A History of the Crusades

by Jonathan Riley-Smith

  One prominent crusading front, the Baltic, had come close to disappearing altogether by 1500. The baptism in 1386 of the Lithuanian grand prince, Jogailo, and his promise to assist in the conversion of his pagan subjects, ultimately doomed the crusading rationale of the Teutonic Order’s warfare against the Lithuanians; it also threatened the knights’ hold on their Prussian Ordensstaat (order-state), in so far as Jogailo’s conversion was associated with his marriage to Queen Jadwiga of Poland, the order’s principal Catholic antagonist, and with the personal union of the two states. The full difficulty of the new strategic situation facing the Teutonic Knights took some time to emerge. The order proclaimed the Christianization of Lithuania to be a sham, and the flow of volunteers from the West was not noticeably affected, while it took some decades to bring about the concentration of Polish and Lithuanian resources against the Ordensstaat.

  From 1410 onwards, however, disasters came thick and fast. On 15 July 1410 the order’s army suffered a terrible defeat at the hands of the Poles and Lithuanians at the battle of Tannenberg. This increased the knights’ dependence upon the help of volunteers from the West. But a few years later their representatives at the council of Constance failed to persuade the council to assist the order against its enemies, and the flow of volunteer knights to Prussia shrank to almost nothing. Some German crusaders continued to proceed northwards to Livonia, where the order’s war against the Orthodox of Novgorod and Pskov still enjoyed crusade status, and Popes Nicholas V and Alexander VI granted crusade indulgences, the preaching of which helped the Livonian brethren pay their heavy war costs.

  But the Livonian crusade was a very marginal feature of the movement, and those crusading enthusiasts who considered the Teutonic Order at all after Tannenberg came up with various ideas for redeploying its resources on the Turkish front.

  This latter development was of course symptomatic of the fact that the Ottoman Turks had become the movement’s main enemies. With the exception of the years from 1402 to about 1420, when the sultanate was recovering from the blow inflicted on it by Tamerlane at the battle of Ankara, the westwards advance of the Turks compelled crusade theorists and enthusiasts to keep their attention focused on the Balkans throughout the fifteenth century. Within this broad span there were several periods of concentrated diplomatic activity, planning, and effort. Between 1440 and 1444 Pope Eugenius IV worked hard to co-ordinate the resistance of the Balkan Christians, especially the brilliant Hungarian commander John Hunyadi, the naval resources of Venice, and contributions by himself and other western rulers, in order to relieve Constantinople, which was on the verge of falling to the Turks. This policy ran into the sands with the disastrous defeat suffered by the Balkan powers at Varna in November 1444. In 1453 the new sultan Mehmed II took Constantinople, and during the next twenty-eight years he directed one of the sultanate’s most powerful surges of expansion. Wallachia, Albania, and Greece were brought under Ottoman rule, and the popes responded with constant attempts both to encourage the resistance of the local powers, and to mobilize a general crusade from the West. Following Mehmed’s death in 1481, his son Bayezid II pursued less aggressive policies in the west, but there were still crusade plans, particularly at the papal congress of Rome in 1490, and during Charles VIII’s invasion of Italy four years later.

  Although there were successes, such as Hunyadi’s extraordinary field campaign of 1443 and the miraculous relief of Belgrade in 1456, the anti-Turkish crusade was a failure. Attempts to deploy western seapower, which was still dominant—although not for much longer—in association with the Hungarians, Serbs, Moldavians, and other Balkan land forces, came to little. Funds and military supplies siphoned eastwards were inadequate, mistimed, or misdirected. And most importantly, no general crusade set out from the West, though that promoted by Pope Pius II came close to doing so in 1464. This failure begs comparison with that of the earlier recovery crusade. Each of the phases of planning was accompanied by the writing of advisory tracts which reconsidered many of the political, financial, and military problems discussed in the recovery treatises, although the strategic scenario called for a largely fresh approach. There were successive waves of exiled rulers who toured Christendom’s courts begging for help, and there were individuals, such as the redoubtable Cardinal Bessarion, who dedicated themselves to the cause of the crusade. There was, too, a not dissimilar spate of projects to which rulers like the western emperor, the king of Aragon, and the duke of Burgundy committed themselves; for these church taxes were levied and indulgences preached, but they failed to materialize.

  To a large extent, too, the failure of the anti-Turkish crusade is explicable by reference to the same considerations which had brought the recovery projects to nothing. The obstacles to be overcome in assembling Ramon Lull’s potestas for the crusade against the Ottomans were even more formidable than for that against the Mamluks. The art of war had become more professional and more costly in the intervening years. There was a greater accumulation of disillusionment and suspicion to deal with in persuading people of the practicability of projects. Theories of the sovereign independence of the lay power, and of the priority of its demands over the resources of its subjects, which were still relatively inchoate around 1300, had been much developed. The Great Schism had brought about a further decline in the political authority of the papacy, with the result that popes like Pius II and Innocent VIII discovered that Christendom’s secular rulers hardly bothered any longer to send representatives to the congresses which they summoned to debate the Turkish threat. Even the construction of a coalition of powers which did have a clear commitment to crusading in the East, normally on grounds of self-interest, was time and again wrecked by Europe’s complex political alignments: Hungary was feared by Venice, Venice’s power alarmed the other Italian states, ducal Burgundy’s involvement was opposed by France, and the German princes believed that any major crusade would trigger an unwanted resurgence of imperial authority in the Reich. Every ruler in fifteenth-century Europe acknowledged the need for a crusade, as the only practicable means of pooling the resources required to combat this massive and hostile power; but in practice nearly all of them blocked its organization.

