With the Genoese war now safely behind her, Venice set about rebuilding and extending her commercial empire. By the first years of the fifteenth century, thanks to a combination of political opportunism, diplomatic finesse, business acumen and an occasional touch of blackmail, she had acquired considerable territories on the Italian mainland, including the cities of Padua, Vicenza and Verona and continuing westward as far as the shores of Lake Garda–to say nothing of Scutari and Durazzo in southern Dalmatia; Nauplia, Argos and her old bases of Modone and Corone in the Morea; and most of the islands of the Cyclades and the Dodecanese. At last she could treat as an equal with nations like England, France and Austria–in her own right, as one of the great powers of Europe.
The Venetians had never considered themselves Italians. Cut off as they were from the terra firma by their lagoon, from earliest times their gaze had been fixed on the east, the source of almost all their commerce and their wealth. Thus their situation was as different from that of the cities of mainland Italy as it was possible for it to be. These cities too were independent republics, but they lacked Venice’s extraordinary political constitution, with its intricate system of checks and balances that made it impossible for any one individual or family to acquire a stranglehold on the state. It was therefore inevitable that sooner or later, at some moment of foreign threat or domestic crisis, each would feel the need of a leader, and more than likely that, when the threat or the crisis was past, that leader would prove a good deal harder to get rid of than he had been to summon. Then, almost before the people knew it, he would have founded a dynasty.
This pattern–which, with minor variations, we find repeated time and again among the major cities of north and central Italy–was not without its advantages. The despot might well prove a tyrant, but he would depend for his position and his prestige on cutting a dash; this meant surrounding himself with a dazzling court, showing himself a munificent patron of the arts–and, incidentally, providing a perfect setting in which the Renaissance could flourish. One of the earliest, Can Grande della Scala of Verona, gave generous support to Dante and Giotto; other names that spring almost unbidden to the mind are those of the Visconti and the Sforza of Milan, the Gonzaga of Mantua, the Este of Ferrara, the Malatesta of Rimini, the Montefeltro of Urbino and above all the Medici of Florence.
What lent additional splendour to these Renaissance courts was the fact that, although the various rulers were almost constantly at war, they seldom if ever fought in person. Such fighting as needed to be done was the work of the condottieri, mercenary generals who sold their swords to the highest bidder. They were not invariably satisfactory; devoid of any emotional loyalty to their cause, they were often dilatory and occasionally duplicitous. But they spared their employers the discomforts of campaigning, allowing them still more time to pursue the arts of peace, and at their best they could be quite extraordinarily effective.
To the south of these Renaissance courts was the Papacy, now–with the return of the Popes from Avignon–on the threshold of a dramatic transformation. Cardinal Albornoz, the papal legate to Italy, had reorganised and consolidated the Papal States; with Venice, Milan, Florence and Naples, Rome was once again one of the five major powers in Italy. It was unfortunate, however, that at this moment the Church was once again rent by a particularly violent schism. Urban VI had so antagonised the cardinals of both the French and the Italian factions114 that they had declared his election null and void and had elected a rival Pope, Clement VII, in his place. Urban, firmly entrenched in Rome, had refused to yield, and so the dispute had dragged on, with new Popes being elected on both sides as necessary. Finally, in March 1409, a General Council of the Church met in Pisa, repudiated both the rival Popes and elected a single successor. Its choice fell on the Cardinal Archbishop of Milan who, having started his life as an orphaned beggar boy in Crete, was to end it as Pope Alexander V.
But the Council had made one disastrous mistake. By calling the two rival Popes to appear before it–and declaring them contumacious when they refused–it implied its superiority over the Papacy, a principle which neither of the rival pontiffs could have been expected to endorse. Before long it became clear that its only real effect had been to saddle Christendom with three Popes instead of two. But it was unrepentant, and when Pope Alexander died suddenly in May 1410 it lost no time in electing his successor.
