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

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  Andronicus III had little time left to resist. In 1341 he was struck by a sudden high fever that lasted four days without breaking. On the fourth day the emperor died, a few months away from his forty-fifth birthday. He left the throne of Byzantium to his nine-year-old son, John V.9

  He had made no arrangements for such a sudden end, and so his megas domestikos, John Cantacuzenus, assumed the role of regent for the child. Most of the Byzantine court seemed to think this perfectly natural; and as soon as affairs in the capital were in order, Cantacuzenus took the army out of Constantinople to head off border threats, a regent’s most important task.

  In his absence, young John’s mother, the Empress Anne, and the Patriarch of Constantinople (who had never liked Cantacuzenus) paid off, promised, and flattered a critical mass of officials to declare Anne regent in place of Cantacuzenus. The megas domestikos, away in Thrace preparing for war, received the message that the city gates had been shut against him. After years of faithful service to young John’s father, he had been declared an enemy of the empire; his lands had been seized, his house destroyed, and even his mother exiled from the city.10

  Cantacuzenus, who had been ready to serve the young emperor faithfully, could not swallow this insult. He decided to fight his way back into Constantinople and claim not just the regency but the crown of co-emperor.

  Civil war began again.

  AS THE WAR BETWEEN REGENTS dragged on, the king of Serbia launched his own bid for power.

  Stefan Dushan was the great-great-great-grandson of Stefan Nemanja, the Serbian Grand Prince who had managed to free his country from Constantinople’s control. Dushan, the ninth king of a dynasty that had endured with enormous stability for nearly two centuries, had been crowned in 1331. His kingdom was bordered on the north by Hungary and Bosnia (technically a Hungarian vassal); on the east by Bulgaria; and on the south by Byzantium. For decades, Serbian nobles had been agitating for an attack on the bordering Byzantine lands; Stefan Dushan’s father had refused, but the son was willing.11

  While John Cantacuzenus and his rivals fought, Stefan Dushan invaded. City after city fell in front of him, until he had reached almost as far as Thessalonica. “The great Serb,” complained Cantacuzenus, his hands occupied with Byzantine opponents, “like an overflowing river which has passed far beyond its banks, has already submerged one part of the Empire of the Romans with its waves, and is threatening to submerge another.”12

  On Easter Sunday, 1346, Stefan Dushan made his intentions perfectly clear. He had already written to the Doge of Venice, whom he hoped to pacify with an alliance, claiming lordship of almost all of the imperii Romaniae; now he had himself coronated as Emperor of the Romans and Czar of the Serbs. He could see the throne of Constantinople, tossed into the air like a ball, hovering between claimants; there was no reason why he should not join their ranks.

  60.2 Serbia under Stefan Dushan

  IN THE END, Cantacuzenus beat him to it.

  To bring the civil war to an end, he made overtures to the most powerful general around: Orhan of the Ottoman Turks. As incentive, Cantacuzenus offered a marriage alliance with one of his own daughters. Should Orhan help him retake Constantinople, the Ottoman chief would then be the son-in-law of the emperor: a position the Turkish leader could not even have dreamed of, two decades before. Orhan, who was an astute politician as well as a competent general, agreed to the plan.

  In 1347, with a thousand of his own men with him and the threat of a much larger Turkish force hovering behind, John Cantacuzenus marched into the city through a gate opened to him by a supporter inside. The regent Anne was broke (she had, as a last resort, borrowed thirty thousand ducats from bankers in Venice, handing over the crown jewels of Constantinople as security) and unable to muster a defense. The people of Constantinople were ready for a competent emperor, and Cantacuzenus had no trouble negotiating a settlement: he would rule with young John V as equal co-emperor, taking the royal name John VI, and all the intrigues, hostilities, and injuries of the previous six years would be covered under a blanket amnesty.

  He had his crown; but Stefan Dushan waited just past Thessalonica, and the Turkish alliance that had given it to him would barely survive the next decade.

  * * *

  *See map 56.1, p. 390.

  *His subjects were actually known as “Osmanli,” the “descendants of Osman,” which came over into western languages as “Othmanli” or “Ottoman”.

