Part 26

Isolated enterprises somewhat of the character of a Crusade, but hardly serious enough to be dignified by that name, recur during the 14th century. The French kings are all crusaders--in name--until the beginning of the Hundred Years' War; but the only crusader who ever carried war in Palestine and sought to shake the hold of the Mamelukes on the Holy Land was Peter I., king of Cyprus from 1359 to 1369. Peter founded the order of the Sword for the delivery of Jerusalem; and instigated by his chancellor, P. de Mezieres (one of the last of the theorists who speculated and wrote on the Crusades), he attempted to revive the old crusading spirit throughout the west of Europe. The mission which he undertook with his chancellor for this purpose (1362-1365) only produced a crop of promises or excuses from sovereigns like Edward III. or the Emperor Charles IV.; and Peter was forced to begin the Crusade with such volunteers as he could collect for himself. In the autumn of 1365 he sacked Alexandria; in 1367 he ravaged the coast of Syria, and inflicted serious damages on the sultan of Egypt. But in 1369 he was assassinated, and the last romantic figure of the Crusades died, leaving only the legacy of his memory to his chancellor de Mezieres, who for nearly forty years longer continued to be the preacher of the Crusades to Europe, advocating--what always continued to be the "dream of the old pilgrim"--a new order of knights of the Passion of Christ for the recovery and defence of Jerusalem. De Mezieres was the last to advocate seriously, as Peter I. was the last to attempt, a Crusade after the old fashion--an offensive war against Egypt for the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre.[57] From 1350 onwards the Crusade assumes a new aspect; it becomes defensive, and it is directed against the Ottoman Turks, a tribe of Turcomans who had established themselves in the sultanate of Iconium at the end of the 13th century, during the confusion and displacement of peoples which attended the Mongol invasions. As early as 1308 the Ottoman Turks had begun to settle in Europe; by 1350 they had organized their terrible army of janissaries. They threatened at once the debris of the old Latin empire in Greece and the archipelago, and the relics of the Byzantine empire round Constantinople; they menaced the Hospitallers in Rhodes and the Lusignans in Cyprus. It was natural that the popes should endeavour to form a coalition between the various Christian powers which were threatened by the Turks; and Venice, anxious to preserve her possessions in the Aegean, zealously seconded their efforts. In 1344 a Crusade, in which Venice, the Cypriots, and the Hospitallers all joined, ended in the conquest of Smyrna; in 1345 another Crusade, led by Humbert, dauphin of Vienne, ended in failure. The Turks continued their progress; in 1363 they captured Philippopolis, and in 1365 they entered Adrianople; the whole Balkan peninsula was threatened, and even Hungary itself seemed doomed. Already in 1365 Urban VI. sought to unite the king of Hungary and the king of Cyprus in a common Crusade against the Turks; but it was not till 1396 that an attempt was at last made to supplement by a land Crusade the naval Crusades of 1344 and 1345. Master of Servia and of Bulgaria, as well as of Asia Minor, the sultan Bayezid was now threatening Constantinople itself. To arrest his progress, a Crusade, preached by Boniface IX., led by John the Fearless of Burgundy, and joined chiefly by French knights, was directed down the valley of the Danube into the Balkans; but the old faults stigmatized by de Mezieres, _divisio_ and _propria voluntas_, were the ruin of the crusading army, and at the battle of Nicopolis it was signally defeated. Not the Western Crusades but an Eastern rival, Timur (Tamerlane), king of Transoxiana and conqueror of southern Russia and India, was destined to arrest the progress of Bayezid; and from the battle of Angora (1402) till the days of Murad II. (1422) the Ottoman power was paralysed. Under Murad, however, it rose to its old height. To meet the new danger a new union of the churches of the East and the West was attempted. As in 1074 Gregory VII. had dreamed of such a union, to be followed by a joint attack of East and West on the Seljuks, so in 1439, at the council of Florence, a new union of the two churches was again attempted and temporarily secured, in order that a united Christendom might face the new Turkish danger.