God's War: A New History of the Crusades

encouraged this, an inscription in their first capital Bursa describing Sultan Orkhan as a ‘mujahid, sultan of the ghazis (i.e. holy warriors), ghazi son of ghazi’, a useful recruiting and disciplining ploy.⁴³ However, Ottoman policy was essentially secular: dynastic aggrandizement, wealth, power, domination, not conversion. They allied with peoples regardless of religion. They tolerated the faiths of their subjects provided they remained loyal. Ottoman success was a product of cultural similarity and contact with their neighbours and adversaries. The great fifteenth-century Albanian resistance leader and Christian hero Scanderbeg (d. 1468) had begun his career as an Ottoman hostage, becoming a Muslim in the service of Murad II, who gave him his name – Alexander Bey. He converted to Roman Catholicism to ease an alliance with the rulers of Naples across the Adriatic.⁴⁴ Western travellers who stayed at the Ottoman court, such as the Burgundian spy Bertrandon de la Broquiere in the 1420s, did not depict them as barbarians. The French crusader Marshal Boucicaut, a veteran of Nicopolis, defender of Constantinople in 1399 and attacker of the Syrian coast in 1403, once offered to serve under Bayezid I (1389–1403).⁴⁵ While in the 1460s, Pius II and his agents were content to fall back on tired if lurid hyperbole of barbarism, the Turks as ‘savage beasts in human form’, Cardinal Bessarion recognized the rational secular imperative behind Ottoman policies: ‘He invades foreign lands so as not to lose his own.’⁴⁶ The Ottoman conquest of Byzantium hardly fits a scheme of an immemorial clash of cultures or religion, Gibbon’s ‘World’s Debate’.

The history of Asia Minor and the Balkans in the later middle ages cannot be explained in confessional terms. The rhetoric of religious confrontation imposed (and imposes) a pattern on events favoured by contemporary apologists, diplomats and polemicists that hardly corresponded to experience. Despite the individual and collective human tragedies inevitable in military conflict and conquest, the Ottoman advances did not constitute unalloyed disaster. Late medieval Byzantium had failed to bring order, peace and civility to the region once under its sway, a failure reaching back beyond 1204 into the twelfth century. The Ottomans restored the geographic, political and economic coherence of the old Greek empire. The Turks entered Europe as vassals and allies of the Byzantine emperor. The Ottoman empire as such, as opposed to the Ottoman dynasty, began in Europe, not Asia. Rival Greek imperial dynasties in the fourteenth century married into the Ottoman sultan’s family. Serb Christian cavalry fought for the Turks at Nicopolis in 1396 (against crusaders) and at Ankara in 1402. Genoese helped Murad II defeat a dangerous western crusade in 1444. Christian allies fought with the Turks at the final storming of Constantinople in 1453, an event actually welcomed by some disaffected Greek Orthodox divines. Holy war remained largely a western luxury that Greeks and other inhabitants of the Balkans could ill afford. In the region of Thessalonica, the people’s preferences expressed this complexity. Conquered by the Turks in the 1380s, the region was restored to Byzantine control in 1403. Under the Ottomans, direct taxation increased (via the kharaj or poll tax on non-Muslim ‘People of the Book’, Christians and Jews) but the rents paid by peasants to landlords decreased, lightening the net fiscal burden. After 1403, the Greeks maintained the Ottoman tax regime, two-thirds of proceeds going to the monks of Mt Athos, who, in 1384, had advocated support for the Muslim Turks against what they regarded as a heretical Greek emperor (John V Palaeologus).⁴⁷ Such cross-currents were typical.

The crusade against the Turks consequently failed to correspond with the political context or military requirements of the Ottoman advance. Western efforts fell into two general phases. The first, interrupted by the collapse of Ottoman power after their defeat by Timur the Lame in 1402, concerned the defence of Byzantium, a task that had failed utterly by the 1460s. The second, consequent on the first, lay in the defence of Latin Christian territories in eastern and central Europe. At the heart of the muddled western response to the Turk lay a reluctance to abandon the conceptual reassurance of Holy Land polemic even in the face of detailed advice and evidence of how Ottoman power worked from spies and veterans of Turkish wars. The traditional Manichaean designation of ‘Christian’ and ‘infidel’ wholly failed to encompass the reality of the politics of the Ottoman advance, let alone its military dimension. The old view of a Turkish conquest of the Byzantine Christian bastion weakened by Latin indifference or hatred of Greeks, of a Muslim enslavement of a resentful Christian peoples, does not match events. Unlike the wars to defend the Holy Land, here the compromises of political realities contradicted the imperatives of religious idealism.

