God's War: A New History of the Crusades (135 page)

The campaign comprised a stunning victory, an embarrassing retreat and a huge, if tainted, profit. Against all expectations, Alexandria, one of the best-defended ports in the Mediterranean, fell by storm on the first day of fighting, 10 October 1365. Once inside the city, the Christians
spent the following week massacring thousands of civilians in rapidly securing vast quantities of booty from one of the richest entrepûts in the world then known to Europeans. It was not a pretty sight; but it appeared, not least to Egyptian eyewitnesses, thoroughly effective, even if the parallels lay less with Constantinople in 1204 than with Damietta in 1249. Sudden success prompted an immediate row. Later apologists depicted King Peter, Pierre de Thomas and Mézières arguing for the retention of Alexandria as a lever to secure the return of Jerusalem. Others, equally well versed in crusade history, insisted the military position of the crusaders was untenable. Better to cut and run with the enormous booty than insist on a futile sacrificial gesture. Prudence prevailed, the Christians evacuating Alexandria on 16 October.

Peter possibly agreed with this analysis. He would have understood that without a promise of a massive relief force, the road from Alexandria led nowhere. Cypriot interests lay in disrupting Alexandrian trade to favour their own ports. By presenting the west with such a dramatic, startling and lucrative victory, the first on such a scale since 1249, Peter may also have hoped to provide impetus for fresh anti-Mamluk commitment at a time when popes and princes were increasingly distracted by the Turks further north. The novelty of Peter’s crusade scheme of 1362–5 lay in the active leadership by an eastern Latin ruler of a western crusade, a coalition as obvious as it was rare. If Peter hoped to create a sensation, he succeeded. Encomiasts, such as Mézières, and the fashionable French poet and musician Guillaume de Machaut, in his verse epic
La Prise d’Alexandre
left vivid – if politically and morally pointed – accounts.
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The English monastic chronicler Thomas Walsingham recorded that not only did the cost of spices rise as a consequence of the sack of Alexandria but many English and Gascons returned from Egypt with ‘cloth of gold, silks and splendid exotic jewels in witness of such a victory achieved there’.
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Despite criticism of the evacuation and the easily caricatured greed of the troops, the capture of Alexandria retained its lustre as a campaign honour whose renown Geoffrey Chaucer, who knew many of the real veterans, was careful to borrow for his Knight in the
Canterbury Tales
.
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Yet Peter I’s strategy, whether of conquest or trade war, failed utterly. The 1365 crusade disintegrated with the evacuation; the next western crusading venture was conducted by the count of Savoy in 1366–7 in the Dardenelles and Black Sea. A few further Cypriot raids on the
Levantine coast over the next few years and another extensive western progress by King Peter in 1367–8 achieved nothing. Peter himself was assassinated in 1369, a victim of Cypriot feuding that rarely declined from the vicious. In fact, he had begun negotiations with the Mamluks in 1366. After his death, a Cypriot-Egyptian peace treaty was agreed. As it transpired, this ended the last crusade specifically directed at the Mamluks who controlled the Holy Land. Priorities changed, despite the cloak of traditional rhetoric. While both Cyprus and the Hospitallers of Rhodes regularly secured truces, treaties and accommodations with the Mamluks, the new power of the Ottoman Turks redirected the use of the crusade.

EXPANSION AND RETRACTION

Traditional eastern Mediterranean crusading operated in the context of a much wider application of wars of the cross. Crusade institutions – vow, cross, indulgence, privileges – continued to be associated with an expanding list of armed conflicts. The professionalism of recruitment and organization, by encouraging vow redemptions, alms and legacies, extended the social reach of involvement while risking the frustration of those forced to be non-combatant participants in an increasingly ritualized activity. By concentrating on the redemptive benefits of the cross to encourage donations, sermons
de cruce
lent themselves to wider penitential and eschatological themes than the crusade. By precept and analogy, crusading was stitched into the broad evangelism of the church and, hence, into religious experience, attitudes and expectations. The crusade also became a feature of state public finance. The availability of huge sums of money derived from church property through regular crusade clerical taxation and fundraising often proving irresistible to lay rulers.

