A History of the Crusades (40 page)

Even before Selim had entered Cairo in 1517, he had been presented with the suzerainty of Algiers by Aruj Barbarossa, who had taken the city in the previous year. The exploits of the brothers Aruj and Khayr al-Din Barbarossa inaugurated the great age of the Barbary corsairs. In 1533 Khayr al-Din was put in charge of organizing the Ottoman fleet and in 1534 he took Tunis. Although a force sent by the Emperor Charles V took it back again in the following year, Khayr al-Din won a great naval victory in 1538 at Prevéza against a Christian naval league sponsored by the emperor and the pope, and in the long run Tripoli, held by the Spaniards since 1510, was retaken by the Muslims (1551) and the whole of North Africa except for Morocco was annexed to the sultanate.

The Ottoman Empire under Suleyman the Magnificent (1520–66) can be seen as the Muslim equivalent of the universal Christian empire of Charles V. Suleyman’s war in the Mediterranean and the Balkans was really an imperial war fought against the Habsburgs, rather than a holy war against Christendom. Suleyman’s propagandists preferred to stress the necessity of jihad against the heterodox Safavids in Iran and
Iraq. At first, fortune consistently favoured Suleyman’s armies: the capture of Belgrade (1521), the capture of Rhodes (1522), victory over the Hungarians at the battle of Mohacs (1526) and the consequent destruction of the Hungarian kingdom. Suleyman did fail to take Vienna in 1529, but this reverse did not seem so significant at the time, as the attempt to take it had only been the result of an afterthought towards the end of a season of campaigning. Even so, as Suleyman’s successors would discover, Vienna was situated at the extreme limit of Ottoman logistical capability. In the course of the sixteenth century Muslim expectations of ever-continuing conquest declined and the
ghazi
ethic fell into abeyance. The Turkish failure at Malta in 1565 delivered a further check to Ottoman ambitions and in the following year Suleyman died.

However, the Ottomans continued to make conquests, and in 1570 their occupation of most of Venetian Cyprus provoked the formation of yet another Christian naval league. The Christians hailed their victory at the Battle of Lepanto in the Gulf of Corinth in 1571 as a mighty triumph over the infidel. Although Turkish losses in that battle were heavy, and thousands of skilled mariners and archers were lost, Ottoman resources were vast and the battle changed nothing. Allegedly, when Selim II (1566–74) asked his vizier how much it would cost to replace the lost fleet, the vizier replied: ‘The might of the empire is such that if it were desired to equip the entire fleet with silver anchors, silken rigging, and satin sails, we could do it.’ Indeed the Ottomans did swiftly build a new fleet, their occupation of Cyprus was not seriously challenged, and they raided at will in the western Mediterranean, sometimes making use of friendly French ports to do so.

In a renewed round of fighting in the Balkans (1593–60) Ottoman troops performed poorly. Ottoman armies copied the military technology of the Europeans, but not their tactics. Turkish observers might admire the discipline of western armies, as well as their skilful deployment of cannons and muskets, but Turkish armies could not emulate the Christians in these areas, and Turkish generals still placed their faith in sword-wielding
sipahi
cavalry. The sultanate was also weakened by fiscal problems and rebellions in Anatolia.

Philosophically-minded Ottoman officials analysed the problems and some of them resorted to the theories of Ibn Khaldun in order to do so. What is striking about their memoranda is that the sultan’s chief duty was no longer seen as being the leadership of the jihad. Instead, they tended to argue that the sultan’s chief duties were to maintain justice and assure the prosperity of his subjects. In 1625 a certain Omer Talib wrote: ‘Now the Europeans have learnt to know the whole world; they send their ships everywhere and seize important ports. Formerly the goods of India, Sind, and China used to come to Suez and were distributed by Muslims to all the world. But now these goods are carried on Portuguese, Dutch, and English ships to Frangistan (Europe) and are spread all over the world from there.’ Others shared Omer Talib’s feeling that the sultanate was threatened by its lack of access to the vast resources of the Americas.

