The History of the Renaissance World: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  Two years after the signing of the Golden Bull, the Teutonic Knights—assuming, perhaps, that the Hungarian king had lost so much support that he was vulnerable—made a play to turn their Transylvanian territories into an independent state. They sent a petition to Honorius III, asking that they be put directly under the authority of Rome, answerable only to the pope—a request that would have exempted them from obedience to earthly kings.

  Honorius happily granted the request, but the petition was a clear attempt to abscond with the granted Hungarian land and create an independent state. King Andrew was indignant. The Teutonic Knights, says one of his court chroniclers, had become “to the king like a fire in the breast, a mouse in the wallet and a viper in the bosom, which repay their hosts badly.” He assembled an army, marched into Transylvania, and drove the Teutonic Knights out.5

  Deprived of their Hungarian roosting place, the Teutonic Knights were at loose ends. But their venture had confirmed a new purpose for the order: domestic crusade, fighting against pagans and infidels at home. Their renewed calling came at the right time. Honorius III, following in the footsteps of Innocent III, was proving to be more willing than any pope before him to recognize wars against non-Muslims as worthy of the designation (and rewards attached to) crusade.

  North of the Hungarian border, west of the Rus’, lived a people who had as yet played almost no part in the larger power struggles of the surrounding nations. The Polans were a Western Slavic tribe who had, for two centuries, occupied the river-crossed lands between the Carpathian Mountains and the Baltic Sea. Their existence had first been chronicled in the anonymous Gesta Principum Polonorum, written around 1115; they were, says the Gesta, ruled by a dynasty called the Piast, who had converted to Christianity sometime in the tenth century. In 992, the Piast prince Boleslaw had crowned himself the first king of the Polans, but the title brought no unity. Cousins of the Piast fought with each other for the crown, and local tribal leaders resisted the victors. By the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Polans were divided into a series of dukedoms, discrete but fairly prosperous and orderly: Little Poland, Mazovia, Kujawy, Greater Poland, Silesia.6

  The Polans duke Konrad of Mazovia, in the north, hoped to conquer the lands directly above him. These lands were occupied by another tribal people, known (from the language they spoke) as Lithuanians; and the Lithuanian-speakers themselves were divided into three groups, each of which spoke a different Lithuanian dialect. Farthest to the north were the Letts, bordered by the Rus’ on the east and just below the cold Baltic Sea. In the basin of the Vistula river lived a second group of Lithuanian-speakers, known, generally, as Prussians. Between them lay a larger group who simply claimed the name Lithuanian.7

  To European eyes, all of the Lithunians dwelt at the very edge of civilization. According to Oliver of Paderborn, they “venerated the waters, trees, hills and caves . . . and worshipped all kinds of mythological creatures.” “They burned their dead, along with the horses and weapons and magnificent clothes,” offers the anonymous thirteenth-century chronicle Descriptiones Terrarum, “for they believed that they can use these and other burned items in the world to come.” These were markers of wild paganism, and Honorius III had already sent missionary bishops into Lithuanian lands to convert the tribes. The efforts had not yielded much success: the “evil, sinful wickedness” of the Prussians, writes the German historian Nicolaus von Jeroschin, “had made them so stubborn that no teaching or exhortation or blessing could move them from their error.”8

  There was one good thing about the Prussians, Nicolaus von Jeroschin adds as an afterthought: they “lived at peace with the Christians who had settled alongside them.” This was soon to end.

  The Polans, just a little ahead of the Lithuanian tribes in the evolution of their state, saw them as fair game. Konrad of Mazovia offered the Teutonic Knights another opportunity to crusade: they could come into his dukedom and fight against the enemies of Christ who lived around the Vistula. In exchange, he promised them a northern tract of land in his dukedom for their own “in perpetuity . . . and in addition the lands which they might conquer thereafter with the help of God.”9

  For a relatively small payout, Konrad thus got a heavily armed, zealous, and experienced border guard. The Teutonic Knights gained a base of operations and the chance to conquer a kingdom, plus all the benefits of holy war: In 1226, Honorius III declared the fight against Lithuanian-speakers to be a new crusade, complete with full absolution of sin for those who took part.

