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  The death of Constantine himself is shrouded in mystery. Some writers claimed that as the final onslaught began the emperor begged his courtiers to kill him and when they refused he charged into the fray and died under a hail of scimitars and daggers. Muslim sources indicate that he was close to the walls on the Sea of Marmara, looking to escape by boat, when he was slain by troops unaware of his true identity. Yet once the battle was over Sultan Mehmet did not try to eradicate a Christian presence from his new capital; for a start he realized that the city needed its local population to survive and prosper and soon Muslims, Christians, and Jews mingled freely enough, although the latter two remained subject groups who paid a poll tax according to Islamic law. The sultan even appointed a new Orthodox patriarch, which shows a broad sense of tolerance too.

  The loss of Christendom’s greatest city provoked outrage in the West, not least because of the apparent indifference of the major ruling powers. Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (later Pope Pius II) wrote: “For what calamity of the times is not laid at the door of the princes? All troubles are ascribed to the negligence of rulers. ‘They might,’ said the populace, ‘have aided perishing Greece before she was captured. They were indifferent. They are not fit to rule.’”67

  A NEW CRUSADE? THE FEAST OF THE PHEASANT

  Within a year of Mehmet’s triumph, Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy, one of the most powerful men in Europe, made lavish promises to launch a crusade to recover Constantinople and to drive back the infidel. The forum for this was the Feast of the Pheasant (February 1454), an event saturated with chivalric behavior and another superb, if slightly late, example of the intimate connection between noble display and crusading.68 The year 1453 had also marked the end of the Hundred Years War and this seemed the perfect moment to respond to the catastrophe in the East. Philip’s father had led the forces defeated at Nicopolis in 1396 and although held prisoner for six months he had received a hero’s welcome on his return. Philip summoned the Burgundian nobility to the city of Lille in northern France to attend a sumptuous banquet and to hear his plans. Thirty-five artists were employed to decorate the chamber and, to ensure that the world knew of this splendid occasion, the duke ordered official accounts of the feast to be distributed. The report noted:

  There was even a chapel on the table, with a choir in it, a pasty full of flute players. A figure of a girl, quite naked, stood against a pillar . . . she was guarded by a live lion who sat near her. My lord duke was served by a two-headed horse ridden by two men sitting back to back, each holding a trumpet. . . . Next came an elephant . . . carrying a castle in which sat the Holy Church, who made piteous complaint on behalf of the Christians persecuted by the Turks, and begged for help. Then two knights of the Order of the Golden Fleece brought in two damsels . . . these ladies asked my lord duke to make his vow. It was understood that if the king of France would go on the crusade, the duke would go.69

  Philip’s vow was made “to God my creator and to the most virgin His mother, and to the ladies, and I swear on the pheasant. . . . If the Grand Turk would be willing to do battle with me in single combat, I shall fight with him with the aid of God and the Virgin mother in order to sustain the Christian faith.”70 This entrancing combination of revelry and unrestrained excess shows an almost total absorption of crusading into the chivalric ethos. The contrast between the cavorting of naked women and the impassioned preaching of a man such as Bernard of Clairvaux is self-evident, yet the Holy Church was said to be delighted by Philip’s promise—as well it might, given that many of the guests soon followed his example and assumed the cross too.

  Two months later Philip repeated his intention at Regensburg where he spoke of his Christian duty and of “the crisis in which Christianity finds itself. If we wish to keep our faith, our liberty, our lives, we must take the field against the Turks and crush their power before it becomes any stronger.” Centuries of crusading hyperbole had preceded this statement, but it was a rare occasion when the gravity of the threat seemed to match the claims being made. Philip pushed ahead with his plans and engaged in serious and extensive preparations that included the manufacture of new pennons and banners, as well as signing up over five hundred gunners: an indication that Mehmet’s use of heavy artillery had been noticed in the West. Mehmet heard about the crusade and riled the duke with use of his spectacular title: “true heir of King Alexander and Hector of Troy, sultan of Babylon,” and he promised to do to Philip’s army the same as his predecessor had done to the duke’s father at Nicopolis.71 By the summer of 1456, however, the duke’s enthusiasm had begun to wane. His stipulation that the king of France should crusade remained unfulfilled as national rivalries became ever more important in frustrating the chances of holy war.

  Mehmet, meanwhile, inspired by his triumph, advanced toward the Balkan town of Belgrade. In spite of his recent successes the determined resistance of Hungarian troops led by John Hunyadi and the seventy-year-old Franciscan friar John of Capistrano held off the Turks for three weeks and then, in a pitched battle, utterly defeated them.72 This feat of virtuosity, achieved without the crowned heads of western Europe, did much to stem the Ottoman advance for the next fifty years at least. As the fifteenth century drew to a close, the final large-scale crusading campaign of the medieval period was about to take place in Iberia.

