A History of the Crusades

by Jonathan Riley-Smith

  Portugal no longer had an infidel frontier. The Portuguese branch of Santiago elected its own master and had become largely independent, while Avis was a national order as was that of Christ, which was founded with the Temple’s properties in 1319. The Portuguese orders, including the Hospital, fought the Moors at the River Salado in 1340, but for decades they were mainly absorbed in national politics and largely subservient to the crown which, much as in Castile, managed to impose royal princes and others as their masters. As for the Portuguese Hospitallers, in 1375 they had paid no responsions to Rhodes for nine years. In 1385 the regent, an illegitimate son of King Pedro I who had been brought up by the master of Christ and who had become master of Avis, headed the national opposition to Castilian invasion and became king as João I. The orders reverted briefly to holy warfare when the Portuguese reconquest was extended overseas, the master of Christ and the prior of the Hospital fighting in the seizure of Ceuta in Morocco in 1415. Pope Martin V appointed Prince Henrique governor of the Order of Christ in about 1418, and he was able to use its brethren and its wealth to finance his momentous voyages of discovery. In 1443 the pope gave the Order of Christ title to any lands it might in future capture in Morocco, the Atlantic isles, and elsewhere beyond the seas. That order received extensive material and spiritual privileges in the Atlantic islands, along the African coasts, and eventually in Asia, and in 1457 Henrique granted it a twentieth of the incomes of Guinea; its great overseas wealth was later displayed in its spectacular priory with its numerous cloisters at Tomar. Royal interference in the Portuguese orders, their involvement in secular politics, their internal dissensions, and the frequent appointment of royal princes to control the orders and their incomes continued, but their participation in the papally-sanctioned crusades against infidel Morocco was no more than occasional. The contingents of the three Portuguese orders fought in the unsuccessful attack on Tangier in 1437, and the Portuguese Hospitallers at Arzila in 1471. The three orders and the Portuguese Hospital all rejected papal proposals of 1456 for them to establish military outposts and maintain one third of their brethren in Ceuta, and in 1467 the papal curia even agreed that the Portuguese orders were not obliged to any offensive war, a decision which aroused protests in Portugal.

  In the Baltic regions of Prussia and Livonia, which were separated by an endlessly contested strip of territory, the Germans had successfully been pursuing a very different, essentially continental, confrontation. This became less bitter than it had been in the thirteenth century, especially in the more peaceful western parts of Prussia, but was still perpetual, and often freezing and bloody. The Teutonic Order retained some Mediterranean possessions, notably in Sicily and Apulia, in addition to its extensive commanderies and recruiting grounds in Franconia and Thuringia, along the Rhine, and in other German lands. Though reliant on its German holdings for manpower, the order was not constrained within any kingdom as the Iberian orders were. Prussia and Livonia lay outside the empire and were held or protected, in ambiguous and debatable ways, from both emperor and pope. There was bitter dissension over the order’s proper purpose: the brethren in the Baltic called for the headquarters to be moved northwards to end the order’s double burden in Prussia and the East by concentrating on its new function of fighting the Lithuanians, while others wanted to continue the Jerusalem objective. Finally, in 1309, the master, Siegfried von Feuchtwangen, transferred the convent from Venice to Prussia without his brethren’s assent. His successor Karl von Trier was exiled to Germany in 1317, the same year in which the Hospitaller convent deposed its master. The next master, Werner von Orseln, was elected in Prussia in 1324, and thereafter the masters ruled over a grandiose court from the imposing riverside palace at Marienburg with its brick residence, chapter house, and chapel.

  In 1310 the Teutonic Order faced extremely serious accusations of massacring Christians in Livonia, brutally despoiling the secular church, attacking the archbishop of Riga, trading with the heathen, impeding the task of conversion, and driving numerous converts into apostacy. The order was in grave danger of dissolution, and it became involved in tangled diplomacy with the Lithuanians whose clever pretences of conversion to Christianity embarrassed and discredited it. Yet it went on to make real progress, despite armed opposition from the Poles. Much territory was acquired. Danzig and eastern Pomerelia were seized in 1308 and Estonia, to the north of Livonia, was purchased from the Danes in 1346, but the stubborn and effective opposition of the pagan Lithuanians and the order’s need for both booty and conversions demanded frequent campaigns. Under Winrich von Kniprode, master from 1352 to 1382, the Lithuanians were brilliantly defeated with the help of western nobles attracted to the order’s prestigious expeditions or Reisen. In his youth John of Boucicaut, later marshal of France, served three times in Prussia and the future Henry IV of England went twice. There were often two Prussian expeditions a year and one in Livonia. They caused much death and destruction, while the brethren suffered losses in sustained warfare of a type and scale unknown on Rhodes or in Spain. Paradoxically, the Germans’ successes contributed to their downfall: in 1386 the powerful Lithuanians allied with the Poles and their formal conversion to Christianity in 1389 undermined the fundamental justification for the Teutonic holy war. By continuing its warfare the order emphasized that its motives were as much political and German as religious and Christian. As a result its enemies eventually combined in their determination to recover their lands, and in 1410 the Poles and a diversity of allies outnumbered and destroyed the Teutonic army at Tannenberg.

