A History of the Crusades (42 page)

To some degree the Ottoman Turks helped to bring this disarray to an end by providing the movement with a new and compelling focal point in the Balkans: as early as the mid-1360s packing the companies off on crusade against the Turks was mooted as an alternative to their destruction within Christendom, while in the 1390s plans for an anti-Turkish crusade were depicted as a mechanism, as well as a reason, for ending the Great Schism. Before that, however, the successes of the Turks in Asia Minor and their incipient seapower in the Aegean Sea gave rise to an excellent example of the movement’s ability to respond to changing demands. This was the naval league, an association of Latin powers threatened by the Turks and banding together under the papal aegis to provide a flotilla of galleys in their self-defence. The leagues were the principal form of crusading in the East between 1334, when their prototype defeated the Turks in the gulf of Adramyttion (Edremit), and the 1370s, when the Turkish advance in the Balkans placed a field campaign back on the agenda. Small-scale, funded through a combination of church taxes and the sale of indulgences, and presided over by a papal legate whose chief problem was usually to prevent the allies falling out among themselves, the leagues were well-tuned both to the new strategic scenario in the East and to the chronic warfare and economic dislocation in the West, which rendered impossible any grander enterprise.

In essence the anti-Turkish leagues were ‘frontier crusades’, waged in the main by local powers—principally Venice, Cyprus, and the Knights Hospitallers of St John—as a means of maintaining the regional balance of power. Although fought on a larger scale, they were somewhat like the constant razzias which took place on the Granada frontier, and like the razzias they were interspersed with periods of
convivencia
and free commercial exchange. However, the active involvement of the papacy gave them a broader complexion, because of the measures
which it undertook in their support, its attempts to bring in western powers as participants, and its constant plans that the leagues’ limited goals and successes should become a springboard for much more. After his league achieved the greatest success of any by capturing most of the Turkish port of Smyrna in October 1344, Pope Clement VI expressed the hope that this bridgehead might be exploited by a bigger expedition, a
pas-sagium particulare
. This was a striking example of how concepts generated by the recovery treatises and planning were adapted for use elsewhere; much the same strategic thinking lay behind papal sponsorship of Count Amadeus of Savoy’s crusade in aid of the Greeks at Constantinople in 1366.

Whatever advantage they gained from the papacy’s sponsorship, the leagues’ successes naturally hinged primarily on the dominance of western seapower in the Mediterranean. This enabled the Latins to strike at will anywhere on the Muslim littoral, from the central Maghrib to the Dardanelles, and it resulted in the most dramatic crusading victory of the century, Peter of Cyprus’s capture of Alexandria in 1365. The king’s expedition followed a tour of Europe’s courts which he conducted between 1362 and 1364 in the hope of raising assistance and volunteers. His proclaimed goal was the reconquest of Jerusalem, of which he was titular king, and to this end he enjoyed the backing of both Pope Urban V and King John of France. In practice, it is more likely that the king aimed from the start at capturing Egypt’s premier commercial outlet, the most important rival to his own port of Famagusta, with a view to either holding on to it or destroying its amenities. However, the success of Peter and his Cypriot and Hospitaller fleet in seizing Alexandria was marred by the fact that, with a Mamluk army approaching, they had to abandon it within less than a week.

The Alexandria campaign brings together many of the recurring themes of fourteenth-century crusading. It reveals that naval strength in itself could not effect a decisive or lasting turnaround in the strategic situation. The expedition’s origins were as a
passagium particulare
, but the planned general passage, which was to be led by King John of France, was always unlikely, and it faded away completely at the king’s death in 1364. The
crusade displayed, too, the muddle in papal policy which led both Urban V and his eastern legate, Peter Thomas, to accept King Peter’s suggestion that the West should resume the struggle against the Mamluks at a time when the Turkish danger was growing ominously in the north: quite possibly the pope was happy to support any eastern project which offered hopes of ridding France and Italy of the
routiers
. And the fundamental tension between trade and crusade which had earlier doomed attempts to maintain a trade embargo on Egypt was apparent in the horrified response to these events of the Italian commercial powers. By spreading rumours of a Cypriot–Mamluk truce, Venice helped to destroy any hopes of a ‘follow-up’ expedition, and in 1367 the republic earned the pope’s rebuke by refusing to transport crusaders, horses, and war materials to the East.

