Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam

by Andrew Wheatcroft

  THE CONFRONTATION IN THE LEVANT ADMINISTERED A DEEP SHOCK to both Western Christendom and the world of Mediterranean Islam, imprinting deeply upon both cultures. Every conquest engendered a desire for reconquest. To understand how and why this effect persisted over many centuries lies within the domain of social psychology, and then the difficulty is finding methods of interpretation that are not simply anachronistic or inappropriate. Kimball Young, one of the early pioneers of the discipline, set out the essence of the problem: “Propaganda may be open and its purpose avowed, or it may conceal its intention. It always has a setting within a social-cultural framework, without which neither its psychological nor its cultural features can be understood.”18 The fear and hatred that grew out of the confrontation between Islam and Christendom were a conditioned, or “Pavlovian” response.19 The reinforcement sustaining that response was sometimes a personal experience, but more often it stemmed from a firm conviction acquired by other means. Most of those who believed that the infidels—“Saracens,” “Agarenes,” “Ishmaelites,” “Turks”—were savage and barbarous had never met a Saracen or a Turk in their lives. Yet this understanding was as real to them as if they had. They knew it from their neighbors, from listening and reading, from visual images, much as we do today. This infusion of new knowledge was vital to maintaining hostility.

  Pavlov’s message was that unless these experiences and beliefs were sustained and regularly reinforced, then the conditioned response would dwindle. This drip feed of new information and ideas, the reiteration of old themes, meant that the far-distant conflict in the Levant conditioned the subsequent relationship between Christendom and Islam. It became the symbolic reference point for future recollections. As Alphonse Dupront put it, “When we say the word ‘crusade,’ something thrills and disturbs us. This ‘something’ is the utmost power of myth that is alive and real.”20 The word “Crusade” in Western society has now largely lost its specific denotation—war in a good cause—but it still carries a powerful charge. By contrast “Crusade” carries a stronger meaning for many Muslims, while “holy war”—jihad—still evokes a frisson of fear among Christians. These words have become metonyms of the enemy, reinforcing memories of their essential cruelty and savagery.21

  We can trace the means by which these fears and hatred were constructed. Emmanuel Sivan began his seminal work on the Muslim “counter-Crusade” by pointing to distinct but parallel elements in the creation of this ideology: existing attitudes, which were in place before the pressure of events and of propaganda, and created attitudes formed (or exploited) as a result of events or propaganda.22 These functioned as reinforcement for the existing attitudes. But these twin elements were just as powerful in creating first the ideology and, later, myths of “Crusade” in Western culture. The Crusaders who marched to the Holy Land had firm (if ill-founded) ideas about their enemy, while the Muslims they encountered had almost no specific notions about the Franks, except that they were grotesquely unappealing infidels. However, during their confrontation in the East, Muslims and Western Christians developed much more complex and roughly symmetrical views of each other. The degree to which each group produced reverse or mirror images is remarkable. Christians regarded Muslims as inherently cruel and violent; Muslims felt the same about the Westerners. Christians developed wild imaginings about the sexual proclivities of Muslims. Muslims regarded the Franks, as Usāmah made clear, as little better than animals in terms of sexual propriety.

  Equally, each could initially appreciate heroic and noble qualities in the other. The sultan Saladin was portrayed in many Western accounts, despite the loss of Jerusalem to his armies in 1187, as more just and honorable than many Christian rulers. Likewise, Muslims had no difficulty in recognizing the military skill and bravery of their opponents at the same time that they described them as “accursed.” Nor did negative attitudes prevent many forms of political and economic connection between enemies even in times of war and rancorous propaganda.23 However, while the Muslims might produce the occasional Saladin and Baybars, and were formidable opponents on the battlefield, their visible power appeared inferior to Westerners’.24 No Saracen fortress, for example, could match the raw defensive power of the Crusader castles such as Krak des Chevaliers, Beaufort, or the sea castle at Sidon.25 It was the rise to dominance of the Ottoman Turks from the mid–fourteenth century, in both Anatolia and Balkan Europe, that altered that equation. Saladin had been a noble individual, but represented a contemptible people. The Grand Signior, the sultan of the Turks, the “Great Cham,” represented an infidel state and culture whose power was to be feared and could not be denied.