  The Teutonic Order brought in German settlers and converted many indigenous pagans to Christianity in a major colonization process which was much more extensive than that conducted by the Castilian orders in Andalusia. It created a model of administrative efficiency and uniform bureaucracy, the Ordensstaat par excellence. While Prussia, with a population of perhaps 350,000, did not require money from its commanderies in Germany, its recruitment depended on a continual flow of brethren from Germany. The Prussian commanderies paid no regular dues comparable to the Hospital’s responsions and the German houses sent almost no money, but in Prussia itself the order received incomes from trade, from land rents and booty, and from levies on the brethren’s frequent changes of office; in the fifteenth century it also taxed its population. Incomes from different sources were allotted to specific funds, as with Montesa and the Castilian orders. Some knight-brethren paid their entry fee, were received into a house in Germany, and simply remained there; others were refused admission in Germany and travelled to Prussia or Livonia with their arms, three horses, and sixty florins. Those who went to Prussia, many of them from Franconia, seldom returned. Priests and serving-brethren were recruited largely among the German settlers in Prussia.

  There were perhaps 100 brethren at the centre of command at Marienburg and hundreds more in the commanderies; some houses had fewer than ten brethren but others had eighty or more. Chapters general became increasingly infrequent and there was no equivalent to the Hospital’s conventual seal, but the senior officials enjoyed wide administrative experience and they could, like the Hospitaller oligarchy, restrain their master. He was compelled to consult his senior officers and commanders; he could be threatened or deposed, and one master was murdered. Some senior officials resided at Marienburg where, for example, they controlled the treasury, but others had their own territorial seats, such as that of the marshal at Königsberg, and resided in them. The most numerous class of brethren, the knights, constituted a largely aristocratic military caste, but that served to alienate their German settler subjects, who could normally enter the order only as priests or serving-brethren and who lacked representation in their country’s government. The Teutonic Order had no real navy but its army was excellently armed, after about 1380 with cannon, and its fortresses were well constructed. After 1410, however, the need to hire expensive mercenaries provoked increasingly intolerable financial strains.

  Further north, the Teutonic brethren waged a quite di
stinct holy war in Livonia, where their order developed a quasi-independent regime which had some of the characteristics of a separate Ordensstaat with its own organization and policies. There was a separate Livonian master who was confirmed by the high master or Hochmeister in Prussia from two candidates chosen in Livonia; after 1438 the Livonian brethren effectively chose their own master. Livonia did not form a unitary state like Prussia, since three bishops controlled extensive territories and in Estonia the knightly class exercized a degree of secular government. The Livonian knight-brethren came especially from northern Germany and the Rhineland, with some priests and serving-brethren being recruited in Livonia. Conditions of service were more drastic than in Prussia, and attrition eastwards involved unending forest raids and devastations, truces, and shifting alliances. The element of exploitation was more pronounced in Livonia where there was little intermarriage between the German settler minority and the indigenous population. The Livonian brethren, scarcely touched by the disaster at Tannenberg in 1410 in which they played no part, retained a more explicit and aggressive anti-pagan role and repeatedly fought the schismatic Russians. However, as in Prussia, there were serious internal quarrels which centred especially on individual control of wealth. In 1471 the Livonian brethren deposed their master, Johann Wolthuss, who was accused of numerous corruptions, of preparing a war against the Russians contrary to all advice, and of personally annexing a number of commanderies and their wealth. The Russian wars continued; in 1501, for example, the Russians ravaged eastern Livonia but were defeated in the following year by the master Wolter von Plettenberg, who did much to stabilize the Livonian situation.

  Far away on Rhodes, the Hospitallers procured themselves a double function in the policing and protection of Latin shipping and in opposing first the Turkish emirs of the Anatolian coastlands opposite Rhodes and later the power of the rapidly expanding Ottoman regime to the north. The Teutonic and Iberian orders were essentially national, but the Hospital was a truly international organization able to survive attacks made upon it within single kingdoms. The Hospital’s struggle was much less concentrated than that of the Teutonic Order and its military action less continuous and intense, but it was not necessarily a weaker body. The fortunate formula of an island order-state permitted its survival for many centuries, while its constitution restricted a master who enjoyed extensive powers on Rhodes but whose authority within his order was quite effectively limited and moderated by his multinational conventual oligarchy of senior officers, by periodic chapters general, and by statutory limitations such as those governing the employment of his seals. Other arrangements, such as the institution of langues (tongues), or national groupings, and auberges, or residential houses for the langues, though they constituted a source of endless friction at one level, actually served to distribute offices and to regulate tensions between brethren of differing origins.

