The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (33 page)

The Papal States should never have existed. They were founded on the so-called Donation of Constantine,
¹¹⁶
a story deliberately fabricated by the curia in the early eighth century according to which Constantine the Great, on moving his capital to Constantinople in 330, had conferred upon Pope Sylvester I dominion over Rome and ‘all the provinces, places and
civitates
of Italy and the Western regions’. No one thought to doubt its veracity until 1440, when the Renaissance humanist Lorenzo Valla proved the document on which it was based to be a forgery; by that time the six states had long been a
fait accompli
. Papal control over them varied considerably; Ferrara and Bologna, for example, were allowed almost complete self-government, while Pesaro and Forlì were kept on a much tighter leash, with the Popes frequently imposing their own vicars. All six, however, were obliged in one way or another to provide an annual subsidy to the papal coffers; together, they were often the Papacy’s chief source of income.

Pope Martin’s death in 1431 left his work still unfinished. His two separate responsibilities–on the one hand, that of re-establishing papal supremacy over the conciliar movement (an inevitable consequence of the recent schism) and, on the other, that of defending papal lands against his neighbours and several rapacious
condottieri
–had left him little time for anything else. His successor, Eugenius IV, was forced out of Rome three years later by a republican revolution and spent the next nine years in exile in Florence. There, however, he scored what appeared at the time to be a major diplomatic victory. Early in 1438 the Byzantine Emperor John VIII Palaeologus had arrived in Italy with a huge following–it included
inter alia
the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, eighteen metropolitans and twelve bishops, including the brilliant young Bessarion, Metropolitan of Nicaea, and Isidore, Bishop of Kiev and all Russia–with the object of reaching some sort of accommodation with the Church of Rome. Neither John nor any of his subjects had the slightest wish to reconcile their differences on theological grounds, but his empire seemed doomed and he knew that while it remained in Roman eyes heretical there was no hope of persuading the west to send a military expedition against the ever more threatening Turk. The conference began its deliberations at Ferrara, but subsequently moved to Florence–where, on 5 July 1439, an official Decree of Union was signed by all but one of the senior Greek churchmen. The Latin text of the decree began with the words
Laetentur Coeli
–‘let the heavens rejoice’. But the heavens, as it soon became clear, had precious little reason to do so.

The Emperor John had a sad homecoming. Back in Constantinople, he found the Council of Florence universally condemned. The Patriarchs of Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria had already disowned the delegates who had signed on their behalf. These and the other signatories were condemned as traitors to the faith, castigated throughout the capital and in several cases physically attacked–to the point where in 1441 a large number of them issued a public manifesto, regretting that they had ever put their names to the decree and formally retracting their support for it. Suddenly, the Emperor’s own position on the throne looked distinctly uncertain. True, there were other distinguished pro-unionists who might have given him their support, but Bessarion of Nicaea, who had converted to Catholicism in 1439 and had almost immediately been made a cardinal, had left Constantinople in disgust within a few months of his return and taken the first available ship back to Italy, never again to set foot on Byzantine soil. His friend Isidore of Kiev, who had also been admitted to the cardinalate, was less lucky; on his return to Moscow he was deposed and arrested, though later he too managed to escape to Italy.
¹¹⁷

For Pope Eugenius, on the other hand, there was no uncertainty. Church union now existed, at least on paper; and it was now his duty to raise a Crusade against the enemies of Byzantium. Were he not to do so, he would not only be going back on his word to the Emperor; he would be proclaiming to all that the Council of Florence had been a failure, the
Laetentur Coeli
worthless. In eastern Europe if not in the west, he found willing recruits, and an army some 25,000 strong, composed largely of Serbs and Hungarians, set off in the late summer of 1443 under the Hungarian King Ladislas, the Serb George Brankovich and the brilliant John Hunyadi, Voyevod of Transylvania. It began promisingly enough: the cities of Nish and Sofia had both fallen by Christmas. The Ottoman Sultan Murad II, simultaneously threatened with serious risings by the Karaman Turks in Anatolia, by George Kastriotes–the famous Skanderbeg–in Albania and by the Emperor’s brother Constantine Palaeologus, Despot of the Morea,
¹¹⁸
saw that he must come to terms and invited the three leaders to his court at Adrianople. The result was a ten-year truce, granted by the Sultan in return for a number of not very generous concessions in the Balkan peninsula.

