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

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  On August 25, after two weeks of suffering, the king of France died in camp. Charles of Anjou and Edward of England both arrived not long after to find Philip, the king’s oldest son and heir, also ill with dysentery. The conquest of Tunis had never been likely; now Charles negotiated a peace with al-Mustansir, who paid him off in order to get rid of the besieging army, and the demoralized Crusaders returned home. King Theobald of Navarre stopped in Sicily, where he too grew ill and died. This left the throne of Navarre in the hands of his younger brother Henry, who was by all accounts a competent ruler, although so corpulent that he was nicknamed “Henry the Fat” by his contemporaries. (Four years later, Henry the Fat suffocated on his own adipose tissue, leaving his infant daughter Joan as queen of Navarre.)

  Philip recovered; he took the coffins of his father and brother back to France and began his rule as Philip III.

  Edward of England was unwilling to abandon his crusade. He collected his own men and a few extras (among them, a Milanese priest named Tebaldo Visconti who had been invited to join the journey to Egypt by Louis IX himself) and sailed towards the Holy Land.

  Bohemund VI, ruler of the Principality of Antioch, had lost everything but Tripoli to Baibars of Egypt; and Baibars, whose modus operandi included plenty of trash talk, was planning to finish the conquest. “We left you, but only to return,” he wrote to Bohemund. “We have deferred your total destruction, but only for a certain number of days.” Edward intended to prevent that destruction. He had three hundred knights, and recruited more from Cyprus, but his real strength lay in an alliance he negotiated as soon as he arrived in Tripoli: with the ruler of the Il-khanate dynasty, Hulagu’s son and successor Abaqa. Facing the joint Crusader and Il-khanate Mongol defensive front, Baibars agreed to a truce that would protect the plain of Acre and the road to Nazareth for ten years, ten months, ten days, and ten hours.5

  Edward did not immediately start home. He was inclined to linger in the east, hoping for the chance to perform a greater deed in service of Christ’s cause; he helped rebuild a few defenses and tried to talk Abaqa into whittling away at the power of the Egyptian front.

  In October 1271, the Milanese priest Tebaldo Visconti, who had joined Edward to continue the failed Egyptian Crusade, learned (greatly to his surprise) that he had just been elected to be the next pope. Clement IV had died in 1268, and for three years the cardinals had been in conclave in the Italian city of Viterbo, just north of Rome, quarreling over the succession: half of them wanted a French pope who would support Charles of Anjou, the rest an Italian pope who would resist him. For three years, the Church had been headless.

  The citizens of Viterbo, finally fed up with the delay, had banded together and locked the cardinals into a single palace, removed the roof, and threatened them with nothing but bread and water until they chose a new pontiff. “And since they were not able to agree upon any one of those there present,” Villani writes, “they elected [as] Pope Gregory X . . . the cardinal legate of Syria in the Holy Land”: Visconti, a compromise candidate who was Italian but had spent most of his career outside Italy, who had never been involved with papal politics.6

  Visconti, an idealist who (like Edward) was thoroughly committed to the recovery of the Holy Land, was not entirely pleased by this. Nevertheless, he started back towards Rome. But Edward still delayed. In June of 1272, an assassin attacked him in his chambers with a poisoned dagger; Edward managed to kick the dagger away and kill the attacker, but he was wounded in the struggle, and the wound festered and weakened him. Not until September was he strong enough to start home.

  He was still traveling back towards England when Henry III died, after fifty-six years as king of England, and left the crown to his son.7

  THE CRUSADES had ended.

  The expedition to Tunis and Edward’s journey to Acre, neither of which had anything to do with Jerusalem—and neither of which involved very much in the way of actual fighting—were later known to some historians as the Eighth and Ninth Crusades. Other chronicles did not even grant them the name.

  The crusading age, on its deathbed, had one last gasp before it expired.

