by G. J. Meyer
Though Angevin rule continued through the fourteenth century and nearly half of the fifteenth, it brought nothing but conflict and disorder. Partly because of the legacy of the Norman and German and French invaders, partly too because Naples had no major cities other than its capital and therefore almost no urban middle class, what emerged was a feudal society on the northern European model, one more dominated by hereditary landholding barons than any of the other major Italian states. In all of mainland Italy it was the only state whose ruler had royal status, causing it to become known as Il Regno—The Kingdom. As in the territories near Rome, here too the power of the barons became a chronic source of instability. Charles I’s heirs were barely able to hold together their inheritance and could not have done so without the fisc—the financial tribute that the barons owed to the king as overlord. In the fourteenth century the barons, a wild and unruly lot under any circumstances (Machiavelli would describe them as “men inimical to any kind of civilization”), became completely uncontrollable. The weak rulers of the time had no choice but to grant them repeated concessions and yield to their escalating demands. The result was mayhem on a grand scale and a draining away of Naples’s importance in international affairs.
In 1382 Charles I’s great-great-grandson Charles, who thanks to the dynastic maneuvers of his ancestors was king of Hungary, murdered his much-married but childless cousin Queen Joanna I of Naples and seized her throne. Four years later he was succeeded by his son Ladislas, who needed until the end of the century to consolidate his control and then set about to reestablish Naples as a major power. Though often irresponsible in his management of Il Regno’s internal affairs, selling favors to the barons to raise the money with which to finance his campaigns of conquest, he was relentless in encroaching on his neighbors to the north. The conditions of the time favored his ambitions: this was the period of the Great Schism, so that a weakened papacy was unable to maintain control over its Italian territories, and Milan too had been temporarily enfeebled by the premature death of its duke. Ladislas made himself dominant in central Italy. He might have done so in the north as well if he had not died at age fifty-eight. He had been preparing fresh conquests when his health suddenly failed.
Ladislas’s successor was the climactic Angevin disaster, his sister Joanna II. Like the first Joanna she was childless, and her willingness to hand power over to various lovers contributed to making her two decades on the throne yet another period of violence and confusion. We saw earlier how she made Alfonso of Aragon her heir and invited him to move to Naples and help her fend off her Angevin cousins, then changed course and declared successive Angevins to be her heirs instead, thereby ensuring that her death would be followed by continued war for the crown.
When the popes returned to Rome, it became their policy to do everything possible to keep Naples weak. We have seen how Eugenius IV, in order to secure Aragonese support of his claim to be sole legitimate pope, departed from this policy by recognizing Alfonso as king of Naples.
It was a fair enough trade, justified by the circumstances and offering significant benefits to pope and king alike. But it was also dangerous, and its long-term consequences would be momentous. By granting Naples to a strong, capable, and ambitious king who already ruled much of the western Mediterranean, Eugenius’s recognition of Alfonso made Il Regno as powerful as it had ever been, thus setting the stage for generations of further conflict.
3
Pope and King, Friends No More
In May 1456, meeting the deadline that Calixtus had set a year earlier, a Christian war fleet made up of sixteen newly built triremes set forth from the papal port at Ostia, where the Tiber enters the sea some twenty miles downstream from Rome. In command was Cardinal Ludovico Trevisano, known as Scarampo and, as it happened, the same ferocious prelate who, a decade and a half before, had so thoroughly subdued the Papal States and the city of Rome as to make it possible for Pope Eugenius IV to return from exile. By this time Scarampo, vastly rich thanks to the booty from his campaigns, had for some years been peaceably occupied as chamberlain at the papal court. It is not surprising that a man of his aggressive temperament was eager for a return to action.
He sailed first for Naples, where he expected to be joined by Alfonso V’s fleet and perhaps by Bishop Urrea’s wayward squadron as well. He found no one waiting for him, however, because by then the king’s and Urrea’s ships had joined forces and sailed off to the north, launching an unprovoked attack on the city-state of Genoa. Not only would Naples not be contributing to Calixtus’s crusade, therefore, but Genoa, which Alfonso regarded as an obstacle to the expansion of his empire, was now out of the picture as well. Scarampo had no choice but to embark for the East alone. Calixtus, when he learned what had happened, took King Alfonso’s actions as not only a violation of Naples’s responsibilities as a member of the Italian League but as a personal betrayal.
