The drive towards church union failed to grasp the essentials of the Byzantine predicament. While continued economic and commercial prosperity sustained the noble and urban Byzantine elites, as well as the Italian commercial predators, for the Byzantine imperial government, irreversible loss of territory meant loss of revenues. Constant frontier warfare dislocated agriculture; necessarily higher taxes provoked peasant and aristocratic alienation from the imperial administrators in Constantinople. Lack of funds and manpower forced Byzantine rulers to abandon serious naval commitment, isolating them further. Compelled to hire land armies for protection and support in the regular civil wars, emperors and imperial claimants frequently found they could not pay their troops, who seized lands instead: the Catalan Company in central Greece in 1305–11; the Ottoman Turks in Thrace after 1345. This military dependency on private, non-imperial armies became entrenched by incessant political feuding. By the 1340s, the Byzantine emperor was so poor that he pawned the crown jewels in Venice, replacing the royal regalia with glass replicas. Donations for the upkeep of the great church of Saint Sophia went to pay Turkish mercenaries. Despite their cosmic pretentions, the Byzantine emperors became Ottoman dependants, then tributaries, by the 1380s vassals of the sultan. The still lucrative commercial system was run by others; at one point the Genoese controlled 87 per cent of Bosporus customs. The Orthodox church constituted the only robust, independent power in the Greek polity, which impeded western assistance. The contrast between ancient claims and contemporary debility was tellingly captured by a witness to Manuel II’s visit to Henry IV of England at Christmas 1400:
how grievous it was that this great Christian prince should be driven by the Saracens from the furthest East to the furthest Western Islands to seek aid against them… What dost thou now, ancient glory of Rome?51
Yet, by the late fourteenth century, Greek emperors were more often than not allies and vassals of the Turks, not their implacable foes. Manuel himself, less than a decade earlier, had served for six months in the army of Sultan Bayezid I in Anatolia. Such were the contradictions of Byzantine survival.
By 1400, Byzantine emperors survived on sufferance. The Byzantine civil wars of 1346–54, between John V Palaeologus and John VI Cantacuzene made the Ottomans arbiters of the empire. Sultan Orkhan married a daughter of John VI in 1346, Muslim polygamy proving a diplomatic boon. John V’s proposal for a new western crusade in 1355 coincided with some of the bitterest fighting of the Hundred Years War and renewed papal crusades in Italy. In 1358, John V recognized Ottoman power when one of his daughters married a son of Sultan Orkhan. Fresh attempts by John V to enlist western aid in the late 1360s only produced the limited intervention of Amadeus of Savoy’s crusade in 1366–7. Once in control of most of the Balkans north of Attica and south of the Danube, Sultan Bayezid began an eight-year blockade of Constantinople in 1394. The western crusade of 1396 achieved nothing, although it temporarily drew some fire from the siege of Constantinople. The capital was reprieved for half a century by factors outside its control. These did not include the crusade. Until their wholesale adoption of gunpowder in the fifteenth century, the Turks lacked the ability to destroy the still-formidable walls of Constantinople. They also lacked control of the sea, depending on western allies such as the Genoese for shipping and technical expertise. Only in the decades surrounding the final attack on Constantinople did the Ottomans become a naval power, a fundamental prerequisite for achieving Mehmed II’s goal of recreating a Mediterranean empire based on Constantinople. The loss of western naval hegemony ultimately sealed the fate of the maritime Latin east just as lack of military power doomed mainland Greece and the Balkans. In the fourteenth century, the Ottoman empire in Europe and Asia Minor had rested on a series of loose overlordships and alliances, with power delegated to vassals. By contrast, in the fifteenth century a highly centralized and disciplined Ottoman polity emerged after the restoration of the empire following Timur’s withdrawal to central Asia and death in 1405, and the resolution by 1413 of the family power struggle in favour of Mehmed I. Acquiring a navy and cannon, the Ottomans restored their control over the sub-Danubean Balkans in a generation. Short of a miraculous revolution in western European priorities, the fall of Constantinople appeared inevitable.
