A History of the Crusades (46 page)

Although they had had their problems, for two and half centuries the Lusignans managed to avoid serious succession crises. Beginning in 1458, however, this dynastic stability foundered. In that year King John II (1432–58) died, leaving a daughter, Charlotte, and a bastard son named James. James took refuge in Cairo. In 1460, backed by an assortment of European adventurers, among whom Sicilians were prominent, and a force of Egyptian soldiers, he led an invasion of Cyprus. In the ensuing civil war, which lasted until 1464, he overthrew the legitimate
branch of the family and became king. It was some time before James could gain a measure of international recognition, but he did at least manage to establish relations with Venice and in 1472 married a Venetian noblewoman named Caterina Cornaro. Then in 1473 he died. A son, James III, was born posthumously, but he in his turn died the following year. Apart from Charlotte, now in exile in the West, and some illegitimate branches of the family, the royal house of Lusignan was extinct. In the turmoil surrounding the deaths of James II and his son, the Venetian authorities intervened to safeguard their interests and to prevent a group of James’s Sicilian counsellors and mercenary captains taking control. Until 1489 they maintained the fiction that James’s widow, Caterina Cornaro, was the ruling queen of Cyprus. They then ended the pretence, abolished the monarchy, and administered the island as part of their overseas empire.

Before the 1470s the government in Venice had not shown any particular interest in Cyprus. But after the loss of Negroponte to the Turks in 1470 and in the course of their attempts to collaborate with the Turkoman leader Uzun Hasan in their struggle against the Ottomans, the Venetians had come to appreciate the island’s economic and strategic potential. Their rule lasted from 1474 until the Ottoman conquest of 1570–71. The population rose steadily and the economy seems to have revived. The Ottoman conquest of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt in 1516–17 followed by the capture of Rhodes in 1522 left Cyprus in a particularly exposed position. The Venetians refortified the castle at Kyrenia and rebuilt the walls at Famagusta so as to withstand cannonade. At Nicosia, the capital, they decided that more drastic measures needed to be taken. The medieval walls there had never afforded adequate protection. Back in the 1450s the pope had set aside money from the sale of indulgences for refortifying the town, and copies of the indulgence printed by Gutenberg at that time are among the earliest instances of the use of printing with movable type. By the 1560s, however, it was thought necessary to dismantle the entire circuit and replan the fortifications from scratch using, as we have seen, the most up-to-date military designs. To achieve this programme it was necessary to demolish
a large number of buildings including the Dominican church where many of the Lusignan kings had been buried. In the event the building work was not quite complete when the Ottomans launched their invasion. Nicosia fell in September 1570 after six weeks of fighting. Kyrenia surrendered without putting up any resistance. But at Famagusta the Venetian garrison endured a siege that lasted from September 1570 until August the following year and only surrendered when supplies of food and gunpowder were exhausted.

The loss of Latin Syria forced the Hospitallers to find a fresh role. Initially they established themselves in Cyprus, but once it became obvious that there was to be no return to the Holy Land they turned their attention elsewhere and in 1306 embarked on the conquest of the Byzantine-held island of Rhodes. It appears to have taken until 1309 before the island was fully in their hands, but from then until 1522 they used it as their headquarters (see
Chapter 13
) and as a base from which they attempted to halt Muslim depredations and expansion. They also occupied a number of the nearby smaller islands, and, although they busied themselves policing the shipping lanes, they were forever criticized for making insufficient use of the income from their extensive estates in the West. As we shall see, in 1344 they shared in a successful assault on Smyrna. They then had to shoulder most of the burden of defending it until it was captured and destroyed by Tamerlane in 1402. Towards the end of the fourteenth century the Hospitallers were also involved in efforts to defend southern Greece which was now coming under Turkish attack, but they lacked the resources to intervene effectively in the increasingly chaotic situation there. Tamerlane’s victory over the Ottomans at Ankara in 1402 had the effect of relieving the Turkish pressure on Greece, and within a few years the order, at odds with the other Christian rulers in the region, took the opportunity to withdraw. Spared the need to spend their revenues on Smyrna and Greece, the Hospitallers now concentrated on protecting Rhodes itself, the nearby mainland castle of Bodrum, and the surrounding islands.

