A History of the Crusades (44 page)

Not since St Louis’s expeditions more than two centuries previously had a major European government been so directly and continuously involved in organizing and waging a big crusade. Such involvement was essential, for Granada’s defences had been built up over much the same period of time. Its conquest necessitated the application of massive military power, deployed with persistence year after year to reduce the emirate’s size piecemeal fashion. The mobilization of men, horses and mules, artillery and powder, grain and other foodstuffs, necessitated a formidable concentration of effort. Some 52,000 combatants
were engaged for six months in the siege of Baza in 1489. Above all, money was called for: some 800 million
maravedís
according to one estimate. The provisioning of the troops and the financing of the conflict were directed personally by the queen. As one of the war’s leading historians, Ferdinand del Pulgar, put it, ‘the queen’s mind did not stop thinking about how to get money, both for the war against the Moors and for the other demands constantly thrown up by the government of her realm.’

Most of the extraordinary expenditure which the war required was met from crusade sources, in particular from church taxes and the preaching of indulgences. The king and queen petitioned vigorously for these and took care that each crusade bull (
bula de la cruzada
) was publicized to maximum effect. The success achieved by the latter, by comparison with the patchy results obtained by the preachers of the anti-Turkish crusade elsewhere in Europe, is striking. To a large extent it can be attributed to the small sums demanded in exchange for the indulgence, the generous privileges granted, the active assistance which preachers and collectors received from lay officials, and the proof available, in the shape of bulletins from the front-line, that the money was really being spent on fighting. But there was probably more to it than this. The cause for which Castilians gave money and, in the case of the troops, fought and even died, was a national as well as a sacred one. The convergence of patriotic feeling and religious zeal, visible at times during the Hundred Years War and, paradoxically, amongst the Hussite heretics in the 1420s, was at its most apparent in Castile in the 1480s. Together with the dominance of the state in the management of the crusade itself, it was a clear pointer for the future development of crusading.

As it entered the sixteenth century, the crusade, in its traditional form as a papally-directed holy war symbolizing Christendom’s unity and forwarding its common interests, was in a manifestly sick condition. Nothing showed this more vividly than the Fifth
Lateran Council (1512–17), at which the papal curia made its last attempt before the Reformation to set in motion an anti-Turkish crusade. The eastern background to the council’s deliberations was an immensely sombre one. The Turks had recently developed their naval strength to the extent of inflicting huge losses on the Venetians; in 1515–17 they conquered the eastern Anatolian plateau; and in 1516–17 they destroyed the Mamluk sultanate and absorbed Syria and Egypt into their empire. It was virtually inevitable that they would resume their westwards advance in the near future. The council listened to impassioned speeches, levied church taxes for a crusade, and appealed for action by Europe’s rulers. Pope Leo X was genuine in his enthusiasm for crusading and he made strenuous efforts both to dampen down the Italian conflicts, which his predecessor Julius II had vigorously fanned, and to assist in peace negotiations between France and England. There was some optimism in the air but, as so often in the past, the grandiose offers and sweeping promises made by such rulers as the Emperor Maximilian I, Francis I of France, and Henry VIII of England came to almost nothing. As if emphasizing the contrast with their opponents’ lethargy, the Turks managed in 1521 to take Belgrade, the key to Hungary and the chief obstacle to their renewed advance.

If there was any hope for a revival of the movement, it lay with Spain. The union of Castile and Aragon proved to be permanent, if imperfect, and this new power was embarking on an expansionist foreign policy which drew not only on the military expertise built up during the Granada war, but also on the convergence of religious and patriotic fervour which had characterized it. The papacy contributed towards the latter by constantly issuing fresh grants of clerical taxes and renewing the
bula de la cruzada
. As early as 1415 the Portuguese capture of Ceuta in Morocco had been treated as a crusade, and a flow of further Portuguese conquests in the western Maghrib in the fifteenth century benefited in the same manner. Soon after Granada was secure the Castilians imitated their western neighbours, commencing a spectacular drive into Algeria and Tunisia. By 1510 they had reached Tripoli and were preparing for an assault on Tunis. They were half-way to their stated objective of
Jerusalem. This may seem like propaganda or at best self-delusion, but it was fully in keeping with the mystical and eschatological tone which is frequently visible during the Granada war, and which shaped the thinking of Christopher Columbus and the Franciscan missionaries in the New World. In practice, however, this surge eastwards brought the Castilians into collision with the Ottomans and their clients, the North African emirs and corsairs. Thus the Iberian crusade merged with the anti-Turkish crusade in the central Maghrib.

