Damage to the papacy was also long-lasting. Popes had been the leaders and initiators of the crusade for Jerusalem, but now their reputation was gone. The papal residence at Avignon after 1309 was described as the Babylonish Captivity and there were long campaigns fought to bring order to Italy and a return to Rome. In the Great Schism (1378–1414) popes and antipopes were busy attacking and condemning one another and were distracted from crusading.
Crusade at Sea: The Naval Role of the Hospitallers
While the Templars underwent their long Passion, their sister Order secured a new role. An invitation to the Hospitallers from a landholder on the island of Rhodes to move there and help defend his interests against marauding Genoese corsairs secured the support of Clement V for its conquest, the nominal ruler being the Byzantine emperor. Relations between the West and Byzantium were poor and Clement authorised the Grand Master to make war, treating the Byzantines as schismatics and allowing him crusade subsidies. The Grand Master, Fulk of Villaret, nephew of the Grand Master who had collaborated with James of Molay, finally conquered Rhodes in 1309–10.
A rich, manageable territory with a deep-water port and old Byzantine fortifications, Rhodes had good agricultural land and ample food and water and lay 250 miles from Cyprus, within sight of the new, growing Muslim power in Anatolia. The Order adapted to a maritime function, harassing Muslim shipping and raiding the Anatolian coastline, combining naval warfare with their traditional land fighting. An indigenous population worked the land and valued the Order’s success in bringing peace and treating the sick in their hospital. Knights, sergeants, mercenaries and slaves, together with the indigenous population forming a militia in emergencies, created a fighting garrison of some 7,500, strong enough to withstand a siege. Under the Hospitallers Rhodes distinguished itself as it fought off the fleet and army of the Ottoman sultan Mehmet the Conqueror, victor over Constantinople in 1453, when he attempted to end the Knights’ raids and assaulted the island for eighty-nine days in 1480. Grievously outnumbered and subject to the monster cannon of the time, a last stand by the Grand Master, Peter d’Aubusson, on a walkway of the fortification called the Tower of Italy as it was on the verge of being taken, turned the battle. An early printed book with engravings by one of the Knights, Pierre Caoursin, recorded events of the siege and its aftermath, increasing the prestige of the order and boosting recruitment.
Crusade and Jerusalem
Philip the Fair’s dramatic confrontations had been a kind of thunderclap warning to his world of a new situation. French popes, English kings, the Hundred Years War between France and England and other national conflicts put up near-impregnable barriers to the Jerusalem crusade; significantly, it was Edward III, the first of the English kings not to take the cross, who invented the chivalric ritual of the Knights of the Garter, overshadowing the traditional rites of crusading. The costs of war had grown and sucked in money which would otherwise have been donated to the needs of crusading. Major changes in feudal service, which increased the use of mercenaries, and new methods of waging war, which required time and investment, all worked against the continuance of crusading in the style of the past. It was not that all hope of Jerusalem had been put aside. When wars went well, victors were inclined to dream of Jerusalem’s recovery, but practical difficulties always took precedence. The dream died, but only slowly.
For Mamluks who flourished on bribes and arbitrary fines, the pilgrim trade was a rich source of revenue and a reliable one as no one expected disruption from a Jerusalem crusade. Aristocratic pilgrims and some better-off bourgeois undertook the journey, while poor pilgrims were priced out. There was a change of attitudes. In Jerusalem the Franciscans occupied the Cenacle, the supposed site of the Last Supper on the Mount of Olives, and were allowed a role in escorting pilgrims but the pilgrims themselves no longer wished to be buried in the city.
The Franciscans maintained simplicity in worship, whereas previously the clergy in the Crusader States had provided pilgrims with a liturgy of the highest quality so as to leave them with a memorable experience. The friars were aware they lived on sufferance, at the whim of the Mamluks, who granted them rights at the basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem and at the tomb of Mary but expected them to share these with members of the Eastern Churches. The keys to the sites remained in Mamluk hands. Under the Ottoman Turks the Franciscans were forced to leave their friary in 1551 but found another site near to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and continued their long service to pilgrims.