The ‘hit and run’ approach which characterized the capture of Alexandria was again in evidence some twenty-five years later in the Franco-Genoese crusade to the Maghribian port of Mahdia. On this occasion trade and crusade were in harmony, for it was the Genoese who proposed the campaign at the court of Charles VI, in the winter of 1389–90, in the hope of establishing permanent control over the port. Following the three-year truce arranged with England in June 1389, the proposal was received with great interest. The king’s maternal uncle, Louis II of Bourbon, eagerly embraced the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of his ancestor St Louis. An army of about 5,000 combatants, including 1,500 French
gentilshommes
, sailed from Genoa early in July 1390. The crusaders laid siege to Mahdia, but after several weeks a number of Muslim relief forces arrived. It was apparent that the port could not now be taken, and a withdrawal was arranged.

There is strong evidence that both Peter of Cyprus and the Genoese were anxious to depict their expeditions as fullyfledged chivalric enterprises which would enable participants to display their prowess and reap a harvest of rewards and renown, while imitating the deeds of such heroes as St Louis, Godfrey of Bouillon, and Roland. To this extent the two crusades were very traditional, while at the same time being akin to the naval leagues in their astute use of seapower as a means of
achieving clear-cut and limited military objectives within a commercial context. To accuse either Peter or the Genoese of manipulating the chivalric zeal of their contemporaries in order to realize selfish goals would, however, be a simplistic and anachronistic view of a much more complex interaction of goals and attitudes. The same applies to relations between the Teutonic Knights and the volunteer knights who came to Prussia to take part in the
Reisen
, the order’s campaigns against the Lithuanian pagans. Not only did these furnish incontrovertible proof of the persistence of crusading enthusiasm amongst Europe’s chivalric élite right through to the end of the century, but they also, like the naval leagues, showed the movement and its sponsors adapting with some ingenuity to novel strategic circumstances.

These circumstances were composed of a conflict between a Catholic military order and a dynamic pagan power for control of Samogitia and the valley of the Nemunas (Memel). The conflict fitted the remit of the crusading movement; it enjoyed the support of the popes and was generally regarded by European public opinion as a worthy outlet for the energies and resources of the Teutonic Knights following the loss of the Holy Land. But the nature of the war did not favour large crusading armies recruited by papal bulls and financed by Church taxes; nor was Prussia a suitable arena for the ‘multiple-stage’ crusade developed by the theorists. The terrain between Prussia and Lithuania was a barren wilderness and large armies could not have been fed. Moreover, the harsh climate, with its bitter cold and heavy snowfalls in winter, and its massive flooding in spring and early summer, confined campaigning to the depths of winter, when the snow was hard and firm and the marshes iced over, and to late summer, when some weeks of high temperatures had dried the landscape. Even then, the inhospitableness of the terrain and the distances to be covered limited most campaigning to raids, sieges, and perhaps the construction or strengthening of a fortress, to stake out a more permanent claim to the land.

The order had no more than about 1,000 brethren in both Prussia and Livonia with which to conduct these winter and summer
Reisen
(journeys). In order to defend its lands in eastern
Prussia, and to carry out its proclaimed goal of converting the Lithuanians by coercion, it made use of the privilege granted it by Innocent IV in 1245 to recruit crusaders without the formal preaching of the crusade. On this basis, starting in the winter of 1304–5 and continuing for more than a century, thousands of knights from almost every Catholic state in western and central Europe travelled out to Prussia by land and sea in the hope of taking part in a summer or winter
Reise
. The war in which they fought has been described as an ‘interminable crusade’, and it lacked even the regular pattern of war and truce which characterized the Catholic–Muslim frontiers in Granada and the Aegean. It was conducted with great savagery on both sides. During a Lithuanian invasion of Livonia in 1345, for instance, the chronicler Wigand von Marburg noted that ‘everything was laid waste, many people massacred, women and children captured and carried off …’, while in 1377 Master Winrich von Kniprode and his guest Duke Albert of Austria ‘spent two days in the area [of Kaltinenai], set fire to everything, and drove away men, women, and children. Nobody escaped their hands.’

