God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Constantinople. The locals were the more realistic. By the 1440s, much of Thrace had become thoroughly Turcified. There was no Byzantine empire to restore. Sultan Murad II exploited these divisions by offering peace terms to George Brancovic of Serbia (1427–56) and King Ladislas IV of Hungary. Brancovic accepted; Ladislas, after some equivocation, did not. The negotiations delayed assembling a new army, giving the Ottomans time to prepare their defences.

A western fleet of twenty-two or twenty-four galleys arrived in the Dardenelles in July 1444, mainly contributed by the papacy, Burgundy and Venice, manned by Venetians. Remaining immobile on station, the fleet totally failed to prevent Murad crossing the Bosporus north of Constantinople in October 1444 with a very large army. Neither did it make any attempt to harry the Black Sea coast or join up with the land army that advanced from the Danube to the Bulgarian port of Varna with just such an intention. The fleet’s Venetian captain, Alvise Loredan, declined to risk his ships, provoke the Turks or assist the Hungarians, perhaps fearful of the competitive dangers of committing Venice too actively in the interests of other land powers. The Ottoman and Hungarian armies met on 10 November at Varna. Despite being heavily outnumbered, the Hungarians fought all day, the battle itself ending without either side gaining a clear advantage. However, losses were horrifying. King Ladislas and Cardinal Cesarini were both killed. Morale evaporated. The remnant of the Hungarian army under Hunyadi withdrew, leaving victory to the Ottomans. Varna confirmed Ottoman control of Rumelia while exposing the diplomatic fragility of their opponents. Peaceful accommodation, even under duress, seemed preferable to many Serbs, Hungarians and Poles, a point reinforced by Varna’s catastrophic casualties and the passivity of the Venetian naval commanders. Aggression was not as obvious a reaction to Ottoman power along the Danube or in the Aegean as it appeared in the council chambers of Rome or the banqueting halls of the Low Countries. The reluctance of eastern rulers to agree among themselves, still less to fight at western behest, placed a bar to foreign aid. Hunyadi, now regent of Hungary (for Ladislas V), reflecting his own territorial vulnerability as lord of Transylvania, did pursue an aggressive policy. In 1448 he obtained crusade indulgences from Nicholas V for a foray into Serbia that ended in defeat by Murad II at Kossovo, the site of the great iconic Serbian defeat by Murad I in 1389. No western crusaders accompanied him. After Varna, eastern and central Europe was left largely to its own devices. Western rulers’ political interests were concentrated in Greece, the Aegean and Cyprus; their emotional anxieties focused on Constantinople.

THE FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE

In 1453, Mehmed II decided to risk a full assault on Constantinople, despite undefeated enemies on his eastern (Karaman) and western (Hungary) frontiers. The city would unite his empire, remove a potentially troublesome base for hostile troops and help define a universalist imperial ideology. Heavy artillery and temporary naval supremacy supplied the immediate means of conquest. The final siege by land and sea began in April 1453.⁷⁶ The last Greek emperor, Constantine XI, was politically and financially bankrupt, short of fighting men and bereft of allies willing to come to his aid, both Hungary and Venice holding back. His ramshackle, depopulated city was defended by a garrison of only a few thousand, afforced by Italian professionals. Constantine could only wait behind the great walls of the city and hope for relief that never came. After weeks of heavy pounding, the Turks moved in for the kill early on the morning of 29 May 1453, when the attackers swarmed into the breaches in the western land walls. The final scene saw the few defenders, the Italians prominent among then, in a desperate last stand within the walls. Constantine was killed in the press, his body possibly mutilated and his head taken as a trophy to the victorious sultan. The second sack of Constantinople may have been as damaging as the first in 1204. Perhaps as many as 4,000 Greek civilians died, about a tenth of the remaining population; many others were enslaved or ransomed. Within a decade, the last mainland Greek outposts had been engulfed; the surviving Latin holdings appeared even more precarious.

