God's War: A New History of the Crusades

granting the confiscated Templar property to the Hospitallers.

The Templar scandal exerted a significant influence on the future direction of the two largest surviving military orders. The Teutonic Knights narrowly avoided the similar, perhaps better-merited, fate of dissolution after another inquiry begun by Clement V in 1308. Fresh from having only just escaped condemnation by Boniface VIII, the order at Riga was briefly excommunicated in 1312–13. Hard lobbying and the order’s role in Prussia and German imperial politics saved them, rather than any marked change in public or private behaviour, which continued to attract hostile comment, including a critical papal verdict in 1324 over the Livonian affair, before resurfacing prominently at the Council of Constance (1414–18).³³ The Hospitallers too were not immune to external scrutiny, some of it highly critical, at times menacing, as when Pope Innocent VI threatened to impose reform from without.³⁴

Both orders learnt from the Templar debacle that protection lay in physical security. After 1291, the Hospitallers, like the Templars, had been based in Cyprus; the Teutonic Knights in Venice. Between 1306 and 1310, the Hospitallers conquered the island of Rhodes, transferring their headquarters there in 1309. The same year, the Master of the Teutonic Knights moved to the distant safety of Marienburg (Marlbork) in Prussia. Both orders were now settled in their own order-states. The timing was hardly accidental, precisely coinciding with the trials of the Templars. From these moves the orders gained protection and a restatement of their vocations as warriors of Christ on the frontiers of Christendom. Whatever the compromises with supposed enemies across the religious frontier – and there were many – the relocation of the military orders altered their role. The Teutonic Knights effectively abandoned the eastern Mediterranean while the Hospitallers created an independent eastern Mediterranean principality. Although still supported by estates across all of Europe – Rhodes receiving its western profits in the form of annual ‘responsions’ – both orders now operated behind their own palisades as sovereigns, at no one’s beck and call except their own. By doing so, they helped shape the later medieval pattern of devolved and local campaigns in the east, which replaced the grand international expeditions of earlier generations in tackling the great new crusading venture of the later middle ages.

THE OTTOMAN TURKS

One of about ten emirates arising from the debris of the collapsed Seljuk sultanate of Rum in the later thirteenth century, the Ottomans fed on the carcass of the Byzantine empire.³⁵ While their rivals to the south engaged in piracy in the Aegean, attracting naval leagues under papal auspices in 1332–4 and 1343–5, leading to the capture and occupation of Smyrna (1344–1405) and a futile campaign by Humbert, dauphin of Vienne (1345–6), the Ottomans posed a different problem. Originating in the area around Bursa in north-west Asia Minor, the Ottomans, followers of Osman and his son Orkhan (1326–62), began to annexe lands along the Sea of Marmora, reaching the Bosporus and Dardenelles by the 1330s. While other Turkish mercenaries were defending Smyrna from the Christian Holy League, in 1345 Orkhan was hired by a claimant to the Byzantine throne, John VI Cantacuzene, to fight in Thrace during the imperial civil war, first against rival Greeks then against invading Serbs. The Ottomans soon secured their own bases in the Gallipoli peninsula, Gallipoli itself falling in 1354. An Ottoman empire was being created in Europe, not Asia, on land, not around easily accessible coasts.

Alarm at Ottoman advances in Thrace led to the first crusading coalitions to stop them. An offshoot of the crusade plans of Urban V and Peter I of Cyprus, a small expedition commanded by Count Amadeus VI of Savoy in 1366–7 succeeded in capturing Gallipoli and a number of Black Sea ports.³⁶ This hardly gave the Ottomans pause. Around 1369, they took Adrianople (Erdine), which became their capital. By the end of the century, after their defeat of Serbia at Kossovo in 1389, they dominated the Balkans between the Danube and Gulf of Corinth. While the spirited but ill-conducted crusade that was crushed at Nicopolis on the Danube in 1396 served only to consolidate Ottoman power, their defeat by Timur in 1402 spared central Europe immediate further assault. Under Murad II pressure was resumed. Gradually, assisted by confessional and political bickering among their Christian opponents, the Ottomans conquered the whole of the Balkans, as well as Asia Minor and Anatolia. The capture of the long-isolated Constantinople in 1453 by Mehmed II the Conqueror led to the absorption of the rest of Latin and Byzantine Greece by the mid-1460s and Venetian Negroponte in 1470. After a generation of relative peace after Mehmed’s death, Selim I the Grim and Suleiman I the Magnificent conquered Mamluk Syria, Palestine and Egypt (1516–17), Belgrade (1521), Rhodes (1522–3) and most of Hungary after the crushing victory at Mohacs (1526). Vienna was besieged, but not taken, in 1529. This transformation of the political map of eastern Europe and the Mediterranean was conducted on the ideological terrain of the wars of the cross. Yet, the improbably successful defence of Belgrade in 1456 aside, no crusade had done much to prevent it.