The Registers of official correspondence of Innocent IV, a distinguished canon lawyer who himself wrote on the theory of just war, had shown just how extensively the crusade was applied to a variety of political conflicts.
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Preaching of the cross was ordered against Frederick II; his son Conrad IV; the duke of Bavaria; Hohenstaufen supporters generally; Livs and Balts in Livonia and Prussia; Mongols; the irreligious in Sardinia; Muslims in Spain, Africa and Palestine; Greeks
threatening the Latin Empire of Constantinople; alleged heretics in Italy, Lombardy and Bosnia; and Ezzelino of Romano. At other times, targets included the Drenther peasants in the diocese of Utrecht (1228–32); Stedinger peasants of the Lower Weser (1232–4); Russian Greek Orthodox (beginning in 1240); Finns (certainly in 1257 and from 1348); political opponents of the kings of England (1216–17 and 1265); Sicilians and Aragonese (1283–1302); Piedmontese cultic followers of the charismatic Fra Dolcino (1306–7); a gazetteer of Italian city states from 1255, including Venice (1310) and Milan (from 1360); the Canary Islands (planned in 1344); various Turkish emirs in the Aegean (from the 1330s); fourteenth-century mercenary companies, or
routiers
(from 1357), that fed on the opportunities and spoils of the Anglo-French and Italian wars; supporters of both sides during the Great Schism of the papacy (1378–1417), chiefly in the 1380s; Bohemian Hussites (from 1420); and, of course, the Ottomans. Of the scores of campaigns of the cross in the centuries after Louis IX’s defeat in 1250 some answered urgent military necessity or traditional strategic ambition. Others were the result of allies’ political pressure on the papacy to grant status and access to church funds to assist recruitment, diplomacy and war finance. The papacy was not necessarily a soft touch. Gregory IX instituted a careful investigation into the alleged heresy of the Stedinger peasants in the diocese of Bremen before authorizing a crusade to suppress then in 1232.
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John XXII refused to accept the arguments of Philip V of France in 1318 that his enemies, the Flemish, were on a level with Saracens because, as excommunicates, their hostility to French policy impeded an eastern crusade.
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John’s successors remained reluctant to apply crusade formulae on behalf of the French during the Hundred Years War. Some popes were more enthusiastic for wars in the eastern Mediterranean; others for wars in Italy; others for a generally more pacific approach to Christendom’s ills.

This expanded use of crusading followed changing patterns of international politics and diplomacy. Intractable disputes in the western Mediterranean between Naples, Sicily and Aragon in the late thirteenth century were superseded by bitter internecine Italian rivalries throughout the fourteenth century, driven by revived German imperial interest in the peninsula, papal absence in Avignon (1309–77) and the rise of the
signoria
in the endlessly competing city states of Tuscany and Lombardy. To all of these, crusading privileges were assigned at some stage. The
Hundred Years War may not have attracted crusading, except during the Great Schism, but much of the rhetoric advocating a negotiated peace was constructed in the context of first the recovery of the Holy Land and then defence against the advancing Turks. Far from an expression of cultural antiquarianism, the crusade retained practical resonance. It also continued to supply an ostensibly neutral and generally respected context and excuse for diplomatic settlement and compromise, from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean. Crusade talk was not necessarily cynical, hypocritical or sentimental double speak, although such elements existed. During the two long periods of truce between England and France in the 1360s and 1390s, crusade planning and action were conducted through the cooperation of former enemies. Failure to secure peace could elicit accusations of hindering the cause of the Holy Land or Christendom. Traditional formulae persisted into the sixteenth century.

