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

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  Like his Muslim counterparts, Ma-Huan made note of the customs, the landscapes, the food and drink of a dozen different countries. But these were not voyages of discovery. Cheng Ho’s “star-guided rafts” were loaded with armed Ming soldiers; his mission was to collect tribute and submission from every king he encountered. He was tasked with conquest, not diplomacy: “Upon arriving at foreign cities, capture those barbarian kings who resist civilization and are disrespectful,” he summed up his instructions, in his own words. “Exterminate those bandit soldiers that indulge in violence and plunder. The ocean routes will be safe thanks to this.” He had the hardware to back up his intentions: hundreds and hundreds of nine-masted ships, thousands of deck-mounted bronze cannon, tens of thousands of Ming marines packed aboard. 4

  While Cheng Ho led his fleets farther and farther abroad, the Emperor Yongle personally conducted five different campaigns against the Oirats and the Northern Yuan. He fought in the north; Cheng Ho sailed to the west; and yet another Ming army was dispatched to the south.

  90.1. The Sea Voyages of the Yongle Emperor

  This south-pointing army, five hundred thousand strong, was ostensibly sent to restore the Tran dynasty to the throne of the Dai Viet, and to remove the usurping Ho ruler. This was a good and moral motivation, a “righteous war” according to Confucian doctrines, carried out to restore the proper order. “When the criminal [Ho] is captured, we will select a virtuous offspring of the Tran family as king,” Yongle decreed. “We will help him rule the place, and then withdraw our forces.” 5

  It was a good front, but once the Ming soldiers had destroyed the Ho power—the capital city was overrun in 1406, the usurping king Ho and his son taken prisoner in 1407—the Emperor Yongle found himself unwilling to let it out of his hands. Instead, he sent an administrator to run the country, and formally annexed it as a province of Ming China. He renamed it Jiaozhi, its name in ancient times, when it had been claimed by the Tang dynasty.*

  For twenty years, the Ming ruled the Dai Viet directly, in the Fourth Chinese Domination. It was a plum conquest for Yongle, who captured over a quarter of a million elephants, horses, and cattle, nine thousand ships, and nearly fourteen million “shoulderloads” of grain—an amount somewhere around nine hundred thousand tons.6

  Meanwhile, fighting continued in the north. By the time the last expedition against the Oirat had ended, the emperor had pushed the Ming border all the way out to the Amur river, far beyond the old Yuan frontiers. He had increased the size of the Ming army, from around forty thousand cavalry at the beginning of his reign to a million and half near the end. He had begun a massive repair effort on the crumbling Great Wall to the north. He had claimed old Dadu, the southern capital of the Yuan, as his personal capital. Now renamed Beijing, it was the home to his gargantuan new royal residence, a city within the city, decades in construction: the Forbidden City, for use by the emperor and the royal family alone.7

  ALL OF THIS cost a lot of money.

  The expenditures were already starting to pinch in 1418, when the northern Dai Viet aristocrat Le Loi, youngest of three sons, began to organize a resistance to the Chinese occupation. At first, he chose to throw his weight behind the restoration of the old and vanished Tran dynasty; he picked an inoffensive Tran figurehead and proclaimed that he would help return the Tran to the throne.

  But before long, he simply led the rebellion himself, under the royal name Binh Dinh Vuong: Pacifying King of the Dai Viet. His right-hand man and chief general, Nguyen Trai, helped him to rally the Dai Viet countryside behind his cause; Nguyen Trai, a well-educated and crafty man, is said to have gone into the forest and written “Le Loi is the king and Nguyen Trai his servant” with animal fat on hundreds of leaves. When the ants ate away the fat, the message showed up as perforated letters, appearing to the uneducated villagers in the countryside as a supernatural prophecy.8

  90.2 The Ming and the Oirat

  With the peasants rallying behind him, Le Loi and Nguyen Trai carried on a guerrilla war, the strategy of the weaker side in a fight. More and more Ming troops were sent into the Dai Viet jungles; regiment by regiment, they disappeared at the hands of the guerrilla forces that waited. For ten years, the Dai Viet battlefield sucked away at the Ming army.

