The History of the Renaissance World (104 page)

The Emperor Xuande called a halt. The Ming soldiers withdrew; Le Loi claimed victory, along with the throne of a now-independent Dai Viet. He was the first king of a new dynasty, the Le, which would rule until the eighteenth century. And the final sea expedition of the Ming returned in 1433. The ships never again left the Ming ports.
¹¹

Despite Xuande’s efforts to refocus on the northern battlefield, the Oirat were increasingly victorious.

A new Oirat khan named Esen Tayisi had inherited the leadership of the coalition, and was proving alarmingly good at welding more and more of the surrounding Mongol tribes and petty states into his following. At the same time, the Ming were suffering from a lack of leadership. The cautious Xuande died after just ten years, leaving the throne to his seven-year-old son, the Emperor Zhengtong. The empire was in the hands of the child’s advisors; they were divided over strategy, and the Oirat advance pushed the Ming front steadily, frighteningly, backwards. Frantic fortification of the Great Wall and a series of new barriers inside it—the “inner Great Wall,”
nei-ch’ang-ch’eng—
did little to hold the Oirat off. By the time the young emperor turned twenty-one, Esen Tayisi had advanced to within two hundred miles of Beijing itself.
¹²

In 1449, Zhengtong, on the advice of his chief eunuch, Wang Zhen, agreed to personally lead an army against the Oirat. The royal counselors were once again divided over strategy: “The Son of Heaven, although the most exalted of men, should not get personally into these dangers,” one opponent of the expedition offered, tactfully. “We officials, although the most stupid of men, insist that this must not occur.” The phrasing suggests that Zhengtong was not receptive to criticism; his actions suggest that he had delusions of a glorious victory. In the searing heat of August, he marched from Beijing with half a million men. It was the seventh month of the Chinese calendar, the Ghost Month, when the gates of hell were said to be open so that the dead could roam among the living.
¹³

As they neared the Oirat front, they passed heaps of unburied Ming corpses, victims of a recent Oirat attack on the nearby fortress of Datong, two weeks earlier. But there was no sign of the Oirat army. The landscape was eerily empty; the piles of bodies grew higher; and the spooked emperor decided to turn around and go back to Beijing.

It was already too late. Esen Tayisi had silently surrounded them, cutting off their escape route, and on the first day of September he pulled the noose tight. With the Ming army camped at Tumu, the Oirat suddenly emerged, cutting down thousands with a hail of arrows and then charging over the bodies to scatter the rest. The eunuch Wang Zhen died in the fighting, probably murdered by his own angry and terrified men. The Emperor Zhengtong himself, recognizing defeat, sat down on the ground and waited silently to be taken prisoner.

Esen Tayisi now sent a demand for a massive ransom payment to Beijing. He had expected the Ming to hand over cash to retrieve their emperor without quarrel; instead, the royal court at Beijing simply declared the captive Zhengtong to be Grand Senior Emperor and crowned his younger brother Junior Emperor in his place.
¹⁴

Disgusted, Esen Tayisi set his young prisoner free; he probably hoped that the merciful act would eventually give him a foothold in Beijing. But when Zhengtong made his way back to the capital, he found his brother less than pleased to see him, and his people uninclined to restore him to full reign. He spent the rest of his life in the Forbidden City, walled away from his people, remote and withdrawn.

As the emperor went, so went the Ming.

The days of ambitious military campaigns, wide-ranging sea voyages, and international diplomacy were trickling to an end. The Oirat threat dwindled; Esen Tayisi was murdered by his own men in 1455, during a sharp struggle between the tribes over control of the coalition, and the massive attacks on the northern border ceased. But the Ming emperor did not try to retake the land. No new offenses were planned, no campaigns to foreign lands, no diplomatic missions demanding tribute. The manpower and tax revenue remaining to the Ming all went to the support of a passive internal policy: the fortification of boundary walls, a retreat to the safe land within them.
¹⁵

*
The three early periods known to the Dai Viet as “Chinese Domination” were 207
bc–ad
39,
ad
43–544, and
ad
602–905.

Chapter Ninety-One

Failure

Between 1412 and 1440,
the Catholic church and the Christian empires
fail to find the old unities

T
HE
C
ATHOLIC
C
HURCH
had been badly cracked by the long years of dual papacy; the cracks were now papered over, but still visible through the thin tissue of agreement. The paradigm of a single Christian empire still survived in stereo, in the hands of the German king to the west and the Byzantine emperor. Both of them claimed the ancient baptized crown of Rome, the call to enforce the
pax Romana
as a
pax Christiana
.

But all of these ideals were aging, and at least one of them was already emitting a deathbed rattle.

S
IGISMUND
, king of Germany and Hungary, was not yet emperor of a holy Roman kingdom. Both Italy and Bohemia, territories of the old empire, lay beyond his grasp.

Before his death from plague in 1402, Gian Galeazzo Visconti—granted the title Duke of Milan by the emperor Wenceslaus IV—had claimed almost all of northern Italy. Only Florence and Venice had remained independent, and Genoa had saved herself from his grasp only by submitting to the rule of the French.

But with Visconti dead, his two sons (aged twelve and thirteen) were helpless in the hands of various ambitious Milanese soldiers and city officials. The older son, Gian Maria, fell under the control of the soldier of fortune Facino Cane and his capable wife Beatrice Lascaris; for a decade, this formidable couple ruled Milan through the puppet duke, while the cities and lands that had once been under Milanese control were claimed, one by one, by other Milanese captains and merchants.

