The siege went on for over a month, in summer heat; inside the city, the Jin ate their horses, then grass, then boiled their saddles and the skins covering the military drums to make soup. Soon, they ate the dead. Weakened by hunger and then by plague, the defenses finally collapsed. As Subotai’s men poured into the city, Aizong killed himself.7
Subotai did not immediately turn on the Southern Song. He had been summoned north by Ogodei to take charge of the next offensive: three thousand miles in the opposite direction, all the way over on the western side of the Mongol territory.
These were the lands awarded to Batu and Orda, the two sons of dead Jochi. Orda, the oldest, had been given already-conquered territory on the lower Syr Darya river, south of the Aral Sea. Batu’s portion had been the lands across the Volga river, beyond the Caspian Sea: an inheritance that had not yet been conquered by the Mongols, and was not yet theirs to give. Now the Great Khan intended to help his nephew lay hold of his promised lands.8
Subotai, now in his midfifties, had been serving the khans since the age of seventeen. He had fought in the west already, helping Jochi to shatter the Kievan forces at the Kalka in 1223. He had absorbed the lessons of western warfare and practiced them in the east. Now, heading back towards Europe, he was at the apogee of his profession. Batu, nominally the leader of the campaign, was a straw boss; the European campaign had Subotai’s fingerprints all over it. Unrelenting sieges, crafty maneuvering of light and highly mobile troops, calculated ferocity intended to terrify the next foe into surrendering: the patterns practiced in Goryeo and the Jin empire were repeated again and again, stamping Subotai’s mark into European land.
Late in 1237, Subotai and Batu crossed the Volga; the Mongols were accustomed to fighting in the bitter cold, and the frozen countryside posed no challenge to them. A breakaway strike force, commanded by the veteran general Chormaghan, veered to the south and crossed the Caucasus range into Georgia. Already battered by the Mongols in 1219, Georgia now lost its capital city, Tbilisi, and most of its eastern reaches; the Georgian nobles were pressed into the Mongol ranks.9
Meanwhile, Subotai and Batu had terrified the first Rus’ city in their path. They captured Riazan’ on December 21, just before the Christmas Mass. “They burned it all,” says the contemporary Voskresensk Chronicle, “and killed its prince and his princess, and seized the men, women, and children, and monks, nuns, and priests; some they struck down with swords, while others they shot with arrows and flung into the flames.” Moscow fell, as did Kiev after a ten-week siege; so many panicked Kievans crowded into the Church of the Tithe, hoping for safety, that the second floor gave way and the church collapsed inward. Six years later, a traveler passing through Kiev made note of the skulls and bones still piled on the deserted streets.10
45.2 Mongol Conquests in the West
By 1240, all of the Rus’ principalities except for Novgorod, the most distant, were under Batu’s rule; his nonexistent inheritance had finally been fleshed out with captives. Subotai, after resting his army, pressed on in the spring of 1241: across the Carpathian Mountains, into Hungary.
To most Europeans, the Rus’ were still a distant and mysterious people, but Hungary was their doorstep. Fifty thousand Mongol warriors now swarmed down on it from the mountains, while another twenty thousand marched sideways into the lands of the Polans to block reinforcements. The Duke of Greater Poland, Henry the Pious, did his best to drive them back; but his own personal retinue of trained soldiers was small, and although the Teutonic Knights joined him, the Christian army was badly outnumbered. When they met the Mongols on April 9, near the town of Liegnitz, Henry’s knights were slaughtered, along with the farmers and metalworkers Henry had drafted to fill the ranks. Henry fell with them. When the survivors finally began to clear the field, Henry’s stripped and headless body was recognized by his wife only because he had six toes on his left foot.11
Two days later, four hundred miles to the south, Subotai and the rest of the Mongols came face-to-face with the Hungarian army at the Sajo river. In the lead rode Béla IV, son of Andrew of Hungary, king since his father’s death six years earlier. The Hungarians were heavily armored, ready to fight, well supplied by the nearby towns of Buda and Pest, on either side of the Danube. Subotai backed his own men slowly away; and then, when the Hungarians advanced, encircled them.12
The Hungarians were probably doomed even before Subotai’s feint. In front of the Mongol advance, refugees had fled across the Carpathians into Hungary, and Béla IV had welcomed them. His noblemen had not been as pleased by the influx of foreigners. Summoned by their king, the Hungarian nobility showed up to fight, but the monk Rogerius of Apulia, who survived by hiding in a nearby swamp, noted afterwards that they “were discontented, and . . . lacked the needed will and enthusiasm. They even hoped that the king would lose the battle, making them even more important.”13
The Mongols had plenty of enthusiasm. They fought viciously, hurling boulders at the Hungarian crossbowmen with catapults, tossing Chinese firecrackers and minibombs of flaming tar into the midst of the knights. Sixty thousand Hungarian soldiers fell on the field; in an echo of Kiev, a passerby several years later describes “fields white with bleaching bones.” Béla IV escaped from the field, but Subotai sent an assassin after him: Kadan, a younger son of Ogodei himself. Kadan had helped lead the charge against Henry of Poland, and after the victory had ridden hard south to be present at the second battle.14
He pursued Béla IV through the dukedom of Austria and back around into Croatia, but gave up when Béla crossed into the Adriatic and took refuge on a small rocky island; the Mongols generally did not like to cross oceans, even when their prey was in sight. Instead, Kadan went back to his general.
