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

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  Nizamu-d din had been ruthless, but he had also been effective, and without him the government descended again into chaos. Hastily, the sultan summoned one of his grandfather’s favored slaves, Jalalu-d din Firu Khilji, from his post as governor of the northern city of Samana and gave him the job of administering palace affairs.

  Jalalu-d din proved to be just as efficient and ambitious as his predecessor. Before long, the young sultan was struck by a mysterious paralyzing illness. Jalalu-d din presided over the enthronement of the boy’s infant son as the next sultan, took the job of regent, and then with the help of his sons, kidnapped the baby. In 1289 he declared himself sultan in the child’s place. (Barani doesn’t tell us what happened to the baby, who conveniently disappeared.)

  This brought an end to the mamluk dynasty of Balban and inaugurated a new dynasty, that of the Khilji. Jalalu-d din was Turkish by descent, but the Khilji had been Indianized over several generations, and the Turks of Delhi at first resisted his rule. He was forced to establish his headquarters at Kilu-ghari, a few miles from Delhi, and for the first two years did not even try to enter the capital city. Instead, he governed from Kilu-ghari, distributed alms, recruited a sizable army, and then finally sent his sons ahead of him to clear opposition out of Delhi before his arrival.

  His sultanate turned out to be a short one. More than seventy when he became sultan, Jalalu-d din was still energetic and sharpwitted, careful of his power but not paranoid. When a treasonous plot was uncovered in his palace, he burned the traitors alive and had their leader crushed by an elephant. But when he received reports that a group of drunken nobles had spoken, “in their cups,” about killing him, he simply remarked, “Men often drink too much, and then say foolish things. Don’t report drunken stories to me.”3

  But he was moving towards eighty; he was disinclined to fight; and the throne was not his with any kind of legitimacy. When the inevitable end came, it was from within his own house.

  His chief general was his nephew ‘Ala’-ud-Din; Jalalu-d din had brought the boy up in his own house and had married a daughter to him. He trusted ‘Ala’-ud-Din without question. He had given the young man the governorship of Kara, a well-to-do town not far west of Allahabad, and had allowed him to keep a good part of the booty and treasure from various raids down into the Hindu kingdoms of the Deccan, the dry lands south of the Narmada river. Unknown to his uncle, ‘Ala’-ud-din had been stockpiling this wealth and delaying passing on the sultan’s part of it, in hopes of raising and equipping an army of his own: “Through Kara,” says Barani, “he hoped to obtain Delhi itself.”4

  Warned by his advisors that ‘Ala’-ud-Din might be planning a coup, the sultan refused to listen. “What have I done to ‘Ala’-ud-Din that he should turn away from me?” he said. As his nephew arrived back from one of these raids, carried out against the rich southern city of Devagiri, the sultan went out to meet his uncle with just a few men in attendance. ‘Ala’-ud-Din knelt down in front of him to pay homage, and the sultan gave him a welcoming kiss and took him by the hand. But ‘Ala’-ud-Din had ordered his men to use this gesture of affection as a signal to attack. One of them drew his sword and wounded the sultan; as the old man tried to run back towards his attendants, a second one beheaded him. His men were cut down as well.

  ‘Ala’-ud-Din marched into Delhi with his private army and claimed the throne. He distributed offices and gold to all his supporters: the gifts, and the honors, earned him security. “People were so deluded by the gold which they received,” Barani writes, “that no one ever mentioned the horrible crime which the Sultan had committed, and the hope of gain left them no care for anything else.”5

  His uncle’s head was placed on a spear and paraded in front of him, into Delhi. And like his pitiless counterpart in Constantinople, ‘Ala’-ud-Din ordered his cousin, Jalalu-d din’s oldest son, blinded to disqualify him from ever laying claim to the throne.6

  ‘ALA’-UD-DIN had barely finished his first year as sultan when the Mongols came over the mountains.

  Mongol invasions into India had been carried on, for decades, by raiding parties from both the Il-khanate and Chagatai lands. Neither khanate had made any real effort to conquer Indian lands; they were too busy fighting each other.

