A History of the Crusades-Vol 3 (58 page)

King Peter vainly tried to restore order.
He had hoped to hold the city, and, as the Crusaders had burned its gates, he
demolished the bridge by which the road to Cairo crossed the great canal. But
the Crusaders now only wished to take their plunder home as quickly as
possible. An army was coming up from Cairo, and they were unwilling to risk a
battle. Even the King’s own brother told him that the city was untenable, while
the Viscount of Turenne, with most of the English and French knights, roundly
said that they would not remain any longer. Peter and the Legate protested in
vain. By Thursday the 16th only a few Cypriot troops remained in the city. The
rest of the expedition had returned to the ships, ready to depart. As the
Egyptians had already reached the suburbs, Peter himself embarked on his galley
and gave the order for evacuation. So heavily laden were the ships that it was
necessary to jettison many of the larger pieces of loot. For months to come
Egyptian divers salvaged precious objects from the shallow waters off Aboukir.

Peter and the Legate had hoped that, when
their gains were safely stored in Cyprus, the Crusaders would start out again
with him on a new expedition. But no sooner had they reached Famagusta than
they all began to make arrangements to journey home to the West. The Legate
prepared to follow them, to win other recruits in their place, but he fell
mortally ill before he could leave the island. King Peter held a service of
thanksgiving on his return to Nicosia, but his heart was sore. His report to
the Pope told of his triumph but also of his bitter disappointment.

The news of the sack of Alexandria had a
mixed reception in the West. It was first hailed as a military triumph and a
humiliation for Islam. The Pope was delighted, but saw that Peter must have
immediate reinforcements to take the place of the deserters. King Charles of
France promised to send an army. The most celebrated of his knights, Bertrand
du Guesclin, took the Cross; and Amadeus, Count of Savoy, known in romance as
the Green Knight, who was preparing a journey to the East, decided to sail for
Cyprus. But then the Venetians announced that Peter had made peace with the
Sultan. King Charles countermanded his army. Du Guesclin went to fight in Spain
and Amadeus to Constantinople. The Venetians, unlike the Pope, had not been
pleased by the outcome of the Crusade. They had hoped to use it to strengthen
their commercial hold on the Levant. Instead, their ample property in
Alexandria had been destroyed, and their whole Egyptian trade had been
interrupted. The sack of Alexandria came near to ruining them as a commercial
power, to the delight of the Genoese, whose restraint had been rewarded. Soon
the whole of the West experienced the effects of the Crusade. The price of
spices and silks and other Eastern goods to which the public was now accustomed
rose steeply as the supplies ran out and were not renewed.

Peter had in fact opened negotiations with
Egypt, but both sides were too bitter to wish for peace. While the emir
Yalbogha, hampered by his unpopularity in Egypt, played for time until he could
build a fleet for the invasion of Cyprus, Peter made extravagant demands for
the cession of the Holy Land and followed them up with raids on the Syrian
coast. But his Crusading mania began to alarm his subjects, who feared lest the
resources of the island would be exhausted in a hopeless cause. When a knight
with whom Peter had quarrelled planned his murder in 1369, not even his own
brothers lifted a finger to save him. The year after his death a treaty was
signed with the Sultan. Prisoners were exchanged; and Cyprus and Egypt settled
down to an uneasy peace.

1375: Collapse of the Armenian Kingdom

The holocaust at Alexandria marks the end
of those Crusades whose direct object was the recovery of the Holy Land. Even
had all the Crusaders been as devoted as King Peter, it is doubtful whether the
expedition could ever have been to the benefit of Christendom. When it took
place, Egypt had been at peace with the Franks for over half a century. The
Mameluks had begun to lose their earlier fanaticism. Their Christian subjects
were receiving kinder treatment. Pilgrims were freely allowed to the Holy
Places. Commerce was flourishing between East and West. Now all the bitterness of
the Moslems was revived. The native Christians, guiltless though they were,
underwent a new period of persecution. Churches were destroyed. Even the Holy
Sepulchre was closed for three years. The interruption to commerce did serious
damage all round to a world that had not yet recovered from the ravages of the
Black Death. The kingdom of Cyprus, whose existence the Mameluks had been ready
to tolerate, became an enemy to be deleted. Egypt waited sixty years for her
revenge. But the ghastly devastation of the island in 1426 was a direct
punishment for the sack of Alexandria.

