A History of the Crusades (48 page)

Though on occasion the emperors benefited from western crusading enterprises, the Latins established in the Aegean could not or would not offer them any substantial help in the face of Ottoman advance. Not even the Hospitallers on Rhodes were in a position to have any tangible effect on the fortunes of the empire. In any case the attitudes of both the Greeks and the Latins to the Turks could on occasion be distinctly ambivalent. During the Byzantine civil war in the 1340s, John Cantacuzenus allied with the Ottoman leader Orkhan to whom in 1346 he gave his daughter in marriage. Then in 1352 the Genoese, who were hostile to Cantacuzenus, also entered a formal alliance with Orkhan. It was in the confused political circumstances of these years that the Ottomans first established themselves on European soil. In 1387 the despot of the Morea was using Turkish troops in his war against the principality of Achaea; in 1388 the Venetians were upbraiding the lord of Corinth, Nerio Acciaiuoli, for assisting the Turks in attacking their territory; in 1394–5 the Turks in conjunction with the ruler of Achaea, Peter of San Superan, were attacking the despot. In the kaleidoscopic shifting of alliances at this period both Greeks and Latins showed a readiness to side with the Turks against their fellow Christians. Sometimes they did so out of fear of what might happen to them if they refused Turkish demands for assistance; on other occasions they deliberately set out to use the Ottomans to score off their co-religionists. Thus in 1399 Antonio Acciaiuoli and the Turks were threatening to seize Athens which earlier had belonged to Antonio’s father and which the Venetians had subsequently taken. Among the Christian rulers in Romania only the Venetians and the Hospitallers consistently avoided alliances with the Turks, while in the hundred years from the middle of the fourteenth century to the middle of the fifteenth the Genoese had a long and profitable alliance with them. Indeed, the Genoese were even drawn into the dynastic conflicts which from time to time convulsed the Ottoman sultanate, as for example in 1421 when they were providing
Murad II with ships and troops in his struggle with his brother, Mustafa. The Ottoman–Genoese alliance ended in 1450 with a seemingly unprovoked Turkish attack on Lesbos. With the exception of Chios, the Genoese lost all their possessions in the Aegean and Black Sea to the Turks within a few years of the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

In Cyprus the political situation was less confusing. Relations between the Cypriot kings and the rulers of Cilician Armenia, the only other nearby Christian kingdom, were frequently poor. The problems originated in the first decade of the fourteenth century. Amalric of Tyre, who had usurped power in Cyprus in 1306, had married the king of Armenia’s sister, and their descendants, alienated from the ruling branch of the Lusignan dynasty in Cyprus, remained prominent in the Armenian realm. Between 1342 and 1344 and again at the very end of the kingdom’s existence in the 1370s Amalric’s descendants occupied the Armenian throne. The ill-feeling between the kings of Cyprus and their Armenian cousins may have been exacerbated by commercial rivalry between the ports of Famagusta and Ayas. It must have resulted in less military aid being sent to Cilicia than might otherwise have been the case. On the other hand, the rulers of Cyprus never found themselves having to ally with a Muslim power against other Christians, although in the 1440s their suzerain, the sultan of Egypt, did insist on the Cypriots allowing his fleets to take on supplies en route for their assaults on Rhodes. At one point, however, a Christian power seriously considered a Muslim alliance against Cyprus. In 1383 the Genoese were engaged in imposing their own candidate, James I, on the throne of Cyprus, and when their plans ran into difficulties it was proposed that they should bring in Turkish troops from the nearby emirate of Karamania to help enforce their will. In the event it proved unnecessary, which from the point of view of the Cypriots was just as well.