[58] The logical result of the union was the Crusade of 1443. An army of cosmopolitan adventurers, led by the Cardinal Caesarini, joined the forces of Wladislaus of Poland and John Hunyadi of Transylvania, and succeeded in forcing on Murad II. a truce of ten years at Szegedin in 1444. But the crusaders broke the truce, to which Caesarini had never consented; and, attempting to better what was already good enough, they were defeated at Varna. Here the last Crusade ended; and nine years afterwards, in 1453, Mahommed II., the successor of Murad, captured Constantinople. It was in vain that the popes sought to gather a new Crusade for its recovery; Pius II., who had vowed to join the crusade in person, only reached Ancona in 1464 to find the crusaders deserting and to die. Yet the ghost of the Crusades still lingered. It became a convention of diplomacy, designed to cover any particularly sharp piece of policy which needed some excuse; and the treaty of Granada, formed between Louis XII. and Ferdinand of Aragon for the partition of Naples in 1500, was excused as a thing necessary in the interests of the Crusades. In a more noble fashion the Crusade survived in the minds of the navigators; "Vasco da Gama, Christopher Columbus, Albuquerque, and many others dreamed, and not insincerely, that they were labouring for the deliverance of the Holy Land, and they bore the Cross on their breasts."[59] "Don Henrique's scheme," it has been said, "represents the final effort of the crusading spirit; and the naval campaigns against the Moslem in the Indian seas, in which it culminated, forty years after Don Henrique's death, may be described as the last Crusade."[60]

10. _Results of the Crusades._--In one vital respect the result of the Crusades may be written down as failure. They ended, not in the occupation of the East by the Christian West, but in the conquest of the West by the Mahommedan East. The Crusades began with the Seljukian Turk planted at Nicaea; they ended with the Ottoman Turk entrenched by the Danube. Nothing is more striking in history than the recession of Christianity in the East after the 13th century. In the 13th century the whole of Europe was Christian; part of Asia Minor still belonged to Greek Christianity, and there was a Christian kingdom in Palestine. Nor was this all. A wide missionary activity had begun in the 13th century--an activity which was the product of the Crusades and the contact with the Moslem which they brought, but which yet helped to check the Crusades, substituting as it did peaceful and spiritual conquests of souls for the violence and materialism of even a Holy War. The Eastern mission had been begun by St Francis, who had visited and attempted to convert the sultan of Egypt during the Fifth Crusade (1220); within a hundred years the little seed had grown into a great tree. A great field for missionary enterprise opened itself in the Mongol empire, in which, as has already been mentioned, there were many Christians to be found; and by 1350 this field had been so well worked that Christian missions and Christian bishops were established from Persia to Peking, and from the Dnieper to Tibet itself. But a Mahommedan reaction came, thanks in large measure to the zeal of Timur; and central Asia was lost to Christianity. Everywhere in the 15th century, in Europe and in Asia, the crescent was victorious over the cross; and Crusade and mission, whether one regards them as complementary or inimical, perished together.[61]

But the history of the Crusades must be viewed rather as a chapter in the history of civilization in the West itself, than as an extension of Western dominion or religion to the East. It is a chapter very difficult to write, for while on the one hand an ingenious and speculative historian may refer to the influence of the Crusades almost everything which was thought or done between 1100 and 1300, a cautious writer who seeks to find documentary evidence for every assertion may be rather inclined to attribute to that influence little or nothing.[62] The dissolution of feudalism, the development of towns, the growth of scholasticism, all these and much more have been ascribed to the Crusades, when in truth they were concomitants rather than results, or at any rate, if in part the results of the Crusades, were in far larger part the results of other things. At most, therefore, it may be admitted that the Crusades _contributed_ to the dissolution of feudalism by putting property on the market and disturbing the validity of titles; that they aided the development of towns by vastly increasing the volume of trade; and that they furthered the growth of scholasticism by bringing the West into contact with the mind of the East. If we seek the peculiar and definite results of the Crusades, we must turn to narrower issues. In the first place, the Crusades represent the attempt of a feudal system, bound under the law of primogeniture to dispose of its younger sons. They are attempts at feudal colonization; and