  FERDINAND AND ISABELLA: THE CONQUEST OF GRANADA AND THE VOYAGES OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

  Chaucer’s fictional knight had campaigned in Iberia during the late fourteenth century. A burst of crusading energy during the reign of Alfonso XI of Castile (1325–50) brought the capture of Algeciras in 1344, but this was not really a period of substantial progress for the reconquest and more one of consolidation and immigration as the Christians sought to confirm the gains of previous generations. Decades of political infighting also slowed the process, and the rule of Henry IV of Castile (1454–74) saw a man drawn to Islamic customs, clothing, and company. Some disapproved of this dubious behavior and continued unrest saw him cede the succession to his half-sister, Isabella, and her husband the Aragonese Prince Ferdinand. Thus two of the great Spanish dynasties joined together and their profound personal devotion to the crusading cause was a vital factor in the Christians’ eventual victory. This aggressive mood chimed in with the feelings of their people too. Convivencia, that is the toleration of other peoples, had been a striking feature of Iberian culture for centuries but a new sense of hostility now emerged. The first groups to experience this were the Jews and the converses (converts from Judaism) and pogroms began during the 1390s. In the aftermath of Henry IV’s reign, Ferdinand and Isabella stepped up the antagonism toward non-Catholics with the launch of the Inquisition in 1478, once again targeted largely at the conversos.

  Ferdinand and Isabella’s eventual triumph was also the product of a good, if at times tense, relationship with the papacy. National and religious interests coalesced and successive popes legislated vital financial support for the enterprise. Increasingly generous offers of spiritual rewards—not just for those who went on crusade, but also to individuals who paid for someone to go in their place—were augmented by the full indulgence for people who gave as little as two silver reales. Legislation that allowed payment for spiritual benefits for deceased relatives was another recent—and highly lucrative—development. Taken together, and actively promoted by the Church hierarchy, these measures produced immense sums of money without which the reconquest could not have happened. As well as creating a fiscal framework for this new offensive, Pope Sixtus IV also offered spiritual encouragement, and in 1482 he sent the two monarchs a great silver crucifix to be carried at the front of the crusader army as a battle standard. These new expeditions were important to the pope, and indeed to Christendom in general, because the Ottoman triumph at Constantinople had generated a fear that the Turks might move through North Africa and penetrate Europe from the west. Ferdinand and Isabella played upon this sentiment to some extent and a letter from the king to his envoy in Rome in 1485 is generally take
n as a fair representation of his crusading fervor: “We have not been moved nor are we moved to this war by any desire to enlarge our realms and seigniories, not by greed to obtain greater revenues than we possess, not by any wish to pile up treasures; for should we wish to we could do it with much less danger and expenditure. . . . But our desire to serve God and our zeal for His holy Catholic faith, make us put all other interests aside.”73

  Thousands of people journeyed to Spain to expel the Moors from Iberia—men from England (sent on the orders of King Henry VII himself, who commanded prayers for the crusade’s success to be said across the land), Germany, Switzerland, Ireland, Poland, and France came to fight under the silver standard, although the bulk of the armies were of Spanish origin. Annual campaigns began in 1483 and within a few years they took Ronda and Malaga. The size of the Christian forces was immense and we have reliable evidence that an army of 52,000 besieged Baza for six months in 1489. By way of comparison, the combined sides at the Battle of Hattin in 1187 had numbered no more than 40,000. By the summer of 1491 the Muslims were pinned back to the stronghold of Granada, on the edge of the Sierra Nevada mountains, deep in southern Andalusia. The royal family led a huge army, well supported by artillery, to besiege this formidable site, which was defended by the emir Boabdil. This was not the most intense of conflicts, and once it became plain that the Muslims were not going to get help from their coreligionists in North Africa a negotiated surrender was always likely. On January 2, 1492, Granada capitulated and the great silver cross was raised on the highest tower. Ferdinand and Isabella received Boabdil’s submission (the doffing of his hat to Ferdinand), leaving the Muslim to a tearful, if probably apocryphal, return to his mother, who allegedly scolded him for crying like a woman for what he could not defend like a man.

  The entire Iberian Peninsula was back in Christian hands and the king sent an ecstatic report to Rome: “Your Holiness has such good fortune, after many travails, expenditures and deaths, and outpouring of the blood of our subjects and citizens, this kingdom of Granada which for 780 years was occupied by the infidels, that in your day and with your aid the victory has been won . . . to the glory of God and the exaltation of our holy Catholic faith.”74 A special Mass celebrated this landmark victory—and the Spanish legate held a bullfight for the citizens of Rome as his way of marking the moment.

