Some Monuments
Visitors coming to the ancient city of Constance across the misty waters of the Bodensee are greeted by two monuments. One is a chaste obelisk commemorating Graf Ferdinand von Zeppelin’s invention, the airship, the first of which flew from nearby Friedrichshaven in 1900. The second is decidedly unchaste, and much more impressive.
The colossal statue of Imperia, thirty feet tall, weighing nine tons, smiles suggestively from the pierhead. She is long-legged, full-breasted, poised on high heels, wearing a G-string and a revealing gown. On each of her huge outstretched hands sits a naked mannikin; on the left a crowned and bearded emperor, and on the right a mitred pope, legs demurely crossed; all revolve slowly, a full turn in four minutes. They commemorate the Council of Nations which assembled here in 1414 and defined the future of Europe for the next century. The Emperor is Sigismund, King of the Germans, of Hungary and of Bohemia, and Holy Roman Emperor, who presided over the Council; the Pope is Martin V, appointed by the Council, to end the schism which had divided the Catholic Church for nearly forty years. The lady herself can be taken to represent some of the literally thousands of sporting girls who came to lighten the task of the clergymen, professors and diplomats while they continued their deliberations for three years: it is not recorded that any of the girls starved.
Half a mile away, outside the city walls, is a much more sober memorial, a simple stone slab marking the spot where the Czech reformer, Jan Hus, was burned on the orders of the same Council. His death sparked an explosion of indignation in his native country which led to thirty years of warfare and the first successes of the Protestant Reformation; the national festival of the Czech Republic, celebrated on 6 July, the anniversary of his death, is Master Jan Hus Day.
One the other side of the Alps, few visitors to Florence fail to see the splendid Baptistry. Once inside, they can hardly miss the magnificent tomb just to the right of the altar, flanked by two great pillars, the joint work of Donatello and Michelozzo, but perhaps they may not read the inscription carefully enough: JOANNES QUONDAM PAP XXIII. The recumbent figure is that of Pope John XXIII – and this is not a misprint – who convened the Council, and who was deposed by it; Edward Gibbon uncharitably wrote of his trial: ‘The more scandalous charges were suppressed; the vicar of Christ stood accused only of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy and incest.’ Taken together, the three memorials recall the failures and successes of the Council of Constance.
The Triumph of Islam
Generations of novelists and scriptwriters have nourished Western fantasies of the Crusades as struggles between gallant adversaries, or as a noble effort to reclaim sacred lands for Christendom. As always in history, the facts are more complicated, although also sometimes more interesting. The Holy Places of Palestine were, and so remain, at least as sacred to Jews and Muslims as to Christians, and Muslims remained faithful guardians of them for many centuries. Whatever ideals inspired the First Crusade in 1095, including that of reclaiming the lands lost to Islam by the Greek Orthodox Emperor of Constantinople, were quickly dispersed. Two German crusading ventures devoted themselves to plundering and massacring Rhineland Jews, before attacking the Catholic Christian Hungarians (who accounted for many of the German invaders, and dispersed the rest).
Subsequent Crusaders abandoned any pretence of assisting the Greeks, and in 1204 French and Flemings, assisted by the Venetians, on a Crusade blessed by Pope Innocent III, devastated Constantinople, sacked the cathedral of St Sophia, and placed a prostitute on the throne of the Patriarch; for nearly sixty years thereafter the ancient Empire of Byzantium, the heir of Imperial Rome, was divided between French, Catalans and Venetians. An official, papally authorized Crusade had become too valuable a weapon to be used only against the infidel. Crusades against orthodox, but politically inconvenient, European enemies, giving the same privileges of freedom from taxation, the prospect of loot, and the quick path to heaven became more common, and at the same time called into question the whole currency of ecclesiastical blessings and curses.
By the end of the thirteenth century it hardly needed the brutal tactics or the grim diplomacy of Sultan Baibars the Crossbowman to eject the Crusaders from the remnants of the Kingdom of Outremer, the heritage of the previous crusades. Baibars was the first of the Mamluk dynasties, which were to rule Egypt for the next two hundred years. The previous two Crusades, led by King Louis of France – St Louis – had been disastrous, ending with tens of thousands of casualties and the French kingdom bankrupted. Civil wars between rival claimants to the kingdom, the old feud between the Knights of the Temple and those of the Hospital, allied to the jealousy of Venetian, Genoan and Pisan traders, had already done the Muslims’ work for them. The once splendid Catholic states of Palestine and Syria had been reduced to a few ports and a handful of isolated castles; apart from a patch of land held by the Armenians, the King of Cyprus was the only remaining Christian power in the region.