  As for popular feeling about the anti-Turkish crusade, this raises problems which make generalized remarks hazardous. As noted earlier, the association between chivalry and crusade was weakening, not least because the decay of the Reisen brought its most regular expression to an end: already by 1413 the Burgundian traveller Guillebert of Lannoy wrote of the Reisen as an historical episode. Actual crusading had long since become distant from the lives of most commoners. For them, the crusade meant primarily the preaching of indulgences, the success or failure of which hinged on so many other factors—such as the ability of the preachers, the attitude of the local lay powers, and the extent to which other indulgences were being or had recently been promoted—that viewing response as a measure of people’s reaction to the crusading cause itself is hardly viable. In 1488 the parishioners at Wageningen, in the diocese of Utrecht, received their priest’s attack on the preaching of the crusade with such sympathy that they refused to allow the collectors to take away the money donated. But how much is this evidence of antagonism worth by comparison with chronicle accounts of the popular and successful preaching of the crusade at Erfurt in the same year, let alone the extraordinary response to the preaching of the crusade to relieve Belgrade in 1456? The subject is an interpretative minefield; but the evidence to hand would certainly not support the view that it was popular apathy or hostility, as opposed to political and financial problems, which stopped the anti-Turkish crusade materializing.

  With the exception of some naval activity, and campaigning by the local powers in the Balkans, the anti-Turkish crusade failed at the drawing-board stage. More dramatic failures, in the sense of repeated and humiliating defeats in the field, were suffered by the series of crusades launched between 1420 and 1431 against the heretical Hussites in Bohemia. These crusades, the only large-
scale expeditions against doctrinal heretics in the late Middle Ages, had their origins in the complex interaction of religious unorthodoxy, political unrest, and nationalist stirrings within the Bohemian crown lands. The harsh criticism directed against the abuses of the contemporary Church by the Prague academic and preacher John Hus broadened out into a radical reinterpretation of basic Catholic beliefs which brought about his condemnation and burning in 1415 at the council of Constance. The complicity in this tragic event of the ruling Luxemburg dynasty, and the sympathy felt by many Czech nobles for Hussite views, led to a rebellion in Prague in 1419. And the association of Hussitism with Czech national identity, and of the repressive forces of both Church and State with the German minority in Bohemia, gave the conflict between Catholics and Hussites a nationalist complexion.

  The man who had to deal with this very tangled scenario was Sigismund of Luxemburg, the king of Hungary. Sigismund inherited the Bohemian crown from his brother Wenceslas after the latter died of shock during the rebellion of 1419. Unwisely Sigismund decided to apply an axe to a situation which we can see, with the benefit of hindsight, called for a scalpel. Since he was emperor-elect, and Bohemia and its dependent territories lay within the boundaries of the Reich, Sigismund was entitled to call on the assistance of the German princes. He also needed to do so, since it was dangerous to denude Hungary of fighting men at the precise point when the Turks were resuming their pressure on its southern border. But he knew from experience that, for all their fears about Hussitism spreading into their lands, Germany’s princes, both secular and ecclesiastical, would be reluctant to take the field. Faced with this dilemma, Sigismund acceded to the suggestions of Pope Martin V and militant lobbyists at his own court that the religious issue should be highlighted and his dynastic cause in Bohemia raised to the level of a crusade. It was therefore as the commander of a crusading army that he entered his own lands in the spring of 1420.

  Sigismund was unable to take Prague in 1420 and, although he was crowned king in St Vitus’s Cathedral, which luckily was situated in the Catholic-held fortress of Hradcany, outside the city walls, he was hounded out of his kingdom in March 1421. But this was only the first in a sorry catalogue of disasters. Two further crusades in 1421–2 suffered defeats just as serious as those incurred by the first expedition. In 1427 another crusade, the most ambitious of them all, was routed in western Bohemia. The Hussites had now gained the upper hand to such an extent that they launched a series of raids, which they dubbed ‘the beautiful rides’, into the surrounding German lands. Finally, in the summer of 1431, a fifth crusade was turned back at Domazlice. The hawks having conspicuously failed, the doves were allowed to take over, and after painful negotiations Sigismund reached a compromise settlement with his recalcitrant subjects in 1436. Hussitism remained entrenched in Bohemia, despite further attempts to suppress it through crusades in 1465–7.