It would therefore be wrong to assume that people in the Latin East in the later Middle Ages automatically valued Christian solidarity above all else and refused to engage in friendly relations with their Muslim neighbours. In the long term the struggle against the Turks dominated the history of the
entire region, but rivalries between competing Christian powers could and did on occasion lead to military co-operation with the Turks, even though such co-operation could easily stimulate and facilitate further Turkish expansion at Christian expense. Nor did the consideration that strife among the Christian powers would make Muslim conquests all the more easy necessarily count for very much. Internecine warfare between Christians was commonplace. It ranged from the feuding between the lords of minor Aegean islands or petty acts of piracy to conflicts involving some of the greatest powers of Christian Europe. In the first half of the fourteenth century the conflict between the French and the Aragonese cast its shadow over the Latin East. From the 1280s onwards this conflict had had as its focus the bitter struggle between the Aragonese and the Angevins—themselves a cadet branch of the French royal house—for control of southern Italy. Achaea was an Angevin dependancy; Athens, under the Catalan Company, looked to the patronage of the Aragonese royal house. There could be no accommodation or co-operation between the two, and it is no surprise that the French claimant to Athens in the 1330s, Walter of Brienne, could turn to the Angevins for support in his attempt to supplant the Catalan regime. Since the 1270s the Angevins and the Lusignans of Cyprus had disputed the title to the kingdom of Jerusalem. In the early fourteenth century the kings of France took the lead in seeking to organize a crusade to win back the Holy Land, but, as we have seen, a French-led crusade can have had little appeal in Cyprus: the Lusignans knew that they would not be installed as kings of Jerusalem, and, if the crusade failed, Cyprus would be likely to bear the brunt of any Muslim retaliation. In the 1310s the childless king of Cyprus, Henry II, was prepared for his kingdom to pass to the Aragonese royal house. In the event there was no French-led crusade and no Aragonese acquisition of Henry’s kingdom, but things could have turned out very differently. The Angevins had other irons in the fire, such as the overthrow of the Greek regime in Constantinople and the restoration of the Latin empire, and there can be no doubt that in the first quarter of the fourteenth century this lingering and increasingly unrealistic programme inhibited papal
attempts to aid the Byzantines. However, by the mid-fourteenth century Angevin power in Italy was waning and France was fully occupied with war with England. At the same time the Aragonese were finding that they could not readily intervene in the Latin East in any effective manner. So strong was the hegemony of the Genoese and Venetians that the Aragonese found that their merchants could never do more than trail far behind them in third place, and with the demise of the Catalan Company’s rule in Athens Aragonese influence dwindled further.

In the Aegean and the adjacent waters of the Mediterranean, where communication by sea was often more important than communication by land, naval power was of the utmost significance. Rulers such as the Hospitaller masters or the kings of Cyprus possessed ships which they could use to patrol the seas and curb piracy, but the greatest concentration of naval strength lay in the hands of the Genoese and Venetians. In an age in which merchant galleys could double as warships, their domination of trade between Europe and the eastern half of the Mediterranean meant that they wielded great power. They could use their navies to protect their trade, and in building up their mercantile marine they could enhance their war fleets. In the case of Venice, where the government regulated shipping to an appreciable extent, there was a deliberate policy of establishing Venetian-controlled ports of call along the routes to Constantinople and the East. At Genoa there was no such central control, but the Genoese were no less aggressive in seeking trading centres which they could possess for themselves. Both maritime powers competed for markets and commercial privileges and both were prepared to flaunt their power to ensure that their merchants could continue to maximize their profits and trade with as few impediments as possible.

Genoese relations with Cyprus provide a good example of how this assertiveness might work in practice. The Genoese had enjoyed commercial privileges in the island from the early thirteenth century. By 1300, however, their relations with the authorities were poor. Partly this had come about because in their view the Cypriots had shown too much sympathy towards
their rivals, the Venetians, and partly because the Cypriots were trying to limit the extent of their privileges and enforce the papal embargo on trade with the Mamluk ports. The Genoese did not take kindly to what they regarded as attempts to restrict their ability to trade where and when they liked and with a minimum of overheads, and in the 1310s the situation deteriorated to the extent that they engaged in punitive raids on the coast of Cyprus. The Cypriot authorities naturally enough wanted to make sure that as much as possible of the wealth that accrued through trade found its way into their coffers and they were not prepared to sacrifice any more of their sovereignty in order to attract overseas merchants to do business on their soil. On the other hand, Cyprus needed the Genoese merchants if the island’s commercial prosperity was to be sustained, and trade continued, albeit against the background of a stream of disputes, most of them petty in themselves. In 1364 a more serious incident occurred in Famagusta when a number of Genoese nationals were killed. On that occasion King Peter I conceded all the Genoese demands for compensation as he was anxious that nothing should interfere with the crusade he was then about to launch. However, in 1372 the government in Cyprus refused Genoa’s demands for reparations after a similar incident, and, as we have seen, war resulted. In 1373 the Genoese sent a war fleet, captured Famagusta and inflicted a considerable amount of damage on the island. They retained Famagusta as a secure base from which to trade and attempted, with admittedly fluctuating success, to impose tribute on the Lusignans. It could be argued that the Cypriots had largely brought this catastrophe upon themselves, but the fact remains that the Genoese had used their naval power to defend and enlarge the interests of their merchants and in the process had greatly weakened a major outpost of Christendom.