Subotai had just dispatched a scouting party to go even farther westward: to the borders of Frederick’s Holy Roman Empire itself. They got within sight of Vienna, on the edge of the empire. Rumors of the quick-moving invaders spread, terrifying all who heard. A Hungarian priest announced that the Mongols were, in fact, the Antichrist. “Tribulation long foreknown and foretold has come upon us . . . with a ferocity already described by the testimony of the Holy Scriptures,” wrote a Polish Franciscan to his brethren. “They are the sword of the Lord’s anger for the sins of the Christian people,” mourned the Count Palatine of Saxony, in a letter to a fellow duke.15
It seemed that the end of days had come. And then, as quickly as the sky had clouded over, the storm blew away.
Even as Subotai’s scouts were gazing at Vienna’s distant spires, Ogodei Khan was dying. Before the great Mongol general could organize an attack on the Holy Roman Empire, he received the news that his old friend and master was dead. At once, he collected his troops and headed home.
Batu remained in the west, governing his conquered lands from Sarai, his new capital city on the lower Volga; his kingdom became known as the Golden Horde. But back in the Mongol heartland, a family feud had broken out over the succession to the title of Great Khan. Subotai intended to be there for the election of the next Mongol overlord.16
He never came west again. In Karakorum, he found the Mongol clans divided in support of Genghis Khan’s grandsons; and the four years of infighting that followed brought a temporary end to Mongol conquests.
Chapter Forty-Six
The Debt of Hatred
Between 1229 and 1250,
the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II
helps the pope establish the Inquisition
and is then excommunicated and deposed
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPEROR FREDERICK II, dodging the rain of pig scraps hurled his way, had left Jerusalem. He arrived back in Italy in 1229, knowing from reports sent by his officials what he would find: the empire ready to break apart.
The Holy Roman Empire, held together only by the fiction of the Roman resurrection, was perpetually splintering. Germany had possessed its own strong national identity since the tenth century. The northern Italian cities, separated from the German duchies by the Alps, h
ad already reassembled the twelfth-century Lombard League that had defied Frederick’s grandfather. And Sicily, part of the empire only because Frederick II had inherited its crown from his mother Constance, was for all practical purposes a separate kingdom.
In Frederick’s absence, Pope Gregory IX had taken revenge on the unrepentant excommunicate emperor by prying at the empire’s cracks. He had given the deposed John of Brienne, the father of Frederick’s dead wife, permission to attack Sicily, promised his support to the Lombard League, and gone even further: “The pope has . . . spread false news of our death, and made the cardinals swear to it,” Frederick wrote back to al-Kamil’s court, upon his arrival in Italy. “So, on these men’s oaths . . . a rabble of louts and criminals was led by the nose. When we arrived . . . we found that King John and the Lombards had made hostile raids into our domains, and doubted even the news of our arrival because of what the cardinals had sworn.”1
When the Lombards and King John found out that the reports of Frederick’s death had been exaggerated, they lost heart; and when Frederick appeared on the horizon at the head of a German army, both parties beat a hasty retreat. Gregory IX, left without supporters, was forced to agree to a truce. He lifted the emperor’s excommunication; in return, Frederick promised not to take revenge on the agitators.2
Frederick’s next problem: Germany itself.