  THE SULTAN OF THE OTTOMAN TURKS MADE HIMSELF THE STANDARD-bearer of Islam. The Ottoman Turks were nomads who, brought as mercenaries into Anatolia by the Seljuqs, survived their downfall. By 1280 they had established a small Ottoman center, named after their chief, Osman, in western Anatolia. His son, Sultan Orhan, established their capital at Bursa on the slopes of Mount Olympus in Mysia (Mount Uludağ) in 1326, where Osman’s title is inscribed as “The mujahid [he who fights for Islam], Sultan of the ghazis, ghazi son of a ghazi [warrior son of a warrior].”26 Orhan’s palace was built in the city’s citadel on a long mountain spur, a fortress which he enlarged and extended until it was “nearly impregnable.”27 In 1350 the Byzantine emperor, John Cantacuzenus, recruited Orhan’s Ottoman warriors in his campaign against the king of Serbia, Stephen Dushan. Three years later Orhan’s son Suleiman crossed the Hellespont to take possession of the fortresses promised as the price of their support. Within a few years, from their base at Gallipoli, the Ottomans had advanced to cut the road from Constantinople to the fortress town of Adrianople, the capital of Thrace.

  Suleiman was thrown from his horse while hunting and died of his injuries. It was his son Murad who succeeded his grandfather Orhan as sultan around 1361. In fifteen months his ghazis had brought terror to the land. Adrianople surrendered rather than risk the fate of Chorlu, where the Turks had slaughtered everyone within the walls, only saving the commander for a formal execution. Soon the Turkish domain in Europe extended from the Bosphorus to the foothills of the Balkan mountains. The Byzantine emperor in Constantinople accepted the Ottoman power, but other Christians were not so quiescent. The Serbs, with some Hungarians in alliance, crossed the river Maritza, only to be “caught as wild beasts in their lair,” and driven back into the river “as flames driven before the wind,” in the words of an Ottoman chronicler.28 In 1366, the Ottomans crossed the river Maritza and pushed north until by 1369 they had taken the mountain passes and the land before Sofia. Then Murad turned west into Macedonia. In three years the Turks had reached the river Vardar at the town of Skopje, and their European dominions at that point extended from the Thracian plain to the Dinaric Alps. The sultan also extended his territories in Anatolia, but the bulk of his domain lay north of the Hellespont, so he shifted his capital from Bursa to Adrianople. By 1386 most of the main, Christian cities of the southern Balkans, including Sofia, Monastir, and Nish, were in his hands. Only Belgrade on the Danube and Constantinople remained beyond his power. In 1388, Murad launched his armies against the Kingdom of Serbia to complete his conquest of the Balkan lands.

  On June 20, 1389, on the plain of Kosovo Polje, the “field of the crows” where the corvines feasted on the bodies of the dead, Murad, with his Asian and European armies, and backed by all his Christian tributaries, defeated Lazar, the leader of the Serbs. At this moment of triumph, the sultan was killed on the battlefield and immediately succeeded by his son Bayezid, who was commanding the Turkish right flank. In the aftermath of the battle, the surviving Serb princes submitted to Turkish power. After Kosovo, the Ottomans turned their attention to the one remaining obstacle to their domination of the southern Balkans. In 1391, they laid siege to Constantinople itself, but once again the great walls protected the city. A contingent of 600 men-at-arms and 1,600 archers led by Boucicault, the marshal of France, arrived in 1398, breaking the Ottoman blockade and stiff
ening the Byzantines’ resistance. Yet even this reinforcement could not remove the Turkish threat, so a year later Boucicault withdrew and the siege was lifted in exchange for concessions that effectively made the Byzantine emperor a vassal of the sultan.