The political fragmentation of the Balkans and Asia Minor in the thirteenth century provided the essential context for the creation of Ottoman power. The Byzantine empire of the twelfth century was replaced by rump successor Greek states at Nicaea (then, after its recapture in 1261, Constantinople), Epirus and Trebizond. These competed with established Latin territories in Greece, based in the statelets of Athens in Attica and Boeotia, Achaea in the Peleponnese and Venetian holdings in the Aegean archipelagos, at Euboea (or Negroponte) and ports scattered along the southern Peloponnese and Ionian coast. To the north the Bulgarians and Serbs maintained independent kingdoms, while successive kings of Hungary attempted to extend their authority south of the Danube into Bosnia and eastwards to Wallachia. In Asia Minor, a similar disintegration had occurred with the collapse of the Seljuk sultanate of Rum in the mid-thirteenth century. By the early fourteenth century, authority had devolved on to competing Turkish emirates, such as those of Aydin, Menteshe and Tekke along the west and south-west coast of Asia Minor, and the Ottomans in the northwest and Karaman in the south-east. To survive and thrive, each of these principalities from the Danube to the Taurus Mountains, including the enfeebled, renewed Byzantine empire, pursued a complicated round of shifting alliances and hostilities with and against their neighbours based on advantage, not cultural or religious affinity. The most fertile ground for Ottoman expansion proved to be in the Christian, especially Orthodox Christian Balkans, not in Muslim Anatolia. The fragmented political control concealed wide varieties in the nature of these competing powers. None of them, even in extremis, constituted fertile ground for new mass crusades. The Italian cities, although boasting long crusading traditions, appropriately operated their strictly commercial and imperial policies according to profit, not eternal salvation. The Latin states of Frankish Romania, ruled by a western military aristocracy scattered across central Greece and the Peleponnese, had never attracted western crusaders in any numbers. The Slav Balkan princes sought autonomy, not Latin or Roman Catholic domination. Help for Byzantium was complicated by religious suspicion on both sides and contingent on a unification of eastern and western churches that the Greeks, mindful of Latin behaviour since 1204, consistently repudiated.

Even when the menace of the Turks was recognized in the west, the obstacle of church union remained.⁴⁸ The price of a substantial western crusade, from the papacy’s point of view, was Greek obedience to Rome, for Byzantine emperors a fatal dilemma. To secure western military aid on such terms risked alienating the people for whom they were seeking the aid in the first place. In principle, a form of ecclesiastical accommodation was feasible. Sections of the Armenian Orthodox church had entered into communion with Rome in the twelfth century. However, the legacy of 1204, the increasing equation of the Greek Orthodox church with the Byzantine state and its cultural identity, and the rise of a popular Greek mysticism known as the Hesychast movement in the early fourteenth century impeded reconciliation. Rome’s inescapable insistence on papal supremacy institutionalized the division. The first attempt at reunion, at the Second Lyons Council of 1274, a diplomatic stunt by Michael VIII Palaeologus to secure a papal alliance against Charles of Anjou’s designs on the Balkans, was repudiated by Michael’s successor, Andronicus II, in 1282. However, after the civil wars of the 1340s and 1350s, the alternative to an alliance with the west was submission to the Ottomans. John V offered reunion in 1355 and visited Rome and the west in 1369, a journey repeated by Manuel II in 1400–1401 and John VIII in 1423. The renewed Ottoman pressure after 1420 persuaded elements of the Greek elite, led by the distinguished humanist scholar John Bessarion (1403–72), with the support of John VIII, to agree to church union at the Council of Florence in 1439.⁴⁹ Bessarion made his career in the west, for thirty years a loud advocate of a new crusade, later a cardinal of the Roman church and only narrowly defeated for the papacy itself in 1455. Bessarion embodied the possibilities of church reunification, but he operated on a rarefied plane of high politics, diplomacy and cosmopolitan scholarship. His accommodation held little appeal for the majority of his fellow Greek Orthodox countrymen. Moreover, the alternatives of the fourteenth century, church union or the Turk, were no longer realistic. The Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror wished to replace Byzantium, now little more than the city of Constantinople. Church union had no effect. The west provided inadequate aid. No pan-Christian alliance was possible in the shifting sands of Balkan politics: rational self-interest of local rulers and the power of the Ottomans made sure of that. Within Byzantium, the Union of Florence was generally repudiated, causing a damaging conflict between the Orthodox hierarchy and the last two emperors, John VIII and Constantine XI. The last Byzantine emperor never resiled from the Florence agreement, expelling anti-union clergy. In his city’s final death agony in 1453 he was sustained by Italian troops, who proved more loyal than many of his Orthodox subjects.