  While this was going on, Yongle was continuing to spend lavishly on keeping up appearances in the capital city. An ambassador from Baghdad, visiting the capital city Beijing in 1421, was present at a royal feast where a thousand different dishes were served: “geese, fowls, roasted meat, fresh and dry fruits . . . filberts, jujubes, walnuts, peeled chestnuts, lemons, garlics and onions pickled in vinegar . . . and various kinds of intoxicants.” The diplomats present were required to perform eight prostrations in front of the emperor; in return they were loaded with lavish presents of silver, weapons, hawks, and horses.9

  Yongle did not live to see the consequences of his expansiveness. He died in 1424, while on campaign in the north. He was followed by his son, the Emperor Hongxi; Hongxi lived only two more years, leaving the Ming rule to his son, the Emperor Xuande, in turn.

  The Emperor Xuande was no coward. He had fought with his grandfather in the north as a young man, and he planned to continue the campaigns against the Mongols. But, faced with a shrinking treasury and an unending war in the south, he chose to triage the Ming resources: to halt the sea expeditions and withdraw from the troublesome Dai Viet war: “We have used military forces every year in Jiaozhi,” he told his court. “Many innocent people have been killed, and the people of China are exhausted.” His advisors were divided, half of them protesting that withdrawal would be a dangerous sign of weakness, the other half pointing out that the Dai Viet kingdom was always a problem, and that no Chinese dynasty had ever managed to hold on to it without headaches.10

  While they dithered, Le Loi led his men in a series of concerted attacks on the Chinese front. By 1427, at least ninety thousand Ming soldiers had fallen in the Dai Viet jungles.

  The Emperor Xuande called a halt. The Ming soldiers withdrew; Le Loi claimed victory, along with the throne of a now-independent Dai Viet. He was the first king of a new dynasty, the Le, which would rule until the eighteenth century. And the final sea expedition of the Ming returned in 1433. The ships never again left the Ming ports.11

  Despite Xuande’s efforts to refocus on the northern battlefield, the Oirat were increasingly victorious.

  A new Oirat khan named Esen Tayisi had inherited the leadership of the coalition, and was proving alarmingly good at welding more and more of the surrounding Mongol tribes and petty states into his following. At the same time, the Ming were suffering from a lack of leadership. The cautious Xuande died after just ten years, leaving the throne to his seven-year-old son, the Emperor Zhengtong. The empire was in the hands of the child’s advisors; they were divided over strategy, and the Oirat advance pushed the Ming front steadily, frighteningly, backwards. Frantic fortification of the Great Wall and a series of new barriers inside it—the “inner Great Wall,” nei-ch’ang-ch’eng—did little to hold the Oirat off. By the time the young emperor turned twenty-one, Esen Tayisi had advanced to within two hundred miles of Beijing itself.12

  In 1449, Zhengtong, on the advice of his chief eunuch, Wang Zhen, agreed to personally lead an army against the Oirat. The royal counselors were once again divided over strategy: “The Son of Heaven, although the most exalted of men, should not get personally into these dangers,” one opponent of the expedition offered, tactfully. “We officials, although the most stupid of men, insist that this must not occur.” The phrasing suggests that Zhengtong was not receptive to criticism; his actions suggest that he had delusions of a glorious victory. In the searing heat of August, he marched from Beijing with half a million men. It was the seventh month of the Chinese calendar, the Ghost Month, when the gates of hell were said to be open so that the dead could roam among the living.13

  As they neared the Oirat front, they passed heaps of unburied Ming corpses, victims of a recent Oirat attack o
n the nearby fortress of Datong, two weeks earlier. But there was no sign of the Oirat army. The landscape was eerily empty; the piles of bodies grew higher; and the spooked emperor decided to turn around and go back to Beijing.

  It was already too late. Esen Tayisi had silently surrounded them, cutting off their escape route, and on the first day of September he pulled the noose tight. With the Ming army camped at Tumu, the Oirat suddenly emerged, cutting down thousands with a hail of arrows and then charging over the bodies to scatter the rest. The eunuch Wang Zhen died in the fighting, probably murdered by his own angry and terrified men. The Emperor Zhengtong himself, recognizing defeat, sat down on the ground and waited silently to be taken prisoner.