Baldassare Cossa, who now joined the papal throng under the name of John XXIII,115 was widely believed at the time to have poisoned his predecessor. Whether he actually did so is open to doubt. He had, however, unquestionably begun life as a pirate; and a pirate, essentially, he remained. Morally and spiritually, he reduced the Papacy to a level of depravity unknown since the days of the ‘pornocracy’ in the tenth century. A contemporary chronicler records in shocked amazement the rumour current in Bologna–where Cossa had been papal governor–that during the first year of his pontificate he had violated no fewer than 200 matrons, widows and virgins, to say nothing of a prodigious number of nuns. His score over the three following years is regrettably not recorded; he seems, however, to have maintained a respectable average, for on 29 May 1415 he was arraigned before another General Council, this time at Constance. As Gibbon delightedly noted, ‘the most scandalous charges were suppressed: the vicar of Christ was only accused of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy, and incest; and after subscribing his own condemnation, he expiated in prison the imprudence of trusting his person to a free city beyond the Alps.’
Next, in early July, Pope Gregory XII–Urban’s third successor–was prevailed upon to abdicate with honour, with the promise that he would rank second in the hierarchy, immediately after the future Pope–a privilege that was the more readily accorded in view of the fact that, since he was by now approaching ninety and looked a good deal older, it was not thought likely that he would enjoy it for long. Indeed, two years later he was dead. By then, the anti-Pope Benedict XIII had been deposed in his turn, and with the election of Otto Colonna as Pope Martin V in 1417, the schism was effectively at an end.
It was Martin who, more than anyone else, was responsible for the Renaissance Papacy. Entering Rome in 1420 and continuing where Albornoz had left off, he took in hand the chaotic papal finances; in a largely ruined city with a population reduced to some 25,000, he initiated a programme of restoration and reconstruction of churches and public buildings; he strengthened papal power by dissolving the Council of Constance; and he succeeded–at least to some degree–in bringing under his control the Church in France, which had become quite impossibly arrogant and overbearing during the years of the Avignon Popes. Himself a member of one of the oldest and most distinguished Roman families, he took the first significant steps in transforming the College of Cardinals and the curia from the genuinely international bodies that they had been heretofore into institutions that were predominantly Italian. (This aroused much criticism at the time, but it enabled him to create the first really efficient curia.) Finally, he re-established order in the Papal States.
The Papal States should never have existed. They were founded on the so-called Donation of Constantine,116 a story deliberately fabricated by the curia in the early eighth century according to which Constantine the Great, on moving his capital to Constantinople in 330, had conferred upon Pope Sylvester I dominion over Rome and ‘all the provinces, places and civitates of Italy and the Western regions’. No one thought to doubt its veracity until 1440, when the Renaissance humanist Lorenzo Valla proved the document on which it was based to be a forgery; by that time the six states had long been a fait accompli. Papal control over them varied considerably; Ferrara and Bologna, for example, were allowed almost complete self-government, while Pesaro and Forlì were kept on a much tighter leash, with the Popes frequently imposing their own vicars. All six, however, were obliged in one way or another to provide an annual subsidy to the papal coffers; together, they were often the Papacy’s chief source of income.
Pope Martin’s death in 1431 left his work still
unfinished. His two separate responsibilities–on the one hand, that of re-establishing papal supremacy over the conciliar movement (an inevitable consequence of the recent schism) and, on the other, that of defending papal lands against his neighbours and several rapacious condottieri–had left him little time for anything else. His successor, Eugenius IV, was forced out of Rome three years later by a republican revolution and spent the next nine years in exile in Florence. There, however, he scored what appeared at the time to be a major diplomatic victory. Early in 1438 the Byzantine Emperor John VIII Palaeologus had arrived in Italy with a huge following–it included inter alia the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, eighteen metropolitans and twelve bishops, including the brilliant young Bessarion, Metropolitan of Nicaea, and Isidore, Bishop of Kiev and all Russia–with the object of reaching some sort of accommodation with the Church of Rome. Neither John nor any of his subjects had the slightest wish to reconcile their differences on theological grounds, but his empire seemed doomed and he knew that while it remained in Roman eyes heretical there was no hope of persuading the west to send a military expedition against the ever more threatening Turk. The conference began its deliberations at Ferrara, but subsequently moved to Florence–where, on 5 July 1439, an official Decree of Union was signed by all but one of the senior Greek churchmen. The Latin text of the decree began with the words Laetentur Coeli–‘let the heavens rejoice’. But the heavens, as it soon became clear, had precious little reason to do so.