One hope remained, and that was the strange possibility of an alliance with the Mongol Khan, Arghun Ilkhan of Persia, grandson of the great Genghiz. Himself a Buddhist, the Khan’s vizier was a Jew and his best friend a Christian Turk, born in China – all a good illustration of the age’s complexity. In 1287 Arghun sent an envoy to Europe, offering aid against the Muslims. Although ambassador Rabban Sauma was welcomed by both French and English monarchs – King Edward I impressed him as the ablest statesman in the West – neither could offer a date when they might be ready to send an army to Palestine. Rabban was also welcomed by Pope Nicholas IV, and the Mongol priest was allowed to celebrate Mass before all the cardinals and to receive the sacrament at the hands of the Pope; again, however, no firm undertakings were forthcoming.
Taking the initiative once more, Arghun wrote to both King Philip of France and King Edward, in the name of the Great Khan Kubilai himself, proposing to invade Syria in January 1291, accompanied by the Christian King of Armenia, if the two kings would give their support. Once again, his offer was politely dismissed.
And by then it was too late. Baibars’s successor, Sultan Qalawun, picked off the remaining fragments of Outremer until only the stronghold of Acre, the best harbour on the coast of Palestine, which had served as the base for all previous invasions, was left for the next Sultan, al-Ashra, to subdue. Acre’s brave defence lasted for seven weeks before those who could took to the boats. The Templars fought on in their Order’s castle for another ten days until the undermined walls collapsed, crushing attackers and defenders alike. Some captives were taken – the prices in the Damascus slave market collapsed, girls going for a drachma apiece – but most of the population of Acre were slaughtered on the spot: by 28 May 1291 the Crusades seemed to be over. Realistically, the Khan decided that the unreliable Christians had to be abandoned, and made peace with the Mamluks.
It must have seemed to any outside observer that Latin Christianity was in possibly terminal decline and that the future lay with triumphant Islam. The Abode of Peace, Dar al-Islam, extended for six thousand miles, from Spain to the Java Sea, from the Volga river to the coasts of Mozambique. Sheik Ibn Batuta, who left a record of his nearly thirty years of journeys, was acclaimed during his lifetime as ‘the Traveller of the Whole Body of Islam’. From his native Tangier he went to Cairo (acquiring a pair of wives on the way), then the largest city in the world, explored Arabia and Asia Minor, made the pilgrimage to the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina four times, sailed down the west coast of Africa to Dar es Salaam, crossed the Sahara desert to Timbuktu and followed the caravan routes bearing slaves, ivory and gold from central Africa to Fez, a city with a hundred large caravanserais and fifteen thousand brothels (three thousand staffed by boys). Another journey took him north to the camp of the Mongol Khan Mohammed Uzbek on the Volga and on to nearly the latitude of Moscow; returning, he called at Constantinople, where he met Emperor Andronicus. His longest journey was through the Hindu Kush to Afghanistan and Delhi, where he served the Emperor Mohammed Tughlak for eight years, before moving on to the Maldives (another four wives), Bengal and Sumatra; more than 75,000 miles by land and sea, and almost all through the Abode of Peace, where Arabic was understood and Islamic law ruled.
By contrast the Christian world was shrinking. The Orthodox Byzantine Empire, devastated by both Muslims and Western Catholics alike (the Christians by a long way the more destructive) was now limited to little more than Thrace, Macedonia and some of the Greek and Black Sea coastline, with such satellite independent states as Bulgaria. Russia, except for a small area around Novgorod, was subject to the Mongol Golden Horde. Apart from the small Muslim Kingdom of Granada, the other major and rival part of Christendom, Catholic Europe, had so far survived almost intact. Stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the northern shores of the Mediterranean, its eastern boundaries were formed by the dominions of the Teutonic Knights and the emergent kingdoms of Poland and Hungary.
Although very much smaller in extent than the Muslim states, Catholic Christendom could theoretically claim a unity that existed nowhere in Islam. Few Western Christians questioned the spiritual supremacy of the Roman Pope or his ultimate control of all ecclesiastical affairs, and the enormous wealth of the Church brought great political influence. As much as a third of a country’s land might be owned by the Church, even if lay nobles exercised sovereign rights over some of it, and direct ecclesiastical rule was common. The Teutonic Knights were unimpeded lords of all East Prussia; as much as a quarter of present-day Holland and much of western Germany was controlled by the great archbishops, including a considerable slice of the Rhineland, Europe’s richest region. A traveller might walk from Denmark to Bohemia or to France without moving more than a few miles from Church rule. Of the seven feudal princes who elected the German Emperor, three were archbishops. Even in England, the most united and centralized of European countries, the Prince Bishop of Durham ruled the present county and strategic parts of Northumberland.