Remarkably, compared with the number of sermons preached, taxes levied and indulgences sold, active crusading against the Turks remained a sideshow. Even at the height of the Ottoman threat to central Europe, when in 1463 Pius II was pointing to their presence ‘from the Black Sea to Hungary, from the Aegean shore to the Danube’, planners felt the need to associate their grander schemes of resistance with the pipe-dream of the recovery of the Holy Land.³⁷ Yet this was no distant war that relied on dedicated rhetorical fictions and religious empathy to render it immediate, as was the case with the Holy Land. The Greek emigre Cardinal John Bessarion argued, in 1463, that the Ottomans threatened ‘our country, our homes, our children, our family, and our wives’ as they wished ‘to subjugate the entire world starting with Italy’.³⁸ Four years earlier, a papal legate told Henry VI of England that Ottoman dominance of the Danube threatened the Rhine and hence English interests directly. The later fifteenth-century English House of Commons feared lest the Ottoman conquests interrupt the supply of bowstaves from the Crimea.³⁹ Scare-mongering of Italy in danger did not appear fanciful when Otranto was briefly occupied in 1480. The chances of a Turkish conquest of Rome, of Italian Renaissance artists serving an Ottoman sultan were not entirely remote. As a barometer of their success, the demonized Turk replaced the Saracen as a western European catch-all bogeyman.

Yet this perception of the Ottomans as constituting a danger to the traditional integrity of Latin Christendom took generations to become established in the imagination and policies of the west, never fully eradicating the luminous image of the lost Holy Land as a metaphor of Christian failure. There were several reasons for this. The initial victims of Ottoman conquest were as liable to be schismatic Greeks as Catholics. The tangled politics of Byzantium, Latin Greece and the Christian Balkans lacked the resonance of the recovery of the Holy Land, which was sustained by a widespread liturgy of supplication, intercession and sacrament. Only in the fifteenth century did the Turk even compete for the prayers of the faithful.⁴⁰ Confusion and wishful thinking, often attendant on crusading, were rife. When Urban V authorized his new crusade in the east in 1363, he made no distinction between the Mamluks and the Turks.⁴¹.

Conceptual obstacles paled beside practical difficulties. The early strategy (c.1332–67) of small naval leagues or modest amphibious attacks on the littoral of Greece and Asia Minor hardly matched the military resources of the Ottomans as they advanced into the Balkans. The Ottomans’ was a land empire, not a thalassocracy. A further debilitating problem lay in the implacable enmity between potentially the most important providers of transport, the Genoese and the Venetians, the former as often as not actively allying with the Turks to steal material advantage over their ancient commercial rivals whose empire the Ottomans were eroding. The alternative, a mass land attack by western powers in conjunction with local rulers, never materialized, except in very attenuated forms in 1396, 1444 and 1456. Even the growing acceptance of a land route for a new crusade, while recognizing the plight of eastern Europe, was often justified in terms of Godfrey of Bouillon, not Mehmed the Conqueror.

THE TURKS AND BYZANTIUM

The nature of the Ottoman threat distinguished them from previous Asiatic opponents of Byzantium.⁴² By 1300, the Ottomans had lost or adapted their steppe-based nomadic culture, which had first brought them to Asia Minor. Long before the establishment of their capital at Adrianople (Erdine), their political system revolved around a settled polity, no longer reliant on pasturage and a nomadic lifestyle. Being an Ottoman depended on loyalty to the ruling dynasty not ethnic origin or identity: Ottoman, follower of Osman/Uthman, the eponymous, semilegendary founder of the dynasty’s greatness. As with Christian political communities, religious observance supplied the signifying social and propagandist glue. In this, the Ottomans copied the Byzantines. Just as Latins and Turks and other barbarians had perennially become Byzantine before 1204, so Greeks became Ottomans, including, after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, members of the imperial family itself and their courtiers. Although insistent on Islam, the Ottomans were not fighting religious wars, even if they relied on traditional jihad rhetoric. Their early proximity to the Byzantine frontier probably