  Western Christendom had finally recognized the power of its new enemy. Over roughly fifty years (1396–1448), four Crusades were mounted with the intention not of recapturing Jerusalem, but of attacking the Ottoman infidels in the Balkans. After 1389, the Muslim enemy was not in Asia but on the banks of the Danube, with Tartar horsemen raiding into Hungary and the borderlands of Austria. Six years after Kosovo, Crusaders responded to the urgent appeal of Pope Boniface IX and a Christian army marched east. They were crushed on September 26, 1396, by the well-organized Ottoman troops of Sultan Bayezid Ilderim (“the Thunderbolt”) before the town of Nicopolis on cliffs above the river Danube. On the morning after the battle the sultan sat and watched as the surviving Crusaders were led naked before him, their hands tied behind them. He offered them the choice of conversion to Islam or, if they refused, immediate decapitation. Few would renounce their faith, and the growing piles of heads were arranged in tall cairns before the sultan, and the corpses dragged away. By the end of a long day, more than 3,000 Crusaders had been butchered, and some accounts said as many as 10,0. A single knight was freed and sent to Paris to recount the sultan’s vengeance to the king of France. The carnage was in part a response to the Crusaders’ massacre of their Turkish prisoners before the battle, but this formal and ceremonial slaughter was an innovation, and different from the massacres that were commonplace after the capture of cities or in the immediate aftermath of a battle. The mass killings by Crusaders in Jerusalem in 1099 had stemmed from an enraged bloodlust after battle. Bayezid by contrast intended a calculated and memorable act of cruelty, which ran counter to the normal customs of war: many of those killed were of noble birth, for whom a ransom would have been paid.29

  But the sultan’s aim was achieved. The news of Nicopolis and its aftermath quickly became known throughout Europe and it proved very difficult to rouse any interest in the West for a new Crusade.30 Only in Hungary was the appeal of the Crusade still potent, and eventually Bayezid’s son Murad II confronted a resurgent Hungarian power. The Hungarians and their allies were led by the “white knight of Wallachia,” János Hunyadi, whose silvered armor became famous throughout the Balkans. The Hungarians knew him as “Török-verö” (scourge of the Turks). He was appointed governor of Transylvania in 1441, and regained much of the land lost to the Turks along the Danube. In 1443, the long-anticipated Crusade was launched: Vladislav, king of both Poland and Hungary, launched a new Crusade, and advancing south of the Danube recaptured both Sofia and Nish. After a serious defeat at Kostunitza, Murad sanctioned a ten-year truce.

  But in the following year, the Hungarian king broke the terms of the truce and led a new Crusade down the Danube. Murad, at the time defending his territory in Asia, quickly gathered the Ottoman armies from there and Europe. He marched north toward the Crusaders. At the city of Varna, on the shores of the Black Sea, the sultan unexpectedly won another victory on the scale of Nicopolis. King Vladislav and many of his best troops died in the battle. The king’s head was cut from his body, preserved in a barrel of honey, and dispatched to Bursa, where it was spiked on a lance and paraded in triumph through the streets.31 Meanwhile, Hunyadi, who had commanded one wing of the Crusader force, escaped from the debacle and fled north beyond the Danube. He slowly gathered a new army and again marched south to attack the Ottomans. On October 16, 1448, on the fateful plain of Kosovo, Hunyadi and his army of Hungarians, Wallachians, Czechs, and Germans met the Ottomans on the same ground where Lazar had fallen more than half a century before. The battle lasted three days, and Hunyadi’s army succumbed to Ottoman discipline and tenacity.32

  There was a new intensity to these wars in the Balkans. Hitherto, the Mongols had been unique in their relentless cruelty, but now it seemed that both Christians and Muslims vied with each other for the scale and ingenuity of their atrocities. The ruler (voivod) of Wallachia, Vlad Tepes “the Impaler,” perfected the technique of mass death, skewering his enemies on a long spit or spear—the longer the stake, the higher in rank the victim.33 In 1461, Murad II’s son the young Ottoman sultan Mehmed II, was horrified when he saw the 20,000 rotting corpses hanging on sharpened stakes outside the walls of Vlad’s capital of Tirgoviste, although he himself had had no hesitation in condemning criminals to death by impalement in his own domains. Earlier centuries had seen many isolated examples of deliberate savagery, but from the fifteenth century barbarity reached new levels. The public death by flaying of the Venetian senator Bragadino just before the battle of Lepanto, which I described in chapter 1, was paralleled in Western Christian society by the elaborate ceremonial of the auto-da-fé in Spain, and an increasingly spectacular theater of cruelty in public executions north of the Pyrenees.34