In the fifteenth century Rhodes became notorious as a base for corsairs, and in 1440 and again in 1444 the Mamluk sultan retaliated by sending his fleet to attack the Hospitallers’ possessions. However, unlike the Cypriots who had suffered grievously in similar circumstances in the 1420s, the Knights of St John were well prepared and had no difficulty coping with these assaults. A more immediate threat was posed by the Ottomans. In 1453 the Turks had conquered Constantinople; by 1460 they had overrun almost all southern Greece; in 1462 they occupied Lesbos and in 1470 Negroponte. Rhodes effectively blocked further naval expansion to the south and east. In the 1470s there were repeated Turkish raids on Hospitaller possessions, and in 1480 the Ottomans launched a major attempt to conquer the island and expel the order for good. The siege of Rhodes city lasted almost three months and in the end had to be abandoned. Although they had succeeded in fending off the invasion, the defenders were left greatly weakened, and their survival has to be attributed to a respite gained by the death of the sultan Mehmed II the following year and the subsequent succession disputes in which the western powers were able to use the threat of unloosing a captive pre-tender to the throne to prevent the new sultan, Bayezid II, from attacking Christian territories. It was not until 1522 that the Ottomans again launched a full-scale invasion. On this occasion the sultan, Suleyman the Magnificent, commanded his troops in person. As in 1480 the Turks closely invested the city of Rhodes, but this time it surrendered after a six-month siege.

By the end of the thirteenth century the Frankish principality of Achaea was already past its prime. The defeat at the hands of the Greeks at Pelagonia in 1259 had led directly to the Byzantine reoccupation of the south-eastern portion of the Peloponnese and to the prospect of further losses. In his need to find a protector Prince William II had turned to the Angevin king of Sicily, Charles I, and in 1267 had accepted his suzerainty. Charles, who had hopes of supplanting the Byzantines and
re-establishing the Latin empire of Constantinople, was a natural ally. But after the rebellion of 1282 known as the Sicilian Vespers, his successors could no longer provide the sort of military and financial aid that was necessary. They were, however, able to exploit their position as overlords to intervene in the principality’s internal affairs, and the failure of the male line of the ruling Villehardouin family in 1278 gave them plenty of opportunity so to do. Between 1289 and 1297 the principality was ruled by William II’s daughter, Isabella, and her husband, Florent of Hainault, but after Florent’s death the Angevin kings in Naples sought ways of replacing Isabella and Mahaut, her daughter, by a member of their own house. Only briefly did this intention waver when in 1313 other ambitions led them to promote the marriage of Mahaut to Louis, a younger brother of the duke of Burgundy. It was at this juncture that the Angevin dominance was challenged by an Aragonese claimant, Ferrand, the younger son of King James I of Mallorca. With the Aragonese Catalan Company already ruling in the adjacent duchy of Athens there was a real possibility that the Aragonese would take control of the whole of Latin Greece. But it was not to be. A war between the opposing parties ended in July 1316 in a pitched battle at Manolada in which Ferrand was killed. Louis of Burgundy died shortly afterwards. In a series of high-handed actions King Robert of Naples thereupon ousted the widowed Mahaut and in 1322 had his own brother, John of Gravina, invested as prince. Mahaut died a prisoner in Naples in 1331.

Direct Angevin rule, however, failed to remedy the problems confronting the principality. Around 1320 the Byzantines had made some substantial gains in the central Peloponnese with the result that henceforth the principality was largely confined to the western and northern coastal areas. In 1325–6 John of Gravina led a substantial but as it happened unsuccessful expedition with the intention of recovering lost ground. He then retired to Italy, never to return. Instead he governed through a series of lieutenants, and this pattern of absentee rule continued after 1332 when as part of a family compact he surrendered his rights to Achaea to his youthful nephew, Robert of Taranto. Since 1297 there had been no resident prince who had had
effective control, and it is therefore no surprise that the surviving feudatories tended to pursue their own policies and disregard the demands of their lord. In 1338 Catherine of Valois, who was Robert’s mother and also the titular empress of Constantinople, brought a substantial force of men-at-arms from Italy in an attempt to reassert princely authority. She withdrew in 1341 leaving the barons as intractable as ever. Exasperated by the alternating
laissez-faire
and interventionist policies of the Angevins, in the 1340s they looked in turn to the Byzantine power-broker John Cantacuzenus and to the king of Mallorca as possible alternatives to Neapolitan overlordship. What they wanted was someone who would defend and guarantee their possessions but not interfere in their affairs. It was too much to ask, and in any case neither ruler was in any position to take on the role they envisaged.

