God's War: A New History of the Crusades

In a final irony of Byzantine history, the Orthodox patriarchate was restored to Constantinople by its Turkish conqueror.⁵⁰

The drive towards church union failed to grasp the essentials of the Byzantine predicament. While continued economic and commercial prosperity sustained the noble and urban Byzantine elites, as well as the Italian commercial predators, for the Byzantine imperial government, irreversible loss of territory meant loss of revenues. Constant frontier warfare dislocated agriculture; necessarily higher taxes provoked peasant and aristocratic alienation from the imperial administrators in Constantinople. Lack of funds and manpower forced Byzantine rulers to abandon serious naval commitment, isolating them further. Compelled to hire land armies for protection and support in the regular civil wars, emperors and imperial claimants frequently found they could not pay their troops, who seized lands instead: the Catalan Company in central Greece in 1305–11; the Ottoman Turks in Thrace after 1345. This military dependency on private, non-imperial armies became entrenched by incessant political feuding. By the 1340s, the Byzantine emperor was so poor that he pawned the crown jewels in Venice, replacing the royal regalia with glass replicas. Donations for the upkeep of the great church of Saint Sophia went to pay Turkish mercenaries. Despite their cosmic pretentions, the Byzantine emperors became Ottoman dependants, then tributaries, by the 1380s vassals of the sultan. The still lucrative commercial system was run by others; at one point the Genoese controlled 87 per cent of Bosporus customs. The Orthodox church constituted the only robust, independent power in the Greek polity, which impeded western assistance. The contrast between ancient claims and contemporary debility was tellingly captured by a witness to Manuel II’s visit to Henry IV of England at Christmas 1400:

how grievous it was that this great Christian prince should be driven by the Saracens from the furthest East to the furthest Western Islands to seek aid against them… What dost thou now, ancient glory of Rome? ⁵¹

Yet, by the late fourteenth century, Greek emperors were more often than not allies and vassals of the Turks, not their implacable foes. Manuel himself, less than a decade earlier, had served for six months in the army of Sultan Bayezid I in Anatolia. Such were the contradictions of Byzantine survival.

By 1400, Byzantine emperors survived on sufferance. The Byzantine civil wars of 1346–54, between John V Palaeologus and John VI Cantacuzene made the Ottomans arbiters of the empire. Sultan Orkhan married a daughter of John VI in 1346, Muslim polygamy proving a diplomatic boon. John V’s proposal for a new western crusade in 1355 coincided with some of the bitterest fighting of the Hundred Years War and renewed papal crusades in Italy. In 1358, John V recognized Ottoman power when one of his daughters married a son of Sultan Orkhan. Fresh attempts by John V to enlist western aid in the late 1360s only produced the limited intervention of Amadeus of Savoy’s crusade in 1366–7. Once in control of most of the Balkans north of Attica and south of the Danube, Sultan Bayezid began an eight-year blockade of Constantinople in 1394. The western crusade of 1396 achieved nothing, although it temporarily drew some fire from the siege of Constantinople. The capital was reprieved for half a century by factors outside its control. These did not include the crusade. Until their wholesale adoption of gunpowder in the fifteenth century, the Turks lacked the ability to destroy the still-formidable walls of Constantinople. They also lacked control of the sea, depending on western allies such as the Genoese for shipping and technical expertise. Only in the decades surrounding the final attack on Constantinople did the Ottomans become a naval power, a fundamental prerequisite for achieving Mehmed II’s goal of recreating a Mediterranean empire based on Constantinople. The loss of western naval hegemony ultimately sealed the fate of the maritime Latin east just as lack of military power doomed mainland Greece and the Balkans. In the fourteenth century, the Ottoman empire in Europe and Asia Minor had rested on a series of loose overlordships and alliances, with power delegated to vassals. By contrast, in the fifteenth century a highly centralized and disciplined Ottoman polity emerged after the restoration of the empire following Timur’s withdrawal to central Asia and death in 1405, and the resolution by 1413 of the family power struggle in favour of Mehmed I. Acquiring a navy and cannon, the Ottomans restored their control over the sub-Danubean Balkans in a generation. Short of a miraculous revolution in western European priorities, the fall of Constantinople appeared inevitable.

