Unholy Roman Empire
PROLOGUE
The carnage was everywhere as far as the eye could see, blood stains
painting the streets in sinister crimson, splattering under the hooves of
thousands horses; even the seasoned veterans frequently turned their eyes away,
making the sign of the cross and uttering prayers at the sight of their work.
There was no one left standing; every Saracen in the city was slaughtered with
no mercy shown, revenge for the occupation of the Holy City that was once again
in the hands of soldiers of Christ. The man on the horse smiled, observing the
utter devastation from the higher ground.
He was already rather aged, but still powerfully built, clad in
expensive armor embellished with the black eagle on yellow field. A great sword
rested at his side, adorned with gold and jewels, a symbol of status in the
war-torn world. The man’s great red beard showed more than a few strains of
grey hair, and his movements, while still betraying the great deal of strength
in his bulky frame, showed more than a few signs of coming old age.
As the knights of his entourage looked down at the Holy City of Jerusalem, engulfed in plunder, slaughter, and rapine, he reflected on his moment of triumph. This was the one accomplishment not even the greatest of his predecessors could match, the crowning achievement of the four and a half decades of his life’s struggle. He could remember the days long gone when panic spread through all of Christendom when the Saracens took Edessa, and the humiliation that his uncle and predecessor suffered on the ill-advised foreign adventure; now was the time for payback.
He thought of the churchmen in distant Rome, so sure of their innate
superiority to him and his likes, yet too cowardly to do anything but hide
behind the walls of the Vatican while the real men fought and died to spread
the word of God and His Son into the lands the meek and degenerate long
deserted. At least the Saracens, infidels and heretics they might be, were in
his mind preferable to the overbearing, controlling so-called “Vicar of Christ”
and his clique of sycophants and master manipulators, the very ones who would
dare to deny him, the Holy Roman Emperor, his birthright, and the birthright of
his Empire.
At least the Saracens, misguided as they were, were brave, fearless,
fighting to death against his men, and dying on the streets of Jerusalem as the
payment for their bravery. In another time, another place, he would have spared
a few words of admiration for an enemy like that, fighting whom would be
stories worth of minstrels singing about for centuries to come. Yet, this was
neither time nor place, for the Warriors of Christ proven victorious once
again, and now there would be no one to deny that God is truly with them, with
him.
Then, his thoughts darted towards the distant north-west, towards the
city of the Greek schismatics on the Bosphorus. How could these heretics claim
his title, passed on through Charlemagne and Otto the Saxon? How could they
dare to claim their superiority to the true Emperor of the West? He had little
love for them… hell, he thought, at least the Saracens could be noble,
virtuous, and honorable – the Greeks were weak, degenerate, constantly scheming
against him and against one another. Maybe, he thought, one day they will be
shown the might of the one true Roman Empire, and be made to bow down like the
vermin they were. At least that Saladin fellow held strong and proud before the
axe of the executioner; he doubted that Isaakios of Constantinople would even
manage a straight face for a short moment before breaking down in pleas for his
life. He hated these schismatics more so than the Pope and his schemes.
He knew, however, that the time was growing short. He was already
nearing seventy years of age, and as much as he liked to think otherwise, his
time on this earth was nearly over. Who would continue the struggle, he
thought? There was one thing he envied of the Greek basileus, the ease with
which he seemed to be able to control the Patriarch of Constantinople – and how
little the Patriarch was able to interfere in the worldly affairs. Maybe, one
day… a thought simmered in his mind. Maybe not him, but one of his successors
would be able to return the reign of Emperors to Europe, and to make the
insolent, proud nobles and clerics alike bow down to them, like it was once
before – and like it shall be again.
The wind blew a patch of dust into his face, dry desert sand drenched
in blood of this fateful day. He knew today that his place in history was
complete, and that, like Charlemagne, Constantine, or Augustus, he has
accomplished what was laid out before him, to be remembered forever in the
moment of his victory, untarnished by defeat or setbacks. The wind made the
man’s long cloak waver in the hot air of afternoon, revealing the insignia of
the House of Hohenstaufen, and the Imperial Eagle – the eagle of Caesar,
Augustus, Constantine, and now – the eagle of Frederick Hohenstaufen, the first
of his name to hold the scepter of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Savior of
Jerusalem. Frederick smiled again, this time a wolfish grin. His name stroke
fear into the hearts of Saracen and heretic alike, with all bowing down before
him, heard all over the Christendom and in many places beyond. And this name
will be the one to remember him by, the man of great deeds and great red beard,
Barbarossa!
The Aftermath of the Third
Crusade (1190-1198)
All in all it's just a poor
man's crusade
Poor man's crusade
The Holy Land home of our blessed lord
Enslaved and stained by godless hands
They shall be damned
Jerusalem
Is waiting for you
To rise once again
So we will slaughter in the name of Christ
Demons & Wizards “Poor
Man’s Crusade”
To understand the phenomenon of European history known as the Unholy
Roman Empire, it would be necessary to examine the roots of its establishment,
hundreds of years before the crowning of Ulrich as the first Unholy Emperor.
Thus, it is only fitting that our story begins in the wane of the XIIth century
with the one Frederick von Hohenstaufen, more commonly known as Barbarossa.
While the story of Frederick’s life and accomplishments prior to the
Third Crusade is best told elsewhere, there is no denying that the capture of
Jerusalem by the German army in the fall of 1190 was probably the single
greatest achievement of the man’s life, at least in his own eyes, and in those
of his contemporaries. That Barbarossa lived only for three more years after
his most spectacular victory also helped to create the myth of the great
Emperor that served as an inspiration to many of his more and less capable
successors. To this day there are legends circulating about the late Frederick
not being truly dead, but simply asleep, waiting to come to his people in their
greatest hour of need, signified by the time when the ravens stop circling
around the tower under which he is said to sleep.
Thus, when Frederick Barbarossa departed the Holy Land in late 1190,
there was no question in the minds of his subjects and, more importantly, other
Christian rulers, that this short, unassuming looking man except for the great
red beard was truly blessed by God, and commanded authority far greater than
that his temporal status gave him. With the succession of his son Henry, future
Henry VI, virtually assured, Barbarossa’s reign, despite his failures in Italy
and problems enforcing his authority in Germany, was viewed by his
contemporaries as an astounding success. With Henry already crowned the King of
Germany and, in 1190, the King of Jerusalem, his future seemed bright indeed.
When in 1193 Henry VI succeeded to the Imperial crown, he was already
an accomplished leader, having been the chief enforcer of his father’s policies
in Italy, and a regent during the Third Crusade. By then, Henry could claim a
successful expedition against Sicily to his credit, adding it to Hohenstaufen
domains on the account of it being his wife Constance’s inheritance, as well as
quelling of numerous Guelph rebellions in Northern Italy; the transfer of
authority from Frederick to him was therefore smooth and relatively efficient.
Within months of his ascent to the crown, Henry shown that he was made
of the same material as his late father. Any dissent in Italy was crushed; the recently
elected octogenarian Pope Celestine III was in no position to intervene as
Henry’s armies encroached on Rome itself. An embassy was sent to the court of
the Eastern Emperor Alexius III with demands of tribute, which Alexius was all
too quick to give in to. Thinly veiled threats were sent to the court of
Richard of England, demanding that the latter recognizes Henry as his suzerain.
Richard’s flat out refusal was the source for much political hostility
between England and Holy Roman Empire during the remainder of Henry’s eventful
reign, mostly displayed in the debate on another Crusade, this time against
Egypt. Eager to win for himself the glory and the wealth that such an adventure
would bring, Richard attempted to invoke yet another Crusading adventure, which
was being opposed by Henry and (through Henry’s forceful manipulation) by the
Pope for the fear of Richard becoming too powerful. Secretly, however, aging
Celestine hoped that Richard might be his deliverance from this boorish German,
and thus soon secret correspondence begun to travel between London and Vatican
with alarming frequency.
Unfortunately for Henry, while still technically he was the most
powerful monarch on the continent, his ability to project power to the British
Isles was minimal, to say the least, and with French King being of little help,
Henry could do little but wait, all the while trying to centralize his domains
and transferring much of his power base to his new fief in Sicily. By 1196,
inspired in part by the Byzantine model, Henry attempted to change the
succession law in the Holy Roman Empire to be hereditary, rather than elective.
Meeting with stiff resistance from the German princes and Italian nobles, Henry
was ultimately unsuccessful, albeit he found some significant support for the
idea. It was, however, of some consolation to him that the princes agreed to
confirm the crowning of his infant son Frederick as the King of Germany, the
sure stepping stone to the Holy Roman Empire itself.
In a meanwhile, elsewhere in Europe the clouds were gathering fast. In
1195, the Eastern Emperor Isaac II was overthrown by his own brother Alexius
III, blinded and imprisoned. However, another Alexius, Isaac’s son, was able to
escape his uncle’s trap and found refuge at the court of one Philip of Swabia,
a German prince married to dethroned Isaac’s daughter, and almost immediately
started to weave the incessant web of intrigue that could only be described
befittingly as Byzantine in nature, ultimately hoping to unseat his uncle in
Constantinople.
Henry was immediately skeptical of this new pretender; it was better
for him to have a weak, complacent Emperor in Constantinople that was already a
proven quantity, and a relatively worthless one at that. As long as Alexius III
was in power, there could be no trouble expected in the East; no matter what
promises his young namesake made, the fact remained that in the wrong hands, he
might become a pawn of those opposing Henry, and the weapon by which his
downfall could be wrought.
As long as the ailing Celestine was Pope, Henry was content with his
ability to contain any Crusading sentiments that posed direct threat to his supremacy;
however, the introduction of young Alexius into the mix of European politics
threw all bets off. As Alexius’ promises grew more and more exorbitant, many in
England, France, and even German principalities begun to support the idea of a
Crusade, financed in large part through the newly restored Emperor of the East.
Then, in 1198, the situation changed once again. The Pope Celestine
III, already an invalid after series of strokes, died in Rome. In his stead,
the Curia elected a man of a very different caliber, the one Lotario de Conti.
A scion of one of the most prominent Roman aristocratic families, Conti was the
nephew of late Pope Clement III, and despite his relative youth, was no
stranger to politics. As the new Pope ascended to the Pontificate under the
name of Innocent III, Henry knew that the battle for the hearts and souls of
Europe just entered into another round.
Opening The Floodgates (1198-1205)
Oh, you've been surprised
again
Pulled like a leaf to the waterfall
Everybody's just pretending
I thought that you'd learn by now
Ooh, think about it one more time
What have you got when the god is gone
Clouds don't have a silver lining
And all you ever get is rain
'Cause you can't get blood from a stone
You can't open the door if there's nobody home
They've taken it all so just leave me alone
You can't get blood from a stone
Dio – Blood From A Stone
By the time of his ascention, Innocent III was thirty seven years old,
and determined to make a lasting impact. His first action upon ascending to the
Pontificate was to make the Prefect of Rome swear allegiance to him, rather
than to the Emperor, which understandably was not received well in Henry’s
court. When Innocent demanded that Romagna be restored to Papal control in
1199, Henry has had enough, and departed for Italy at the head of his knights,
with the full intention of removing Innocent and having him replaced with
someone more agreeable. Excommunication was quick to follow.
When Henry’s troops invaded Italy from the north, the reason for Innocent’s
seemingly senseless bravado was made clear – Germany was in arms again, under
the leadership of the one Otto, son of Barbarossa’s one-time ally and eventual
rival Henry the Lion and the member of the House of Welph – sworn enemies of
the Hohenstaufens. Otto was one of the staunchest opponents of making the
Emperorship hereditary during Henry’s earlier attempt at that, and was long
suspected of harboring the designs on the Empire himself; with Innocent’s
backing, and with large sums of money covertly provided by Richard cour-de-Lion
of England and Philip Augustus of France (who, ironically, decided to abandon
the age-long grudge against England, at least for a time being, in order to put
down the more immediate threat of Henry’s Germans), Otto was able to wreak
havoc, swaying many of the German nobles to his cause.
Now, Henry was faced with a dilemma. On one hand, he was within reach
of Rome, and thus could attempt to solve the question of supremacy within his
Empire once and for all; on the other hand, if he could not return to Germany
and deal with the rebels, there could be not much of the Empire left. Thus
outmaneuvered, Henry could do little but accept the Papal offer of peace, which
lifted the excommunication at the price of Italian territories of Ancona and
Romagna, and recognition of the Papal authority in Rome itself. At any other
time, Henry would have probably refused the offer and would have attempted to
enforce his authority in Italy by less diplomatic measures; however, as
Innocent was able to create a powerful and determined league to ward off
Henry’s ambitions, the Emperor was forced to let the Pontiff arbitrate the
supposed dispute between him and the rebel Otto. Moreover, to further the
Emperor’s humiliation, he had to provide at least several regiments of knights
for a new Crusade. The only concessions, seemingly minor at the time, but
increasingly important later, won by the Emperor were the affirmations of his
son Frederick as both the King of Sicily, and the King of Germany, given out by
the Pope as almost an afterthought to placate Henry for the time being. When
Henry returned to Germany in mid-1200, the relations between the Emperor and
the Pope could not have been much worse.
