They probably intended to force him into lifting the deposition, but three days later Boniface VIII was rescued by a small band of friends from Rome and taken to the Vatican. He died there a month later at sixty-eight years old, worn out by stress and fury.8
With him the old ideal of the papal monarchy—of the pope as spiritual king, over and above Church law—died too. Boniface had tried to corral the power that had once belonged to the empire, and had failed. His successor, Benedict XI, ruled for a matter of months; a yearlong argument between the French and the Italian cardinals followed, while the papal seat sat empty.
Things were looking up for Philip, who now won several victories in a row in Flanders. In the spring of 1305 he was able to force the Flemish to submit, on punitive terms. Victorious over Flanders, victorious over the pope, he now explained to the cardinals that his first choice for Benedict’s successor was the French archbishop of Bordeaux, Bertrand.
Bertrand was duly elected on June 5, 1305. Crowned at Lyons as Pope Clement V, he took up residence not in Rome but at Avignon: technically under the control of Charles the Lame, but essentially under French control. For the next seventy years, the papacy would remain out of Rome, in French hands: the “Babylonian Captivity” of the papacy. In thanks for Philip’s support, the new pope revoked his excommunication and promised the French king a tithe of all the Church’s income.9
Philip the Fair collected his tithe and continued to raise money to pay off his war debts, with no further objections from the papacy. In 1306, he exiled all of the Jews from France so that he could confiscate their property. The following year, he made a move against the Knights Templar, the richest military order in Europe.
Until now, the Templars had been answerable only to the pope. But Clement V, Philip’s lapdog, quickly agreed to remove his protection. As soon as he did so, Philip issued a letter ordering the arrest of the Templars throughout France, on charges that the Templars indulged in all sorts of secret and occultish acts of demon worship. They were to be treated as heretics: “You will hold them captive to appear before an ecclesiastical court,” he wrote, to the chief inquisitor of Paris; “you will seize their movable and immovable goods and hold the seizures under strict supervision in our name.”10
This included a vast amount of treasure, held in the Templar fortress right outside the walls of Paris. The inquisitor duly sent out his agents, and all through France the Templars were suddenly arrested and imprisoned. Among them was Jacques de Molay, the sixty-year-old Grand Master of the order. Imprisoned, starved, and threatened with torture, de Molay confessed that, yes, when he had joined the Templars forty-two years earlier, he had been required to spit on a cross and deny the divinity of Christ; which he had done, but “not with his heart.”11
59.1 The Papal Palace at Avignon.
Credit: Photo by author
He then recanted this, but the damage was done. Wielding the Grand Master’s confession, interrogators convinced other Templars to confess to a whole range of blasphemous and idol-worshipping rituals, including black magic and ritual acts of sodomy. In 1310, Philip IV ordered fifty-four Templars burned at the stake outside the walls of Paris; on March 24, 1312, Clement V officially abolished the Templars, with “bitterness and sadness of heart . . . by an irrevocable and perpetually valid decree.” In 1314, the elderly Grand Master was removed from his prison cell and burned to death on a tiny island in the middle of the Seine.12
Meanwhile, Clement V continued his policy of royal appeasement.
In 1308, Albert of Germany had been assassinated; in his place, the German electors chose Henry of Luxembourg as King Henry VII of Germany. Henry wanted to become the next Holy Roman Emperor; Clement V did not dare enter Rome, but he agreed to send cardinals who would crown Henry there.
Henry made a long journey south, crossing into Italy in the fall of 1310. There he was welcomed by the Ghibellines. The Guelphs, who had the upper hand in Florence thanks to Charles of Valois’s support of the Neri, encouraged other Guelphs throughout northern Italy to hinder Henry’s approach. “The Florentines, the Bolognese, the Lucchese, the Sienese, the Pistoians, and they of Volterra, and all the other Guelf cities . . . held a parliament,” Villani writes, “and concluded a league together, and a union of knights, and swore together to defend one another and oppose the Emperor.”13
59.1 The Empire, Divided
Henry, hoping to get the entire territory of the old empire back under his thumb, spent most of the summer of 1311 laying siege to the rebellious city of Brescia. In September, the city finally surrendered. Genoa, ambivalent about emperors, agreed without much conviction to give Henry a twenty-year oath of loyalty; Pisa, historically pro-emperor, declared itself on his side, offered him six hundred bowmen, and provided him with transport down the coast to Rome on thirty Pisan ships.