  Pulled away from his first crusade, the new pope Gregory X had made crusading the focus of his papacy. As part of readying the Christian world for a brand-new wave of crusades, he had opened discussions with Michael VIII, emperor of restored Byzantium, about reunifying the divided eastern and western churches. Michael VIII, a canny politician with no particular theological training, was enthusiastic. A church council had already been planned for the eastern French city of Lyons in 1274; Gregory X invited Michael to send a delegation to this Second Council of Lyons to discuss the possibilities. He also invited Thomas Aquinas, hoping that the great theologian would help out-argue any objections the Byzantines might raise; but Aquinas sickened and died on the journey to Lyons. He had not quite reached his fiftieth birthday.

  In the end, his presence was unneeded. The delegation, headed by the chronicler George Akropolites, arrived at Lyons in midsummer, bearing a letter from Michael VIII that conceded almost every theological distinction of the eastern church in favor of the Roman positions.* A celebratory Mass was then carried out, with priests from both east and west taking part, and the council moved on to address other issues. This included the renewal of crusading in the east; also present at Lyons was a delegation of Il-khanate Mongols, sent by Abaqa to demonstrate his willingness to fight on the side of the Crusaders against the Egyptian Muslims.8

  On their return, though, the Byzantine delegates found that the citizens of Constantinople were dead set against this politically desirable reunion. Monks and priests in the capital protested; even Michael VIII’s sister Eulogia snapped, “Better that my brother’s empire should perish, than the purity of the Orthodox faith.”9

  Michael VIII was trying to still the dissent—imprisoning, flogging, and banishing those who dared speak out against union with Rome—when Gregory X, traveling back towards the papal palace, grew ill. He died on the road, January 10, 1276. The next three popes elected by the cardinals all died within a year, unable to implement any meaningful policies of their own. All of Gregory X’s efforts at unity unraveled.10

  So did his plans for crusade.

  No Crusader force ever returned to the east. After a triumphant reign of nearly seventeen years, Baibars died. His powerful mamluk colleague Qalawun seized the throne of Egypt, driving Baibars’s sons into exile. In the decade and half after his accession in 1277, Qalawun’s empire crept steadily outwards. Tripoli fell to the armies of the Bahri Sultanate in April of 1289, bringing an end to the Principality of Antioch.

  At the fall of Tripoli, Qalawun was nearly seventy; the following year, he died in Cairo, but his son al-Ashraf Khalil picked up both his crown and his sword. In April 1291, al-Ashraf Khalil led the Bahris in a final push against the last remaining fragment of the final Crusader kingdom: Acre, the sole remaining outpost of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

  Al-Ashraf Khalil’s army, says Villani, was so huge that it “stretched over more than twelve miles.” The Egyptian forces surrounded the city, filled in the moats, and battered at the walls, but for some weeks the inhabitants of Acre, led by the Knights Templar, resisted—stopping up the holes in the walls first with stones, then with wood planks, and finally with sacks stuffed with wool and cotton. In the end, they could hold out no longer. The gates were broken down, and the Egyptians flooded in. “There were of slain, and prisoners, men, women and children, more than 60,000,” Villani writes, “and the loss of goods and booty was infinite. And . . . they broke down the walls and strongholds, and set fire to them, and destroyed all the city, whereby Christendom sustained very great hurt; for . . . there remained in the Holy Land no city pertaining to the Christians.”11

  54.2 The Triumph of the Bahri Sultanate

  * * *

  *The thorniest issue was the western church’s insistence that the Holy Spirit “proceeded,” or issued, from both the Father and the Son. The east refused to use this
formulation, known as the “Filioque clause.” Eastern believers thought that to speak of the procession of the Holy Spirit “from the Father and the Son” suggested that God the Father and Jesus Christ were separate beings in a way that violated the unity of the Trinity. However, the real quarrel between east and west was one of authority: whether pope or patriarch ultimately had the last word on which Christian beliefs were or were not orthodox. For more on the specific theological problems involved, see Jaroslay Pelikan, The Growth of Medieval Theology (600–1300) (University of Chicago Press, 1978), particularly chapter 5, “The One True Faith.” For the eleventh-century division of the Christian church into east and west, see “Schism,” in Bauer, The History of the Medieval World, pp. 584–595.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Kublai Khan

  Between 1273 and 1294,

  Kublai Khan conquers China,

  tries to subdue Champa,

  fails to conquer the Dai Viet and Japan,

  and becomes the first Yuan emperor

  THE GREAT KHAN had lost three-quarters of his empire, but the quarter that remained to him was vast: the Mongol homeland, with Karakorum at its heart and the enormous sweep of plateaus north and west; the land seized from the Western Xia and the Jin and from Goryeo; the entire north of the Song.

