The History of the Renaissance World: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  Immediately, Frederick retreated and pointed out piously that his quarrel was not with the Church but with the ambitions of the man himself. Gregory’s successor served for only seventeen days before dying of illness and throwing Rome into chaos. Not until 1243 was a new pope finally elected: the Genoese cardinal Sinibaldo Fieschi, a canon lawyer who now became Pope Innocent IV.

  Frederick had been friendly with Cardinal Fieschi, but he had his reservations. “This election,” he told his familiars, “will be of much hurt to us; for he was our friend when cardinal, and now he will be our enemy as Pope.” His prediction very shortly came true.15

  Innocent IV had a lawyer’s mindset, and before long was combining Roman law with canon principles to come up with a clear articulation of his own power. Church law, he wrote, was above secular law; and since, in Roman jurisprudence, the prince stands above the law, so the pope also stands above church law, unbound by it, able to change it, depart from it, or even nullify it as needed. Absolute papal monarchy: it was a theory that Innocent IV spent much of his papacy elaborating and defending, and it was almost custom-designed to infuriate the emperor.16

  Innocent IV began his papacy by ordering Frederick to give up all of the territory he had conquered since his excommunication by Gregory IX, five years earlier. When Frederick refused, Innocent IV traveled to the French city of Lyons—outside of Italy, and outside of the emperor’s grasp. There he renewed both the excommunication and the call for Frederick’s deposition as emperor.17

  This began yet another war of letters, with both pope and emperor pleading their case to the rest of the world. “I hold my crown from God alone; neither the Pope, the Council, nor the devil shall rend it from me!” Frederick raged. “What might not all kings fear from the presumption of a such a pope?” “When a sick man who cannot be helped by mild remedies undergoes a surgical incision or cautery,” wrote Innocent IV, primly, in response, “he rages in bitterness of spirit against his doctor. . . . If then Frederick, formerly emperor, strives to accuse . . . the sacred judge of the universal church . . . he is behaving in the same fashion.”18

  Inevitably, the war of words devolved into simple war. Innocent IV declared one of Frederick’s German subjects, Henry Raspe, to be the new king of Germany in place of young Conrad (now seventeen); Henry marched on Conrad’s own forces but died on campaign, so Innocent threw his weight behind another candidate, William of Holland. While Conrad fought in Germany, Frederick II started to lose his foothold in Italy. Bishops and cardinals loyal to the pope were preaching revolt to the emperor’s subjects in Sicily and Lombardy. In early February of 1248, Frederick’s army was unexpectedly defeated while laying siege to the city of Parma; the emperor was forced to flee to Cremona, and most of the gold and treasure he had been using to finance the war fell into Lombard hands. The Milanese, heading the Lombard League, led the recapture of Modena; Como fell; and in 1250, still battling, Frederick II grew ill with dysentery, the scourge of a soldier’s existence.19

  “That Frederick who was once emperor died . . . in Apulia,” writes the Franciscan Salimbene. “And because of the very great stench of corruption which came from his body, he could not be carried to Palermo, where the sepulchers of the kings of Sicily are.” Salimbene was a northerner, and other northern Italians believed his horror story. In fact, Frederick’s body was embalmed, taken by ship to Sicily, paraded through the streets with an honor guard, and buried in Palermo, at the church of Monreale. The emperor’s death left Innocent IV still marooned in Lyons, Frederick’s son Conrad fighting off the anti-king of Germany, William, and the Inquisition blooming like a black weed across Europe.20

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  The Shadow of God

  Between 1236 and 1266,

  the crown of Delhi passes from

  the family of Iltumish to a Turkish slave

  who becomes absolute monarch

  THE SULTAN OF DELHI, Iltumish, was dead. His sons were “engrossed in the pleasures of youth,” none of them worthy of the throne; and so Iltumish left his crown to his daughter Raziyya. “[She] was a great sovereign, and sagacious,” the Tabakat-i-Nasiri tells us, “just, beneficent . . . and of warlike talent, and was endowed with all the admirable attributes and qualifications necessary for kings; but, as she did not attain the destiny, in her creation, of being computed among men, of what advantage were all these excellent qualifications to her?”1

  Her father’s officers divided. The vizier of Delhi and his supporters, hoping to put one of the sultan’s useless sons on the throne instead, mounted an attack on the palace, while several governors from the outlying provinces marched with their forces to Delhi to fight for Raziyya. The queen’s supporters won, driving the malcontents out of the city.

