Holy Warriors Read online

  Peter soon renewed his attempts to recruit help from the West but he met with little success and the following year returned to Cyprus. In spite of the brevity of his conquest, this all too rare blow against the Mamluks had won him widespread renown and was reported in glowing terms across the Christian world, as far afield even as Russia. Yet the king’s ultimate fate is hard to reconcile with this image of a gallant holy warrior. His attack had infuriated the Mamluks and thereby damaged the Cypriot economy, and this, coupled with his own appalling temper, provoked a political crisis. Relations with his nobility deteriorated and Peter was frequently offensive toward their womenfolk. Such was his level of irrationality that he is reported to have imprisoned his steward for failing to provide oil for his asparagus! These matters culminated in a decision to kill him and on January 16, 1369, he was attacked in his own bed. The murderers smashed his skull, cut his throat open, dressed him in a tramp’s clothes, and left the corpse in the palace hall.33

  The siege of Alexandria represented one of the few high points of crusading warfare in the Mediterranean and, in effect, it came to mark the end of major conflict with the Mamluks. Richard Waldegrave survived the campaign and returned home, soon to venture into another field of war, the Baltic. Once more, he endured and in 1376 entered Parliament, and five years later he ascended the political hierarchy to become the speaker of the House of Commons (one of his descendants, William Waldegrave, was a member of the cabinet under Margaret Thatcher and John Major). Richard’s days of long-distance travel were over and he settled down in England until his death in 1402. His career had overlapped with a much more influential figure, the future Henry IV of England, Henry Boling-broke, and through him we can glimpse something of crusading in the Baltic region.

  Henry was only twenty-four years old when he proposed to campaign against the infidel in, first, the Mediterranean and then the Baltic. His plans to join a crusade against Muslim pirates, based at al-Mahadia in Tunisia, foundered when promises of safe conduct through France failed to materialize, but he sustained his enthusiasm for holy war by going to northeastern Europe in July 1390. After a second visit to the Baltic in 1392 he headed south to Venice and made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1393. The survival of his household accounts permit an exceptionally vivid reconstruction of both these journeys: as the son of John of Gaunt, the wealthiest man in England, and as a cousin of King Richard II (1377–99), he was able, and expected, to travel in some considerable style.34

  Henry became involved in the Teutonic Knights’ continued attempts to defeat the Lithuanians, a fierce, pagan people who worshipped a panoply of gods. Their rituals included the burial of leaders in full war regalia with their horses, while captured enemy commanders were asphyxiated to show their weakness. By this time they occupied lands in the river basins of a region known as the Wilderness, a hundred-mile stretch of territory characterized by dense forests, marshlands, and lakes, as well as innumerable tributaries. This was an astoundingly hostile region in which to live and campaign. Experienced guides were vital to the crusaders and progress through the forests was inevitably slow, compounded by terrible rain and snowstorms. Freezing temperatures were the norm and daylight hours were minimal. Campaigns were only really possible twice a year: first, when it was cold enough to freeze the rivers and to solidify the bogs, yet not so bitter as to render movement dangerous; secondly, after the thaw when the sun had sufficiently dried out the marshes to permit safe passage.35 The Teutonic Knights, based at Marienberg in Poland, had responsibility for the conversion and defeat of these pagans, although the morality of using warfare as a means of conversion provoked fierce debate in ecclesiastical circles.

  In the end, arguments that emphasized the untrustworthiness of the pagans—and hence the need to conquer them—prevailed and the Teutonics’ role was reconfirmed. Not an especially convincing line of reasoning, perhaps, but sufficient for those contemporaries who fought for, and with, the Knights. Given the privilege of a perpetual crusade they could launch annual wars against the heathen, known as Reisen (journeys), for which spiritual rewards were merited, although there is little record of any ceremonial taking of the cross. The ebb and flow of local allegiances also intervened, most dramatically when, in 1386, the Lithuanian ruler Jogaila was baptized and, on his marriage to a Polish princess, he was elected to the throne of Poland as Wladislaus II. In consequence, the conversion of his lands looked likely and the morality of a crusade against Christians became ever more dubious.36