The Italian humanist Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, soon to be Pope Pius II, lamented at the news of Constantinople’s conquest, ‘a second death of Homer and Plato’.⁷⁷ A more traditional polemic of grief soon prevailed: the church in danger, the heritage of Christ defiled. To the same extent such reactions failed to stimulate a serious counter-attack, they missed the significance of the event. The mayhem, death and destruction, not least of artefacts and libraries, should not be ignored. Yet the human tragedy needs its own perspective. Greek cultural exchange with the west had flourished for generations. Greek learning was not something that reached western Europe in the luggage of Constantinopolitan refugees in 1453. The Byzantine state had comprehensively failed as a political institution. The fate of eastern Christendom lay not in the malignity of western holy warfare or diplomatic indifference, but in the operation of indigenous forces. The advent of the Ottomans was not the unalloyed disaster some have imagined, certainly not for the Ottomans, their allies, local Balkan groups they fostered and patronized, their Muslim subjects or even the Greek peasantry. Certain Greek elites suffered, but religious persecution played no part in fourteenth- or fifteenth-century Ottoman culture. Many Greeks who did not flee found Ottoman service, some even favour as converts to Islam. Ottoman culture, as eclectic and sophisticated as any in Europe and western Asia, introduced no new barbarism. The assumption of Christian superiority of culture or ethics is a damaging legacy of the age of colonialism and a feature of ill-informed modern demonization. The Ottoman triumph provided the lands of former Byzantium with security and a revived economy. By recreating the old territorial Byzantine empire, the Ottomans succeeded precisely where the crusaders of 1204 and generations of Greek rulers had failed. After 1453, Constantinople once again became the centre of the eastern Mediterranean world, resonant in its new name, Istanbul, ‘in the city’, ‘downtown’.

The reaction in the west to the fall of Constantinople varied from genuine concern to ritual hysteria. In courts from Germany to the Iberian peninsula, elaborate plans were instigated for a new crusade. The papacy sought to galvanize Christendom in a new meritorious and redemptive cause through the assertion of papal leadership. Nicholas V issued a crusade bull, Etsi ecclesia Christi (30 September 1453). The German imperial Reichstag discussed the Turkish war on three occasions in 1454–5, Philip of Burgundy attending the diet at Regensburg in April 1454. The assembly at Frankfurt in November 1454 was addressed by Piccolomini, whose speech was widely circulated.⁷⁸ Large numbers of exhortatory pamphlets were produced, some using the new technology of printing. Nicholas V’s successor, Calixtus III, maintained the momentum by authorizing preaching, clerical taxes and the sale of indulgences. The taxation aroused predictable clerical resentment. While the indulgence campaign proved financially effective, for example in England, the ubiquity of pardoners excited suspicion and encouraged widespread fraud.⁷⁹ Con men and crusading were not unfamiliar partners. Calixtus, despite age and debilitating gout, displayed obsessive energy in promoting the new venture, selling papal assets, including plate, dinner services and precious bindings from the volumes in the new Vatican Library created by his immediate predecessor. Galleys were constructed in the Tiber. Calixtus persuaded Alfonso V of Aragon (also king of Naples), whose secretary he had once been, to take the cross in November 1455. The German emperor Frederick III followed suit. Leadership of the crusade served the interests of his Habsburg family lands bordering Hungary while allowing Frederick to play a genuinely imperial role within Germany. In this company, Philip of Burgundy, even though he began to raise secular taxes for the crusade in his dominions, was conspicuous by his failure to take the cross, partly a reflection of his anomalous position as one of the richest and most powerful rulers in Europe who nonetheless remained subordinate to other monarchs. His French overlord, Charles VII, refused his cooperation or approval of the scheme.

In the autumn of 1454, Philip proposed an expedition for the following year. The lack of German response, Charles VII’s opposition and the death of Nicholas V (April 1455) postponed action. Beyond raising money, hardly much of a burden for any prince, Philip did remarkably little in the way of military or naval preparations. The timetable slipped. Alfonso V suggested a massive amphibious attack for 1457 to no effect. Crucially, Venice, at peace with the Turks since 1454, refused to become involved. While the western powers dithered, Mehmed II extended Ottoman control over Serbia (1454–5) preparatory to an attack on Hungary and the middle Danube. The fantasies of the Burgundian nobles at Lille or German princes at Frankfurt or the courtiers of Alfonso V, saturated with images of the historic Holy Land wars of the cross, not only proved impossible to realize, they failed to address the actual threat to fellow Latin Christians on the Danube. The failure of western rulers to organize an international expedition of any significance after 1453 relegated traditional mass crusading to the lumber room of military strategy, as Jean Germain put it, ‘the old expeditions and campaigns overseas that are called crusades (croisiez)’.⁸⁰ Western inaction confirmed that the only effective assistance crusading institutions could provide against the Ottomans lay in moral support, financial help, limited small-scale, mainly naval expeditions and the encouragement of locally based resistance.