He had not been back to Germany, the core of his empire, for over ten years. He had left the country in the care of his young son Henry, crowned king of the Germans in 1222, which meant that Henry’s regents had been the de facto rulers for nearly a decade. But in his father’s absence, Henry had grown up. He was now nineteen, desperately anxious to be independent.
Realizing that Henry needed reining in, Frederick sent him a message ordering him to attend, in 1231, an imperial diet (a general assembly of all the dukes of Germany, presided over by the emperor) at Ravenna. Immediately, the Lombard League cities banded together and blocked Henry’s pathway through the Alps. Henry, without a great deal of regret, sent his apologies to his father.3
Frederick replied sharply. He was displeased with reports of Henry’s lavish lifestyle, and his tendency to favor court advisors who were hostile to the emperor. He ordered his son to meet him in the north of Italy in 1232. In the meantime he issued a series of imperial decrees reversing Henry’s latest decisions.4
Henry decided not to push the issue—yet. He met Frederick and took an oath of loyalty to him. But the two men were strangers, and the oath was an empty one.
Frederick chose to view the matter as closed. He sent Henry back to Germany and prepared to visit Sicily, the third of his three kingdoms; it was his birthplace, and the only part of the empire that felt like home. But before he left Italy, he finished putting into place another strategy for dealing with the Italian troubles—one that played to his own natural tendencies and also tied Gregory IX’s purposes more closely to his own.
Frederick II had always been inclined to treat heresy as an intensive offense against the empire itself. “To offend the divine majesty,” he had written, back in 1220, “is a far greater crime than to offend the majesty of the emperor.” A greater crime: more destructive and more pernicious, he meant, and deserving of at least the same penalty as treason.5
At the beginning of his reign, he had decreed that heretics within his realm should be banished forever and all of their possessions confiscated: the penalties that emperors before him had also enforced. The Albigensian Crusade, boiling along in southern France during the first decade of his reign, gave him another model for dealing with heretics.
Just two years earlier, the Council of Toulouse had established inquisitive committees of laypeople and priests in each southern French parish, tasked with investigating heresy and handing over the suspects to the secular authorities for punishment. Together, the emperor and the pope took this strategy a step or two further. The Dominicans, the Order of Preachers founded by Dominic Guzman to evangelize the Languedoc heretics, were appointed to spearhead the same hunt, throughout Sicily, and Germany, and Italy itself. By the papal decree Excommunicamus, published in 1231, anyone pointed out by the Dominicans was to be taken into custody by imperial officials (“relaxed to the secular arm”), held for examination, and then punished with animadversio debita: the “debt of hatred,” the due penalty for those who had rebelled not only against the emperor but against God himself.6
Gregory did not specify the exact nature of the ultimate animadversio debita, but repentant heretics were to be imprisoned for life. Unrepentant heretics clearly deserved much worse. Burning at the stake had been legal for centuries in Germany, although the penalty had not often been enforced, and Frederick had already decreed its legality for the Lombard cities within the empire. Now he wrote it into law once more. The first stipulation in the Sicilian Code of 1231—Sicily’s first written constitution—condemned heretics as traitors, subject to the same penalty of death.7
Now, in all three kingdoms of Frederick’s empire, heretics were to be hunted, imprisoned, questioned, and executed. The Council of Toulouse had established the Inquisition, but Frederick and Gregory IX had armed it with the sword.
