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

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  This neatly avoided the problem of paying personal homage to the new king of the Lombards, which he did not wish to do. It also didn’t fool Sigismund, but since there was no graceful way for him to insist on Filippo Maria’s presence, he accepted the excuse, claimed the crown on November 25, 1431, and went home again.

  91.1 The Empire of Sigismund

  It took another eighteen months to arrange the imperial coronation in Rome; Pope Eugene IV kept falling out with the attendees at the Council, which made his departure complicated. Finally, in May of 1433, Sigismund had all of his ducks in a row. He journeyed from Germany south, through Lombardy, entering Rome itself on May 21, surrounded by six hundred knights and eight hundred foot soldiers and riding beneath a canopy of gold cloth. Ten days later, Eugene IV crowned him Holy Roman Emperor underneath the dome of St. Peter’s.8

  In celebration, Sigismund began to use a new seal: a double-headed eagle, representing his dual identity as king of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor. Later in that same year, he returned to the Council to weigh in on its (interminable) discussions and negotiations. Speaking to the assembled priests in Latin, he used the feminine gender for a neuter noun; when a nearby canon tactfully corrected him, Sigismund retorted, “I am the Emperor of the Romans, and above grammar” (Ego Imperator Romanus sum, et super grammaticam).9

  His new status brought some small forward movement to the Council, which finally agreed, on November 26, to withdraw condemnation of the Hussites as heretics, to allow Bohemian laypeople to receive the cup of wine at the Eucharist, and to permit preaching by anyone who was “commissioned” by a “superior.” On the other two points, the Council waffled. But the Hussite leaders in Prague, receiving this news from Basel, were inclined to accept the partial concession. Bohemia was a small country; for over a decade, the regular business of trading, farming, and living had been completely disrupted by war; over a hundred thousand men had died in the fighting, and waves of plague had swept across the country again and again.10

  Unfortunately, the Hussite movement had now matured enough to subdivide into sects, and the most radical of the Hussites refused to agree to any compromise.

  Led by Prokop the Shaven, an army of hard-line Hussites laid siege to the Catholic city of Plzeň; in response, the more moderate Hussites joined with orthodox Catholics to fight against them. At Lipany, on May 30, 1434, a pitched battle between the extremists and the moderate-Catholic alliance ended with the defeat of the fanatics and an eventual compromise, sworn out in 1436. The Compactata, the Compacts of Basel, recognized the Hussites as part of the Catholic Church although different in practice and belief: the first time that western Christianity had recognized the existence of a distinct sect as inside Christianity, yet outside pure Catholic doctrine. It was a kind of oneness—paper unity, existing as long as no one crumpled the surface.11

  THE COMPACTS OF BASEL had managed to bring Bohemia back within the empire, but the kingdom’s submission was brief.

  After four years as emperor, Sigismund died on December 9, 1437. He was a few months away from his seventieth birthday, probably suffering from diabetes; the toes on his left foot had been amputated not long before. Feeling the end approach, he ordered himself dressed in the imperial robes and managed to get himself onto the imperial throne, where he sat and waited for death to come.12

  He left no sons, and his son-in-law Albert, the forty-year-old Duke of Austria, claimed the right to all of his titles. Albert had no difficulty ascending the Hungarian throne, and in March of 1438 the German electors agreed to recognize his claim to Germany. But Bohemia rejected him, and the bickering Hussite factions argued over whom to recognize in his place.

  Meanwhile, the Council of Basel was still carrying on. It had semisettled the Hussite question, but a plethora of other matters, including various church reforms and the possibility of (once more) attempting to draw the Greek Orthodox church of Constantinople back into the Roman fold, were unsettled.

  And factions had developed within the Council. Just as Bohemia splintered away from the Holy Roman Empire, the Council also splintered. Pope Eugene IV and his supporters insisted on moving the deliberations to Florence, where the wealthy merchant-politician Cosimo de’Medici had assured them of a welcome. A stubborn rump Council remained behind, insisting that the pope had acted without proper consideration of the Council’s authority, and elected a replacement: a northern Italian aristocrat who became the “antipope” Felix V.