  The Il-khanate was now in the hands of Ghazan, the great-grandson of the Il-khanate founder Hulagu. Following the great Mongol tradition, Hulagu’s son and successor Abaqa had drunk himself to death in 1282; his two sons seized and lost the leadership of the Il-khanate, in quick sequence, and in 1295, Ghazan, a competent hardened soldier of twenty-four, had become khan. Like his grandfather, he was an enemy of the Egyptian sultanate and the Golden Horde khanate north of the Black Sea; he allied himself with Christian interests, made overtures of friendship to Andronicus II of Constantinople, and kept up a friendship with the distant Chinese khanate of Kublai.7

  58.1 The Mongol Invasion of Delhi

  The Chagatai khanate, now in the hands of Chagatai’s great-grandson Duwa, was friendly with the Golden Horde khan but hostile to Kublai’s rule, and firmly opposed to the Il-khanate—particularly when the Il-khanate soldiers made ventures eastward. Bloody fighting over the right to claim Khurasan had kept the two khanates focused on each other instead of on the lands to the south. But the internal struggle for the Il-khanate throne after Hulagu’s death had given the Chagatai armies an edge, and right before Ghazan’s khanship began, Chagatai soldiers had finally driven the Il-khanates out.8

  Now Duwa had a base from which he could do more than raid north Indian lands; he could actually plan a conquest.

  In the second year of ‘Ala’-ud-Din’s reign, the Mongols crossed through the mountains and came into the north. The sultan sent his brother Ulugh and his close friend Zafar at the head of a large Delhi army to meet them. At Jalandhar, the Delhi army won an easy victory over the Mongols: “Many were slain or taken prisoners,” says Barani, “and many heads were sent to Delhi. The victory . . . greatly strengthened the authority of ‘Alau-d din.”9

  In the flush of victory, the sultan sent an invasion force of his own westward, against the Hindu state of Gujarat. It fell easily and was folded into the Delhi sultanate. Among the prisoners taken captive was a eunuch named Malik Kafur; when ‘Ala’-ud-Din saw him, he was “captivated” by the slave’s beauty. From that time on, Malik Kafur was his constant companion.10

  He intended to keep up the war against the Hindu states, but the Mongols now returned. Having tested the enemy’s strength, the Chagatai khan Duwa was ready to embark on a full-scale conquest. In 1299, he sent a force magnitudes larger than that of the 1296 invasion—two hundred thousand horsemen, according to contemporary reports—under the command of his son. Instead of raiding and fighting against border fortresses, this army ignored every target between the mountains and Delhi, and made straight for the capital city.11

  Panic swept across the north. Villagers in the Mongol path abandoned their houses and farms and fled to Delhi, only to find that the city was in poor shape to receive them.

  The old fortifications had not been kept in repair, and terror prevailed, such as never before had been seen or heard of. All men, great and small, were in dismay. Such a concourse had crowded into the city that the streets and markets and mosques could not contain them. Everything became very dear. The roads were stopped against caravans and merchants, and distress fell upon the people.12

  ‘Ala’-ud-Din summoned governors and their armies from all over his sultanate to report to Delhi for its defense. But, given the state of the city and the panic inside its gates, he ignored the advice of his councillors to prepare for siege and marched out of Delhi, towards a pitched battle on open ground.

  The battle lines between the two massive armies stretched on for miles. ‘Ala’-ud-Din himself commanded the central units, with his brother in charge of the left wing, and his friend and general Zafar on the right. His own troops, equipped with hundreds of elephants, broke the Mongol line in front of him; Zafar’s wing also drove back
the enemy, but in chasing them down, Zafar lost two horses from beneath him and finally was killed. After nearly a full day of fighting, the Mongols began to retreat. They made their way back to the Khyber Pass, losing more men to illness and exhaustion along the way. Duwa’s son himself died on the forced journey.