  The opposition never fully faded, though. Raziyya appointed as Master of the Stables (a military position, directing the deployment of both horses and elephants) an African soldier named Malik Hakut, born in the highlands of the southern Nile. Immediately her Turkish detractors began to whisper that Malik Hakut must be her lover; why else would she have appointed a non-Turk to such a favored position? To quell the gossip, Raziyya abandoned traditional female appearances; whenever she rode out, she used a war elephant rather than a horse, and wore a man’s armor and headdress.2

  But this did not end her troubles. She was forced to put down a serious rebellion in Lahore, and had just returned to Delhi when she heard that her trusted official Malik Altuniah, governor of the southward city of Bathinda, had also revolted. Unknown to Raziyya, this second rebellion had been carried out with the cooperation of Turkish officials in her own court. She left Delhi again and marched to Bathinda, but as she arrived, her own retinue joined with Malik Altuniah, killed the queen’s Master of the Stables, and took her prisoner.

  With Raziyya held captive in the Bathinda fortress known as Qila Mubarak, her shiftless brother Bahram declared himself king in Delhi, with the support of forty Turkish officers and aristocrats. But Malik Altuniah had intended to seize the throne of Delhi himself. He drew up a contract of marriage with Raziyya (apparently without consulting her), converting himself from rebel to her champion, and then brought her by force back to Delhi, where he mounted an attack on Bahram.

  According to the Tabakat-i-Nasiri, Bahram’s forty supporters and their retinues routed the attackers in short order. On October 13, 1240, Raziyya and her new husband were taken captive; both of them were executed the next morning. She had served as the first Muslim queen of India for three years, six months, and six days.3

  Bahram only lasted two years before his own soldiers assassinated him. For some years, his supporters—the Forty, the most powerful mamluk warriors and courtiers in Delhi—struggled with one another for power while paying lip service to a puppet sultan: first Raziyya’s alcoholic nephew and then her youngest brother, Nasiruddin.4

  Nasiruddin, aged twenty when he was elevated to the sultanate of Delhi in 1246, survived on the throne for two decades by not trying to rule. He was, says the Tabakat-i-Nasiri, devoted to fasting and prayer and the study of the Holy Word; he was a model of all gentle virtues: compassion, clemency, humility, and harmlessness. Causing no harm, he received none. He gave himself over to study and charity, and turned the running of the sultanate over to his Turkish officials. “The Sultan expressed no opinion without their permission,” explains the fourteenth-century poet and historian Isami; “he did not move his hands or feet except at their order. He would neither drink water nor go to sleep except with their knowledge.”5

  Chief among his officials was the Turkish Grand Chamberlain Balban. Taken captive in a Mongol raid on his tribe as a young man, sold at the Baghdad slave market, and finally bought by Iltumish himself when he was in his early thirties, Balban had spent his entire adult life as a slave; but in Delhi, this was no bar to advancement. He had worked his way into Iltumish’s good graces, had served Raziyya herself in the court position of Chief Huntsman, and by 1246 was one of the most experienced soldiers and administrators
of the Forty. Nasiruddin chose him to be vizier, making him the de facto sultan of Delhi: “The king lived in the palace,” says Isami, “and Balban governed the empire.”6

  The years of disruption at Delhi had threatened the sultanate’s defenses. To the southeast, the Hindu king of Orissa—long resistant to Muslim encroachment—had gone on the offensive. His name was Naramasimha Deva; he had begun his push outward in 1238 and had taken away parts of Bengal that had once fallen under Islamic rule; the Delhi-controlled city of Laknaur had fallen to Naramasimha in 1243, and the year after, a massive battle on the shores of the Ganges had ended with the Orissa armies triumphing. “The Ganga herself was blackened,” reads an Orissa inscription celebrating the victory, “by the flood of tears from the eyes of the Muslim women of the north and west, whose husbands fell to Naramasimha’s army.”7

  And to the north, the Mongols threatened. Lahore had been sacked, in 1241, by a Mongol raiding party that descended, looted the city, slaughtered anyone who resisted, and then withdrew. More sustained invasions seemed likely.

