Sea of Faith

by Stephen O'Shea

  Frederick's aesthetic and intellectual appreciation of the Islamic east—he may well have been the first Orientalist—was complemented by the wholly pragmatic acceptance of the Muslim Mediterranean by a growing force in the Christian west. The Italian maritime republics, particularly Genoa and Venice, had shoved aside Jewish and Greek traders in the eastern Mediterranean and come to monopolize commerce in the region. They had no quarrel with Islam; indeed, the Italians may be said to have had brains and no scruples, so intelligently did they flout repeated pleas from the pope to desist from trading with the infidel. The merchants knew that Christendom was changing and that demand for the spices and luxuries of the east would continue growing. No longer was sumptuary dress and ostentatious display the preserve of a few families of lords and ladies; in the prosperous thirteenth century, during which western Europe was spared major convulsive wars, an emerging class of townsmen—and their wives—sought to emulate the splendor of their social betters. Stadtluft macht frei—town air makes men free—ran the medieval axiom; it also made them free-spending.

  From their timorous beginnings around the year 1000, these merchant navies of Italy—and of Catalonia—now boldly sailed to all points of the Tyrrhenian, Adriatic, Aegean, and Black seas and to all the ports of the Middle East. Adventurers such as Marco Polo retraced the spice route all the way east to the court of the Mongol khan. Their success had been greatly abetted by the crusaders, whose opening up of the Palestinian and Lebanese coastline had given the merchants a base from which to weave a network of commercial contacts in Muslim Aleppo and Damascus and beyond. After a time, it became clear that trade was possible no matter what the confessional complexion of a city, and that the Christian merchants in Acre and other ports of Outremer would not be drawn into another bloody debacle in the Galilean wilderness for the sake of some otherworldly ideal. Jerusalem was the city on the hill, but not the water: Frederick's reappropriation of the city lasted barely fifteen years, as the wealthy coastal communities of Outremer turned their backs on it. That, and incessant internecine strife, made it easy prey for recapture by the Muslims in 1244.

  In ports they did not control, the Italians and Catalans were given their own trading counters—called funduqs—that also included living quarters, warehouses, baths, and chapels. Under the Ayyubids, especially the broad-minded al-Kamil, few hindrances were put in the way of Latin traders working in Alexandria, Damietta, and Cairo. The successor dynasty in Egypt, the Mamluks, proved just as hospitable, reaping considerable profits from directing the trade of the Indian Ocean up the Red Sea and into their souks, where the Europeans paid stiff tariffs for merchandise. Venice, a commercial oligarchy, created the forerunner of the modern diplomatic corps in these years, its resident merchants championing the interests of their state and reporting back on the developments in their host city. The Pisans, thanks to the mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci, the son of a funduq ambassador in Bougie (Bejaia, Algeria), introduced Arabic numerals into the lengthening account ledgers of the westerners. And the Catalans, eager to get at the gold from sub-Saharan Africa, descended on the coast of the Maghrib as traders rather than warriors. The Romance lexicon of commerce came to be enriched with such borrowings from the Arab funduq as cheque, tariff, bazaar, traffic, and arsenal. If at times their Muslim partners punished these merchants for supplying logistical help for various crusading efforts against Ifriqiya and Egypt, the later Middle Ages nonetheless witnessed a steady increase in trade. For Muslim and Christian alike, God's business sometimes came a distant second to one's own.

  This commercial convivencia did not, however, shut down the imperative of war. The Mamluks, congenial though they were to the Italians, pursued a campaign of belligerence in the Levant. Under Sultan Baybars, a brilliant and merciless general, the Mamluks succeeded in stopping the Mongols at the battle of Ayn Jalut in the Jordan Valley. Following that epochal triumph in 1260, Baybars and his successors turned their ferocious attentions on the Latins. The Krak des Chevaliers fell, as did Marqab, Tortosa, and all the other outposts of the Christian Levant. The great city of Antioch, one of the five sees of Christianity, was so comprehensively sacked by Baybars that it never recovered. In 1291 the last holdout, Acre, was stormed amid scenes of dreadful massacre—the Mamluks were not led by a magnanimous Saladin. The merchants, deprived of their footing in Palestine, moved their operations to Cyprus, where the descendants of Guy de Lusignan, the loser at Hattin, had established a kingdom. From there, they resumed trading with their titular enemies, as if, incredibly, nothing had happened.