  40.1 The Baltic Crusade

  The Teutonic Knights took some time to organize and assemble themselves, but in 1233 the first invasion of Prussia, across the Vistula river, began. It was the beginning of a war that would last for decades. What began as the “Baltic Crusade” turned into an ugly, bloody, protracted struggle in which (as the historian Kenneth Setton puts it), “primitive tribes with no common political organization were obliged hopelessly to protect their lives, farms, tribal independence, and religion against the superior might of the west.” Before long, the fighting forked into a double war, one against the pagan Lithuanians, the other against nearby Christians who hoped to seize some of the land east of the Baltic for themselves.10

  “It was completely joyless and full of hard fighting,” writes Nicolaus von Jeroschin of the new Crusade, “. . . a land of horrors and wilderness . . . [where] the knightly sword of Christianity greedily devoured the sinners’ flesh.” For the next fifty years, the Teutonic Knights would lay waste to the lands of the Lithuanians—fighting, perhaps, for Christ, but hoping to gain themselves a kingdom.11

  Chapter Forty-One

  Lakeshores, Highlands, and Hilltops

  In Africa, between 1221 and 1290,

  a descendant of Solomon overthrows a descendant of Moses,

  a Muslim king extends his reach,

  and the kings of Mapungubwe move to the hilltops

  IN 1221, the greatest church builder in Africa died.

  Eight hundred years before, an eastern African king named Ezana had been converted to Christianity by the Roman emperor Constantine himself.* His kingdom, Axum, had remained a Christian realm until its disintegration, sometime in the middle of the tenth century. The fall of the capital city left the ghost of the empire behind: a network of monasteries and nunneries, a scattering of conquered and converted peoples who went on living, in peaceful obscurity, between the highland headwaters of the Nile river and the shores of the Red Sea.1

  Sometime in the middle of the twelfth century, a local chief named Marara had managed to reclaim the title of king once held by those long-ago Christian rulers. He lived on the southern edge of the old Axumite land; his people, the Agau, had been forced to submit by the Axumites nearly nine hundred years before. But he claimed to be the rightful successor to the Axumite throne. He took the small southward town of Adafa as his capital, the descendants of the bygone Axumites as his subjects. His dynasty, the Zagwe (“of Agau”), left almost no records behind; no chronicles, no inscriptions, not even any minted coins.2

  But they did leave churches, carved from single massive chunks of rock.

  Marara’s great-nephew, Gebra Maskal Lalibela, was by far the most accomplished of all the Zagwe church builders. He was, by his own claim, a descendant of Moses and his Ethiopian wife.† Ancestry from a patriarch revered by Christian scripture was an efficient way to bolster his claims to be in the Axumite royal line, as was the elaborate coronation ceremony built around the Zagwe kings, observed by the Arab traveler Abu Salih. The king was crowned by a priest, beneath the portrait of the angel Michael in the church that bore the angel’s name; tonsured to represent his spiritual calling, he was clothed in priestly clothes rather than a crown.3

  In the first quarter of the thirteenth century. Lalibela built nearly a dozen churches, carved out of the red volcanic rock. A narrow rocky river cut through his capital city; this river, channeled into deeper hand-cut narrows, was renamed Yordanos, the Jordan. The steep rock faces on both sides
of the Yordanos were whittled away into huge standing outcrops, enormous lumps of stone on the banks; and then those blocks were chiseled, hollowed, and shaped, by skilled masons of the king, into churches with domes, pillars, and arches. The Mount of Olives church stood to the north, the Mount of Transfiguration to the south. A new holy landscape, the distant and inaccessible Israel of the Gospels, had been carved into African ground.4

  There is not much more that we know about the Zagwe; only that, in 1270, a highland dweller named Yekuno Amiak married the daughter of the last Zagwe king and then usurped his father-in-law’s throne. He too had no real right to claim the Axumite mantle—he came from yet a third people, the Amhara—but he also claimed to be descended from a patriarch. In his case, the distinguished ancestor was King Solomon; a continually elaborated legend held that the queen of the western Arabic kingdom Sabea, who had visited Solomon to see his splendor, had returned from her journey pregnant; her son Menelik had then stolen the Ark of the Covenant from Solomon himself and carried it into Africa. This made Yekuno Amiak both the son of kings and the guardian of the (as yet unseen) Ark, a worthy successor to the Axumite throne.5

  It also garnered him the support of the monasteries and nunneries. With their recognition of his right to rule, Amiak moved the capital to Shewa. From that city, his descendants, the Solomonid dynasty, would rule for two and a half centuries.