  ‘Ala’-ud-Din made his way back to Delhi in a state of triumph so ecstatic that, once back, he announced his intention of founding a new religion. (“My sword . . . will bring all men to adopt it,” he told his courtiers. “Through this religion, my name and that of my friends will remain among men to the last day, like the names of the Prophet and his friends.”) He named himself “The Second Alexander” and had this title embossed on his coins, announcing his intentions to go out like Alexander the Great and conquer the known world.13

  The threat of the Mongol return had convinced the sultan that Delhi needed a huge standing army. One of his chroniclers notes that he built his forces until he had a standing cavalry of 475,000 horsemen. Unlike many kings at the turn of the century, he paid regular salaries to his soldiers; so that they could live comfortably on the salaries, he introduced fixed prices into the markets of Delhi, setting state-controlled limits on the costs of grain, fruit, sugar, oil, even shoes and coats. Merchants who were caught price gouging were arrested; if convicted, they were punished with the removal of flesh equal to the weight of the falsely priced goods sold.

  To funnel money towards defense, ‘Ala’-ud-Din also restricted the ability of his noblemen to live luxuriously; anyone who wanted to throw a huge party or indulge in a major purchase had to get permission from the Market Controller, a new office introduced into Delhi’s government by the sultan. He repaired all of the frontier forts, garrisoned them with well-trained regiments, and branded the military’s horses to prevent theft or unauthorized sale. He put into place an espionage system to warn him of Mongol movements and unprepared fortress commanders, of discontented soldiers and possible revolt. By the century’s turn, the Mongol threat had helped to turn the sultanate of Delhi into one of the most efficient, tightly controlled, and aggressive empires in the world.14

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  The End of the Papal Monarchy

  Between 1301 and 1317,

  Boniface VIII destroys the Templars,

  infuriates the king of France,

  and takes the papacy into exile

  AS THE CENTURY TURNED, Pope Boniface VIII made a massive effort to restore the old power of the papacy; the power it had held back in the days of Innocent IV, more than half a century before.

  But fifty years down the road, it was now apparent that Innocent had unintentionally put an expiration date on the power of Saint Peter’s heir. He had excommunicated Frederick II, authorized civil war in the Holy Roman Empire, and helped to split Germany, Sicily, and Italy apart; and in doing so, he had deprived the papacy of its strongest potential ally, a Holy Roman Emperor with the power to protect the Church’s interest across all three lands.

  Now there was no Holy Roman Emperor at all. Sicily was controlled by James of Aragon; southern Italy, the “Kingdom of Naples,” by Charles the Lame, son of Charles of Anjou; Germany, by Rudolf of Hapsburg’s son Albert. Louis IX’s throne was occupied by Philip IV, nicknamed “Philip the Fair” for his good looks; he was much less well-disposed towards the privileges of the Church than his pious grandfather.

  And the northern Italian cities were caught in a massive and complicated power struggle between two rival political parties.

  These factions, known as Guelph and Ghibelline, had started out in the twelfth century, as supporters to two rival candidates for the Holy Roman Emperorship: Conrad of Hohenstaufen (the Ghibellines) and Henry the Lion (the Guelphs). The Hohenstaufens had successfully snagged the title, meaning that the family’s Ghibelline loyalists in Italy were now ardent supporters of the empire’s power over those perpetually rebellious Lombard lands.

  A hundred years later, the Ghibelline and Guelph parties had lost most of their pro- and anti-empire leanings. But they still existed as hostile factions, with members of each struggling for control of Italian cities north of the Papal States. By this point, those struggles had lost any identification with the fate of the empire: they were struggles for control over ports, trading privileges, tax breaks. Like any political party that survives for more than a century and a half, the Guelphs and the Ghibellines had taken on a culture and life of their own, divorced from their original purpose.1

  Boniface VIII now had to negotiate with all of the complicated and opposing powers that surrounded him: a much more difficult and precarious task than his predecessors had faced in dealing with their Holy Roman Emperors.

  In northern Italy, he decided to ally himself with the Guelphs. A vicious and ongoing fight between Guelph and Ghibelline families (the Cancellieri and the Panciatichi) had devolved into an even bloodier fight within the Guelphs themselves. Two branches of the Cancellieri, the Bianchi and the Neri (the “White Guelphs” and the “Black Guelphs”) were carrying on a vigorous private warfare. Unable to persuade the two clans to make peace, Boniface VIII invited Philip IV’s younger brother, Charles of Valois, to come into Italy and settle the fight.

