1396: The Sultan’s Victory
When the knights had dismounted, their
horses rushed riderless back to the camp. The Wallachian and Transylvanian
contingents at once decided that the battle was lost and hastened to retire,
seizing all the boats that they could find, in order to cross the river. But
Sigismund ordered his troops to advance to the rescue of the Westerners. They
slew many of the disordered Turkish infantry as they moved up the hill, but
when they approached the battlefield they found that they were too late. The
Sultan’s cavalry charged down on them and drove them back with heavy loss right
to the banks of the river.
When his army was scattered, Sigismund himself
was persuaded to abandon the fight. He took refuge on one of the Venetian ships
in the river, which carried him to Constantinople and on home through the
Aegean and the Adriatic. He feared to journey by land, as he suspected
treachery from the Wallachians. His soldiers, together with the few survivors
of the Western Crusaders, made their way to their own countries as best they
could, harassed by hostile natives and wild beasts and the rigours of an early
winter. The Count Palatine reached his father’s castle in rags and died a few
days later. Few of his fellow-refugees were more fortunate.
Bayezit had won a great victory; but his
losses had been very heavy. In his rage, remembering also the massacres
committed by the Crusaders, he ordered his prisoners, to the number of three
thousand, to be killed in cold blood, only sparing the few noblemen for whom a
high ransom could be charged. A French knight, James of Helly, who spoke
Turkish, was made to identify them and then was allowed to travel to the West to
arrange for the money to be raised. It was not till the following June that a
Western embassy reached the Sultan at Brusa and handed over to him the vast
sums that he demanded. Many sympathizers throughout Christendom sent
contributions, but the greater part was paid by King Sigismund and by the Duke
of Burgundy, who provided more than a million francs. The released captives
reached their homes towards the end of 1397.
The Crusade of Nicopolis was the largest
and the last of the great international Crusades. The pattern of its sorry
history followed with melancholy accuracy that of the great disastrous Crusades
of the past, with the difference that the battlefield was now in Europe and not
in Asia. The faults and follies had been the same. The same enthusiasm had been
dissipated in quarrels, jealousy and impatience. All that the West learned from
this final failure was that the Holy War was practicable no more.
Timur the Lame
There would be no more Crusades. But the
infidel remained threatening the heart of Christendom. He had reached the
Danube and the shores of the Adriatic Sea. Constantinople was Christian still,
but isolated, only spared because the Sultan had not yet artillery strong
enough to batter its massive walls, nor sufficient ships to interrupt its
communications by sea. The Knights Hospitallers at Rhodes and the Italian lords
of the Aegean archipelago found themselves on a frontier, and Cyprus was a
distant outpost. The King of Hungary, the voyevods of Wallachia and Moldavia
and the chieftains of Albania sought help to defend their borders. The Italian
republics were kept busy calculating what policy would best preserve their
commercial interests. The Pope was deeply conscious of the threat to
Christendom. But the powers of the West were no longer interested. Their last
experience had been too bitter; and the enthusiasm that prompted it could not
be revived after such a disaster. And even the Pope himself continually
intrigued in Hungary to replace Sigismund by Ladislas of Naples, regardless of
the harm that civil war would do to the defences of central Europe. The French
King, who found himself from 1396 to 1409 suzerain of Genoa, was sufficiently
worried about the fate of the Genoese colony at Pera, opposite Constantinople,
to send Marshal Boucicaut with twelve hundred men to the Bosphorus in 1399. His
presence prevented a half-hearted Turkish attempt on the Imperial city; but as
no one was ready to pay him or his men, he soon withdrew. The Byzantine
Emperor, Manuel II, then journeyed hopefully to the West to seek for help. The
Italians were shocked to see how poor the heir of the Caesars had become; the
Duke of Milan gave him splendid gifts that his state might be more suited to
his rank. He was magnificently received at Paris and at London. But no material
help was offered. The Papacy was uninterested, for Manuel was too honest to
promise the submission of his Church to Rome, knowing that his people would not
endure it. But in 1402 he hurried back to his capital cheered by news that
seemed to portend the decline of the Ottoman Empire.