As Wigand noted on another occasion, the Teutonic Order’s volunteers came eastwards, ‘to practise chivalry against Christ’s enemies’, and they were habitually led into action by the banner of St George, the patron saint of knighthood. It is in the promotion of the
Reisen
by the order, and particularly in its astute use of the
Ehrentisch
(table of honour), that the centrality of the cult of chivalry to the Lithuanian campaigns is seen at its clearest. Although the fullest description of the
Ehrentisch
, by John Cabaret of Orville, portrays it as a sort of prize-giving banquet at the end of a
Reise
, rather stronger evidence points to it preceding the campaign, perhaps as a means of sealing the brotherhood-in-arms of the volunteers. Thus in 1391, when the murder of the Scots nobleman William Douglas by some English knights made it impossible to set up the
Ehrentisch
at Königsberg before the
Reise
, the master feasted his guests on campaign, at Alt-Kowno; since this was enemy territory, they had to dine in full armour. Such curious, not to say comical, episodes should not lead us to think that the
Reisen
constituted mere fantasy or play-acting, for they were dangerous as well as
expensive undertakings. Clearly the order had succeeded in touching a nerve in the minds of Europe’s nobility, but there can be little doubt that the same men who flocked to Prussia would have fought on other fronts, had the nature of the conflicts there permitted.

Indeed, many who fought on the
Reisen
also took part in the biggest and most ambitious of the century’s crusades, the Nicopolis campaign of 1396. This expedition was the West’s response to the Ottoman advance in the Balkans, in particular to the disastrous Serb defeat at Kosovo in 1389, which brought the Turks to the frontiers of Hungary and made the Venetians fear for the safety of the Adriatic. So grave was the situation in the East that both obediences of the Great Schism were prepared to back a major crusade. But what made such a crusade possible was the truce between England and France, and the existence at both courts of powerful peace lobbies which saw in the Balkan crisis a chance to effect a lasting reconciliation between the two countries. Between 1392 and 1394 there was a great deal of diplomatic activity which envisaged a two-stage crusade: a
passagium particulare
to depart in 1395 led by John of Gaunt, Louis of Orleans, and Philip the Bold of Burgundy, and a subsequent general passage to be jointly commanded by Charles VI and Richard II. As in the case of the Mahdia and Alexandria campaigns, the strategic ideas of the recovery theorists thus retained their influence. But the gravity of the situation, the alarm bells ringing at Buda and Venice, and the altruistic but active interest of Westminster and Paris, raised expectations to a level unprecedented since the 1330s, perhaps even since the death of Gregory X.

The scope of the planning contracted in 1395. For various reasons all three royal princes dropped out of the crusade, and by the winter of 1395–6 the advance
passagium
had become a predominantly Franco-Burgundian force under the command of Philip the Bold’s eldest son, John of Nevers, and a cluster of French magnates, including the period’s crusading hero
par eminence
, John le Maingre (Marshal Boucicaut). The force which set out from Montbéliard in the spring of 1396 remained impressive, and at Buda it picked up Hungarian support led by
King Sigismund. Initial successes along the Danube valley came to an abrupt end on 25 September, when the army fought a pitched battle with Sultan Bayezid I south of the Bulgarian town of Nicopolis (Nikopol). It is extremely difficult to work out what happened, but it was probably French chivalric pride linked to unfamiliarity with Turkish tactics—a combination all too familiar in crusading history—which led to a catastrophic defeat. John of Nevers and many other crusaders were captured. There could be no general passage now.

The army which perished at Nicopolis was the last big international force to set out from the West to engage the Turks, and the historian is left feeling that this battle must have possessed the long-term significance of Hattin or La Forbie. This is easier to suggest than to prove. There is no doubt that the interest in crusading of both the French and the English nobility declined after Nicopolis, but this could have occurred for reasons other than the defeat; and it is arguable that the trail-off in French royal interest was compensated for by the continuing commitment of the Burgundian ducal court, which now had a virtual vendetta to conduct. However, after Nicopolis there does appear to be a change in mood. The enthusiasm of the military class was to be less easily aroused in future, and there were fewer signs in the fifteenth century that crusading was cherished as one of the primary expressions of the values of Europe’s nobility. It is this, above all, which gives inner coherence to a great deal of fourteenth-century crusading, and explains its remarkable panache, as well as its sometimes irritating lack of focus.