Stalin once cynically asked to be told how many divisions the Pope had. In 1300 the answer would have been that all the fighting religious orders, the Templars and Hospitallers, the Spanish knights of Santiago, Calatrava and Alcantara, as well as the Teutonic Knights, the best organized and most effective warriors in Europe, were all responsible through their Grand Masters only to the Pope. Catholic Christianity was imposed on everyone except the Jews who were, usually grudgingly, allowed to follow their religion. All others must convert or perish, whereas in the more tolerant Muslim societies Christians were permitted to keep their faith and allotted a recognized, if secondary, place in society.
Christianity was also much more visibly obvious than Islam. Worship was essentially communal, based on the Mass, mediated through a priest, while every Muslim was in direct contact with his God through his daily prayers. Every Christian village therefore had its church, every city its cathedral; the countryside was rich with abbeys and convents, surrounded by their often extensive domains. The geographical hierarchy was supplemented by the wandering orders of Friars, Dominican and Franciscan, and by Church officials. It was entirely typical that ten of Chaucer’s twenty-nine Canterbury pilgrims were connected with the Church. In practice lay rulers acquired a good slice of this wealth for themselves, although by negotiation rather than outright appropriation, and with due recognition of the final authority of the Pope, Bishop of Rome and Christ’s Vicar upon earth.
If there were to be any Christian attempts to regain the lost lands of Outremer the obvious and best answer must have been to unite the two rival creeds, the Greek Orthodox and the Latin Catholic. Although the ancient Empire of Byzantium had fragmented, the great city founded by Constantine held out and Byzantine armies remained formidable; but they were engaged in fighting off predatory fellow-Christians. When an enemy prisoner was brought in triumph to Byzantium in 1281 it was not a Turk or Mamluk but Sir Hugues le Rousseau de Sully, the leader of a Franco-Italian invasion routed by the Greeks at the battle of Berat. As long as such papally approved Catholic attacks continued the prospects of a successful Christian resistance were derisory.
Failing reconciliation between the Churches the two essentials for a crusade were a committed pope and a strong king of France, the one to provide the spiritual authority and the other the military force. Crusades had traditionally been – those in the Baltic and Spain excepted – if not exclusively French, at least a francophone affair. Such distinguished thirteenth-century Crusaders as Simon de Montfort, Earl Richard of Cornwall and Lord Edward, later King Edward I, even if coming from England, were linguistically and culturally members of the French elite. The last major German Crusader, the Emperor Frederick, had slunk out of Acre in 1229, pelted with entrails and excrement.
After the fall of Acre those two major conditions were lacking; although there were many efforts at least to begin a recovery, they came to nothing. Crusading finances and arms were diverted from combating Muslims to the less risky task of fighting fellow-Catholic Christians, as the two parts of a divided Latin Church struggled for ascendancy. Only at the very end of the fourteenth century, more than a hundred years later, was the last great Crusade begun. Any hope of re-establishing a Christian kingdom in the East had been abandoned. The last Crusade was an anxious attempt to save the heartland of Europe from absorption by a triumphant Islam. Although it was a tactical failure, at least a generation of comparative peace was secured, during which European unity might be re-established. The leader who lost that Crusade, but who eventually succeeded in restoring Christendom, was another German Emperor: Sigismund, the figure gloomily sitting on Imperia’s right hand, was the most powerful sovereign of his time, and by far the most interesting. Consider the bare facts. He survived as Hungarian king, ruling over that talented and turbulent people, although not without some violent upsets, for half a century (1387–1437). For all that period Hungary was Christendom’s first line of defence against the menacing Turkish armies south of the Danube, with the grudging support of the Rumanian Vlachs, while at the same time facing hostile Poles, Venetians and Bosnians. In addition Sigismund was first Protector and then King of Bohemia, which included Moravia, Silesia and Lusatia.
Finally, Sigismund was King of Germany, and the successor of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor, with a real if limited authority over all the German-speaking lands and an indistinct acknowledgement by the rest of the Catholic sovereigns as, at least, the first among equals. Only a man of extraordinary qualities could have retained such a varied collection of responsibilities, and for so long a period; the fact that all depended on the choice of others – Hungary, Bohemia and the Empire were all elective crowns – and that Sigismund had little by way of personal power, makes his survival all the more remarkable. It was ironic that his success in reuniting Europe was followed by another devastating succession of internecine and self-destructive Christian wars that opened the way for the advance of Islam.