  The rich fields in the Yangtze river valley, and the lands below it, were still unconquered.

  Those southern lands, the last remaining to the Song, were still ruled by the emperor Song Duzong. Few men could have gracefully maintained a court, in the face of the relentless and frightening Mongol aggression; Song Duzong was not one of the few. He turned to wine and feasting, his harem of concubines, gambling and games to distract himself from the coming end.1

  For five years, the Mongol armies had been laying siege to the double city of Xiangyang and Fancheng, on the northern and southern banks of the western Yangtze: the gate to the south. In the early years of the assault, the Song managed to resupply the cities by the river. But as time went on, the Mongol blockade strengthened; Song resupply ships could make it through only with massive casualties. Then, in March of 1272, a team of siege engineers arrived from the west, sent to Kublai Khan by his nephew Abaqa of the Il-khanate Mongols as a gesture of goodwill. Led by Ala al-Din of Mosul, they brought with them a new weapon: trebuchets that used counterweights, instead of brute pulling strength, to hurl unusually massive stones at the walls of Fancheng. The walls began to crumble. By early February of 1273, they were breached; the Mongols stormed in and executed over ten thousand of the city’s inhabitants, stacking the bodies up where the defenders in Xiangyang could see them. When the trebuchets began to systematically break down the walls of Xiangyang, the city’s commander surrendered. The river basin now lay in Kublai Khan’s hands; the gate was opened.2

  Shortly after the seizure of Xiangyang, Kublai Khan issued a declaration of war to Duzong.

  Since the time of Genghis Khan, we have communicated diplomatically with the Song . . . [asking for] a cessation of hostilities and respite for the people. . . . This could have provided a plan for all humanity. Yet [you] . . . continued to dispatch troops year after year. The dead and injured now pile up while prisoners and hostages grow. This all suggests that the Song has brought peril to its own people.3

  The Mongols had, of course, been at war with the Song for four decades, and Kublai himself had already spent fourteen years trying to conquer the south. But the formal declaration of war signaled a shift. He was no longer the Great Khan of a vast rough-hewn nomadic empire, built by invasion; he was one king pointing out the faults of another. He was defending the legitimacy of his attack.

  He had changed.

  Already, he had begun to designate the years of his reign with a Chinese dynastic title. He had moved away from the Mongol capital Karakorum, and built himself dual capital cities in China, north and south, in imitation of his predecessors. The northern capital was his summer home; to the Mongols it was known as Shangdu, “Supreme Capital,” and it was a luxurious and settled king’s city. “In Xaindu did Cublai Can build a stately pallace,” an anonymous traveler had written, after touring Shangdu, “encompassing sixteene miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile meddowes, pleasant springs, delightfull streames, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the middest thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure, which may be removed from place to place.” Five hundred years later, the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge would fall into a drug-induced sleep while reading the traveler’s memoirs and dream of Shangdu; when he awoke he would write,

  In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

  A stately pleasure-dome decree:

  Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

  Through caverns measureless to man,

  Down to a sunless sea.4

  Kublai Khan’s second capital, two hundred miles to the south, was built right next to the burned remains of Zhongdu. He called this city Dadu, “Great Capital”; today, its ruins still survive in the northern suburbs of Beijing. The Venetian traveler Marco Polo, who visited Dadu sometime after 1270 and wrote of his journey some thirty years later, describes a minutely planned city: “perfectly square,” surrounded by white battlements, with arrow-straight streets and carefully laid-out allotments of land for each family and clan chief:

  55.1 Kublai Khan.

  Credit: The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY

  In this manner the whole interior of the city is disposed in squares, so as to resemble a chess-board, and planned out with a degree of precision and beauty impossible to describe. The wall of the city has twelve gates, three on each side of the square . . . every gate being guarded by a thousand men.5

  The security of the city reflected Kublai Khan’s strengthening grasp on the lands around him. He had reduced Goryeo to complete submission; the Crown Prince who had surrendered to Mongke in 1259 had passed the rule of Goryeo to his son Chungnyeol, and Kublai had forced the young man to accept the lesser title of king, rather than the traditional Goryeo title of emperor. He had also given Chungnyeol a Mongol princess for his wife. This was not as great a privilege as it might seem. Kublai Khan, says Marco Polo, had twenty-two sons by his four wives, twenty-five by his concubines (who numbered at least a hundred), and an untold number of daughters; he used them to tie his vassals close to him.6

  In 1274, he suffered an unexpected failure. Past Goryeo lay the island of Japan, governed by the Kamakura shogunate in the hands of the shikken (“Regent of the Shogun”) Hojo Tokimune. Several years earlier, Kublai Khan had sent a curt demand for tribute and submission to the Kamakura shogun; Hojo Tokimune ignored the message, plus several follow-ups. With Goryeo firmly under his control, Kublai Khan now organized a two-fleet invasion force, one setting sail from the coast of China, the other from the southern shores of Goryeo, converging on Japan.7

  The Mongols were not good on the water, but Kublai was able to press thousands of watermen and hundreds of ships from China and Goryeo into service; the entire force probably numbered just over twelve thousand men and perhaps three hundred vessels, a reconnaissance force rather than a full-blown invasion. The ships swept by the smaller outlying islands, dispatching their garrisons without too much difficulty, and on November 19 the fleet arrived at Hakata Bay, on the northern end of the island of Kyushu itself.8

  Samurai warriors hastily assembled to fight off the invasion, but when the Goryeo contingent scented bad weather, they talked the Mongol commanders into withdrawing after a single day of fighting. Even so, the ships were caught by a storm on their way out of the bay, and perhaps a third of them were lost.

  The armies on the Chinese mainland had better fortune. The war against the Song began to draw to an end. Kublai’s general Bayan led his armies along the Yangtze river; city after city fell to them; and by the end of 1275, they had reached the southern Song capital of Hangzhou.

  By then, the emperor Duzong was dead; his five-year-old son had been aclaimed as the Emperor Gong, with the child’s mother as regent. In the f
ace of the Mongol horde, she agreed to surrender the city. In January of 1276, the city’s gates were thrown open and the Mongols marched in. The boy emperor and his mother surrendered; Bayan treated them well and sent them to Shangdu, where Kublai Khan’s empress settled them into new quarters; Gong would live the rest of his life as a Buddhist monk in the north of China.9

  Even then, Southern Song resistance did not end. The little boy had two brothers, both of whom were offered, by various partisan groups, as emperor in exile. The middle son, Duanzong, died not long after his acclamation. The youngest, six-year-old Bing, had been concealed in a Buddhist temple far to the south. Guarded by his mother (a younger concubine of Duzong), her father, and the mother of the dead Duanzong, Bing survived until 1279. Pursued by a Mongol detachment, his guardians finally dragged him with them into the sea, drowning the child as they committed suicide to avoid capture. His death brought a final end to the Southern Song; Kublai Khan’s dynasty, the Yuan,* now controlled China.10

  Kublai had not forgotten about Japan.

  Two years after the initial invasion, he had sent another embassy demanding surrender. The shikken Hojo Tokimune beheaded them and began to prepare for war. He summoned samurai from across western Japan to defend the coast. They built eight-foot stone walls along the beaches of Hakata Bay and other likely ports, to trap landing Mongol troops between the water and the fortifications; they assembled a special navy of small, very fast boats.