  Unlike the fourteenth-century schism, this division of the papacy turned out to be a mere footnote; Eugene IV proceeded on to Florence, and most of Christendom recognized that the Council of Basel had become the Council of Florence. But for the next ten years, the obstinate Felix V continued to claim the title of pope.*

  IN 1439, the emperor of Constantinople arrived at Florence, ready to discuss the possibilities (yet again) of union with Rome; never mind that Rome itself was still suffering a fair amount of disunion.

  He was driven by the changing situation in the Ottoman empire. The kindly disposed Ottoman sultan Mehmed had died in January of 1421 (a natural death, according to court chronicles; poison, according to rumor), and his son, the fierce eighteen-year-old Murad II, had at once laid siege to Constantinople.

  The elderly Manuel II had paid the new sultan off in 1424, temporarily lifting the siege. But the old emperor died not long after, leaving his son John VIII to face the new Ottoman threat. Emperor John VIII had journeyed to Italy, to what was now the Council of Florence, to ask the Christian west to unify against the Ottoman east, for the sake of Constantinople’s survival: a repeat of the same theme that had been heard, like an out-of-tune first violin, since the call for the First Crusade.

  The effort failed.

  John’s strategy was to try, once again, to smooth out the differences between east and west; to sponge out nearly five hundred years of diverging thought and theology, custom and culture, for the sake of a single-front war. But even before the arrival of the emperor’s party (which included seven hundred priests, court officials, theologians and scholars), the patriarch of Constantinople was infuriated by a message reminding him that he was supposed to kiss the foot of the pope when he was presented. His intentions, he retorted, were “to treat the Pope as a father, if he were older than me; if of the same age, as a brother; if younger, as a son.”13

  This jousting over rank continued. Once at the Council, the Byzantines and Europeans argued over the best seats, priority during meals, whether or not the Patriarch got to decorate his dais with curtains like the Pope, where Easter services should be held, and (eventually) church doctrines. From June 4, 1438, through July 5, 1439, the Council argued, in marathon daily sessions, over the theological points that divided them: the exact way in which the Holy Spirit related to the other two persons of the Trinity, the use of leavened versus unleavened bread for the Eucharist, the precise degree of authority that the Pope held over the Greek church, and a host of related minutia. The priests and theologians hammered out compromise statements, word by word and preposition by preposition. During the deliberations, the Patriarch died of old age.14

  Finally, the compromises were finished, set down on paper as the Decrees of Union, read out loud to much rejoicing, and greeted with hymns of praise from both Greeks and Latins (although, since neither set of clergy approved of the hymn style of the other, they were forced to alternate singing at each other across the central aisle in the cathedral of Florence).

  Guaranteed the support of the Western church, and bearing with him the promise that Pope Eugene would send three hundred warships and twelve thousand florins to help defend Constantinople against the Turks, John VIII set off for home. He arrived early in February 1440; and within a matter of weeks, both the promised soldiers and the much-needed cash had followed him to his capital city.

  Yet the unification never happened.

  Greeted by Constantinople’s people at the docks with the question “How did your efforts fare? . . . Did we win our cause?” the
priests who had accompanied the emperor retorted, “We have sold our faith overseas, we have exchanged piety for impiety!” Only the very top levels of the Greek church and court were behind the compromise; the priests who labored in Constantinople’s churches and the laity in the pew saw it as a sellout, the crass exchange of precious sacred treasures for raw political advantage. Reading his people correctly, John VIII delayed in publishing the Decrees of Union in Constantinople.15

  The delay became permanent. The attempt to draw the churches back into one body was no more successful than the reunification of the old Holy Roman Empire. The costly trip west, the countless hours in argumentation, the unending negotiations: all of this had brought a few more soldiers to Constantinople, but had achieved nothing else. And those soldiers would prove useless against the coming attack.

