God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  The Italian humanist Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, soon to be Pope Pius II, lamented at the news of Constantinople’s conquest, ‘a second death of Homer and Plato’.77 A more traditional polemic of grief soon prevailed: the church in danger, the heritage of Christ defiled. To the same extent such reactions failed to stimulate a serious counter-attack, they missed the significance of the event. The mayhem, death and destruction, not least of artefacts and libraries, should not be ignored. Yet the human tragedy needs its own perspective. Greek cultural exchange with the west had flourished for generations. Greek learning was not something that reached western Europe in the luggage of Constantinopolitan refugees in 1453. The Byzantine state had comprehensively failed as a political institution. The fate of eastern Christendom lay not in the malignity of western holy warfare or diplomatic indifference, but in the operation of indigenous forces. The advent of the Ottomans was not the unalloyed disaster some have imagined, certainly not for the Ottomans, their allies, local Balkan groups they fostered and patronized, their Muslim subjects or even the Greek peasantry. Certain Greek elites suffered, but religious persecution played no part in fourteenth- or fifteenth-century Ottoman culture. Many Greeks who did not flee found Ottoman service, some even favour as converts to Islam. Ottoman culture, as eclectic and sophisticated as any in Europe and western Asia, introduced no new barbarism. The assumption of Christian superiority of culture or ethics is a damaging legacy of the age of colonialism and a feature of ill-informed modern demonization. The Ottoman triumph provided the lands of former Byzantium with security and a revived economy. By recreating the old territorial Byzantine empire, the Ottomans succeeded precisely where the crusaders of 1204 and generations of Greek rulers had failed. After 1453, Constantinople once again became the centre of the eastern Mediterranean world, resonant in its new name, Istanbul, ‘in the city’, ‘downtown’.

  The reaction in the west to the fall of Constantinople varied from genuine concern to ritual hysteria. In courts from Germany to the Iberian peninsula, elaborate plans were instigated for a new crusade. The papacy sought to galvanize Christendom in a new meritorious and redemptive cause through the assertion of papal leadership. Nicholas V issued a crusade bull, Etsi ecclesia Christi (30 September 1453). The German imperial Reichstag discussed the Turkish war on three occasions in 1454–5, Philip of Burgundy attending the diet at Regensburg in April 1454. The assembly at Frankfurt in November 1454 was addressed by Piccolomini, whose speech was widely circulated.78 Large numbers of exhortatory pamphlets were produced, some using the new technology of printing. Nicholas V’s successor, Calixtus III, maintained the momentum by authorizing preaching, clerical taxes and the sale of indulgences. The taxation aroused predictable clerical resentment. While the indulgence campaign proved financially effective, for example in England, the ubiquity of pardoners excited suspicion and encouraged widespread fraud.79 Con men and crusading were not unfamiliar partners. Calixtus, despite age and debilitating gout, displayed obsessive energy in promoting the new venture, selling papal assets, including plate, dinner services and precious bindings from the volumes in the new Vatican Library created by his immediate predecessor. Galleys were constructed in the Tiber. Calixtus persuaded Alfonso V of Aragon (also king of Naples), whose secretary he had once been, to take the cross in November 1455. The German emperor Frederick III followed suit. Leadership of the crusade served the interests of his Habsburg family lands bordering Hungary while allowing Frederick to play a genuinely imperial role within Germany. In this company, Philip of Burgundy, even though he began to raise secular taxes for the crusade in his dominions, was conspicuous by his failure to take the cross, partly a reflection of his anomalous position as one of the richest and most powerful rulers in Europe who nonetheless remained subordinate to other monarchs. His French overlord, Charles VII, refused his cooperation or approval of the scheme.