THE CRUSADE OF NICOPOLIS

The western response to the Turkish conquests rarely reached the pitch of an armed crusade, despite sporadic papal appeals and offers of crusade privileges stretching back to the 1360s and 1370s. The expedition of Amadeus of Savoy in 1366–7, an adjunct of the papal-Cypriot schemes of 1362–5, exposed the limits of what could be achieved. Raiding, even occupying strategic maritime bases, such as Gallipoli or Smyrna, while helping the local interests of Latin rulers in the Aegean and in Rhodes, hardly impinged on the Turkish land advance. The prerequisite for any serious crusading venture lay in the establishment of peace in western Europe. The dissipation of efforts in the 1360s were overtaken by the resumption of the Hundred Years War in 1369 and the papal schism from 1378. Only after the Anglo-French truce of 1389, which ushered in a generation of wary peace, were new international schemes devised to fight the infidel. The first target, in keeping with aristocratic attitudes, was not the Turk at all, but a more traditional, if peripheral, foe.

In 1389–90, the Genoese took advantage of the truce to invite the French government of Charles VI to sponsor an expedition to capture the Tunisian port of al-Mahdiya. The Genoese probably hoped this enterprise would further their interests in the area after their own annexation of the island of Jerba, south of al-Mahdiya, in 1388. The French embraced this opportunity for unequivocally meritorious warfare. Lavish tournaments at Smithfield in London and especially at St Inglevert near Calais helped recruit English nobles in an appropriately chivalrous setting. The expedition was commanded by Charles VI’s uncle, Louis II, duke of Bourbon.⁵² In France recruitment was limited to 1,500, probably not including archers. The English contingent, made up mainly of well- placed but second-rank courtiers, was led by John Beaufort, an illegitimate son of Richard I’s powerful uncle John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, who contributed twenty-five knights and 100 archers.⁵³ The Genoese supplied a fleet estimated as twenty-two galleys and eighteen transports. Although both Avignon and Roman popes offered indulgences, the al-Mahdiya expedition resembled a strenuous jaunt, on a par with the Baltic reisen, rather than a serious attempt to conquer territory in North Africa. Although there may have been processions and prayers for victory at home, no lay or ecclesiastical central funds were allocated or granted. Leaders were expected to be of gentle birth, capable of paying their own way. Despite the indulgences and the chroniclers’ language of crusading, there is no clear evidence that a single participant actually took the cross.

Sailing from Genoa in July 1390, the Franco-English army besieged al-Mahdiya for nine weeks, fighting off relief attempts. Cooperation appeared good between the different elements in the army, Louis of Bourbon consulting the English, whose archers played a prominent role in the action. However, once peace terms were offered by the Hafsid ruler of Tunis, all contingents outside Duke Louis’s household rejected his wishes and accepted them. The weeks before al-Mahdiya cost few lives; disease proving more lethal.⁵⁴ The campaign achieved nothing of concrete value, although it may have enhanced French links with Genoa. It is hard to locate the 1390 campaign within the tradition of the sporadic penetration of north Africa, conducted in this period largely by Castilians and Portuguese. Rather, it should be seen as part of Genoa’s commercial strategy taking advantage of the Anglo-French truce of 1390. Both governments could appreciate the diplomatic benefits of this mechanism of reconciliation. Nobles and knights on both sides of the English Channel were eager to justify their status on exotic and laudable battlefields, not just in the service of crown and country. Many veterans of 1390 also found their way to Prussia and eastern Europe. The al-Mahdiya adventure provided a dress rehearsal for the Nicopolis crusade six years later.

The early 1390s saw a recrudescence of old-fashioned crusade dreaming. The victories of Bayezid I had brought him to the southern frontiers of Hungary, whose new king, Sigismund, sought military help from the west. This coincided with the emergence at the French and English courts of a new crusading policy. Promoted by the energetic veteran lobbyist Philip of Mezieres, now settled in Paris, schemes were bandied about for a crusade that would seal the new peace between England and France, heal the papal schism and liberate the Holy Land. Individual commitment was secured through membership of Mezieres’s New Order of the Passion (Nova religio passionis), which between 1390 and 1395 attracted the patronage of Charles VI (although he lost his mind in 1392) and Richard II (1377–99), as well as scores of English and French knights. Through royal favour, personal diplomacy and targeted pamphleteering, Mezieres and members of his order influenced the language of diplomacy, creating a discernible atmosphere of crusading enthusiasm and expectation.⁵⁵