  * * *

  *This practice, which was defended by both Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas, seems to have grown out the doctrine of transubstantiation; if the bread and wine are literally transformed into Christ’s body and blood, taking part of either means that the worshipper has shared in the consumption of Christ, so both are not necessary. Because the wine was more easily spilled and abused (and, possibly, more expensive), many priests throughout France, Italy, and Germany refused to serve wine to the laity. This was a widespread but never universal practice; it was resented, by the Hussites, for drawing a sharp line of privilege between ordained and nonordained believers.

  *The Council of Basel met for a transitional time at Ferrara before ending up at Florence. The entire council itself is most often now referred to as the Council of Florence, but the terms “Council of Basel” and “Council of Ferrara” are also sometimes used.

  Chapter Ninety-Two

  Perpetual Slavery

  Between 1415 and 1455,

  the Portuguese send slave ships to West Africa,

  and the pope gives them permission for conquest

  DECADES BEFORE, the war between France and England had thrust tendrils into the Spanish peninsula; those tendrils had rooted, and now were growing thorny fruit of their own.

  The former John of Aviz was now John I of Portugal, and John of Gaunt’s English daughter Philippa was his queen. In Castile, the nine-year-old great-grandson of Enrique of Trastámara ruled as John II. After the Portuguese victory at Aljubarrota, the two countries had remained at war for another twenty-six years; not until October 1411 was a truce finally reached.

  Now Castile and Portugal were carrying on a new struggle: for trade, for wealth, and for the islands that lay in the Atlantic to the west.

  So far, Castile was winning. In 1402, the French adventurer Jean de Béthencourt had landed in the Canary Islands “with the view of conquering the islands, and bringing the people to the Christian faith.” He hoped for glory, chivalric deeds of daring, and plenty of loot; his expedition, chronicled by two Franciscan priests who accompanied it, immediately captured some of the inhabitants, an African tribal people known as the Guanches, and brought them back to the port of Cadiz to sell as slaves.

  Béthencourt, seeing the opportunity for even more glory than he had originally intended, had then gone to the court of Castile and asked young John II’s father to recognize him as king of the Canary Islands, vassal to the throne of Castile. The Castilian king agreed: “It shows a very good intention on his part,” he told his court, “to come to do me homage for a country which, as I understand, is at two hundred leagues distance, and of which I never heard before.”1

  Before long the Guanches were almost extinguished, taken to Europe as slaves; the Canary Islands, repopulated by Castilian peasants brought over to farm and fish. Castile now boasted brand-new territories in the Atlantic, and the Portuguese—always vigilant against Castilian ambitions—looked to expand their own reach.2

  John I of Portugal decided on the target: the port city of Ceuta, on the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar. Ceuta was then in the hands of the North African sultan of the Marinids, one of the dynasties that had taken up the space left by the disintegration of the Almohad empire at the end of the thirteenth century. Fighting against the Marinids had at least two advantages. The battle could be pitched to his people as an extension of the Reconquista, the Christian reconquest of Muslim-taken territories, which had stalled on the Spanish peninsula thanks to the stubborn resistance of the Muslim kingdom of Granada; this was less fraught than mounting an attack on another Christian nation. And it would occupy his sons. He had five legitimate sons, and in 1415 they ranged in age from thirteen to twenty-four; that was a lot of young ambitious male energy that needed to be pointed in the right direction.