Thus, the call for another Crusade was made in autumn of 1200; however,
this time around Innocent believed that having a powerful European ruler lead
it would result in said ruler becoming extremely dangerous should he emerge
victorious – he did not have to look far back to recall the example of
Barbarossa, whose legacy dominated the Papal affairs during Celestine’s
pontificate. The call was sent not to the crowned heads of the continent, but
to the rank-and-file feudal lords anxious to carve new fiefdoms for themselves
in the distant lands. Out-of-work soldiers, disinherited younger sons, petty
minor nobles with dreams of power and wealth – all were welcome, and all were
to become the weapon by which Innocent III would deliver Egypt from the grip of
the infidel. Moreover, the victory would create a set of new Christian states
loyal to the Supreme Pontiff and the Mother Church, not to the temporal rulers
like despised Henry.
At this time, the focus of our story shifts to the lagoons and canals
of the city of Venice. A mercantile republic with long history and even longer
memory, it long stood as an oddity in the Mediterranean world populated by
bandit kings, feudal warlords, or autocratic empires, competing against few
other Italian city-states in selling its goods and services to the highest
bidders all the while building an empire of its own. By 1201, when Pope’s call
for a new Crusade spread with alarming urgency throughout Europe, Venice was in
possession of possibly the largest fleet on the continent, her influence
growing with every passing day.
Its seafaring abilities, long an envy of the kings and emperors, were
now going to be put to use in the name of Christ, for the Venetian Doge Enrico
Dandolo negotiated a profitable agreement with the leaders of the new Crusading
army, promising to transport the army to Egypt and to provide naval support on
the journey in return for their share in any plunder, and land for new colonies
in North Africa.
However, now there was another factor of unpredictability in the air.
With young Alexius Angelus attempting to gather support among the powers of
Europe for restoration of his father (and, of course, himself) to the Eastern
throne, it was not long before the Venetians sensed a much more profitable
venture in the making. As Alexius’ promises of military and financial assistance
grew more and more fantastic, the gathering European knights were more and more
interested in the idea of subduing the proud and defiant Byzantium, just as the
Pope himself looked favorably upon the idea of ending the Great Schism between
the Eastern and Western Churches.
When in early 1205 the great fleet sailed out, supposedly towards
Egypt, no one could guess what its final destination and eventual fate would
be.
The City Of Men’s Desire
(1205-1207)
Mortified by the lack of
conscience,
Our sanctity bears no relevance.
Insignificance is our existence,
Hear the litany of life's persistence.
Our pleas for mercy fall upon
unhearing ears,
Take my life, my soul, wipe away these
bitter tears.
Vanquished in the name of your god,
One of the same to whom we all pray.
Vanquished in the name of your god,
One of the same to whom we once
prayed
Try to close my mind - From the
screams I hear,
Repentance is denied, the
conformation of my fear
Bolt Thrower – “IVth
Crusade”
As the Venetian galleys sailed on to the East, the purpose of the
Fourth Crusade became rather clear. With young Alexius in the tow, the armies
were bent on achieving one goal – to restore him to the throne, and to obtain
the wealth of Constantinople’s suzerain to attack and ultimately conquer Egypt,
the last major Saracen bastion in the Middle East.
The army gathered upon the ships was of varying composition, with many
French and Italian knights and their retinues composing the bulwark of it;
however, there was a sizeable German contingent sent by Henry, handpicked from
the troops of the princes unquestioningly loyal to him. While only about a
third of the army in size, this was where most of the battle-worthy troops
hailed from; some were the veterans of the Third Crusade, while some others
were inspired by the tales of wealth and power their fathers or older siblings
achieved during that adventure. In summer 1205, the great fleet sailed slowly
up the Bosphorus, creating widespread panic amongst the Greek landowners and
Constantinople’s residents.
Courage was by far not one of Alexius III’s few virtues, and the sight
of the Crusading army camped under the walls of his capital was more than he
could take. Slipping away under the cover of the night with as much of the
Imperial treasury as he could get his hands on, he escaped to one of his
Thracian estates. Thus, in the most critical moment of its history, the Eastern
Empire was left without an Emperor, and with no effective leadership to face
the Western army.
With the lack of other options apparent, old Isaac II was taken from
his cell and draped in Imperial purple, restoring him as the ruler of the city.
Due to his blindness, which would have normally disqualified him from ruling in
the eyes of the Byzantines, young Alexius IV was hastily brought into the city
and crowned co-Emperor. Now, all eyes were on the Emperor to fulfill the
promises he made back in the courts of Europe, and now probably regretted ever
considering.
One of the first things young Alexius found to his dismay was the horrid
state the Imperial finances were in after his uncle’s inept reign. By
instituting extreme measures and confiscating church and some private funds, he
was able to pay off about half of the amount he promised to the Crusading
leaders; however, this did little to endear him to the city’s population, who
knew very well where their money was going. Nor did he have much support from
the Byzantine military, already in the state of decay, with various generals
openly questioning his right to be on the Imperial throne.
On the other side of the walls, however, was an army determined to take
what was promised to them, by force if needed. And within that army, Enrico
Dandolo, the Doge of Venice, was gaining momentum as its effective leader. This
development could not have been any more unwelcome to the Byzantines, as
Dandolo seemed to have held a long personal grudge against them, going back,
accordingly to the rumors, to the riots of 1186 and 1187 that cost many Latins
their lives, and, supposedly, causing Dandolo’s blindness. With this
charismatic leader, gradually the focus of the Crusade shifted from simply
installing a sympathetic Emperor and collecting their pay, to outright takeover
of the schismatic Greeks and their Empire.
As the Crusaders’ demands for money grew more and more outspoken,
Alexius IV was unable to answer them; the theoretical union of the churches was
not accepted throughout the population, and the Byzantines openly questioned if
someone more capable than the Angeli should sit on the Throne of Emperors.
Finally, in 1206 the official named Alexius Ducas, nicknamed Murtzuphlus due to
his connecting eyebrows, decided to take matters into his own hands,
successfully executing a plot to kill his younger namesake and to mount the
throne himself as Alexius V. Isaac II succumbed quickly as well, suspicions of
poisoning circulating around with much validity.
This new development was just the excuse the Crusaders needed. As the
new Emperor refused to pay up to their demands, and started to reinforce the
walls and the city’s garrisons, Dandolo and his compatriots gathered in the
outlying district of Galata to make their plans for not only the conquest, but
the eventual division of the Byzantine Empire.
On the morning of August 6, 1206 the assault on Constantinople begun by
both land and sea. The initial fighting was hard, and wave after wave of the
Crusaders was repulsed from the walls; not all, however, was well both within
and without the walls of the Imperial capital. The demoralized Byzantine troops
were hardly able to hold off the invaders; only the regiments of Varangian
guards proved to be the reason the city did not fall on the first day of the
assault. Many of the noble families were gathering their possessions, ready to
leave the city for their estates at the first chance, some even sending
emissaries to the advancing Latins to guarantee them the safe passage.
Outside the walls, the underlying cracks within the Crusading camp
started to show. The first assault was mostly performed using Italian and
French troops; Germans sent by Henry saw little of the actual fighting. Now,
the Venetians and the French were demanding that the next assault be led by the
Germans. The German commanders, handpicked by Henry, were not enthusiastic
about the idea of assaulting Constantinople to begin with; in addition, they
had secret orders to ensure the Crusade does not end up being a victory for the
Papal-sponsored league, instead resulting in an advantage for their Emperor. On
the morning of a second day, it seemed that the Crusaders could not even mount
an effective assault due to their army being divided.
Then, the German camp received a visitor whose presence changed the
situation. One of the patrols happened upon the hiding place of Alexius III,
and brought the fugitive former Emperor along with his remaining treasures to
the camp. He was a usurper, true, and a proven coward; however, with the deaths
of Isaac II and Alexius IV, he was the only remaining legitimate candidate for
the Byzantine throne. In open defiance of the Venetians and the French, the
German army proclaimed that it would fight to restore Alexius III to the
throne, but not to install a Latin Emperor.
Desperate that his scheme was at the verge of ruin, Dandolo attempted
to bribe the German leaders into complying with his orders; with at least a
third of his army suddenly flaying away, he knew he could only hope to take
Constantinople by reaching some sort of an agreement with them. By October, the
negotiations practically stalled as two camps were as far away from each other
as they could be.
As the last days of October were slowly trickling away, the German camp
received another visitor, this time of even more importance. Arriving with his
own retinue of knights and supporting troops was Philip of Swabia, the
Emperor’s brother and loyal enforcer of his will. By now any chance of
agreement was in tatters, as Philip was quick to point out that the presence of
the Italians and the French were no longer necessary.
Within days of Philip’s arrival, aged Enrico Dandolo, already
frustrated with his designs not going as planned, succumbed to illness, leaving
the Venetians and the French leaderless; this was the moment Philip chose to
strike. Rounding up the Crusading leaders, he proclaimed that as the Emperor’s
representative, he is the one with the highest authority in the camp, and that
the army shall follow his command. Any dissenting nobles were quickly executed
or otherwise silenced; with the German contingent now larger and better
organized than their Italian and French counterparts, the room for any dissent
was nigh absent.
As the army encamped for the winter, Philip sent embassy after embassy
to Constantinople, attempting to come to agreement with its Emperor, and, if
that failed, with the city’s leading nobles, whose fears of assault by now
somewhat eased. The presence of the Crusading army was a thorn in their side,
sure – but was a reinstated Emperor such a large price to pay for these
unwashed barbarians leaving them alone? This was the question many a Byzantine
noble asked himself during the waning days of 1206. On Christmas day, just as Alexius
V arrived in Hagia Sophia cathedral for the service, several conspiring nobles
attacked him, and hacked him to pieces before the Varangian guard could get to
them.
Yet again the great city was without a ruler; however, the populace was
not willing to accept Alexius III as their rightful sovereign, remembering his
conduct nearly two years before. Instead, the Senate made a different offer.
Anxious to get rid of the army camped below their walls, and to prevent
an instance of another one just like it emerging from the West, they, however,
decided that Alexius Angelus was unfit to rule, and definitely not fit to
reign. But, was not Philip the husband of late Isaac’s daughter? Was he not,
also, the brother of the Western Emperor, the most powerful man in the West,
and an ally that they could not afford not to keep? Thus, when Philip of Swabia
was invested with the Imperial Purple on New Year’s Day, 1207, the news were
received with relief both in Constantinople and the rest of Byzantium, and in
the court of Henry, the Emperor of the West.
Another man, however, was furious. Not only the upstart Hohenstaufens
outplayed and outmaneuvered him this time, Innocent III could never hope to
raise another army for his own purpose. Having considered excommunicating both
Henry and Philip, he was only able to restrain himself when the rumors that the
Imperial army was marching towards Rome started to surface.
Yet, he thought, let the Hohenstaufens enjoy their brief triumph.
Innocent’s coalition still included Richard of England and Philip Augustus of
France; two bitter enemies that were only held together by their mutual fear,
hatred, and loathing of Henry and his house. With Henry’s power growing, was it
not the time the French and the English provided some much-needed muscle to the
Pope’s grand schemes?
Trouble In Paradise (1207-1212)
An unforeseen future nestled
somewhere in time.
Unsuspecting victims no warnings, no signs.
Judgment day the second coming arrives.
Before you see the light you must die.
Forgotten children, conform a new faith,
Avidity and lust controlled by hate.
[the] never ending search for your shattered sanity,
Souls of damnation in their own reality.
Chaos rampant,
An age of distrust.
Confrontations.
Impulsive habitat.
Slayer – “South Of Heaven”
As much ambition as Innocent III held, he knew that his sights were set
on a rather impossible goal. Yet, after all, was he not Christ’s Vicar on
Earth, heir of Saint Peter, and the Supreme Pontiff of all Christendom? Who,
but the Pope himself was qualified to sit above the petty squabbles of the
earthy princes and kings, to guide the Christendom and its empires towards
greater glory, towards the kingdom of God?
Innocent spent long months of early 1207 formulating his plans,
gathering his allies, and attempting to placate the English and the French into
giving up their old rivalries for the sake of crushing the insolent German
Emperor. He instantly found that after the outcome of the Fourth Crusade being
more favorable to Henry and the House of Hohenstaufen than to anyone else, even
Richard Cour-de-Lion of England, known for his hot temper and willingness to
risk everything for the sake of adventure, would not commit thoroughly to the
league designed to curb the Imperial power.
Meanwhile, the thoughts of Emperor Henry were increasingly centered
around ensuring the succession of his son Frederick, now aged thirteen. It was
his hope to found a true dynasty, not unlike the Emperors of the East, who
could at least usually assure the succession of their sons in stark contrast to
their Western counterparts, whose attempts to centralize the control of their
domains were met with stiff resistance from German princes and the Catholic
hierarchy. In late 1209, he felt secure enough to consider another Diet, with
the implied purpose of making the Emperorship hereditary. However, just as
Henry was preparing to send out the heralds to his sometime untrustworthy and
rebellious subjects, a stroke of fortune changed his luck again, via news from
faraway Constantinople.
There, Philip was facing with a variety of problems, including the
increasingly porous border with the various Turkish tribes and the Seljuk
Sultanate, the persistent problem of Bulgars, Vlachs, and Serbs pressing on the
Empire’s Northern and Western frontiers, and the always restless Greek
nobility, scandalized at his insistence of Rome’s ecclesiastic supremacy to the
Patriarch of Constantinople, and scoffing at him as a rude and boorish
barbarian behind his back, only tolerated because the other alternatives were
much worse. Trying to make himself secure, Philip commanded series of
expeditions against the Seljuk-ruled Anatolian frontier, most of which were met
with only limited success at best; the heavy Western troops had a hard time
catching mobile light Seljuk cavalry, while the Greek nobles made it painfully
obvious that they had very little interest in campaigning, preferring the
comforts of Constantinople to the rigors of the battlefield.
