A History of the Crusades (45 page)

The survival to such a pronounced degree of crusading practices in Spain is explained by the conservatism of Church and society and, above all, by the link between state finances and crusade revenues which dated back at least to the Granada war. Profits drawn from the military orders, the
cruzada
, and the
subsidio
made up about two-thirds of the two million ducats which an informed commentator at Rome estimated in 1566 as Philip II’s annual haul from the Spanish Church. This may make us suspicious about the king’s constant assertions that he was engaged in the pursuit of God’s cause. His biographers, however, tend to be convinced of his sincerity. Moreover, many of the numerous comments made in the sixteenth century to the effect that Spain’s wars were those of God originated not at governmental level but in sources which cannot be construed as propagandistic in intent. Accounts of the exploits of
conquistadores
, the memoirs of Spanish soldiers, and contemporary letters and histories about the fighting in the Mediterranean and the Low Countries, as well as the Armada of 1588, expound common themes. The Spanish were God’s chosen people, the new Israelites; they were extending the faith by conversion in the New World and defending it by force of arms in the old one; their successes were providential. It followed that their soldiers who fell were guaranteed a place in heaven. Before the battle of Steenbergen in 1583, for example, Alexander Farnese reportedly encouraged his troops by assuring them that they would win ‘a fair victory over the enemies of the Catholic religion, of your king and mine; this is the day on which Jesus Christ will make you all immortal and place you in the ranks of the chosen.’

This association of crusading with Habsburg foreign policy, with the idealized self-perception of Spain’s military class, and
more generally with Spanish national feeling, was the most significant expression of the survival of the crusade, albeit in radically altered form, in the Catholic South. But it was not the only one. In
Chapter 13
it will be shown that the Hospitallers carried the history of the military orders through into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by their participation in the continuing struggle against the Turks in the Mediterranean. The survival in the same period of crusade indulgences and church taxes is less well documented but undoubtedly occurred, for example during the Veneto-Ottoman struggle for Crete (1645–69), the second siege of Vienna (1683), and the Holy League of 1684–97. There is for historians of the crusades a fascination in tracking down ever-later examples of crusade preaching, individuals assuming the cross, and grants of indulgences for fighting, and more generally in tracing the expression of crusading ideas and sentiments into modern times. This fascination is easily understood and it forms a legitimate field of enquiry, so long as we accept that the crusading movement, with its connotations not just of acquiescence but of broad-based popularity and support, had long since come to an end.

PETER EDBURY

T
HE
Mamluk conquest of Acre and the other Frankish-held cities and fortresses in 1291 marked the end of a western presence in Syria and Palestine that had its origins in the First Crusade. But elsewhere in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean, Latin rule persisted. The kingdom of Cyprus, established in the 1190s in the aftermath of the Third Crusade, survived as the most easterly of these western possessions until the Turkish conquest of 1571. In Greece and the Aegean, in the area that contemporaries often conveniently referred to as ‘Romania’, several of the regimes that had come into being in the early years of the thirteenth century after the conquest of Constantinople by the army of the Fourth Crusade continued to hold sway. The Frankish princes of Achaea and dukes of Athens between them ruled much of southern Greece; Italians held Negroponte and many of the smaller Aegean islands, while the Venetian republic governed Crete and the southern Greek ports of Coron and Modon. Though the Latins had lost Constantinople itself in 1261, in the fourteenth century western Europeans were able to add to the territories in the Aegean under their control, with Rhodes and Chios the most notable of these later acquisitions.

During the thirteenth century the most potent threat to continued Latin rule in Romania had come from the Greeks
of Nicaea or Epiros. But after 1300, as Byzantine power waned, so, as we have seen, the threat from the Turks came to the fore. The close of the thirteenth century saw the emergence of the Turkish warlord in north-western Asia Minor named Osman. As has already been described, his descendants, the Ottoman sultans, were in due course to overrun all these Latin possessions as well as the Byzantine empire, the Balkans, the other Turkish emirates of Asia Minor, the Mamluk sultanate, and more besides. In the seventeenth century, with the conquest of Crete from the Venetians, the Ottomans brought the history of western rule in the territories won during or after the crusades to the East to a close. Iraklion, the principal city of Crete, surrendered to the Turks in 1669, and despite the fact that Venetian garrisons were able to remain in a few other places in the island until 1715 and Venetian-led troops had spectacular though short-lived successes in Greece in the 1680s, the fall of Iraklion can be regarded as marking the end of an epoch.