  In the decades immediately after Granada the Spanish started to make inroads into North Africa, in part to gain economic benefits but also to progress eastward in the stated hope of reaching Jerusalem. Back in the 1120s Bishop Diego Gelmírez of Compostela had argued that the holy city could be reached via North Africa and, almost four centuries later, it seemed a possibility. In 1510, however, a Spanish defeat at Tripoli marked the end of this plan.75 The wish to recover Jerusalem had been a powerful idea in the court of Ferdinand and Isabella and the same year that Granada fell one notable individual made his contribution to this aim: Christopher Columbus. Given his fame as the man who discovered the Americas, Columbus may not be the most obvious character to be heralded as a crusader but the capture of Granada had generated a fevered atmosphere of religious renewal. Within months the Spanish monarchs had signed and sealed documents to authorize his first great voyage, and Columbus’s own diaries show that his ultimate intention was to lay the ground for the recovery of Jerusalem itself. On December 26, 1492, he wrote of his wish to secure gold and spices to finance an expedition “to conquer the Holy Sepulchre, for thus I urged Your Highnesses to spend all the profits of this, my enterprise, on the conquest of Jerusalem.” His desire for riches was driven by spiritual as well as earthly reasons. By 1501–2 Columbus came to see himself as an agent of divine will, encouraged by the Holy Spirit. Stirred by apocalyptic ideas in the writings of contemporary Franciscans, he hoped to create the conditions for the Second Coming of Christ by the conversion of all peoples to Christianity and the recapture of the holy city. He also wanted to form an alliance with the great Mongol khan to fight Islam. By this time, however, while the Mongols might offer patronage to Nestorian monks, they had no interest in a war against the Muslims. Even more damagingly, Columbus’s conviction that such an alliance was possible was founded on a misunderstanding that the distance westward to the Orient was far smaller than in reality.76

  The political and religious climate of the sixteenth century effectively brought to an end crusading’s formal ties with its medieval origins. Struggles between the mighty Habsburg Empire of Charles V (1519–56) and the Ottoman Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent (1520–66) still represented Christianity at war with Islam and in 1529 the relief of Vienna repulsed a Turkish thrust at the heart of Europe. While this was indeed a fully fledged crusade, such clashes were more akin to an imperial-led defense of Habsburg lands, rather than a holy war. In northern Europe, meanwhile, the Reformation swept away Catholic beliefs, national churches emerged to cast aside papal authority, and crusading became increasingly irrelevant: indulgences had become a debased and discredited idea. Too many false preachers had extracted money for their own ends and spiritual rewards were seen as a commercial, rather than a holy, transaction. A vast range of causes were eligible for these benefits and many people—often including secular princes—had taken a cut from the funding. As Pius II lamented, “People think our sole object is to amass gold. No one believes what we say. Like insolvent tradesmen, we are without credit.”77

  What had happened at Granada represented a combination of crusading fervor and national interests, combined with effective papal support, efficient government control over crusade taxes, and a well-oiled publicity machine. This had helped to generate widespread popular enthusiasm but elsewhere in Europe it became almost impossible to draw together all these factors simultaneously, and this too explains the broader decline of crusading in this period. On rare occasions, fear of the Turks induced the Christians to act together, most notably with the epic sea victory of a Venetian-Spanish fleet at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. Perhaps the last crusade of any real size was the Spanish Armada where the agendas of the papacy and Philip II coincided and the curia blessed the expedition as a crusade. When God’s will—or the tenacity of the English navy, combined with devastating storms off Ireland—rebuffed the campaign, the holy war seemed spent. Other than the Knights Hospitaller, boldly holding on to their island fortress of Malta, this most prominent feature of the medieval age appeared, finally, to have run its course.

  The jihad spirit was in decline too—at least with regard to its use against the Christian West. In fact, the Ottomans spent much of the sixteenth century fighting Muslims rather than Christians. The Safavids of Iran, a powerful Shi’ite group, emerged as a serious danger and, just as Nur ad-Din and Saladin had called jihads in the name of orthodoxy, so the Turks vigorously pursued holy war against these enemies of the Sunni. Another opponent was, however, orthodox; namely, the Mamluks of Egypt, and in 1516–17 further Ottoman success brought an enormous area of land (plus a massive increase in revenue) under their control. From Egypt much of North Africa fell under Turkish authority. In the West, the armies of Suleyman the Magnificent prevailed at Belgrade in 1521, although defeat at Vienna eight years later marked the fullest extent of Ottoman expansion. The Turks also picked off surviving outposts of the crusades: the Hospitallers were expelled from Rhodes in 1522 (which prompted their move to Malta) and by 1571, Venetian-ruled Cyprus was conquered as well. Notwithstanding the famous defeat at the Battle of Lepanto the Ottomans dominated the eastern Mediterranean. By the seventeenth century, jihad sentiments and the drive of the ghazis had, like the zeal of the crusaders, largely given way to an imperialist agenda and the need to sustain the ruling institution. As the century drew to a close, the mighty Ottoman Empire began, ever so slowly, to decline—and in doing so it became ever more tempting to the expanding monarchies of Christian Europe.78

  NEW CRUSADERS?

  From Sir Walter Scott to Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush

  In the emotional aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11
, President George W. Bush began to articulate his response: “This crusade . . . this war on terror is going to take a while.” Thus, unwittingly or not, he offered up one of the most incendiary remarks of recent years. His choice of the word “crusade” was a propaganda gift to Osama bin Laden, who could claim that, just as crusader forces had unleashed death and destruction on the medieval Muslim world, now Bush called for the repeat of such a phenomenon. While the validity of bin Laden’s analogy can be questioned it is worth considering how and why the idea of a “crusade”—whatever it now means—has survived into the twenty-first century. As we have seen already, crusading—in its various forms—continued to be a potent concept long after Frankish control of the Holy Land had ended in 1291.