Hunyadi’s initial campaign in 1443–4 with a large Serbo-Hungarian army, with recruits from Bohemia, Moldavia and a few from the west, had been a success. Attacking through Bulgaria, Nish and Sofia were captured and Erdine (Adrianople), the Ottoman capital, menaced, before Hunyadi withdrew to Belgrade. Plans for 1444 called for the land army to link up with an allied fleet on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria. However, when the Venetian flotilla of twenty-two or twenty-four galleys, paid for by the papacy, Burgundy and Venice, finally appeared in the Dardanelles in July 1444, it did not move into the Bosporus and Black Sea as planned, failing to intercept a large Ottoman army crossing to Europe north of Constantinople in October 1444. Fear of losses and provoking the Turks induced paralysis in the Venetian naval commander. The allied army under Hunyadi and King Wladislav was abandoned to face the much superior Ottoman force at the Bulgarian port of Varna. The battle on 10 November lasted all day. Casualties on both sides were enormous. King Wladislav and Cardinal Caesarini were killed, sapping morale and persuading Hunyadi’s Hungarians to withdraw.
The Ottoman victory further consolidated their rule over Rumelia (their Balkan provinces) while highlighting their enemies’ divisions. Varna’s slaughter confirmed the scepticism of many Serbs, Hungarians, Moldavians, Poles and Venetians at the wisdom of aggressive policies towards Ottoman power favoured by western strategists. There were exceptions. Hunyadi, now regent of Hungary (for Ladislas V, 1444–56), persisted in challenging the Turks across the Danube frontier, in 1448 obtaining crusade indulgences from Nicholas V (1447–55) for a campaign into Serbia where he was defeated by Murad II at Kossovo, the site of the battle of 1389. The 1448 bull fitted a familiar fifteenth-century papal stand-by, issuing crusade credentials as a means of focusing diplomacy, asserting papal authority and, through the sale of indulgences and church taxation, supporting front-line commanders with financial assistance. Only in the 1450s and early 1460s did this pattern stretch to attempts to organise substantial crusading in western Europe in response to the fall of Constantinople (1453) and the defence of Belgrade (1456).
The Fall of Constantinople 1453: Another Crusade that Never Was
Constantinople fell to the Turkish armies of Mehmed II (1451–81) on 29 May 1453 after a fifty-three-day siege. The last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI, was killed during the final assault. Bankrupt, diplomatically isolated, heavily outnumbered, reliant on Italian mercenaries, the defenders of Constantinople, reduced to a beleaguered city state, had been left to face the Turkish heavy artillery and massed infantry without allies. News of the city’s fall and subsequent sack and massacre provoked the most concerted international efforts by the major western powers to gather a grand crusade of the fifteenth century. Horror stories of the slaughter, enslavement and ransoming of Greek civilians excited polemic narratives of barbarism overthrowing civilisation (‘a second death of Homer and Plato’ in the words of the humanist Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II)8 to complement familiar ritualised hysteria and the traditional trope of Christendom in danger. The crisis deepened as the Ottomans consolidated their hold over Serbia (1454–5), threatening Hungary and the middle Danube, and conquered the remaining Frankish and Greek territories on mainland Greece: Athens fell in 1456; the Peloponnese between 1458 and 1460; Venetian Euboea (Negroponte) in 1470. Central Europe, the remaining Venetian holdings in the Aegean and Ionian Seas and the Hospitallers on Rhodes all appeared vulnerable.