Spanish Military Orders and Reconquista
The Hospitallers and Templars were so respected in the Iberian peninsula that two indigenous orders were founded along the same lines: that of Santiago in 1175 and that of Calatrava, approved by the pope in 1187. These had an advantage over military orders devoted to the Holy Land because of the shorter lines of communication during campaigns.
Two kings transformed the whole Christian future in Spain by breaking with the old traditions of raid, counter-raid and the levying of tribute. They were steeled by adversity, St Ferdinand III of Castile by his struggle till 1130 with the formerly independent kingdom of Leon and James I of Aragon by the conflicts he had to face between landlocked Aragon and the maritime ambitions of Catalonia. Ferdinand campaigned long and hard in harsh climatic conditions aided by dissensions among Muslims and tensions between successive Berber enthusiasts and settled mudéjars, winning Cordoba and finally the richest prize, Seville. His archbishop, Rodrigo, was by his side to reassure him that the lands he was seizing could rightly be taken, for they had been Christian under the Visigoths. His history is much less well known than that of St Louis, who conquered no Muslim territory, but he was very like the French king in his austere devotion to the crusading cause. The sexual athlete James of Aragon was no saint, but he displayed a restraint especially unusual in the anarchic story of Iberian kings by handing over Valencia to St Ferdinand after he had conquered it and treating the conquered people of the Balearics, where there were substantial minorities of Jews and Muslims, with restraint and tolerance.
It was the context in which the Catalan Ramon Llull (1232–1315) began his career. A former troubadour in the court of James I, he had a vision and became a missionary to Islam. Studying Latin and philosophy in Paris and Montpellier, learning Arabic and reading the Quran, whose magnificent Arabic he admired, he followed the Franciscan ideal of poverty, believing in persuasion of Muslims and Jews to Christianity by exploring common ground. He devised a system of pictures and symbols based on the natural order of the universe to attract and persuade Muslims who did not accept and could not read the Gospels. The paintings associated with him – the system of persuasion central to his life’s work – still move the observer. And yet, dedicated persuader as he was and tireless advocate for the learning of Arabic for mission, Llull could never emancipate himself from the use of force. Muslims should be compelled, he came to believe, to listen to the truth being preached, just as a child is compelled to listen to its lessons.
It was a view which corresponded to the decisions made by the canonist Pope Innocent IV in 1245, who accepted the universal doctrine that faith can never be imposed by force but also decreed that, since Christ as God had power over all men because of Creation, so the pope as His representative had responsibility for both Christians and non-Christians. He could thus require non-Christian rulers to admit missionaries to preach the Gospel and, in the case of refusal, call on Christian rulers to force them to do so. This looked like Christianity imposed by force and Innocent’s judgement was used by the conquistadors to coerce submission in the New World. A friar would be used to preach Christianity to the South American Indians in a language they did not understand. As they remained blank or, more likely, ran away, the ground was established for saying that they had refused missionaries the right to preach, and thus they and their rulers could be subjected to conquest. In this way Mexicans and Peruvians were exposed to tyranny and expropriation by Cortes and his fellows. Popes allocated spheres of i
nfluence between the Portuguese and the Spanish in lands occupied by enemies of the faith, providing these rivals with what was in effect a monopoly of trade. Montezuma defended his own beliefs, and it brought about his end.
Governments in Europe were solely interested in smooth transactions bringing rewards to them without dissidence from aristocrats. Europeans went to the New World, risking the hazards of the Atlantic to get rich quickly. Cortes and his fellows came from seaports attracting a mass of immigrants and in a maelstrom of bacteria acquired an unusual resistance to infection that their victims in the New World did not have. The indigenous population perished from disease in great numbers. Bartolomé de las Casas saw for himself what was going on, became a friar and, with others, devoted himself to denouncing what was happening – but without effect. It was a stain on Catholicism in the sixteenth century, the poisonous legacy of Innocent IV endeavouring to wrestle with relationships between the Church and alien peoples.
