All posts tagged The Albigensian Crusade

Byzantium: The Decline and Fall (2) by John Julius Norwich (1995)

This is a review of the second half of the third volume in John Julius Norwich’s weighty and famous three-volume history of the Byzantine Empire, from the founding of Constantinople in 330 to the fall of the same city to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.

The third volume covers the period from the catastrophic Battle of Manzikert of 1071 in which the Byzantine army was massacred by the new power in the Middle East, the Seljuk Turks, through to the final triumph of the Ottoman Turks and the miserable fall of the city.

It is a long, miserable and frequently appalling book to read. It took a big effort to get over the emotional trauma of reading about the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusaders in 1204, so traumatic I devoted a detailed blog post to it.

The Sack of Constantinople

Byzantium: The Decline and Fall contains so much brutality, cruelty, violence, so much destruction, rape and sending into slavery that it is hard to process and hard to cope with, emotionally.

As mentioned in my review of the first half, it depicts a world of unending conflict, in which all nations, rulers, emperors, kings, princes, khans, sultans, emirs and warlords are unceasingly engaged in endless conflict with each other, in which no treaties last, no peace endures, and each spring armies are mustered the length and breadth of Europe and Asia, on that year’s campaign of war and conquest.

Key events

1202 Fourth Crusade assembled at Venice. 1204 The Fourth Crusade captures Constantinople. A Latin Empire of Constantinople is formed, with other territories parcelled out to crusader lords and upstart Greeks asserting new Byzantine ‘successor states’.

1209 to 1229 The Albigensian Crusade against heretics in the south of France.

1243 The Battle of Köse Dağ in which the invading Mongols devastate the Seljuk Turks. The Turks never recover, but disintegrate into a host of emirates and small successor states. One of the smallest of these, in north-west Anatolia, would be ruled by Othman who would become the semi-legendary founder of the Ottoman Empire.

1261 Emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus recaptures Constantinople, not in a battle but almost by accident when the main Latin army is away.

1274 Union of Lyon – at the Second Church Council of Lyon the fourteenth ecumenical council of the Catholic Church the Byzantine emperor Michael VIII made various pladges to reunite the Eastern church with the Western i.e. to submit to papal power and to change rituals and wordings to agree with the Latin rite. This was a bid to gain help from the pope and Latin nations but the Greek population and most of the clergy rejected it, and it was later repudiated by Michael’s successor, Andronicus II.

1282 The Sicilian Vespers – the Norman rulers of Sicily were a persistent threat to Constantinople, repeatedly mounting large expeditions to cross the Balkans and attack the city. The Sicilian Vespers was a rebellion of the native population of Sicily against their arrogant French overlords, which massacred them and for a generation neutralised that threat.

1291 The Fall of Acre, the last Crusader kingdom of Outremer.

1299 date traditionally given for the founding of the Ottoman Empire.

1354 The Ottoman Turks capture Gallipoli on the northern, European shore of the Bosphorus and henceforth use it as a bridgehead into the Balkans.

1389 After victory at the Battle of Kosovo (15 June) the Ottoman Turks take over most of the Balkans, depriving Constantinople of agricultural land and manpower.

1402 Tamburlaine devastates the Othman Turkish army at the Battle of the Chubuk Plain. If he had stayed and conquered more of Anatolia he might have wiped out Ottoman Rule but he ceased his Western campaign and turned East where he died the next year, leaving the Ottomans to regroup and renew their threat against Constantinople.

1453 May 29 – Fall of Constantinople Sultan Mehmed II’s forces capture the city, leading to a day of unprecedented massacre, pillaging and rape.

Key issues

The post-sack era

For sixty or so years after the sack of 1204, the history of the Byzantine Empire was one of a succession of Greek emperors based in Nicaea trying to unify the squabbling Greek statelets, negotiate with the new Latin rulers of Constantinople, while also managing relations with the Turks to the East and the Bulgars and Serbs to the North.

Family squabbles

Throw in repeated internecine rivalry within the extended families of the emperors themselves, and problems created by a series of religious divisions and you have an extremely complicated story to tell. The situation around the two sacks, in 1204 and 1453, are particularly complicated, but Norwich tells it all with admirable clarity, and finds the time to give a brief summary of the overall achievements of each of the emperors, men (and some women acting as regents) who were condemned to struggle with the steadily declining situation.

Schisms

The Arsenites took their name from the Patriarch Arsenius who excommunicated the emperor Michael VIII for his treatment of his young co-emperor and rival, John Lascaris (Michael had him blinded and confined to prison for the rest of his life). Michael had Arsenius deposed and replaced in 1267 but the Arsenites only grew in number and zeal, providing a powerful opposition for the rest of Michael’s reign.

The Hesychasts (from the Greek hesychasm meaning ‘holy silence’) teaching a meditation technique which could help the faithful attain a vision of ‘the divine, uncreated light which had surrounded Jesus Christ at his Transfiguration’. The practice spread sparking, as new movements do, reforming zeal among its adherents, and opposition to all the compromises and fudges of the orthodox establishment, until the church became divided into bitterly opposing factions of hesychasts and traditionalists, a schism which spilled over into politics and took up the energy of successive emperors throughout the 14th century.

The Catholic Church

By the 1200s the Roman Catholic Church demanded control over the Eastern Orthodox Church and was firmly of the view that the Easterners were schismatics, little better than heretics, a view dating from the actual schism of 1054, but accompanied by a background of suspicion and dislike.

In the last 250 years of its existence the empire was forced to approach the Papacy numerous times, begging for help against the encroaching Turks, in return for which the emperor pledged to convert his people en masse to Catholicism, at the 1274 Union of Lyon, and again in the 14th century. But this ploy never worked out because:

all the senior Orthodox churchmen refused to co-operate
the Greek people passively resisted all changes
the papacy never came up with the material aid to the struggling empire which the emperor had bargained for

Crusades

We all know about the conventional and numbered sequence of crusades against Muslims in the Holy Land (and Egypt). Reading this book makes you aware of quite a few other ‘crusades’. I was surprised to learn of the many times Western princes and kings tried to get the pope’s approval for almost any armed venture by persuading him to call it a ‘crusade’.

1190 the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa tried to secure papal blessing and the name of ‘crusade’ for his planned attack on Constantinople (p.161)
In 1265 Charles of Anjou and Provence, younger brother of King Louis of France, persuades pope Clement IV to declare Charles’s war against the pope’s arch-enemy, King Manfred of Sicily, a ‘crusade’ (p.225)
In 1280 the same Charles of Anjou (having defeated Manfred and become King of Sicily) persuades the pope also call his next campaign, a vast amphibious attack against Constantinople, a ‘crusade’ against the Eastern schismatics and heretics (p.249)
In 1396 Pope Boniface IX gives the name of ‘crusade’ (and historians call the Crusade of Nicopolis) to the vast army assembled by King Sigismund of Hungary. 10,000 French knights and 6,000 Germany knights joining Sigismund’s 60,000 who all set off down the Danube and, outside the city of Nicopolis, are massacred by the Turks. According to Norwich ten thousand captured prisoners were beheaded in the Sultan’s presence. (p.355)

Reading about the many, increasingly petty and secular, ‘crusades’ devalues them. Like the papal mechanism of ‘jubilees’ when all debts were meant to be forgiven, or the pope’s increasingly liberal use of ‘excommunication’, the term ‘crusade’ soon loses all religious meaning and becomes just another diplomatic tool in the endless series of conflicts which are the Middle Ages, just another tool in the armoury of popes struggling to maintain the independence of the Papal States and the authority of the Catholic Church.

The joke papacy

The devaluing of the idea of the ‘crusade’ was just part of the general absurdity of the papacy in the Middle Ages. The shenanigans surrounding the election of the popes, the interference of various kings (the King of France and the Holy Roman Emperor in particular) and the repeated setting up of popes and anti-popes by rival factions, who promptly excommunicated each other and all their followers, reduced the concept of God’s one representative on earth to a laughing stock.

As I count it, there were no fewer than 21 anti-popes in the period covered by this book (1080 to 1453), and it was also the period when the papacy left Rome altogether and based itself in Avignon (from 1309 to 1376) where it fell under the domination of the French King. It is utterly typical of the period that the French ‘exile’ was triggered after Pope Boniface VIII was arrested and beaten so badly by soldiers of King Philip IV of France that he died.

The Avignon Papacy

Venice

Venice was responsible for the sack of Constantinople and plays the role of bad guy for the remaining 250 years of the empire, repeatedly attacking and burning the city, often as part of its ongoing and intensely bitter feud against Italy’s other maritime state, Genoa. The sequence of events is long and very complicated but Norwich gives the sense that, right up to the very last moment, Venice was guided purely by commercial self-interest, determined to screw as much land and trading advantages out of the Byzantine Empire as possible even when the ’empire’ amounted to little more than a half-ruined city. Only in the last few months of its existence do the Venetians seem to have realised that the loss of Constantinople and the unimpeded ownership of the entire Balkan Peninsula by the Turks would put them on the Adriatic coast right opposite themselves. Too late they offered to send the emperor ships and troops, decades too late, maybe a century too late.

Mercenaries

After the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 the Seljuk Turks were effectively free to move into Anatolia. The process wasn’t immediate but within a decade they had taken control of the whole central portion of Anatolia, submitting the native Greek Christians to Muslim rule and laws. Most importantly Anatolia had been for a thousand years the source of a) food b) fighting manpower to the Eastern Empire. With its loss, the empire had to turn increasingly to paying for mercenary soldiers to fight its cause.

The loss of Anatolia had long since deprived Byzantium of its traditional source of manpower; for many years already it had had to rely on foreign mercenaries. (p.259, referring to the year 1300)

As the book progresses, you become aware that mercenaries fought on all sides. It was, for example, striking to learn that when, in 1211 the Seljuk Sultan of Iconium, Kaikosru, attacked the Byzantine forces of the emperor Theodore, both armies contained a contingent of Latin mercenaries at their core (p.190).