Not only was a final Ottoman attempt to take Vienna in 1683 a failure, but it provoked the War of the Holy League (1684–97) and led to loss of Buda and Belgrade. By the Peace of Karlowitz (1699) the Ottomans were obliged to cede Hungary and Transylvania to Austria, while Venice and Poland secured other territories. The Ottoman tide of advance had been clearly stemmed. Moreover it was, for the first time, unambiguously the defeated power and actually yielding territory to the Christians. The Age of Jihad had passed and the long process of dismembering the Ottoman empire had begun. Even if Gibbon was correct in calling the struggle between Christianity and Islam in the eastern Mediterranean the ‘world’s debate’, it had been a debate between the deaf and it was not until the midnineteenth century that Arabs even coined the term
Hurub al-Salibiyya
to refer to the Wars of the Crusades.

NORMAN HOUSLEY

A
S
it neared the end of the first two centuries of its existence, the crusading movement was in a condition of crisis. Recent successes in Spain, Prussia, and Italy had been staggering, but they could not compensate for the fact that the defence of the Holy Land stood on the edge of calamity in the face of the Mamluk advance. Given the nature of crusading, the crisis was bound to be one of faith as well as military strategy: as the
Constitutiones pro zelo fidei
, the crusade decrees of the Second Lyons Council, expressed it in 1274, ‘to the greater shame of the Creator, and the injury and pain of all who confess the Christian faith, they [i.e. the Mamluks] taunt and insult the Christians with many reproaches—“where is the God of the Christians?” ’ (cf. Ps. 115: 2). The crisis did not end in 1291 because few contemporaries accepted the loss of Palestine as final: indeed, arguably it was not until after the outbreak of the Hundred Years War in 1337 that hopes for recovery were marginalized to an optimistic few. There are good reasons for beginning a survey of the later crusades by focusing on the fertile yeast of ideas, and the consolidation of methods of organization and finance, which the Second Lyons Council either initiated or furthered, and which spanned the decades on either side of 1300. These changes were not alone responsible for the survival of crusading for many generations to come; but they aptly displayed the qualities of engagement, resilience, and adaptability which underpinned that survival.

‘In order to acquire the Holy Land, three things are required above all: that is, wisdom, power, and charity.’ Thus Ramon Lull, in the preamble to his crusade treatise
De acquisitione Terrae Sanctae
(1309), set the agenda for the promotion of a recovery crusade. Wisdom (
sapientia
), in the form of advice, was not lacking. Lull himself was one of the most prominent and prolific of the many Latin Christians who penned recovery treatises in the decades between the Second Lyons Council and the beginning of the Anglo-French war. Sylvia Schein has listed twenty-six between the councils of Lyons and Vienne (1274–1314), after which there were still many to come. In terms of origin, status, affiliation, and expertise, the authors formed a cross-section of European male society (interestingly, there are no known contributions by women). They included kings (Henry II of Cyprus and Charles II of Naples), a leading French royal official (William of Nogaret), an assortment of bishops and mendicant friars, the masters of the leading military orders, an exiled Armenian prince, a Venetian businessman, and a Genoese physician. Some were armchair strategists, others experts, although this was not always apparent in their advice; all wrote for an audience, usually one of popes and kings, in the hope and expectation of action.

This outpouring of counsel and exhortation was new, distinctive, and significant. It came about in part because popes from Gregory X onwards acted on a precedent of Innocent III— in this, as so often, the
fons et origo
of crusading developments—by soliciting advice. Most of the earliest surviving tracts and memoranda were written for the Second Lyons Council and the first full-blown recovery treatise, that of Fidenzio of Padua, was probably also a response to Gregory X’s appeal for written counsel, although it was not completed until shortly before the fall of Acre. Such appeals reflected a widespread perception of the need for radical and innovative thinking about virtually every aspect of crusade organization, from the form to be assumed by the expedition through to the disposition and protection of the conquered lands, if the mistakes of the past were
not to be repeated. This constructive and unblinkered response to past errors led to something like a consensus of views emerging on many principal facets of the longed-for recovery crusade. The expedition should be preceded by a sustained blockade of the Mamluk lands, with the twin goals of depriving the sultan of essential war imports (including the slaves who were trained as his élite cavalry), and weakening his fisc. It should take place in two stages, the first of which (the
passagium particulare
) would establish a foothold, which the second (the
passagium generale
) would exploit. The crusade should be organized on a professional basis, well-funded, and subject to clear-cut, respected, and experienced leadership. Civilians and camp-followers should be excluded.