  Attitudes around the sea of faith were slowly being transformed, the age-old enmities whittled away by the workings of economic intercourse. The struggle between the two faiths for primacy was far from over, but both the aristocratic Frederick II and the bourgeois merchants pointed to a future in which curiosity and self-interest might check the reflex of bigotry, or at least the demonizing bred of incomprehension. From Majorca at the close of the thirteenth century, a lone voice spoke wistfully of a dream of nonviolence. Although the Franciscan Ramon Llull ended his life plumping for bloody crusade, the call to unity he wrote in his youth would have been unthinkable a hundred years earlier:

  Ah! What a great good fortune it would be if . . . we could all—every man on earth—be under one religion and belief, so that there would be no more rancor and ill will among men, who hate each other because of diversity and contrariness of beliefs and of sects! And just as there is only one God, Father, Creator, and Lord of everything that exists, so all peoples could unite and become one people, and that people be on the path to salvation, under one faith and one religion, giving glory and praise to our Lord God.

  That pious hope remained unrealizable. What Llull could not anticipate was that a new era of rancor and diversity was about to begin, coming not from his native Majorca, but from lands far to the east.

  Gallipoli. The small town, now called Gelibolu, overlooks one end of a sixty-kilometer-long strait known in antiquity as the Hellespont, in the Middle Ages as St. George's Arm, and in the present day as the Dardanelles. Here Asia meets Europe. To the southwest of Gallipoli, a peninsula of the same name—a storied battleground of the First World War—stretches to the Aegean and forms the wooded European shore of the strait. To the east, the Dardanelles opens up into the expanse of the Sea of Marmara, which in turn narrows at Istanbul to form the strait of the Bosporus, leading to the Black Sea. Medieval kings and sultans knew that if ever Islam were to take hold in Europe, it would somehow have to find a way across this watery frontier—just as it had done centuries earlier at the western edge of the Mediterranean, when Tariq and his Berbers rowed across the Strait of Gibraltar. The eastern crossing was eventually made at Gallipoli, thanks to an act of God.

  On March 2, 1354, an earthquake flattened the fortress town. For its Greek inhabitants, survivors of the Black Death pandemic less than a decade earlier, the quake was one calamity too many. They deserted their ruined town and clambered aboard their ships in search of safer havens, leaving a site of strategic importance unguarded and empty, there for the taking. It was not long before their Turkish neighbors on the Asian side noticed their absence. By the time the heat of the summer had settled on the land, the Turks had occupied and refortified Gallipoli, the first of their stepping-stones to a European empire. With that, the final era of the sea of faith had begun. The monotheisms used to justify medieval collisions of armies would eventually be replaced, under the multinational state soon to be formed, by arguments of self-interest. Religion was still present in sanctioning and sanctifying aggression, but it would take a backseat to the realities of commerce and the dictates of naked imperialism. If the merchants of Genoa and Venice had been the harbingers of this change, the Turks brought it about.

  The settlers of Gallipoli were the Ottomans, a heretofore obscure Turkish clan of seminomads whose achievements would far eclipse those of their settled forebears, the Seljuks of Rum. In Asia Minor, what had begun at Manzikert would be finished by the
Ottomans—their rule saw the definitive disappearance of Hellenism from the heartland of Byzantium. In Europe, their role was to be more nuanced, for in founding a multiethnic and multiconfessional empire they would, despite the terror and atrocity attendant upon their initial conquests, create as enduring a moment of convivencia as that of Umayyad al-Andalus. This facet of the Ottoman ascendancy is sometimes overlooked. Through the lens of nineteenth-century Balkan nationalists, when the Ottoman Empire was, as has been nicely put, "a prodigy of decay," the early days of Turkey in Europe came also to be seen as the wellspring of all evil, a dead hand impeding the progress of man. In fact, the Ottomans in their first centuries created a vibrant amalgam of conflict and coexistence, one that was worthy of the rich variety of cultures to have arisen around the Mediterranean. If the Ottomans, like many in their time, were practitioners of acts nowadays decried as "medieval" in their cruelty, they nonetheless helped bridge the gap to the modern—and their opportunistic crossing of the strait at Gallipoli set in motion the change.

