A History of the Crusades

by Jonathan Riley-Smith

  In Cyprus the political situation was less confusing. Relations between the Cypriot kings and the rulers of Cilician Armenia, the only other nearby Christian kingdom, were frequently poor. The problems originated in the first decade of the fourteenth century. Amalric of Tyre, who had usurped power in Cyprus in 1306, had married the king of Armenia’s sister, and their descendants, alienated from the ruling branch of the Lusignan dynasty in Cyprus, remained prominent in the Armenian realm. Between 1342 and 1344 and again at the very end of the kingdom’s existence in the 1370s Amalric’s descendants occupied the Armenian throne. The ill-feeling between the kings of Cyprus and their Armenian cousins may have been exacerbated by commercial rivalry between the ports of Famagusta and Ayas. It must have resulted in less military aid being sent to Cilicia than might otherwise have been the case. On the other hand, the rulers of Cyprus never found themselves having to ally with a Muslim power against other Christians, although in the 1440s their suzerain, the sultan of Egypt, did insist on the Cypriots allowing his fleets to take on supplies en route for their assaults on Rhodes. At one point, however, a Christian power seriously considered a Muslim alliance against Cyprus. In 1383 the Genoese were engaged in imposing their own candidate, James I, on the throne of Cyprus, and when their plans ran into difficulties it was proposed that they should bring in Turkish troops from the nearby emirate of Karamania to help enforce their will. In the event it proved unnecessary, which from the point of view of the Cypriots was just as well.

  It would therefore be wrong to assume that people in the Latin East in the later Middle Ages automatically valued Christian solidarity above all else and refused to engage in friendly relations with their Muslim neighbours. In the long term the struggle against the Turks dominated the history of the entire region, but rivalries between competing Christian powers could and did on occasion lead to military co-operation with the Turks, even though such co-operation could easily stimulate and facilitate further Turkish expansion at Christian expense. Nor did the consideration that strife among the Christian powers would make Muslim conquests all the more easy necessarily count for very much. Internecine warfare between Christians was commonplace. It ranged from the feuding between the lords of minor Aegean islands or petty acts of piracy to conflicts involving some of the greatest powers of Christian Europe. In the first half of the fourteenth century the conflict between the French and the Aragonese cast its shadow over the Latin East. From the 1280s onwards this conflict had had as its focus the bitter struggle between the Aragonese and the Angevins—themselves a cadet branch of the French royal house—for control of southern Italy. Achaea was an Angevin dependancy; Athens, under the Catalan Company, looked to the patronage of the Aragonese royal house. There could be no accommodation or co-operation between the two, and it is no surprise that the French claimant to Athens in the 1330s, Walter of Brienne, could turn to the Angevins for support in his attempt to supplant the Catalan regime. Since the 1270s the Angevins and the Lusignans of Cyprus had disputed the title to the kingdom of Jerusalem. In the early fourteenth century the kings of France took the lead in seeking to organize a crusade to win back the Holy Land, but, as we have seen, a French-led crusade can have had little appeal in Cyprus: the Lusignans knew that they would not be installed as kings of Jerusalem, and, if the crusade failed, Cyprus would be likely to bear the brunt of any Muslim retaliation. In the 1310s the childless king of Cyprus, Henry II, was prepared for his kingdom to pass to the Aragonese royal house. In the event there was no French-led crusade and no Aragonese acquisition of Henry’s kingdom, but things could have turned out very differently. The Angevins had other irons in the fire, such as the overthrow of the Greek regime in Constantinople and the restoration of the Latin empire, and there can be no doubt that in the first quarter of the fourteenth century this lingering and increasingly unrealistic programme inhibited papal attempts to aid the Byzantines. However, by the mid-fourteenth century Angevin power in Italy was waning and France was fully occupied with war with England. At the same time the Aragonese were finding that they could not readily intervene in the Latin East in any effective manner. So strong was the hegemony of the Genoese and Venetians that the Aragonese found that their merchants could never do more than trail far behind them in third place, and with the demise of the Catalan Company’s rule in Athens Aragonese influence dwindled further.

  In the Aegean and the adjacent waters of the Mediterranean, where communication by sea was often more important than communication by land, naval power was of the utmost significance. Rulers such as the Hospitaller masters or the kings of Cyprus possessed ships which they could use to patrol the seas and curb piracy, but the greatest concentration of naval strength lay in the hands of the Genoese and Venetians. In an age in which merchant galleys could double as warships, their domination of trade between Europe and the eastern half of the Mediterranean meant that they wielded great power. They could use their navies to protect their trade, and in building up their mercantile marine they could enhance their war fleets. In the case of Venice, where the government regulated shipping to an appreciable extent, there was a deliberate policy of establishing Venetian-controlled ports of call along the routes to Constantinople and the East. At Genoa there was no such central control, but the Genoese were no less aggressive in seeking trading centres which they could possess for themselves. Both maritime powers competed for markets and commercial privileges and both were prepared to flaunt their power to ensure that their merchants could continue to maximize their profits and trade with as few impediments as possible.