Henry decided that this was victory enough for the moment, and headed for his coronation. But the Romans, not happy to see him, shut the gates against him. Stalled on the outside, Henry was finally forced to go to the church of St. John Lateran, beyond the city’s limits, for his coronation. As soon as the ceremony was finished—June 29, 1312—he started back up north. He intended to bring Florence, the center of the resistance, to its knees.14
He laid siege to Florence in September. But the city held out with ease, and by January Henry had decided to take a temporary break from the attack. He went instead to Pisa, where he allowed his army to rest, and sent to Germany for reinforcements.
The new regiments did not arrive until July, by which point Henry had grown more and more severely ill with a malarial fever that had tormented him since the previous fall. He died on August 24, 1313, having spent all but a few months of his reign outside of Germany.15
The German electors gathered, to the north, and immediately split into two camps. They named two kings simultaneously, Louis of Bavaria and Frederick of Austria. Immediately, civil war began; the two men were equal in supporters, in land, and in armies, and the civil war went on for a full decade.
Wary of Philip IV, deprived of German support, Clement now made overtures to the sole remaining strong power in Italy: the King of Naples. Charles the Lame had died in 1309, four years before, and his son Robert had succeeded him as king of southern Italy. Clement offered Robert the position Vicar of Italy, which meant vice-regent of the north, theoretically under papal authority. This was good for Robert, since it doubled the size of his kingdom; it was also good for Clement, since Robert directly owed him loyalty for the land.16
It was the last decision Clement made. He died on April 20, 1314, fifty years old, suffering from an illness that left ulcers all over his legs. His body was taken to Uzeste, where he had asked to be buried. While it was lying in state, says the Italian chronicler Agnolo di Tura, a fire burst out and burned the bottom half of the corpse, either a very bad stroke of luck or a folktale ending to the pope whose catastrophic rule had destroyed the Templars and taken the papacy into exile.17
Seven months later, the forty-six-year-old king of France was boar hunting on horseback in Fontainebleau forest when his horse fell, injuring him so badly that he died a few days later. His son Louis, who had already inherited the crown of Navarre from his mother Queen Joan at her death in 1305, now became king of France as well.
He ruled as king of France and Navarre for only eighteen months before dying unexpectedly at the age of twenty-seven. His second wife was about to give birth, and the nobles of France agreed to appoint Louis’s younger brother Philip as regent, pending the baby’s birth. On November 15, she gave birth to a son; but he lived for only six days.
Louis X already had a daughter, Princess Joan, from his first marriage. Her relatives attempted to argue that she, as the direct descendant of the oldest son, should become queen of France. Philip immediately had his lawyers dig out an ancient bit of law used by the barbarian Salian Franks, centuries before. The lawyers argued convincingly that this code, the Salic Law, had always been an acknowledged part of French law; a
nd since it barred women from inheriting the rule, Princess Joan could inherit only the crown of Navarre from her dead father. The French throne had to go to the nearest male relative: Louis’s brother.
The French nobles, on the whole, preferred to be ruled by a grown man rather than by an infant girl. Philip V was crowned the new king of France on January 9, 1317. It was a personal victory; but the aftershocks of the decision would trouble France for the next century.18
Chapter Sixty
The Appearance of the Ottomans
Between 1302 and 1347,
the Ottoman Turks appear in Asia Minor,
the Catalan Company arrives at Constantinople,
and the emperors of Constantinople
find themselves at constant war
ANDRONICUS II, second emperor of the Byzantine restoration, was facing a new upheaval.
Five or six years before, the village of Sogut had suddenly awoken. Sogut lay in the lands of the Turkish Sultanate of Rum; since its conquest by the Mongols in 1243, the Sultanate had existed in name only, its sultan a figurehead, the real power in the hands of Il-khanate viziers.