as such they resulted in a number of colonies--the kingdom of Jerusalem, the kingdom of Cyprus, the Latin empire of Constantinople. They resulted too in a number of "chartered companies"--that is to say, the three military orders, which, beginning as charitable societies, developed into military clubs, and developed again from military clubs into chartered companies, possessed of banks, navies and considerable territories. In the second place, as has already been noticed, the Crusades represent the attempt of Western commerce to find new and more easy routes to the wealth of the East; and in this respect they led to various results. On the one hand they led to the establishment of emporia in the East--for instance, Acre, and after the fall of Acre Famagusta, both in their day great centres of Levantine trade. On the other hand, the commodities which poured into Venice and Genoa from the East had to find a route for their diffusion through Europe. The great route was that which led from Venice over the Brenner and up the Rhine to Bruges; and this route became the long red line of municipal development, along which--in Lombardy, Germany and Flanders--the great towns of the middle ages sprang to life. Partly as a result of this trade, ever pushing its way farther east, and partly as a result of the Asiatic missions, which were themselves an accompaniment and effect of the Crusades, a third great result of the Crusades came to light in the 13th century--the discovery of the interior of Asia, and an immense accession to the sphere of geography. When one remembers that missionaries like Piano Carpini, and traders like the Venetian Polos, either penetrated by land from Acre to Peking, or circumnavigated southern Asia from Basra to Canton, one realizes that there was, about 1300, a discovery of Asia as new and tremendous as the discovery of America by Columbus two centuries later. At the same time the old knowledge of nearer Asia was immensely deepened. It has already been noticed how military reconnaissances of the routes to Egypt came to be made; but more important were the guide-books, of which a great number were written to guide the pilgrims from one sacred spot of Bible history to another. There were medieval Baedekers in abundance for the use of the annual flow of tourists, who were carried every Easter by the vessels of the Italian towns or of the Orders to visit the Holy Land and to bathe in Jordan, to gather palms, and to see the miracle of fire at the Sepulchre.

Colonization, trade, geography--these then are three things closely connected with the history of the Crusades. The development of the art of war, and the growth of a systematic taxation, are two debts which medieval Europe also owed to the Crusades. Partly by contact with the Byzantines, partly by conflict with the Mahommedans, the Franks learned new methods both of building and of attacking fortifications. The concentric castle, with its rings of walls, began to displace the old keep and bailey with their single wall, as the crusaders brought back news from the East.[63] The art of the sapper and miner, the use of siege instruments like the mangonel, and the employment of various "fires" as missiles, were all known among the Mahommedans; and in all these respects the Franks learned from their enemies. The common use of armorial bearings, and the practice of the tournament, may be Oriental in their origin; the latter has its affinities with the equestrian exercises of the Jerid, and the former, though of prehistoric antiquity, may have received a new impulse from contact with the Arabs. The military development which sprang from the Crusades is thus largely a matter of borrowing; the financial development is independent and indigenous in the West. As early as 1147 Louis VII. had imposed a tax in the interests of the Crusades; and that tax had been repeated by Louis, and imitated by Henry II. in 1166, while it had been still further extended in the Saladin tithe of 1188. The taxation of 1166 is important as the first to fall on "moveables"; the whole scheme of taxation may be regarded as the beginning of a modern system of taxation. But it was not only to the lay power that the Crusades gave an excuse for taxation; the papacy also profited. Tithes for the Crusades were first imposed on the clergy by Innocent III. at the Lateran council of 1215; and clerical taxation was thus part of the whole statesmanlike project of the Fifth Crusade as it was sketched by the great pope. Henceforth tithes for the Crusades are regular; under Gregory IX. they become a great part of the papal resources in the Crusade against the Hohenstaufen; and in the 16th century they are still a normal part of the government of the Church.