  They had been on the doorstep of Europe for years. Originally a minor clan of the Seljuk confederacy that had been left in tatters by Mongol depredations, the Ottomans, or Osmanlis, first rode into view under their eponymous leader, Osman, at the start of the fourteenth century. Granted a beylik—a petty prinicipality—in the northwestern extremity of Anatolia, Osman set about snapping up the remnants of Constantinople's holdings in Asia. From Bursa, their capital south of the Marmara, the Ottoman ghazis—warriors of the faith—waged a relentless campaign of territorial expansion. They were fortunate in having three long-lived and extremely capable warlords during this time: Osman, who reigned from 1300 to 1326; Orhan (1326—60); and Mu-rad I (1360—89). Born generals and, like all the early Ottomans, raised in the saddle, these leaders enthusiastically attacked Christian and Muslim alike. As the number of rival Turkish princelings in Anatolia steadily dwindled under their assault, the rough and ready of every stripe—Turkoman nomads, Christian adventurers—flocked to the Ottoman banners. By the time Orhan gazed across the Dardanelles, he had a formidable force behind him.

  The Ottomans were also fortunate in that the Europe they beheld in the middle of the fourteenth century was every bit as muddled as Anatolia. The collapse of Byzantine rule in Europe following the Fourth Crusade's sack of Constantinople had never been repaired. A coup d'etat engineered by Genoa regained Constantinople for the Greeks in 1261—in exchange for supplanting Venice in Levantine trade—and a competent dynasty, the Palaeologi, came to power, but never again would the Byzantines exercise control over their once-vast European territories. They were left with a pitiful rump of an empire that comprised parts of the Peloponnese, the city of Thessalonica, the Thracian hinterland around the city of Adrianople, and the capital itself. Everything else was in play: by the sea, the ports of the Greek and Balkan mainland and the islands of the Aegean saw repeated wars by the rapacious Italian maritime republics; inland, the forested highlands of the Balkans witnessed the rise and fall of ephemeral empires and evanescent baronies. The sole kingdom to come close to duplicating Byzantine glory in the Balkans, the Serbian empire of Stephen Dushan, would fall apart into squabbling principalities on his death in 1355.

  For the Balkans of these years, the sole unifying factor was cultural, the Slavs adopting the trappings and titles of their former Greek masters and, in the case of the Serbs and Bulgars, establishing their own independent patriarchates, an act of imitation and originality all at the same time. As the Ottomans contemplated their move into Europe, what has been called a "Byzantine commonwealth" of religious and cultural expression was alive and thriving in the Balkans. However sublime, a civilization gazing toward the monks of Mount Athos for guidance was unsuited to repel a pragmatic invader—especially one that cared not a whit if that cultural commonwealth prospered or withered. For the Ottomans, power mattered, not faith or language. When they looked to Europe, they saw not the beauty of Slavic Christendom but a fissiparous feudal maze. The formidable unitary empire of the Byzantines was gone—Europe was, in practice, Anatolia all over again.

  And again fortune smiled on the Turks. Prior to establishing their permanent bridgehead at Gallipoli, the Ottomans had been invited into Europe—paid handsomely, in effect, to conduct an exploratory razzia. The occasion was a Byzantine civil war over the Palaeologi succession at midcentury. The result of the Turkish reconnaissance can hardly be overstated—the hungry Ottomans acquired a firsthand knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of the Christian forces and, just as crucially, saw the pastureland of Thrace and heard of the mineral riches beyond the mountains in the verdant interior. Orhan also had a good look at basileus John VI Cantacuzenus' three beautiful daughters, one of whom, Theodora, he demanded—and got—in marriage. He was, by many accounts, deeply smitten.

  Once Orhan took Gallipoli, he no longer needed permission to visit. The years that followed saw an almost uninterrupted series of Ottoman victories. Thrace was overrun, Thessaly threatened. The town of Adrianople, notorious for the death of Emperor Valens at the hands of the Visigoths a millennium earlier, became the capital of the Ottoman world under the name of Edirne. The Bulgars and even the Byzantines became tribute-paying vassals to the triumphant sultan. In 1371, the chimera of a south Slav empire, one that reached all the way to the warm waters of the Mediterranean, was smashed forever. At the Marica River, to the west of Edirne, the Ottomans routed the Serbs, who were forced to retreat permanently behind the mountainous walls of Macedonia. Marica, the most important battle in subduing the region, was soon followed by other Ottoman feats of arms. In 1389 Sultan Murad I assembled his forces and marched far inland to the crossroads of the southern Balkans, near the watershed of the Aegean and Black seas. There, on a desolate upland called the Field of the Blackbirds, or Kosovo Polje, the Ottomans and their Christian allies met a combined Serb and Bosnian army supplemented by Hungarians and Albanians.