  Queen Philippa herself died just before the assault force was launched. The royal chronicler of the Portuguese court says that she roused herself from her bed, just before her death, when she heard the north wind blowing, and exclaimed, “It is the wind for your voyage!” A month later, the Portuguese ships, her three older sons on board, had arrived at Ceuta to assault the city.3

  After a single day, the Marinids abandoned the fight. John of Portugal led the attack himself, with his heir and oldest son, Edward, at his side; twenty-year-old Henry and his twenty-two-year-old brother Peter fought together on the other wing. After the defenders fled, the mosque of Ceuta was thoroughly scrubbed out, refitted with Christian altars and crucifixes, and cleansed with consecrated water, and all three princes were knighted by their father there. “It was a splendid thing to see, for they were all large and well formed, and were dressed in clean clothes, and wearing their swords,” writes the court historian Gomes Eanes de Zurara.4

  The Marinids had not tried very hard to hold Ceuta, but they were also unwilling to give the Portuguese an undisturbed beachhead into their empire. They launched constant attacks; John I spent a tremendous amount of money defending it, and in 1418 he was forced to send an army under his third son, young Henry, to help lift a Marinid siege of the city. The year after, he appointed Henry to be Ceuta’s permanent governor.5

  Ceuta was turning out to be an expensive disappointment; Marinid resistance made it impossible to use the city as a base for expansion into the north of Africa. So Henry made it his business, while holding Ceuta secure, to also find another path for trade. He had always wished, says Zurara, “to know the land that lay beyond the isles of Canary and that Cape called Bojador, for that up to his time, neither by writings, nor by the memory of man, was known with any certainty the nature of the land beyond that Cape.”6

  He used Ceuta as a base to send out ships into the Mediterranean, through the Strait of Gibraltar, and then south towards Cape Bojador. It was not an easy mission to sell.

  He sent out many times, not only ordinary men, but such as by their experience in great deeds of war were of foremost name in the profession of arms, yet there was not one who dared to pass that Cape of Bojador and learn about the land beyond it, as [Prince Henry] wished. And to say the truth this was not from cowardice or want of good will, but from the novelty of the thing and the wide-spread and ancient rumour about this Cape, that had been cherished by the mariners of Spain from generation to generation . . . that beyond this Cape there is no race of men nor place of inhabitants . . . no water, no tree, no green herb—and the sea so shallow that a whole league from land it is only a fathom deep, while the currents are so terrible that no ship having once passed the Cape, will ever be able to return.7

  For twelve years, Henry sent out ships, year by year. Portuguese colonists settled on the Madeira Islands, and Portuguese ships raided Marinid ports. But despite Henry’s promise of enormous reward, none of the captains were willing to venture past the Cape.

  IN 1433, JOHN I DIED. Henry’s older brother Edward was crowned king of Portugal, at the same time that yet another Portuguese ship sailed from Ceuta, bound west-southwest. Its captain, Gil Eannes, got as far as the Canary Islands and then, “touched by the self-same terror,” turned north. Henry resupplied his ship and then sent him back out. “You cannot find,” he told Eannes, “a peril so gr
eat that the hope of reward will not be greater.”8

  Fortified with this promise, Eannes finally pushed past the cape. He returned with the news that the dreaded territory below was entirely unlike anything that had been rumored; he had seen calm seas, a long fertile coastline, and no people. Further reconnaissance ships reported the same, although one found footprints of men and camels. Henry sent yet another expedition, with instruction to land horses on the shore and ride inland until they sighted humans. The riders found no sign of villages or settlement before they grew afraid and turned back.

  Political turmoil brought a temporary end to Henry’s expeditions. His brother the king declared war on the North African Marinids, despite the lukewarm support of Portugal’s lawmaking assembly, the Cortes; Henry, more enthusiastic than the Cortes, offered to lead an attack on the important port city of Tangier. With him, he took his brother Ferdinand, the youngest of John I’s sons, now aged thirty-five.

  As it happened, the governor of Tangier was the same Marinid official who had been governing Ceuta at the time of its conquest by the Portuguese. He had learned from his defeat; he opened the gates of Tangier to draw the Portuguese army in, and then sent a detachment around behind to trap them in front of the city.9

  92.1 Portuguese Explorations

  When yet more Marinid reinforcements arrived, sent from the Marinid sultan in Fez, Henry was forced to give up. He managed to negotiate the freedom of most of his men by promising to give up Ceuta, but he was obliged to leave Ferdinand and twelve other Portuguese knights as hostages to assure the city’s surrender.