In many other ways the Europe over which the Crusades had passed was different from the Europe of the 11th century. In the first place, many political changes had been wrought, largely under its influence. Always in large part French, the Crusades had on the whole contributed to exalt the prestige of France, until it stood at the end of the 13th century the most considerable power in Europe. It was France which had colonized the Levant; it was the French tongue which was used in the Levant; and the results of the ancient and continuous connexion with the East are still to be traced to-day. Of the other great powers of Europe, England and Germany had been little changed by the Crusades, save that Germany had been extended towards the East by the conquests of the Teutonic Order; but the Eastern empire had been profoundly modified, and the papacy had suffered a great change. The Eastern empire had been for a time annihilated by the movement which in 1095 it had helped to evoke; and if it rose from its ashes in 1261 for two centuries of renewed life, it was never more than the shadow of its old self, with little hold on Asia Minor and less on Greece and the Archipelago, which the Latins still continued to occupy until they were finally conquered by the Ottoman Turks. The papacy, on the other hand, had grown as a result of the Crusades. Popes had preached them; popes had financed them; popes had sent their legates to lead them. Through them the popes had deposed the emperors of the West from their headship of the world, partly because through the Crusades the popes were able to direct the common Christianity of Europe in a foreign policy of their own without consultation with the emperor, partly because in the 13th century they were ultimately able to direct the Crusade itself against the empire. Yet while they had magnified, the Crusades had also corrupted the papacy. They became an instrument in its hands which it used to its own undoing. It cried Crusade when there was no Crusade; and the long Crusade against the Hohenstaufen, if it gave the papacy an apparent victory, only served in the long run to lower its prestige in the eyes of Europe. When we turn from the sphere of politics to the history of civilization and culture, we find the effects of the Crusades as deeply impressed, if not so definitely marked. The Crusades had sprung from the policy of a theocratic government counting on the motive of otherworldliness; they had helped in their course to overthrow that motive, and with it the government which it had made possible. In part they had provided a field in which the layman could prove that he too was a priest; in part they had brought the West into a living and continuous contact with a new faith and a new civilization. They had torn men loose from the ancestral custom of home to walk in new ways and see new things and hear new thoughts; and some broadening of view, some lessening in the intensity of the old one-sidedness, was the inevitable result. It is not so much that the West came into contact with a particular civilization in the East, or borrowed from that civilization; it is simply that the West came into contact with something unlike itself, yet in many ways as high as, if not higher than, itself. The spirit of _Nathan der Weise_ may not have been exactly the spirit engendered by the Crusades; and yet it is not without reason that Lessing stages the fable which teaches toleration in the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. In any case the accusations made against the Templars at the time of their suppression prove that there was, at any rate in the ranks of those who knew the East, too little of absolute orthodoxy. While a new spirit which compares and tolerates thus sprang from the Crusades, the large sphere of new knowledge and experience which they gave brought new material at once for scientific thought and poetic imagination. Not only was geography more studied; the Crusades gave a great impulse to the writing of history, and produced, besides innumerable other works, the greatest historical work of the middle ages--the _Historia transmarina_ of William of Tyre. Mathematics received an impulse, largely, it is true, from the Arabs of Spain, but also from the East; Leonardo Fibonacci, the first Christian algebraist, had travelled in Syria and Egypt. The study of Oriental languages began in connexion with the Christian missions of the East; Raymond Lull, the indefatigable missionary, induced the council of Vienne to decide on the creation of six schools of Oriental languages in Europe (1311). But the new field of poetic literature afforded by the Crusades is still more striking than this development of science. New poems in abundance dealt with the history of the Crusades, either in a faithful narrative, like that of the _Chanson_ of Ambroise, which narrates the Third Crusade, or in a free and poetical spirit, such as breathes in the _Chanson d'Antioche_. Nor was this all. The Crusades afforded new details which might be inserted into old matters, and a new spirit which might be infused into old subjects; and a crusading complexion thus came to be put upon old tales like those of Arthur and Charlemagne. By the side of these greater things it may seem little, and yet, just because it is little, it is all the more significant that the Crusades should have familiarized Europe with new plants, new fruits, new manufactures, new colours, and new fashions in dress. Sugar and maize; lemons, apricots and melons; cotton, muslin and damask; lilac and purple (azure and gules are words derived from the Arabic); the use of powder and of glass mirrors, and also of the rosary itself--all these things came to Europe from the East and as a result of the Crusades. To this day there are many Arabic words in the vocabulary of the languages of western Europe which are a standing witness of the Crusades--words relating to trade and seafaring, like tariff and corvette, or words for musical instruments, like lute or the Elizabethan word "naker."

GENEALOGY OF THE KINGS OF JERUSALEM