The Emperor John had a sad homecoming. Back in Constantinople, he found the Council of Florence universally condemned. The Patriarchs of Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria had already disowned the delegates who had signed on their behalf. These and the other signatories were condemned as traitors to the faith, castigated throughout the capital and in several cases physically attacked–to the point where in 1441 a large number of them issued a public manifesto, regretting that they had ever put their names to the decree and formally retracting their support for it. Suddenly, the Emperor’s own position on the throne looked distinctly uncertain. True, there were other distinguished pro-unionists who might have given him their support, but Bessarion of Nicaea, who had converted to Catholicism in 1439 and had almost immediately been made a cardinal, had left Constantinople in disgust within a few months of his return and taken the first available ship back to Italy, never again to set foot on Byzantine soil. His friend Isidore of Kiev, who had also been admitted to the cardinalate, was less lucky; on his return to Moscow he was deposed and arrested, though later he too managed to escape to Italy.117
For Pope Eugenius, on the other hand, there was no uncertainty. Church union now existed, at least on paper; and it was now his duty to raise a Crusade against the enemies of Byzantium. Were he not to do so, he would not only be going back on his word to the Emperor; he would be proclaiming to all that the Council of Florence had been a failure, the Laetentur Coeli worthless. In eastern Europe if not in the west, he found willing recruits, and an army some 25,000 strong, composed largely of Serbs and Hungarians, set off in the late summer of 1443 under the Hungarian King Ladislas, the Serb George Brankovich and the brilliant John Hunyadi, Voyevod of Transylvania. It began promisingly enough: the cities of Nish and Sofia had both fallen by Christmas. The Ottoman Sultan Murad II, simultaneously threatened with serious risings by the Karaman Turks in Anatolia, by George Kastriotes–the famous Skanderbeg–in Albania and by the Emperor’s brother Constantine Palaeologus, Despot of the Morea,118 saw that he must come to terms and invited the three leaders to his court at Adrianople. The result was a ten-year truce, granted by the Sultan in return for a number of not very generous concessions in the Balkan peninsula.
When the news reached Rome, Eugenius and his curia were horrified. The Crusade had been intended to drive the Turks out of Europe; by the terms of this truce, they seemed almost as firmly entrenched as ever. The Pope’s right-hand man, Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini, left at once for Ladislas’s court at Szegedin, where he formally absolved the King from his oath to the Sultan and virtually ordered the Crusade on its way again. Ladislas should have refused. Absolution or no absolution, he was breaking his solemn word to the Sultan. Besides, his forces were by now dangerously diminished. Many of the erstwhile Crusaders had already left for home, and Brankovich–who had had his Serbian territories restored to him–was delighted with the truce and determined to observe it. But the young King decided to do as he was bidden.
In September he was back with what was left of the army, and accompanied now by the cardinal himself. Somehow he managed to make his way across Bulgaria to the Black Sea near Varna, where he expected to find his fleet awaiting him. The allied ships, however–mostly Venetian–were otherwise engaged. Murad, on hearing of Ladislas’s betrayal, had rushed back from Anatolia with an army of 80,000 men, and the ships were at that moment striving to prevent him from crossing the Bosphorus. They failed. Forcing his way across the strait, the furious Sultan hurried up the Black Sea coast and on 10 November 1444, just outside Varna, with the broken treaty pinned to his standard, tore into the Crusading army. The Christians fought with desperate courage; outnumbered, however, by more than three to one, they had no chance. Ladislas fell; so, shortly afterwards, did Cesarini. The army was annihilated; of its leaders, only John Hunyadi managed to escape, with a handful of his men. The last Crusade ever to be launched against the Turks in Europe had ended in catastrophe.