  Chapter Sixty-One

  The Fall of the Khilji

  Between 1303 and 1320,

  the Muslim sultanate of Delhi spreads across the north,

  but the Khilji dynasty loses its hold on the throne

  UNDER ‘ALA’-UD-DIN’S heavy hand, the sultanate of Delhi was spreading, in a series of Muslim assaults aimed at obliterating the Hindu holdouts of India. The Rajput kingdoms—the Hindu warrior clans, the “sons of kings”—were falling, one by one.

  61.1 The Rajput Kingdoms

  Gujarat had already been taken. Malwa, the kingdom of the Rajput Parama clan, and Ranthambhore, the strongest fortress of the Chauhan clan, followed quickly. In January of 1303, the sultan turned his eye towards Mewar, kingdom of the Guhila. The Guhila were the most powerful of the remaining Rajputs; for five hundred years, they had fought back, successfully, against Muslim invasion.

  According to later accounts, ‘Ala’-ud-Din chose to attack Mewar because he hoped to kidnap Mewar’s beautiful queen: Padmini, wife of the Mewar shah Rana Ratan Singh. He began the attack with deception: he visited the capital city of Chittor, ostensibly in peace, but with men hidden outside the gates. When Rana Ratan Singh courteously escorted him to the gates at the end of the visit, ‘Ala’-ud-Din’s men sprang out of hiding, seized the king of Mewar, and dragged him off to the sultan’s camp.

  To save her husband, Padmini sent a message to the sultan, offering to exchange herself for her husband, as long as she could bring her beloved maids and attendants with her. ‘Ala’-ud-Din agreed; and the next day, a whole procession of curtained litters, each carried by six slaves, wended its way towards the camp. But the slaves were Rajput warriors, and the litters were so many Trojan horses, crammed with fully armed soldiers. Once inside the camp, the soldiers leapt out, slaughtered the guards around ‘Ala’-ud-Din’s camp, rescued their king, and fought their way back to Chittor.1

  The details of this unlikely situation were probably invented by the sixteenth-century poet Jayasi, who was working out a detailed allegory in which ‘Ala’-ud-Din represents lust, Rana Ratan Singh love, and Padmini herself wisdom. According to Jayasi, when ‘Ala’-ud-Din finally did conquer Chittor (which he did, after an eight-month siege), Rana Ratan Singh died fighting, while Padmini sacrificed herself on his funeral pyre rather than submit to ‘Ala’-ud-Din. But there may be glimmers of fact beneath Jayasi’s embroidery. ‘Ala’-ud-Din seems to have taken the resistance of Chittor very personally; the chronicler Amir Khusru, who was there, notes that when Chittor finally fell, the sultan uncharacteristically ordered thirty thousand of the Hindu inhabitants massacred.2

  In the remaining years of ‘Ala’-ud-Din’s reign, the other Hindu kingdoms surrounding the sultanate fell, one by one. Khusru lists conquest after conquest, cities and principalities falling in front of the Delhi commanders, campaign after campaign carried out “in order that the pure tree of Islam might be planted . . . and the evil tree, which had struck its roots deep, might be torn up by force.”3

  The Pandyan realm, divided by civil war between two princes, fell in 1308; the northern part of the Sri Lankan island declared its independence, and Delhi armies occupied the Pandyan capital. Other Hindu kingdoms south of the Deccan survived: the Yadava, ruling from Devagiri, and the two successor states of the old Chalukya kingdom: the Kakatiya (centered at Warangal) and the Hoysala (with its capital at Dwarasamudra). But they too suffered from constant attacks: Dwarasamudra was sacked, Devagiri raided, Warangal besieged. And although the Delhi armies always withdrew from these southern lands, th
ousands died in the raids: “Their heads rolled on the plain like crocodile’s eggs,” writes Khusru.4

  In celebration of his victories, the sultan constructed a black pavilion in the middle of Delhi, “like the Ka’aba in the navel of the earth.” The Ka’aba was Islam’s most sacred shrine; at Mecca, it housed the Black Stone, a sacred rock (possibly a meteorite) oriented towards the east.* To this simulacrum came “kings and princes of Arabia and Persia,” to prostrate themselves not just before the duplicate Ka’aba but before the sultan as well. Delhi, Amir Khusru concludes, had become “the city of Islam.”5

