Europe: A History (79 page)

Johan Huizinga, whose studies have had a powerful impact on perceptions of the period, was talking not only of insecurity in face of constant calamities but also of the ‘proud or cruel publicity’ which surrounded almost all persons and events—the lepers with rattles, the beggars in churches, the public executions, the hellfire sermons, the processions, the dwarves and magicians, the pageantry, the stark colours of heraldry, the steeple bells and the street-criers, the stench and the perfume:

When the massacre of the Armagnacs was in full swing… [in 1418] the Parisians founded a brotherhood of Saint Andrew in the church of Saint Eustache: every one, priest or layman, wore a wreath of red roses, so that the church was perfumed … as if washed with rose-water.
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Map 14.
Europe, c.1300

This ‘extreme excitability of the medieval soul’ may owe something to the Gothic enthusiasms of the later Romantics. But it is an essential element to be considered in the impossible task of recapturing the medieval past.

Yet the very brilliance of Huizinga’s thesis invites caution. Like most Western historians, he directed his researches to one corner of Western Europe, in his case to France and the Netherlands; and there must be some reluctance to apply the generalizations to Christendom as a whole. More importantly, in portraying the spirit of the declining Middle Ages so vividly, there must be some danger of underplaying the seeds of change and regeneration which were also present. Renaissance scholars have no difficulty in tracing the origins of their subject to the early fourteenth century (see Chapter VII). It stands to reason that there was a very long period when the old coexisted with the new. Historians stress the one or the other according to the burden of their tale. Huizinga suggested that humanist forms did make a late appearance, but without the ‘inspiration’ of the Renaissance. And he ended with that favourite metaphor of all historians struggling with the rhythms of change: ‘the tide is turning’.
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In the circumstances, it may be wise to resist the metaphor of the waning medieval twilight. It might be more accurate to think of the period in terms of a prolonged crisis for which contemporaries had no solution. There was no awareness of a dawn to come. In more senses than one, late medieval Europeans were children of the plague.

The Byzantine Empire, as reconstituted after the expulsion of the Latin Emperors, was a mere shadow of a shadow. On the European shore it held little more than the city of Constantinople and the adjacent province of Roumelia. In Asia Minor it held a few towns on the Black Sea, and most of the Aegean coastline. Elsewhere, its former provinces were in the hands of the independent kingdoms of Bulgaria and Serbia; of assorted Frankish princes, displaced crusaders, and Venetian governors; and in Anatolia, of the Turkish sultans of Iconium, the so-called empire of Trebizond, and the kingdom of Lesser Armenia. From 1261 to its eventual destruction in 1453, it was ruled by the dynasty of the Palaeologi, descendants of Michael VIII Palaeologus (1258–82), who had engineered the recapture of Constantinople during the absence of the Venetian fleet. Of this Empire, in its dotage, it has been written:

The Greeks gloried in the name of Romans: they clung to the forms of imperial government without its military power; they retained the Roman code without the systematic administration of justice, and prided themselves on the orthodoxy of a Church in which the clergy … lived in a state of vassalage to the imperial Court. Such a society could only wither, though it might wither slowly.
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The desperate Palaeologi sought aid from all and sundry. To hold off Venice, they turned to the Genoans who at various times possessed Amastris, Pera, and Smyrna and the islands of Lesbos, Chios, and Samos. They allied with Aragon;
and on several occasions they tempted the Papacy with the prospect of ending the Schism. In the Epoch of Civil Wars, 1321–54, they briefly restored their rule as far as Epirus. Until 1382 an anti-emperor maintained his court at Mistra in the Morea. By that time John V (1341–91) had become both a catholic and a vassal of the Turks. In 1399 his successor, Manuel II (1391–1425), set off on a vain journey to raise support in Rome, Paris, and London,
[
MOUSIKE
]

The most sensational development of the era was the appearance of a new Turkish warrior tribe that was destined to supplant the Byzantines. The Osmanlis or Ottomans moved into the void left by the Mongols’ defeat of the Seljuks. They took their name from Osman I (r. 1281–1326), son of their founder, Ertugrul, who had established an outpost in the Anatolian interior. From that base they raided far and wide, chipping away at the Byzantine frontier, launching fleets of pirates into the Aegean, and crossing over into the Balkans. They first entered Europe in 1308, when a band of Turkish mercenaries was imported by the Byzantines’ own mercenary force, the Catalan Grand Company, which had rebelled against its imperial employers. In that year they took Ephesus; in 1326, Bursa—which became their first capital; in 1329, Nicaea; in 1337, Nicomedia. Osman’s son, Orkhan (r. 1326–62), established a permanent bridgehead on the Dardanelles, and styled himself Sultan. His grandson, Murad I (r. 1362–89), having set up the second Ottoman capital in Adrianopolis (Edirne), dared to use the old Seljuk title ‘Sultan-i-Rum’ (Sultan of Rome). Sultan Bayezit (r. 1389–1403), though defeated by Tamerlane, conducted the main conquest of Asia Minor, overwhelming the Greek settlements with Muslim colonists, whilst attacking both the Peloponnese and Wallachia. On his death, Ottoman territory was forty times greater than a century earlier, and Constantinople was surrounded (see Appendix III, p. 1259).

During that century of conquest, the frontier between Christendom and Islam was remade. The Byzantines’ former subjects, in Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Bosnia, enjoyed a brief interval of liberty and confusion, before they too were subjugated by the invincible Turk. The Ottomans led a supreme nation of
ghazis
, ‘warriors of Islam’—and they knew it. In the old mosque at Bursa, an inscription to Orkhan runs: ‘To the Sultan, son of the Sultan of the Ghazis, Ghazi son of Ghazi, Margrave of the horizons, hero of the world.’
⁶

Medieval Greece, in the interval between the Latin and the Ottoman conquests, was split into local principalities. The despotate of Epirus, the duchy of Athens, the southern principality of Achaea, and the island duchy of Naxos all passed a couple of centuries in the sun. Their commercial interests were controlled by the Italian cities; their rulers were Latins; the populace Orthodox.
[
ROMANY
]

Bulgaria, too, moved away from the Byzantine orbit. The second Bulgarian empire, which had emerged in the late twelfth century, was a dynamic, multinational realm. From his capital at Trnovo, Ivan Asen (r. 1186–1218), ‘Tsar of the Bulgars and Greeks’, spread his sway to Belgrade and Skopje. His successor, Ivan Asen II (r. 1218–41), took in Albania, Epirus, Macedonia, and Thrace. Two further dynasties were of Cuman origin. But on 28 June 1330 Tsar Michael Shishman was slain by the Serbians, who thereby established their hegemony. In the following
decade the Ottomans began to ravish the valley of the Maritsa. By 1366 the last Bulgarian Tsar, Ivan Shishman III, was obliged to send his sister to the Sultan’s harem and to declare himself an Ottoman vassal. Trnovo was razed. Bulgaria was starting its 500-year career as an Ottoman province.