Even more trouble awaited him in the capital. While he had little
trouble having his seven year old son Otto crowned co-Emperor, the Byzantine
intrigue between the Greek nobles rampaged almost unchecked, with a few covertly
questioning whether it was a good idea to accept a Teuton Emperor, even if the
one with the family ties to the Angeli. Gradually, the intrigue centered around
the person of one Theodore Laskaris, son-in-law of former Emperor Alexius III.
Lascaris was the most vocal opponent of allowing the Latin Emperor into
the city, and even now his allegiance to the new regime was uneasy at best.
Having previously distinguished himself as a valiant and resourceful military
leader, and commanding respect and grudging admiration from much of the
Byzantine and even some of the Latin military, he believed himself to be the
rightful successor to the Angeli, his right to the throne being stronger than
that of Philip, and his faith remaining unashamedly Orthodox. When by mid-1209
Philip attempted to enforce the Catholic supremacy, Lascaris discovered that
the allies were not very hard to find, and even easier to manipulate.
Waiting for the right moment to strike, the conspirators soon saw their
chance. As most of the Latin troops were away from the capital on a raid into
the Turkish territory, Lascaris and his companions attacked Philip in his
palace, where the latter was hacked to death. Running through the streets of
Constantinople with their bloody swords and the detached head of Philip, the
conspirators made their way into Hagia Sophia, where they announced to the
surprised populace that the Latin occupation was over, and that the true
Orthodox Emperor was to be crowned.
As Theodore Lascaris accepted the crown from the trembling hands of the
Patriarch, he knew very well that his empire was in a precarious position. It
would not survive another Crusade; even now, there were thousands of Latin
troops through its principal cities; his primary hope was in the fact that the
Western European politics would make it impossible for any major undertakings
to be made. Thus, he had to tread on very thin ice.
First, there was a matter of young Otto. Under different circumstances,
Lascaris would have happily ordered the boy to be disposed of, or at the very
least blinded or castrated in order to invalidate his claim to the throne;
however, anything that might placate the Western Emperor Henry could also
prevent him from retaliating. Thus, Otto was forced into a monastery, however,
suffering no mutilations or other injuries.
When the word of it reached the Latin army, the German commanders were
in a state of rage. The twenty thousand strong German army quickly marched on
the capital, laying waste to the parts of Byzantine Asia they passed through. A
Byzantine army under command of one Michael Ducas was smashed near Nicomedia,
and Ducas himself was lucky to escape alive. In the capital, the general mood
was on the verge of complete panic. As the rumor of Henry’s promise of
reinforcements to the Latin leaders trickled its way into the city, many
Byzantine nobles outright fled the capital for the dubious safety of their
country estates, hoping to disassociate themselves from this new government.
In 1210, the second siege of Constantinople begun. However, this time
around Lascaris was able to commandeer the citizens into a spirited defence
against lesser Latin army, whose troops launched assault after assault upon the
city walls. But the walls stood firm; little by little, courage was returning
to the defenders, who sent numerous sallies against the Latins, sometimes with
much success.
In Vatican, the Pope Innocent watched these developments with
satisfaction. He was not overtly enthusiastic about the idea of a schismatic on
the throne of the East; however, this was still greatly preferable to the hated
Hohenstaufens. When Henry attempted to crown his son Frederick co-Emperor in
order to govern his empire while Henry himself sailed towards Constantinople,
Innocent flat out refused to perform the ceremony, and threatened
excommunication should such a ceremony be performed. Henry’s anguish and rage
were not hard to imagine; not only the Pope managed to prevent him from
ensuring his son’s succession, but also from being able to safely launch an
assault against his brother’s murderer, and a usurper to his own title!
Enraged, Henry swept down into Italy, however, during the siege of Milan, now
occupied by Gwelph-affiliated Papal supporters, Henry was fatally wounded by an
arrow, dying in September of 1210.
Henry’s death sent shocks through Europe. Shortly before departing
towards Italy, he had young Frederick crowned King of Germany and King of
Sicily in open defiance of the Pope; now Frederick’s birthright was at stake.
Henry’s old enemy Otto once again assumed leadership of a ragtag group of
German barons, getting himself crowned an anti-King, and soon the Holy Roman
Emperor, all with the covert blessing of Innocent, who even now attempted to
strengthen the Papal armies and to retake the regions of Italy from the
Imperial domination.
By 1211, Frederick was in Sicily, where he started gathering an army to
assault Rome from the south, and to put a more agreeable Pope in power; in a
meanwhile, he had arranged for a coronation as a Holy Roman Emperor in Naples,
which was performed with great pomp by a churchman who was selected as
Frederick’s own anti-Pope as Calixtus III. This resulted in prompt
excommunication by Innocent, who was just as promptly excommunicated in turn.
In the East, things took turn for worse as well. Despairing at their
ability to take Constantinople by force, the Latin troops wrecked terrible
vengeance through the countryside, tearing through the Balkans and Asia Minor
like a scythe of doom. Eventually, they seized control of Thessalonica,
establishing the Kingdom of Greece, which also extended into Thessaly, cutting
off the former Byzantine provinces of Morea and Epirus from the capital. This
was also the moment the Bulgar Tsar Kalojan chose to strike south, capturing
large portions of Thrace and leaving the Byzantines only with the Black Sea
coast.
In Asia, Michael Ducas, though defeated once, set himself up as a
pretender to the Imperial throne with the capital in Nicaea, deciding that this
was the best defense against the punishment Lascaris would likely inflict on
him for his inability to stop the Latins from crossing over into Europe. The
Comneni brothers, grandsons of Emperor Andronicus Comnenus, swept into
Trebizond, capturing it by using the troops provided by their Georgian allies
and proclaiming the elder brother Alexius as the legitimate Emperor. The local
governors in Morea and Epirus, realizing that there was little chance of help
from the capital, set up independent principalities, with the one Andronicus
Paleologus claiming Epirus, and one Andreas Cantacuzenos setting himself up in
Morea. Thus, where there was one united Empire only years before, there were
six statelets, with no less than four claiming right to the Throne of Emperors.
As both the West and the East braced themselves for the coming storm,
no one could predict what the outcome of this tempest was going to be.
Kingdoms Of Gods (1212-1218)
Iron Maiden – “Montsegur”
By 1212, the ancient order of Europe was on the brink of collapse. In
Southern Italy, Sicilian armies of Frederick Hohenstaufen clashed against Papal
mercenaries, supplemented by Guelph sympathizers from Italy and troops sent by
Otto IV, the Holy Roman Emperor sponsored by the Pope Innocent. In the Balkans,
the Latins, the Greeks, the Serbs, and the Bulgars fought against each other,
sometimes forming fragile alliances that dissolved as soon as one side clearly
had the advantage, all the while blissfully ignorant of the Seljuk raids
against the Nicaean principality that ravaged the countryside even as the Greek
nobles plotted for the jeweled prize of Constantinople.
The old rivalries sprung up again in France and Britain, with death of
King Richard and the succession disputed between his brother John and his
nephew Arthur, the latter being immensely popular in England’s continental
territories. In Germany, the Hohenstaufen party all but went into hiding,
suppressed by their Welf enemies, who celebrated their ascention to the
Imperial throne and were ready to destroy the last remnant of their former
rivals’ power – the Kingdom of Sicily, where young Frederick’s uneasiness was
not in any way mitigated by these ongoing developments.
The chaos and overall confusion muddied up the waters of European
politics, all to the joy and satisfaction of the Pope Innocent III. Now, finally,
he could make his long-going plans into reality. No longer satisfied with the
spiritual leadership, he longed to make the Holy See’s temporal power as great
as its ecclesiastic guidance – being the supreme arbiter, the only authority
fit to pass judgment on kings and princes, emperors and doges alike. Now,
another scheme begun to take shape in his head.
In the regions known as Languedoc, in the no-man’s land between the
kingdoms of Iberia, city-states of Italy, and tenuous hold of France, a new and
dangerous heresy begun to prosper. Known to contemporaries as the Cathars,
these heretics denied the Catholic hierarchy, and preached against the validity
of oaths, the main instrument by which business was conducted in largely
illiterate European societies, and among the European courts. Moreover,
believing that material world was evil in essence, and that nature of Jesus was
that of a ghost, not a flesh and blood manifestation of the almighty, who would
never appear in a world as tainted with sin as ours, and denying the Holy
Trinity were the offenses that no self-respecting Catholic theologician would
even bother reconciling with. This was the heresy in its vilest form, and the
fact that it was supported by a number of local nobles, some of whom held considerable
power, was nothing short of insult to Innocent.
As it became clear that the Sicilians had little chance to break into
Central Italy, held off by Papal mercenaries and Emperor Otto’s troops,
Innocent’s thoughts returned to France, and to one man in particular. Simon de
Monfort was his name, a staunchly religious French noble who won reputation for
himself as an efficient, competent, and energetic soldier with just enough
ability to be a threat on the battlefield, but without the kind of worldly
ambition that would make him dangerous to his would-be master in Rome.
Innocent summoned de Monfort to Vatican in early 1213, and there gave
him his holy mission – to rid Languedoc of the vile heretics in the name of
Mother Church. When de Monfort returned to his estates in France, accompanied
by the entourage of Catholic envoys, abbots, priests, and quite a few shady
looking characters whose bearing gave them away to be assassins in monk’s
robes, he met with Philip Augustus, the King of France, who was long attempting
to extend his control southward, and the plan was formed.
This new endeavor was not to be just another expedition to subdue
rebellious counts and barons; no, this was different. For this time, the Pope
Innocent called for an all-out Crusade against this vile rot that plagued
Christendom, promising final absolution to any faithful Catholics that take
part in this sacred task. Gathering in the city of Lyon in mid-1214, about
10,000 Crusaders were ready to bring the word of their master to Languedoc.
In 1214 and 1215, a number of battles were waged between the Crusaders
and the local armies, now gathered under the leadership of one Count Raymond of
Toulouse. As time went on, Raymond became increasingly desperate, attempting to
claim religious orthodoxy if the Crusading forces just left him along and
focused on the Cathars. Alas, this was to no avail, for Simon de Monfort saw
not only heresy to be exterminated and souls to be saved, but a land to make
his own, at the expense of Raymond and his allies.
In 1216, Raymond was captured under the flag of truce, and imprisoned,
whereas de Monfort claimed the title of Count of Toulouse for himself, with
full endorsement of the Pope. In the meanwhile, the war on Italian peninsula
was swinging decisively into Innocent’s favor, as Frederick’s troops were
pushed further and further towards Naples, and off the mainland. In Thrace, the
Despotate of Epirus made a number of gains against the Latin kingdom of
Thessalonica, only to be forced back by the Bulgar onslaught; the Byzantine
remnant in Constantinople triumphed against all odds near Nicomedia in Asia
Minor against their Nicaean counterparts, making an alliance of convenience
with the Comneni in Trebizond; the Latins forced Morea into vassalage only to
withdraw to deal with the Epirote threat.
As 1217 drew near, a shocking message trumpeted all throughout
Christendom. Jerusalem, the Holy City, and the site of one of five ancient
Patriarchates, the same Jerusalem that so much blood was spilled to liberate a
generation ago has fallen to the infidel – once again. How could this be,
Catholics in courts all over Europe asked each other? Could it be that the
German Emperor, excommunicated and pressed hard on all sides, was not worthy in
the eyes of the Almighty to defend the holy places of Christianity? Could it be
the punishment for the treacherous slaughtering of Eastern Emperor Philip
inflicted on Christendom by the unforgiving hand of God?
One man knew this was no fluke. At fifty six years of age, Innocent III
was beginning to think about the continuation of his labors by a worthy
successor; at the same time, there was still much to be done in this world. In
a series of fiery proclamations, Innocent lambasted the “King of Sicily” (as he
officially referred to Frederick, refusing to acknowledge him as the Emperor),
the Cathars, and the Greek heretics for keeping entire Christendom so divided
as to lose its holiest places to the Saracen. More often than not, the Pope and
his legates implied the innate superiority of his spiritual stature over the
temporal statures of the rulers, rekindling the memories in those who listened,
memories of a better age than this century of strife, where brother stood
against brother, and corruption was the rule.
In 1218, Otto IV succumbed to fever, and Innocent decided on a radical
solution. Rather than crown another Emperor, who would be tempted by all things
worldly to stray further away from Mother Church, was it not the time for the
Holy Father himself to take the burden of the Empire upon his own shoulders?
The Donation of Constantine, though often questioned by some of the worldly
leaders, did clearly say that the Pope could bestow the Empire upon whoever he
wishes to – and that the Pope is its true spiritual caretaker. Even the great
Theodosius kneeled before the Church; was it not the time the haughty German,
Greek, French, Italian, Spanish, and English princes followed his example?
Thus, as Innocent prepared his declaration, both the German princes and the
court of Frederick in Sicily grew increasingly more alarmed.
At the same time, in the Eastern portion of Christendom, another death
sent waves throughout the neighboring locales. In September 1218, Theodore
Lascaris fell from his horse on a hunting trip, breaking his back in process;
by November he was dead. Theodore left no male issue; the husbands of his two
daughters were relative non-entities, only one of whom, Sergius Sphrantzes,
showed some sort of promise. And then there was a matter of Philip’s son Otto,
technically a monk, but still possessing respectable claim to the throne.