This sets the tone for the ever-increasing use of mercenaries by all sides: for example, the young general Michael Palaeologus – before he himself seized the throne – was sent into exile and ended up leading the Sultans Christian mercenaries in battle against the Mongol invaders in 1256 (p.205).

In 1258 Michael, now emperor, despatches an army against his Greek rival in the west, the Despot of Epirus: and this Byzantine army contains contingents from Hungary, Serbia, as well as Cuman and Turkish mercenaries (p.208)

‘Multicultural’ is not at all the right word, but the universal use of mercenaries brings home one of the many differences from our own ties. In our day we associate an army with the country which funds and organises it. We think of armies as being national. In those times an army could be made up of an extremely heterogenous group of man fighting for all kinds of reasons.

In 1302 a Byzantine force was caught just outside the city of Nicomedia by a Turkish army twice its size commanded by a local Ghazi named Othman. It wasn’t a decisive battle, the Byzantines turned and fled, the Turks proceeded west to the coast, ravaging all the towns and settlements they passed through. Historically the encounter is notable because it marks the first appearance of the legendary Othman, founder of the Ottoman Empire. But for the point I’m making the important thing is that the Byzantine force was largely composed of Alan tribesmen. (p.263)

As the reliance on mercenaries increased, successive emperors of Byzantium found themselves trapped into paying the spiralling costs of even basic defence. More and more income was diverted to pay the insatiable demands of foreign fighters. Thus when around 1350 Symeon, Grand Duke of Muscovy, sent a large quantity of gold to pay for the restoration of the St Sophia church, the emperor of the time was forced to use the entire sum in order to pay mercenaries, Turkish mercenaries – Muslim mercenaries. The Grand Duke was not pleased.

Because if their pay wasn’t kept up, mercenaries were a dangerously double-edged weapon.

In 1263 Michael sends a fleet and army against the King of Achaia (one of the breakaway Greek kingdoms created after the 1204 sack of Constantinople), an army of some 15,000 men a third of who are Muslim Seljuk mercenaries. (p.220) This did not end well as half way through the campaign the mercenaries, who had not been paid for six months, suddenly demanded their wages and when these were not forthcoming, deserted to the other side (p.222)

This of course was the weakness of mercenaries: if you ran out of money, they stopped fighting for you and, as the years went by, the Empire became increasingly strapped for cash. The most notable example of this was the Grand Catalan Company.

The Grand Catalan Company

This was a powerful group of mercenaries led by Roger de Flor between the Sicilian Vespers in 1282 and Roger’s assassination in 1305. During this period they evolved to become one of the most efficient fighting forces in the Mediterranean and were hired by the Byzantine Emperor Andronicus II Palaeologus to fight the increasing power of the Turks.

Norwich gives a fascinating account of the colourful career of Roger himself (sent to sea aged eight, pirate captain by the age of 24) and of the brilliant campaign they undertook against the Turks. He explains that, if only the Catalan Company had followed up its initial victories against the Turks and pushed on into Anatolia it is conceivable that the Empire might have been able to seize much of the territory back, re-establish its agriculture and earlier model of military service and generally been restored. But the Catalans, as mercenaries, were only interested in loot and broke off the campaign to return to the sea and their treasure stores.

It was fear about their increasing independence and refusal to obey orders which prompted the emperor to permit his other group of mercenaries – the Alans – to carry out a massacre of the Catalan Company during a feast at which Roger himself was murdered (the Alans had a long-festering grievance against the Catalans). The surviving Catalans went on a wild rampage through Adrianople (where the assassination took place) and beyond. It’s fascinating to learn that the memory of these massacres lasted so long that the monks of nearby Mount Athos prohibited the entrance of Catalan citizens until as recently as 2000.

The Great Catalan Company

Marriages

As explained in a previous blog post, in the absence of all international bodies or agreed norms of behaviour, one of the few ways rulers had of trying to control the chaos of endless international rivalries and war, was through family and kinship ties. Specifically, the tool of marrying off your brothers or sisters or sons or daughters to the children of other rulers you wished to secure an alliance with, or to structure the inheritance of property, specifically territories and kingdoms.

In May 1197 the Emperor Alexius III was obliged to stand impotently by while his niece, Irene, daughter of the blinded ex-emperor Isaac II, was married off by Henry VI King of Sicily to his own younger brother Philip of Swabia. (p.164)
When Henry of Hainault, Latin ruler of Byzantium, died in 1216, the Frankish barons elected his brother-in-law Peter of Courtenay to succeed him. In France at the time Peter set sail for the East with an army of 5,500 men, landing in Epirus and laying siege to the town of Durazzo. The town proved impregnable and Peter and most of his men were captured in the mountains of Albania and thrown in prison, never to be heard of again. His wife, Yolanda, had sailed direct to Constantinople where she adopted the title of Empress and regent for their new-born son. She consolidated her position by giving the daughter of her brother, Henry (who was named Mary) to the Emperor of the Byzantine government in exile in Nicaea, Theodore Lascaris.
When the Latin Emperor Robert I (the son Yolanda acted as regent for) died in 1228, leaving an eleven-year-old boy, Baldwin II, as his successor, the Latin barons offered the throne of Byzantium to an ageing adventurer and one-time King of Jerusalem, John of Brienne. John reluctantly accepted on the understanding that 11-year-old Baldwin would immediately marry his (John’s) own four-year-old daughter, Maria, and that she be given a sizeable dowry in the form of land. (p.195)
In 1235 John Asen emperor of Bulgaria signed a treaty of alliance with Nicaea which was sealed by the marriage of his daughter Helena to the son of the Nicaean Emperor John Vatatzes. (p.197)
In 1249 John Vatatzes secured a treaty of friendship with Michael II, Despot of Epirus (and illegitimate son of the despotate’s original founder, Michael I) by marrying his granddaughter Maria to Michael’s son Nicephorus. (p.200)

And so on and on.

In fact I noticed that there is a slowly increasing mention of treaties in the text, and it would be interesting to know how the concept of ‘the treaty’ changed and evolved over this long period and how it related to the early development of ‘the nation state’, whether there was an increasing recognition of the legal standing of treaties, or whether they remained agreements between individual leaders.

Whatever the theory, pieces of paper remained cheap and easy to tear up, whereas bonds of blood and marriage (and so grandparentage of the children of these unions) remained a primeval force understood by all sides.

In 1256 Tsar Michael Asen of the Bulgars was assassinated and succeeded by a boyar named Constantine Tich. Tich saw the strategic usefulness of an alliance with Byzantium and so he repudiated his wife in order to marry Irene, the daughter of Byzantine Emperor Theodore II. (p.205)
Early in 1258 Manfred of Sicily, the bastard son of Frederick II, invaded Epirus. The Despot of Epirus, Michael, was at that moment besieging the Byzantine city of Thessalonica so he decided to ally with Manfred against the Nicaean Empire, negotiated a deal with him and sealed it by giving Manfred the hand of his eldest daughter, Helena. (p.207)
In 1291 Charles II of Anjou proposed an alliance with Nicephorus, Despot of Epirus, against Constantinople, which he cemented by marrying his son, Philip, to Nicephorus’s daughter, Thamar. (p.260)

Child marriages

I was struck by the number of marriage contracts which involved very young children.

In 1136 Raymond of Poitiers, son of William IX, Duke of Aquitaine, married Constance, daughter of Bohemund II of Antioch, aged six, in order to give Raymond legitimacy as the new ruler of the Crusader Kingdom of Antioch. (p.77)
In September 1158 Theodora Comnena, niece of Byzantine emperor Manuel I Comnenus, was married to King Baldwin III of Jerusalem. She was 12, he was 28. (p.122)
On 2 March 1180 the Patriarch Theodosius celebrated the marriage of Princess Agnes of France to Alexius Comnenus of Constantinople. She was nine, her husband was ten. (p.137)
In 1244 the Nicaean Emperor John Vatatzes strengthened his position vis-a-vis the Latin kingdom by marrying Constance, the illegitimate daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. Constance was just 12-years-old and forced to take the Byzantine name Anna, and married to a man forty years older than her who was, as everyone knew, having an affair with one of her own waiting-women. (p.199)
In 1282 an ambitious new ruler came to the throne of Serbia, Stephen Miliutin, who within a year declared support for Charles of Anjou (the threatener from Sicily) and allied with the Despotate of Epirus (on the west Balan coast). The Byzantine Emperor Andronicus realised he had to neutralise this threat and when he heard that Miliutin’s legal wife had died (he was said to keep at least two concubines) he offered his own sister in marriage. Interestingly, the sister, Eudocia, flat out refused to be married and so Andronicus turned to the next best thing, his own daughter Simonis. Simonis was five years old and Miliutin 40. Amazingly, the little girl was taken by a Byzantine deputation to Thessalonica where the wedding was carried out by the Archbishop of Ochrid. Miliutin was thrilled that her dowry included most of the territory of Macedonia (which he coveted) and he agreed to allow little Simonis to remain in the Serbian nursery ‘for a few more years until she was old enough to live with him as his wife’. It is interesting to note that many people at the time saw this as immoral, and that the Patriarch of Constantinople, John XII, resigned in protest. (p.261)
In 1284, Andronicus II married Yolanda (who was renamed Eirene as Empress) who was eleven at the time. (p.275)

You could see this as the exploitation of the young, or as treating women as pawns – but I see it as treating people as pawns.

Everyone in any kind of position of power might well have had their own identity, character, wishes, plans and all the rest of the fol-de-rol surrounding ‘personality’ and ‘individuality’ which we in our post-Enlightenment, post-religious, consumer society take for granted. But eminent people living then existed primarily as pieces on a vast chess board, to be switched, taken, or sacrificed without a moment’s hesitation, as the game demanded.