When the news reached Rome, Eugenius and his curia were horrified. The Crusade had been intended to drive the Turks out of Europe; by the terms of this truce, they seemed almost as firmly entrenched as ever. The Pope’s right-hand man, Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini, left at once for Ladislas’s court at Szegedin, where he formally absolved the King from his oath to the Sultan and virtually ordered the Crusade on its way again. Ladislas should have refused. Absolution or no absolution, he was breaking his solemn word to the Sultan. Besides, his forces were by now dangerously diminished. Many of the erstwhile Crusaders had already left for home, and Brankovich–who had had his Serbian territories restored to him–was delighted with the truce and determined to observe it. But the young King decided to do as he was bidden.

In September he was back with what was left of the army, and accompanied now by the cardinal himself. Somehow he managed to make his way across Bulgaria to the Black Sea near Varna, where he expected to find his fleet awaiting him. The allied ships, however–mostly Venetian–were otherwise engaged. Murad, on hearing of Ladislas’s betrayal, had rushed back from Anatolia with an army of 80,000 men, and the ships were at that moment striving to prevent him from crossing the Bosphorus. They failed. Forcing his way across the strait, the furious Sultan hurried up the Black Sea coast and on 10 November 1444, just outside Varna, with the broken treaty pinned to his standard, tore into the Crusading army. The Christians fought with desperate courage; outnumbered, however, by more than three to one, they had no chance. Ladislas fell; so, shortly afterwards, did Cesarini. The army was annihilated; of its leaders, only John Hunyadi managed to escape, with a handful of his men. The last Crusade ever to be launched against the Turks in Europe had ended in catastrophe.

Resistance was not yet quite over. The following summer the Despot Constantine embarked on a raiding expedition through central Greece as far as the Pindus Mountains and into Albania. He was welcomed everywhere he went. Meanwhile his own governor of Achaia, with a small company of cavalry and foot-soldiers, crossed to the north shore of the Gulf of Corinth and drove the Turks out of western Phocis (the region around Delphi). This last insult was too much for Murad. Only a few months before, he had abdicated his throne in favour of his son; now he furiously resumed his old authority to take vengeance on these upstart Greeks. In November 1446 he swept down into the Morea at the head of an army of some 50,000. Phocis was once again overrun; Constantine hurried back to the Hexamilion, a great defensive fortification running six miles across the Isthmus of Corinth, roughly along the route of the present canal, determined to hold it at all costs. But Murad had brought with him something the Greeks had never seen before: heavy artillery. For five days his huge cannon pounded away at the wall, and on 10 December he gave the order for the final assault. Most of the defenders were taken prisoner or massacred; Constantine himself barely managed to make his way back to his capital at Mistra.

In one respect he was lucky: his capital was spared. It had been saved by one thing only: an unusually early and severe winter. Had the Sultan launched his campaign in May or June rather than in November, his army would have had no difficulty in reaching the furthest corners of the Peloponnese; Mistra would have been reduced to ashes, the Despot would have been killed–and Byzantium would have been deprived of its last Emperor.

On 31 October 1448 John VIII died in Constantinople, to be succeeded by his brother Constantine. Of all the Byzantine Emperors John is in appearance the best known, thanks to his portrait in the famous fresco by Benozzo Gozzoli that adorns the chapel of the Palazzo Medici– Riccardi in Florence. He had hardly deserved his posthumous celebrity; but he had done his best, and had worked diligently for what he believed to be right. Besides, the situation was already past all hope; anything he attempted would have been doomed to failure. And perhaps it was just as well. Byzantium, devoured from within, threatened from without, scarcely capable any longer of independent action, reduced now to an almost invisible dot on the map of Europe, needed–more, perhaps, than any once-great nation has ever needed–the
coup de grâce
. It had been a long time coming. Now, finally, it was at hand.