  Esen Tayisi now sent a demand for a massive ransom payment to Beijing. He had expected the Ming to hand over cash to retrieve their emperor without quarrel; instead, the royal court at Beijing simply declared the captive Zhengtong to be Grand Senior Emperor and crowned his younger brother Junior Emperor in his place.14

  Disgusted, Esen Tayisi set his young prisoner free; he probably hoped that the merciful act would eventually give him a foothold in Beijing. But when Zhengtong made his way back to the capital, he found his brother less than pleased to see him, and his people uninclined to restore him to full reign. He spent the rest of his life in the Forbidden City, walled away from his people, remote and withdrawn.

  As the emperor went, so went the Ming.

  The days of ambitious military campaigns, wide-ranging sea voyages, and international diplomacy were trickling to an end. The Oirat threat dwindled; Esen Tayisi was murdered by his own men in 1455, during a sharp struggle between the tribes over control of the coalition, and the massive attacks on the northern border ceased. But the Ming emperor did not try to retake the land. No new offenses were planned, no campaigns to foreign lands, no diplomatic missions demanding tribute. The manpower and tax revenue remaining to the Ming all went to the support of a passive internal policy: the fortification of boundary walls, a retreat to the safe land within them.15

  * * *

  *The three early periods known to the Dai Viet as “Chinese Domination” were 207 bc–ad 39, ad 43–544, and ad 602–905.

  Chapter Ninety-One

  Failure

  Between 1412 and 1440,

  the Catholic church and the Christian empires

  fail to find the old unities

  THE CATHOLIC CHURCH had been badly cracked by the long years of dual papacy; the cracks were now papered over, but still visible through the thin tissue of agreement. The paradigm of a single Christian empire still survived in stereo, in the hands of the German king to the west and the Byzantine emperor. Both of them claimed the ancient baptized crown of Rome, the call to enforce the pax Romana as a pax Christiana.

  But all of these ideals were aging, and at least one of them was already emitting a deathbed rattle.

  SIGISMUND, king of Germany and Hungary, was not yet emperor of a holy Roman kingdom. Both Italy and Bohemia, territories of the old empire, lay beyond his grasp.

  Before his death from plague in 1402, Gian Galeazzo Visconti—granted the title Duke of Milan by the emperor Wenceslaus IV—had claimed almost all of northern Italy. Only Florence and Venice had remained independent, and Genoa had saved herself from his grasp only by submitting to the rule of the French.

  But with Visconti dead, his two sons (aged twelve and thirteen) were helpless in the hands of various ambitious Milanese soldiers and city officials. The older son, Gian Maria, fell under the control of the soldier of fortune Facino Cane and his capable wife Beatrice Lascaris; for a decade, this formidable couple ruled Milan through the puppet duke, while the cities and lands that had once been under Milanese control were claimed, one by one, by other Milanese captains and merchants.

  In 1412, while Facino Cane lay dying of fever in Pavia, a band of his enemies murdered the twenty-one-year-old Duke in Milan. His younger brother Filippo Maria Visconti became Duke of Milan in his place. The new Duke, aged twenty at the time of his accession, took the advice of his friends and married Facino’s widow Beatrice, now aged forty. She agreed to the match; she got to be Duchess of Milan, while Filippo Maria was able to claim control of her alliances and also of her rather extensive family lands.1

  It was never a happy match. Filippo Maria Visconti had an odd and unattractive personality; he was intelligent, and a shrewd user of men, but pathologically frightened of thunder, obese, and so self-conscious about his hooked nose and vast girth that he lived in secret rooms, changing them frequently, scuttling away from his subjects in the street and refusing to allow his portrait painted. Beatrice, in turn, was a powerful and wealthy woman twenty years his senior. The two coexisted in mutual hostility until 1418, when Filippo Maria accused his wife of adultery and ordered her beheaded.

  No one believed the charges; but it was more expedient to stay on the good side of the Visconti Duke.2

  Filippo Maria found more satisfaction in his conquests. He had hired the mercenary Francesco Carmagnola to head the Milanese army, and by 1421 Carmagnola had reconquered for Milan almost all of the territories that had fractured away from the Duke’s control. As a bonus, he added Genoa, which changed its alliance from the mad king of France to Filippo Maria instead.