THE CRUSADE OF NICOPOLIS
The western response to the Turkish conquests rarely reached the pitch of an armed crusade, despite sporadic papal appeals and offers of crusade privileges stretching back to the 1360s and 1370s. The expedition of Amadeus of Savoy in 1366–7, an adjunct of the papal-Cypriot schemes of 1362–5, exposed the limits of what could be achieved. Raiding, even occupying strategic maritime bases, such as Gallipoli or Smyrna, while helping the local interests of Latin rulers in the Aegean and in Rhodes, hardly impinged on the Turkish land advance. The prerequisite for any serious crusading venture lay in the establishment of peace in western Europe. The dissipation of efforts in the 1360s were overtaken by the resumption of the Hundred Years War in 1369 and the papal schism from 1378. Only after the Anglo-French truce of 1389, which ushered in a generation of wary peace, were new international schemes devised to fight the infidel. The first target, in keeping with aristocratic attitudes, was not the Turk at all, but a more traditional, if peripheral, foe.
In 1389–90, the Genoese took advantage of the truce to invite the French government of Charles VI to sponsor an expedition to capture the Tunisian port of al-Mahdiya. The Genoese probably hoped this enterprise would further their interests in the area after their own annexation of the island of Jerba, south of al-Mahdiya, in 1388. The French embraced this opportunity for unequivocally meritorious warfare. Lavish tournaments at Smithfield in London and especially at St Inglevert near Calais helped recruit English nobles in an appropriately chivalrous setting. The expedition was commanded by Charles VI’s uncle, Louis II, duke of Bourbon.52 In France recruitment was limited to 1,500, probably not including archers. The English contingent, made up mainly of well-placed but second-rank courtiers, was led by John Beaufort, an illegitimate son of Richard I’s powerful uncle John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, who contributed twenty-five knights and 100 archers.53 The Genoese supplied a fleet estimated as twenty-two galleys and eighteen transports. Although both Avignon and Roman popes offered indulgences, the al-Mahdiya expedition resembled a strenuous jaunt, on a par with the Baltic reisen, rather than a serious attempt to conquer territory in North Africa. Although there may have been processions and prayers for victory at home, no lay or ecclesiastical central funds were allocated or granted. Leaders were expected to be of gentle birth, capable of paying their own way. Despite the indulgences and the chroniclers’ language of crusading, there is no clear evidence that a single participant actually took the cross.
Sailing from Genoa in July 1390, the Franco-English army besieged al-Mahdiya for nine weeks, fighting off relief attempts. Cooperation appeared good between the different elements in the army, Louis of Bourbon consulting the English, whose archers played a prominent role in the action. However, once peace terms were offered by the Hafsid ruler of Tunis, all contingents outside Duke Louis’s household rejected his wishes and accepted them. The weeks before al-Mahdiya cost few lives; disease proving more lethal.54 The campaign achieved nothing of concrete value, although it may have enhanced French links with Genoa. It is hard to locate the 1390 campaign within the tradition of the sporadic penetration of north Africa, conducted in this period largely by Castilians and Portuguese. Rather, it should be seen as part of Genoa’s commercial strategy taking advantage of the Anglo-French truce of 1390. Both governments could appreciate the diplomatic benefits of this mechanism of reconciliation. Nobles and knights on both sides of the English Channel were eager to justify their status on exotic and laudable battlefields, not just in the service of crown and country. Many veterans of 1390 also found their way to Prussia and eastern Europe. The al-Mahdiya adventure provided a dress rehearsal for the Nicopolis crusade six years later.