  In the autumn of 1454, Philip proposed an expedition for the following year. The lack of German response, Charles VII’s opposition and the death of Nicholas V (April 1455) postponed action. Beyond raising money, hardly much of a burden for any prince, Philip did remarkably little in the way of military or naval preparations. The timetable slipped. Alfonso V suggested a massive amphibious attack for 1457 to no effect. Crucially, Venice, at peace with the Turks since 1454, refused to become involved. While the western powers dithered, Mehmed II extended Ottoman control over Serbia (1454–5) preparatory to an attack on Hungary and the middle Danube. The fantasies of the Burgundian nobles at Lille or German princes at Frankfurt or the courtiers of Alfonso V, saturated with images of the historic Holy Land wars of the cross, not only proved impossible to realize, they failed to address the actual threat to fellow Latin Christians on the Danube. The failure of western rulers to organize an international expedition of any significance after 1453 relegated traditional mass crusading to the lumber room of military strategy, as Jean Germain put it, ‘the old expeditions and campaigns overseas that are called crusades (croisiez)’.80 Western inaction confirmed that the only effective assistance crusading institutions could provide against the Ottomans lay in moral support, financial help, limited small-scale, mainly naval expeditions and the encouragement of locally based resistance.

  BELGRADE 1456

  The successful defence of Belgrade in July 1456 exemplified just such limited crusading.81 Mehmed II advanced up the Danube in the summer of 1456, laying siege to Belgrade in the first week of July. He hoped, once the city had fallen, to press on to Buda before the campaign season ended. Facing him at Belgrade, the modest garrison was minded to come to terms. However, unexpected reinforcements arrived, led by John of Capistrano, a seventy-year-old Observant Franciscan with a long history of enthusiasm for crusading and moral rearmament. His interest in the recovery of the Holy Land and the Turkish question stretched back to the 1440s, part of his order’s longstanding involvement in preaching against enemies of the church, including heretics and Jews. Well connected, John had visited the Burgundian court in March 1454 and attended the German imperial diet at Frankfurt in November. He began preaching the crusade. By the spring of 1455, John was in Hungary concocting with a probably sceptical Regent Hunyadi an absurd plan for a huge international crusade of 100,000 men. More constructively, John toured the region preaching and establishing his credentials as a religious reformer. Credibility among crusade preachers assumed great importance. A few years later Pius II acknowledged the damage from past deceit, corruption and idleness: ‘People think our sole object is to amass gold. No one believes what we say. Like insolvent tradesmen we are without credit’.82 Only ostentatious displays of simplicity and sincerity could anaesthetize such feelings. John exuded the right balance of personal holiness and practical direction.

  John’s preaching in Hungary, begun in May 1455 but reaching a crescendo of intensity between February and June 1456, was carefully orchestrated. Reflecting both his age and careful organization, progress was measured: 375 miles in fourteen months, less than a mile a day. In February 1456, in a well-publicized ceremony at Buda, John took the cross from the papal legate, John of Carvajal. According to John, at least, his evangelism was enormously successful, especially with ‘the lesser folk’. Hunyadi’s strategy appeared to have two elements. He concentrated on enlisting a reluctant nobility while John and his fellow preachers provided the focus for raising the general popular military levy, based on the so-called militia portalis system in use for a couple of generations.83 This system of peasant military levy meant these nonnoble recruits possessed at least rudimentary arms and probably some basic training. John’s transparent sincerity mitigated any social or fiscal resentment a summons from the nobles may have aroused, his appeal deliberately transcending secular hierarchy. Little was left to chance. Local bishops lent their support. News of his preaching was carefully spread before his arrival. Sometimes, congregations were disappointed, one being kept waiting for over a week without John appearing. Recruits also came from outside Hungary, mainly Austria and Germany, i
ncluding, apparently, hundreds of students from Vienna university, perhaps seeking a glamorously adventurous summer vacation away from the lecture halls. John’s efforts formed only the centrepiece of a campaign that led to a summer of cross-taking in parts of Hungary, attracting very positive reports. Observers may have been pleasantly struck by the focus on raising men rather than the more usual touting for money. John’s contribution may have been exaggerated in his own writing and the hagiographical accounts that soon clustered around the events of 1456. Nonetheless, he raised a significant army, perhaps some thousands strong, even if its cohesion suggests it was held together by more than the friar’s personality alone.

