Europe: A History (114 page)
From the Christian viewpoint, danger signals began to flash when the Turks used their new-found strength to move westwards. They advanced both up the Danube valley into Hungary, and against the corsair states of the North African coast. The Danubian campaigns began in 1512 with the takeover of Moldavia. Then, when Belgrade was captured (1521), the wide Hungarian plain lay open to the Ottoman advance. After 1526, when the last independent King of Bohemia and Hungary, Louis II Jagiellon, was killed at the Battle of Mohács, Austria itself came under threat. The Turks laid their first unsuccessful Siege of Vienna in 1529, and three years later were still raiding deep into the alpine valleys. The truce of 1533 was only obtained at the price of the partition of Hungary. Western Hungary was left to its new Habsburg rulers; central Hungary, including Budapest, became an Ottoman province; Transylvania became a separate principality subject to Ottoman tutelage. Skirmishing raged all along the new borders until the Peace of Adrianople (1568), when the Habsburgs undertook to pay annual tribute. In 1620–1 the Turks moved up the Dniester beyond Moldavia, only to feel the weight of the Polish hussars at Chocim.
[USKOK]
In the Mediterranean, renewed Ottoman expansion was signalled by the attack on Rhodes and the capitulation of the Knights Hospitallers (1522). Algiers was captured in 1529, Tripoli in 1551, Cyprus in 1571, Tunis at the second attempt in 1574. Malta survived a grand siege (1565). In the view of the Catholic world, the centrepiece was provided by the naval battle of Lepanto (1571), where Don John of Austria, natural brother of Philip II, succeeded in uniting the combined naval forces of Venice, Genoa, and Spain, and destroying the Ottoman fleet. Here was the last crusade, the last battle of massed galleys, the last significant Ottoman move for many decades.
[GRECO]
The Ottoman surge had several consequences. First, it revived the old crusading spirit, especially in the Catholic countries. The question posed by Erasmus— ‘Is not the Turk also a man and a brother?’—reflected an eccentric response to contemporary passions. Secondly, it helped preserve the division of Christendom by diverting major Catholic forces at the height of the Protestant Reformation. The Sultan was Luther’s best ally. Thirdly, on the diplomatic front, it made the Western powers think more closely about Eastern Europe, and to open the first tentative contacts with the East. It underlay France’s openings to the Porte and to Poland-Lithuania, and the Empire’s missions to Moscow. Lastly, it started a craze for Turkish styles and artefacts—Europe’s first experience of ‘Orientalism’.
USKOK
I
N
1615–17 the Republic of Venice fought an ‘Uskok War’ in the Adriatic against the Habsburgs. The object, as Venice saw it, was to suppress Habsburg-sponsored piracy. As the Habsburgs saw it, the
uskoki
or ‘Corsairs of Senj’, were a necessary part of the Empire’s defences, and the Venetians were undermining their security.
1
Senj, now in Croatia, was an Adriatic port situated near the point where Venetian, Habsburg, and Ottoman territory met. Its castle was the coastal anchor of the Habsburgs’
Militärgrenze
or
vojna krajina
, the ‘Military Frontier’, which had been established in the 1520s and consolidated along its length with fortified settlements. Its harbour provided a base for the pi rate-patriots, who lived partly from fishing, but mainly from plundering Venetian ships on the sea and Ottoman towns in the interior.
These
Uskoks
—whose name derives from the Croatian word
uskočiti
, ‘to jump in’ or ‘to board’—lived by a code of honour and vengeance. They were the maritime counterparts of the martial frontiersmen or
grenzer
, many of them refugee Serbs and fugitive serfs, who guarded the length of the inland border and who one day would rise against Croatian rule. Like their brothers on the Ottoman frontier in Poland and Hungary, or the Cossacks of Ukraine, they saw themselves as champions of the faith, defenders of the
antemurale christianitatis
, heroes of the holy war. They were celebrated as such in the epic legends of South Slav literature. Their activities were encouraged and rewarded by the Habsburgs until the middle of the 18th century. The Krajina was not officially abolished until 1881.
Piracy, like banditry, is a relative concept. Early modern Europe was full of
klephts, hajduks
, ‘corsairs’ or ‘sea-raiders’, whose operations might be approved by one authority whilst being judged illegal by others.