The early 1390s saw a recrudescence
of old-fashioned crusade dreaming. The victories of Bayezid I had brought him to the southern frontiers of Hungary, whose new king, Sigismund, sought military help from the west. This coincided with the emergence at the French and English courts of a new crusading policy. Promoted by the energetic veteran lobbyist Philip of Mézières, now settled in Paris, schemes were bandied about for a crusade that would seal the new peace between England and France, heal the papal schism and liberate the Holy Land. Individual commitment was secured through membership of Mézières’s New Order of the Passion (Nova religio passionis), which between 1390 and 1395 attracted the patronage of Charles VI (although he lost his mind in 1392) and Richard II (1377–99), as well as scores of English and French knights. Through royal favour, personal diplomacy and targeted pamphleteering, Mézières and members of his order influenced the language of diplomacy, creating a discernible atmosphere of crusading enthusiasm and expectation.55
Coincidentally or not, concrete plans were put in train at least from 1392. The lead came from the Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy, who used the crusade schemes to assert his power against his brothers for control of French affairs after the onset of Charles VI’s madness. He was also probably a genuine enthusiast. By 1394 a plan had crystallized under which Duke Philip, his nephew and rival, Charles VI’s younger brother, Louis, duke of Orléans and John of Gaunt would embark for Hungary the following year. Philip began collecting money from his lands in Burgundy and Flanders; Louis and Gaunt may well have received royal funds. By the end of the year, Gaunt had raised 1,500 men, although these may have been destined to police a Gascon revolt. Venice had been approached and Sigismund was expecting the army in 1395. As in 1390, crusade bulls were issued by Popes Boniface IX (Rome and Benedict XIII (Avignon), although the latter only in the spring of 1396, shortly before the expedition departed. Also in common with the al-Mahdiya expedition, there is no clear sign that any of those involved in this enterprise actually took the cross.56
However, delays in coordinating western aid with the plans of the Hungarians, diplomatic difficulties between England and France and domestic political problems, in Gascony and at the fractious French court, sabotaged this ambitious programme. The three putative leaders withdrew. Gaunt delegated his role to his bastard John Beaufort, the al-Mahdiya veteran. Philip the Bold appointed his son and heir John of Nevers to lead his troops. Louis of Orléans abandoned the project altogether. English involvement became peripheral. Beaufort may have joined the expedition when it embarked in the spring of 1396, but it is not certain. No unequivocal evidence of English participation exists. If individuals or private companies enlisted, it is unlikely they included a substantial or officially sponsored regiment.57 The expedition devolved on to the household of John of Nevers, a circle of Burgundian knights and a smattering of French nobles sympathetic to the Burgundian faction at court, many of them with past or future experience of war in Prussia, Tunisia and Greece. The total of men at arms probably came to a few hundred, the whole Franco-Burgundian force to a few thousand, hardly Mézières’s great redemptive crusade. Except as a make-weight for Sigismund’s border defence, it is difficult to imagine what could be achieved by such a force. As well as its size, the decision to travel to Hungary by land severely limited its options, precluding action independent of Hungarian plans.
Although serious in intent, and courageous in battle, the leaders of this western army appear to have been seduced by wishful self-esteem, not sober strategy. Hopes of battering a path to Constantinople, of sweeping the Ottomans aside in one fell encounter or even, as some apparently envisaged, continuing to Jerusalem, were entirely illusory. Sigismund probably appreciated this, advocating a defensive strategy once the western army arrived in Hungary. Yet he played along with Burgundian fantasies to acquire powerful – and free – reinforcements. The policy was born of the crusade diplomacy after 1390 and the eagerness, demonstrated at al-Mahdiya, of French nobles to engage in what was still almost universally regarded as meritorious warfare far from home. The fourteenth century had witnessed the institutionalization of the cult of chivalry into a legion of secular orders, such as those of the Garter in England (1348) or the Star in France (1352). Many of these orders of chivalry, such as the Neapolitan Order of the Knot, dedicated to the Holy Spirit (1352), enjoined service in an eastern crusade on its members, an obligation that had more to do with personal self-image than the exigencies of Balkan politics or Levantine warfare. The 1396 campaign provided an occasion for the honouring of such commitments.58