Between 1231 and 1240, the two men cooperated in a series of decrees that increased the reach of the Inquisition and bound their two purposes closer and closer together. Both were driven by the specter of disorder and chaos in their domains, and Gregory at least was a firm believer that this disorder came from the supernatural world. Heretics, he explains in his 1233 letter Vox in Rama, gather their strength from secret rites where they do homage to a black cat, and summon into their midst a demonic creature who demands their obedience: a manifestation of Lucifer himself, “the most damned of men . . . whose lower part is shaggy like a cat.” “Who would not be inflamed against such perdition and the sons of perdition?” he concludes. “. . . No vengeance against them is too harsh.”8
And the vengeance was harsh indeed. Heretics were burned at the stake in Verona, in Milan, in Rome itself. “In the year of our Lord 1231 began a persecution of heretics throughout the whole of Germany,” records an official chronicle of the archbishops of Trier, “and . . . many were burned. . . . So great was the zeal of all that from no one, even though merely under suspicion, would any excuse or counterplea be accepted . . . no opportunity for defense be afforded. . . . Forthwith, he must confess himself guilty.”9
FREDERICK HAD MANAGED to align himself, however briefly, with Rome; but he continued to spar with his own son.
Near the end of December 1234, Henry declared open war against his father and his father’s forces. He headquartered himself on the banks of the Rhine river, just south of the German city of Koblenz. It was a short rebellion. Frederick, avoiding the hostile northern Italian lands altogether, landed on the northern shore of the Adriatic and then marched up through the loyal eastern German duchy of Carinthia. Joined by the Duke of Carinthia and by the equally loyal Duke of Lorraine, he progressed to Worms. His presence in his country, after so many years away, was greeted as a Second Coming by his people; and by the time he reached Worms, Henry’s supporters had faded away. “The Emperor . . . seized his said son, King Henry, and two sons of his, little lads,” wrote the Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani, no fan of Frederick, “and sent them into Apulia into prison . . . and there he put him to death by starvation in great torment.” In fact, Henry did not die from starvation, but after nearly eight years in confinement he could bear no more; in the early days of 1242, while riding under guard to a new prison cell near Martirano, he spurred his horse over a steep cliff face and was killed.10
But Henry was still alive when Frederick assembled a new imperial diet at Mainz, in 1235, and had his second son, seven-year-old Conrad, elected as the new king of Germany (and crowned two years later). He then began to plan a war against the rebellious Lombards; determined, now that his own family was in line, to restore “the unity of the Empire.”11
While the Inquisition began to spread its new-fledged
wings, Frederick—ignoring Gregory IX’s repeated pleas for peace in Italy—campaigned in Lombardy. Verona welcomed him; Vicenza resisted, and was sacked; Ferrara surrendered; Mantua fell. The Milanese fought stubbornly, for months on end. Frederick, backing away, managed to draw them away from their home ground towards Cortenuova, farther to the east, and then surrounded them. On November 27, 1237, the emperor’s army killed or took prisoner over half of the Milanese soldiers and seized almost all of their horses, wagons, and supplies.
The remainder fled; and Frederick, bolstered by his victory, demanded the unconditional surrender of the city. Milan refused. “We fear your cruelty,” they wrote back, in response, “which we know by experience; we had rather die under our shields by sword, spear, or dart, than by treachery, starvation, and fire.” Instead, they dug themselves in for the winter; and their resistance encouraged the other Lombard cities to rejoin the battle.12
It had become increasingly clear to Gregory IX that Frederick’s designs on Italy would, eventually, reach down to Rome itself. The temporary truce between the two men was fragile; cooperation against heretics would last only so long, as a common bond. Gregory IX’s attempts to negotiate peace between emperor and Lombards were rejected. When, early in 1239, Frederick landed troops on the shores of the island of Sardinia, which the pope claimed as his own territory, Gregory IX rose up in wrath and condemned the emperor’s ambitions: “The hatred which sprung up between the pope and the emperor, like an old wound, produced foul matter,” records the English chronicler Matthew Paris. In the Lenten season, Gregory IX pronounced Frederick II not only excommunicated but deposed.13
46.1 Frederick’s War in Italy
The foul matter was now out in the open. Pope and emperor exchanged a series of increasingly testy letters, with Frederick copying his complaints to the crowned monarchs of Europe. (“The nations are now endeavouring to despise the ruler of Italy and the imperial sceptre!” he complained, neatly conflating his differences with Gregory and his desire to put down the Lombard revolt.) Finally Frederick II, leaving troops to go on with the war in Lombardy, began to march south towards Rome itself. In August of 1241, he was approaching the city’s walls when Gregory IX—well into his eighties, suffering from the heat of a Roman summer—died.14
The History of the Renaissance World: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople Page 32