The Byzantine Senate debated the succession for weeks, even before
Theodore’s body was cold, considering not only the matter of legitimacy, but,
incidentally, the matter of saving their own skins. After all, was not Theodore
indirectly responsible for a disaster of the Empire’s splintering just a few
years ago? Most of the men could remember the time when the Eastern Empire
ruled over Asia Minor as well as Europe, when the Emperor’s word was law from
Epirus to faraway Trebizond – and there were some that knew that their
association with late Theodore was a death sentence should Otto be allowed to
take the throne.
And yet there was another candidate in the wings. Alexius Comnenus, the
ruler of Trebizond, based his claim on his own descent from the Comneni dynasty
that ruled through most of the XIIth century, and was seen as more legitimate
claimant than the rest. After all, the Senators whispered, was it not the
Comneni who brought the Empire back from the brink of ruin of Manzikert into
the glory it enjoyed until the degenerate Angeli took over? Besides, here was a
prospect of regaining at least some of the Empire’s former dominions, and maybe
– just maybe, restoring it to the greatness it had once known?
As the waning days of 1218 made their slow run on the shores of
Bosphorus, Alexius Comnenus was raised to the purple as Alexius VI, in hopes
that the great Eastern Empire might once again regain its former glory. In
Trebizond, his brother David was given the rank of sebastokrator, second only
to the Emperor himself, in addition to the title of Despot of Trebizond. But
another man’s star was rising fast, a Turkic tribal leader who accepted baptism
at the insistence and with sponsorship of David, and whose raids against the
Seljuk interior of Anatolia were bringing terror into his enemies’ hearts. He
was given a name of David at baptism, both as a symbol of his new allegiance’s
strife against the hostile world, and as an acknowledgement of his benefactor;
but the name that stroke fear against his enemies was the one given to him at
birth – Ertugrul.
Like Lambs To The Slaughter
(1219-1230)
What pain will it take
To satisfy your sick appetite
Go in for the kill
Always in sight-prey
The time always right-feast
Feed on the pain-taste
Sorrow made flesh-sweet
Live how you want
Just don't feed on me
If you doubt what I say
I will make you believe
Shallow are words from those who starve
For a dream not their own to slash and scar
Big words, small mind
Behind the pain you will find
A scavenger of human sorrow
Scavenger
Abstract theory the weapon of choice
Used by scavenger of human sorrow
Scavenger
So you have traveled far across the sea
To spread your written brand of misery
Death – “Scavenger Of Human
Sorrow”
The year 1219 begun on a somewhat ominous note, with the Pope Innocent
refusing to crown any of the claimants to the Imperial throne, but instead
announcing that just as Constantine gave his Empire to the Pope nine centuries
ago, it is the Supreme Pontiff that should also take on the duties of the
Emperor, as the leader of Christendom, and the infallible prelate of God.
Understandably, this did little to endear Innocent to any of the claimants, but
at the same time, did not cause an all-out assault on Italy as Innocent feared
might be the case. Much of the European armed forces were still tied up in
internecine conflicts, pouring resources and manpower into a vain attempt to
vanquish the flame of Cathars; with Jerusalem lost to the Egyptian Caliph
again, it was clear that the divine favor left secular rulers who allowed
things to sink to such a dire state.
Still, from Frederick Hohenstaufen’s point of view, the churchman in
Rome was nothing but an impostor; in fact, he had a Pope of his own that did
his bidding and that would dutifully issue proclamations denouncing the usurper
in Vatican, and the entire Sicilian ecclesiastic hierarchy that supported the
Emperor, not the renegade Pontiff. Therein was a problem; it was Sicily that
was his, not the entire Empire. Yet as long as Innocent was in charge of the
Catholic Church, the best Frederick could hope for was some sort of
reconciliation – that is, as long as the renegade Pope acclaimed him as the
rightful Holy Roman Emperor.
In the East, things continued as before, with Ergutrul’s forces dealing
a number of significant defeats against the Nicaeans, and forcing the rebel
Michael Ducas to recognize the authority of Constantinople, albeit grudgingly.
The Epirotes managed to inflict heavy defeat on the Latins, overrunning
Thessaly and forcing Morea into vassalage; desperate, the Latins turned to
Alexius VI for help, offering to recognize him as the lawful Emperor and to
join in with his forces as long as their lives, lands, and religion are
respected. Alexius was only happy to oblige, with restoration of his empire
well under way. By early 1221, the territories claimed by the Byzantines
extended into Asia Minor, southern coast of the Black Sea all the way to
Trebizond, large chunks of Thrace, and most of Macedonia.
Of course, the Imperial control of these areas was not as strong as
Alexius would have liked to believe; in Asia Minor, Michael Ducas was
constantly plotting to either regain his independence, or even to usurp the
throne; in Macedonia, the Latins, delivered from the Epirote threat, were
getting restless, getting into numerous conflicts with the local Greek and Slav
populations. The Bulgars to the northwest were another threat, their incursions
being repulsed only to come back again next year. But still, this was better
than the miserable reign of Theodore Lascaris, the Byzantines whispered among
themselves; maybe with more time, a true Renaissance might come again,
restoring the outlying provinces, and making the word of Constantinople’s
sovereign law through the Mediterranean again.
It was with this proud state that Frederick decided his future might
lay. Neither the Greeks nor the Latins living in the Balkans had much love for
the Pope or his recent antics; an offer of alliance from the “legitimate” Western
Emperor was a godsend. Not that the Eastern Emperor could realistically project
much military power; however, Constantinople, despite all pitfalls that befell
her in recent years, was still rich, and could offer some much needed financing
for Frederick’s own grand plan – final subjugation of the unruly Pope, and the
restoration of the Roman Empire in the West.
In Languedoc, however, the flames of war were further fanned by the
involvement of French king Louis VIII, who succeeded his late father Philip in
1220. Louis joined in the Crusade after its previous leader, Simon de Monfort,
succumbed to an arrow wound during a particularly difficult siege, and made it
clear that he considered these lands part of France, as opposed to being an
independent state that de Monfort’s heirs attempted to keep. An extremely
religious man, Louis saw the Pope Innocent as the true representative of God,
and led the Crusade with enthusiastic zeal, slaughtering both the Cathars and
their faithfully Catholic neighbors with little regard for telling one from
another. When a papal legate complained about a particularly gruesome execution
of one village’s entire population, it is recorded that Louis’ response was,
“God will know his own,” although to the end of his life Louis denied ever
speaking the words.
At any rate, Louis in Languedoc was bad news for Frederick, who instead
attempted to reach out further north, towards England. There, a long, bitter
civil war was being fought between despotic king John and his nephew Arthur, in
which John seemed to gain an upper hand. In early 1222, Sicilian ambassadors
were secretly dispatched towards the courts of English barons, who were not
only tired of the long, drawn out fighting, but who were also beginning to be
extremely discouraged with both claimants. As the Sicilians arrived on the
shores of Albion, even better news awaited them – Arthur was captured in France
by troops loyal to John, and summarily executed. Now, many English barons were
on the point of revolt, and did not take much persuading.
With Sicilian gold, the barons attempted to force John into signing a
document that would make him little more than a figurehead king – the Magna
Carta, granting the barons an unheard-of before right to overrule the king.
Sure enough, such powers were frequently used with the lower ranks on the
feudal ladder, but for king John, it was nothing short of an insult. The result
was another round of civil war. This time, however, the baronial envoys
listened to Sicilian suggestions to offer the throne to Louis of France, who
accepted their offer with enough eagerness that some could have suspected him,
not Frederick, of the ulterior motive.
Louis’ English campaigns are better told elsewhere; it suffices to say
that by 1226 he controlled most of southern England when a bout with dysentery
ended what could have become French supremacy of the British Isles. Ironically
enough, John followed him to the grave within weeks, not able to enjoy the
spoils of his unlikely victory; the Magna Carta was signed in the name of
John’s eleven year old son Edward by a baron-appointed regent. In a meanwhile,
Frederick was given a free hand at restoring Imperial control in Central
Europe.
Negotiations with the various German princes resumed, and with good
amount of bribery, Frederick was able to once again reestablish the league that
his Hohenstaufen predecessors led against their Welf enemies; by 1223 he was
recognized as lawful Emperor through most of Germany. In 1226, Frederick’s
forces were massing to attempt an invasion of Central Italy, and subjugation of
the Pope, when the news he was hoping for all along arrived. Innocent III was
dead.
His time as a Supreme Pontiff was a turbulent one, and not completely
successful in all respects; however, he was looked at by the number of
succeeding Popes as somewhat of a model ruler, able to keep both the Emperors
and the churchmen on a tight leash, and commanding respect, if not outright
admiration even from his staunchest enemies. He strengthened the Catholic
church immensely, creating a powerful structure that defied conventional
borders and secular rulers; ordered destruction of the heretics and brought the
haughty Easterners to their knees. This man, considered controversial even in
his time, cast his shadow across the ages to come, and formed a mold in which
the future of his faith would be forged.
Earlier in the year, Frederick’s own anti-Pope passed away; his
successor had not been chosen yet. Thus, would it not be only appropriate to
enthrone a new Pontiff in Rome itself, with the condition being a triumphal
coronation of the lawful Holy Roman Emperor? This was on Frederick’s mind as he
advanced towards Rome, meeting with little resistance except for several
diehard Italian nobles whose well-being was directly tied to the late Pope, and
who attempted to prevent election of anyone sympathetic to Frederick with a
measure of desperation.
The cardinals, however, placed their bets on one Sinibaldo de Fieschi,
a member of one of the first families of Genoa, and a man of considerable
learning and erudition. De Fieschi mounted the Papal throne as Innocent IV,
making it clear that he was going to emulate his celebrated predecessor if by
his name alone. However, the new Pope was willing to be a bit more
accommodating than his predecessor, helped not in the least by the Imperial
armies sitting on his borders.
As a Christian, he reminded Frederick, it would be his Imperial duty to
undertake a great venture into the East, where Jerusalem herself was tormented
under the heel of the Saracen, and where heathen Turks threatened the Eastern
Christendom. He would, indeed, be willing to accept Frederick as a lawful
Emperor, on a condition of a promise to lead another Crusade into the Holy
Land, to restore it back to the light of Mother Church.
While Frederick had his own reservations, the offer seemed much more
reasonable than the he expected, and with a potential for additional gains
through a Crusade, he hesitated very little before entering Rome to receive the
Imperial crown from the trembling hands of a new Pope. It seemed that very
little could stand in the way of this maverick young Emperor who stood against
the greatest Pope in recent history and emerged triumphant despite all
obstacles.
And yet despite this seemingly major victory, Frederick still
entertained doubts. For one, there was a matter of the Crusade itself, a
difficult logistical endeavor that would leave him open to his enemies at home.
For two, there was a matter of preserving his current gains, and of securing
his newly recovered Empire from further revolts of the German barons, and
further attempts by the Church to infringe upon what was rightfully Imperial
domain.
As Frederick pondered his next actions, the focus of our tale shifts
once again to the region known as Languedoc, where the brutal crusade against
the Cathars was starting to wind down due to lack of competent leadership and
internal squabbles between the crusading nobles who attempted to divide their
conquests even before they were made. Announcement of king Louis VIII’s death
was a complete shock to many, and the fact that at least two of Louis’ sons
stood in line for the throne further muddied up the waters. Under the late
king’s will, France was to be given to his eldest son, another Louis, thirteen
years old at the time; however, the queen Blanche favored another son,
eight-year-old Robert to ascend the throne, claiming that shortly before his
death, the late king changed the will so that Robert, not Louis would inherit.
The succession crisis in France gave the Cathars a much needed reprieve,
resulting in a virtual exodus of much of Cathar believers from Languedoc into
friendlier lands of Muslim Spain; while the leaders of Cathar faith frequently
chose to stay in Languedoc and face torture and mutilation at the hands of the
recently created Catholic Inquisition, a number of the Perfecti, the Cathar
preachers left with the main body of believers.
Meanwhile in Sicily Frederick II spent most of 1227 and 1228 visibly
making preparations for the Fifth Crusade, although the true nature of his
preparations had more to do with the need to properly secure his dominions, and
keep a watchful eye on the Pope. Innocent IV, while clearly not a man of his
predecessor’s caliber, was nevertheless a firm believer in clerical supremacy,
and still had all wealth and power of the Catholic Church at his disposal.
While Frederick’s Sicilians stood at the borders of the Papal State, he could
do very little; as soon as the Emperor departs on a Crusade, all bets were off.
While the Western Emperor pondered the issues at hand, his Eastern
counterpart was busy preparing for an undertaking of his own – the restoration
of mainland Greece to the Imperial rule. While the Latins made their grudging
submission, there could be no question of completely destroying their power and
risking alienating his erstwhile Sicilian ally; yet their loyalty was
questionable at best, and Alexius VI knew that given half a chance, they would
revolt, currently kept in check only by the fear of Epirotes.
Therefore, he had to tread with care. Alexius entered into a secret
arrangement with the Epirotes, offering them large quantities of tribute in
return for their help in his newest undertaking. Under the pretense of
attacking the Epirote heartland, Alexius led both the Imperial forces and the
large Latin contingent through the mountain passes into the Epirote territory,
where the Latin force was ambushed by what appeared to be an Epirote onslaught.