It was under Catherine of Valois’s patronage in the 1330s that her Florentine counsellor and financier, Niccolo Acciaiuoli, began to acquire fiefs and come to prominence in the principality. In 1358 the ineffectual and absentee titular prince, Robert of Taranto, granted him the valuable and strategically important lordship of Corinth. By then Turkish raids were becoming a major problem, and it was clear that the Angevins were incapable of doing anything to counter them. Indeed, after Robert’s death in 1364, the family engaged in a series of quarrels over who was to be the rightful prince while at the same time largely abandoning Achaea to its fate. In 1377 Queen Joanna of Naples leased the principality to the Knights Hospitallers of St John. It was they who introduced the force of Gascon and Navarrese mercenaries into Achaea known as the Navarrese Company. By the late 1370s Niccolo Acciaiuoli’s nephew, Nerio, had become lord of Corinth and had acquired Vostitsa on the Gulf of Corinth and Megara from the weakening Catalan regime in Athens and so had come to dominate the entire region. In 1379, with Nerio’s connivance a part of the Navarrese Company invaded the duchy of Athens and seized Thebes, the principal city, leaving the Catalans holding out in Athens itself. The rest of the Company remained in Achaea where its commanders assumed control of
the towns and fortresses of the princely domain. They continued to hold
de facto
power when in 1381 the Hospitallers formally handed the principality back to Queen Joanna. In the early 1380s the series of political crises in southern Italy that led to Joanna’s overthrow ended the Angevin overlordship to all intents and purposes. In 1396 King Ladislas of Naples granted the title of prince of Achaea to the Navarrese leader, Peter of San Superan.

The growing Ottoman threat forced the various Christian powers in the Peloponnese into a measure of accommodation. The Navarrese turned to the Venetians whose fleet and whose control of Coron and Modon, Crete, and Negroponte meant that they were the most considerable military and naval power in the area. Nerio Acciaiuoli turned to Theodore Palaeologus, the Byzantine despot of the Morea, to whom in 1388 he gave his daughter in marriage. In the same year he succeeded in gaining control of Athens. However, a common front against the Turks proved elusive. The Byzantine occupation of Argos, a town that the Venetians had just purchased from the widow of its last lord, led to a protracted wrangle that was exacerbated when the Navarrese treacherously seized Nerio Acciaiuoli during negotations to settle this dispute. In 1394 Nerio died and Theodore seized Corinth. By then Ottoman power had reached as far as the northern shores of the Gulf of Corinth, and major incursions into the Peloponnese in 1387, 1394–5, and 1397 took their toll. In 1397 Theodore arranged for the Hospitallers to take charge of Corinth, and by 1400 he was even prepared to consider selling the entire despotate to them. The Ottoman defeat at the hands of Tamerlane in 1402 eased the pressure. Peter of San Superan died in 1402, and in 1404 Centurione Zaccaria, his widow’s nephew and a member of an old-established baronial family, swept aside Peter’s heirs and had the king of Naples invest him as prince of Achaea. It was Centurione who in the course of the next quarter of a century presided over the demise of the principality. It succumbed not to the Turks but to the aggressive acquisitiveness of the despots of the Morea, the last act being played out in 1430. The Byzantine despotate survived until the Ottoman conquest of 1460.

During the thirteenth century the duchy of Athens had flourished under the rule of the Burgundian La Roche family. The dukes had been more than able to hold their own despite the fluctuating fortunes of their neighbours to north and south, and the duchy had enjoyed the benefits of prosperity, dynastic stability, and military success. In 1308 Duke Guy II died childless, and the duchy passed to a cousin, Walter of Brienne. Within a short time of his accession Walter was faced by the arrival on his northern border of the army of mercenaries known as the Catalan Company. As a fighting force it had had its origins in southern Italy during the wars between the Angevins and the Aragonese that had begun in the aftermath of the Sicilian Vespers of 1282. In 1303 the Catalans had hired their services to the Byzantine emperor who had used them against the Turks of Asia Minor; they then turned against their paymaster and did an immense amount of damage to Byzantine territory in Thrace before moving into Thessaly. Walter thought he could use the Catalans to further his own ambitions to dominate that region; a campaign fought in 1310 was highly successful, but Walter was not prepared to reward them in line with their expectations. They advanced into his duchy and in March 1311 crushed his forces in a battle fought by the river Kephissos. The Athenian knights, reinforced by contingents from elsewhere in Frankish Greece, were induced, like the English at Bannockburn three years later, to charge into a marsh. The slaughter was immense. Walter himself was killed and the Catalans were able to occupy the whole of his duchy.