The History of the Renaissance World (90 page)

78.1. Poland under Casimir the Great

Late in October 1370, the sixty-year-old king was out hunting on horseback when he took a hard fall. His physicians suggested that he recuperate in peace and quiet, but he refused to take to his bed. Soon he was suffering from fever and shortness of breath, probably pneumonia; at sunrise on November 5, Casimir the Great died.
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His funeral was massive and elaborate, with a mile-long ceremonial procession of knights and courtiers and the distribution of silver coins to the people. At the end of the funeral mass, his royal standard was broken into pieces. “At this, there arose such a shriek from the congregation in the cathedral, such an outburst of weeping from young and old, from high and low alike, that they could hardly be calmed,” wrote the king of Hungary, who was present. “And no wonder! The death of the peace-loving king had caused them to fear that the peace to which they had all grown accustomed during his lifetime would now end.”
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The king of Hungary, Louis of Anjou, had attended in order to register his claim to the Polish throne. He was the closest male relative of the dead king (his mother had been Casimir’s sister), and Casimir himself had promised him the crown. Louis soon managed to negotiate a compromise with the Polish dukes: they would recognize him as king of Poland, and in return he would leave them alone. He further sweetened the deal with a proclamation issued in 1374, the Privilege of Košice, that reduced their obligations to the crown to three duties (payment of a small land tax, military service within Poland only, and the upkeep of castles and fortifications). He also redistributed hundreds of acres of royal land among them. He then rarely came into Poland, and for twelve years, the united kingdoms of Hungary and Poland were a single realm only on paper.
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Unfortunately, Louis shared his uncle’s inability to father a son. Before he died, in 1382, he had arranged for his oldest surviving daughter, ten-year-old Mary, to succeed him as queen of Hungary and Poland; he had also arranged her marriage to the Roman Emperor Charles IV’s teenaged second son, Sigismund.

But after his funeral, the aristocrats of both countries objected to Mary’s rule. In Poland, a strong party of dukes argued for election of Mary’s younger sister Hedwig instead; this would break the union of the two crowns and preserve Poland’s separate existence. In Hungary, a dissenting party of Hungarian nobles who disliked the idea of female rule invited the king of Naples (the southern part of Italy, separate from Sicily for the last century) to come in and take the crown.
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The Hungarian disagreement turned out much bloodier than the Polish. The king of Naples, Charles II, arrived in Hungary in 1386. He was assassinated a month later, by agents of Mary’s mother Elizabeth, who had hoped to rule as regent for her young daughter. In retaliation, the supporters of the dead king kidnapped Mary and her mother and dragged them off to Croatia, where, in a mountain fortress, Elizabeth was strangled in front of her daughter’s eyes.
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Sigismund (with his father’s assistance) put together a force of German soldiers and Venetian sailors and arrived in Hungary a few months later. By a combination of force and concessions, he managed to negotiate Mary’s release and also claim the throne of Hungary for himself. The antiqueen contigent, pacified by his promise that Mary would have no more power than a queen consort, finally accepted his claim.

Mary, suspecting that her new husband had been complicit in her mother’s death, refused to live with him. He was no more enthusiastic than she was; the two occupied separate households until her accidental death in a riding accident in 1395. She was twenty-four, pregnant with their first child; her death prevented the crown from passing out of Sigismund’s hands, and after that he reigned alone as king of Hungary.

Meanwhile, little Hedwig, not yet eleven, had been crowned king on October 16, 1384. The Polans had no other way to designate a ruling queen, a
queen regnant
, since Polish queens had always simply been wives of the king. But the name
king
did not solve the primary problem: their country, newly enlarged, newly powerful, was now governed by a female child.

For help, the Polish dukes turned to their most likely ally: the Grand Duke of Lithuania.

The Teutonic Knights had originally been invited into the Polish duchies to help
conquer
the Lithuanians. But the Teutonic conquest of the Lithuanian-speaking region of Prussia had had the side effect of uniting the Lithuanians to the east into a stronger and stronger block of resistance, governed and directed by a Grand Duke who ruled from the capital city of Vilnius.

Teutonic aggression had also convinced Casimir’s father that an alliance with the Lithuanians would provide good protection against both the
German-Prussian
state and the possible expansion of the Golden Horde. In 1325, he had arranged for Casimir to marry the daughter of the Grand Duke, creating a union between the two countries.

Casimir’s wife, Aldona, converted to Christianity at the time of her marriage. But the Lithuanians remained unapologetically “pagan,” continuing in their traditional nature worship; the armed conversion of Prussia had not done much to convince them that Christianity would improve their condition. Now, however, the Polish dukes had a proposal for the Grand Duke of Lithuania. If he converted to orthodox Christianity and married Hedwig, he could become king of Poland and Lithuania, a strong country that would be vulnerable to neither Teutonics nor Mongols.

The Grand Duke, Jogaila, was in his midtwenties and already showing signs of the political intelligence that would mark the rest of his reign. He was a man of moderate habits: he dressed plainly, ate sparingly, never drank, and entertained himself with hard-riding hunts. “A person of simple manners, better suitable for hunting rather than government,” the fifteenth-century chronicler Jan Dlugosz called him, scornfully; but Dlugosz was not a fan of the Lithuanian-Polish union, and even he had to pay grudging credit to Jogaila’s character, “sincere and honest, and without double dealing.”
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Jogaila’s mother, a Rus’ aristocrat, had been an orthodox Christian, and Christianity was not unfamiliar to him. He agreed to the conditions, and on August 14, 1385, Hedwig’s regents met Jogaila at the city of Krewo and signed a formal agreement: the Union of Krewo, a personal union of the two countries under the Grand Duke.