  Rhodes was comparatively small and its resources limited, but it could be fortified in stone and defended with minimum manpower; armed conflict was not perpetual while shipping and mercenaries were hired only when necessary. The number of Hospitaller brethren on Rhodes probably varied considerably between about 250 and 450; unlike Prussia, Rhodes needed not men, whose arrival was sometimes positively discouraged, but money, especially to pay for essential food imports. Some funds were generated through the development of the port and of the island economy; much of the rest came from the western priories, whose retention had to be justified by some display of holy warfare. The island order-state demanded the establishment of a naval tradition and the arrangement of the local economy and government in ways which would support defensive measures. The harbour brought shipping, pilgrims, pirates, trade, and taxes; the island was populated to produce foodstuffs and auxiliary forces; its forests furnished timber for shipbuilding; the inhabitants constructed and manned towers and castles or served as galley oarsmen. Rhodes had been acquired as the result of a capitulation made on agreed terms and the Greeks, perhaps 20,000 by 1522, were reasonably fed, protected, and represented, while as uniates who recognized the Roman pope they kept their Greek liturgy; on the whole the population felt reasonably well treated and was prepared to collaborate.

  In moving from Cyprus to Rhodes the Hospital turned its back on the old Jerusalem-oriented crusade, though it continued to give occasional assistance to the Christians of Cilician Armenia and it retained its sugar-rich Cypriot commandery. Its achievement after 1306 was to bottle up the naval aggression from the Turks of Menteshe and to push the centre of Turkish expansion northwards to Aydin and its naval base at Smyrna. The Hospital participated in Latin naval leagues against the great Umur of Aydin, notably in 1334. The order’s finances had by then been restored, yet proposals for crusading action in 1335 and 1336 were suppressed by Pope Benedict XII, probably to prevent the order removing its considerable credits from the pope’s own Florentine bankers; as a result, between 1343 and 1345 the Hospital lost the enormous sum of over 360,000 florins when the Bardi, Acciaiuoli, and Peruzzi went bankrupt. Thereafter the Anglo-French and other wars, the great plague which arrived in 1347, and general economic and demographic decline in the West drastically limited recruitment, resources, and military activity. The Hospitallers’ effectiveness depended on their efficiency and experience as much as on their resources. The one or two galleys which guarded Rhodes together with 50 or 100 brethren and their auxiliary troops could play an important role. The Hospital collaborated in the crusade which captured Smyrna in 1344 and in its defence thereafter; from 1374 until its loss in 1402 the Hospital held sole responsibility for Smyrna. Fifty Hospitallers fought against the Ottomans at Lampsakos in the Dardanelles in 1359, and Hospitaller forces served against other Turks on the Anatolian shores facing Cyprus between 1361 and 1367. Some 100 brethren with four galleys under their admiral, Ferlino d’Airasca, took part in the major crusade which sacked Alexandria in 1365. By 1373 the Hospital was virtually the sole military force available to the papacy for the defence of Byzantium. Yet a Byzantine proposal of 1374 for the Hospital to defend Thessalonica and another Byzantine city, probably Gallipoli, came to nought. The passagium inspired by Pope Gregory XI which sailed to Vonitza in Epiros in 1378 was pathetically small; it was crushed by the Christian Albanians of Arta who captured the master, Juan Fernández de Heredia, and held him to ransom.

  The next master, Philibert of Naillac, and a few other Hospitallers fought in the Nicopolis crusade of 1396 and were responsible for saving King Sigismund of Hungary after the defeat. There was apparently a party at Avignon and at Rhodes which from about 1356 onwards insistently sought a broader economic basis and more prestigious opportunities of opposing Ottoman advances by transferring the Hospital to southern Greece, almost as a Hospitaller equivalent of Teutonic Livonia. The order took a five-year lease on the Latin principality of Achaea in about 1377 but had to abandon it following the débâcle near Vonitza, yet between about 1383 and 1389 there were renewed attempts to establish the Hospital in the Peloponnese, and after the Nicopolis disaster the Hospitallers leased the Byzantine despotate in the eastern Peloponnese for several years, defending the isthmus at Corinth against Ottoman invasions of the peninsula. Though severely limited by the general western failure to resist the infidel Turks, the Hospital was an effective element in the defence of Christian Europe, whether acting independently or as part of a general crusade.

  The Papal Schism of 1378 split the Hospital into two obediences and thus increased opportunities for indiscipline and the non-payment of dues owed to Rhodes, where the French-dominated convent held firmly to the Avignon allegiance. The English crown supported the Roman pope but allowed English men and money to travel to Rhodes, which in 1398 was allegedly being supported by only nine out of twenty-one western priories. In 1410 a chapter general at Aix-en-Provence showed a remarkable solidarity within the order by ending its own schism some seven years before that in the papacy. Unfortunately, the financial pressures on rival popes forced them into a greater exploitation of profitabl
e provisions to benefices, and that deprived brethren of the prospect of promotion which supposedly rewarded the seniority they had acquired by service at Rhodes. When in 1413 it emerged that Pope John XXIII had sold the rich commandery of Cyprus to the 5-year-old son of King Janus, the conventual brethren threatened to leave Rhodes. The Papal Schism was ended in 1417 by the council held at Constance where the Hospitaller master acted as guardian of the conclave. This council witnessed the bitter debate in which the Teutonic Order claimed that the Lithuanians were not Christians and that the Poles were allied to them, while the Poles asserted that the brethren had failed even to convert the Prussians.