Manfred of Sicily was defeated by the merciless Charles of Anjou at the Battle of Benevento on 26 February 1266. Only after three days was Manfred’s body found and Charles then denied it a Christian burial but had it placed by the bridge at Benevento so that every passing soldier in his army could throw a stone at it and build up a burial cairn. Manfred’s wife, Helena of Epirus, and is three young children were imprisoned at Nocera. Of the four, three never appeared again: one son was still there in the same prison 43 years later. (p.225)
In December 1355 the Emperor John V sent a desperate letter to Pope Innocent VI begging for help. If the pope would send him 500 knights, a thousand infantry, fifteen transport ships and five galleys, John promised to oversee the conversion of the Greek Orthodox church to Roman Catholic rites and personnel. In addition he would send his five-year-old son, Manuel, to be raised a Catholic and disposed of as the pope saw fit. (p.326)

Youth

Very young some of these children may well have been but then, almost everyone was young. Lots of the rulers died in their 30s or 40s. Norwich repeatedly comments that rulers in their 60s were old for their time. And there are some staggering examples of how much was expected, and achieved, by people of incredible youth.

In 1268 Manfred of Sicily’s nephew Conradin marched south from Germany in a bid to save his family’s inheritance from the aggressor Charles of Anjou. On 23 August Charles shattered his army at Taglioacozzo. Conradin captured, subjected to a kangaroo court and then beheaded in the market square in Naples. He was just sixteen and the last of the Hohenstaufen dynasty. (p.225)

The most striking example of youth achieving astonishing things is the final capture of Constantinople itself by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror. Norwich shows in detail how Mehmed led Turkish forces to defeat the crusade led by John Hunyadi after the Hungarian incursions into his country broke the conditions of the truce Peace of Szeged, and then goes on to explain the thinking behind his final assault on Constantinople, and describe in great details both the preparations for the siege – by land and by sea – and a day-by-day account of the siege, breach and fall of the city. The attacking Turks gave themselves up to an orgy of violence and destruction, massacring and raping civilians, desecrating, looting and torching the churches. Through the mayhem strode the Sultan, surrounded by his bodyguard, to the vast church of Hagia Sophia, which he had already decided would be converted into the largest mosque in the world. He knelt and kissed the floor and thanked Allah for his victory.

And he had achieved all this – by the age of twenty-one!

The generality of the heartless, calculating treatment meted out to everyone was symbolised for me by the widespread blinding of the powerful when they were brought low or presented a threat – not as a punishment, but to neutralise them as a threat.

Blindings

From the eight or nine hundreds onwards it became customary to blind rival emperors you had overthrown and/or their male children, in order to permanently prevent them becoming a threat. It was considered less cruel than simply murdering them.

In 1077 the general Nicephorus Bryennius made a bid for the throne, but was captured and blinded by Nicephorus III Botaneiates. (p.64)
1204 following the fall, sack, and occupation of Constantinople, the Emperor Alexius V ‘Mourtzouphlos’ was blinded
In 1218 Boril of the Bulgars was overthrown by his cousin John II Asen and blinded. (p. 193)
1230 John Asil of Bulgaria defeated Theodor of Thessalonica and had him blinded. (p.197)
In 1295 the Empire’s foremost general, Alexius Philanthropenus, rose up in revolt. He was quickly defeated, captured and blinded. (p.262)
In 1373 the Ottoman Sultan Murad’s son, Sauji, rose against him. The Sultan quickly defeated the rebel forces and had his son blinded. (p.336)

But the most disgusting of the many, many blindings in this book is of a helpless eleven-year-old boy.

John IV Lascaris was only seven years old when he inherited the throne on the death of his father, Theodore II Ducas Lascaris. He was put under the regency of the bureaucrat George Muzalon who was hugely unpopular and swiftly murdered by the nobility (in church). The leader who emerged was the successful young general Michael Palaeologus who usurped the regency and then, on January 1, 1259, made himself co-emperor as Michael VIII. (Michael was, in fact, John’s second cousin once removed.) After Michael’s conquest of Constantinople from the Latin Empire on July 25, 1261, Michael needed to secure full control of the Byzantine inheritance and so four months later he had John IV – who he’d left behind in the palace at Nicaea – blinded on Christmas Day. It was the boy’s eleventh birthday. He was then sent to a prison in Bithynia where he lived for another fifty years. Many at the time were disgusted by this act and it led to Michael’s excommunication by the Patriarch Arsenius Autoreianus. (p.212)

Political mutilation in Byzantine culture

All this can be set against what became an embedded habit of the Ottoman Dynasty which was that, upon the death of each Sultan, his sons fought for power and the victor had all his defeated rivals strangled. This wasn’t just a bad habit practised by the occasional wicked sultan – it was enshrined in Ottoman law.

Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror’s Law of Governance imparted the right of executing the male members of the dynasty to his son in order to prevent an interregnum.

To prevent attempts at seizing the throne, reigning sultans practiced fratricide upon accession, starting with Murat I in 1362. Both Murad III and his son Mehmed III had their half-brothers murdered. The killing of all the new sultan’s brothers and half-brothers (which were usually quite numerous) was traditionally done by manual strangling with a silk cord. As the centuries passed, the ritual killing was gradually replaced by lifetime solitary confinement in the ‘Golden Cage’ or kafes, a room in the harem from where the sultan’s brothers could never escape, unless they happened to become heir presumptive. Some had already become mentally unstable by the time they were asked to reign. (Wikipedia)

Slavery

I also cannot get over the way slavery is so casually mentioned. Again and again entire populations of towns, cities and regions are led off into slavery. We are told slavery was ubiquitous throughout the Muslim lands, but also appears to have been common in the Byzantine Empire, and was practiced by all the lesser peoples fringing the narrative, like the Bulgars and Hungarians and Serbs. I am puzzled why the ubiquity of slavery across Europe and the Middle East for most of the Middle Ages isn’t better known, isn’t made more of – especially when you consider the enormous fuss which is made about the African slave trade carried out by the West European nations from the 1500s onwards.

After the Turks seized Gallipoli they began conquering Thrace, taking Didymotichum in 1361, Adrianople in 1362. ‘In every city and village that was captured, a large part of the population was transported to slavery in Asia Minor’ (p.328)
When the Turks seized the city of Thessalonica in 1430, they looted all the churches and burnt many of them to the ground, massacring most of the male population and selling some seven thousand women and children into slavery. (p.395)
In preparation for the final siege the Turks took the nearby island of Prinkipo. the garrison was burnt alive in their fortress, the entire civilian population was sold into slavery. (p.424)
The monk and scholar George Scholarius was sold into slavery along with all his fellow monks (p.442)

Why is black African slavery discussed, raised, debated and lamented on an almost daily basis in books, films, art galleries and the media – while the European and Asian slave trade is completely and utterly absent from all forms of culture whatsoever, except tucked away as a minor detail of histories of the classical world and Middle Ages?

Weren’t the huge numbers of people sold into slavery in the 1100s, 1200s, 1300s and 1400s just as much human beings with lives and hopes and fears, as the people sold into slavery in the 1600s, 1700s and 1800s?

So why commemorate the one and not the other?

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by Simon on June 9, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Christianity, Crusades, Middle Ages

Tagged 1071, 1453, Adrianople, Adriatic Sea, African slave trade, Albania, Alexius III, Alexius Philanthropenus, Andronicus II, Andronicus II Palaeologus, Andronicus III Palaeologus, Andronicus IV Palaeologus, Arsenites, Baldwin II, Battle of Manzikert, Bohemund II of Antioch, Boril of the Bulgars, Byzantine Empire, Byzantium: The Decline and Fall, Charles II of Anjou, Charles of Anjou, Clement IV, Conradin, Constantine Tich, Constantine XI Dragases Palaeologus, Constantinople, crusaders, crusades, Despot of the Morea, Durazzo, Eastern Orthodox Church, Emperor Alexius V 'Mourtzouphlos', Emperor John V, Empire of Nicaea, fall of Constantinople, Fourth Crusade, Frederick Barbarossa, Gallipoli, George Muzalon, Grand Duke of Muscovy, Helena Dragaš, Helena of Epirus, Henry VI of Sicily, Hesychasts, Holy Roman Emperor, Isaac II, John Asen, John Cantacuzenos, John II Asen, John III Ducas Vatatzes, John IV Lascaris, John Julius Norwich, John Lascaris, John of Brienne, John V Palaeologus, John Vatatzes, John VI Cantacuzenos, John VII Palaeologus, John VIII Palaeologus, King Baldwin III, King Manfred of Sicily, King of Jerusalem, Manuel I Comnenus, Manuel II Palaeologus, Mehmed III, Mehmed the Conqueror's Law of Governance, mercenaries, Michael II, Michael Palaeologus, Michael VIII Palaeologus, Murad I, Murad III, Nicephorus Bryennius, Nicephorus III Botaneiates, Othman, Outremer, Patriarch Arsenius Autoreianus, Peter of Courtnay, Philip of Swabia, Pope Boniface IX, Pope Innocent VI, Principality of Achaea, Raymond of Poitiers, Robert I, Roger de Flor, schisms, Second Church Council of Lyon, Sicily, slave trade, Stephen Miliutin, Sultan Mehmed II, Sultan Murad, Sultan of Iconium, Symeon, Tamburlaine, The Albigensian Crusade, the Balkans, the Battle of Köse Dağ, the Battle of Kosovo, the Crusade of Nicopolis, the Duchy of Athens, the Fall of Acre, the Grand Catalan Company, the Ottoman Turks, the sack of Constantinople, the Seljuk Turks, The Sicilian Vespers, the Union of Lyon, Theodore I Lascaris, Theodore II Ducas Lascaris, Theodore II Lascaris, Theodore Lascaris, Theodore of Thessalonica, Venice, When Henry of Hainault, William IX Duke of Aquitaine

Posted by Simon on June 9, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/06/09/byzantium-the-decline-and-fall-2-john-julius-norwich/

Europe’s Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom by Norman Cohn (1975)

Norman Cohn (1915 to 2007) was an English academic historian. In the 1960s he became the head of the Columbus Centre, which was set up and initially financed by Observer editor David Astor to look into the causes of extremism and persecution. As head, Cohn commissioned research and studies from other academics on numerous aspects of persecution, and himself wrote several books on the subject, namely:

The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957) which traced the long history of millenial, end-of-the-world cults which, more often than not, seek scapegoats when the Great Awakening or Rapture or whatever they call it fails to happen
Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith (1993) which traced millennial religious themes to their sources in ancient civilizations
Warrant for Genocide (1966) about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-semitic forgery which surfaced in Russia in 1903 and claimed to describe a Jewish conspiracy for world domination

Europe’s Inner Demons is roughly in two halves: what it builds up to is a description of the witch craze and witch trials of early modern Europe and America (i.e. the 1600s and 1700s). But it’s the first half which interests me more. In this Cohn describes the origin and meanings of many of the absurd accusations which were later to be brought against the ‘witches’, following them from their origin in pagan times, through the early medieval period, and climaxing with their deployment in the arrests, torture and execution of the Knights Templar in the early 1300s.