  In the course of the fourteenth century, nobles from across Europe were drawn to these campaigns and during 1391 Henry Bolingbroke made his preparations. His expedition displayed all the hallmarks of a typical Reise with its potent combination of finery, feasting, and fighting. He was accompanied by around seventy companions, including paid knights (plus their retainers), his own squires and domestic staff, as well as contingents of specialist miners and engineers, and maybe sixty bowmen. The actual expedition fell into two distinct elements: the military campaign (August 9 to October 22, 1391) and the “reward,” laid on by the hosts (October 22, 1391, to late March 1392). The first part saw steady progress through the dense forests toward Vilnius. A battle at the River Vilna saw the loss of one young English knight but the Lithuanian Prince Skirgal (one of Wladislaus’s brothers) suffered heavier casualties with three or four dukes taken prisoner and hundreds of his men slain. The town of Vilnius—an important trading center—was quickly seized, a feat in which Henry played the prominent role that his position demanded. Thomas Walsingham’s Chronica Majora recorded that “the town was captured by the great abilities of the earl. For it was men of his own household who were the first to scale the town wall and to place his standard on its top, while the rest of the army were still drowsing.”37 The main fortress resisted the efforts of miners and engineers and, after five weeks, the master of the Teutonic Knights decided, in the face of a lack of progress, sickness in the camp, and the oncoming winter, to abandon the attempt. Henry then headed back toward Königsberg, the usual base for campaigns against the Lithuanians; he also visited the nearby chapel of Saint Katharine, a place of pilgrimage.

  Over the next four months the tenor of the earl’s stay changed: he was entertained by splendid tournaments and hunting trips; he was presented with hawks and horses (he was particularly careful to take the former home) and bears. Among his train were minstrels: two trumpeters, three pipers, and a nakerer (drummer), as well as heralds, all of whom were kept busy during an intensive succession of feasts and social events. A particular highlight was the Ehrentisch, or Table of Honor, a feast usually held in Königsberg. This select gathering saw the leading knights on each campaign (the paid retainers were excluded) invited to a special ceremony at which they were seated according to their chivalric achievements and presented with a badge that bore the motto “Honour conquers all” in golden letters. Such a highly esteemed award reflected immense prestige on the recipient and was borne with great pride at public events back home. Chaucer’s imaginary knight often “began the Board,” which meant that he was seated in the place of honor at the feast. Such occasions added greatly to the allure of the Reisen and did much to seal bonds of appreciation between the hosts and their guests.38 The spiritual aspect of Henry’s journey did not disappear entirely because the earl made a variety of donations to churches and the poor during his stay in the north, including a gift to the Hospital of the Holy Spirit in Danzig, while in the same city his week of visits and gifts to four particular churches merited the award of an indulgence from Pope Boniface IX.39 Thus, we see the Reisen representing an overlapping blend of chivalry, spirituality, and crusading.

  Multiple tensions within the Polish-Lithuanian relationship offered the Teutonic Knights chances to assert their strength, but the intellectual justification for their policies began to crumble. The University of Cracow produced a polemical tract that demolished the order’s claims to promote conversion. It said that the knights were only interested in land and not in people’s so
uls: the Prussians still remained semi-pagan after more than a century of the order’s rule, while the convert Wladislaus and one of his subject tribes, the Samogitians, were worthy of admiration; thus greed, rather than God’s grace, motivated the knights.

  In July 1410 events on the battlefield dealt another heavy blow to the order’s standing. With the support of a number of German crusaders the knights confronted Wladislaus’s Polish-Lithuanian invasion force at Tannenberg (now Grünwald), about seventy miles southeast of Marienberg. Both sides implored the Virgin Mary for help and by the end of the day she seemed to have favored the Poles and Lithuanians. At first, the Teutonics swept aside the Lithuanian right wing, but in their triumphant pursuit a group of knights parted company with their comrades and the larger contingent of Poles (with Russian and Tartar Muslim auxiliaries) outflanked and swamped the grand master and his men, killing most of the Order’s leading officials and around four hundred knights. The survivors rallied sufficiently well to fight off a fifty-seven-day siege of Marienberg or else the order might have collapsed entirely. Of course, given the Lithuanian-Polish forces’ Catholicism this defeat could not be portrayed as a loss for Christendom, unlike previous setbacks in the north.40 Continued debates about the validity of warfare against the Lithuanians and various political and economic crises plagued the order, and while it struggled on to the Reformation and beyond, its heyday was long past.41