Alfonso was emerging as second only to the Turkish sultan as an obstacle to the fulfillment of Calixtus’s hopes, and the relationship between him and the pope was turning venomous. But the king too felt betrayed: Calixtus, far from being the compliant tool of Naples that Alfonso had expected and others had feared, was proving to be entirely his own man and showed no inclination to take direction from anyone, Spanish or Italian or otherwise. The two were clashing not only over war against the Turks but across a wide array of issues. In the very month that Scarampo’s fleet disappeared over the horizon, Calixtus found it necessary to use thousands of his desperately needed ducats to pay off a mercenary chieftain named Jacopo Piccinino, to get him to break off a siege of Siena that had disrupted the peace in Tuscany. Along the way the pope discovered that from the start, Piccinino had been acting with Alfonso’s encouragement and support. It was another violation of the Italian League, and another betrayal.
It must by this time have seemed to Calixtus that he could expect nothing from those whose help he needed except disappointment and double-dealing. Even the captain-general of the papal forces, one Giovanni Ventimiglia, turned out to be a traitor. He had somehow contrived to get himself taken prisoner just as he stood at the threshold of victory over Piccinino, who was thus able to escape with his forces intact.
It is understandable that Alfonso found it difficult to accept that his onetime secretary, whom he had lifted out of obscurity and put on the path to the papacy, was now his liege lord. The fact that he, proud head of the greatest family in Spain, was obliged as king of Naples to pay a vassal’s obeisance to a mere Borja of Játiva must have seemed a violation of the natural order. To be defied by this same Borja must have seemed an outrage. Frustrated and indignant, Alfonso clearly thought himself justified in stirring up trouble not only in Tuscany and Genoa but in the pope’s own territories. He continued to meddle in the Papal States, encouraging the local barons in their habitual defiance of Rome’s authority. He saw the Orsini in particular as a conduit through which to extend his influence northward, and he made himself their patron in order to do so.
The alienation of pope from king deepened step by painful step. Calixtus alarmed Alfonso by declining to ratify the bulls of legitimization conferred on young Ferrante by his two predecessors, thereby reviving the old question of whether the king’s bastard was entitled to inherit the Neapolitan crown. Next he declared that Alfonso had no right to Benevento and Terracina, two strongholds that lay in the disputed borderlands between Naples and Rome and that the king claimed as rightfully his. The rift became unbridgeable when Alfonso sent a beautiful young woman with whom he had become infatuated, Lucrezia d’Alagna, to Rome to ask Calixtus to annul his forty-year marriage to Maria of Castile. Calixtus had already shown himself willing, within broad limits, to help the king with his wooing. He had agreed to the appointment of a cousin of Lucrezia’s as cardinal-archbishop of Naples, and to the marriage of her sister to Ausias del Milà, one of his own young kinsmen. The annulment of a royal marriage of almost forty years’ duration, however, was more than he felt able to give. Pressed fo
r an answer, he told the young lady, who had been accompanied to Rome by an extravagantly costly entourage and was obviously hoping to become Naples’s queen, that he could not do as she asked because he did not wish to accompany her to hell. That marked the end of civil communications between Naples and Rome.
Before long Calixtus was warning Alfonso that “Your Majesty should know that a pope can depose kings,” and Alfonso was replying that “Your Holiness should know that, should we wish, we shall find a way of deposing a pope.” When Calixtus refused to appoint a bastard son of the bastard Ferrante to the bishopric of Zaragoza in Spain—frustration was driving Alfonso to make increasingly outlandish demands—old resentments hardened into a cold hatred that would last until pope and king were both dead. Alfonso, in a quest for allies among the other rulers of Italy, began arranging what would become a set of marriage alliances with the Sforzas of Milan. His grandson and namesake was married to a daughter of Duke Francesco Sforza, and later a daughter of that union would be married to the third Sforza duke of Milan. The eventual consequences of these arrangements would have horrified Alfonso and Francesco alike had they been able to foresee them.