Timur the Lame was born a petty prince of
Turco-Mongol descent near Samarkand in 1336. By 1369 he was sovereign of all
the lands that had belonged to the Jagatai branch of the Mongols. Thenceforward
he extended his dominions by ruthless warfare, slowly at first, then with
increasing momentum. From 1381 to 1386 he overran the lands of the Mongol
Ilkhanate in Persia and in 1386 conquered Tabriz and Tiflis. For the next four
years he was busy on his northern frontier. In 1392 he captured Baghdad. During
the next years he campaigned in Russia against the Mongols of the Golden Horde,
penetrating as far as Moscow, and in 1395 he appeared in eastern Anatolia,
where Erzinjan and Sivas fell to him. In 1398 he conquered northern India, in a
brilliant campaign made more efficacious by ghastly massacres. In 1400 he
turned westward again and swept into Syria, defeating the Mameluk armies sent
against him first at Aleppo, then at Damascus, and occupying and sacking all
the great cities of the province. In 1401 he punished a revolt in Baghdad by
the total destruction of the city, which was only just recovering from the
effect of Hulagu’s conquest a century and a half before. In 1402 he returned to
Anatolia, determined to conquer the Ottoman Sultan, who was the only potentate
left in Islam that he had not humiliated. The decisive battle took place at
Ankara on 20 July. Bayezit was utterly defeated and taken prisoner, and died in
captivity a few months later. Meanwhile the Ottoman cities of Anatolia fell to
the conqueror, who in December 1402, drove the knights of the Hospital out of
Smyrna.
The Emperor Manuel had hoped that the
disaster to Bayezit might end the Ottoman menace; but he was not strong enough
to take action without support. The Italian republics were cautious. The
Genoese hastened to make a treaty with Timur to preserve their Asiatic trade
but, fearing for their Balkan trade and uncertain of the future, they helped to
preserve Ottoman power by ferrying the remnants of Bayezit’s army across to
Europe. The Venetians held aloof. Their caution was justified. Timur’s invasion
had in fact prevented an immediate attack on Constantinople by the Sultan, and
it preserved Byzantium for another half-century. Had all Europe at once
intervened it might have ended the Ottoman Empire. But the Turks were too well
established racially in Anatolia and politically in the Balkans to be easily
dislodged; nor had Timur the political genius of Jenghiz Khan. On his death in
1405 his empire began at once to disintegrate. The Mameluks quickly recovered
Syria. In Azerbaijan the dynasty of the Black Sheep Turcomans arose and
established a dominion from eastern Anatolia to Baghdad. There were nationalist
stirrings in Persia where soon the great Safawi dynasty appeared. In
Transoxiana Timur’s descendants lasted on for nearly a century; but it was only
in India that they founded an enduring empire, as the Great Moghuls of Delhi.
1444 The Expedition to Varna
In Anatolia the only ultimate effect of
Timur’s invasion was to introduce a new influx of Turks and Turcomans and thus
eventually strengthen the roots of Ottoman power. When Timur died the sons of
Bayezit took over their father’s inheritance. For six years they fought between
themselves. The civil wars offered the Christian powers another chance of
checking the further growth of Ottoman power, but it was not taken. The
Byzantine Emperor won back by his diplomacy a few coastal cities, and the
Knights of Rhodes were allowed to build a castle on the mainland opposite their
island, at Bodrun, the ancient Halicarnassus. But nothing else was gained. When
in 1413 Mohammed I became sole Sultan the Ottoman Empire was intact. Mohammed
was a peaceful ruler who avoided aggressive wars but firmly reorganized his
dominions. On his death in 1421 the Ottomans were stronger than before.