The result was a complete slaughter; of five thousand Latins, only two hundred
survived as prisoners of the Epirotes. The battle spelled the end of Latin
power in Greece; curiously enough, the Byzantine force claimed to have been
separated from the Latin one, and unable to come to its aid – even more curious
was the fact that there were no reported Byzantine casualties.
In Anatolia, Ergutrul’s raiders attacked Seljuk and Armenian
settlements with impunity, always returning to Trebizond loaded with plunder
and prisoners, and proving their worth many times over to sebastocrator David.
However, the experience of the past years awakened more ambitions for a
territory of his own, a great empire built on dual Turkic and Greek
foundations. It was not time yet, he thought to himself – but in his mind he
could already see himself and his successors exalted beyond their wildest hopes
and expectations. As the year 1230 rolled on, even Ergutrul himself could not
predict what turn his fate would take following the tide that loomed across the
great plains of Asia, beneath the rising sun, and that was about to storm east.
Arrival Of The Demons
(1230-1243)
Fear Factory – “Body Hammer”
By spring of 1230, Frederick II was finally ready to undertake the
promised Crusade. In a meanwhile, he had to contend with the unruly German
princes resisting his attempts to crown his own son Conrad as the King of
Germany, the title usually leading to the Emperorship itself; the machinations
of the Pope Innocent IV, who appeared to bide his time before unleashing the
animosity he felt towards his Imperial rival; and the problems in the East,
where allegations of foul play were quietly whispered in slaughter of Latin
knights in the mountains of Epirus. The promised Crusade, already delayed
several times, was almost in danger of not happening at all, prompting threats
of excommunication upon Frederick from the Pope.
With all of these issues weighting heavily on him, it is no wonder
Frederick decided upon a more diplomatic solution. In summer of 1230, his
envoys returned from Baghdad, where the Abbasid Caliph al-Mustansir granted his
demands for return of Jerusalem, as long as Frederick promised to undertake to
protect the Muslim residents of the city and Muslim pilgrims. In truth,
al-Mustansir held little real power, being more of a figurehead ruler, however,
both he and his viziers agreed that another Crusade would be too much trouble
to deal with – especially since Frederick’s terms were quite reasonable, and he
did come from a long line of rulers with strong crusading record.
To say that the Pope was outraged to hear of this arrangement was an
understatement. Not only Frederick was able to outmaneuver him again and to
resolve the Crusade without actually leaving Sicily, but he succeeded! This was
not good, to say the least, for the authority of the Pope. Unfortunately for
Innocent IV, as much as he strived to emulate his celebrated predecessor, he
was not quite up to task; the ability to stand against the Emperor required
just a tad more ruthlessness, diplomatic ability, and administrative acumen
than he himself possessed. It was said of him that he spent days wandering
around his palace, devising ideas and schemes that ultimately came to little
fruition, all the way until his death in 1232, which some say was caused by him
simply giving up on the strife against this godless Emperor. To add insult to
injury, the conclave of cardinals assembled to elect his successor was
successfully prevented from making a definite decision by Frederick’s
machinations, resulting in a stalemate that continued well into next year.
Late in 1233, the college of cardinals finally made their decision,
albeit not the one Frederick II hoped for. In late Innocent’s stead, they
elected one Ugolino di Conti, nephew of the great Innocent III, who took the
vow of Papacy and the somewhat ironic name of Clement IV. Although already aged
eighty eight, and not expected to last long, Clement was to prove an energetic,
powerful leader that the Catholic church sorely needed, and a persistent thorn
in the side of the Emperor.
At the same time, strange reports started to arrive from the east. In
1223, an army of Russian princes was crushed on the shores of river Kalka by a
previously unknown menace, a horde of steppe warriors from the northern
outskirts of China that seemed unstoppable. Various accounts of the battle
placed the blame on the cowardice of Russians’ tribal Polovets auxillaries, but
in reality, the outcome of the battle seemed to have been decided by the
inability of the princes to work together to overcome this new menace.
Surprisingly, the horde withdrew back into the wastes of Asia as quickly as
they came, leaving little but terror and questions in its wake.
Now, a slew of reports came in indicating that the kingdom of Volga
Bulgars, distant relatives of the original Turkic Bulgar tribesmen that founded
Bulgarian kingdom centuries ago, was being dismantled by concerned effort from
the same steppe warriors, known as the Mongols. In the West, Emperor Frederick
did not seem to be at the least concerned; this was the Easterners’ problem, he
thought – let them deal with it. In Constantinople, various parties debated on
how to best treat this invasion. As long as it did not trample on Byzantine
territories, the Eastern Emperor Alexius VI did not give it too much attention,
and the matter was quickly discarded.
In 1233, Alexius VI died in his sleep, only the second Byzantine
Emperor in half a century to pass on peacefully while still a reigning monarch,
and the first one to hand over the throne to his successor of choice without
the questions of legitimacy or strife since the death of Manuel I. In July
1233, late Emperor’s son Andronicus was crowned in Hagia Sophia as Andronicus
II, much to the chagrin of sebastocrator David who hoped his own son Manuel to
succeed, but to little calamity otherwise. The tension between Andronicus and
his uncle was soon resolved, after Andronicus definitely confirmed Manuel as
his successor on condition that should Andronicus have any male issue, they
would succeed Manuel. The arrangement appeared to be mutually beneficial, and
silenced the small, but vocal minority previously incited by David.
By early 1234 the last vestiges of Catharism in Languedoc were
extinguished, and fires burned high fed by both the supposed heretics and the
people who had the misfortune of living by their side. The region was by now
being incorporated into the greater Kingdom of France, many traces of its
former practical independence being erased along with its inhabitants. And the
French king Louis IX was not finished. Although still rather young, by now he
had his sights on England, where succession of short-lived child kings and figureheads
kept the kingdom in state of complete chaos. Preparations were being made for
invasion when the new Pope first started to show his mettle. He absolutely
forbid Louis to embark on this expedition, not only echoing his uncle’s belief
of Papal supremacy over the secular rulers, but also attempting to keep Louis,
a fervent Catholic, from getting too powerful and becoming a threat to match
Frederick’s. Grudgingly, Louis complied, even if he was not very enthusiastic
about the idea of putting an end to strife in England – that, of course,
through imposing his own authority and incidentally adding England to his own
domain.
In addition, Clement issued a proclamation to Frederick ordering him to
perform a great Crusade against the Saracen holdouts in North Africa. By this,
he hoped to distract the Emperor for long enough to where he could again begin
the campaign of subverting the Holy Roman Empire to subservience under the
benevolent rule of the Pontiff. After all, he thought, was not the Pontiff, and
not the Emperor, the supreme authority in the land? Time after time he reminded
himself that it was the Pope that crowns the Emperor, not the other way around;
Clement was determined to keep it so.
While the Pope was busy asserting his authority and issuing decrees to
the rulers of Christendom, the runaway Cathars found their lot much improved in
the haven of Al-Andalus, the Muslim holdout in Spain. Desperate for allies and
manpower, the Caliph of Al-Andalus offered them enthusiastic reception, as long
as they provided tribute for his coffers and men to defend his frontiers
against the ever more aggressive Christian rulers. By 1236 the situation on the
Iberian peninsula stabilized enough to where the Nasrid Caliph of Granada,
Muhammed I was able to start retaking some of the splinter taifa kingdoms and
reassert control over whatever little was left of Muslim Spain. Recognizing the
wisdom of accepting non-proselytizing dissidents and heretics from the
Christian world as loyal subjects, Muhammed covertly begun to seek other groups
such as the Cathars that faced extermination in their lands, but were willing
to relocate, providing his kingdom with newfound vitality and security. Soon,
Granada became known as one of the most cosmopolitan, multi-cultural regions in
all of Europe, with the level of tolerance for religious and ethnic minorities
unrivaled even in Frederick’s Sicily, where the skeptical Emperor chose to
overlook enforcement of Papal edicts against the Muslims and the Jews.
As for Frederick II, his promised Crusade still had not departed by
1237, enraging Clement over what he saw as blatant disregard for his authority.
Matters came to blows quickly, with furious Pope excommunicating the Emperor,
who gave the notice little regard. Curiously, in late 1237 Frederick did choose
to embark on a Crusade, apparently in open mockery of the Pope who was now
deprived of any affiliation with this endeavor.
Despite Frederick’s sailing to Carthage, Clement still was not
completely certain of his ability to put this upstart Emperor down once and for
all. After all, Carthage was only across the water, and Frederick could be back
any day, either as a conquering hero that once again raised the banner of
Christendom over the infidel lands, or, as Clement preferred, shamed, defeated,
or, better yet, dead.
As the initial reports of the Emperor’s progress started to trickle in,
Clement was disappointed. In 1238, Frederick took Carthage, suffering very
little losses in the process; by 1239 he controlled most of the surrounding territory.
Still, betting on the fact that Frederick would be preoccupied with quelling
Muslim resistance in the area, Clement ordered an invasion of Southern Italy,
which succeeded in short term thanks to the efforts of rather large French
contingent sent by Louis IX at the Pope’s insistence. The invasion was,
however, stalled at Naples, albeit at great cost in lives; besides, Frederick
was on his way back with many battle-hardened veterans of his Tunisian
campaigns, and this time he meant business.
In early 1240, after having recovered Southern Italy, Frederick
launched an invasion of Papal State, attempting to remove Clement once and for
all; however, the invasion was not the success he hoped for, and after several
inconclusive battles, representatives from both the Pope and the Emperor
arrived at negotiations table. The excommunication was lifted; however,
otherwise status quo was maintained. Neither side was willing to press too hard
to achieve an advantage, however, as there was a more pressing issue to deal
with at hand, which was seemingly threatening all of Christendom.
When the first reports of Mongol attacks on the Russian cities between
1237 and 1239 surfaced, they were of little concern to the Western Europeans,
being dismissed as yet another steppe invasion that would pillage the eastern
steppes and leave back where it came from. Better yet, when the Mongol attacks
against the Saracen states were reported, where they showed no mercy to anyone
who resisted, the Westerners could be almost forgiven for thinking this horde
was the wrath of God inflicted upon the Orthodox heretics and the infidels. It
all changed in 1240, when Batu Khan captured Kiev, the center of moribund and
fragmented Kievan Rus, and clearly decided to march further west.
The legend has it Batu was so amazed at the splendid beauty of Kiev
that he gave orders to his troops not to use their enormous siege engines, and
not to destroy any of its magnificent architecture as the great Mongol host
surrounded the capital of the Russian principality. Whether or not there was
any truth to the legend, it did little to save the inhabitants of the city;
many were slaughtered, many more carried off to slavery or other unmentionable
fates. What was even more frightening to the kings and princes of the west was
that not only the Mongols laughed in the faces of Christian missionaries, but
that it was only one of the three great hosts sent to subjugate all land until
the last sea, carrying the orders of the Great Khan in a faraway realm.
Another force smashed into the Middle East and Anatolia, devastating
all in its wake, and laying waste to much of Persia. In 1242 the Mongols under
command of Baiju took Erzerum from the Seljuk Sultan Kai Khusrau II; in 1243
they defeated the Seljuk army at Kose Dag. While Andronicus II in
Constantinople could only watch with glee at the Seljuk defeats, it became
clear to him that something must be done before entire Anatolia is overran by
the Mongol horde. In 1243, Andronicus dispatched his uncle David along with a
large contingent of Turkish cavalry under command of Ergutrul against the
Mongols; the result was nothing short of disastrous.
At Nicomedia, David’s Byzantines ill-advisedly attacked the Mongol
center, which drew away leading into an ambush. The result was a complete
slaughter. Heavy Byzantine cavalry could not catch the light Mongol horse
archers, all the while being peppered with arrows and javelins; as the sun set,
the survivors fled for their lives. David himself was not amongst them,
captured and subsequently executed by the Mongols along with his son Manuel.
The only commander on the Byzantine side to emerge from this disaster
with any sort of credit was Ergutrul, whose light cavalry were able to cover
the Byzantine retreat, and who distinguished themselves in battle by being the
last to run, and inflicting large casualties upon the Mongol force sent against
them. In Constantinople, panic ensued. Not only the route into Europe lay open
for invasion, the best and the ablest military force the Empire has been able
to assemble since the days of the original Comneni has just been completely
wiped off the face of the earth. The Mongol host cut off the lines of
communication between the capital and outlying enclaves, now accessible only by
the sea, and wasted no time in taking both Nicomedia and Brusa within months of
the battle.
When the Mongol messengers reached the Emperor in Constantinople, he
was prepared to make accommodations, acknowledging himself a tributary of the
Khan as long as the terrifying invaders left him alone. Not only that, but much
of Asia Minor was completely depopulated and ravaged, leaving only lands
surrounding Nicaea and Trebizond relatively untouched. To salvage the situation
the best he could, Andronicus invested Ergutrul with the rank of Despot of
Trebizond, hoping that his best commander would be able to maintain Imperial
control by the Black Sea coast.
This was beyond Ergutrul’s wildest hopes when he acknowledged
Trapezuntine Emperor as his overlord decades ago. A barely literate son of a
tribal chief was now a ruler of wealthy realm, nominally as a provincial
governor of the Byzantine Emperor, but as he would soon discover, practically
independent, with little way for the capital to enforce its authority. With the
Seljuks still in a state of complete disorder, and with the Mongols pacified by
large tribute, Ergutrul could pick off smaller states, principalities,
villages, and cities one by one, enlarging his dominions considerably over the
next decade. The seeds of true greatness had been sown.