The Rise of the Ottoman Turks
The Ottoman Turks transformed the Muslim world. The early steps of their leaders in pursuit of power were so quiet and unobtrusive that they deceived both the ruling Mamluks and the West. Osman (1299–1326), the founder of the dynasty, an obscure border lord of the north-western corner of Anatolia, profited, as other emirs did, from the breakdown of the Seljuq sultanate. His son Orkhan, leader from 1326 to 1362, using the ghazi tradition of resistance to Byzantium and gathering adventurers around him, made remarkable and rapid advances, taking Busra across the Sea of Marmara from Constantinople in 1326, Nicaea in 1331 and Nicomedia in 1337; as early as 1333 the emperor of Byzantium was paying him an annual tribute. The Ottomans took Gallipoli in 1354, were pushed out but regained it. Thus early on, the Ottomans made a place for themselves both in the former Byzantine heartland of Anatolia and in Europe and so began the isolation of Constantinople. While the traditions of jihad and nomadism lay at the heart of their enterprise, the Ottomans’ skill lay in moving from nomadism to pasturage, avoiding the temptation of going back to the steppe lands to make conquests and never forgetting the need to sustain military success as outsiders who had nothing but their arms to recommend them, having no title to consideration as descendants of Muhammad.
A further step in the consolidation of the Ottoman territories took place in about 1369, when Sultan Murad I (1362–89) established a working capital at Adrianople (Edirne), a key nodal point for travel and commerce. The town had succumbed easily after a well-placed massacre at nearby Chorlu led its occupants to choose surrender rather than suffer a similar fate. As rulers the Ottomans had real qualities but never shrank from ferocious action when crossed.
There were two reasons for the rapid advance of a distinctively Ottoman form of the slave-soldier, recruited from Christian boys within Ottoman lands who were removed from their parents at an early age, were converted to Islam and trained for military and state service. Called Janissaries (the ‘new troop’), they carried all the advantages of Baybars’s Mamluks and formed the cornerstone of the emerging Ottoman state. An infantry force, they had what initially no one else had – muzzle-loading muskets, powder and shot. Cavalry back-up was provided by spahis, feudal nobility who occupied a secondary role behind the Janissaries. The infantry’s celibate life revolved round the Ottoman dynasty and they were rewarded according to their talent and success in performing the tasks set them. At the end of their service they were allowed to marry and were settled on the fringes of the empire, never at the centre where they could have caused trouble.
The second factor facilitating rapid expansion and success in retaining territory lay in the confusion which prevailed in the territories of the former Byzantine Empire. A shaky Latin Empire owing allegiance to the pope had been set up on the ruins of Byzantium as a result of the blunders of the Western troops and their leaders in the Fourth Crusade in 1203–4 and commanded no loyalty. It succumbed to an old Byzantine aristocratic dynasty, the Palaeologi, who took over the shattered city of Constantinople in 1261, expelling the Latins and promptly fell into the classic error of the emperors of the past, wasting money on elaborate ceremonial and neglecting their long-suffering peasantry. The papacy would do nothing to help the Byzantines because they insisted on emperors accepting their authority and their doctrine of the Procession of the Holy Spirit, before any military action was undertaken. In turn, the mass of people in Constantinople and the recovered Byzantine territories, the rulers and the Greek Orthodox hierarchy rejected any attempts at compromise made by emperors and aristocrats with the Catholics over papal authority and Trinitarian doctrine, remembering with bitterness the devastation inflicted on their city by the Fourth Crusade. Their intransigence was reinforced by a Byzantine mystical movement, Hesychasm, which led its adherents to accept passively their suffering as the will of God.
The empire remained weak; Western crusaders did not come to help the emperors; adventurers tried their luck. Statelets formed: a Villehardouin dynasty, Catalan merchants, Venetians, volatile and transient. In short, no force came into existence capable of standing up to the Ottomans in the whole area of the Aegean, the Balkans or the eastern Mediterranean. On the mainland in the Balkans the same weaknesses appeared. Bulgaria was passionate about escaping from the yoke of the Byzantines, remembering with tears the oppression of the Emperor Basil II the Bulgar-slayer in the eleventh century; trying to be independent, it was crushed. Belgrade, under a Hungarian garrison and galvanised under St John Capistrano, beat the Ottomans off in 1456, but it was the exception. Serbia struck out for its independence but, although it succeeded for a time, it was crushed at the battle of Kosovo in 1389.