  IN THE CENTER of the continent, the kingdom of Kanem was at its zenith.

  Dunama, the first royal convert to Islam, had not managed to bring all of his people into the fold behind him. But his descendant and namesake Dunama Dibalemi, ruling from sometime in the early 1220s and staying in power until 1259, took more direct action. He first requested, and then ordered, his people to abandon their traditional practices and follow the ways of Islam; and then, to make his point, he destroyed Kanem’s most precious religious object.6

  “In the possession of the Saifawa [dynasty],” an Arab account tells us, “there was a certain thing wrapped up and hidden away, whereon depended their victory in war. It was called Mune and no one dared to open it. Then the sultan Dunama . . . wished to break it open. His people warned him, but he refused to listen to them. He opened it, and whatever was inside flew away.”7

  41.1 Zagwe, Kanem, and Mapungubwe

  The exact nature of the mune is never made clear, but this was part of its power. The sacred object required obscurity for its power. Veiled, it was potent. Unveiled, trivial. Dibalemi ripped away its secrecy.

  He had no need for talismans to give him victory in war. Dibalemi was good at war. He spent the early years of his reign building up his cavalry units, until he could put forty thousand mounted soldiers on the field at one time. He established a sizable arsenal on the northern shore of Lake Chad; from there, says the Arab geographer Ibn Sa’id, he often launched a fleet to make sea raids “on the lands of the pagans, on the shores of this lake . . . [he] attacks their ships and kills and takes prisoners.”8

  During his thirty years on the throne, Dibalemi used his ships and cavalry to stretch his reach across the entire basin of Lake Chad. This gave him control of the southern part of the Eastern Trade Route, and a guaranteed path to trade in the north.

  It also limited, somewhat, his enthusiasm for the spread of Islam. His refusal to abide by the secret of the mune speaks to his deep conviction of the truth of Islam. He lived by the pillars of Islam; he went on hajj not once but twice; he gave alms to the poor; he was known, says Ibn Sa’id, “for his religious warfare and charitable acts.”9

  But like his predecessors, he used captive non-Muslim slaves as his primary currency, trading them north for horses and goods in short supply in central Africa. And so the lands south of Lake Chad remained non-Islamic, profitable hunting grounds for slaves that did not fall under Islamic prohibition.10

  The quick and massive assimilation of nearby tribes and kinglets did not make Kanem a peaceful empire. By the end of his reign, Dibalemi was facing a serious undercurrent of rebellion. Some accounts chalk the unrest up to the clan of the Bulala, African traditionalists who resisted Islam and were aghast by Dibalemi’s desecration of the mune. Others suggest that, as the empire expanded, Dibalemi placed his sons as lieutenant governors in the outer reaches and then was forced to deal with their growing independence: “The sons of the ruler,” the Kanem king list remarks, tersely, “became separated in different regions.”11

  Whatever the cause, Dibalemi died with his empire still intact, firmly Muslim, heavily armed, the strongest kingdom in central Africa; but with seeds of unrest just beginning to sprout.

  SOUTH OF BOTH Kanem and Kagwe, on the Limpopo river, lay a kingdom that was neither Christian nor Muslim. Lacking the tradition of written chronicles that Islamic scholars and Christian monks carried with them, the kingdom of Mapungubwe left no king lists behind: just gold and ivory, glass beads and Chinese celadon, marks of an impressive trade network that stretched far to the east.