Deal With The Devil (1243 –
1250)
Judas Priest – “Deal With
The Devil”
The year 1243 in the West opened up on an ominous note with the death
of Clement IV in Rome. While many were surprised to see old Clement last as
long as he did, expecting him to pass on within a year or two of his ascent to
the Papacy, even more surprising were the news of his passing, just as the
Emperor Frederick and the Pope were finally beginning to agree that the menace
of the Mongol horde, which by now ravaged Anatolia, Middle East, Russia, and
was beginning to raid the Hungarian borders was greater than the issue of whose
lead the Christendom should follow, at least for a time being. After all, if
the two could not come to an agreement of some sort, there could be no
Christendom left for them to divide or squabble over!
Over the last year of his life, Clement, knowing that the end was
coming near, begun to groom one of the younger cardinals, his nephew Rinaldo
Conti, to succeed him on the throne of Saint Peter; Rinaldo was elected Pope
without much difficulty by summer of 1243, taking the name of Alexander IV. The
new Pope was determined to continue his predecessor’s policies, and as such the
transition proved to be initially smooth; he too was aware of the danger the
Mongol invasion represented, and wasted no time in implying Frederick to
organize a crusade to wipe out this new menace from the face of Europe.
In a meanwhile, reports continued to come in of engagements in Poland
and Hungary, usually with results giving little credit to the Christian forces.
Attempts to convert the Mongol leaders were made, albeit with very little
success – it was far more common for the conquerors to chase the Christian
preachers out of their camp than to even bother to give them a listen. On the
other hand, the Mongols seemed to care very little about persecuting any
religions in conquered territories, and allowed the survivors practically a
free rein on what god or gods they chose to follow. In that, and in slaughter, they
were indiscriminate.
The only states to escape widespread devastation so far were those that
chose to pay tribute to the terrifying invaders rather than attempt to face
them on the battlefield; the Republic of Novgorod in Russia, the Byzantine
Empire and its Despotate of Trebizond, and several others that chose submission
rather than risking devastation. As the entire Western Christendom was
trembling with fear, another piece of news came in. The great Khan Ogadai, the
ruler of the entire Mongol Horde, was dead.
By then, the western borders of the Mongol Empire stretched all the way
into Poland and Hungary, just as its eastern borders were within sights of
Japan; it commanded resources of many kingdoms and countries, ruling over the
people of all faiths, origins, and creeds. It was speculated that this one
death stopped the Mongol advance in Europe as Batu Khan and other senior
commanders rushed back to Mongolia to ensure their claim on succession.
Of these, Batu had to contend with his cousin Guyuk, the son of Ogadai
the most; Batu’s own conquests, courtesy of a brilliant Mongol general Subotai
were the greatest of his competitors, however, he faced the powerful opposition
of Ogadai’s widow, who preferred her son to succeed. The succession struggle was
to last for three years, at the end of which Guyuk succeeded in assuring his
supremacy, albeit at the cost of Batu setting up a khanate of his own centered
around the Volga River, with the surviving Russian princedoms as its unwilling
vassals. Thus, Western Europe was spared the immediate attention of the horde,
even as many of its rulers did not even realize how close they came to having
to fight for the survival of the entire Christendom in the West.
No sooner the body of Ogadai grew cold as furious argument erupted
between Frederick II and the Pope. It is, the Pope believed, the right time to
strike at the heathens, and smite them from the face of the earth – and who
would be better suited to do this than a true Roman Emperor of the West?
Unless, of course, his claims were inherently false, and warranted no
recognition, and his rule no acceptance…
If anything, Frederick was understandably annoyed by Alexander’s
not-too-covert machinations at launching another crusade. His forces already
somewhat depleted from attempts to pacify Carthage and add it to Hohenstaufen
domains, he was in a dubious position of not being truly able to launch a
crusade, but also not wanting it to be launched in his stead by lesser European
rulers who might end up gaining fame, fortunes, and legitimacy to challenge him
or his children for the Imperial title.
In a meanwhile, Frederick worked hard to secure his conquests, and to
reunify the Empire. Over the preceding several years, he was forced to give
more and more concessions to his German vassals, giving the princes the rights
that were formerly solely an Imperial possession. He attempted to compensate
for the effective dissolution of his authority in the North by enforcing it in
his own domains in Sicily and Carthage, where he settled thousands of families
from German areas loyal to him; he also moved some of the conquered Arabs and
Berbers to Sicily, where there was already a significant Arab minority. The
courts of Europe were scandalized by Frederick’s apparent lack of concern over
the religion of these new subjects; in fact, Muslim Arabs ran much of his
Sicilian civil service, and provided a steady tax base for his endeavors. How
could, they asked themselves, the most Christian ruler of Europe be so debased
as to freely deal with the infidel?
At the same time, these measures helped Frederick to transform his own
domains into a more centralized, multi-ethnic state where his own control was
absolute. By then, it can be argued that he largely gave up on Germany,
accepting tenuous allegiance of its many feudal lords as a consolation prize of
sorts, allowing him to still claim it as the part of his Empire, but exercising
little real power there. Instead, his ambitions were centered on Italy.
He was the Roman Emperor, he reminded himself. And a Roman Empire that
did not possess Rome itself was an abomination, a pitiful realm with grandiose
claims, but little to back them up. He would build a new Rome, and this would
be centered in Sicily, Carthage, and Italy, not in the now forlorn lands of
Germany where petty ambition of so many insignificant princes spelled ruin for
what was to become of his Empire. His would be the rebirth of the true Empire,
under one true God, under one true Emperor, with the one true Patriarch of the
Church to watch over the souls of its people – in that exact order. Albeit
being the skeptic that Frederick was known to be, he must have thought that the
premise of the Pope having any part in the government was preposterous, to say
the least.
In summer 1246, Frederick sent an ultimatum to the Pope ordering him to
surrender his secular authority as it was clearly the Emperor’s own prerogative
to reign and to rule. Not surprisingly, Alexander IV’s answer was not a perfect
example of civility, excommunicating this wayward Emperor for the second time
in his career, and going as far as to proclaim him the Antichrist and the very
incarnation of evil that plagued Christendom. By now, weary of the constant
struggle, most European sovereigns did little to interfere. Even the most
fanatically Catholic of them, Louis IX of France was beginning to get weary of
the pervasive influence the Church had in his realm, and thus did little other
than send the Pope words of support and grudging monetary contribution.
The rest of 1246 was somewhat uneventful, as both sides mustered their
forces and allies – Frederick to invade Central and Northern Italy, and the
Pope to defend it. In early 1247, Frederick’s armies finally marched north,
taking great care in not destroying the lands or their populations for the aim
of keeping them loyal Imperial subjects after the cessation of hostilities.
Some of the cities where Guelph feeling was minimal even opened their gates to
him voluntarily, as the Papal mercenary armies proved to be of no match to
determined Sicilian Emperor this time around.
By winter of 1247, Frederick’s armies were at the gates of Rome itself,
and the Pope Alexander decided that he had to flee towards Genoa. In January
1248, Frederick entered Rome in triumph, this being his greatest achievement –
the true restoration of the Roman Empire in the West. Once again, he
established an anti-Pope of his own in Rome, who promptly renounced any claims
to secular power, being merely content with spiritual authority, which he
supposedly held at the behest of his Imperial master.
Now, with Rome firmly in his grip, Frederick set his sights further
north, where mercantile republics of Pisa, Genoa, and Venice were starting to
get restless. Pisa was the least of Frederick’s problems; the Ghibelline
feeling there ran strong, and the Pisans happily acknowledged the Imperial
supremacy in return for retaining of their autonomy and preservation of its
institutions.
The Genovese and the Venetians were another story. Genoa had strong
connections to the Pope, and sufficient power in the surrounding areas to raise
a determined army that could successfully withstand Frederick’s assault. In
addition, Venice was a powerful merchant state on its own, and willing to
defend its commercial and geopolitical interests with all its strength.
Therefore, Frederick decided on attempting to play out on the rivalry between
the two, sending ambassadors to Venice with an offer of alliance and respecting
its existing rights and privileges.
The Venetians, wary as they were of Frederick’s long-term intentions,
knew well that the situation could be very advantageous to them; they had
little love for the Pope, and even less for Genoa. Besides, they knew from
experience that no Holy Roman Emperor to date was able to found a lasting
dynasty; rumors of Frederick’s declining health gave them reason to believe
that they could squeeze all the benefits of alliance out of the insolent German
all the while keeping them after he is long gone.
In late 1249, the war for Northern Italy begun. Initial successes of
the Genovese were countered by greater resources of Frederick’s territory, and
armed neutrality of the Venetians, paid off by the Emperor not to interfere in
any way. By the middle of 1250, there was little progress on either side, as
the Imperial armies could not penetrate the Genovese defenses, and the Genovese
armies could not deal a decisive defeat to their opponent. It was then that the
Pope Alexander IV decided to take a fateful step.
In The Wings (1250-1265)
As I walk through the blackened forest
Thoughts of hate and anger fill my soul
The charred remains of the holy rollers
Scream repentance though it's far too late
I fight back the laughter at what I see
The suffering healers false destined prophecy
He didn't think yesterday of the end of his life
The brainwashed fools born again of a thousand lies
Hate filled screams break the silence
Terrifying dreams filling up your head
Blasphemy thrusting out, in the masses it reigns
The mask of hypocrisy is slowly unveiled
Fear the angels holocaust, they're screaming
Dreams of pain forever entering your head
Death and hatred loathing, on mankind it feeds
Earth is dead and gone now, we've brought it to an end
Iced
Earth – “Angels Holocaust”
The choices left to Alexander IV were somewhat
limited. On one hand, he could stay in Genoa, putting his faith into the
defenses of the Italian merchant state, and hoping that eventually his allies
would come around and decide to push the godless Emperor back to Sicily, where
he belongs. On the other hand, he could take refuge with the more dependable,
and, incidentally, more powerful state – France, to be exact. It was early in
1250 that he received an offer from the French king Louis IX to take up
residence in Paris until such time as the usurping Anti-Pope and his Imperial
master could be crushed, or persuaded to reconcile.
The risks of taking this course were
several, primary one being that the very issue of who would control
Christendom, the Emperor or the Pope, would be now at the hands of the French
king, who may or may not prove to be any better to deal with than Frederick.
Not only the Pope would be in Louis’ power, the traditional Catholic powerbase
of Italy would be given up until such time as it could be recovered – that is,
if it could be recovered at all. Alternatively, already there were disgruntled
speeches made in Genoa about the futility of war, and the need to reconcile
with the Emperor, even if it means paying lip service to Frederick’s Pope.
After all, Frederick was nearly at the gates of Genoa herself, and the city’s
resources and manpower could be put to much better ends, such as strengthening
its mercantile presence around the Mediterranean to counter that of Venice,
which was making considerable gains against Genovese colonies everywhere.
By July 1250, Frederick’s army won a major
victory that decisively swayed the Genovese opinion to the point where the Pope
was no longer feeling safe or welcome in the city. Grudgingly, Alexander
decided that the French king’s offer was the best he had, and set his course
for Paris. At the time of his unwilling escape, he did not know that he would
never see Italy again.
Late in 1250, several major developments
took place. First, the Genovese and Frederick finally made a peace deal, costing
the city-state much in terms of financial obligations, but otherwise leaving it
as an Imperial free city – basically restoring a status quo. The Venetians were
not happy about this, but at the same time, the gains in colonies they made
during the war more than compensated.
The second item of note was the curious
ceremony crowning Louis IX of France Holy Roman Emperor with full blessing and
participation of the Pope Alexander IV. Frederick chose simply to ignore this,
knowing well that he had little ability to enforce his will north of the
Apennines, and instead focused on securing his domains in Italy that he spent
so much time fighting over. Over the next two years the system of government he
utilized in Sicily was to become the staple of increasingly centralized Kingdom
of Italy, which was now truly a part of the Holy Roman Empire.
In 1252, Frederick knew that the end was
coming near. Already in very poor health after years of campaigning, and not
expecting to survive his latest bout with fever, he made orders for his son
Conrad to be crowned Emperor in Rome. Soon thereafter, he adopted the monk’s
habit and died, content that his life’s work had been accomplished.
Conrad IV faced a number of challenges to
his rule at his ascendancy, not the least of them the issue of another supposed
Holy Roman Emperor reigning in France, and the German barons’ doubtful loyalty.
His direct dominions included Sicily and most of Italy proper, in addition to
the Kingdom of Carthage, where he was the titular king, and where he attempted
to relocate more and more settlers from parts of Germany still loyal to the
Hohenstaufen. At this point, it became clear to both late Frederick and his son
that Germany was hard to hold, and even harder to please, with the ability to
project Imperial power being rather minimal; something had to be done to
salvage the situation, or at least obtain as much benefit from it as was
possible.
The first test to his reign came in late
1252, as cases of plague were first reported in the Balkans. By 1253, the
virulent, deadly plague that was henceforth known as the Black Death arrived in
Germany and Italy; by 1254 it was at the gates of Rome itself. Men noble and
commoner alike were stricken down; the churchmen prayed day and night for
deliverance, yet none came. By 1256 the outbreak of plague has largely
subsided, not reaching the proportions it would grow to a century later, but
the political damage has been done.