War against the Turks, however, is only one of several themes that criss-cross the history of the western-ruled lands in the eastern Mediterranean during these centuries. Conflicts among the Latins themselves and between the Latins and the other Christian rulers, the Byzantine emperors and the kings of Cilician Armenia, are also prominent. More particularly, the forms that western government and society might take, the relevance to the Latin-ruled territories of commerce between East and West, and the vexed question of the extent to which the Latin regimes can be labelled ‘colonial’ and can be seen as prefiguring European colonial experiences elsewhere from the sixteenth century onwards are all topics that deserve attention. Throughout the Latin East people of western European extraction ruled over an indigenous population that was predominantly Greek in speech and in religious affiliation. How this underclass fared at the hands of the dominant minority is another subject of considerable interest. But before alighting on a few of these issues, a sketch of the political history of these disparate territories is called for, if only to provide a chronological framework within which to consider them.

At the time of the fall of Acre the kings of the Lusignan dynasty had been ruling in Cyprus for a century. Many of the original Frankish settlers were, like the members of the royal house itself, people who had been dispossessed by Saladin’s conquests of 1187–8, and the arrival of many more refugees from Latin Syria during the course of the thirteenth century had had the effect of reinforcing the Latin position in the island. Since 1269 the kings of Cyprus had also laid claim to the title of king of Jerusalem, even though their right to do so had been contested by the Angevin kings of Sicily. However, in 1291 it was the then Cypriot king, Henry II (1286–1324), who had had possession of Acre and who had done what little he could to withstand the Mamluk assault.

Henry never completely lost sight of the idea that he might some day recover the kingdom of Jerusalem. He made some serious if in the event ineffectual attempts to co-operate with Ghazan, the Mongol ilkhan of Persia, during the latter’s invasions of Syria in 1299–1301; he attempted, again ineffectually, to enforce the embargo on western ships trading in Mamluk ports in the hope of weakening the sultanate economically and so making a Christian reconquest feasible, and on at least two occasions he sent memoranda to the pope on how a crusade to recover the Holy Land might be conducted. But there was no crusade to restore Christian rule in Jerusalem, and, even if there had been, Henry himself was scarcely in a position to profit by it. Any major expedition to the East at the beginning of the fourteenth century would have been led by the French, and, if successful, would almost certainly have established French or Angevin rule in the Holy Land. In the last decade of his life Henry was building up dynastic ties with the royal house of Aragon, the Angevins’ principal rival in the Mediterranean, but to no effect. In any case he had shown himself to be inadequate as a ruler. A baronial
coup d’état
led by his brother, Amalric lord of Tyre, in 1306 resulted in his suspension from power, and in 1310 he was sent into exile in Cilician Armenia. On Amalric’s death later that year Henry resumed his rule, but the legacy of
this episode was renewed hostility with the Genoese and frosty relations with the Armenians. In other words, the king became embroiled in quarrels with the most powerful of the Italian mercantile republics in the East and with the only other Christian kingdom in the vicinity of his own realm.

The reign of Henry’s nephew and successor, Hugh IV (1324–59), saw a major reorientation. Instead of concerning himself with the Mamluk sultanate and the recovery of the Holy Land, Hugh turned his attention to the problems posed by the growing Turkish presence in the waters between Cyprus and the West. From the early 1330s until the end of his reign he was associated with the Knights Hospitallers of St John on Rhodes, the Venetians, and the papacy in trying to curb Turkish piracy in the Aegean, and he was also able to place the Turkish rulers of much of the southern coast of Anatolia under tribute. At the same time he seems to have stopped trying to enforce the embargo on trade with the Mamluks and to have sought better relations with the Genoese. His policy was eminently sensible. Since the end of the thirteenth century Cyprus had been enjoying considerable commercial prosperity, largely as a result of its position athwart one of the main trade routes between East and West. Safeguarding the shipping lanes to Europe was thus a matter of prudent self-interest. If Turkish pirates operating from bases on the western or southern coast of Asia Minor could interfere unchecked with international commerce, then the wealth that this trade brought Cyprus and its rulers would diminish and the island would be less able to fend off any future Muslim invasion.