  The battle of Kosovo, not the far more decisive encounter at Marica, has lived on in the folk memory of the Balkans. An elaborate congeries of religious and nationalistic myth similar to the fog surrounding Las Navas de Tolosa, Kosovo became an allegory for the martyrdom of the Serbs at the hands of the Turks. For all the prose and poetry connected to the battle—much of it composed centuries afterward—we can be certain only that the principal leader of the Serbian armies, Prince Lazar Hrebeljanovic, was killed sometime in the clash, and that Sultan Murad, too, met his end there, perhaps assassinated. Otherwise, the battle may even have been a draw rather than an outright Ottoman victory.

  The many monuments and chapels dedicated to Kosovo tell a fuller story, of which there are three main narrative strands: the beheading of a defiant Prince Lazar by the Turks; the treacherous desertion of one Vuk Brankovic and his men, whose actions absolved the Serbs of responsibility for the defeat; and, above all else, the bravery of the hero-assassin of the sultan, Milos Kobilic, who wormed his way to the great Ottoman's side by pretending to be a traitor. This last personage, whom some historians unkindly believe to be a total fabrication, is an especially powerful element of the Kosovo myth, epitomizing love of country grandly sweeping away any petty concern of personal survival. In 1914 it was thought providential that Serbia's most famous assassin, Gavrilo Princip, shot the archduke in Sarajevo on a June 28, the day celebrated as the anniversary of Kobilic's deed. Whatever the truth behind the Kosovo story, it remains one of the most protean legacies that the struggle between medieval Muslim and Christian armies has bequeathed to the present day, an argument for faith, self-sacrifice, resistance to tyranny, and national solidarity. Even those figures with a far greater supranational resonance in collective memory—Martel at Poitiers or Saladin at Hattin—cannot match Kosovo's Shakespearean cocktail of betrayal, martyrdom, and murder.

  The monument to the battle of 1389 at Kosovo Polje.

  For the Turks of the time, the battle was a milestone for entirely different reasons. The killing of Murad represented an unprecedented stumble in the Ottoman
march to empire, deplored in subsequent Turkish chronicles. That misstep was only partially rectified by his son and successor, Beyazit I, also known as Yilderim (Thunderbolt) for his mercurial temperament and actions—on learning of his father's death, to take but one example, he promptly gouged out the eyes of his elder brother. Eager to consolidate power gained through this deed, Beyazit quickly made peace with the Serbs after Kosovo and cultivated the friendship of their leaders. Stefan Lazarevic, the son of the slain Lazar, became a faithful vassal of the Turks and participated in many of Beyazit's campaigns in Europe and Asia. Stefan's sister, Olivera, wed the Ottoman sultan, thereby cementing the bonds between Turk and Serb. Given the tales that grew up around this moment of Balkan history, it is ironic that Kosovo, in reality, ushered in close to a century of alliance between the two peoples.

  Nor were the Ottomans completely unwelcome in other parts of the Balkans. In the territories conquered outright by the Turks, many of the peasants who had fled began returning to the land once the customary horrors of ghazi raiding and slaving had subsided and the sultan's governance taken control. The new dispensation was seen to have its advantages, principally in the easing of the common man's feudal burden, as the Ottoman system of landholding demanded far fewer compulsory days of work on the lord's manor. Moreover, not all churches became mosques, and provided the new punitive taxes were paid, the commonwealth of priest and archimandrite could still guide its flocks, with the blessing and encouragement of the sultan. A tentative convivencia, in short, had settled on the lands.

  Still, the harshness of conquest should not be washed away in rose water. Where the Ottomans did innovate in a malevolent way was in the establishment of the yeni ceri (new troops), or Janissaries. These were Christian youngsters taken from their families, in what became a regular cull of the Balkans, to learn the techniques of war in the Ottoman capital and serve as the sultan's praetorian regiments. This boy tribute, the cause of boundless heartbreak over the centuries in the fastnesses of the Balkans, became a pillar propping up the Ottoman state, arguably as important as Islam itself. Forcibly converted and forbidden to marry, the Janissary youths formed the first permanent standing army of the mare nostrum since the Roman Empire and provided an institutional counterpoint to the ghazis of the early Ottoman ascendancy. The nomadic ghazis, distressed at the settling down brought on by success, pined for the simpler days of border raiding and rapine. The uprooted Janissaries would anchor the empire; the rootless ghazis, provide it with its ethos of constant expansion.