At this point it seemed inevitable that the papally-directed international crusade would be superseded by the state-directed national crusade epitomized by Spain’s campaigns against the Moors. But the election of Charles of Spain as Holy Roman Emperor in 1519 brought about what looks like a brief revival of the older tradition. Charles V had to perform a difficult balancing act between furthering Castile’s interests in North Africa and carrying out his imperial responsibilities in central and eastern Europe. Initially, the latter entailed assisting Hungary, and after Hungary’s collapse in 1526 it meant the defence of the
Reich
itself against the Ottomans. The emperor worked in close if abrasive co-operation with the pope, who constantly reminded him of his many duties, and his territories were so extensive and varied that at times it seems as if his crusades, particularly his relief of Vienna in 1529 and his great expedition to Tunis in 1535, were akin to those of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Charles saw himself as a new Barbarossa or Charlemagne; indeed, the celebration of the victory at Tunis as the triumph of Rome over Carthage points to even older traditions of imperial warfare. But this is illusory, for Charles was always defending his own lands or dynastic interests, with the use of his own troops and funds, even if the former were encouraged and the latter boosted by crusading measures. The crusading status of Charles’s conflicts is undeniable, but as Francis I and other enemies of the emperor were quick to point out, they were ‘Habsburg crusades’, fought for particularist ends.

By the time Charles V marched in relief of Vienna Christendom was split by its confessional divide. In the Lutheran, and later Calvinist, states of the North the rejection
both of papal authority and of the sacrament of penance which underpinned crusade indulgences, effectively extinguished crusading. Arguably this was little more than the formal ending of a practice which had become residual in any case. The closingdown of the Lithuanian front in the early fifteenth century and the failure of all plans for a general crusade against the Ottoman Turks meant that relatively few families in England, the Low Countries, or Germany had directly experienced crusading for some generations, unless their members entered the Order of St John, became papal preachers and tax collectors, or went as individuals or in groups to fight in Granada, Hungary, or Rhodes. There were more of the latter than one might expect, such as the 2,000 or so Burgundians who set out from Sluys in 1464 with the intention of fighting on Pius II’s crusade—en route, they stopped off at Ceuta and helped the Portuguese to repel a Moorish attack—or the 1,500 English archers whom Henry VIII sent to Cadiz in 1511 to take part in King Ferdinand’s planned Tunis crusade. But they were not enough to keep the tradition healthy. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that crusading had come to occupy a rather small corner of the rich fabric of Catholic culture which the reformers destroyed.

Of equal importance was the fact that its image had become disreputable and its resonances negative. This is nowhere more apparent than in Erasmus’s contribution to the long series of crusade treatises, his
Consultatio de bello Turcis inferendo
of 1530. Writing at the time of Hungary’s dismemberment and in the immediate aftermath of the Ottoman siege of Vienna, Erasmus most unwillingly supported a war against the Turks: ‘I do not advise against war, but to the best of my ability I urge that it be undertaken and pursued auspiciously.’ This meant that Christendom’s secular authorities should fight altruistically, and the troops in a spirit of penitence, like the early Templars as described by St Bernard. The conflict should be financed by cutting superfluous court expenditures, ‘spending in piety what they take away from extravagance’, and by voluntary donations, for ‘the people’s suspicion will be eroded as plans mature into action’. Above all there should be no preaching of indulgences, which were associated with failure, dissimulation, and
shabby ‘fixes’ between the pope and local rulers, and no participation by the Church. ‘For it is neither seemly, nor in accordance with holy scripture or the laws of the Church, for cardinals, bishops, abbots, or priests to get involved with these matters; and to this day their involvement has never met with success.’ This was no longer crusading, rather a purged form of Christian warfare rising phoenix-like from the ashes of old, discredited structures.