  The Hussite crusades have not received the detailed attention which they deserve and while some aspects of their failure are reasonably clear-cut, others are not. On the Hussite side, it is apparent that a fragile coalition of radicals and conservatives was reinforced both by the atrocities foolishly committed by the Catholics and by a strenuous assertion of Czech national feeling in the face of crusading armies composed largely of Germans. In the field, it benefited enormously from the organizational flair and innovative tactics of John Zizka. Given the relatively primitive conditions of fifteenth-century warfare, it is probable that the Hussites drew a greater advantage from their short lines of communication and supply than the crusaders did from their theoretical ability to surprise the enemy and co-ordinate attacks from several directions. On the Catholic side, the fact that armies were, time and again, routed rather than defeated testifies to a severe deterioration in morale. As always in crusading, these defeats prompted doubts about the justice of the Catholic cause, the more tellingly since a negotiated settlement was viable in a way which it was not in crusading against Muslim powers. The leaders of the crusades tried both to learnand to innovate—the promoters of the 1431 campaign adopted military ordinances which may have been based on Zizka’s own—but were at best partially successful. Above all, the Reich’s decentralized constitution militated against the forceful direction and control which were needed.

  This last point receives indirect corroboration from the most successful fifteenth-century crusade, that conducted by Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile against Granada between 1482 and 1492. Indeed, a comparison between the Turkish and Hussite crusades on the one hand and the Granada war on the other is revealing of what was lacking in the first two. This final phase in the Reconquista hinged on the marriage between Ferdinand and Isabella in 1469, which ended, temporarily at least, the age-old rivalry between the two kingdoms, and on Isabella’s success, ten years later, in bringing to a close the dynastic convulsions within her realm. That done, Isabella could turn to Granada. Her own temperament was fully in tune with the growing atmosphere of militant intolerance towards other faiths which has been detected in mid- to late-fifteenthcentury Castile. Moreover, it was in the interests of both Castile and Aragon to expel the Moors before the advancing Ottomans developed their seapower enough to imitate the Almoravids and Almohads by bursting into Spain through a door held open by their embattled fellow Muslims. These background considerations explain why the opportunistic seizure of Alhama by the count of Cadiz, early in 1482, was developed into a programme of conquest which culminated in the surrender of Granada ten years later.

  Not since St Louis’s expeditions more than two centuries previously had a major European government been so directly and continuously involved in organizing and waging a big crusade. Such involvement was essential, for Granada’s defences had been built up over much the same period of time. Its conquest necessitated the application of massive military power, deployed with persistence year after year to reduce the emirate’s size piecemeal fashion. The mobilization of men, horses and mules, artillery and powder, grain and other foodstuffs, necessitated a formidable concentration of effort. Some 52,000 combatants were engaged for six months in the siege of Baza in 1489. Above all, money was called for: some 800 million maravedís according to one estimate. The provisioning of the troops and the financing of the conflict were directed personally by the queen. As one of the war’s leading historians, Ferdinand del Pulgar, put it, ‘the queen’s mind did not stop thinking about how to get money, both for the war against the Moors and for the other demands constantly thrown up by the government of her realm.’

  Most of the extraordinary expenditure which the war required was met from crusade sources, in particular from church taxes and the preaching of indulgences. The king and queen petitioned vigorously for these and took care that each crusade bull (bula de la cruzada) was publicized to maximum effect. The success achieved by the latter, by comparison with the patchy results obtained by the preachers of the anti-Turkish crusade elsewhere in Europe, is striking. To a large extent it can be attributed to the small sums demanded in exchange for the indulgence, the generous privileges granted, the active assistance which preachers and collectors received from lay officials, and the proof available, in the shape of bulletins from the front-line, that the money was really being spent on fighting. But there was probably more to it than this. The cause for which Castilians gave money and, in the case of the troops, fought and even died, was a national as well as a sacred one. The convergence of patriotic feeling and religious zeal, visible at times during the Hundred Years War and, paradoxically, amongst the Hussite heretics in the 1420s, was at its most apparent in Castile in the 1480s. Together with the dominance of the state in the management of the crusade itself, it was a clear pointer for the future development of crusading.

  Extinction in the North—Survival in the South

  As it entered the sixteenth century, the crusade, in its traditional form as a papally-directed holy war symbolizing Christendom’s unity and forwarding its common interests, was in a manifestly sick condition.
Nothing showed this more vividly than the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–17), at which the papal curia made its last attempt before the Reformation to set in motion an anti-Turkish crusade. The eastern background to the council’s deliberations was an immensely sombre one. The Turks had recently developed their naval strength to the extent of inflicting huge losses on the Venetians; in 1515–17 they conquered the eastern Anatolian plateau; and in 1516–17 they destroyed the Mamluk sultanate and absorbed Syria and Egypt into their empire. It was virtually inevitable that they would resume their westwards advance in the near future. The council listened to impassioned speeches, levied church taxes for a crusade, and appealed for action by Europe’s rulers. Pope Leo X was genuine in his enthusiasm for crusading and he made strenuous efforts both to dampen down the Italian conflicts, which his predecessor Julius II had vigorously fanned, and to assist in peace negotiations between France and England. There was some optimism in the air but, as so often in the past, the grandiose offers and sweeping promises made by such rulers as the Emperor Maximilian I, Francis I of France, and Henry VIII of England came to almost nothing. As if emphasizing the contrast with their opponents’ lethargy, the Turks managed in 1521 to take Belgrade, the key to Hungary and the chief obstacle to their renewed advance.