During this time few of the European rulers
attempted any large-scale conquests, much in fear of bringing the plague to
their lands; the long-awaited crusade against the Mongol hordes was no closer
to reality than when it was first conceived. When in 1255 the Pope Alexander
died of plague, Conrad was only too quick to point out that this must have been
heaven’s sign of displeasure with the usurping clergyman and his crowning of
the French king as the Holy Roman Emperor, the title that should rightfully
belong to the Hohenstaufen.
Using this as a relatively convenient
opportunity, Conrad declared an Imperial Diet, gathering the German princes in
Milan, and attempting to secure their loyalty and to ensure hereditary
succession being legally recognized in the Empire. In 1257, barons and princes
from all over Germany and Italy were gathered in the grand palace built
specifically for the occasion, under the watchful eye of the Emperor himself,
to discuss the future of his Empire.
The council was not what Conrad IV hoped
for. Not only the number of barons loyal enough to show up was less than he had
expected, showing him how little authority he held in Germany, but the price
they set for recognizing succession of his own first born, Henry, was steep.
The Italian barons were easier to deal with; much of Italy and Sicily were
direct Imperial domains, where Conrad’s authority was exercised without a
glitch, and where his word was law. Their German counterparts, on the other
hand, would have nothing to do with making Holy Roman Empire’s throne
hereditary unless they were given almost all of the rights that once were
exclusively Imperial prerogative – building of new cities, ability to
independently wage war or make peace without Imperial interference (which, to
be truthful, was already practically the case in Germany), gathering of the
taxes, and a variety of others.
As a result, Conrad was faced with a choice
of either giving up on changing succession rules, or making his presence in
Germany even more ephemeral than it already was. While the Western Emperor
pondered these matters and attempted to reach a decision, the focus of our
story once again shifts east, to Anatolia, where much has changed since we last
visited that part of the world.
In the years following the initial Mongol
incursion, the Byzantine power in Anatolia proper waned to a certain extent,
now with the capital controlling only Nicaea directly, and relying on the new
class of quasi-feudal barons who both administered the land and defended it
against incursions by Turks and Mongols, the Akritai. Fiercely protective of
their lands, and frequently unruly, the Akritai represented the first line of
defense for the Empire impoverished by paying off the Mongols, the Western
Empire, constant warfare, and loss of outlying territories. Emperor John III,
who succeeded Andronicus II in 1256 was unable to reverse the decline, being
known more for his obsession with religion than with interest in government;
the Emperor’s brother, sebastokrator Alexius, was not any more capable.
These were the conditions in which the
Despot of Trebizond, Ergutrul, now going by the name of David was able to
prosper. He knew well that the weakness of Constantinople meant he could act as
an independent ruler with impunity; paying lip service to the capital meant
that as long as the merchants were given safe passage, and small, almost
nominal tribute was delivered, he had free reign to do as he pleased. In 1258,
just as the news of Hulagu Khan’s sack of Baghdad reached the terrified
inhabitants of Anatolia, Ergutrul arbitrarily named his infant son Basil as
co-Despot, despite usually requiring Constantinople’s approval to do anything
of a kind. By 1260, Ergutrul’s raiders retook Nicomedia from the local Mongol
and Turkish tribes; by 1262 he won a major victory against the resurgent
Sultanate of Rum, and forced the Sultan to pay annual tribute. All the while
increased payments to the Mongol Khanate ensured that he could expand as he
pleased, taking advantage of any opportunities that presented themselves, and
taking great care not to antagonize any of the powers that might be able to
bring him down before his plans are brought to fruition.
By now, Ergutrul’s ambition found a new
outlet. Not too far to the west was the Imperial capital of Constantinople,
still sumptuous in its golden splendor even in these troubled times; the crossroads
of the world, and heart of the faith. Whoever controls the city, Ergutrul must
have thought to himself, controls the East, especially if he is augmented by
power of army and wealth of the entire Empire.
Yet, there were obstacles. Not only the Comneni,
despite their recent failings, were still popular enough to rule out a civil
war of any kind, but also Ergutrul himself was disqualified for Emperorship due
to his birth as a pagan Turk. His son, on the other hand, was born of a
Trapezuntine noblewoman, and was raised and educated as a Greek, while still
being taught in the ways of his nomadic Turkic ancestors. Thus, Ergutrul
resolved, that even if Trebizond was the end of the line for him, his son may
yet sit on the Throne of Emperors.
In the West, the Diet of Milan was at a
stalemate, as neither Conrad nor his German barons were willing to give in; as
a consolation prize of sorts, young Henry was crowned the King of Germany, but
in reality this meant very little. When, and if Henry succeeds to the Imperial
crown, Conrad knew that he would have to face the same uphill battle, made only
possible by his control of Rome, and challenged by the Franks who even now lay
claim to his rightful title. By 1262, a number of German barons practically
defected to Louis IX, claiming to recognize him as the lawful Emperor; by then
Conrad has had enough. If he could not have Germany by the force of diplomacy,
he would have it by the force of arms.
Unlike his predecessor, who almost
deliberately ignored German affair, Conrad fashioned himself after his
great-grandfather, bearing somewhat of a visual likeness to the man, as well as
certain similarity in manners and temper that made more than one contemporary
uneasy, for the memory of terrible Barbarossa was still somewhat fresh in the
minds of the Germans and the Italians – his ambition was to restore the Empire
of Barbarossa to direct rule of his family, and he was not willing to stop at
anything to achieve that. In 1265, Conrad set out north with an army of
approximately fifty thousand foot and ten thousand mounted knights, harvesting
the entire resources of Sicily and Italy for this massive expedition as the
world lay waiting.
The
Last Of The Hohenstaufen (1265-1290)
Survivor - warrior princePsychopath - making differenceArchangel - bleed crimson skies New danger - innocence lies Falling calling - the diabolicalOpen wide the gates and yellScreaming dreaming - the dark and damnableBut you just never can tellFeeding needing - the undestroyableRoll up the show beginsBlinding grinding - the undeniableThe centuries of sin Supplier - medical childSycophant - restless and wildIllusions - a timeless placeSadistic - right in your face Expressionless faces in silhouette stanceLeading the way through the death of a danceHowling in harmony hostile in keyOut on the plains of indulgence we breedScreams in the night from a chorus of fearHiding in corners the drunken one leersSeparate and down faking all in disgraceNow is the time to ask questions of faith The diabolical The dark and damnableThe undestroyable Centuries of sin
Probot
– “Centuries Of Sin”
When Conrad IV set towards retaking Germany
by the force of arms, he had several goals. First, he wanted to reinforce loyal
territories from being taken over by the French or French-leaning German
barons; second, he wanted to crush whatever remnants of Guelph insurgency still
existed in the north.; third, he wanted to restore his empire to the position
of unchallenged supreme power on the continent. From the beginning, it was no
easy task.
His first move was to reinforce the stalwart
Hohenstaufen bastions in Alsace-Lorraine, constantly skirmishing with the
French heavy cavalry due to their proximity to the French territories, and
fighting series of minor battles that failed to deter Conrad from pushing
north. By 1266, Alsace-Lorraine was once again a true Imperial dominion.
From there on, it was but a short push
towards Strassburg and Trier, both of which put up a spirited resistance, but
proved to be no match for the full might of the Imperial army. As Conrad’s army
settled into the winter quarters in the last months of 1267, the remaining
German barons vowed to protect their independence by forming an alliance of the
prominent duchies and states within Germany, where the primary players were the
duchies of Saxony, Bavaria, Thuringen, and Austria. Leading this alliance of
convenience was Charles of Habsburg, a duke of Austria, and a member of a
family only recently arriving into prominence, although they had been the
rulers of Austria for some time by now.
When Louis IX of France died of old age in
early 1268, the dukes decided that in order to combat the threat of Conrad
taking over all of their privileges, independence, and much of their lands they
needed to provide an effective counterpart to the Emperor. Thus, claiming that
upon Louis’ death the Imperial throne became vacant, and not recognizing claims
of neither Conrad nor his son Henry the dukes acted, electing Charles of
Habsburg as first the King of Germany, and shortly thereafter as a Holy Roman
Emperor as Charles IV. The German barons formerly professing loyalty to Louis
IX were quick to follow up on their pledges to Charles IV, who was then crowned
by the papal legate who made a perilous journey through lands controlled by
Conrad all the way from Paris.
To say that Conrad was outraged at the news
of this would have been an understatement. He fully expected some sort of
intrigue and cloak-and-dagger games upon his invasion of Germany, but even
knowing what to expect, this was still a bitter pill to swallow. At the
present, however, he chose to stand his ground, and to ensure his dominance in
the lands already under his control, promoting officials, reinforcing city
defenses, and conscripting local troops into his own army to prepare for his
next endeavor – the march to the east.
The French, it is true, were still a problem
to be dealt with, but the new French king Philip III was more interested in
subduing unruly barons in England and southern France than in any adventures in
Germany and Italy, so for once Conrad’s back was relatively secure, reinforced
with a straightforward bribe that sealed the agreement of Conrad’s
non-interference in French affairs in Spain whereas Philip chose to turn the
blind eye towards the pleas of German barons. In 1270, the campaign that would
decide the fate of Germany begun.
At its onset, fortunes of war seemed to
favor Conrad, who captured a number of strategically important cities and
defeated Charles’ army on two occasions, failing, however, to win a decisive
enough victory to resolve the struggle once and for all. In 1272, Conrad
decided on an all-out offensive against the Habsburg lands in Austria, hoping
to crush his primary rival’s powerbase with one concentrated blow. It is there
that the disaster struck.
In Tirol, two enemies’ forces met in the
largest scale battle of the entire war to date in the mountainous terrain where
Conrad’s superior numbers could not make significant difference. Despite that,
Conrad’s troops seemed to prevail, pushing the Habsburg army back, and
utilizing Italian infantry to great effect against Charles; it was, ironically,
not long in all contemporaries estimates before Habsburg troops would start
running when a crossbow bolt found Conrad in a thick of the melee, fatally
wounding him and leaving his retinue to carry him off the field. At first, the
Imperial army still seemed to have an upper edge, however, as soon as the news
of Conrad’s wound and apparent demise spread, many dropped their weapons and
ran, leaving their comrades to be slaughtered by resurgent Habsburg army. In
one moment, what should have been Conrad’s greatest victory turned to be his
most spectacular and devastating defeat.
He lived on for two more days, struggling in
constant agony and beset with worries about the future of his Empire; now that
the battle was lost, it seemed almost as if he had lost the will to fight on,
and gave up the ghost shortly thereafter. Now, with the Emperor dead, even
those remnants of his army that limped back to safer havens of Lorraine and
Italy lost much of their fighting spirit, and it was a crippled, broken, and
disheartened army that crawled back from Conrad’s Austrian campaign.
Looking back at Conrad’s twenty year reign,
it is hard not to feel at least some degree of sympathy for this ambitious,
driven, yet ultimately unsuccessful Emperor whose very attempt to restore the
Holy Roman Empire to its ancient glory drove it into the decades of bickering
and struggle that were to mark the inheritance his successor would receive. He
secured Italy, and made his enemies tremble at a mere mention of his name, but
at the same time proved that Germany was as good as lost for the Empire, as the
speed with which the German principalities swore allegiance to Charles of
Habsburg was second only to the speed with which news of Conrad’s passing
spread across the continent. It was left to young Henry, now Henry VII
(although it would be several years before Henry would actually receive the
Imperial crown) to maintain whatever little gains he could salvage from his
father’s untimely demise.
Nineteen years old at the time of his
succession, Henry spend much of his teenage and then adult years following his
father on campaign, often right by his side in the thick of battle. No stranger
to war, he was popular with the army, and, to a lesser extent, with nobility
and clergy of the realm who thought him potentially more dangerous than his
father for the simple fact of his militant virtues. The first problem he had to
deal with was the aftermath of Conrad’s devastating defeat. Knowing well that
the troops he had left were not enough to secure the conquests Conrad made
prior to his death, and that immediately continuing aggressive war was not an
option due to diminished forces left to him, he had to make a hard decision to
abandon most of them, and to make his stand in the Alpine passes where his
troops inferior numbers and shaky morale would be offset by excellent defensive
positions. Then, he hoped, he would be able to assemble another army in Italy,
and reinstate the German campaign his father left behind.
Henry knew that Alsace-Lorraine region,
already known for its loyalty to his family, could provide a good base to
strike from, and thus was vital if the house of Hohenstaufen were to regain
dominance in Germany; thus, he sent a large detachment of his dwindling army
under command of a loyal officer to reinforce its defenders and to keep
Habsburg forces out of the ancient Hohenstaufen domains. This, however, left him
dangerously low on quality troops, forcing him to block Alpine passes and hope
that the Habsburg army would not be able to press its advantage immediately; he
could not afford another loss like his father suffered, and worse yet, he could
not afford the rival Emperor to invade Italy and thus potentially destroy
everything Conrad IV fought for.
As the winter settled in, Henry could
congratulate himself on a relatively smooth transition of power. Already
messengers from Italian barons were arriving with oaths of fealty and promises
of reinforcements in the coming spring; the Pope in Rome agreed in principle to
crown him as soon as Henry could arrive to the city; the French king Philip III
undertook to maintain an uneasy understanding he had with Conrad as long as
Henry promised not to interfere in Spain and England. All in all, there was
more than a glimmer of hope when spring 1273 finally came, and Henry sent for
promised reinforcements to continue his campaign to subdue Germany once and for
all.