Erasmus criticized Luther in the
Consultatio
for condemning the anti-Turkish war outright on the grounds that the Turks were sent by God to punish Christians for their sins. In fact Luther had abandoned this extreme Augustinian stance by this point, for much the same reasons that Erasmus gave his highly-qualified approval for a secular war of defence; whatever their theological views, no reformers could bear the thought of actually living under Ottoman rule. Up to the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 Germany’s Lutheran princes fought alongside their emperor against the Turks, extracting valuable concessions on the religious issue as the price of their assistance. Even after it became clear that the confessional divide was more than a temporary aberration, military co-operation between German Protestants and Catholics against the Turks, like the survival of the Teutonic Order in the northern states, was a sign that things were less clear-cut than they appeared to be. Catholic victories in the Mediterranean were celebrated in the Protestant countries and a sense of common values, some either religious or derived from religion, persisted. Politically and culturally, the Turks were still ‘alien’: Protestant alliances with them against the Catholic powers were kept secret for fear of offending public opinion. Old feelings and beliefs were not to be discarded overnight.

However, it was in the South that the forms and attitudes of crusading persisted, and the length of time for which they endured has in recent years finally received due recognition. The sixteenth century witnessed the culmination of the practice of forming naval leagues against the Turks, which had its humble origins in the 1330s. A league consisting of Charles V, Venice, and the pope was formed in 1538, but it suffered a serious
defeat at Prevéza, off the west coast of Greece. This failure, the recriminations which it caused, and the political differences between the contracting powers, prevented the formation of another league until the struggle for naval control of the central Mediterranean had reached its climax in the late 1560s. The Turkish capture of Tunis in 1569 and Nicosia in 1570 enabled Pope Pius V to persuade both Spain and Venice to enter another league. On 7 October 1571 its galleys won the biggest naval battle of the century at Lepanto, in the gulf of Corinth. The Catholic fleet at Lepanto was financed largely by church taxes and the sale of indulgences. Those who fought were conscious of the significance of the engagement and, in accounts published very soon afterwards, they were depicted preparing themselves for action in a spirit of piety, penitence, and forgiveness which would have earned Erasmus’s approval and would not have seemed unfamiliar to St Louis. Indeed, the Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation accommodated with ease many of the devotional practices of crusading, as well as making its principal institutions acceptable by modifying them. In 1562 Duke Cosimo I of Florence even founded a new military order, the Knights of Santo Stefano, which is described in
Chapter 13
.

As was to be expected, it was in Habsburg Spain that the crusade flourished most during the Counter-Reformation. The degree of institutional continuity here was remarkable, with less reform than elsewhere. It was most visible in the prominent role which the Spanish military orders continued to occupy in society, despite the abuses practised by a crown which used its control of the orders to milk their offices and lands for all they were worth. Then there was the regular preaching of the
bula de la cruzada
on behalf of the Turkish war and the collection of the
subsidio
, a church tax which was clearly descended from the clerical tenth, although it had come to assume far greater proportions. The presence of such legacies from Spain’s crusading past was rationalized in terms of its crusading present, for whatever the concerns of the popes about Spanish aggrandizement, there could be no doubt that the wars which Philip II was waging in the Mediterranean, the Maghrib, and the Low Countries had the effect of maintaining the Catholic faith. Thus when he
granted the king a totally new form of levy on church revenues, the
excusado
, in 1567, Pius V justified it by reference to Philip’s expenses ‘for the preservation and defence of the Christian religion’ in Flanders and the Mediterranean. The pope’s renewal of the
bula de la cruzada
, too, despite the fact it contravened the reforming decrees of the council of Trent, came about in 1571 as the price which Philip II attached to his joining the Holy League.