But beneath the surface of Il-khanate control, the Turks of Rum were restless.
Rum was home to a kaleidoscope of Turkish tribal alliances: Eskenderum, Eskisehir, Konyali, all of them possible challengers of the Il-khanate overlords. Sogut lay at the center of those three tribal territories, home to a small tribe led by the Turkish chief Osman. And sometime shortly after 1290, Osman had embarked on a sudden conquest spree.
There is no written history of his tribe that dates from anywhere near Osman’s lifetime; it is not certain that, in the last decade of the thirteenth century, the people of Sogut were even Muslim. But later legends tell of a dream Osman had, of a great tree growing up to shadow the whole world; the Tigris, Euphrates, Nile, and Danube flowed from its roots; beneath its limbs were built scores of cities filled with minarets, where the faithful came to pray; the leaves of the tree were sword blades, and a wind blew against them and pointed them towards Constantinople, which lay in the distance “like a diamond . . . the precious stone of the ring of a vast dominion which embraced the entire world.”1
And from the beginning of his conquests, it seemed clear that Osman had his eye on Constantinople. He ransacked the nearby countryside, conquered the tribe of the Eskenderum to his north, occupied territory near Ephesus and Pergamum, intruded into Phrygia. The Il-khanate ruler Ghazan, currently occupied with fighting against the Bahri dynasty of Egypt and its tendency to expand, seems to have paid little attention to the agitation just south of the Black Sea. The truth was that Turkish agitation in Asia Minor was nothing new; under Il-khanate supervision, says the contemporary chronicler George Pachymer, the Turks of Asia Minor had been running rampant for decades, laying waste the lands between the coast of the Black Sea and the southern island of Rhodes. Mostly, the Mongol khans ignored the Turks, as long as they stayed where they were supposed to.2
But the Emperor Andronicus could not afford to look the other way. When Osman met a Byzantine army at Baphaeum, near Nicaea, and drove them back, Andronicus grew alarmed. He sent his son and co-emperor, the twenty-five-year-old Michael IX, into Asia Minor with a bigger army, but Michael found himself so outnumbered that he retreated without giving battle.
This was an unpleasant case of dejà vu for the empire. Advancing Turks, two hundred years earlier, had launched the First Crusade when a frightened Alexius Comnenus had appealed to the pope for help. Andronicus II did not make the same mistake. Instead of asking for help, he hired it.
The mercenary captain who agreed to come fight the Turks was Roger de Flor, a onetime Knight Templar who had (fortunately for him) been thrown out of the order by Grand Master Jacques de Molay for piracy. He had assembled around him a mercenary crew called the Catalan Company, mostly made up of soldiers from Aragon proper and from the Aragonese-controlled countship known as Catalonia, on the eastern Spanish coast.* He was at loose ends, having just finished up fighting for James of Aragon, and was looking for his next profitable adventure.
He arrived in September of 1302 with a fleet of Genoese-built ships (he had stiffed the shipbuilders, making an enemy of Genoa) and eight thousand paid soldiers (they had stopped to sack the Venetian island of Ceos on the way, making an enemy of Venice). Crossing over into Asia Minor, the Catalan Company began to engage Osman’s troops, doing the Turks significant harm. But Roger de Flor also showed himself completely willing to rob any Christian settlements in his way, and Andronicus was heartily regretting his invitation, particularly when Roger de Flor demanded more money and, not getting it, started to raid Byzantine territory.2
In the winter of 1304, the Catalan Company retreated to Gallipoli to wait out the cold. While they were there, Andronicus hired a second set of mercenary soldiers to waylay Roger de Flor, on a planned visit to Prince Michael IX at Adrianople, and murder him. The plot, carried out in April 1305, succeeded: the assassins, says the Catalan Company adventurer Ramon Muntaner in his own account of the incident, “massacred” Roger de Flor “and all who had come with [him] . . . not more than three escaped.” At the same time, Byzantine soldiers laid siege to the remaining Catalan Company at Gallipoli. “They found us thus off our guard,” says Muntaner, “and . . . killed over a thousand people. . . . [And] we agreed that . . . we would defy [the emperor] and impeach him for bad faith and for what he had done to us.”4
The Catalan Company fought back, which meant that Andronicus was now carrying on two separate wars with an already spread-thin army: one, led by his son Michael IX, against the Company; one in Asia Minor, against Osman. So he appealed to the Il-khanate, which had not yet paid much attention to Osman and his Turks. The khan Ghazan had died in 1304 without heirs, leaving the Il-khanate to his brother Oljeitu; Andronicus II offered Oljeitu a marriage alliance with one of his own daughters in exchange for troops to fight against Osman.
