God's War: A New History of the Crusades

gesture of martyrdom would shake Christendom to reform where tens of thousands of his erudite words had not. Pius had come late to the priesthood, in his forties, after a successful public and private life as a layman; he had fathered a number of children. His mid-life conversion left him with an originality of perspective and freedom of thought denied his more institutionalized clerical colleagues. Freshness of vision, high intellect and impressive articulacy produced his remarkable elision of the crusade with papal supremacy and his own spiritual journey.

Prospects for action were better than in 1459. Philip the Good, although in his mid-sixties, recommitted himself to the venture. Venice was close to war with the Turks, reversing their neutrality of a decade earlier. Pius relaunched his crusade in October 1463, this time as a limited project directed at the Turks.⁸⁸ The full panoply of preaching, cross-giving, Holy Land indulgences, privileges and financial apparatus was rehearsed. The pope’s leadership became central. To his cardinals Pius made no bones over his personal vocation: ‘we shall in a sense be going to certain death’, a noble end that may have appealed both to his religious faith and his classical imagination.⁸⁹

The autumn of 1463 saw serious diplomatic efforts to gain material support. Pius negotiated with sceptical Italian states while securing a grand alliance between the papacy, Venice, Hungary and Burgundy. On 22 October Pius rather pompously declared war on Mehmed II. Ancona was fixed as the muster point for the international force. The Venetians would transport the army across the Adriatic to join either the Hungarians or Albanian freedom fighters under Scanderbeg. Typically, after another lavish crusade fete at Christmas 1463, Philip of Burgundy ratted, but did send a company of 3,000 men under his bastard Anthony, who set out for Ancona in May 1464. Other small contingents began to move south. The only cardinal to provide a galley was Rodrigo Borgia, nephew and protege of the crusade fanatic Calixtus III, later Pope Alexander VI of ill- repute.⁹⁰ Given his notorious pluralism and greed, Rodrigo could certainly afford it. Pius himself assembled a fleet of galleys to meet him at Ancona before taking the cross at St Peter’s on 18 June 1464, perhaps the only pope in office ever to do so to fight the infidel. Now seriously ill, he must have realized his mission to Ancona, whither he set out in late June, could only be pour encourager les autres and for the salvation of his own soul. The Venetian flotilla of twelve galleys commanded by the doge himself was late. Elements of the papal force, seeing how the land lay, began to desert. It was said that the curtains of Pius’s litter had to be drawn to shield him from the sight of his disintegrating army.⁹¹ On 14 August, soon after reaching Ancona, Pius, as he had expected, died. His crusade died with him.

The Ottoman problem did not. By 1481, when Mehmed the Conqueror died, Venice had lost its Aegean capital Negroponte (1470), the Hospitallers in Rhodes had narrowly survived a massive siege (1480), and Otranto, in southern Italy, had briefly been occupied. In Rumelia, there were no Turkish retreats, even if further conquest ceased under Bayezid II, only to be renewed with a vengeance by Selim the Grim and Suleiman the Magnificent. However, the crusade increasingly assumed a walk-on part in the drama. Bulls continued to be issued. Men still took the cross and rulers the money. The efficacy of the ideal continued to receive obeisance, sometimes genuine, sometimes not. In Hungary, recognized as ‘the wall, bastion or shield’ of Latin Christendom, defence was the priority.⁹² Hunyadi’s son, Matthias Corvinus, used crusading rhetoric to bolster his royal credentials as a monarch from a parvenu dynasty. However, income from papal crusade funds, while useful, made little impression on the cost of Hungary’s military establishment. The recrudescence of crusade enthusiasm in the Iberian peninsula looked to other theatres of holy war, even when its promoters sought to associate them. When Charles VIII of France invaded Italy in 1494 to assert his claim to the kingdom of Naples, he placed the adventure in the context of a desire to fight the Turk and recover Jerusalem. The sincerity of the emotion need not be doubted, even if its implementation was outside practical politics. By initiating a sixty-year war in Italy, Charles VIII destroyed any serious chance to fulfil his ambition. His priorities were very clear. As for so many of his predecessors, the crusade became always the next thing to be done, always just one more military or diplomatic coup away.