  Genoese relations with Cyprus provide a good example of how this assertiveness might work in practice. The Genoese had enjoyed commercial privileges in the island from the early thirteenth century. By 1300, however, their relations with the authorities were poor. Partly this had come about because in their view the Cypriots had shown too much sympathy towards their rivals, the Venetians, and partly because the Cypriots were trying to limit the extent of their privileges and enforce the papal embargo on trade with the Mamluk ports. The Genoese did not take kindly to what they regarded as attempts to restrict their ability to trade where and when they liked and with a minimum of overheads, and in the 1310s the situation deteriorated to the extent that they engaged in punitive raids on the coast of Cyprus. The Cypriot authorities naturally enough wanted to make sure that as much as possible of the wealth that accrued through trade found its way into their coffers and they were not prepared to sacrifice any more of their sovereignty in order to attract overseas merchants to do business on their soil. On the other hand, Cyprus needed the Genoese merchants if the island’s commercial prosperity was to be sustained, and trade continued, albeit against the background of a stream of disputes, most of them petty in themselves. In 1364 a more serious incident occurred in Famagusta when a number of Genoese nationals were killed. On that occasion King Peter I conceded all the Genoese demands for compensation as he was anxious that nothing should interfere with the crusade he was then about to launch. However, in 1372 the government in Cyprus refused Genoa’s demands for reparations after a similar incident, and, as we have seen, war resulted. In 1373 the Genoese sent a war fleet, captured Famagusta and inflicted a considerable amount of damage on the island. They retained Famagusta as a secure base from which to trade and attempted, with admittedly fluctuating success, to impose tribute on the Lusignans. It could be argued that the Cypriots had largely brought this catastrophe upon themselves, but the fact remains that the Genoese had used their naval power to defend and enlarge the interests of their merchants and in the process had greatly weakened a major outpost of Christendom.

  There was an enormous amount of profit to be made from trade, and in the struggle to grab as much as possible for themselves Venice and Genoa frequently came into conflict. Between the 1250s and 1381 there were four major wars between them. Of these, the war of St Sabas which began in 1256 originated in a dispute over property in Acre, but the other three, those of 1294–9, 1350–5, and 1376�
��81, arose principally from their rivalry in Romania. Although much of the military action took place in the West, it was the trade of Constantinople and the Black Sea that in each case provided the casus belli. Paradoxically, military success did not necessarily lead to commercial hegemony and in no instance did either side win so convincingly as to put a stop to the other’s trade. But Genoa’s failure in the war of Tenedos, coming so soon after the expenses incurred in her invasion of Cyprus, ushered in a period of political uncertainty, and after that Genoese interests in the eastern Mediterranean gradually diminished. In the fifteenth century Venice retained a dominant share in the trade with Egypt and Syria and bore the brunt of Ottoman naval activity in and around the Aegean, while Genoa ceased to aspire to her rival’s prominance. Crete and, from the 1470s, Cyprus were valuable Venetian assets. Genoese Chios could not compare.

  In none of the Latin possessions in the East did western Europeans ever make up the majority of the inhabitants. In rural areas especially the bulk of the population was Greek. The ports were cosmopolitan. Famagusta for example had a large Arabic-speaking Syrian community which lived alongside Greeks and Franks, Italians, Jews, and Armenians. Many people, even quite poor people, owned domestic slaves, and the surviving documents suggest that they could be of Slavonic, Asiatic, or black African extraction. There would always be a short-term population of merchants and seafarers, but among the long-term residents there were many who could claim status as Venetians or Genoese even though they had never lived in their supposed city of origin. Evidence survives from the early fifteenth century to suggest that a lingua franca comprising an eclectic mixture of words and phrases drawn from all the local languages existed for everyday converse. Most of the people of European extraction in the East probably spoke a form of Italian. In Cyprus, Achaea, and Athens the original feudal landholders had been French, but in course of time Italians or Catalans superseded them. In the case of Athens the change came violently with the advent of the Catalan Company in 1311. In Achaea it was during the fourteenth century that the nobles with French names gave way to Italians. In Cyprus the process was slower, although at the end of the fourteenth century a western visitor to the island noted with apparent surprise that the king spoke ‘fairly good French’. It was only with the accession of James II and the civil war of 1460–4 that Italian or Spanish names came to predominate among the nobility.