Bayezid I (1389–1403) was the son of an Ottoman sultan and a Byzantine princess; a ferocious fighter, nicknamed ‘The Thunderbolt’, he overcame rival emirs in Anatolia. The defeat of a coalition of cavalrymen from the West – mainly Burgundian, some French, some Teutonic Knights – recognised as crusaders by both the rival popes of the Great Schism, who travelled overland to aid Sigismund, King of Hungary, and were shattered at Nicopolis by the Danube in 1396, encouraged a great blossoming of ambition in Bayezid. The cavalrymen failed through their own impetuosity and their unwillingness to listen to advice from the Hungarians who were much more experienced in Ottoman warfare than they were. Charging full-tilt against the Ottomans, they were lured into an ambush, enveloped by Ottoman horsemen and cut down by their cavalry and Janissaries. Few survived. Nicopolis encouraged Bayezid to seek recognition as Sultan of Rum – that is, Rome – from the caliph at Cairo. This had great significance, because East Rome was an ancient title for the Christian Byzantine Empire and implied a new target for Ottoman conquest.
All plans of Bayezid, however, were wrecked by a shattering defeat at Ankara in 1402 at the hands of Tamerlane, the Tamburlaine of Christopher Marlowe’s play, a Central Asian chieftain of Turkic descent with all the ferocity of Genghiz Khan. The Mamluks were ready to surrender Jerusalem, recognising a power greater than their own, but Tamerlane preferred to attack the Ottomans. Bayezid despaired and died not long after Ankara. Tamerlane’s empire broke in pieces after his death and for a decade Bayezid’s sons battled for the inheritance. It was one moment when a major Western intervention might have checked the rise of the Ottomans. It never happened. Popes were still the natural authority to summon into action residual anti-Muslim crusading impulses in the West, belatedly understanding what a menace the Ottomans were. But although recovered from the conflicts of the Great Schism, the papacy was preoccupied by political crusading, as a series of expeditions with the crusading indulgence were dispatched in 1421–31 to destroy the Hussites in Bohemia. They were contests widely seen as battles between Germans and Slavs over land and power. Byzantine emperors in the meantime were reduced to begging in vain for help in Western capitals.
Ottoman revival came from Murad II (1421–51) who, both as patron and as poet, celebrated Turkish history and myths and encouraged a new consciousness of the Ottoman past. He met and defeated a crusading army summoned by Po
pe Eugenius III, an advocate of reunion between the Greek Orthodox and Catholic Churches, which combined Serbian and Hungarian forces under the heroic leadership of John Hunyadi of Transylvania acting in unison with the young king of Hungary, Ladislas. Venetian ships were to join with these land forces for an amphibious attack on the Ottomans at the Black Sea port of Varna in 1444 but the Venetians were unwilling to risk their ships and Murad split the Serbians from the Hungarians by offering peace proposals which the Serbians accepted and the Hungarians declined. The Hungarians were left alone to face Murad’s troops; they fought all day and inflicted heavy casualties but had to withdraw.
In the Balkans, appeals for Christian unity often went awry when Ottoman rule was not seen as manifestly worse than that of Christian leaders making harsh demands on their peasantry. No doubt Murad would have wished to crown his sultanate by capturing Constantinople; he tried but failed. Finally, an ageing man, he abdicated, giving place to his son Mehmed II.
The Capture of Constantinople, 1453
In 1453 Mehmed II, the Conqueror (1444–6 and 1451–81), had at his disposal the power of the Janissaries and the wealth gained through rigid financial control and a competent taxation system. Constantinople’s massive walls were still an obstacle and Mehmed sacrificed thousands of Janissaries in the assault, risking a backlash elsewhere because he had committed so much of his resources in men and materials to one objective, paying many specialist miners and obtaining at a massive fee a monster cannon which projected missiles of an unprecedented size. This cannon had been offered to the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI (1449–53), but he had not been able to afford it. Mehmed took an internal risk too, as he had been deposed, probably at the wish of a grand vizier who thought an attack on Constantinople too dangerous; for a time his father ruled in his place, but Mehmed made a comeback and, before long, eliminated the grand vizier.
God's Armies Page 26