Nonetheless, by the fifteenth century, the scope of crusading – action, institutions and rhetoric – had contracted, its nature changing as a consequence. Again, the dialectic of decline misses the point. Very crudely, in terms of material activity and international political attention, crusades to the Holy Land dominated the period 1188 to 1250; those in Italy from 1250 to the late fourteenth century; the wars with the Turks from the late fourteenth to the end of the sixteenth century.
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The Italian and Turkish conflicts inevitably merged more seamlessly into their local, political, non-crusading settings than had the campaigns to Palestine or Egypt, even if the legal status was presented by the papacy as identical. Outside Iberia and, to a lesser extent after 1300, north-eastern Europe, the crusade was attached primarily to defensive operations: to resist Mamluks, Turkish pirates or the Ottomans; to extirpate the
routiers
; or to defeat those who, in papal eyes, were trampling on the church’s rights and threatening its patrimony in Italy. Even where the military campaigns were offensive, such as in the Aegean in the 1330s and 1340s or during the Italian wars, the conventional justification remained that of defence, Christendom in danger. This persuasive device had formed part of the language of crusading since the 1090s. Yet before 1250 many of the wars supported by such justifications had actually been campaigns of aggression, notably the attacks of Egypt. After 1250, no similar offensives left the drawing board. Even the Nicopolis campaign of 1396, which saw a western European army fighting the Turks on the Lower Danube, was framed as part of the defence of Hungary, even if optimists
hoped for a subsequent war of reconquest. By the fifteenth century the problem of crusading had become subsumed into the perceived problem of Europe, a question of cultural and political survival against what appeared, at least until the successful defences of Belgrade (1456) and Rhodes (1480), an inexorable force. As Pius II warned in 1463: ‘Christendom is reduced to an angle of the world.’
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The strategic shift during the fourteenth century from plans to reinvade the Near East to desperate attempts to shore up the frontiers of Latin Christian Europe itself coincided with a contraction of crusading destinations. Louis IX’s Egyptian campaign had no successors: it was the last occasion when a substantial land army from western Europe attempted to conquer or reconquer territory in the eastern Mediterranean. Nicopolis and Belgrade apart, all subsequent attacks on Mamluks and Turks represented either naval raids or rapid seaborne assaults, equivalent to the small, fast-moving scorched-earth sorties of the Hundred Years’ War known as
chevauchées
. Of the attacks on Smyrna (1344), Adalia (1361), Alexandria (1365), Tripoli (1367, 1403) or Beirut (1403), only Smyrna was occupied (1344–1402). The exception was Rhodes, conquered and settled by the Hospitallers (1306–10). However, the success of the Hospitallers had not come as a result of a general crusade. Their presence in Rhodes until 1522 illustrated how Christian warfare in the eastern Mediterranean became a function of local interests – Venice, Genoa, Cyprus as well as the Hospitallers – rather than the imperatives of western Christendom. The elaborate fiscal administration established by the Second Lyons Council in 1274 was used as a universal system for less than half a century. The last general clerical crusade tithe, imposed and levied throughout Christendom, was granted by the Council of Vienne in 1312 and collected between 1313 and 1319. Thereafter the system was employed for regionally or nationally limited taxes. During the thirteenth century, central ecclesiastical administration of non-fiscal crusade matters, such as privileges, protection of property and legal immunities, was placed under the papal penitentiary, which acted as a sort of curial clearing-house. Yet this more coherent and more bureaucratic structure wholly failed to translate into crusade action.

Some of the main features of crusading enterprise of the thirteenth century and before fell away in the generations after 1250. The wars in the Baltic were almost exclusively subcontracted to the Teutonic Knights or to the kings of Denmark and Sweden. There was limited international
participation in Iberian wars against the Moors, which, as well as being infrequent, had become the preserve of royal governments, until the later fifteenth century as much vehicles of finance and self-image as serious attempts to oust the Muslims from Granada. The mainly unsuccessful attempts by successive popes from the 1230s to launch crusades against the Greeks in defence of Latin Romania were compromised by parallel attempts at the union of the Roman and Greek Orthodox churches from the 1270s. After the death of Charles of Anjou in 1285, strenuous and persistent diplomatic efforts to involve the French royal family in Greece produced few tangible results. By 1320, despite the anti-Latin policies of the Byzantine emperor, Andronicus II, prospects for an anti-Greek crusade had effectively ended. Never popular in the west, such plans had consistently failed to be supported by extensive preaching or successful fundraising. After the 1320s, western policy turned to attempts to ally with the Greeks against Turkish pirates and acquisitive emirs in the Aegean. As with the Greeks, moves in the years before and after 1300 to accommodate another former enemy, the Mongols, removed another crusade target. The Mongol successor state of the Golden Horde in what is now southern Russia and the Ukraine began to operate within the orbit of the secular politics of eastern Europe, one competing power amidst the rivalries of Lithuania, Poland, Novgorod, Hungary and the Teutonic Knights. Only rarely could the interests of a Christian power extract a papal grant of crusade privileges against the Golden Horde, as in 1345, when the Genoese were defending their Crimean trading base at Caffa.
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Only a very few new applications for crusading privileges appeared, such as the abortive plans and attempts to conquer the Canary Islands in 1344–5 and 1402, justified by the principle of the expansion (
dilatio
), not just defence, of the faith, later a potent argument employed in the European penetration of the Atlantic and the Americas.
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