Leaving Burgundy in April 1396, John of Nevers’s army reached the Hungarian capital Buda late in July. Intent on forcing a hurried and incomplete response from Sultan Bayezid, the combined western and Hungarian army advanced down the Danube into occupied Bulgaria. After capturing the frontier fortresses of Vidin and Rahova, where the poorer, unransomable defenders were indiscrimately massacred, they laid siege to Nicopolis further downstream. Here Bayezid I’s army caught up with them. On 25 September, the coalition Christian forces were destroyed by the Ottomans and their Serbian allies. The Christian allies took the initiative by seeking an assault against the advancing Turks. Refusing to remain as a powerful reserve and failing to coordinate their attack with the Hungarians, the French cavalry broke itself on the Turkish infantry and first rank of horse before reaching the main column of Turkish heavy cavalry, the sipahis, when they were cut to pieces. John of Vienne Admiral of France and William of La Trémoille Marshal of Burgundy were among the slain; John of Nevers, Philip of Artois constable of France, Marshal Boucicaut and Enguerrand of Coucy were among the captured. They later attracted huge ransoms, collectively perhaps as much as 500,000 francs. The Hungarians, deserted by their Wallachian and Transylvanian levies, fared little better at the hands of the Serbians under Despot Stephen Lazarevic. The Turkish victory was overwhelming and indisputable, as crushing a defeat of French arms as Agincourt nineteen years later, where exactly the same mistakes were made. There, as at Nicopolis, the French cavalry insisted on attacking a line of archers and infantry protected by rows of stakes. It says much for poor French generalship of the period: one of the chief tacticians at Agincourt was the Nicopolis veteran Marshal Boucicaut.59
The disastrous Nicopolis campaign has been described melodramatically as ‘a final failure’. ‘There would be no more crusades.’60 Others have acknowledged the defeat as decisive as well as crushing. In confirming Ottoman military strength, and the adhesiveness of their Balkan clients, it exposed the ineffectiveness of western arms, traditional crusade strategies and the feeble hold Sigismund possessed over his allies. Only the irruption of Timur into western Asia in 1400 and his defeat of Bayezid in 1402 at Ankara saved Constantinople and central Europe. In Christian Europe, Nicopolis has been credited with Sigismund abandoning aggression against the Ottomans for his German and Bohemian interests and the disintegration of Anglo-French unity, with wide implications for the survival of Richard II’s regime (it fell in 1399) and the renewal of the Hundred Years War (in 1415). However, both immediate and long-term effects can be exaggerated. Only a relatively small army had been engaged at Nicopolis. The popular court poet and chronicler Froissart was told only 700 French knights were involved.61 The failure to coordinate the land attack with naval operations ran counter to contemporary experience and advice. The disaster of 1396 failed to disarm enthusiasm for fighting the infidel. Neither technically nor generically was Nicopolis the last crusade. Nicopolis did not lead to the conquest of Hungary, Bayezid’s aggression turning eastwards in 1397–1400. The reaction to Nicopolis in France did not match that to other defeats during the Hundred Years’ War. In England, chroniclers’ almost universal silence indicates minimal impact. Nicopolis did not mark a watershed between crusading optimism and pessimism.
The response to the Nicopolis defeat did reveal how crusading was viewed. On their release from Ottoman captivity and return to France in 1398, John of Nevers and his companions were ecstatically received as heroes. The manner of their defeat had inspir
ed a familiar round of hand-wringing introspection. On 9 January 1397 churches across France conducted grief-laden memorial services. Writers close to the French court and in contact with survivors were in no doubt that vanity and folly had led to the Frenchmen’s destruction, although the bravery of individuals was accorded due praise. Nicopolis was transformed into a morality story of sin, redemption and heroism, a paradigm of the image of later medieval crusading itself. The well-informed official chronicler from the monastery of St Denis eschewed easy clichés in highlighting the contrast between the lavish feasts, ornate tents, gawdy clothes and loose women of the Christians with the God-fearing, prudent, discreet Bayezid, a suitable instrument of God’s chastisement of sinners despite his ‘Turkish superstition’.62 Secular writers transmuted events into good stories with a didactic purpose. Froissart’s almost wholly fantastical account of the 1396 campaign, written before 1402, emphasized the scale of the Ottoman threat, inventing threats by Bayezid to march on Rome and feed his horse on the altar in St Peter’s.63 This was no simple call to return to arms, but a polemic to end the papal schism and unite Christendom, precisely the Anglo-French policy that had preceded Nicopolis, a view that did nothing to disturb underlying assumptions about chivalric honour or the efficacy of holy war. Similar themes of folly, pride, Christendom’s disorder, catastrophic defeat, the papal schism and a utopian desire to sweep the Islamic tide back as far as Jerusalem dominated the earliest literary response to the news of Nicopolis, Philip of Mézières’s Epistre Lamentable et Consolatoire (Letter of Lament and Consolation), written by the veteran propagandist, now pushing seventy, in the first weeks of 1397.64 Mézières’s overlaying of pragmatic assessment of responsibility with revivalist cliché stood for a whole body of thoughtful contemporary opinion, mirrored in most other literary, historical, even diplomatic considerations of the eastern question. His ideas were not simply rhetorical flourishes or the eccentricities of a lonely, disappointed political has-been. Instead of flummery distractions, chivalry and holy war were inescapable weapons in the combat with Islam, a view the defeat at Nicopolis, in the hands of literary observers, at least, did much to reinforce. However, the response to Nicopolis confirmed a more damaging trait. Westerners’ reactions were hobbled by a crippling solipsism that explored their own cultural disposition obsessively while failing in any sustained or serious fashion to comprehend or dissect the nature of their opponents. This, too, accorded with some of the longest traditions of crusading and did not end with the great defeat on the Danube.
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