Mohammed’s successor, Murad II, began his
reign with an attempt on Constantinople. But he still lacked heavy artillery
and ships; and after the Greeks had bravely defended their capital, without
outside help, from June to August 1422, he abandoned the siege and concentrated
his attention on conquests in the Greek peninsula, in Asia and across the
Danube. In 1439 the Emperor John VIII, Manuel’s successor, agreed in
desperation at the Council of Florence to submit his Church to Rome. His people
repudiated the union, and he received little for his pains. In 1440 Pope
Eugenius IV preached a new Crusade. Four years later an Albanian chieftain,
Skanderbeg, declared war on the Turks and was joined by his suzerain King
George of Serbia. The Pope himself and the King of Aragon promised to send ten
galleys each to the East. The Hungarian army, under Sigismund’s bastard, John
Corvinus, surnamed Hunyadi, Voyevod of Transylvania for King Vladislav,
prepared to make an incursion across the Danube. But after a few skirmishes the
allies lost heart and agreed to a ten years’ truce, which was signed at
Szegedin in June 1444. Murad then prepared to lead his army away to deal with
enemies in Anatolia; whereupon the Papal Legate with the allied army, Cardinal
Julian Cesarini, persuaded its leaders that an oath sworn to an infidel was
invalid, and urged them to advance. The Orthodox King of Serbia rejected such
casuistry and would not allow Skanderbeg to stay with the army. John Hunyadi
protested against it, but remained in command. He led the allied army, of some
twenty thousand men, to Varna, where they arrived early in November 1444. But
Murad, warned of their violation of the truce, hastened to meet them with about
three times their numbers. The battle was fought on 10 November. The Christians
resisted gallantly; and at the crisis the Sultan, who had the violated treaty
borne into battle with his standard, was heard to cry: ‘Christ, if Thou art God
as Thy followers say, punish them for their perfidy.’ His prayer and his
numbers prevailed. The Christian allies were almost annihilated. King
Vladislav, who was with his troops, was killed, together with the perfidious
Cardinal. Hunyadi himself escaped with a tiny remnant of his army.
Skanderbeg’s gallant efforts saved
Albanian independence for another twenty years; and John Hunyadi, despite a
disastrous defeat in a three days’ battle on the ominous field of Kossovo in
1448, kept the Sultan from crossing the Danube as long as he lived. But by the
time of his death in 1456 the Turks had achieved the ambition that had
dominated Islam since the days of the Prophet. In 1451 Murad II was succeeded
by his son, Mohammed II, a youth of twenty-one, of boundless energy, enterprise
and ability. He made it his first object to conquer Constantinople. This is not
the place to tell of the splendid, tragic story of the last days of Byzantium.
The Greeks, divided against their rulers who had sold their Church to Rome,
rallied with superb courage to face their last agony. The West sent help that
was hopelessly inadequate for all its bravery. The Sultan’s vast resources, his
careful preparations and his indomitable will were destined to carry him to
triumph. Nor was his triumph one only of prestige. Byzantium had been a long
time in dying, but its death guaranteed that the Turks would remain in Europe.
It was to give them the mastery of the Eastern seas. It sounded the knell of
the empires of Genoa and Venice, of the kingdom of Cyprus and of the Hospital
at Rhodes; and it left the Sultan free to drive his armies to the gates of
Vienna.
1464: Pius II, the Last Crusader
All over Europe the fall of Constantinople
was recognized as marking the end of an era. The news was not unexpected, but
it came as a bitter cause for self-reproach. Yet, except for the princes whose
frontiers were immediately threatened, no one cared any longer to take action.
Only the Cardinal Nuncio in Germany, the great humanist Aeneas Sylvius, tried
to rouse the West to its belated duty. But his speeches to the German Diets
bore no result, and his letters to the Pope told of his disillusion. In 1458 he
himself became Pope, as Pius II. Throughout his pontificate he laboured to
recreate such a Crusade as his great predecessors had sent forth. In 1463 his
project seemed near to fruition. A timely discovery of alum mines in the Papal
states provided him with unexpected revenues and threatened to break the
Turkish monopoly of alum. The new Doge of Venice seemed to favour war. The King
of Hungary, at peace at last with the Emperor, was eager for a Christian
alliance. Philip, Duke of Burgundy, showed a welcome interest. The Bull
Ezechielis,
issued in October, mirrored the Papal optimism. But as the months passed,
the enthusiasm faded. Only the Hungarians, who were anyhow faced with a Turkish
war, offered him material support. The Venetians hesitated. None of the Italian
cities was ready to risk the loss of trade that a rupture with the Sultan would
bring. Philip of Burgundy wrote that the plots of the King of France made it
impossible for him to leave his lands. Valiantly the Pope determined that he
would finance and lead the Crusade himself. On his orders his agents assembled
a fleet of galleys at Ancona; and on 18 July 1464, though he was weary and in
failing health, he solemnly took the Cross at a ceremony at Saint Peter’s.