  Mapungubwe had originally been no more than a band of traveling farmers, searching for fertile fields, who had come into the Limpopo river valley some two centuries earlier. Their settlement had grown to several thousand, their farms into multifield operations of millet, beans, pumpkins and melons, sheepfolds and cattle herds. They had begun to hunt elephants and to trade ivory down the Limpopo to Arab traders on the coast. Between the fertile fields and the ivory trade, they grew increasingly wealthy.12

  Apparently the wealth was also unevenly distributed. Around 1220, a new complex suddenly appeared on the top of a nearby hill: a steep-sided, flat-topped hill with only four easily guarded paths to the top. A new palace and new spacious homes now stood on top of the hill; thirty years or so after, massive stone walls rose to enclose them. The smaller huts of nearly five thousand people now clustered around the the hill’s base.13

  This was not for security. There is no sign of war or attack at Mapungubwe; and the government officials, the judges and tax collectors, apparently lived at the bottom of the hill. So did the cattle, goats, and sheep that fed the royal court. Prospering beyond his wildest expectations, the king seems to have removed himself from the hoi polloi, leaving them physically behind.

  The strict segregation of rich from poor, royal from commoner, was a new thing in Africa. But Mapungubwe seems to have flourished for a time in its drastically two-level form. Traces of Mapungubwe settlement stretch over nearly twelve thousand square miles and are scattered with the remnants of trade with Egypt, with China, with India. At the top of the hill, royal graves were filled with gold beads, royal corpses dressed in rich robes and gold bangles and buried sitting straight up. A carved staircase replaced one of the paths, walled and corniced and intended for the king and his court alone.14

  And then the Limpopo became unreliable. It dried to a thread, and then savagely flooded. The temperature dropped; rainfall dwindled. The people at the bottom of the hill began to trickle away. A good many of Mapungubwe’s residents seem to have moved northeast, to the city of Great Zimbabwe; in the next century, the trade routes too would shift to Zimbabwe.15

  Without the commoners below, the king lost his tribute bringers, his taxpayers, his farmers, his place of pride. By 1290, he too had vanished, leaving his palace abandoned on the top of the hill.

  * * *

  *See Bauer, History of the Medieval World, pp. 193ff.

  †Numbers 12:1.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  The Sixth Crusade

  Between 1223 and 1229,

  Frederick II recaptures Jerusalem with no bloodshed

  and has pig intestines hurled at him in thanks

  NEITHER ANDREW OF HUNGARY nor the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick had been present for the surrender of Damietta in 1221; Andrew, because he had gone home from the Fifth Crusade early; Frederick, because he had never arrived.

  Promising again and again to descend on the Crusade in glory, complete with German reinforcements, Frederick II had always found a reason not to leave Germany. Now the Fifth Crusade was
over; but Frederick had vowed that he would go on crusade, and the sacred promise still had to be fulfilled. In 1223, he assured Honorius III that he would be ready to go by 1225. In 1225, he postponed the planned trip east another two years.1

  Frederick was newly married to his second wife Yolande, but the delay wasn’t due to wedded bliss. He was thirty-one, Yolande was fourteen, and the wedding had been celebrated by proxy. She was the daughter of King John of Jerusalem (whose kingdom, ruled from Acre, no longer actually included Jerusalem) and the rightful heir to the crown; John, although claiming the title of king, was merely her regent. And John hadn’t even been in Acre for the last two years. He had been traveling through France, England, Spain, and Germany, trying to whip up some crusading fervor that might help him get Jerusalem back.*

  John had agreed to the marriage in hopes that his new son-in-law would provide him with an army. Instead, Frederick added the title “King of Jerusalem” to his own string of honorifics. Yolande’s husband, he argued, was more entitled to the regency than her father.

  John was furious but impotent; he was in Italy, without an army, and Frederick had the support of Honorius III, who hoped that the title might finally propel Frederick across the Mediterranean. In this, he was disappointed. Honorius died in March of 1227; and Frederick did not make his first stab at crusading until August of that year. “He went to the Mediterranean Sea,” Roger of Wendover says, “and embarked with a small retinue; but after pretending to make for the Holy Land for three days, he said that he was seized with a sudden illness, . . . therefore he altered his course, and after three days’ sail landed at the port where he had embarked.”2