  The greatest atrocity, however, in Christian eyes was the capture and ravishment of Constantinople by Mehmed’s armies on May 28, 1453. The defeat at Varna had greatly diminished Hungarian enthusiasm for a Crusade in the East, and there was no coherent opposition from the West to the young sultan’s investment of the city. In stark contrast to the earlier Muslim sieges of Constantinople over the centuries, the army that assembled in the early spring of 1453 relied not so much on weight of numbers (although it was very large) but upon military professionalism and advanced techniques of war. First, the Turks had armed their twin fortresses on each side of the Bosphorus with powerful guns designed to prevent any relieving force gaining access to Constantinople. Second, at a new cannon factory in Adrianople, huge siege artillery pieces that could destroy the ancient triple walls protecting the Byzantine capital were designed and built. But the imbalance between Muslim power and Christian weakness was apparent in the muster rolls: fewer than 7,000 men defended Constantinople’s fourteen miles of walls, confronting the 80,000 Ottomans gathered outside.

  Early in the morning of May 28, after fifty-three days of desperate resistance, the Ottoman janissaries broke through the walls into the city. By custom they were entitled to three days of looting in any city they had taken by storm. At first they killed everyone they found alive. From the Church of St. Mary of the Mongols high above the Golden Horn, a torrent of blood ran down the hill toward the harbor. The soldiers broke into the churches, ripping out the precious objects, raping or killing anyone who caught their fancy. In the afternoon the sultan made his formal entry, and went directly to the Church of the Holy Wisdom, Hagia Sophia. There he ordered an end to the pillage and destruction and directed that the great church should become the chief mosque of the city. Ducas, in his Historia Turco-Byzantina, records the day:

  He [Mehmed] summoned one of his vile priests who ascended the pulpit to call out his foul prayer. The son of iniquity, the forerunner of Antichrist, ascending the holy altar, offered the prayer. Alas, the calamity! Alack, the horrendous deed! Woe is me! What has befallen us? Oh! Oh! What have we witnessed? An infidel Turk, standing on the holy altar in whose foundation the relics of Apostles and Martyrs have been deposited! Shudder, O sun! Where is the Lamb of God, and where is the Son and Logos of the Father Who is sacrificed thereon, and eaten, and never consumed?

  Truly we have been reckoned as frauds! Our worship has been reckoned as nothing by the nations. Because of our sins the temple [Hagia Sophia] which was rebuilt in the name of the Wisdom of the Logos of God, and is called the Temple of the Holy Trinity, and Great Church and New Sion, today has become an altar of barbarians, and has been named and has become the House of Muhammad. Just is Thy judgement, O Lord.35

  The same sense of violation fills the letter written by the Byzantine scholar, and later cardinal, Bessarion to the doge of Venice two months after the fall of the city.

  Sacked by the most inhuman barbarians and the most savage enemies of the Christian faith, by the fiercest of wild beasts. The public treasure has been consumed, private wealth has b
een destroyed, the temples have been stripped of gold, silver, jewels, the relics of the saints, and other most precious ornaments. Men have been butchered like cattle, women abducted, virgins ravished, and children snatched from the arms of their parents.36

  However, the abominations of the Turks had a precursor. The capture of Constantinople by the Western Crusaders in 1204 had been described in very similar terms. Nicetas Choniates wrote of those days, two and a half centuries before:

  Alas, the images, which ought to have been adored, were trodden under foot! Alas, the relics of the holy martyrs were thrown into unclean places! Then was seen what one shudders to hear, namely, the divine body and blood of Christ was spilled upon the ground or thrown about.

  No one was without a share in the grief. In the alleys, in the streets, in the temples, complaints, weeping, lamentations, grief, the groaning of men, the shrieks of women, wounds, rape, captivity, the separation of those most closely united.37