Oljeitu agreed to the deal. In 1308, an Il-khanate army of thirty thousand men marched against Osman’s troops, but although the Il-khanates claimed victory, Osman seemed unhindered. He took Ephesus, fought down the coast, and made a preliminary pass at Rhodes.
60.1 The Ottoman Invasion
In 1315, the Catalan Company finally abandoned Gallipoli. “We had been in that district [more than] seven years,” writes Muntaner, “and there was nothing left . . . we had depopulated all that district for ten journeys in every direction; we had destroyed all the people, so that nothing could be gathered there. Therefore we were obliged to abandon that country.” They went off in search of other wars, leaving behind a demoralized Michael IX, who had been unable to conquer them.5
He was suffering from some progressive and undefined illness, possibly aggravated by depression. In 1320 he died, leaving his father on the throne along with his twenty-three-year-old son Andronicus III, who had been crowned co-emperor a few years earlier to assure the succession.
Unfortuately, Andronicus III had embroiled himself in all sorts of scandals, mostly involving gambling, prostitutes, and strong drink, and his grandfather was fed up with him. Right before Michael IX’s death, young Andronicus (a married man) had completely horrified his family by hiring hit men to stalk one of his mistresses, whom he suspected of infidelity, and kill the other man she was sleeping with.
The other man turned out to be Andronicus’s half brother Manuel, one of Michael IX’s sons from his second marriage. He died in the dark, on the streets of Constantinople.6
The emperor promptly disinherited his grandson; young Andronicus in turn declared war on his grandfather. He gathered around him a core of discontented men his own age, and the rebels established themselves in Thrace.
The Catalan problem had now been replaced by a civil war. For seven years the Byzantine armies made no progress in reconquering Osman’s territories. Osman himself, perhaps feeling at the edge of his reach, did not advance farther; and the Turks remained in place until he died in 1327, leaving the principality to his son Orhan
.
In May of the following year, Andronicus III finally won his war against the old emperor. He had been carrying on a constant propaganda campaign from Thrace, promising lower taxes and faster action against the Turks, and the people of Byzantium—overtaxed to pay for all of the ongoing fighting—were inclined to think that the time had come for a change in leadership. On the evening of May 23, 1328, supporters inside Constantinople opened the gates for Andronicus III and his troops; and they marched into the city.7
Andronicus III allowed his grandfather to abdicate and enter a monastery in safety; old Andronicus II lived there another five years, dying peacefully at the age of seventy-four.
The new emperor was now thirty-one years old, an experienced soldier with a strong following, most notably his longtime friend and now chief official (megas domestikos) John Cantacuzenus. He immediately began to push forward against the Turkish advance. But in Orhan, who had now named his principality the “Ottoman Empire” in memory of his father,* he faced an opponent as ambitious and capable as he. In the first battle where the two men came face-to-face, near the Marmara straits, Andronicus III was wounded, and the Byzantine ranks broke and fled.
In 1331, Orhan took Nicaea. He advanced to Nicomedia and laid siege to it; for the next six years, the Byzantine armies fought to drive him off. They forced the Turks to lift the siege twice, but both times Orhan retreated and then returned. By 1337, the fields and farms around Nicomedia had been laid waste for so long that the city could no longer be resupplied. The defenders were forced to open the gates, and Nicomedia surrendered.
The following year, Turkish raids into Thrace took thousands of Greek prisoners; three hundred thousand, according to contemporary chroniclers, a wildly inflated number that nevertheless reveals the panic the Byzantines felt, in the face of this ongoing, apparently unstoppable assault.8
The History of the Renaissance World: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople Page 42