Hedwig remained queen, but all power passed into Jogaila’s hands. By all accounts he treated her well. Pregnant for the first time in 1399, she gave birth to a daughter. The little girl died shortly afterwards, and within a week Hedwig too died, of puerperal fever. Casimir’s two great-nieces were now both dead, the Piast dynasty at a final end, and Poland and Lithuania tied together: one monarch, one crown, two armies, two administrations, and one religion, since most Lithuanians followed their Grand Duke into the Catholic fold.
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Chapter Seventy-Nine

The Rebirth of the Mongol Horde

Between 1367 and 1399,
the Iron Cripple destroys the Golden Horde,
invades the west,
and sacks Delhi

I
N
1367, a Mongol soldier in Balkh set out to recover the glory decades of the Mongol conquests: the long-gone days of Genghis Khan, when Mongol ferocity had spread Mongol power across the known world.

He was in his midthirties, known to his compatriots as Timur-Leng, the Iron Cripple (later Latinized to Timurlane); he had earned the nickname by continuing to fight through to the end of a battle despite wounds in both arms and legs, injuries that left him with a permanent limp. He had grown up in the Chagatai Khanate, east of the Oxus river, and for ten years had served his brother-in-law Amir Husayn, the Mongol governor of the city of Balkh.
¹

Amir Husayn was, theoretically, loyal to the Mongol khan of the Chagatai, a descendant of Genghis Khan. But the Chagatai Khanate had never gained the stability that the other three parts of the Mongol empire (the Golden Horde, the Il-khanate, and the Yuan) had at least briefly enjoyed. The Chagatai khans ruled from the eastern side of the Khanate, an area that had gained the nickname
Mughulistan
, “Land of the Mongols”; they had never been able to wield very much power in the western reaches of the kingdom, Transoxania (the lands just east of the Oxus river). There,
amirs
(local Mongol chiefs) wielded the real power. Without them, the Chagatai khans had no hope of retaining their thrones, and Amir Husayn was one of the most prominent kingmakers among all the amirs; he had personally engineered the coronation of the current Chagatai khan, Kabil Shah.
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Since at least the age of twenty-one, one of his biographers writes, Timur had been “very anxious to rebel against the Khan, and to assume [his] power.” But Timur was not a descendant of the royal clan of Genghis Khan (despite the claims that later biographers made on his behalf), and he was not in pursuit of the khanate itself. He wanted power, not a title; dominance, not the mere appearance of it. He wanted the power of Amir Husayn, not the empty title of the puppet khan.
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Like the great Genghis Khan himself, he was a fierce and charismatic fighter. The fifteenth-century warrior-historian Mirza Muhammad Haidar quotes a verse made in Timur’s honor, by those who had seen him in battle: when he seized his sword, he “made such sparks fly from it that / The sun in comparison seemed dark / He charged down like a roaring lion.”
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His battle frenzies had won him a loyal following among Amir Husayn’s soldiers, and their loyalty was only increased by his habit of giving away much of the battle spoil to his troops. He gave them clothing, jewels, horses, weapons, and belts, and (says a contemporary, the court historian Sharaf ad-din Ali Yazdi) thanked them for their bravery by sending them, “in cups of gold, the most delicious wines by the hands of the most beautiful women in the world.” It was a generosity that Amir Husayn, stingy by nature, never displayed.
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“As the power of Amir Timur rose, so did the star of felicity of Amir Husain begin to decline,” writes Haidar. When he felt himself strong enough, Timur turned on Amir Husayn. He laid siege to his former master, trapping him in his capital city of Balkh; on April 10, the defenses broke and Timur’s army flooded in. Timur took his brother-in-law captive and allowed one of his officers, a man with a blood feud against Husayn, to murder him.
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From that time on, Timur ruled in Husayn’s place as amir of Transoxania, with Samarkand as his capital. He ruled in the name of the Chagatai Khanate, but his conquests were all his own. Seventeen long years of campaigning moved his border steadily westward: Khwarezm, Isfahan, Tabriz, the lands south of the Caspian Sea.
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Timur was a throwback, an atavistic combination of Mongol nomad and Assyrian king. He had no interest in diplomacy, scolding his officers for displaying too much restraint: “He was dissatisfied with the gentle way in which his generals . . . treated the enemy,” his court historian noted, “in watering the plains of enmity and warfare with peace.” Timur was more inclined to water them with blood; it had the useful effect of killing any weeds of revolt that might spring up. After a battle against the city of Isfizar, seventy miles south of Herat, he ordered the defenders of the city piled up and cemented into towers while still alive. When Isfahan fell, he had seventy thousand opponents executed. He left pillars of skulls across the former Il-khanate lands to mark his progress. In Sistan, he ordered his troops to wreck all of the irrigation works they could find, destroying the countryside’s ability to grow crops and simultaneously its will to resist.
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He was not merely a sadist. Nor, despite the efforts of his later biographers to put words of piety into his mouth, was he a warrior of the faith. He claimed Islam as his own, but there was no thread of holy warfare in his massacres. He put his enemies to death and spared his allies. He was a practical man, not a philosopher; his only ethic was victory.