The seadogs of England and France were a case in point. When Francis Drake (1545–95) sailed out of Plymouth to plunder the Spanish Main or to ‘singe the King of Spain’s beard’ at Cadiz, he did so under licence from the English Queen, and was knighted for his services. But when others behaved likewise, they were denounced in England as savages. For a time in the early 17th century, for example, Moslem corsairs from the Barbary Coast set up base on Lundy Island, raiding the ports of Devon and Cornwall and selling their captives into slavery. When Jean Bart of Dunkirk (1650–1702) terrorized shipping in the Channel and the Bay of Biscay under licence from Louis XIV, he was received at Versailles and ennobled. In the eyes of their compatriots, Drake or Bart were ‘admirals’. In Spanish eyes, they were international criminals. One man’s ‘rover’ was the next man’s ‘robber’.
GRECO
T
WO
prominent Cretan artists were known to their contemporaries as
El
, or
ll
,
Greco
—’the Greek’. One was the painter Dominikos Theotokopoulos, who settled in Toledo. The other was the musician and composer Frangiskos Leondaritis (c.1518–72), sometime Catholic organist at Kastro, cantor at St Mark’s Venice, and music master to the Duke of Bavaria. Both were products of the Cretan Renaissance.
Crete, ruled by Venice from 1221 to 1669, was the crossroads of Greek and Latin culture. Its capital had been founded and fortified as ‘El Khandak’ during the previous Arab occupation of 827–961; but as Candia or Chandax it became the seat of a Venetian Duke. Candia’s town square was flanked by a ducal palace, by a cathedral of St Mark with
campanile
, and by a loggia that was the favourite meeting-place of the island’s Veneto-Cretan lords. From 1648 to the final capitulation of 16 September 1669, it was the nerve-centre of Duke Morosini’s 21-year resistance to the Ottoman siege.
After the fall of Constantinople, Crete had welcomed numerous Byzantine scholars on their way to Italy. It thereby made a contribution to the Greek Revival which formed such an important stimulus to the Renaissance in the West. Its main contribution to the Greek-speaking world, however, lay in influences moving in the opposite direction. A substantial Cretan colony in Venice, centred on the Church of San Giorgio, had long played a prominent part in the history of Greek printing and publishing. A Venetian from Crete, Zacharias Kalliergis, a rival to the Aldine Press of Marucci, produced the first book in demotic Greek in 1509. Yet in the last century of Venetian rule Crete itself witnessed a sunburst of creativity that was to leave its mark far beyond the island’s shores. The focus, in addition to painting, music, and architecture, was on vernacular Greek literature. A school of dramatists using the Cretan dialect composed a corpus of works in rhyming couplets that covered a wide range of religious, comic, tragic, and pastoral subjects. The
Erofili
of Georgios Chortatzis (1545–1610) is a tragedy set in Egypt. The
Erotokritos
of Vizentzos Komaros (
c
. 1553–1614) is a romance in the style of Ariosto. The
Cretan War
of Marinos Bounialis is an epic history recounting the events of the Ottoman siege:
(S. Alexiou 1969a: 229)
(O my glorious Kastro, do they who still live / weep for you and ask after you? / All the people of Kastro should put on black / and weep day after day, and sing no more; / men, women and children and every maiden / should let it be seen what a fatherland they have lost.)
1
The theatres and academies of Candia, Kastro, and Rhethymno came to a sudden end in 1669. So too did that last fruitful symbiosis of Veneto-Cretan culture, which for a brief moment had reached the status of ‘an independent, innovative force’. But Cretan exiles took their literature with them to the mainland, where it soon established itself as popular reading. Though despised by the Athenian élite, eighteenth-century book catalogues show that it enjoyed wide circulation. Indeed, prior to the work of Dionysius Solomos (1798–1857) and the lonian School, the Cretan dramas formed the sole substantial demotic repertoire. It was the Cretan Renaissance which gave the Greeks their start as a modern, literate nation.
2
The Thirty Years War
(1618–48) may be seen as an episode in the age-old German conflict between Emperor and princes. At another level, it may be seen as an extension of the international wars of religion between Catholic and Protestant; at yet another, as an important stage in a Continental power-struggle involving most of the states and rulers of Europe. It grew from a row in Bohemia between the supporters and opponents of Archduke Ferdinand, and it mushroomed in four distinct phases. ‘Almost all [the combatants]’, wrote one of its most distinguished historians, ‘were actuated by fear rather than by lust of conquest or passion of faith. They wanted peace and they fought for thirty years to be sure of it. They did not learn then, and have not learned since, that war only breeds war.’