Once again, western reaction hardly addressed reality. Byzantium had long been a failed state, its demise the consequence of regional forces not western hostility or indifference. Ottoman rule did not plunge the region into barbaric tyranny, many in the Balkans finding satisfactory degrees of accommodation with the new rulers. The Ottomans avoided systemic religious persecution while providing harsh security and reviving the regional economy, with Constantinople once more the centre of an eastern Mediterranean commercial as well as political empire. European neighbours, trading partners and regional clients adopted pragmatic strategies at odds with the crusade revivalism generated at the papal curia and among sympathetic rulers such as the dukes of Burgundy.9
Nevertheless, from Germany to Spain, a new crusade was aired. Pope Nicholas V (1447–55) issued a crusade bull, Etsi ecclesia Christi (30 September 1453). War with the Turks was considered by the German imperial Reichstag in 1454–5, with Duke Philip of Burgundy (1419–67) present at Regensburg in April 1454. New techniques of publicity and propaganda were employed. Pamphlets circulated widely, exploiting the very recent invention of printing. Nicholas V’s successor, Calixtus III (1455–8), authorised preaching, church taxes and the sale of indulgences, built galleys in a short-lived arsenal on the Tiber, and sent a fleet to the Aegean in 1456–7. This recovered Lemnos, Samothrace and Thasos and defeated a Turkish fleet at Mytilene before raiding the Levant towards Egypt. Calixtus established a separate curial department for proceeds of indulgence sales and clerical taxes, the camera sanctae cruciatae. While clergy complained about taxation, the indulgence campaign went well. Printed forms of sale were introduced. To give a lead, Calixtus sold papal assets including plate and valuable bindings from the Vatican Library founded by Nicholas V. Calixtus’s former employer King Alfonso V of Aragon (1416–58; also king of Naples, 1442–58) took the cross as did the German emperor Frederick III (1440–93), whose Habsburg family lands bordered Hungary. Although Philip of Burgundy did not take the cross, Burgundian commitment was glamorously displayed at Lille in February 1454 during the lavish and gaudy Feast of the Pheasant at which 200 nobles swore to fight the infidel.
136. Epistolae et orationes: Bessarion’s pamphlet on the Turkish war, printed 1471.
Fantasy was not confined to festive theatricals. Duke Philip’s proposal for a campaign in 1455 ignored modest German enthusiasm, the opposition of Charles VII of France (1422–61) and, crucially, Venice’s treaty with the Ottomans in 1454. The death of Nicholas V (April 1455) further postponed action. Apart from taxing his subjects, Duke Philip hardly moved to organise military or naval operations, perhaps surprisingly given his previous sustained patronage of crusading projects and his contributions to fleets to help Rhodes (1429, 1441, 1444) and Constantinople (1444–5). International diplomacy failed to coordinate western policy or investment despite Cardinal John Carvajal’s crusade legation to Hungary (1455–61) during which he oversaw preaching and cross-giving. Alfonso V’s proposal for a massive amphibious attack in 1457 seemed to owe more to a desire to burnish moral credentials than serious policy. Much rhetoric still harked back to historic Holy Land wars of the cross. Deep-seated conflicts of interest and divisions between the western powers prevented any muster of a large international army. Despite significant numbers taking the cross and many more buying indulgences, the limits of practical crusading were further exposed. Thereafter, crusading institutions primarily supplied moral status, public support, finance for modest naval expeditions, and occasional aid for local front-line resistance to the Turks.
Belgrade 1456
The urgency of the Ottoman threat contrasted with the costive responses of western rulers. The ubiquitous use of crusade bulls and preaching chiefly to raise taxes or sell indulgences undermined public confidence, not in the cause or the efficacy of the spiritual rewards so much as in prospects for action. Pope Pius II wryly observed of crusade preaching a few years later: ‘People think our sole object is to amass gold. No one believes what we say. Like insolvent tradesmen we are without credit.’10 Yet preaching and marketing indulgences sustained popular awareness, even alarm, which could translate into active engagement, as shown in events surrounding the defence of Belgrade. In the summer of 1456, Mehmed II advanced up the Danube. The siege began in early July, Mehmed assuming an easy victory as the small garrison was prepared to agree terms. However, the city was unexpectedly reinforced by a substantial army assembled and led by John of Capistrano, a septuagenarian Observant Franciscan enthusiast for crusading and moral renewal.