Resistance was not yet quite over. The following summer the Despot Constantine embarked on a raiding expedition through central Greece as far as the Pindus Mountains and into Albania. He was welcomed everywhere he went. Meanwhile his own governor of Achaia, with a small company of cavalry and foot-soldiers, crossed to the north shore of the Gulf of Corinth and drove the Turks out of western Phocis (the region around Delphi). This last insult was too much for Murad. Only a few months before, he had abdicated his throne in favour of his son; now he furiously resumed his old authority to take vengeance on these upstart Greeks. In November 1446 he swept down into the Morea at the head of an army of some 50,000. Phocis was once again overrun; Constantine hurried back to the Hexamilion, a great defensive fortification running six miles across the Isthmus of Corinth, roughly along the route of the present canal, determined to hold it at all costs. But Murad had brought with him something the Greeks had never seen before: heavy artillery. For five days his huge cannon pounded away at the wall, and on 10 December he gave the order for the final assault. Most of the defenders were taken prisoner or massacred; Constantine himself barely managed to make his way back to his capital at Mistra.
In one respect he was lucky: his capital was spared. It had been saved by one thing only: an unusually early and severe winter. Had the Sultan launched his campaign in May or June rather than in November, his army would have had no difficulty in reaching the furthest corners of the Peloponnese; Mistra would have been reduced to ashes, the Despot would have been killed–and Byzantium would have been deprived of its last Emperor.
On 31 October 1448 John VIII died in Constantinople, to be succeeded by his brother Constantine. Of all the Byzantine Emperors John is in appearance the best known, thanks to his portrait in the famous fresco by Benozzo Gozzoli that adorns the chapel of the Palazzo Medici– Riccardi in Florence. He had hardly deserved his posthumous celebrity; but he had done his best, and had worked diligently for what he believed to be right. Besides, the situation was already past all hope; anything he attempted would have been doomed to failure. And perhaps it was just as well. Byzantium, devoured from within, threatened from without, scarcely capable any longer of independent action, reduced now to an almost invisible dot on the map of Europe, needed–more, perhaps, than any once-great nation has ever needed–the coup de grâce. It had been a long time coming. Now, finally, it was at hand.
Four months after John’s death, on 13 February 1451 in Adrianople after an apoplectic seizure, Sultan Murad followed him to the grave. He was succeeded by his third son, Mehmet–the two older brothers ha
ving died some years before, at least one of them in suspicious circumstances–who was now eighteen. Mehmet was a serious, scholarly boy; by the time of his accession he is said to have been fluent not only in his native Turkish but in Arabic, Greek, Latin, Persian and Hebrew. On hearing the news he hastened to the capital, where he confirmed his father’s ministers in their places or appointed them elsewhere. In the course of these ceremonies Murad’s chief widow arrived to congratulate him on his succession. Mehmet received her warmly and engaged her for some time in conversation; she returned to the harem to find that her infant son had been murdered in his bath. The young Sultan, it seemed, was not one to take chances.
Within months of his succession Mehmet had concluded treaties with Hunyadi, Brankovich and the Doge of Venice, Francesco Foscari; messages of goodwill had been sent to the Prince of Wallachia, to the Knights of St John in Rhodes and to the Genoese lords of Lesbos and Chios. To the ambassadors despatched by Constantine XI in Constantinople the Sultan is said to have replied almost too fulsomely, swearing by Allah and the Prophet to live at peace with the Emperor and his people, and to maintain with him those same bonds of friendship that his father had maintained with John VIII. Perhaps it was this last promise that put the Emperor on his guard; he seems to have been one of the first European rulers to sense that the young Sultan was not all that he seemed. On the contrary, he was very dangerous indeed.
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