  “IN THE LATTER PART of the reign of ‘Ala’-ud-Din,” writes Barani, “several important victories were gained, and the affairs of the State went on according to his heart’s desire, but his fortune now became clouded and his prosperity waned.” He fell out with his sons and with his ministers, reacted with vicious severity to small offenses, treated his officials to fits of temper. He suffered from painful swelling of his legs. And Barani notes, disapprovingly, that his infatuation with the handsome eunuch Malik Kafur grew even more pronounced: “He made him commander of his army, and vizier,” Barani writes, “and this eunuch and minion held the chief place in his regards.”6

  In 1316, ‘Ala’-ud-Din died. He was succeeded by his designated heir, his six-year-old son; with a stunning tone deafness to possible sibling rivalry, ‘Ala’-ud-Din left the young king’s brother, his older son Qutb-ud-Din Mubarak Shah as his regent.

  The decision created instant havoc. Both the six-year-old king and a third brother were blinded (“eyes cut . . . from their sockets with a razor, like slices of melon,” says Barani with relish), and Qutb-ud-Din was proclaimed sultan. The mastermind behind this plan is not entirely clear. Barani, who despises Malik Kafur, blames the eunuch; he says that Kafur intended to blind all three boys but ran into too much opposition. Other accounts chalk the plot up to Qutb-ud-Din. The evidence seems to favor Qutb-ud-Din, who not only kept his eyes but outlived his competition. Thirty-five days later, Malik Kafur was assassinated, beheaded in the halls of the palace by courtiers, or possibly by army officials.

  The teenaged Qutb-ud-Din was now Sultan of Delhi, and immediately followed in his father’s footsteps. He took, says Barani, an “inordinate liking” for a young Hindu prisoner of war who had converted to Islam; he “raised him to distinction and gave him the title of Khusru Khan. He was so infatuated . . . that he placed the army . . . under that youth.” Meanwhile, he occupied himself with pleasure, wine, and overspending. He survived as sultan four years, but only by making every crowd-pleasing decision he could: removing all of ‘Ala’-ud-Din’s price controls, abandoning the tax code, giving the noblemen freedom to pursue their own power-building schemes, raising salaries, scattering gold lavishly around the court to buy loyalties.7

  It was only by chance that no serious invasions or rebellions afflicted the sultanate during Qutb-ud-Din’s brief reign. But his incompetence didn’t win him many friends, bribes notwithstanding, and when Khusru Khan began to plot his overthrow, the ex-slave found plenty of willing allies.

  Late one night, the conspirators entered the royal palace, heavily armed and led by Khusru Khan. Khusru himself went up to the sultan’s rooms, while the rest dispatched the guards in the courtyard. The sultan’s rooms were guarded, but his guards let the sultan’s lover through. As Khusru closed the door behind him, the sultan asked him what all the racket was about: “Your horses have broken loose,” the eunuch said, “and everyone is down in the courtyard trying to catch them.” By this point, Khusru’s men had made their way up to the royal suite behind him. As they began to kill the guards outside the door, the young sultan realized what was happening. “He put on his slippers,” says Barani, “and ran towards the harem. The traitor [Khusru Khan] saw that if the Sultan escaped to the women’s apartments, it would be difficult to consummate the plot.” He ran after Qutb-ud-Din, grabbed him by the hair, and pulled him down. The two men were still wrestling on the ground when the other conspirators arrived behind him. As Khusru bellowed at them to be careful, one of them speared the sultan and dragged him off.8

  Qutb-ud-Din’s headless, dismembered body was thrown into the courtyard. Khusru Khan and his men carried out a palace purge, murdering all of the sultan’s supporters. Then, at midnight, all of the remaining officials assembled in the courtyard by torchlight and recognized Khusru as the new sultan. “Khusru Khan had prevailed,” writes Barani, “the face of the world assumed a new complexion, a new order of things sprung up, and the basis of the dynasty of ‘Ala’-ud-Din was utterly razed.”9

  KHUSRU KHAN’S SULTANATE lasted a single year.