  Despite apologists’ sentimental insistence on the wondrous and miraculous, John of Capistrano’s crusader army, while not necessarily the collection of inspired and devoted civilian innocents of propaganda and legend, played an important role in the defence of Belgrade. They supplied numbers and vital morale. The Hungarian garrison was too small to combat the Turks outside the walls of Belgrade and, without relief, was unlikely to have withstood Turkish bombardment indefinitely. Mehmed may also have relied on the longstanding reluctance of elements in the Hungarian nobility to fight if an accommodation were available. The arrival of John’s troops from 2 July onwards allowed for more aggressive tactics. They helped Hunyadi break the Turkish naval blockade around the city on 14 July. A week later, on the night of 21–2 July, they stood with the garrison in the breaches of the battered city walls to repulse the main Turkish assault. The following day, as Mehmed began to organize his retreat, they formed a major element in the counter-attack that swarmed over the Turkish forward positions, inflicting further heavy casualties and seizing large amounts of matériel. The success of John’s recruiting effort seems to have wrong-footed Mehmed, whose plans depended on a relatively rapid seizure of Belgrade if his further targets were to be met. The crusaders’ appearance in strength dashed hopes that his initial superiority of numbers and control of the rivers would force Belgrade’s surrender. That Ottoman forces were stretched is confirmed by their precipitate withdrawal once the desperate ploy of a night-time frontal assault failed.

  The well-attested tensions between John’s crusaders and Hunyadi added lustre to the image of a providential force whose faith triumphed where military prowess and professionalism had failed. In fact, much of the antagonism between the two groups revolved around the disposition of booty and Hunyadi’s lack of control over the crusaders, a consequence of the decision earlier in the year to give John a measure of autonomous authority over his recruits. However, John showed his understanding of the proper relationship of his army to Hunyadi when, the day after the Turks’ departure, he summarily disbanded his troops when they tried to assert their independence by claiming sole credit for victory and, thus, ownership of its spoils.84 John and his crusaders’ reputation owed most to the search, then and since, for heroes who could be shown achieving temporal success through living up to the highest spiritual standards crusade rhetoric demanded. Undoubtedly, John’s spiritual charisma helped bond his army together and to the cause. His banners spoke both of crusading and the morally strict programme of his order. Revivalism had perennially fuelled crusade enthusiasm, especially in default of the secular discipline or coercion of enforceable lay hierarchies and secular lordship. But such effervescent popular crusading tended to evaporate quickly, John of Capistrano’s crusade proving no exception. His army disbanded and he himself died of the plague in October 1456. Thereafter garrisons and truces kept the Ottomans at bay and out of Hungary until the 1520s, not crusaders, indigenous or foreign.

  The more conventional efforts of Calixtus III wholly failed to defend Hungary. His fleet only managed to set out in August 1456, meeting with modest success during a tour of duty that lasted until late 1457. Lemnos, Samothrace and Thasos were recovered in the Aegean; a Turkish fleet was defeated at Mytilene in the summer of 1457, and an uplifting but pointless raid was conducted down the Levantine coast to Egypt. Pope Calixtus milked these successes. The naval victories were commemorated by a medal, that at Belgrade by the institution in 1457 of general observance of the Feast of the Transfiguration on 6 August, the day news of the triumph had reached Rome a year before. It was also the date of the battle of Mytilene.85 Yet such gestures did little to deflect the consolidation of Ottoman power south of the Danube and in Greece. The flow of the Ottoman advance may have been stemmed, but there was no counter-attack. The overwhelming presence of Turkish dominion from Serbia to Cilicia remained unaltered, a fact that preyed heavily on Calixtus III’s successor, called by some ‘the last crusader’.