The only other Christian kingdom in the
Levant met with an earlier doom. The Armenians of Cilicia had taken no part in
King Peter’s Crusade; but their royal house was now Frankish and many of the
nobility had close connections with Cyprus. Their Church had admitted the sway
of Rome. Throughout the fourteenth century the Egyptians had pressed on them,
suspecting them rightly as friends of the Franks and the Mongols and jealous of
the wealth that passed through their country by the trade-route that reached
the sea at Ayas. The collapse of the Mongol Ilkhanate deprived them of their
chief support. Most of their territory was annexed in 1337 by the Turks. In
1375, while the Cypriots were engrossed in a bitter war with Genoa, Moslem
invaders, Mameluks and Turks in alliance, completed the subjection of the
country. The last Armenian King, Leo VI, fled to the West and died as an exile
in Paris; and Armenian independence was ended.

Indeed, a Crusade such as King Peter
planned was now an anachronism. Christendom could not afford such luxuries. It
had to face too serious a threat further to the north. The planners of the
First Crusade had seen clearly that the rescue of the Holy Land depended on the
maintenance of Christian power in Anatolia.
But since Pope Urban II’s death no Western
statesman had had the wisdom to realize that the maintenance of Anatolia
depended upon Byzantium. The Crusading movements of the twelfth century had
embarrassed the Byzantine Emperor. They had added to the problems that
Byzantium had to face and had never allowed the Emperors the leisure to attend
to the subjection of the Turkish invaders. The task may well have been
impossible, for the Turkish technique of invasion, with its destruction of
agriculture and of communications, made reconquest a difficult task, while the
varied ambitions of Emperors such as Manuel and Andronicus Comnenus resulted in
a further dispersion of energy. The disaster at Manzikert in 1071 allowed the
Turks into Anatolia. The disaster at Myriocephalum in 1176 ensured that they
would remain there. But it was the Fourth Crusade and its irreparable
destruction of the Byzantine Imperial system that gave them the opportunity to
go further. During the thirteenth century Christendom had its last opportunity
for dealing with the Turks. Their power in Anatolia had hitherto been dependent
on the Seldjuk Sultanate of Konya. The Mongol invasions, which began in 1242,
undermined and ultimately destroyed the Seldjuk state. The Byzantine Emperors,
living in exile at Nicaea, were aware of their chance, but their European
preoccupations and their yearning to recover their Imperial capital against the
hostility of the Latin West hampered their efforts, while the Latins lacked the
foresight and experience to understand the situation. Once the Byzantines were
re-established in Constantinople the occasion was gone. The Emperors of the
House of Palaeologus had to contend with young and vigorous kingdoms in the
Balkans, with the demands of the Italian republics and with the risk of a Latin
reconquest, which was very real till Charles of Anjou was crippled by the
Sicilian Vespers. By the end of the thirteenth century it was too late. The
Seldjuks were gone, but in their place there were several active and ambitious
emirates, strengthened by the immigration of Turkish tribes subject to the
Mongols. It would need a long and concerted effort to dislodge them. Chief
amongst the emirs was the Grand Kara
man, whose dominions stretched along the interior of the
country from Philadelphia to the Anti-Taurus. There were other emirs
established at Attalia, at Aydin (Tralles) and at Manissa (Magnesia). The north
coast was still held by Byzantium and its sister-Empire of Trebizond. But south
of Trebizond the country was occupied by the Turcomans; and in the north-west a
lively new emirate was arising, under an enterprising prince called Osman.