  Charles had crossed into northern Italy just before the turn of the century; motivated, says Giovanni Villani, “in the hope of being Emperor, because of the promises of the Pope.” His army was now headquartered at Florence, which was suffering greatly from the White and Black rivalry. He negotiated an alliance with the Neri, the Black Guelphs; and in November of 1301, with papal approval, Charles of Valois and his soldiers helped the Neri launch a feud-ending attack on their enemies in Florence, both White Guelph and Ghibelline. Six days of sacking and burning, looting of shops, and the murder of White partisans followed. The great Florentine poet Dante Alighieri, himself a White loyalist, lost his house and his possessions and was forced to flee from the city; the rest of his life was spent in exile, which accounts for his sour assessment of Charles in the Divine Comedy (“Not land, but sin and infamy, / Shall [he] gain”).2

  Charles mismanaged the Florentine purge, which rapidly became much bloodier than Boniface had intended. In disgrace with his brother Philip, and running short on money, he was forced to return to France shortly after. But he had done Boniface’s bidding, and for a time the warfare in northern Italy lessened.

  Meanwhile, Boniface dealt with Philip IV on a different front. Philip the Fair had already imposed taxes on the French church in order to help pay for his ongoing wars; he had made an uneasy peace with Edward of England, but he had continued to fight against the Count of Flanders. This was expensive, so Philip refused to hear Boniface’s complaints about the ecclesiastical taxes. He also insisted on his right to try clergymen in royal courts and to control the appointments of French priests to empty cathedral posts: all of the old issues between kings and pope, still alive and present.

  In December of 1301, Boniface sent the king a papal letter reasserting the arguments of his powerful forerunners, all the way back to Gregory the Great. Ausculta fili, it began: “Listen, son . . .”

  God has set us over kings and kingdoms. . . . [L]et no one persuade you that you have no superior or that you are not subject to the head of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. . . . Our predecessors deposed three kings of France . . . and although we are not worthy to tread in the footsteps of our predecessors, if the king committed the same crimes as they committed or greater ones, we would depose him like a servant with grief and great sorrow.

  Philip IV read the letter, and then set it on fire.3

  This set him on the high road to excommunication; to guard himself against the inevitable public backlash that would follow, Philip did his best to rally his people behind him. In April of 1302, he summoned to Paris the two most powerful bodies of men in the country: the dukes who ruled the great counties of France, and the leading French churchmen. To these he added, for the first time, a third group: the “deputies of the good towns,” the mayors, prominent citizens, and weal
thy merchants of the largest cities. All three assemblies agreed with him; Boniface was in the wrong, and Philip’s defiance was entirely justified.4

  At the same time, he was struggling in Flanders. On July 11, 1302, a large French army commanded by the distinguished Robert of Artois faced down a force of Flemish foot soldiers, and was horribly defeated near Courtrai. The battlefield, crisscrossed with ditches dug by the Flemish, tripped up the French cavalry; the horses became entangled, falling into the water-filled trenches and throwing their riders, and the Flemish infantry systematically advanced through them, finishing off both men and horses. “Kill all that has spurs on!” their commander, Guy de Namur, called out; and within three hours, the “flower of French chivalry,” an entire army of elite French knights, had been slaughtered. Robert of Artois died among them. Afterwards, the peasants of Flanders scoured the battlefield, taking the golden spurs from the bodies of all of the aristocrats. More than five hundred pairs were hung as trophies in the nearby Church of Our Lady, at Courtrai.5

  In the fall of that same year, another letter arrived from Boniface, even more threatening than the previous one. “If therefore the temporal power errs, it must be judged by the spiritual,” Boniface wrote, “. . . but if the supreme spiritual power commit faults, it can be judged by God alone, and not by any man.” He could condemn Philip, but Philip was powerless to retaliate.6

  Philip was in no mood to hear it. When Boniface finally excommunicated him, in the fall of 1303, he sent Guillaume de Nogaret, his own Keeper of the Seal, to head up a sneak attack on the pope at Anagni. They broke into the pontiff’s residence at night on September 7, twelve hours before Boniface was due to issue a bull of deposition that would remove Philip from the French throne, and took the pope away to a nearby castle.7