It is customary to see the reigns of Henry II and Hugh IV as marking the apogee of the Lusignan kingdom. Visitors to the island commented on the wealth and prosperity they found. The Florentine business agent, Francesco Balducci Pegalotti, who was based in Cyprus in the early years of Hugh IV’s reign, described the enormous variety of merchandise traded there. The well-struck and plentiful coinage testifies to the abundance of silver flowing into the island. The surviving architectural monuments, notably the Premonstratensian abbey at Bellapaïs and numerous churches of fourteenth-century date in
Famagusta of which the former Latin cathedral of St Nicholas is the most celebrated, are further evidence for the flourishing economy. But by the time the ageing and increasingly irrascible Hugh IV handed over power to his eldest surviving son, Peter I, this prosperity was already on the wane. The Black Death of 1347–8 had hit the island hard. As a result of the population loss agricultural and industrial production would have fallen, and since the international demand for merchandise slumped— there being fewer producers and fewer consumers—the wealth that accrued to the island through trade would have fallen correspondingly. But while this economic contraction affected all parts of the Mediterranean world, the situation in Cyprus was exacerbated by the fact that changing trade routes meant that a smaller proportion of the commerce between Asia and western Europe was passing through the island.

It is against this background that the dramatic events of Peter I’s reign (1359–69) should be viewed. Peter began by taking over the port of Korykos from its Armenian inhabitants and then, in 1361, seizing the important trading centre of Antalya from the Turks. As was shown in
Chapter 11
, in 1362 he travelled to the West and toured Europe, recruiting men for a crusade. He and his army left Venice in 1365 and, rendezvousing with the Cypriot forces at Rhodes, descended on the Egyptian city of Alexandria. The garrison was taken completely unawares; the city was captured and pillaged; the crusading army then withdrew on learning of the approach of the main Mamluk army from Cairo. This attack was followed in the course of the next few years by a series of lesser raids on the coast of Syria. Historians have argued about what Peter was doing. The crusading rhetoric of the time would indicate that he believed he could win back Jerusalem and the Holy Places of Christendom; what we know of the peace negotiations suggests that he was looking for trading advantages for Cypriot merchants. The crusade had originally been intended to have as its leader the king of France who as the heir of St Louis would have been expected to set his sights on Jerusalem. But the actual course of events—the destruction of a rival port to Famagusta and then the quest for trading privileges for his own subjects in
the Mamluk sultanate—suggests that Peter may have been more interested in reviving his kingdom’s flagging commerce.

Whatever the truth, it is clear that Cyprus derived no benefit from Peter’s enterprise. Peace with the Mamluks was concluded in 1370, but by then the king was dead, murdered by a group of his own vassals. The Italian mercantile interests had been outraged by his attack on Egypt. In 1372, following a riot at the coronation of the new king, Peter II (1369–82), Cyprus and Genoa went to war. The next year, 1373, the Genoese captured Famagusta, and their destructive invasion was only halted by a spirited defence of Kyrenia castle. This war marked the end of Cyprus’s commercial heyday. The decline of Famagusta was aggravated by the destruction of the local merchants’ working capital, and by the 1390s the port had acquired the characteristics of a ghost town. It remained under Genoese control until 1464. As for the Lusignans, they now found themselves oscillating between a policy of trying to take Famagusta back by force and paying the tribute that the Genoese had imposed. Increasingly impoverished and isolated, they could no longer involve themselves in anti-Turkish activities in the Aegean or take other positive measures to enhance their position. Instead they allowed Cyprus to be used as a base for corsairs, many of them from Catalonia. As a result the Mamluk sultan took reprisals, launching a series of attacks on the island during the mid-1420s. In 1426 the Cypriot troops were overwhelmed at Khirokitia and the king, Janus (1398–1432), was, as we have seen, captured. Henceforth Cyprus was under tribute to Egypt, and when in 1517 Egypt succumbed to the Ottomans the tribute had to be paid instead to Constantinople.