It happens that I’ve just finished reading a book about the Knights Templars, which mentions Cohn’s book, and so I was inspired to read the first half, up to and including the Templars trial.

Cohn shows that:

In pre-Christian, pagan Rome writers and authorities attributed inhuman and uncanny activities to minority, outsider groups who they associated with secret societies dedicated to overthrowing the state. Chief among these was the (originally traditional) event of the Bacchanalia, which, originally, was an orgiastic festival celebrating the god Bacchus but, over time, became associated with dark nights, wine and promiscuous sex. Cohn shows how traditional Roman writers came to associate it with darker, anti-social motivations. A fateful link was made between tiny, minority sects who held secretive activities – the worry that these sects were in some way anti-social, dedicated to social revolution – and the attribution to them of increasingly absurd accusations, such as child murder, ritual sacrifice, the drinking of human blood, and deliberately indiscriminate sex – all designed to undermine traditional values and hierarchies and relationships.
In the early centuries of Christianity, pagan and Roman writers redirected the tropes they’d developed to blacken the followers of the Bacchanal at the new Eastern religious sect, accusing the Christians of unholy rituals at which they drank the blood of ritually murdered individuals, or engaged in promiscuous sex. Cohn points out that these are easily understandable distortions of a) the Eucharist, where Christians really are enjoined to drink the blood of Christ and b) the Loving Cup or various other references to group love, team love, Christian love, which had a purely Platonic, non-sexual meaning. But not for the accusers and propagandists who scraped the barrel of the human psyche to dredge up all the worst crimes they could think of.
Once Christianity had become established (by, say, around 400) the powers-that-be began to persecute Christian heretics and Cohn shows how these heretics now found themselves subject to the same slanders and propaganda as the early Christians had been – dark rumours of midnight masses, perverted rituals, the slaying of a victim whose blood was then drunk and body eaten. And he shows how the ritual victim was all-too-often said to be a baby.

Medieval pessimism

A big-over-arching idea which I found particularly powerful was Cohn’s contention that as the Middle Ages progressed, Christianity – and western culture, such as it was in the early Middle Ages – became more pessimistic.

Going back and reading the early Church Fathers – Tertullian and Justin Martyr and St Jerome and so on – he says you are struck by their conviction that the end of the world is just around the corner and the Day of the Lord is at hand. The early Christians are strong in their faith and happy, burning with conviction that the End is Nigh, that any day now the Lord will return in splendour and all their sufferings will be justified.

However, as the years, then decades, then centuries go by, hopes fade, the Roman Empire is overthrown, societies sink into less advanced forms, the economy collapses, waves of barbarians fight their way across the old imperial lands. And Jesus does not return. By around 1000 AD, medieval culture can be described as depressed. And in its disappointment, it looked with ever-greater desperation for scapegoats.

The atmosphere was changing. Fantasies which in the early Middle Ages had been unknown in western Europe were turning into commonplaces. (p.41)

This is reflected in the rise of the figure and role of Satan and his demons. Cohn has a fascinating chapter (pp.16-34) describing the development of Satan, the Devil. In the Old Testament he is barely mentioned. When bad things happen it is generally because the Old Testament God is wilful and capricious and swayed by his bad moods. Satan does appear in the Book of Job but he is more of a collaborator with God than his enemy; it is Satan who comes up with new ways to persecute Job. It is in the so-called inter-testamentary period – between the last of the accepted books of the Old Testament, written about 300 BC and the first books of the New Testament, written about 50 AD, that Satan undergoes a sweeping change of character. Historians usually attribute this to the influx of Eastern, Zoroastrian and Manichean ideas coming from the Persian Empire in the greater multicultural atmosphere created by the triumph of the Roman Republic and then Empire.

Anyway, in the New Testament, Satan has become a completely new thing, a tormentor and tempter sent to oppose Jesus at every step. Satan’s demons possess innocent people and only Jesus can exorcise them. In the climax of a series of tests, Jesus is made to go out into the wilderness to be confronted and tempted by the Devil in person.

Cohn shows how in the early centuries of the church, saints and holy men were still supposed to be able to drive out demons and Satan’s helpers, merely by revealing the consecrated host or a cross or saying Jesus’ name. But in line with the growth of medieval pessimism, the years from around 1000 AD saw greater and greater anxiety that the Devil was taking over the world which translated into ever-more paranoid fears that secret societies and heresies were flourishing everywhere, dedicated to the overthrow of existing society and to establish the triumph of the Antichrist.

Slowly and steadily, the myth of Devil worship, and the details of how this worship was carried out – by murdering a baby, drinking its blood or its ashes mixed with blood, and then weird rituals to do with black cats (lifting its tail to kiss its anus) – were carefully elaborated by successive generations of highly educated and paranoid Catholic intellectuals.

The stereotype of the Devil-worshipping sect was fully developed, in every detail, by 1100. (p.76)

Heretic hunting and the inquisition

Cohn devoted a chapter to the rise of inquisitions, carefully delineating the difference between secular courts and their power, and the power vested in one-off inquisitors by the pope. He describes the hair-raising campaigns of heretic-hunting inquisitors in Germany and the South of France in the 1200s, notably the egregious Conrad of Marburg appointed inquisitor in central Germany in 1231, or John of Capestrano, appointed heresy inquisitor by the pope in 1418. Already, in 1215 the Lateran Council, by insisting that bishops do everything in their power to suppress heresy on pain of dismissal, had incentivised people across society to come forward with denunciations. Basically a lot of people were tortured into confessing and then burned to death. A lot.

Along the way we learn about the beliefs, the demographics and then the terrible persecutions endured by groups such as:

The Paulicians

A Christian sect which was formed in the 7th century and rejected a good deal of the Old and much of the New Testament, originally associated with Armenia and horribly persecuted by the Byzantine Empire.

The Bogomils

Asect founded in the First Bulgarian Empire by the priest Bogomil during the reign of Tsar Peter I in the 10th century, a form of opposition to the Bulgarian state and the church, they called for a return to what they considered to be early spiritual teaching, rejecting the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Dualists or Gnostics, they believed in a world within the body and a world outside the body, did not use the Christian cross, nor build churches, as they revered their gifted form and considered their body to be the temple, giving rise to many forms of practice to cleanse oneself through purging, fasting, celebrating and dancing.

The Waldensians

Originated in the late twelfth century as the Poor Men of Lyon, a band organized by Peter Waldo, a wealthy merchant who gave away his property around 1173, preaching apostolic poverty as the way to perfection. Waldensian teachings quickly came into conflict with the Catholic Church and by 1215, the Waldensians were declared heretical and subject to intense persecution.

The Fraticelli ‘de opinione’

Members of the Franciscan order of monks who rebelled against its growing worldliness and corruption (St Francis had died in 1226) and tried to return to a really primitive material life, owning literally nothing, and having no food from one day to the next. Declared heretics in the 1400s, Cohn goes into great detail about the trial of leading Fraticelli in 1466.

The Cathars

From the Greek katharoi meaning ‘the pure’, the Cathars were a dualist or gnostic movement which became widespread in Southern Europe between the 12th and 14th centuries. They believed there were two gods, one good, one evil – diametrically opposed to the Catholic church which believes in only one God. The Cathars believed the God of the Old Testament, creator of the physical world, was evil. Cathars thought human spirits were the genderless spirits of angels trapped in the material realm of the evil god, and destined to be reincarnated until they achieved salvation through the consolamentum, when they could return to the benign God of the New Testament.

The self-fulfilling nature of torture

Cohn introduces the reader to each groups’ likely beliefs and social origins, then describes how the secular and religious authorities (i.e. the King of France or Holy Roman Emperor or pope) launched an inquisition, sometimes even called a ‘crusade’, against each of them. (The crusade to exterminate the Cathars in the south of France became known as the Albigensian Crusade, 1209 to 1229).

And then he makes his over-arching point which is that, time and time and time again, the use of torture made ‘heresies’ appear to explode, appear to be held by huge numbers of people, at all levels of society, as innocent victims were roped in and tortured and, quite quickly, would say anything and implicate anyone in order to stop the torture (or, more cruelly, to prevent their family and children being tortured, too).

Yet as soon as they were free to speak in front of secular courts, again and again these supposed ‘heretics’ recanted and said they only confessed to the bizarre rituals, murder, cannibalism and orgies, because they were tortured into saying so.

Cohn shows that there were real heretics i.e. groups who rejected the worldly corruption of the Catholic Church and tried to return to the simple, pure, ascetic life of the early apostles and that, on its own terms, the Church was correct to be concerned about them and to try and bring them back within the fold.

But that the way it did this – by trying to blacken their name by getting members to confess under torture to midnight masses where the Devil appeared in the shape of a black cat, and then a baby was ritually burned to death and its ashes mixed in with wine which all the followers had to drink to assert their membership — all this was fantasy cooked up in the feverish brains of Catholic propagandists and the inquisitors themselves.

What interests Cohn is the way these fantasies became formalised, and turned into part of received opinion, official ‘knowledge’ – not least when a list of these perverse practices was included in a formal papal bull, Vox in Rama, issued in 1233, which included the accusation that the Devil in person attended the midnight covens of the Waldensians and other heretics. In other words, by the early 13th century these absurd fantasies had received official sanction and recognition from the highest religious authorities on earth.