  In the early stages of Latin rule the western conquerors generally kept themselves apart from the mass of the population. But gradually intermarriage and general proximity broke down the barriers and allowed acculturation between the different elements in the population to proceed. Confessional allegiance was a determining factor. The western regimes invariably introduced Latin bishops and clergy and sought ways of reducing the Greek clergy to subordinate status. Normally this entailed the transfer of endowments to the Latins and the elimination or reduction of Greek bishoprics. The Greek clergy were obliged to acknowledge the jurisdiction of their Latin superiors and ultimately that of the pope. Not surprisingly many demurred, but many did not and there are even instances of Greek clergy taking their litigation to Rome. The Latin rulers knew that they had to tread warily. If they allowed the Greek clergy too much independence they could become the foci for discontent; if they were too heavy-handed in their treatment of them popular outbreaks again were likely. In Cyprus by 1300 each Latin bishop had a Greek as a coadjutor who had responsibility for the Greek-rite priests and churches in the diocese. At least twice in the fourteenth century the authorities in the island intervened to prevent clergy newly arrived from western Europe from trying to impose conformity to Latin usages on the Greeks and thereby sparking a riot. In practice a modus vivendi between Greeks and Latins evolved. It would not match the aspirations of the theologians or the publicists on either side, but it seems generally to have satisfied the bulk of the population. In the fourteenth century absenteeism by the higher Latin clergy became increasingly common, and that too may have had the effect of lowering tension. In their different ways the political crises, the Black Death, and the Papal Schism of 1378 all contributed to a weakening of the Latin church establishment in the East, and this decline continued throughout the fifteenth century.

  It is against this background that beginning in the fourteenth century we start to find complaints that Latins were attending Greek services. It may be that in many instances such behaviour followed from the absence of Latin priests, but often people would have done so out of preference: intermarriage and bilingualism must have had some effect on social and religious attitudes. Occasionally too we find instances of Greeks or other eastern Christians who had been converted to Latin observance. In the fifteenth century the Cypriot Audeth family provides evidence of the erosion of traditional loyalties. The Audeths were Syrian Jacobites, but in the 1450s one of their number was a canon of Nicosia cathedral and later titular Latin bishop of Tortosa; at about the same time another member of the family endowed masses in his will in Jacobite, Coptic, Maronite, Greek, and Armenian churches as well as in the Latin cathedral at Nicosia. It is hard to know how common such switching of allegiance was or to analyse satisfactorily the elements that motivated it. The blurring of confessional divisions was mirrored in contemporary art and architecture. For example, icons survive that are clearly the work of Greek masters but which bear Latin inscriptions or that bear Greek inscriptions but which were commissioned by Latin donors; a king of Cyprus composed a Latin office for use on the festival of a Greek saint, Hilarion; at Famagusta the Greek cathedral was rebuilt in the fourteenth century in a thoroughly western style of Italianate Gothic; elsewhere there is a hybridization of architectural forms with motifs taken from both western and Orthodox traditions. Some church buildings betray signs of alteration to allow separate altars for use by Latin and Greek priests. It was in Crete that the cross-fertilization of artistic traditions had its greatest effect with the development of the school of painting which had El Greco as its most famous member. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Cretans were producing popular literature in Greek largely modelled on Italian prototypes. Western travellers sometimes looked askance at those Latin settlers in the East whose speech and dress had come to resemble that of their Greek neighbours, but the fact that such changes occurred suggests that far from remaining polarized, society had melded together to an appreciable extent.

  In Cyprus the kings habitually employed Orthodox Greeks to staff their central financial department, the secrète, and there by the 1460s they were issuing letters in French, Italian, or Greek as necessity dictated. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it would seem that a tightly knit group of Orthodox ‘civil service’ families dominated the personnel. The early fifteenth-century Cypriot historian, Leontios Makhairas, belonged to one of these families, and his chronicle, influenced by the demotic Greek of the time, provides a valuable insight into the extent to which western loan words had been absorbed by the local intelligentsia. It also reflects the attitudes of a member of that class: proud and defensive of his Orthodoxy with perhaps a hankering after the order of a bygone, imperial age; quizzical of converts from Orthodoxy to Catholicism, but also loyal and respectful towards his Lusignan masters.

  To a large extent the rulers in the Latin East were content to allow their subjects to live as they always had done. In Crete and southern Greece a class of Greek landowners survived the takeover, and by 1300 they had persuaded the authorities to accept them as an integral part of the social hierarchy. Rural communities generally retained their pre-conquest organization, the chief difference being that the ruler or the landholder to whom taxes were due was now Latin rather than Greek. There is no reason to suppose that the Latin regimes were any harsher on the peasantry than their predecessors had been, and indeed it may well be that the lot of the paroikoi, the unfree serfs, if anything improved. Alongside their agrarian wealth, most rulers could expect some share in the profits of commerce. The Venetian territories were administered by officials sent from Venice fo
r whom the need to facilitate their merchants’ enterprise remained a priority. Indeed, furthering the interests of Venetian commerce was the principal raison d’être of many of their overseas possessions. But all rulers could benefit from tolls on trade and from the general prosperity that commercial activities could bring.