1344: Capture of Smyrna

The Latins were by now growing aware of
the importance of Anatolia, though they saw it less as a base for aggression
against themselves than as an area in which they needed bases for the control
of the Mediterranean. The Hospitallers’ occupation of Rhodes was largely the
result of chance, but it illustrated a new orientation. The Italian republics
had long been interested in the islands of the Aegean. It was natural that
their concern, and the concern of the whole Latin world, should spread to the
mainland opposite. When the emir Omar of Aydin, who was in possession of the
excellent harbour of Smyrna, built a fleet in order to indulge in piracy in Aegean
waters, both the Venetians and the knights at Rhodes took action. In 1344 a
squadron, to which the Venetians and their dependants contributed about twenty
ships, the knights six and the Pope and the King of Cyprus four apiece, set out
against Smyrna. The Latin Patriarch of Constantinople, Henry of Asti, was in
command. The emir of Aydin was defeated in a sea-battle on Ascension Day, off
the entrance to the Gulf. The Christian allies, at the Pope’s request, refused
an invitation from the Genoese ex-lord of Chios, Martin Zaccaria, who had
joined the expedition, to restore him his island which the Byzantines had
recaptured, but sailed up to Smyrna. After a short struggle the city fell into
their hands on 24 October, though the citadel was untaken. The easy victory was
mainly due to the emir Omar’s unpreparedness and his jealous fear of his
fellow-emirs. He came with his army too late to save the city. But the victors
were lured to try to invade the interior. They were heavily defeated a few
miles from the city, and Henry of Asti and Martin Zaccaria were killed. After
the Turks had failed to retake Smyrna, a treaty signed in 1350 entrusted it to
the Hospitallers, though the citadel remained in Turkish hands. The knights
held Smyrna till 1402, when it was stormed by Timur.

While the fate of Smyrna was still in the
balance, a French nobleman, Humbert II, Dauphin of Vienne, announced his desire
to go on a Crusade to the East. He was a weak, vain man, but genuinely pious
and without personal ambition. After some negotiations with the Pope, it was
decided that he should go to supplement the Christian effort at Smyrna. He set
out from Marseilles with a company of knights and priests in May 1345, and was
joined on his eastward journey by troops from northern Italy. After various
ineffectual adventures he reached Smyrna in 1346, and his army defeated the
Turks in a battle outside the walls. He did not remain there for long. By the
summer of 1347 he was back in France. The whole expedition had been singularly
futile. Its importance is that the Church was now ready to regard an expedition
to Anatolia as a Crusade.

In 1361 Peter of Cyprus, who had recently
acquired Corycus from the Armenians, obtained the help of the Hospitallers in
an attack on the Turkish port of Attalia. After a brief struggle it fell into
his hands on 24 August. The neighbouring emirs of Alaya, Monovgat and Tekke
hastened to offer him allegiance, thinking that his friendship might be useful
against their chief enemy the Grand Karaman. They soon withdrew their
submission and made various attempts to recover Attalia; which, however,
remained in Cypriot hands for sixty years.

Growth of the Ottoman Sultanate

But meanwhile the attention of Europe had
been forcibly turned further north. The first decades of the fourteenth century
saw an extraordinary growth in the power of the Turkish emirate founded by
Osman, son of Ertoghrul, and called Osmanli or Ottoman after him. In 1300 Osman
was a petty chieftain with lands in southern Bithynia. By the time of his death
in 1326 he was lord of Brusa and most of the territory between Adramyttium,
Dorylaeum and the Marmora. His expansion was due partly to his skilful and
supple diplomacy towards his fellow-emirs, and still more to the weakness of
Byzantium. In 1302 the Emperor Andronicus II had rashly hired the service of a
Catalan company, led by Roger Flor, the ex-Templar who had made his fortune by
his disreputable behaviour during the sack of Acre. Roger fought successfully
against the Turks but still more actively against his imperial master. He was
murdered in 1306, but the Catalan company remained in imperial territory, in
hostility to the Empire, till 1315. During its wars it brought a Turkish
regiment, formerly employed by the Emperor in Asia, across into Europe. Soon after
the Catalan company was gone, there was civil war in the Empire between
Andronicus II and his grandson Andronicus III, which only ended on the former’s
death in 1328. Both sides used the Turks as mercenaries. Meanwhile Osman’s son,
Orhan, continued his father’s work. He established a vague hegemony over the
emirs to the south of his lands, and he continued with the conquest of Bithynia.
Nicaea was captured in 1329 and Nicomedia in 1337. In the Empire civil war
broke out again in 1341, between John V and his father-in-law, John
Cantacuzenus, while the growing power of Stephen Dushan of Serbia distracted
the attention of all the Balkan peoples.