A prominent figure in
an Order that held a tradition of preaching against Jews and other perceived enemies of the Church, John’s mission had begun in 1454 as he made a round of visits to Burgundy and to the imperial diet. Whilst trying to interest Regent Hunyadi of Hungary in a fanciful scheme for an army of 100,000 crusaders, John toured Hungary between May 1455 and June 1456, a figure of conspicuous sanctity, austerity and honesty which he combined with shrewd organisational skills. His carefully orchestrated progress was unhurried – 375 miles in fourteen months, less than a mile a day – culminating in a grand ceremony at Buda in February 1456 where he received the cross from the papal legate, John of Carvajal. While Hunyadi enlisted the nobility, John, his team of preachers and local bishops recruited non-nobles, exploiting the Hungarian system of military levies known as the militia portalis that provided a ready supply of armed peasants.11 From beyond Hungary, John signed up followers from Austria and Germany including Viennese students, many attracted by his appeal for people not just money. While John’s carefully crafted aura of sanctity later encouraged an exaggerated retrospective hagiography, alongside mundane secular organisation his preaching and charismatic leadership clearly helped inspire a crusader army of many thousands whose numbers and morale played a significant part in relieving Belgrade. Mehmed’s calculation on the modest size of the Belgrade garrison and the repeated preference of Hungarian nobles for accommodation was upset by the appearance of John’s crusaders after 2 July. They altered the military balance, helping Hunyadi break the Turkish naval blockade (14 July) and the defenders repel the main Turkish attack on the night of 21–22 July. On 23 July they led the destructive counter-attack on the Turkish positions as Mehmed prepared to withdraw, his expectations of a quick victory decisively dashed.
137. Moravian fresco of 1468 showing the siege of Belgrade.
The image of simple peasant faith triumphing where noble professionalism had failed proved irresistible. Not only conforming to well-worn polemic tradition, it also reflected the potency of peasant armies in late medieval and early modern Europe mobilised for political or ideological causes and grievances, as seen from the Shepherds’ Crusades of 1251 and 1320 to the Hungarian peasant crusaders’ anti-noble insurrection of 1514 and the German Peasants’ War of 1524–5. The element of social challenge was displayed at Belgrade when John’s crusaders and Hunyadi’s nobles and professionals briefly fell out over the division of booty and chain of command. The crusaders at Belgrade appeared to embody a rhetorical model of practical virtue: temporal success through the highest spiritual standards, with John’s personal charisma and revivalist message providing a dynamic unifying force. Yet, as with other populist movements, John of Capistrano’s crusade proved evanescent, no more than a summer’s dramatic promenade. He disbanded his army immediately its objective had been achieved in late July 1456 and died of the plague in October. While the crusaders had saved Belgrade and the central Danube, it was left to local garrisons, truces and practical accommodations to maintain the integrity of the Hungarian frontier against the Ottomans until the 1520s. Despite constant diplomatic talk, there were no further significant Danubian crusades; the Ottomans continued to consolidate their power from the Black Sea and Serbia to Cilicia. The Belgrade victory receded into poetic and pious commemoration: in 1457, Calixtus III instituted general observance of the Feast of the Transfiguration to be held on 6 August in honour of the day the previous year that news of the Belgrade victory had reached Rome. In England a poetic romance, Capystranus, found its way into print half a century later.
The Crusade of Pius II
When Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (1405–64), prominent humanist scholar, diplomat and late convert to the priesthood, was elected Pope Pius II in 1458, he immediately revived calls for a crusade, a cause he had been advocating for two decades. Closely involved in crusade diplomacy since 1453, he summoned a council at Mantua (summer 1459–January 1460) to discuss it. Pius pressed ahead despite lukewarm international response and deteriorating international prospects: civil war in England; French opposition to what they regarded as Burgundian crusade posturing; and papal involvement in a protracted succession contest in Naples that pitted the French against the Aragonese. Pius’s old-fashioned rhetoric suggested a traditional mass crusade not just to defeat the Ottoman Turks but also recover Jerusalem. This struck some as impractical but also thin cover for an attempt to assert papal authority. Little came from Mantua. Trapped by his cosmic rhetoric and lurid demonisation of the Turks, early in 1462, Pius decided to lead the crusade himself, perhaps the only way to convince a sceptical international community. The preaching campaign relied on conservative rituals of encouragement, the liturgy of taking the cross minutely choreographed down to the placing (on the breast), colour (red), and material (silk or cloth) of the crosses to be sewn onto the clothes of crucesignati.12 Yet, prematurely aged, already an invalid, Pius hardly generated confidence, his gesture appearing more sacrificial than practical, an act of martyrdom not leadership. However, when he renewed the crusade appeal in October 1463, support seemed available from Burgundy and Venice. A fresh plan advocated a smaller, more realistic expedition against the Turks in the western Balkans. Preaching, cross-giving, Holy Land indulgences, privileges and financial arrangements were announced. While trying to attract other Italian states to his scheme, Pius forged a new coalition between Burgundy, Hungary and Venice. Ancona was set for the campaign’s muster. A Venetian fleet would convey the crusaders across the Adriatic to combine with the Hungarians or the Albanian resistance leader Scanderbeg.