  The conquests were vicious and unsparing; one account says that, at the city of Piacenza, so many citizens were slaughtered by the Milanese that only three people remained alive within its walls. But it set Filippo Maria at the top of the Italian pyramid: “Having become master of all Lombardy,” notes Niccolò Machiavelli, the sixteenth-century Florentine politician, in his History of Florence, “[he was] thinking he might undertake almost anything.” In name, he was a subject duke of the Holy Roman Empire; but in practice, he ruled the north of Italy with something close to an emperor’s power.3

  BOHEMIA POSED an even thornier problem.

  On paper, Bohemia belonged to Germany. But the kingdom was on fire with Hussite rebellion. Sigismund had promised Jan Hus safe-conduct to the Council of Constance, and then had stepped back and allowed him to burn. Hussite fury over the betrayal was widespread, but one Bohemian knight in particular emerged as Sigismund’s opponent: the soldier John Zizka, veteran of wars against the Teutonic Order of Prussia, an ex-captain of the dead Wenceslaus IV. He began to drill the Bohemian peasants, armed with grain flails and riding in wagons, into an actual army. Sigismund, not daring to enter the country, sent a German army ahead of him into Prague; Zizka and his peasants drove the German soldiers back.4

  They now demanded the rights that Jan Hus had begun to preach, as spelled out by the Hussite leaders and submitted to Sigismund: the Four Articles of Prague. The Articles asked the king of Germany, first, to allow open preaching of the Gospel without restriction; second, to permit the Eucharist served sub utraque specie, “in both kinds” (in the Bohemian churches, a practice had evolved since the twelfth century of serving the bread to the Christians in the pews, but reserving the wine for ordained priests alone);* third, to require all clergy to take a vow of poverty, giving up the Church’s right to accumulate wealth; and finally, to punish actions “against divine law” (legi divinae contrariae) openly and promptly. Specific sins were mentioned: drunkenness and theft; adultery and wantonness; unjustified tax and interest rate hikes; the sudden raising of feudal rents. Like the Cathars, like the Waldensians, the Hussites fought against all entitlement and privilege.5

  Sigismund refused to grant the Articles. But in the ongoing battles between German and Hussite forces—led by Zizka and then, after his death from plague, by the scholar-soldier Prokop the Shaven—he lost more and more ground. The sound of the Hussite battle hymn “Ye Warriors of God,” sung by the armed and trained peasants as they marched into battle, was more often than not the sound of German defeat.

  Blessed is everyone who dies for the truth.

  Therefore archers and lancers,

  Of knightly rank,

  Pikemen and flailsmen,

  Of the common peopl
e,

  Keep ye all in mind the generous Lord! . . .

  Feel the pride of the weapon in your hands,

  And cry: “God is our Lord!”6

  In 1421, with Sigismund stalled outside Prague, the Bohemian Diet (the gathered princes of the kingdom) declared him deposed. By 1427, the Hussites were venturing out of Bohemia into Germany, raiding and burning in revenge for German attacks on their homes.

  Sigismund’s response to the Hussite revolt was neither as energetic nor as effective as it could have been; his attentions were divided, he was often in Hungary, and he was saving enough force for a proposed march down into Italy, where he hoped to convince the new unification pope, Martin V, to crown him emperor.

  The first tentative move towards the imperial crown happened in the spring of 1431, when a church council assembled in the German town of Basel to discuss (among many other issues) the problem of the Hussites. But Martin V died shortly after the council was assembled, delaying its deliberations; the cardinals had to pull away from Hussite business to choose a new pope, the Venetian Eugene IV, in his place. In the meantime, Sigismund opened negotiations with Filippo Maria of Milan. Even if he convinced the new pope to give him the imperial crown, he could not march through the Lombard lands towards Rome unless he treatied with or defeated Milan.

  As an incentive, he offered imperial soldiers to aid Milan in its battles with Florence and Venice, and imperial friendship with Milan against those two rival cities. Cannily, Filippo Maria walked a middle path; he agreed to allow Sigismund to enter Milan and be crowned with the Iron Crown of the Lombards (the intermediate step towards emperorship), but when the German king arrived, the Visconti Duke refused to see him. He withdrew to one of his castles outside of Milan and sent a message explaining that he did not dare see Sigismund face-to-face because his emotions were too extreme; he did not want to risk “dying of joy.”7