Four months after John’s death, on 13 February 1451 in Adrianople after an apoplectic seizure, Sultan Murad followed him to the grave. He was succeeded by his third son, Mehmet–the two older brothers having died some years before, at least one of them in suspicious circumstances–who was now eighteen. Mehmet was a serious, scholarly boy; by the time of his accession he is said to have been fluent not only in his native Turkish but in Arabic, Greek, Latin, Persian and Hebrew. On hearing the news he hastened to the capital, where he confirmed his father’s ministers in their places or appointed them elsewhere. In the course of these ceremonies Murad’s chief widow arrived to congratulate him on his succession. Mehmet received her warmly and engaged her for some time in conversation; she returned to the harem to find that her infant son had been murdered in his bath. The young Sultan, it seemed, was not one to take chances.

Within months of his succession Mehmet had concluded treaties with Hunyadi, Brankovich and the Doge of Venice, Francesco Foscari; messages of goodwill had been sent to the Prince of Wallachia, to the Knights of St John in Rhodes and to the Genoese lords of Lesbos and Chios. To the ambassadors despatched by Constantine XI in Constantinople the Sultan is said to have replied almost too fulsomely, swearing by Allah and the Prophet to live at peace with the Emperor and his people, and to maintain with him those same bonds of friendship that his father had maintained with John VIII. Perhaps it was this last promise that put the Emperor on his guard; he seems to have been one of the first European rulers to sense that the young Sultan was not all that he seemed. On the contrary, he was very dangerous indeed.

Mehmet may well have had similar feelings about Constantine, who in his days as Despot of the Morea had constituted a considerable thorn in the flesh of his father, Murad. Constantine Dragases–although a Palaeologus through and through, he preferred to use this Greek form of his Serbian mother’s name–was now in his middle forties, twice widowed and–since neither of his marriages had proved fruitful–actively seeking a third wife. When he had heard of the death of Murad in 1451 he had had the brilliant idea of marrying one of the Sultan’s widows: Maria, the Christian daughter of old George Brankovich. After fifteen years in the harem she had remained childless, and it was generally believed that the marriage had never been consummated. She was, however, the stepmother of the new young Sultan; what better way could there be of keeping the boy under proper control?

There is little point in speculating on how history might have been changed had Constantine Dragases indeed married Maria Brankovich. Not, probably, very much. It is perhaps just conceivable that she could have succeeded in persuading her stepson to renounce his designs on Constantinople; in such an event the Byzantine Empire might possibly have struggled on for another generation or two. But it could never have recovered its strength. Powerless and penniless, a Christian island alone in a Muslim ocean, its days would still have been numbered, its eventual destruction inevitable. In fact, although her parents gave their delighted blessing to the plan, it foundered on Maria herself. She had sworn an oath, she explained, that if ever she escaped from the infidel she would devote the rest of her life to celibacy, chastity and charitable works. Subsequent events were all too soon to justify her resolution.

Mehmet, meanwhile, was losing no time. At that point on the Bosphorus where the straits were at their narrowest, immediately opposite the castle which his great-grandfather Bayezit I had erected on the Asiatic shore, he decided to build another; the two fortresses together would give him undisputed control of the channel. (It was true that the land on which this new castle was to stand was theoretically Byzantine but, as Mehmet pointed out, he could not help that.) In the early spring of 1452 all the churches and monasteries in the immediate neighbourhood were demolished to provide additional building materials, and on 15 April the construction work began. Nineteen and a half weeks later, on 31 August, the great castle of Rumeli Hisar was complete, looking essentially the same as it does today. The Sultan then mounted three huge cannon on the tower nearest the shore and issued a proclamation that every passing ship, whatever its nationality or provenance, must stop for examination. In late November a Venetian vessel, laden with food and provisions for Constantinople, ignored this instruction. It was blasted out of the water. The crew were executed; the captain, a certain Antonio Rizzo, was impaled on a stake and exposed as a warning to any other commander who might think of following his example.