  Henry Bolingbroke had evidently enjoyed his Reise sufficiently to repeat the experience in 1392; the political situation in England may well have made it expedient for him to travel as well. Unfortunately, by the time he had taken the trouble to reach Lithuania there was no need for outside help, although the Teutonic Knights were sufficiently grateful to offer him the considerable sum of £400 toward the cost of his journey. Undeterred, Henry decided to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land (contrary to the impression given by Shakespeare, who suggested that he never went at all). Using the financial services of Lombard merchants he raised the money to march overland through Bohemia to Prague where he stayed with King Wenceslas, brother of Queen Anne of England; thence he went on to Moravia, Vienna, and Venice. There, as befitted a man of his standing, he was accorded the honor of a public reception by the doge and together they gave oblations to Saint Mark’s Basilica. On several occasions he visited the magnificent relic collections in the city, part of the haul taken by the Fourth Crusade from Constantinople in 1204. Huge supplies of food were laid in for Henry’s voyage to the Orient, including 2,250 eggs, 450 kilograms of almonds, two thousand dates, as well as fine wines; he also took the precaution of taking two doctors on the trip.42 By this time, shipping could endure the Mediterranean in winter and Henry set sail from Venice on December 23, 1392. He spent Christmas Day in Zara, the site of so much contention during the Fourth Crusade, and then, via Corfu, he went on to Rhodes. Here Henry was entertained by the Hospitaller grand master before he pressed on to the port of Jaffa. In previous centuries Christian and Muslim rulers had permitted pilgrims to visit shrines and, given the lack of large-scale, open hostilities between the rulers of the Near East and the Catholic powers of the region, Henry was able to make his pilgrimage.

  His stay in the Holy Land lasted only a few days, although the purchase of wax candles and records of offerings made at the Holy Sepulchre and the Mount of Olives signify conventional acts of devotion. En route home a stay on Lusignan Cyprus was accompanied by the usual festivities and the earl received a leopard to transport back to England, as well as a converted Muslim whose baptismal name was given as Henry. The earl then sailed to Venice before progressing through Milan, Burgundy, Champagne, Paris, and thence to Dover and London.43 This journey was, of course, a pilgrimage and a sign of devotion, rather than a crusade, although his travels—by no means unique for the English nobility—brought him into contact with those in the front line of holy war, such as the Hospitallers on Rhodes, and was a sign that interest in the holy places remained tangible among the elite of northern Europe.

  Around the same time as Henry’s adventures, upheavals within the Catholic Church brought a controversial new kind of crusading to the fore. As European warfare grew increasingly costly, professional soldiers became the norm and the papacy used paid troops to try to shape the complex politics of northern and central Italy. Their aim was to end a period of exile at Avignon, a situation precipitated by disturbances in Rome. Although they returned to the holy city in 1376, within two years the outbreak of the Great Schism (1378–1417) damaged the reputation of the papacy even further. Disputes over the identity of the rightful occupant of the chair of Saint Peter meant that at times there were two, or even three, claimants—a corrosive state of affairs that inflicted considerable damage on the standing of, and respect for, the papacy. A series of overtly political crusades took place, most obviously when the agenda of a party in the papal schism coincided with that of someone in another conflict such as the Hundred Years War. In the early 1380s Pope Urban VI offered the English full crusade privileges to fight the French—the allies of his rival, Clement VII. The ebullient Bishop Hugh Despenser preached a crusade and sold large numbers of indulgences, although in the event Parliament granted a substantial sum to support the enterprise and approved the choice of commander. While officials tried to build up a case for the “crusade in defence of the Holy Church and the realm of England,” many contemporaries simply regarded this as a flimsy pretext to continue both the Great Schism and the Hundred Years War. National warfare was fast emerging as the major form of conflict within Europe, and while religious imagery and a sense of righteous cause was often writ large within it, this was not crusading. For example, in spite of the potent rhetoric that described King Henry V of England as a holy warrior, worthy of comparison with the Old Testament hero Judas Maccabeus—a figure who inspired the heroes of the First Crusade—in no sense was the Battle of Agincourt (1415) a papal crusade with full spiritual indulgences.44