Although each of the heretic-hunting frenzies Cohn describes eventually burned out and stopped – sometimes due to the death or discrediting or, in the case of Conrad of Marburg, the assassination of the lead inquisitor – nonetheless, the period as a whole had established the absurd practices of all heretics and enemies of the Church as accepted, indisputable fact, sanctioned by the pope and the entire church hierarchy.

The crushing of the Knights Templar (pages 79 to 101)

Cohn then goes on to show how precisely the same old tropes, the same accusations of unnatural and blasphemous crimes, were dusted off and dragged out to accuse the Knights Templars, in their trials which lasted from roughly 1307 to 1309. His account is largely the same as Michael Haag’s in The Tragedy of the Templars: The Rise and Fall of the Crusader States namely that the whole farrago of trumped-up accusations was made by King Philip the Fair of France in order to get his hands on the Templars’ vast amounts of gold and land. Its more proximate cause was that Philip wanted to merge the two great crusading orders, the Templars and Knights Hospitallers, into one super-order and then place himself at the head of it in order to lead a mighty new crusade – but that was never very likely to, and indeed never did, happen.

Instead Philip’s loyal bureaucrats pounced, arresting all the Templars on the same day and submitting them to torture to force them to admit to the same litany of crimes: that at the initiation ceremony they were forced to spit on the cross, to kiss their initiator on the lower back, buttocks or mouth, agree to sodomy if requested by a senior brother, and other blasphemous acts such as worshiping a malevolent satanic head.

All the Templars who were tortured signed confessions agreeing this is what they had done – understandable, seeing that the tortures included:

having your hands tied behind you, being hauled up via a hook secured to the ceiling, then suddenly released, coming to a stop with a jerk, so that the tendons, muscles and sometimes bones on your shoulders and bones were abruptly torn or shattered
having your feet covered in grease and pit in a naked fire, where they roasted until the toe and feet bones fell out of the cooked flesh

As one Templar said, rather than submit to the tortures he would have confessed that he personally murdered Jesus Christ. The sorry saga dragged on for three years because Pope Clement feebly tried to rescue the order which was, theoretically, answerable only to him. But being himself French and a nominee of the French crown, and based in Avignon on French soil, he eventually, feebly acquiesced in the crushing of the order, the confiscation of its wealth and the burning at the stake of its four most senior officers (plus at least a hundred others).

The fate of the Templars is a sorry, sordid tale of greed, corruption and unbelievable cruelty, but for me is one more proof that the nominally Christian Middle Ages were a complicated mixture of genuine religious belief, almost incomprehensible religious fanaticism, alongside staggering cruelty, all underpinned by very recognisable motives of greed and ambition.

More generally, Cohn’s review of how society has tended to demonised outsider groups – from as far back as we have records – sheds sobering light on this permanent tendency of human nature, and shows how even the most ridiculous prejudices and bigotries can be entrenched as established ‘fact’, and then revived as and when needed to persecute the different, the strange, the non-conformist, the helpless. Couldn’t happen now? Well, the career of the fanatical heretic-inquisitor Conrad of Marburg could be usefully compared to that of Senator Joe McCarthy. And in our own time, right now, 2019, we are seeing the revival of all kinds of tropes and stereotypes designed to justify prejudice and persecution. At least we don’t strappado people or burn them to death – but the underlying impulses of human nature haven’t changed one whit.

Some Knights Templar being burned at the stake, illustration in the Chroniques de France ou de St. Denis.

Other medieval reviews

Complete list of medieval reviews

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by Simon on May 27, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Christianity, European History, History

Tagged 1975, Bogomil, cannibalism, Catholic church, Christianity, Church Fathers, Conrad of Marburg, Cosmos Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith, crusades, David Astor, Eucharist, Europe's Inner Demons, Europe's Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom, Franciscan monks, God, Heresy, heretics, Inquisition, Job, John of Capestrano, Justin Martyr, King Philip the Fair, Knights Hospitallers, Knights Templar, Manichean, Middle Ages, New Testament, Norman Cohn, Old Testament, orgies, paganism, papacy, Peter Waldo, pre-Christian, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Roman Empire, Rome, Satan, sex, South of France, St Jerome, Tertullian, The Albigensian Crusade, the Bogomils, the Cathars, the Columbus Centre, the Devil, the First Bulgarian Empire, the Fraticelli 'de opinione', the Paulicians, The Pursuit of the Millennium, the Waldensians, torture, Vox in Rama, Warrant for Genocide, Zoroastrian

Posted by Simon on May 27, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/05/27/europes-inner-demons-norman-cohn/

The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950 – 1350 by Robert Bartlett (1993)

The sub-title is ‘Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950 to 1350’ and that is very much the central idea I take from this book – that before Europe embarked on its well-known colonial adventures from 1492 onwards, it had already experienced centuries of internal colonisation.

Another book I’ve recently read, Robert Fletcher’s ‘The Conversion of Europe: From Paganism to Christianity, 371-1386 AD’, has prepared my mind for this idea, with its account of the millennium-long process whereby Christianity was spread across the ‘nations’ (such as they were) of Europe, to the pagan peoples and rulers of the fringes.

The final part of that book makes it clear that, after the First Crusade (1095 to 1099), as Christianity was spread along the Baltic and into the last bastions of paganism in Eastern Europe, the evangelising became much more violent. It no longer amounted to a much-venerated saint converting a bunch of open-mouthed peasants by healing a sick girl; it was now about armed bands of knights united in an ‘Order’ – the Livonian Brothers of the Sword, the Teutonic Order – who waged fierce wars of conquest into the East, forcibly converting the populations they conquered and building imperial castles to hold the territory they’d seized.

Charge of the Teutonic Knights at the Battle of Lake Peipus, April 5, 1242

Europe had to colonise itself, before its rulers went on to violently colonise the rest of the world.

Bartlett’s book aims to make you see that a number of scattered events usually treated as separate entities in siloed national histories, were actually all part of One Really Big Pattern: the spread, by conquest, of a centrally organised, Latin, Catholic Christianised state ideology right across Europe, and that this diffusion came from the heart of the old Frankish empire, from the most technologically and ideologically advanced heart of Europe consisting of north-France, north-west Germany and south-east England (after it had been conquered by the Normans in the 1060s).

Thus:

The Norman invasion of Ireland in the 1170s was partly a crude seizure of land and resources, but also involved the imposition on Gaelic Christianity of the much more centrally organised Latin Roman version.
A hundred years later, Edward I’s conquest of Wales in the 1280s had a similar aim of imposing a strong, centralised, Latinate organisation onto a culture traditionally made of scores of petty princes.
The Scots had already undergone a European-style centralising ‘revolution’ under King David I (1124-1153) and so could muster more resources to resist Edward I’s imperial ambitions – but only at the expense of handing over large parts of southern Scotland to settlement by Normans (and Flemings).
This period also saw the Reconquista of Spain, the long effort to push the occupying Muslims out of the Iberian Peninsula, over the centuries from the reconquest of Toledo in 1085 to the recapture of Seville in 1248.
It was also the era of the Crusades (1095 to 1291), which imposed Latin, Catholic Christianity on formerly Orthodox territories in the Middle East.
Just before the First Crusade began, Norman troops under Roger I conquered the Kingdom of Sicily from the Muslims (complete by 1091).
En route to the Holy Land, King Richard I seized Cyprus from its Greek ruler in 1191, transferring it to Latin rule.
And the sack of Constantinople in 1204 led directly to the imposition of Latin, Catholic dioceses and bishops over much of the Byzantine Empire.

The same period saw the campaigns to Christianise the remote regions of northern and north-eastern Europe, now collectively referred to as the ‘Northern Crusades’. These included:

The Wendish Crusade (1147) against the Wends of north-east Germany and Poland.
The Crusade against the Livonians in the north-east Baltic in the 1190s.
The Teutonic Knights prolonged campaign to crush and convert the Prussians in the 1250s.
And a series of drawn-out campaigns against the pagan Duchy of Lithuania, the last stronghold of paganism in all Europe.

Moreover, this period also saw internal crusades to impose order and uniformity within Latin Christendom – most notoriously against the Cathars, a heretical sect which had followers across the South of France and which was brutally suppressed in the ‘Albigensian Crusade’ from 1209 to 1229 (named for the town of Albi, which was one of the heretical strongholds).

The Frankish expansion

The animation below shows the first 500 years of the spread of Christianity, the loss of the Middle east and Africa to the Muslims in the 700s and 800s, the Christian fightback – permanent in Spain, transient in the Levant – and then the abrupt worldwide explosion of Christianity commencing in 1500. It’s the first 1400 years or so we’re interested in, the fluctuations in and around the Mediterranean, and the period 950 to 1350 that Bartlett is particularly concerned with.

In a host of ways Bartlett identifies this expansion with the Franks, the Gothic tribe which seized Gaul from the Romans in the 500s and quickly established a centralised state which reached its geographical maximum under the legendary Charlemagne, king of the Franks from 768 to 814. I hadn’t realised that at its peak, Charlemagne’s empire was coterminous with Western Christendom (with the exception of the Christianised Anglo-Saxon kingdoms) as this map shows. It really was an awesome achievement.

Map of Europe around 800 AD

William of Normandy who conquered Britain in 1066 was a descendant of the Frankish kings. Frankish aristocrats played key roles in all the conquests of the day, against the Moors in Spain and the Saracens in the Levant, in Sicily and Crete and Cyprus, and in the north pressing into Denmark, into Poland and along the Baltic towards Finland and Russia. Bartlett has a nifty diagram showing that by the late Middle Ages, 80% of Europe’s monarchs were descended from the Frankish royal family or Frankish nobles.

No surprise, then, that the word ‘Frank’ began to be used widely as a generic name for the conquerors and settlers all over Europe:

the Byzantine Greeks called the incoming Latins ‘the Franks’
a settlement in Hungary was called ‘the village of the Franks’
the newly conquered peoples of Silesia and Moravia had to submit to ‘Frankish law’
Welsh chroniclers refer to incursions by ‘the Franci’
Irish monks referred to the Anglo-Norman invaders as ‘the Franks’

Similarly, in the Middle East of the Crusader era, Muslim commentators, kings and peoples came to call all Westerners ‘the Franks’. So widespread and famous was this association, that Muslim traders took the name Faranga on their journeys through the Red Sea eastwards, spreading the term as far East as China, where, when westerners arrived hundreds of years later, they were identified as the long-rumoured Fo-lang-ki. (pp.104-105).