The pope’s continuing appeals for unity and resistance to the Ottoman onslaught received the friendliest reception, not unnaturally, in those places that were most directly threatened. One such place was the Serbian capital of Belgrade, an Orthodox bulwark against Turkish conquest of the Balkan peninsula and, as long as it could hold out, a shield protecting the rest of eastern Europe. Its survival at this juncture was in large measure the achievement of three extraordinary individuals, two of them sent by Calixtus from Rome. One was possibly the nearest thing to a military genius that Europe produced in the fifteenth century, the Hungarian János Hunyadi, who understood what a catastrophe the fall of Belgrade would be for his homeland and threw himself wholeheartedly into what many others saw as a cause already lost. The second was the Franciscan friar Juan Capistrano, who had been sent to Germany to preach Calixtus’s crusade and, upon learning that a showdown was approaching in Belgrade, recruited his own army of volunteers and, at age seventy, marched it the five hundred miles from Frankfurt to Serbia. The third was a veteran Vatican diplomat, Cardinal Juan de Carvajal, whom Calixtus had dispatched to Hungary to help in whatever way he could. Together, the Hungarian general, the Neapolitan friar, and the Spanish cardinal managed to get the various nationalities and factions gathered at Belgrade to put their differences aside and focus on the threat outside the city’s gates. Drawing on resources made available by Calixtus’s order that all monies collected outside Italy for crusade purposes should be sent directly to Hungary rather than to Rome, they were able to assemble and arm enough men—albeit largely untrained men—to reduce the sultan’s numerical advantage to two against one. On July 22, 1456, a masterful counterattack by Hunyadi so shattered the Ottoman army that the sultan, himself wounded, had to abandon the siege. It was as great a defeat as Mehmed II would suffer in a career studded with victories, and when news of it reached the Vatican, it sparked wild jubilation.
Calixtus, convinced that a miracle had occurred, ordered it to be celebrated annually, thereby making the Feast of the Transfiguration a permanent feature of the liturgical calendar. Good news rarely lasted long where the conflict with the Turks was concerned, however. Just a month after his victory, Hunyadi fell victim to an outbreak of plague probably precipitated by the heaps of rotting corpses in and around Belgrade. Capistrano died of the same cause in October. Nevertheless, what they and Carvajal had achieved stood as proof that the Ottomans were not invincible and that much could be achieved if the Christians learned to cooperate.
The same lesson could be drawn from the accomplishments of Scarampo and his fleet during the eighteen months that they were active in the eastern Mediterranean. In the course of 1457, from their base on the island of Rhodes, the cardinal’s men drove Ottoman forces from the Aegean islands of Lemnos, Thassos, and Samothrace, briefly took possession of the city of Corinth and even of the Acropolis at Athens, and defeated a Turkish fleet at Mytilene. These were inspiring achievements for a small force operating far from home, or should have been. Scarampo sent repeated appeals for more ships, more men, more money. Calixtus tried to help but had little left to give. When he summoned the nations of Europe to a general congress to open in Rome that December, the result was fresh disappointment. Not enough delegates were on hand for discussions to begin in earnest until March, and two months after that the congress was abandoned, having accomplished nothing. Still unsupported, unable to deliver a decisive blow, Scarampo performed a great service nevertheless. Until finally obliged to return to Italy, he kept the sultan’s navy distracted, divided, and off balance. His expedition, like the defense of Belgrade, became a painfully vivid lesson in what might have been.
It is likely that much of Europe owed its safety and survival, at this juncture, to what was happening in the East. The regions where Roman Christianity gave way to the Orthodox faith became the setting for exploits of an epic character. Though most Italians paid little attention, great things were accomplished decade after decade and made an immense and lasting difference. One of the most brilliant of the heroes was Stephen III, who in 1457 at age twenty-four was crowned prince of Moldavia in what is now Romania and immediately launched into a career that over the next forty-seven years would see him defeat one invasion after another by various, always numerically superior, enemies. He won forty-six of his forty-eight battles, repelling a lifelong series of Turkish attacks while also having to fight off the attempts of his Roman Catholic neighbors, Hungary and Poland in particular, to take possession of his homeland. Somehow he managed to improve the prosperity and enrich the cultural life of Moldavia in the midst of endless peril, and after his death he would be canonized a saint by the Orthodox Church.