  Balban met the threat by organizing annual military campaigns against both Hindu opponents and Mongol outposts. The first of these took place right after Nasiruddin’s enthronement, in 1246. With Nasiruddin in attendance and Balban in command, the armies of Delhi crossed into the region of the northern river known as the Sind and launched an attack on the scattering of Mongol forts there. “By the favour and aid of the Creator,” Balban’s chronicler tells us, “he ravaged the hills. . . . The army of the infidel Mongols who were in those parts took to flight, and . . . fear fell upon their hearts.” The following year, Balban led a similar campaign against Hindu rebels who had fortified themselves at Talsandah, east of Kannauj, and seized it for Delhi.8

  47.1 Balban’s Wars

  The Tabakat-i-Nasiri lists a score of these excursions: yearly military expeditions, buttressing the boundaries of Delhi and beating back the enemies at the sultanate’s edges. The success of these campaigns lay at the heart of Balban’s clout. By 1249, he had grown so indispensable that he was able to arrange a marriage between the Sultan Nasiruddin and his own daughter. “As Balban was the asylum of the Sultan’s dynasty, the prop of the army, and the strength of the kingdom,” Juzjani remarks, “it was his daughter’s good fortune to become the royal consort.”

  He probably intended to be the grandfather of the next sultan, but the single son his daughter bore to her new husband died in infancy, and no more heirs appeared.9

  In 1260, Balban led a massive and bloody reprisal against the hill country of Mewar, a Rajput kingdom south of Delhi that had caused the sultanate unending headaches by raiding, burning, and pillaging: in the eyes of the mamluks, a land of thieves, cattle rustlers, and bandits. Iltumish had attacked Mewar, but had been unable to overrun it. Now, in a series of vicious and bloody battles, Balban reduced the Mewar resistance to nothing. Thousands of Mewar soldiers were killed by the sword, or trampled under the feet of Balban’s elephants; civilians were slaughtered, captives were skinned alive, then hung over the gates of cities that resisted. When guerrilla warfare continued from the forests, Balban supplied his army with axes and ordered them to clear a hundred miles of trees away, laying the ground bare: “Hindus beyond computation fell beneath the unsparing swords of the holy warriors,” the Tabakat-i-Nasiri says.10

  It was Balban’s most spectacular victory yet. The account of the triumph, dated to the fifteenth year of Sultan Nasiruddin’s reign, brings the Tabakat to an end; Nasiruddin remained on the throne of Delhi for another six years, but the histories are silent about his accomplishments. Apparently Balban—despairing of a grandson, and now at the height of his power—had eclipsed the sultan entirely.

  By 1266, Nasiruddin was dead. None of the thirteenth-century chroniclers describe his death; half a century later, Isami would insist that Balban had poisoned his son-in-law. However it came about, Nasiruddin died with no heir, and Balban—father of his widow—claimed the sultanate of Delhi as his own.11

  Twenty years of fighting to strengthen an empire ruled by a figurehead had left Balban with a strong need to assert his own authority. As vizier, he had kept the sultanate of Delhi safe with his own right hand; as sultan, he began to work out a theory that made the strength of that right hand identical to the will of God. He was Zil-i-llahi, “shadow of God”: God’s vice-regent on earth. He, no less than the distant Frederick II, held his crown from God alone; he, no less than the faraway Innocent IV, stood above all written laws. He was answerable to no man, bound by no legal code, and vulnerable to no challenge.12

  No previous sultan had made such a bold claim, but Balban was prepared to give daily demonstrations of his status as divinely appointed representative of God to his people. He gave up drinking in public, remaining always distant, aloof, and solemn. He created an imposing armed guard that surrounded him everywhere he went. He dressed magnificently and sat on a diamond-studded throne, and in his audience chamber he instituted a new ceremony: his courtiers were to prostrate themselves before the throne on their bellies and kiss his feet. They were not to laugh in his presence.13