Questions and theories

All this prompts three questions:

Why did Latin Christianity feel it had to convert the entire continent?
Why did Latin Christianity feel it had to be so centralised; why did it feel so obliged to impose uniformity of ritual and language all across the Christian world?
What gave Latin Christian culture its dynamism – the aggressive confidence which would spill out to the Canary Islands (conquered in the early 1400s), to the Caribbean (1490s), to Central America (1520s), along the coast of Africa (first settlements in Mozambique in 1500), to India and beyond?

1. The first of these questions is answered at length in Richard Fletcher’s book, which shows how Christ’s Great Commission in St Matthew’s Gospel (‘Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you‘) was interpreted by successive Church authorities to mean, first of all, gaining some converts among the rich in cities around the Roman Empire; then to convert all inhabitants of the cities; then, only slowly, to undertake the task of converting the rural peasants; and only then, in the 700s and 800s, the brave idea of venturing beyond the pale of Romanitas to try and convert pagans.

The second two questions are the ones Bartlett specifically addresses and he approaches them from different angles, examining various theories and sifting a wide range of evidence. I found two arguments particularly convincing:

2. The centralisation of the Catholic Church. This stems from the Gregorian Reforms, a series of measures instituted by Pope Gregory VII from around 1050 to 1080. They banned the purchase of clerical positions, enforced clerical celibacy, significantly extended Canon law to impose uniformity on all aspects of Catholic practice. As Wikipedia puts it, these reforms were based on Gregory’s

conviction that the Church was founded by God and entrusted with the task of embracing all mankind in a single society in which divine will is the only law; that, in his capacity as a divine institution, he is supreme over all human structures, especially the secular state; and that the pope, in his role as head of the Church under the Petrine Commission, is the vice-regent of God on earth, so that disobedience to him implies disobedience to God: or, in other words, a defection from Christianity.

This gathering of power by the papacy is generally thought to have reached its height under the papacy of Pope Innocent III (1198 to 1216). Innocent further extended Canon Law, upheld papal power over all secular rulers, using the Interdict to punish rulers he disagreed with (e.g. King John of England) and he was personally responsible for some of the violent campaigns we’ve listed: Innocent called for Christian crusades to be mounted against the Muslims in the Holy Land and the south of Spain, and against the Cathars in the South of France.

Making Christian belief and practice uniform was part and parcel of the extension of its power by a vigorously confident papacy, a vision of uniformity which echoed and reinforced the tendency of secular rulers to create larger ‘states’ in which they asserted increasingly centralised power and uniform laws.

3. As to the literal force behind the aggressive military confidence, Bartlett has a fascinating chapter about the technology of medieval war. Basically, the Franks had heavy war-horses, heavy body armour, the crossbow and a new design of impenetrable defensive castles and all of these were absent in the conquered territories, the Holy Land, southern Spain, Wales and Ireland, in Eastern Europe and the Baltics. These advanced military technologies gave the better-armed Franks victory – at least until their opponents managed to figure out and copy them for themselves. (The Crusades are a different case – fundamentally the Crusaders lost for lack of men and resources.)

But I was drawn to a subtler cause for this great expansion: in the 9th and 10th centuries the laws of inheritance were hazy and patrimonies and estates could be divided among a number of sons, daughters, cousins, uncles and so on. (One aspect of this is the way that Anglo-Saxon kings were chosen by acclamation, not rigid law; and this uncertainty explains the long English civil war following Henry I’s death between his daughter Matilda and her cousin Stephen of Blois, which lasted from 1135 to 1153.)

Thus, along with the imposition of clearer laws and rules within the Church went secular attempts in Frankish lands to regularise secular law, and one element of this was to enforce the previously haphazard law of primogeniture i.e. the eldest son inherits the entire estate. But this new rigour had unexpected consequences – it forced all the other male heirs to go off looking for land.

In a fascinating chapter Bartlett sketches the histories of several aristocratic Frankish families where one son inherited the father’s entire estate and left the other 3 or 4 or 5 well-armed, well-educated, ambitious sons literally homeless and landless. There was only one thing for it – to associate themselves with the nearest campaign of Christianisation and conquest. Thus the de Joinville family from the Champagne region of France spawned sons who fought and won lands in Ireland, in Africa and Syria. The descendants of Robert de Grandmenils from Normandy (d.1050) won lands in southern Italy and Sicily, served the Byzantine Emperor, joined the First Crusade, and ended up building castles in northern Wales.

So a newly rigorous application of the law of primogeniture provided the motive for forcing dispossessed aristocrats to go a-fighting – the newly authoritarian Catholic Church provided a justifying ideology for conquest in the name of uniformity – and iron armour, heavy warhorses, the crossbow and castles provided the technology. Taken together these elements at least begin to explain the phenomenal success of the ‘Frankish expansion’.

Other aspects of medieval colonisation

These ideas are pretty clearly expressed in the first three chapters; the remaining nine chapters flesh them out with a host of details examining the impact of the Frankish expansion on every aspect of medieval life: the image of the conquerors as embodied in coins, statutes and charters; the division of time into primitive pagan ‘before’ and civilised Christian ‘after’; the propagandistic literature of conquest (in various romances and epics); the giving of new Latin place names which over-wrote the native names of the conquered – the Arabs, the Irish, the Slavs; the imposition of new Frankish laws and tax codes; the proliferation of New Towns with Western-based charters, and the creation of hundreds of new villages, laid out on logical grid patterns, especially in eastern Europe. (This reminded me of the passage in Marc Morris’s history of Edward I which describes Edward’s creation of New Model Towns on grid plans in Wales (Flint) but also England (Winchelsea)).

Bartlett presents the evidence for the widespread importation from Christian Germany of heavy, iron-tipped ploughs which were much more efficient at turning the soil than the lighter, wooden Slavic ploughs, and thus increased productivity in the new settlements (pages 148 to 152). This went hand-in-hand with a ‘cerealisation’ of agriculture, as woods were cleared and marshes drained to provide more ploughing land to grow wheat and barley, which in turn led to significant increases in population in the newly settled lands. (Although as with all things human this had unintended consequences, little understood at the time; which is that the pagan predecessors, though fewer in number, had a more balanced diet which included fruit and berries and honey from woodlands – the switch to a cereal-based monoculture increased production but probably led to unhealthier people. Analysis of corpses suggests there was a net loss of stature in humans over the period, with the average height decreasing by about 2 inches between the early and the High Middle Ages.)

Names became homogenised. The Normans imported ‘William’ and ‘Henry’ into the England of ‘Athelstan’ and ‘Aelfric’, and then into the Wales of ‘Llywelyn’ ‘Owain’ and the Ireland of ‘Connor’, ‘Cormac’ and ‘Fergus’. Bartlett shows how these essentially Frankish names also spread east replacing ‘Zbigniew’ and ‘Jarosław’, south into Sicily and even (to a lesser extent) into Spain.

In a move typical of Bartlett’s ability to shed fascinating light on the taken-for-granted, he shows how the centralisation and harmonisation of the Latin church led to the diffusion of a small number of generic saints names. Before about 1100 the churches of the various nations were dedicated to a very wide spectrum of saints named after local holy men in Irish, Welsh, Scots, Castilian, Navarrese, Italian, Greek, Germanic or Polish and so on. But the 1200s saw the rise of a continent-wide popularity for the core gospel names – Mary at the top of the table, followed by Christ (as in Christ Church or Corpus Christi) and then the names of the most popular disciples, John, Peter, Andrew.

The names of individual people as well as the names of their churches, along with many other cultural changes which he describes – all followed this process of homogenisation and Latinisation which Bartlett calls ‘the Europeanisation of Europe’ (chapter 11).

New worlds and the New World

Bartlett doesn’t have to emphasise it but the parallels are clear to see between the colonisation by violence and crusading Christianity of the peripheral areas of Europe in the 1000s to 1300s, and the conquest of the Americas in the 1500s and 1600s. It’s a mind-opening comparison, which works at multiple levels.

For example, many of the charters and decrees about the new European lands proclaimed them ’empty’ virgin land ready to be settled, despite the evidence of native populations living in well-developed (though non-Latin) settlements – just as publicists for the Americas and, later, Australia, would declare them ’empty’ of natives.

Even when there are obviously natives (Welsh, Scots, Muslims, Slavs) the official colonial medieval literature disparages the aboriginal inhabitants’ lack of literacy, of iron tools or weapons, of orthodox Christianity, of organised towns with advanced codes of law and so on.

‘They’ are in every way uncivilised; ‘we’ in every way deserve to take their land because only ‘we’ know how to make it productive and fertile.

Many of the other histories I’ve read describe the numerous medieval conquests in terms of battles, alliances, troops and armour and so on; Bartlett’s is the only one I know which goes on to explain in great detail that, once you’ve conquered your new territory – you need people to come and live in it. You have to persuade people from the old lands to risk making a long journey, so you have to advertise and give would-be settlers tax breaks and even cash incentives. Settlers in Ireland, the south of Spain, the Holy Land or Livonia were all told how much empty land they could have, were offered tax breaks for the first few years and then reduced taxes for decades after, and the lords and conquerors fell over themselves to give the new towns attractive charters and independent powers to determine their own laws and taxes.

All of these techniques would be copied by the conquistadors in Central America or the merchant adventurers who launched the first settlements in North America, or the colonial authorities desperate to fill the wide ’empty’ spaces of Australia or New Zealand. It is a mind-opening revelation to learn how all these techniques were pioneered within Europe itself and against fellow ‘Europeans’, centuries before the New World was discovered.