Better remembered today, for macabre and not entirely imaginary reasons, was Vlad III of Wallachia, like Moldavia an independent principality in the fifteenth century and today part of Romania. Known even in his own time as Dracula (son of the dragon), and to the Turks as “the impaler prince” for his favored method of dispatching enemies, he became voivode or ruler of Wallachia a year before Stephen took charge of Moldavia and was about the same age. Despite his lurid reputation, he was on the whole a good if severely firm ruler, and the intensity of his hatred for the Turks is explained by his life story. In boyhood he had become a hostage of the sultan, his father surrendering him and a brother as security for good behavior, and he was regularly beaten for recalcitrance. The Turks ultimately killed his father and blinded and buried alive an elder brother. Though after achieving his freedom Vlad succeeded in retaking Wallachia from the invaders, this early success simply opened the way to a life of unceasing conflict. Like Stephen, he became an immovable obstacle to Turkish progress west of the Black Sea, and he continued to stand firm until his death in battle at age forty-five. The West owed him, as it owed Stephen, an immense debt. The two kept whole Ottoman armies tied up for decades.
Even more important, and with an even more remarkable story, was the Albanian George Kastrioti, known as Skanderbeg. He, like Vlad Dracula, was given over to the Turks as a hostage in his youth, and in contrast to the Impaler he converted to Islam, entered military service as a janissary, and rose to be a general of cavalry fighting, among other Christian leaders, Hunyadi of Hungary. But in 1443 he switched sides, and a year later won the first of what would ultimately be his more than twenty victories over his erstwhile Turkish comrades. And again the Christian states demonstrated their chronic inability to support, even to refrain from undercutting, one another. Venice, at first delighted with Skanderbeg’s repeated thrashings of the Turks, by 1447 was beginning to be wary of Albania’s growing strength. And so it declared war on Skanderbeg, offering a lifetime pension to anyone who succeeded in killing him and encouraging the Turks to attack him in his rear. In 1448, in the space of a few days, Skanderbeg so completely crushed first the Turks and then the Venetians that the la
tter were obliged to come to terms. Then, his little nation exhausted and desperately in need of support, Skanderbeg offered to become a vassal of Alfonso V, promising to take an oath of fealty as soon as the last Turk had been expelled from Albania (something that was, in fact, never achieved).
Alfonso, so blithely indifferent to Pope Calixtus’s efforts to mount a crusade, was nevertheless happy to take Albania under his wing. Doing so gave him, in the person of Skanderbeg, a brilliantly able ally in his long campaign to elbow Venice aside in the eastern Mediterranean and establish an empire of his own there. It provided benefits closer to home as well. When a baronial rebellion erupted in Naples, Skanderbeg sent some of his famously ferocious light cavalry, the stradioti, to help Alfonso put it down. He repeated the favor in Sicily a year later, both suppressing an uprising and helping Alfonso to show enough strength to discourage a threatened invasion by the Turks. Cynical self-interest, however, remained endemic among the Italians. When the Albanian capital came under siege at one point, Venetian merchants happily sold supplies to the Turkish invaders.
By a cruel irony, Skanderbeg’s success became a factor in the fall of Constantinople: his ability to turn back one invasion after another encouraged other princes to resist Ottoman expansion as well, and this persuaded the Turks that the ancient Christian capital could not be allowed to survive. Four years after they took it, in 1457, they felt ready to attack Albania again and did so with an army of seventy thousand men. On September 2 of that year, true to form, Skanderbeg whipped them so thoroughly that the sultan agreed to a five-year truce. Once again, however, Albania was exhausted physically and financially, and this time Skanderbeg’s appeals to Alfonso V were ignored. He next appealed to Rome, and though Calixtus’s response was pathetically feeble, it appears to have been the best he could do: the immediate dispatch of the only available galley, a gift of money so inadequate as to be practically irrelevant, and a promise of more at the earliest opportunity. Skanderbeg cannot have been greatly consoled to have conferred upon him the meaningless title Athleta Christi—Champion of Christ. He was essentially alone, facing the dead certainty that, truce or no truce, the Turks would be back in their scores of thousands.