In 1412, while Facino Cane lay dying of fever in Pavia, a band of his enemies murdered the twenty-one-year-old Duke in Milan. His younger brother Filippo Maria Visconti became Duke of Milan in his place. The new Duke, aged twenty at the time of his accession, took the advice of his friends and married Facino’s widow Beatrice, now aged forty. She agreed to the match; she got to be Duchess of Milan, while Filippo Maria was able to claim control of her alliances and also of her rather extensive family lands.
¹

It was never a happy match. Filippo Maria Visconti had an odd and unattractive personality; he was intelligent, and a shrewd user of men, but pathologically frightened of thunder, obese, and so self-conscious about his hooked nose and vast girth that he lived in secret rooms, changing them frequently, scuttling away from his subjects in the street and refusing to allow his portrait painted. Beatrice, in turn, was a powerful and wealthy woman twenty years his senior. The two coexisted in mutual hostility until 1418, when Filippo Maria accused his wife of adultery and ordered her beheaded.

No one believed the charges; but it was more expedient to stay on the good side of the Visconti Duke.
²

Filippo Maria found more satisfaction in his conquests. He had hired the mercenary Francesco Carmagnola to head the Milanese army, and by 1421 Carmagnola had reconquered for Milan almost all of the territories that had fractured away from the Duke’s control. As a bonus, he added Genoa, which changed its alliance from the mad king of France to Filippo Maria instead.

The conquests were vicious and unsparing; one account says that, at the city of Piacenza, so many citizens were slaughtered by the Milanese that only three people remained alive within its walls. But it set Filippo Maria at the top of the Italian pyramid: “Having become master of all Lombardy,” notes Niccolò Machiavelli, the sixteenth-century Florentine politician, in his
History of Florence
, “[he was] thinking he might undertake almost anything.” In name, he was a subject duke of the Holy Roman Empire; but in practice, he ruled the north of Italy with something close to an emperor’s power.
³

B
OHEMIA POSED
an even thornier problem.

On paper, Bohemia belonged to Germany. But the kingdom was on fire with Hussite rebellion. Sigismund had promised Jan Hus safe-conduct to the Council of Constance, and then had stepped back and allowed him to burn. Hussite fury over the betrayal was widespread, but one Bohemian knight in particular emerged as Sigismund’s opponent: the soldier John Zizka, veteran of wars against the Teutonic Order of Prussia, an ex-captain of the dead Wenceslaus IV. He began to drill the Bohemian peasants, armed with grain flails and riding in wagons, into an actual army. Sigismund, not daring to enter the country, sent a German army ahead of him into Prague; Zizka and his peasants drove the German soldiers back.
⁴

They now demanded the rights that Jan Hus had begun to preach, as spelled out by the Hussite leaders and submitted to Sigismund: the Four Articles of Prague. The Articles asked the king of Germany, first, to allow open preaching of the Gospel without restriction; second, to permit the Eucharist served
sub utraque specie
, “in both kinds” (in the Bohemian churches, a practice had evolved since the twelfth century of serving the bread to the Christians in the pews, but reserving the wine for ordained priests alone);
*
third, to require all clergy to take a vow of poverty, giving up the Church’s right to accumulate wealth; and finally, to punish actions “against divine law” (
legi divinae contrariae
) openly and promptly. Specific sins were mentioned: drunkenness and theft; adultery and wantonness; unjustified tax and interest rate hikes; the sudden raising of feudal rents. Like the Cathars, like the Waldensians, the Hussites fought against
all
entitlement and privilege.
⁵

Sigismund refused to grant the Articles. But in the ongoing battles between German and Hussite forces—led by Zizka and then, after his death from plague, by the scholar-soldier Prokop the Shaven—he lost more and more ground. The sound of the Hussite battle hymn “Ye Warriors of God,” sung by the armed and trained peasants as they marched into battle, was more often than not the sound of German defeat.

Blessed is everyone who dies for the truth.

Therefore archers and lancers,

Of knightly rank,

Pikemen and flailsmen,

Of the common people,

Keep ye all in mind the generous Lord! . . .

Feel the pride of the weapon in your hands,

And cry: “God is our Lord!”
⁶

In 1421, with Sigismund stalled outside Prague, the Bohemian Diet (the gathered princes of the kingdom) declared him deposed. By 1427, the Hussites were venturing out of Bohemia into Germany, raiding and burning in revenge for German attacks on their homes.

Sigismund’s response to the Hussite revolt was neither as energetic nor as effective as it could have been; his attentions were divided, he was often in Hungary, and he was saving enough force for a proposed march down into Italy, where he hoped to convince the new unification pope, Martin V, to crown him emperor.

The first tentative move towards the imperial crown happened in the spring of 1431, when a church council assembled in the German town of Basel to discuss (among many other issues) the problem of the Hussites. But Martin V died shortly after the council was assembled, delaying its deliberations; the cardinals had to pull away from Hussite business to choose a new pope, the Venetian Eugene IV, in his place. In the meantime, Sigismund opened negotiations with Filippo Maria of Milan. Even if he convinced the new pope to give him the imperial crown, he could not march through the Lombard lands towards Rome unless he treatied with or defeated Milan.