  THE CRUSADE OF PIUS II

  By the time of his election as Pope Pius II in August 1458, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (1405–64) had been promoting an anti-Turkish, anti-Muslim eastern crusade for over twenty years. A distinguished scholar, man of letters and experienced diplomat, Pius had been heavily engaged during negotiations in the earlier 1450s. On elevation to the throne of St Peter he immediately renewed calls for a crusade (October 1458), convening an international conference at Mantua (summer 1459–January 1460). Although the attendance at Mantua was meagre and the response decidedly tepid, Pius drove the meeting to agree on a new expedition, imagining at the end of it that he had a plan, with fixed promises of men and funding. Optimism soon ran into the sand. International prospects were poor. England had slipped into civil war. The new French king, Louis XI, continued his predecessor’s hostility to Philip of Burgundy’s participation. Louis had little time for his previous protector’s posturing, regarding Philip as spoilt, arrogant and ‘of no great intellect’.86 In Italy, the succession to Naples dragged the pope into a conflict that pitted France against Aragon. Pius hardly helped. After 1453, he appeared to hanker after an old-fashioned general crusade to defeat the Turks and recover Jerusalem. This increasingly looked like code for enhancing papal supremacy rather than a serious military proposal. His and his advisors’ language when discussing the Turks became crudely abusive. However, by placing the crusade at the centre of his pontificate, Pius was staking papal authority and even, as he admitted in 1462, respect for the church hierarchy itself.87

  This explains the otherwise bizarre, pathetic or tragic coda to his reign. By early 1462, Pius had decided the only way to rescue his crusade and papal authority was to lead the expedition personally, to say to the faithful, ‘Come with me,’ not, ‘Go on your own.’ This represented the height of impracticality. Pius was prematurely old, a semi-invalid. A crusade, he very publicly acknowledged in 1463, would kill him. Perhaps he reckoned a heroic gesture of martyrdom would shake Christendom to reform where tens of thousands of his erudite words had not. Pius had come late to the priesthood, in his forties, after a successful public and private life as a layman; he had fathered a number of children. His mid-life conversion left him with an originality of perspective and freedom of thought denied his more institutionalized clerical colleagues. Freshness of vision, high intellect and impressive articulacy produced his remarkable elision of the crusade with papal supremacy and his own spiritual journey.

  Prospects for action were better than in 1459. Philip the Good, although in his mid-sixties, recommitted himself to the venture. Venice was close to war with the Turks, reversing their neutrality of a decade earlier. Pius relaunched his crusade in October 1463, this time as a limited project directed at the Turks.88 The full panoply of preaching, cross-giving, Holy Land indulgences, privileges and financial apparatus was rehearsed. The pope’s leadership became central. To his cardinals Pius made no bones over his personal vocation: ‘we shall in a sense be going to certain death’, a noble end that may have appealed both to his religious faith and his classical imagination.89

  The autumn of 1463 saw serious diplomatic efforts to gain material support. Pius negotiated with sceptical Italian states while securing a grand alliance between the papacy, Venice, Hungary and Burgundy. On 22 October Pius rather pompously declared war on Mehmed II. Ancona was fixed as the muster point
for the international force. The Venetians would transport the army across the Adriatic to join either the Hungarians or Albanian freedom fighters under Scanderbeg. Typically, after another lavish crusade fête at Christmas 1463, Philip of Burgundy ratted, but did send a company of 3,000 men under his bastard Anthony, who set out for Ancona in May 1464. Other small contingents began to move south. The only cardinal to provide a galley was Rodrigo Borgia, nephew and protégé of the crusade fanatic Calixtus III, later Pope Alexander VI of ill-repute.90 Given his notorious pluralism and greed, Rodrigo could certainly afford it. Pius himself assembled a fleet of galleys to meet him at Ancona before taking the cross at St Peter’s on 18 June 1464, perhaps the only pope in office ever to do so to fight the infidel. Now seriously ill, he must have realized his mission to Ancona, whither he set out in late June, could only be pour encourager les autres and for the salvation of his own soul. The Venetian flotilla of twelve galleys commanded by the doge himself was late. Elements of the papal force, seeing how the land lay, began to desert. It was said that the curtains of Pius’s litter had to be drawn to shield him from the sight of his disintegrating army.91 On 14 August, soon after reaching Ancona, Pius, as he had expected, died. His crusade died with him.