Crusading refused to fade away. It still addressed central issues of politics, war, faith and community. International crusading remained a matter of courtly speculation, diplomatic trope and academic, and occasionally scholarly, debate. Popes continued to promote crusading with literary vigour, although the frequency and eloquence of their bulls were not matched by deeds. Increasingly the cruciata, through its taxes or sale of indulgences, became a matter of pious fiscality, in Spain a significant feature of public finance, jealously guarded by sixteenthcentury monarchs. Indulgences remained popular. In England alone, between 1444 and 1502 there were twelve indulgence sales campaigns on behalf of crusades against the Turks. One of the earliest surviving pieces of English printing was an indulgence form issued to Henry and Katherine Langley of London on 13 December 1476.⁹³ In 1464, a new curial finance department was established, the papal privy purse, specifically to receive crusade money. While the Ottomans presented a vital danger, talk of the recovery of Jerusalem remained the familiar small change of diplomatic parley and bombast, as in Francis I’s attempt to impose an Italian peace in 1515. His later treaty with the Turks (1536) dealt a serious blow to the concept of a confessional foreign policy. Yet old habits died hard. In 1498, the Roman poet laureate promised the new French king Louis XII a Roman triumph and a greeting by Apollo if he liberated the Holy Land and Constantinople.⁹⁴

The atmosphere more than the apparatus of crusading infected the language used to describe battles with the Turks. One account of the attack on Lesbos in 1501 is decorated by a lay crusade sermon supposedly delivered by the French king’s lieutenant, compete with promises of papal indulgences, salvation, temporal and eternal honour and glory.⁹⁵ Ironically, on the eve of the Lutheran revolt against papal indulgences in 1517, the greatest challenge to the theology of crusading yet mounted, reassuring anachronism gave way to some appreciation of reality. None of the debates or decrees of the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–17), which discussed an expeditio against the Turks, mentioned Jerusalem.⁹⁶ The febrile and hostile politics of Italy, France and Spain prevented any but verbal activity. Religious disunion of a sort unknown in the west for centuries soon complicated responses to both crusading and the Turk. The greatest Muslim threat to Christendom, the advance of the Ottomans to the suburbs of Vienna in 1529, occurred in the same year German evangelical princes signed the ‘Protest’ from which the name Protestant derived. Thereafter, although many Protestants were far from squeamish about holy war or fighting the Turks, crusading assumed a partisan status, a weapon, if at all, of a splintered confessional affinity some, at least, of whose ideological assumptions and roots had been attacked if not hacked off. Crusade institutions remained in the papal armoury, especially in support of Habsburg campaigning around the Mediterranean. For the Roman Catholic faithful, the ideal still shone. Pope Paul III’s summons to the great reforming council at Trent in 1544 announced its purpose: ‘the removal of religious discord, the reform of Christian morals, and the launching of an expedition under the most sacred sign of the cross against the infidel.’⁹⁷

But Paul hoped the council would abolish or restrict bulls for crusade indulgences, efforts thwarted by Spanish opposition for reasons of income not salvation. Yet that part of the game was up. Roman Catholic crusade apologists were increasingly reluctant to emphasize the offer of indulgences; their sale was abolished by Paul V in 1567. Crusading retained its place as an appropriate vehicle for Roman Catholics to use in fighting holy war. Yet religious division rendered its theology anathema to significant sections of Christian society who sought and found other ways and means to articulate and pursue violence in the name of their God.

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The Crusade and Christian Society in the Later Middle Ages

Crusading mentalities did not wholly depend on active military engagement. The emotions sporadically summoned to support fundraising or recruitment were nourished by liturgy, literature, preaching, the sale of indulgences and taxation, from Cyprus to Greenland.¹ By the fourteenth century, planners and publicists assumed popular understanding and, for anti-Muslim crusades, sympathy. The familiarity of the crusading spawned recognizable social stereotypes: the ‘ashy’ descroisie or pontificating armchair crusader; the money-grubbing huckster and indulgence salesman; the power-seeking crusade preacher; the pious and chivalrous crusading knight; the faithful footslogger. The categories identified by Francis Bacon in his discussion of responses to holy war in the early seventeenth century boasted long histories: thoughtful theologians; fiery religious zealots; pragmatic soldiers; calculating courtiers; temporizing politicians.² In the later middle ages, crusading enjoyed greater prominence within western European society than on many frontiers with the infidel.