  Divisions of belief sparked another notable branch of crusading within Europe, although there was a contemporary whiff of nationalism. The first major crusade against heresy since the Albigensian Crusade of 1209 was directed at the supporters of John Hus, a radical teacher at the University of Prague. He was a man scathing in his criticism of clerical vices, and he demanded that the clergy follow the example of the Bible and nothing else. Hus also dismissed various papal indulgences and stated that laymen could receive both bread and wine in the Eucharist, rather than just bread. The Bohemian monarchy reneged on promises of safe conduct and had Hus burned to death on July 6, 1415. His supporters, many of whom were members of the local nobility (shades of the situation in southern France two hundred years earlier), turned to war and widespread social unrest followed. The king of Bohemia was (temporarily) deposed and the papacy authorized a series of crusades in 1420–22, although there was also a nationalist dimension in that the Hussites represented Czech identity in conflict with the crown’s mainly German allies. The Hussites’ anger toward the papacy cascades out of this manifesto published by the citizens of Prague in 1420:

  Most recently the Church acted not as a mother but as a stepmother. That most cruel snake has given birth to a malignant offspring . . . and the entire poison has been poured out upon us when . . . the Church raised the cruel cross against all of the faithful in our kingdom and with bloody hands announced a crusade. . . . All of this has been for nothing other than . . . the truth of God. The pope has called from everywhere an unjust war, summoning our natural enemies, the Germans, and has invited them, with false indulgences from pain and sin, to fight us. Even though they have no reason they are always antagonistic to our language. . . . Who, faithful to the kingdom, would not grieve over the fact that the lying priest, full of iniquity, wished to ferment this pus in this golden and most Christian kingdom even to the point of exterminating within us the truth of God. . . . We pray that you, like brave knights, may remember our fathers, the old Czechs, and stand up willingly against this evil.45

  On several o
ccasions the Hussites roundly defeated the crusaders, often because of their innovative military skills. The use of wagons, sometimes drawn into a rectangular formation or else used as a mobile defensive barrier for infantry and cavalry, or even as a base for small cannon, was one element in their repertoire.46 Hussite forces spread into neighboring lands such as Poland, Hungary, and Austria but local anti-Czech nationalism often blunted their religious message. Further crusades in 1427 and 1431 also failed; Hussite beliefs survived in Bohemia and in subsequent years a negotiated compromise was reached—a settlement in part engendered by increasing fear of the most powerful and dynamic force in southeastern Europe, the Ottoman Turks.

  THE RISE OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE SACK OF CONSTANTINOPLE, 1453

  In the course of the fourteenth century the main forum of crusading warfare in the eastern Mediterranean became Constantinople and the Balkans, a shift prompted by the remorseless rise of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans were a nomadic tribe from northwestern Asia Minor who had emerged under the leadership of Osman, a frontier warlord, at the very start of the fourteenth century. Their origins are somewhat hazy but early on the presence of large numbers of ghazis (volunteers dedicated to the holy war who fought in the expectation of booty and who were treated as martyrs on their death) and Sufi mystics gave them a strong religious drive. A series of victories against Muslim and Byzantine Christian opponents convinced them that God was on their side. By the middle of the century they had established a strong territorial base in northwestern Anatolia and begun to push through the Dardanelles and into southeastern Europe. In 1389 the Ottomans destroyed a Serbian army at Kosovo, another battle that has remained strong in modern regional consciousness. The immensity of the Turkish threat began to concentrate minds in Catholic Europe in a way not seen for decades. Coupled with a rare window of peace in the Hundred Years War, and inflamed by the crusading enthusiasm of John of Nevers, son of the duke of Burgundy, and Marshal Boucicaut, this generated a substantial army ready to turn back the Ottoman menace. Boucicaut’s biographer evoked the spirit in which the French nobility joined the crusade: “he [John of Nevers] was then in the full flower of youth, and wanted to follow the path sought by the virtuous, that is to say, the honour of knighthood. He considered that he could not use his time better than in dedicating his youth to God’s service, by bodily labour for the spreading of the faith . . . several young lords wanted to go along, to escape boredom and employ their time and energies on deeds of knighthood. For it really seemed to them that they could not go on a more honourable expedition or one more pleasing to God.”47 The results of the expedition were, however, catastrophic.