proved himself a more energetic and determined leader than either his father or his elder brother, campaigning not only in Thrace but also in Bulgaria, capturing Philippopolis (Plovdiv) in 1363 and putting considerable pressure on the Bulgar Tsar John Alexander to collaborate with him against Byzantium. After a decisive battle on the Maritsa river in 1371, Bulgaria became a Turkish vassal and was soon wholly absorbed. Murad’s other signal achievement was to reduce the emirs of western Anatolia to a state of total subjection; henceforth, as the Ottoman Sultans advanced into Europe, their rear would be secure.
Murad was assassinated during the historic battle of Kosovo, ‘the field of blackbirds’, on 15 June 1389. On that day, under the inspired leadership of his son Bayezit–who was proclaimed Sultan on the field–the Serbian army was utterly destroyed, the Serbian nation effectively annihilated for four hundred years. Bayezit–known to his subjects as Yilderim, the Thunderbolt–was a man of superhuman energy, given to outbreaks of almost insane violence and utterly merciless to all who stood in his way. During his thirteen-year reign, the pace of conquest quickened still further. In the spring of 1394 an immense Turkish host marched against Constantinople itself, and by the beginning of autumn the siege had begun in earnest. The Sultan ordered a complete blockade, and for some time essential supplies in the city ran desperately short. The blockade was to continue in one form or another for eight years; fortunately for the citizens, however, as the ever-unpredictable Bayezit lost interest and involved himself in other operations that offered more immediate rewards, the pressure was soon relaxed.
Nevertheless, although Constantinople was spared for a little longer, other cities were less lucky. Thessalonica fell in 1394; in 1396, at Nicopolis (Nikopol) on the Danube, the Sultan smashed an army estimated at 100,000–the largest ever launched against the infidel–raised by King Sigismund of Hungary. Thus it was that by the end of the fourteenth century the Ottoman conquest of eastern Europe and Asia Minor had acquired a momentum that could no longer be checked. Of the Sultan’s Christian enemies, Serbia and Bulgaria were no more. Byzantium remained, but it was a Byzantium so reduced, so impoverished, so humiliated and demoralised as to be scarcely identifiable as the glorious Empire of the Romans that it had once been. And yet, doomed as it was, it was never to give up the struggle. Almost unbelievably, it was to endure another sixty years–and, at the last, to go down fighting.
For the Most Serene Republic of Venice, the last quarter of the fourteenth century had been traumatic indeed. The old rivalry with Genoa had come to a head. Beginning with a struggle over the island of Tenedos–which lay at the gateway to the Dardanelles, controlling the entrance to the straits–it had continued a good deal nearer home, with the siege and ultimate capture in August 1379 of Chioggia, a fortified city within the Venetian lagoon commanding a direct deep-water channel to Venice itself. Never in all its long history had the Republic been so seriously threatened; indeed, had the Genoese admiral Pietro Doria followed up his victory with an immediate assault on the city, it is hard to see how he could have failed. Fortunately for Venice, he decided instead to blockade it and starve it into submission, and the Venetian commander Vettor Pisani saw his chance. Chioggia, almost landlocked, depended on only three narrow channels; on midwinter night, 21 December, three large, stone-filled hulks were towed out in the darkness, and one sunk in each of them. The blockaders were blockaded. On 24 June 1380 the 4,000 beleaguered Genoese, half-dead with hunger, made their unconditional surrender.
It was not quite the end of the war; not until the following year did the two e
xhausted republics accept the offer of Count Amadeus of Savoy to mediate, and the consequent Treaty of Turin provided for the continuation of trade in the Mediterranean and the Levant by both Venice and Genoa side by side. But as time went on it gradually became clear that Venice’s victory had been greater than she knew. Not for the first time, she was to astonish her friends and enemies alike by the speed of her economic and material recovery. Genoa, on the other hand, went into a decline. Her governmental system began to crumble; torn asunder by factional strife, she was to depose ten doges in five years and soon fell under a French domination which was to last a century and a half. Only in 1528, under Andrea Doria, was she finally to regain her independence; but by then the world had changed. Never again would she constitute a threat to Venice.
The Serenissima, by contrast, had emerged from six years of the most desperate war in her history with her political structure unshaken. No other state in Italy could boast such stability, or anything approaching it. Beyond her borders, all Italy had succumbed to the age of despotism; only she remained a strong, superbly ordered republic, possessed of a constitution that had effortlessly weathered every political storm, foreign and domestic, to which it had been exposed. The majority of her people, admittedly, had been shorn of effective power for the past hundred years,113 but the civil service was open to all, the commerce and the craftsmanship for which the city was famous provided a source of pride and satisfaction as well as rich material rewards, and few citizens ever seriously doubted that the administration–quite apart from being outstandingly efficient–had their own best interests at heart.
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