It would be wrong either to exaggerate this consensus or to assume that the emerging blueprint was a workable one. Some theorists, including, surprisingly, the last master of the Templars, James of Molay, rejected the
passagium particulare
and favoured a single, all-out general passage. There was no agreement about where the
passagium
should land. Axes were liberally ground and politics constantly intruded. For the French theorists Peter Dubois and William of Nogaret the crusade was in part an instrument of Capetian dynastic ambitions, while even such a brilliant and altruistic thinker as Ramon Lull allowed himself to be heavily influenced by Aragonese and French interests, which he incorporated into his plans of attack. On the other hand, it would have been a waste of time writing in a political vacuum; it was unrealistic to try to disentangle the crusade from the dynastic and economic goals of the great powers, and one of the most striking features of the finest treatise writers, Lull and the Venetian Marino Sanudo Torsello, is the fact that their presence was welcomed at courts, assemblies, and church councils. They were great networkers and it is clear that the flow of ideas and influence was two-way.

Whether or not the purged and reformed crusade which such men advocated had any chance of materializing is more difficult to judge, hinging as it did on the other two attributes which Lull considered necessary, charity (
caritas
) and power (
potestas
). Any attempt to gauge public sentiments about the crusade either
on the basis of reactions to the disasters in the East—above all the loss of Acre—or on that of the response to crusade preaching, is all but doomed from the start. The first was too conditioned by special interests and the universal search for a scapegoat, while the second was distorted by the shift in official preaching towards the collection of funds in lieu of personal participation. There were, however, some telling, if short-lived, eruptions of popular interest not long after the fall of Acre. These were usually linked to the eschatological strand in crusade ideas. They were at odds with the advanced, professional form of crusade advocated by most of the theorists, but have the virtue of revealing that the theorists’ obsession with the recovery of the Holy Land touched the population at large when the mood was right. Such eruptions occurred at roughly ten-year intervals: in 1300, when news reached the West of the ilkhan Ghazan’s victory over the Mamluks at Homs, and in 1309 and 1320, when ‘peasants’ crusades’ in Germany and France demonstrated clearly that the poor were still susceptible to outbreaks of crusading zeal.

Higher up the social scale, we are on firmer ground. Evidence is richer, and it is clear that the cult of chivalry, which attained its fullest elaboration at about the time of the fall of Acre, incorporated crusading as one of its defining characteristics. It was no coincidence that secular rulers so often chose to announce or launch their crusade plans in settings of chivalric splendour; indeed, this would be true as late as Philip the Good’s Feast of the Pheasant in 1454. Family traditions of crusading, particularly in France and England, also predisposed numerous nobles to respond enthusiastically to the projects which were hatched at the papal and royal courts. Their enthusiasm was increasingly tinged with suspicion about the motives and real intentions of those promoting the projects, and this expressed itself in greater wariness about undertaking the formal obligation of assuming the cross; but again and again, from the time of Edward I of England’s crusade plans in the 1280s, through to those of Philip VI of France in the early 1330s, recruitment of fighting men did prove possible.

In fact one is led to the conclusion that it was the lack of
potestas
, rather than that of
caritas
, which brought the recovery projects to nothing. To explain why, it is necessary first to outline some of the enormous advances in military organization and financial support which were occurring, and together with the treatises came to form a permanent legacy of the Lyons council and the fervid planning of the following half-century. There was gradually emerging a practice of crusading which, while less streamlined and efficient than that envisaged by some of the theorists, was more in tune with trends in contemporary warfare and was therefore more likely to produce results. A movement towards contractual recruitment, with all its advantages in terms of control and accountability, can clearly be seen in the crusade planning of Edward I, Charles IV, and Philip VI. There was a growing appreciation of the importance of making full use of the West’s supremacy at sea, and not solely in terms of the projected naval embargo on the Mamluk lands. Due importance was vested in reconnaissance, spying, and the cultivation of allies amongst neutral powers. The need to adapt tactics to deal with differing circumstances and enemies was appreciated, and the provision of experts in siege warfare was anticipated. Overall, the balance between the mystical and the military, once a crusade had taken the field, was firmly tipped in favour of the latter, to a degree which it had not been even as recently as the campaigns of St Louis.