Conclusion

This a very persuasive book which mounts an impressive armoury of evidence – archaeological and ecological, in place names, people’s names, saints names, in cultural traditions, church records and epic poems, in the spread of monasteries and universities and charters and coinage – to force home its eye-opening central argument: that the more advanced, centrally organised parts of Europe (north-west France, north-west Germany and south-east England) (all ultimately owing their authority, technology and ideology to the Frankish empire of Charlemagne) succeeded in conquering and settling the rest of less advanced, less developed and non-Christian Europe with the aid of a panoply of technologies and ideologies, legal and cultural and physical weapons – a panoply which Europeans would then use to sail out and conquer huge tracts of the rest of the world.

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A Chronology of the Crusades

The Crusades lasted about two hundred years from 1095 to about 1295 and were designed to ‘liberate’ Jerusalem and the Christian Holy Places from the control of Muslim rulers. Although there were later military adventures or social movements which called themselves crusades, they either petered out or were diverted to other targets. Historians squabble over whether there were seven or eight or nine crusades.

Muhammed

632 Muhammed dies.

637 Muslim armies besiege and take Jerusalem from the Byzantines.

The Great Schism

1054 Eastern and Western Christianity finally split after years of drift, crystallising into the Eastern Orthodox church based in Byzantium and the Roman Catholic church based in Rome, their respective followers known as Latins (or Franks) and Greeks.

1063 King Ramiro I of Aragon murdered by a Muslim and Pope Alexander II offers an indulgence (forgiveness of all sins; go directly to heaven) to anyone taking arms to revenge this crime.

1064 to 1066 – A group of about 7,000 Germans, some heavily armed, travel to Jerusalem and back unhindered.

1073 Pope Gregory VII helps organise an army against the Muslims in Spain, promising any soldier he can keep the land he seizes.

1095 Byzantine Emperor Alexios I sends an ambassador to Pope Urban II asking for military help against the growing Turkish threat (in fact the fast-expanding Great Seljuk Empire). Urban sees an opportunity to reassert Western control over the East and starts preaching a new idea: anyone who takes up arms and travels to liberate the Holy Land under the order of the Pope will go to heaven. Killing the infidel will no longer require penance: it will be a penance.

The First Crusade 1096 to 1099

1096 Easter. Peter the Hermit led a mass of maybe 20,000 people to set off to the Holy Land. As they moved through Germany they sparked off a series of massacres of Jews in every town and city. Having reached the Byzantine Empire they were ambushed by Muslim forces and only about 3,000 survived. Official crusader armies departed Europe August and September 1096.

1097 Siege of Antioch until June 1098. Crusaders massacre the Muslim inhabitants and loot the city.

1099 15 July – CAPTURE OF JERUSALEM The remnants of the army enter/liberate Jerusalem, massacre native Muslims, killing all the Jews, burning the synagogue, looting all the holy buildings. The chronicler claims some 70,000 were slaughtered and the streets piled high with corpses.

1100 On Christmas Day in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, Baldwin of Edessa is crowned King of Jerusalem.

[1101 The Crusade of 1101, also known as The crusade of the faint-hearted due to the involvement of soldiers who had turned back from the First Crusade, was in three distinct groups of western soldiers, all of which were soundly thrashed by Seljuk Turks led by Kilij Arslan. As usual when the crusaders took Caesarea they rounded up all the Muslims into the Grand Mosque and massacred them all. And were then themselves beaten and killed by Kilij. The survivors eventually made it to Jerusalem, more as a pilgrimage than a military force.]

1109 The Franks sack the city of Tripoli after a five year siege, then rampage through it, burning the Banu Ammar library, the largest in the Muslim world, containing over 100,000 manuscripts.

1118 Baldwin dies, succeeded by his cousin, Baldwin II.

1124 Tyre falls to the Franks who now hold the entire cost from Egypt to Antioch.

1131 King Baldwin II dies and is succeeded by his son-in-law, Count Fulk of Anjou.

1122 to 1124 The Venetian Crusade A combination of religious fervour (it was sponsored by Pope Callixtus II) and commercial savvy, some 120 ships carrying over 15,000 men left Venice on 8 August 1122: they besieged Corfu to settle a commercial dispute; defeated a navy from Fatimid Egypt; besieged and took the sea port of Tyre, which became a Venetian trading centre, and on the way home ravaged various Greek islands, forcing the Empire to concede their trading privileges.

1135 Pope Innocent II’s grant of crusading indulgences to anyone who opposed papal enemies can be seen as the beginning of politically motivated crusades.

The Second Crusade 1145 to 1149

1144 King Fulk dies. Army of Imad ad-Din Zengi recaptures Edessa (modern Urfa), massacring the men and selling the women into slavery. Which leads Pope Eugenius III to call for another crusade, supported by various clerics, notably Bernard of Clairvaux.

1146 March 31 – Bernard delivers the first of many thundering first crusade sermons. In May and June armies from France and Germany led by King Louis VII and Conrad III set off.

[1147 A group of crusaders from northern Europe allied with the king of Portugal, Afonso I, retaking Lisbon from the Muslims.]

1147 October 25 – Battle of Dorylaeum: Conrad III and his army of 20,000 men was badly defeated by the Seljuk Turks led by Mesud I. The Germans abandoned the crusade and Conrad and the 2,000 survivors retreated to join the forces of King Louis VII of France.

1148 Louis and Conrad’s surviving soldiers besiege Damascus. It ends in complete defeat and a ruinous retreat. ‘St Bernard’s crusade ended in fiasco.’ (p.93)

1150 Louis and Conrad return home, failures.

The Wendish Crusade

1147 German knights attacked western Slavs on their border with a view to christianising them. Henry restarted efforts to conquer the Wends in 1160, and they were defeated in 1162.

[1172 Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony, made a pilgrimage that is sometimes considered a crusade.]

Saladin

1169 Saladin – Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb – a Kurdish Muslim from Damascus, is in complete control of Egypt.

1169 to 1187 the campaigns of Saladin to unite the usually warring Arab kingdoms.

1180 King Baldwin IV negotiates a peace treaty with Saladin.

1185 24-year-old Baldwin IV dies, leaving the throne of Jerusalem to the eight-year-old Baldwin V.

1186 Baldwin V dies. The kingdom is weakened by complicated dynastic feuds which lead to Guy of Lusignan being crowned king.

1187 SALADIN RETAKES JERUSALEM Saladin led an enormous army of 30,000 into Palestine and inflicted a crushing defeat on the army of Jerusalem at the Battle of Hattin on 4 July. He took his time capturing all the surrounding towns and then retook Jerusalem on 29 September. In studied contrast to the crusader’s massacre and pogrom of 1099, Saladin enforces his army to respect the city and its inhabitants: not a building was looted, not a person harmed.

When Pope Urban III heard the news he died of a heart attack. On 29 October Pope Gregory VIII issued a papal bull calling for the…

The Third Crusade 1189 to 1192

1189 Frederick I ‘Barbarossa’, Holy Roman Emperor, commanded a vast army which sailed to Constantinople, then fought its way across Anatolia, winning battles but suffering from the heat and lack of supplies. Coming down the other side of the Taurus Mountains, Frederick went for a swim in the river Göksu and drowned. His disheartened troops turned back. Philip II of France, and Richard I of England led their armies on to the Holy Land.

1190 Pre-Crusade pogroms of Jews spread across England climaxing in a particularly violent massacre of Jews at York in March.

1191 Richard the Lionheart captured Cyprus from the Byzantines, then recaptured Acre and Jaffa. But they ran out of food before reaching Jerusalem which he knew, anyway, he didn’t have the force to hold.

1192 Richard negotiates a treaty with Saladin allowing Christian pilgrims free passage, then sails home. ‘Jerusalem would never again be captured by crusaders.’ (Crusades p.151) In Palestine Richard had had a big argument with Leopold of Austria. Now, travelling overland back through Leopold’s territory, Richard was identified and arrested. Leopold handed him over to the Emperor Henry VI who held him in prison for a year before a vast ransom could be organised to buy his freedom.

1193 Saladin dies worn out.

1199 Richard dies of gangrene from an arrow wound at an insignificant siege in Aquitaine.

The German Crusade

1197 Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor, fulfils a promise to his father. Led by Conrad of Wittelsbach the army landed at Acre and captured Sidon and Beirut, but when Henry died most of the forces returned to Germany.

The North European Crusade

1193 Pope Celestine III called for a crusade against Northern European pagans and his successor Pope Innocent III issued a papal bull declaring a crusade against the pagan Livonians. Bishop Berthold of Hanover led a large army against them, during which the Christian settlers found the city of Riga, although Berthold was himself killed in battle in 1198.

1201 Albrecht von Buxthoeven established Riga as the seat of his bishopric in 1201.

1202 Albrecht formed the Livonian Knights to convert the pagans to Catholicism. The Livonians were conquered and converted between 1202 and 1209.

1217 Pope Honorius III declared a crusade against the Prussians.

1226 Konrad of Masovia gave Chelmno to the Teutonic Knights in 1226 as a base for the crusade.

1236 The Livonian Knights were defeated by the Lithuanians at Saule.

1237 Pope Gregory IX merged the remainder of the troops into the Teutonic Knights as the Livonian Order.

1249 The Teutonic Knights completed their conquest of the Old Prussians. They then conquered and converted the Lithuanians, a process which lasted into the 1380s. The order tried unsuccessfully to conquer Orthodox Russia.

The Fourth Crusade 1202 to 1004: the Sack of Constantinople

1199 Pope Innocent III began preaching the Fourth Crusade in France, England, and Germany. The two military leaders Doge Enrico Dandolo of Venice and German King Philip of Swabia had their own political agendas and when the enterprise turned out not be able to pay the Venetian fleet, they decided to conquer and loot Constantinople instead.

1202 They seized the Christian city of Zara prompting Innocent to excommunicate them.

1203 Easter – the army set sail for Byzantium.

1204 The army entered Constantinople and enacted the complicated plot to put Prince Alexius IV on the throne. Alexius had promised wild amounts of money in return but turned out to be unable to pay. Alexius was murdered in a palace coup; the blind old emperor died; the coup plotter announced himself emperor. All this made it easier for the Latins and their Catholic leaders to give the go-ahead for a devastating sack of the city, which spread out of control to unbridled looting, massacring, churches pillaged and thousands murdered in the streets.