54
The Bohemian phase, 1618–23, began on 23 May 1618, when a delegation of Czech nobles entered the Hradčany Castle in Prague and threw the Habsburg governors, Jaroslav von Martinitz and Wilhelm von Salvata, out of a high window and into a dungheap (which broke their fall). They were protesting against recent attacks on Protestant churches, against Archduke Ferdinand’s contested assumption of the Bohemian throne, and against his alleged violations of the Royal Charter of Toleration, the
Majestätsbrief
of 1609. (This defenestration of Prague was a deliberate imitation of the incident that had sparked off the Hussite War 200 years earlier.) At the time, Ferdinand was campaigning for the imperial election, and the religious peace in Germany was wavering. The Lutheran princes were watching uneasily as the Evangelical Union led by Frederick, Elector Palatine, measured up to the Catholic League led by Maximilian, Elector of Bavaria. The Bohemian rebels raided Vienna and started a revolt in Austria. In 1619, when Ferdinand succeeded to the Empire, they formally deposed him as King of Bohemia, choosing the Calvinist Elector Palatine in his place. This meant open war (see Appendix III, p. 1280).
At the great Battle of Bíláhora (Weissenberg, or the White Mountain) near Prague on 7 November 1620, the Bohemian army was crushed by the imperialists. Then, in a terrible revenge, Bohemia’s native nobility was suppressed, by execution or confiscation. Czech society was literally decapitated. The country was systematically catholicized and germanized. The Calvinists were expelled. The ‘Winter King’ fled. His lands in the Palatinate were invaded from the Spanish Netherlands and seized by the Bavarians. The Catholics’ general, Count Tilly (1559–1632), victor of Prague, stormed Heidelberg (1622) and criss-crossed northern Germany in pursuit of the Protestant forces headed by Count von Mansfeld (1580–1626). The unprovisioned armies began to live off the land like so many hordes of locusts.
The Danish phase, 1625–9, began when Christian IV of Denmark, Superior of the Imperial Circle of Lower Saxony, entered the fray in defence of his hard-pressed Protestant confrères. Assisted by English, French, and Dutch subsidies, he had to contend with a new imperialist army raised by a Catholic nobleman from Bohemia, Albrecht von Waldstein or ‘Wallenstein’ (1583–1634). After defeat at the Bridge of Dessau on the Elbe (1626), the Protestant forces attempted to link up with their Transylvanian ally, Bethlen Gábor. Mansfeld marched all the way to the Danube, via Silesia. Then it was the turn of the imperialists, after dealing with Mansfeld at Neuhausel (near Bratislava), to move in strength against the Protestant north. Tilly attacked the Netherlands with the help of the Spaniards. Wallenstein overran Brunswick, Lower Saxony, Mecklenburg, Schleswig, Holstein, Jutland, and the Baltic coast to the outskirts of Stralsund, declaring himself ‘Generalissimo of the Baltic and the Ocean Seas’. By the Treaty of Lübeck (1629) the Danes were persuaded to retire on the return of their lost possessions. By the Edict of Restitution the Emperor ordered the Protestants to surrender all the former ecclesiastical lands acquired since the Peace of Augsburg. Wallenstein, whose army contained many non-Catholics, objected and was dismissed.
The Swedish phase, 1630–35, began when Gustavus Adolphus sent a contingent to hold Stralsund. In 1631, fortified by the Treaty of Bärwalde with France, he landed with the main Swedish army and proceeded to restore Protestant fortunes with vigour. In 1631 he failed to relieve Magdeburg before it was mercilessly sacked by the imperialists; but at Breitenfeld he crushed Tilly and moved into the Palatinate. He was joined by John George, Elector of Saxony, a Lutheran who previously had backed the Emperor. In 1632 he entered Bavaria. Munich and Nuremberg opened their gates. With the Swedes preparing to march on Vienna, and the Saxons in Prague, a desperate Emperor was forced to recall Wallenstein. At the furious Battle of Lützen near Leipzig (16 November 1632), the Swedes prevailed. But Gustavus fell; his naked body was discovered under a heap of dead, a bullet hole through his head, a dagger thrust in his side, another bullet, ominously, in his back. The Protestant cause faltered until revived once more by the League of Heilbronn. In 1634 Wallenstein opened negotiations, only to be placed for his pains under the ban of the Empire, and assassinated. After the imperial success at Nordlingen, an ailing Emperor made peace with the Lutheran princes at Prague. The Edict of Restitution was suspended.