  Barani’s distaste aside, he seems to have been a reasonably competent ruler and soldier, and the sultanate itself, tightly organized by ‘Ala’-ud-Din, continued to run more or less smoothly. But as soon as he was secure on his new throne, Khusru Khan renounced his profession of Islam and returned to Hindu practice. The conquered Hindus rejoiced, especially when Khusru began to promote Hindu officers and courtiers through the ranks. But the coherence of the Delhi sultanate was largely due to ‘Ala’-ud-Din’s vision of the empire as an Islamic realm, bringer of truth to the heathens, and Khusru Khan’s reconversion quickly wiped out his support. Barani complains that “preparations were made for idol worship in the palace” itself, and that “copies of the Holy Book were used as seats, and idols were set up in the pulpits”; it is unlikely that Khusru was foolish enough to defy Islamic practice so overtly, but Barani’s chronicle reflects the outrage that the Muslims of Delhi felt over this reversal.10

  Two months after Khusru’s accession, the governor of one of the outlying areas in the Punjab, Ghazi Malik Tughluq, rallied an opposition party against him. In a pitched battle outside the walls of Delhi, a collection of Muslim governors and their troops faced down Khusru’s royal army. The sultan’s force broke and ran; Khusru himself hid in a nearby garden, where he was discovered and beheaded on the spot.

  The governors then proclaimed Ghazi Malik the next sultan (“You have delivered us from the yoke of the Hindus!” they exclaimed). He took the royal title Sultan Ghiyas-ud-Din, and, Barani concludes, “everyone paid him due homage. . . . In the course of one week, the business of the State was brought into order, and the disorders and evils occasioned by Khusru and his unholy followers were remedied.” Two Delhi dynasties had fallen, and now a third ruled; the dynasties might disintegrate, but the sultanate itself remained unmoved.11

  * * *

  *See Bauer, History of the Medieval World, pp. 193–195, 294–296.

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  The Triumph of the Bruce

  Between 1304 and 1314,

  Edward I subdues the Scots,

  Edward II flees from them,

  and Robert Bruce becomes their king

  EIGHT YEARS of desperate fighting against the English had resulted in little gain for the Scots.

  William Wallace had followed up his victory at Stirling Bridge with an invasion of England itself and had returned to Scotland loaded with plunder and glory. But the following year an English army crushed Wallace’s men in the Forth valley near Falkirk, and Wallace was driven into hiding. Four more years of fighting yielded no real advantage for either side, and no single leader of the Scottish cause emerged. Edward, anticipating a victory yet to be won, awarded the title Prince of Wales to his oldest son, also named Edward; the first time an English heir apparent had claimed it.

  In 1302 a brief peace had been declared. But nine months later, Edward invaded Scotland once more. Deprived of Wallace, deprived of French support, the Scots were defeated again and again. By Easter of 1304, Edward had fought his way up to Stirling Castle on the river Forth.

  He planned the attack on the castle as a massive demonstration of English strength; he had commissioned a mammoth new trebuchet nicknamed the “War-wolf,” and as the siege began five master carpenters and fifty craftsmen were still assembling it outside Stirling’s walls. Prince Edward, just turned twent
y and in command of one wing of the English army, was sent to collect lead from the roofs of nearby churches to add to the counterweight. When the outmatched garrison in the castle tried to surrender, the king refused to accept until the trebuchet could hurl its first boulders: “Stirling Castle was absolutely surrendered to the King without conditions this Monday, St. Margaret’s Day [July 20],” one of his knights wrote in a letter home, “but the King wills it that none of his people enter the castle till it is struck with his ‘War-wolf.’” Only when the walls were battered to bits did he allow the garrison to yield.1

  This seemed to wrap the matter up. “Both great and small in the kingdom of Scotland (except William Wallace alone) had made their submission,” says John of Fordun, “. . . and after all and sundry of Scottish birth had tendered him homage, the king, with the Prince of Wales, and his whole army returned to England.” He left a Chief Warden as vice-regent in his place, and never entered Scotland again.2

  Eleven months later, William Wallace was taken prisoner by John Menteith, the English-appointed governor of Dumbarton Castle; the fourteenth-century chronicler Peter of Langtoft notes, without elaboration, that Wallace was betrayed to Menteith by his own servant, Jack Short, and was “taken unexpected at night.” He was sent to London, where, after a trial that consisted of a recitation of his crimes without any chance for defense, he was hanged, cut down and disemboweled alive, and then beheaded as his intestines were burned in front of him. “His body was hewn into four quarters to hang in four towns,” says Langtoft, “his head at London, his quarters spread throughout Scotland.”3

  As far as Edward was concerned, this brought an end to the Scottish matter; but the Scots were not yet finished resisting.