On 22 October 1463, Pius formally declared war on Mehmed II. The response was mixed. Despite another lavish crusade fête at Christmas 1463, Philip of Burgundy only despatched 3,000 men under his bastard Anthony in May 1464. While a few other small bands from north of the Alps and Italy moved towards Ancona, only one cardinal provided a galley, Rodrigo Borgia, nephew and protégé of the crusade enthusiast Calixtus III, later notorious as Pope Alexander VI.13 Pius also provided galleys and, in St Peter’s on 18 June 1464, took the cross, possibly the only pope in office to do so to fight the infidel rather than political enemies in Italy. However, when he set out for Ancona in late June, he was already seriously ill. The Venetian fleet commanded by Doge Cristoforo Moro was delayed. Soldiers in the papal army at Ancona began to desert: the curtains of Pius’s litter were said to have been drawn shut to stop the now dying pope see them go. He died on 14 August. His crusade died with him. Pius’s heroic, pathetic pursuit of a grand crusade definitively underlined the difficulty if not futility of such designs, a lesson not lost on his successors. His most tangible contribution to the crusade lay elsewhere, in initiating the process of reserving to the papal crusade treasury the monopoly profits from alum (used to fix dyes in textiles) discovered at Tolfa in the Papal States in 1461.14
From Crusade to Realpolitik
Pius II’s crusade scheme had recognised one element of the new political reality. The immediate frontier with the Turks lay along the Danube and down the Adriatic. Regions such as Croatia became war zones. By 1478, a decade after Scanderbeg’s death, Albania had been absorbed into the Ottoman Empire. In 1480–1 the Turks briefly occupied Otranto on the south-east tip of Italy, a shocking incursion into the heart of western Christendom that provoked another round of hand-wringing, crusade bulls and fund-raising. In the Aegean, the Hospitallers only narrowly survived a long Turkish siege of Rhodes in 1480. The death of Mehmed II in 1481 and an Ottoman succession dispute under Bayezid II (1481–1512) lessened the immediate pressure in the Adriatic: Bayezid even struck a deal in 1495 with western powers to keep his rival claimant, Djem, captive. However, Venice lost its remaining mainland holdings in Greece between 1499 and 1502, including the Adriatic port of Durazzo, while the Ottomans continued to harden their control over Rumelia and completed their annexation of the Black Sea and lower Danube.
138. Crusade economics: alum mines at Tolfa.
Pius’s successors reverted to pragmatism: selling indulgences to fund front-line rulers, a
nd building anti-Ottoman alliances, which in the 1470s included Uzun Hassan, a Turcoman warlord in Azerbaijan, and approaches to the Tartars of the Golden Horde north of the Black Sea, as well as front-line rulers such as Stephen III of Moldavia (1457–1504). Awkwardly, the heretical Hussite ruler of Bohemia, George Podiebrad (1458–71), promoted his own scheme for a new international crusade in 1463 but instead faced a crusade against him in 1466–7. Crusade credentials helped secure a royal title for Hunyadi’s son Matthew Corvinus as king of Hungary (1458–90). The Poles and Hungarians sought rival patriotic solidarity and international advantage by promoting their kingdoms as bastions (antemurales) of Christendom against the infidel. However, political disunity in the west and on the Balkan frontier undermined attempts to gather effective coalitions to combat the Turks. For those on the front line, such as the Moldavians, advantage and survival not ideology determined policy. Innocent VIII’s crusade council of Rome in 1490 proved abortive and Alexander VI’s crusade proclamation of 1500 was largely ignored.
The World of the Crusades Page 43