1205 Bulgars defeated the crusaders and remaining Greeks at Adrianople. The devastation of Byzantium permanently weakened the Eastern Empire, didn’t bring its church under Latin rule, as the Pope dreamed, and probably benefited Venice most, which seized control of commerce in the empire.

The Albigensian Crusade 1208 to 1229

1208 launched to eliminate the Cathars of Occitania (present-day southern France) lasted for decades and led to Northern French domination of the South. In July 1208 the crusaders took Béziers and massacred every man, woman and child. When soldiers asked the Abbot how they could avoid killing ‘true’ believers, he replied:

‘Kill them all. God will know his own.’

Mindset of terrorists throughout the ages.

[1221 Pope Honorius III asked King Andrew II to put down heretics in Bosnia. Hungarian forces answered further papal calls in

1234 and 1241. This campaign ended with the Mongol invasion of Hungary in 1241.]

The Fifth Crusade 1213 to 1221

1215 Pope Innocent III called the Fourth Council of the Lateran in 1215. It was at this mass assembly of bishops and cardinals that ‘heresy’ was defined, ‘inquisition’ formalised, Jews were ordered to wear special clothing and Innocent announced his new crusade.

1216 Innocent III dies.

1217 Duke Leopold VI and Andrew II arrived in Acre but failed to assert their power and left.

1219 The remaining forces besieged Damietta in Egypt and captured it in November 1219. But further plans were blocked by the Arab leader Ayyubid Sultan Al-Kamil and the crusaders were forced to surrender and hand back Damietta.

The Sixth Crusade b.1228

1228 Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, after being repeatedly threatened and eventually excommunicated by Innocent’s successor, Pope Honorius III, for his delays, finally landed at Acre.

1229 RESTORATION OF JERUSALEM – However, both sides being reluctant to fight, Frederick agreed a peace treaty with Al-Kamil which allowed Latin Christians to rule most of Jerusalem and a strip of land along the coast, with the Muslims controlling their sacred areas in Jerusalem. Frederick had himself crowned in the Holy Sepulchre and declared himself the mouthpiece of God. Frederick returned home to find the Pope had organised armies to invade his realm.

1238 Frederick tried to extend his lands into northern Italy and Pope Gregory declared a crusade against him. ‘The Holy War was now being preached not against the ‘infidel’, not even against a heretic – no such charge was made against Frederick – but against a political enemy of the Pope.’ (Crusades p.181) Crusade had become degraded to a purely secular concept.

1239 A force led by King Theobald I of Navarre arrived in Acre in September. Defeated in battle in November, Theobald negotiated another treaty with the Ayyubid Sultan Al-Kamil.

1244 The Destruction OF Jerusalem

The Ayyubids invited Khwarazmian forces whose empire had been destroyed by Genghiz Khan’s Mongols, to reconquer the city. It fell July 15, 1244 and the Khwarezmians completely razed Jerusalem to the ground, leaving it in ruins.
1244 An Arab force led by al-Salih Ayyub seized Jerusalem.

The Seventh Crusade 1248 to 1254

1245 to 1250 King Louis IX of France organized a vast army, set sail in 1248 and landed in Egypt in June 1249. In a series of battles they were defeated, and in 1250 Louis was captured and ransomed for 800,000 bezants, and a ten-year truce agreed.

1254 Louis withdrew to Acre, now the only Crusader territory of any significance, which he built up again until his money ran out in 1254 and he had to return to France.

[1256 The Venetians were evicted from Tyre, prompting the War of Saint Sabas over territory in Acre claimed by Genoa and Venice. The war dragged on for a decade during which both Christian sides allied with Muslim forces and most fortified buildings in Acre were destroyed.

1266 Louis IX’s brother Charles seized Sicily and other parts of the eastern Mediterranean with a view to restoring the Latin empire by reconquering Byzantium.]

The Eighth Crusade 1270

1265 The ferocious Mameluk Sultan Baibars ibn-Abdullah had captured Caesarea, Nazareth, Haifa, Safed, Toron, and Arsuf.

1268 Baibars captures Antioch and massacres its entire population.

1270 These events inspire King Louis IX of France to sail to Tunis with a large fleet and impressive army. However it was the height of the Saharan summer, the army was devastated by disease and Louis died. Thus ended the last major attempt to take the Holy Land.

The Ninth Crusade 1272

1270 The future Edward I of England had travelled with Louis. He sailed with his forces to Acre in May 1271. His forces were small and he was unable to alter the existing peace treaties between Baibars and King Hugh of Jerusalem.

1272 Edward learned of his father’s death.

1274 Edward I returns to England to take up his crown.

1277 The fearsome Baibars dies.

The last crusade

1281 Election of a French pope, Martin IV who threw himself behind the campaigns of French king Charles I. His ships were at Sicily when the Emperor of Byzantium conspired to provoke the ‘Sicilian Vespers’, an uprising during which the crusader fleet was abandoned and burnt.

1287 King Charles I dies, allowing Henry II of Cyprus to reclaim Jerusalem.

These kinds of struggles are typical of the endless disunity and conflict among the Roman Christians which continually undermined efforts to hold the Holy Land. In this two hundred year period the papacy, far from creating the kind of total control over Christendom which Innocent and Urban dreamed of, had become just one among a hectic throng of nationalist kings and princes all fighting each other. The papacy had lost all its moral authority. Thus:

1284 The Crusade of Aragon was called by Pope Martin against Peter III of Aragon, Peter supporting anti-Angevin forces in Sicily, Martin supporting Charles of Anjou.

1298 Pope Boniface VIII proclaimed a crusade against Frederick III of Sicily (Peter’s younger brother).

The end of the Crusader states

1291 A group of pilgrims from Acre was attacked by Muslim forces and in retaliations killed some innocent Muslim merchants. The Sultan demanded compensation from the king of Acre and, when none came, used it as a pretext to besiege and then capture the city. Men, women and children were massacred: prisoners were beheaded. Acre had been the last independent Crusader state in the Holy Land and its fall signified that – The Crusades had ended.

Non-Holy Land ‘crusades’

1365 The Alexandrian Crusade Peter I of Cyprus captured and sacked Alexandria for mainly commercial reasons, killing as many Christians as Muslims and Jews.

1390 The Mahdian Crusade Louis II led a ten-week campaign against Muslim pirates in North Africa. After a siege the crusaders signed a ten-year truce.

1396 Crusade against the Ottomans led by Sigismund of Luxemburg, king of Hungary which was defeated by the Ottomans in the Battle of Nicopolis.

1420s The Hussite Crusades military action against the followers of Jan Hus in Bohemia from 1420 to about 1431. Crusades were declared five times during that period: in 1420, 1421, 1422, 1427, and 1431.

1440s Crusade against the Ottomans Polish-Hungarian King Władysław Warneńczyk invaded recently conquered Ottoman territory, reaching Belgrade in January 1444. Negotiated a truce with Sultan Murad II. The Ottomans won a decisive victory at the Battle of Varna on 10 November, and the crusaders withdrew. This left Constantinople exposed and it fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.

John Hunyadi and Giovanni da Capistrano organized a 1456 crusade to lift the Ottomon siege of Belgrade.
1487 Pope Innocent VIII called for a crusade against the Waldensians in the south of France but little military activity followed and it had no effect…

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by Simon on December 4, 2015 • Permalink

Posted in Christianity, History, Middle Ages, War

Tagged A Chronology of The Crusades, Acre, Adrianople, Afonso I, Al-Kamil, al-Salih Ayyub, Albrecht von Buxthoeven, Alexios, Alexius IV, Andrew II, Antioch, Ayyubids, Baibars ibn-Abdullah, Baldwin II, Baldwin IV, Baldwin of Edessa, Baldwin V, Battle of Dorylaeum, Battle of Hattin, Bernard of Clairvaux, Bishop Berthold of Hanover, Byzantium, Cathars, Charles I, Charles of Anjou, Church of the Nativity Bethlehem, Conrad III, Constantinople, Count Fulk of Anjou, crusades, Cyprus, Damascus, Damietta, Doge Enrico Dandolo, Duke Leopold VI, Edessa, Edward I, Franks, Frederick Barbarossa, Frederick I, Frederick III of Sicily, Genghiz Khan, Genoa, Great Seljuk Empire, Guy of Lusignan, Henry II of Cyprus, Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, Imad ad-Din Zengi, infidel, Jerusalem, Khwarezmians, Kilij Arslan, King Hugh of Jerusalem, King Louis IX, King Philip of Swabia, Konrad of Masovia, Latins, Leopold of Austria, Louis IX, Louis VII, Mameluk, Mesud I, Muhammed, Occitania, Ottomon Empire, Peter III of Aragon, Peter the Hermit, Philip II, Pope Boniface VIII, Pope Celestine III, Pope Eugenius III, Pope Gregory, Pope Gregory IX, Pope Gregory VIII, Pope Honorius III, Pope Innocent II, Pope Innocent III, Pope Innocent VIII, Pope Martin IV, Pope Urban II, Richard I, Richard the Lionheart, Saladin, Sultan Al-Kamil, Sultan Murad II, Teutonic Knights, The Albigensian Crusade, The Eighth Crusade, The Fifth Crusade, The First Crusade, The Fourth Crusade, The Great Schism, The Livonian Knights, The Ninth Crusade, The Second Crusade, The Seventh Crusade, The Sixth Crusade, The Teutonic Knights, Theobald I of Navarre, Tripoli, Tunis, Tyre, Venice, York, Zara

Posted by Simon on December 4, 2015

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/12/04/a-chronology-of-the-crusades/

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Byzantium: The Decline and Fall (2) by John Julius Norwich (1995)

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Europe’s Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom by Norman Cohn (1975)

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The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950 – 1350 by Robert Bartlett (1993)

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A Chronology of the Crusades

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The German Crusade

The North European Crusade

The Fourth Crusade 1202 to 1004: the Sack of Constantinople

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The Sixth Crusade b.1228

1244 The Destruction OF Jerusalem

The Seventh Crusade 1248 to 1254

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