There was an enormous amount of profit to be made from trade, and in the struggle to grab as much as possible for themselves Venice and Genoa frequently came into conflict. Between the 1250s and 1381 there were four major wars between them. Of these, the war of St Sabas which began in 1256 originated in a dispute over property in Acre, but the other three, those of
1294–9, 1350–5, and 1376–81, arose principally from their rivalry in Romania. Although much of the military action took place in the West, it was the trade of Constantinople and the Black Sea that in each case provided the
casus belli
. Paradoxically, military success did not necessarily lead to commercial hegemony and in no instance did either side win so convincingly as to put a stop to the other’s trade. But Genoa’s failure in the war of Tenedos, coming so soon after the expenses incurred in her invasion of Cyprus, ushered in a period of political uncertainty, and after that Genoese interests in the eastern Mediterranean gradually diminished. In the fifteenth century Venice retained a dominant share in the trade with Egypt and Syria and bore the brunt of Ottoman naval activity in and around the Aegean, while Genoa ceased to aspire to her rival’s prominance. Crete and, from the 1470s, Cyprus were valuable Venetian assets. Genoese Chios could not compare.

In none of the Latin possessions in the East did western Europeans ever make up the majority of the inhabitants. In rural areas especially the bulk of the population was Greek. The ports were cosmopolitan. Famagusta for example had a large Arabic-speaking Syrian community which lived alongside Greeks and Franks, Italians, Jews, and Armenians. Many people, even quite poor people, owned domestic slaves, and the surviving documents suggest that they could be of Slavonic, Asiatic, or black African extraction. There would always be a short-term population of merchants and seafarers, but among the long-term residents there were many who could claim status as Venetians or Genoese even though they had never lived in their supposed city of origin. Evidence survives from the early fifteenth century to suggest that a lingua franca comprising an eclectic mixture of words and phrases drawn from all the local languages existed for everyday converse. Most of the people of European extraction in the East probably spoke a form of Italian. In Cyprus, Achaea, and Athens the original feudal landholders had been French, but in course of time Italians or Catalans superseded them. In the case of Athens the change came violently with the advent of the Catalan Company in
1311. In Achaea it was during the fourteenth century that the nobles with French names gave way to Italians. In Cyprus the process was slower, although at the end of the fourteenth century a western visitor to the island noted with apparent surprise that the king spoke ‘fairly good French’. It was only with the accession of James II and the civil war of 1460–4 that Italian or Spanish names came to predominate among the nobility.

In the early stages of Latin rule the western conquerors generally kept themselves apart from the mass of the population. But gradually intermarriage and general proximity broke down the barriers and allowed acculturation between the different elements in the population to proceed. Confessional allegiance was a determining factor. The western regimes invariably introduced Latin bishops and clergy and sought ways of reducing the Greek clergy to subordinate status. Normally this entailed the transfer of endowments to the Latins and the elimination or reduction of Greek bishoprics. The Greek clergy were obliged to acknowledge the jurisdiction of their Latin superiors and ultimately that of the pope. Not surprisingly many demurred, but many did not and there are even instances of Greek clergy taking their litigation to Rome. The Latin rulers knew that they had to tread warily. If they allowed the Greek clergy too much independence they could become the foci for discontent; if they were too heavy-handed in their treatment of them popular outbreaks again were likely. In Cyprus by 1300 each Latin bishop had a Greek as a coadjutor who had responsibility for the Greek-rite priests and churches in the diocese. At least twice in the fourteenth century the authorities in the island intervened to prevent clergy newly arrived from western Europe from trying to impose conformity to Latin usages on the Greeks and thereby sparking a riot. In practice a
modus vivendi
between Greeks and Latins evolved. It would not match the aspirations of the theologians or the publicists on either side, but it seems generally to have satisfied the bulk of the population. In the fourteenth century absenteeism by the higher Latin clergy became increasingly common, and that too may have had the effect of lowering tension. In their different ways the political crises, the Black Death, and the Papal Schism of 1378 all contributed to a weakening of the
Latin church establishment in the East, and this decline continued throughout the fifteenth century.