  He made a few practical innovations as well. Those of the Forty who still survived were sent far away from Delhi, on missions to distant corners of the sultanate, preferably the most wild and dangerous ones; those who survived were selectively pruned through poisoning. Balban had a network of spies throughout the empire, sending constant reports back to Delhi about the behavior of far-flung officials. One of those spies, failing to provide an update on the doings of a provincial governor, was publicly executed and hung up on the city gate of his target.14

  In the disorderly years since Iltumish, explains Balban’s biographer Ziauddin Barani, the people of Delhi had become “vacillating, disobedient, self-willed.” Balban’s unyielding hand on Delhi’s reins restored peace: “The dignity and authority of government were restored,” Barani writes. “Fear of the governing power, which is the basis of all good government . . . had departed from the hearts of all men, and the country had fallen into a wretched condition. But from the very commencement of the reign of Balban the people became tractable, obedient, and submissive.” The Turkish slave, risen to the sultanate, had reduced his people to the state he had once endured: obedient and submissive, slaves.15

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  The Seventh Crusade

  Between 1244 and 1250,

  Egypt changes hands,

  and another crusade fails

  DECEMBER IN PARIS, 1244: nearly Christmas. Louis IX of France lay ill, so close to death that he could neither speak nor move. Even the movement of his breath had ceased. “He was in such evil case,” his friend and biographer Jean de Joinville writes, “that, as they tell, one of the ladies who tended him wished to draw the sheet over his face, and said that he was dead.”1

  Thirty years old, Louis IX—crowned king at twelve, governed by his mother until he turned twenty—had just finished beating back Henry III’s unsuccessful invasion of the western French lands. He was at the height of his strength, but he had no male heirs; his death would throw France into crisis. The entire palace wept. The doctors left; the doors to his room were flung open for mourners; priests arrived to “commend his soul.” And then, suddenly, the king took a deep breath and sighed.2

  He had emerged from his coma; and when he had recovered enough to sit up and speak, he announced that in thanksgiving, he would go on crusade.

  This announcement was greeted with joy by everyone except his mother Blanche, who tried to talk him out of it and even offered to pay for mercenaries who could go in his place. But Louis was unmoved. He had made a sacred vow, and he was not Frederick II; he would not renege.3

  Even before his illness, Louis IX had probably been contemplating crusade. In the fall of 1244, disastrous news had come from the east: Jerusalem had fallen once more into Muslim hands.

  The disaster had been brought about by a complicated five-year series of events. Frederick’s treaty with the sultan al-K
amil had expired in 1239; Islamic law dictated that a treaty made by Muslims with infidels could not last more than ten years. In most cases, treaties were simply renewed once per decade. But al-Kamil had died in 1238, and his two sons had battled over his empire.

  The older brother, as-Salih Ayyub, triumphed (and imprisoned his rival for the rest of his life). However, the short sharp civil war had given Ayyub’s uncle as-Salih Ismail, brother of al-Kamil and governor of Damascus under al-Kamil’s sultancy, the opportunity to rebel. He declared himself ruler of the Syrian half of the Ayyubid empire, splitting Saladin’s kingdom in half. Ismail was now the overlord of Jerusalem.

  So Ayyub hired mercenaries to attack his uncle’s Syrian domains, hoping to recover them for himself.

  These mercenaries were wandering survivors of the Turkish kingdom of Khwarezm, destroyed by Genghis Khan in 1219. When the last Shah of Khwarezm, Jalal ad-Din, had fled into India pursued by Genghis’s men, his army and family had been wiped out, but Jalal ad-Din himself had survived. He had spent the next ten years of his life waging guerrilla warfare against the Mongol conquerors, finally meeting his end at Mongol hands in a desperate mountain battle in 1231. His followers, instead of dispersing, became known as the Khwarezmiyya, nomadic mercenaries, claiming to preserve the last remnants of Khwarezm culture, hiring themselves out to whoever could pay.4

  In 1244, ten thousand Khwarezmiyya, fighting on behalf of the Sultan of Egypt, swept down on Syria. On August 11, they stormed Jerusalem. They slaughtered both Muslims and Christians in the streets, broke into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and ripped the bones of the Crusader kings of Jerusalem from their crypts. Ayyub of Egypt claimed the city, now not much more than ruins, for his own.5