At the first sight of the reinforcements,
Henry realized that his problems were much more severe than he thought. Both
the number and the quality of troops sent from Italy were significantly
inferior to what he was expecting; there was no question of continuing the campaign.
Enforcing his authority in Italy by the force of arms was out of questions as
well, as that would leave him vulnerable to the attack from the Habsburgs and
their allies.
At that point, an offer came from Charles
IV, demanding Henry to surrender his claims to the Imperial title, and allowing
him to remain as the King of Sicily; Rome itself and the surrounding
territories, along with most of the former Papal States, were to be returned to
the Pope Urban IV, now residing in Paris in a relatively uncomfortable
situation of surviving on French king’s sufferance; the Hohenstaufen lands in
Germany were to be given to one of Henry’s younger brothers. Henry’s reaction
was not hard to imagine.
This was the reversal of everything his
father, grandfather, and great-grandfather fought for; under no circumstances
was the offer acceptable. Henry responded with an offer of his own, telling
Charles to go back into his lands and abandon the claims which he made at being
Roman Emperor – indeed, he could be an Emperor of the pigs or the cows, because
that would be the only thing he and his like are worth. And, Henry’s message
continued, should Charles want to press his claims, Henry would be delighted to
meet him face to face and stain his steel with Habsburg blood.
In reality, there was little real power
behind the bravado young Hohenstaufen displayed. As of 1273, he still had not
been properly crowned, and had not been in Italy since the beginning of his
father’s campaigns. Some of the Italian and German barons were on the point of
revolt; others had already revolted away to Charles and his promises of
absolution and forgiveness. The Venetians and the Genovese were troublesome,
demanding further concessions in return for their loyalty; the only ones whose
loyalty Henry did not doubt were the Pisans and the Sicilians.
And yet the figure of Henry VII, much like
that of Richard Coer-de-Lion almost a century before him created much
admiration in those that followed him, and generated a semi-mythological legend
of a gallant warrior prince, ruthless and courageous in war, yet magnanimous
and forgiving in times of peace, honoring the memory of his father whom he
sought to avenge, and defending the Empire from those who would conspire to
tear it from within. It is hard to distinguish fact from fiction with the
larger-than-life figure of Henry VII presented in troubadour ballads and
historical chronicles (incidentally, most of which were written decades after
his passing), but when whatever little pieces are certain are discerned, we see
a shape of a man in a desperate struggle to maintain what his ancestors fought
and died for, and to restore the ideals they held, whether or not it was
realistic or even remotely plausible.
It is also worth of note that despite
Henry’s reputation as a great warrior, the list of his military achievements is
surprisingly short. Where he excelled with personal valor and fighting ability,
he came short in tactical acumen and ability to create and execute long-term
strategies, which proved his undoing in the end. While he was idolized by the
soldiers serving under his command, he commander at best a lukewarm reception
from the clergy, and was frequently rebelled against by the nobles. It is thus that this aspiring, yet imperfectly
capable prince ascended the throne and begun his eventful reign.
Any hopes of reconciliation with Charles
broken, Henry mustered whatever resources he could find, including large
numbers of mercenaries, and marched back into Germany. This undertaking nearly
bankrupted the Imperial treasury, and led to riots even in the loyal Imperial
cities in Sicily due to high taxes imposed by the Emperor to finance his war
effort. Worse yet, Europe was scandalized to hear that Henry was employing
Egyptian, Mongol, and Turkic mercenaries in his German campaign, most of whom
were either Muslims or pagans. How could it be, the people of Europe asked
themselves, that this supposedly “Holy” Roman Emperor is using heathens and
heretics against Christian lands?
In 1274, Henry fought a pitched battle
against the Habsburg forces, narrowly defeating them and reinforcing at least
some semblance of order in his dominions. He knew that the stalemate could not
last for much longer; already the French king was hungrily eyeing the rich
provinces of Alsace-Lorraine, ready to renege on their earlier deal at the
first opportunity; the Italians, currently kept in check by the news of his
victory, could rebel at any time; the outlying kingdoms of Jerusalem and
Carthage, long Imperial possessions, were threatened by the Muslim and Mongol
incursions, the former barely holding out, and the latter suffering from large
contingents of troops that would have normally protected it being instead
redirected to support Henry’s war effort. The war had to end quickly if there
were any pieces to be left to be picked up from the overall chaos.
With the French king stepping in to mediate,
negotiations between Charles and Henry finally begun in spring of 1275. At
first both sides were unwilling to compromise, in no doubt due to some harsh
rhetoric exchanged earlier, but eventually the pressure of continuing the war
neither was able to sustain for much longer forced an agreement to be forged.
Charles IV was to be given the title of Caesar, or Kaiser, and would give one
of his daughters in marriage to Henry, stopping just short of recognizing
Charles’ Imperial claims; the Imperial title was to be kept elective, and would
remain in Henry’s possession. Germany was diplomatically declared to be
“administered” by the Kaiser – essentially the admission that Henry had little
power north of the Apennines. The situation with the two Popes was left
unresolved, diplomatically stating that the Church matters should be decided by
the Church – yet there was no doubt that the situation in the Holy Roman Empire
most resembled a powder keg ready to explode, and that the agreement between
Henry and Charles was not as much a peace deal as it was a truce to allow them
both to gather strength for the following round.
Late in 1275 Henry returned to Italy, having
not been in the peninsula since when he was but a child. He was duly crowned in
Rome to a reception of a large crowd, and immediately went ahead about the
business of reinforcing the Imperial authority that had already been in danger
of collapsing in some of the outlying areas. He found it to be a more difficult
affair than he had expected, as crippling taxation and forced drafting of men
into the army depopulated some rural areas, and impoverished some of the
cities, while the local Italian nobles ruled in his stead as practically
independent princes, secure in knowledge that Henry needed their support to
keep the throne.
With this in mind, Henry announced in 1276
that he intended to have the Empire’s permanent capital established in Rome.
The reasons for this were twofold. Not only it would do much to strengthen his
prestige diplomatically across the continent, but it was easier to keep an eye
on potentially disloyal Italian barons and always troublesome Venetians and
Genovese. Over the next four years he rarely ventured outside the capital,
preferring to maintain status quo while he rebuilt his strength and reinforced
the neighboring territories, initiating large-scale fortifications projects in
Rome, Ravenna, Palermo, and Naples as well as building fortresses, expanding
cities, and strengthening his army which by now consisted of a moderately
sized, but loyal and capable core of veterans that went through German campaign
and came back in one piece. It was Henry’s intention to build up an army that
was loyal to him and him alone, without regard for provincial or ethnic
loyalties; to this effect, he established Imperial recruiting grounds in all
major cities, drafting a quota of able-bodied men for term of twenty years,
after which they would be given land in parts of the Empire that were left
chronically depopulated by warfare and plague.
While war tore Germany apart, the Eastern
part of Christendom was struggling with its own, no less formidable problems.
The passing of Byzantine Emperor John III opened the way to the throne for
Manuel II, his nephew, who proved to be much more ambitious and forceful ruler
than his predecessor. Knowing full well that the Western Emperor was in no
shape to retaliate, Manuel ceased to pay him tribute, attempting to strengthen
his financial situation and to enforce true Imperial dominion in the Balkans
and Anatolia, where Ergutrul’s continuous warfare enlarged his domain
considerably. By 1268, most of the Mongols were gone from Anatolia or were
assimilated into unruly Turkic tribes that still thrived in the interior; the
Sultanate of Rum, long moribund, was not able to exercise any real authority.
As such, Ergutrul practically had a free hand in conquering various tribal
territories, and making them pay tribute to the Despot of Trebizond – not to
the Emperor in faraway Constantinople.
In 1270, Ergutrul inflicted a serious defeat
on the forces of Sultanate of Rum that attempted to stop his predations; as a
result, the Sultan was once again forced to pay tribute and acknowledge his
vassalage to the Empire – in this case, however, the Empire practically meant
the Despotate of Trebizond, no matter what the actual agreement said. Three
years later, matters finally came to blows as Manuel II became increasingly
suspicious of his erstwhile subject’s true intentions, and demanded that some
of the most lucrative territories in Asia Minor, currently under Ergutrul’s
“protectorate” would be ceded back to direct control from the capital.
Ergutrul, who by then felt practically as an
independent ruler, demanded that Manuel give the hand of one of his daughters
to his own son, Basil, who accompanied his father on most campaigns and already
showed some promise of being an excellent soldier, and inspiring leader,
despite only being sixteen years old at the most. Needless to say, Manuel was
enraged that his vassal, and a pagan-born Turk nonetheless made such a demand
to him, the descendant of great Alexius I, and the man able to trace his
bloodline for many centuries; yet Ergutrul’s accomplishments were undeniable,
and to spurn him meant nothing short of civil war.
It is ironic that the Empire that has
attempted to remove the Turkish menace from Anatolia ended up being so
completely dependent on the ability, talent, and conquests of one Turk to where
even the Emperor himself had to heed his vassal in order to maintain peace. At
the same time, letting Ergutrul maintain such degree of control could have
disastrous consequences for the Comnennian dynasty, and for many of the Greek
aristocrats whose position in the government largely depended on their
connections with the ruling house. Therefore, a plan was hatched.
Manuel, in truly Byzantine fashion, would
agree to the proposed marriage, but cite his daughter’s young age as the reason
for his unwillingness to conduct it immediately. Instead, the marriage would be
conducted upon Anna Comnena’s reaching the age of fifteen, which would not
happen for another three years. In three years, Manuel figured, Ergutrul, who
was already in his mid-seventies, might be dead, and Basil would not be able to
negotiate from position of strength. And even if he were still alive, a wedding
ceremony would provide a perfect occasion for the Imperial assassins to sneak
in and to eliminate this dangerous threat to the throne – both of them, in fact.
In Manuel’s mind, keeping the throne in the dynasty, and destroying the Turkish
upstarts once and for all was worth sacrificing his daughter.
Ergutrul, sensing danger, reluctantly agreed
to an arrangement, but not before ensuring that his son would automatically
obtain the rank of Caesar and be recognized as a Despot in his own right upon
either the event of Basil’s marriage, or Ergutrul’s death, whichever would come
first. Over the course of the next three years, he made sure to train Basil in
the business of government, warfare, and diplomacy, instilling a sense of
purpose in the young man who now aspired to reach higher than his father
thought possible decades ago – to the Imperial throne itself.
In 1279, the marriage of Basil “the Turk”,
as he became known to the annals of history and Anna Comnena, the daughter of
Manuel II was solemnized in Nicomedia in the presence of the Emperor himself.
During the subsequent festivities, eighty-one year old Ergutrul complained
about not feeling well; within an hour or so, he retired to his quarters where
he expired shortly thereafter. While the official cause of death was determined
to be simply the old age, Basil suspected poison, rightly so, and sneaked out
of the city with few trusted companions and his new wife, heading for Trebizond
where he could be safe until such time as to unseat Manuel and his family from
the Throne of Emperors and to avenge the murder of his father.
Ergutrul was an odd figure, a Christianized
Turk who rose from being a simple tribal chieftain to the founder of a dynasty.
It could be argued that had he aligned himself with a different power, he could
never have risen as far as he had, but then it would be merely theoretical
speculation, as the memory of his name was revered amongst his descendants, who
took the surname Ergutrulos, in reference to his original name prior to his
baptism.
In light of these events, Basil acted more
to guard his borders and to pretend loyalty whereas in fact he was looking for
the first opportunity to strike against his master. Even if he could defeat the
Imperial army in the field, he wanted to cause as little damage as possible,
preferring instead to use the army’s strength and wealth of Imperial coffers
for himself instead of draining it during the inevitable conflict; besides. His
chance to strike came earlier than he expected, in 1282, when Manuel’s son
Andronicus deposed and blinded his father, mounting the throne as Andronicus
III.
Basil flat out refused to recognize the
usurper, and had himself proclaimed Emperor by his troops in Trebizond, basing
his claim on his kinship to the Comneni via his wife. As dissent was ripe in
Byzantine Europe and Asia Minor, Basil’s army swelled as it passed towards the
capital, where terrified Andronicus III attempted to reach reconciliation with
his former servant to no avail. Betrayed by his own lieutenants, Andronicus was
summarily caught and executed in late 1282 as Basil III Ergutrulos, also known
as Basil the Turk finally achieved that which he set his sights on long ago –
the Imperial throne itself.
The Western Emperor Henry VII could afford
little time contemplating what events in the East could surmount to for him.
Already trouble was brewing in the West, where despite continuous assurances to
the contrary, Charles of Habsburg was building up his armies and making secret
pacts not only with the German barons, but with the outside powers as well,
securing assistance from the French king Philip III and the kings of Hungary
and Poland. Henry could only watch impotently as his own attempts on reaching a
meaningful alliance with any of major European powers were either outright
rebuffed, or amounted to nothing but flowery praise and empty promises as the
very same powers who he contacted had attempted to either stay as far as
possible from the conflict, or benefit from what they believed would be Henry’s
almost certain defeat.
Yet, Henry was far from hopeless, at least
in his own mind. Once again much of Italy was securely under his dominion, and
his army was finally rebuilt to the strength it had known under Conrad. Despite
the urgent need to spare troops to protect far-flung lesser kingdoms of
Carthage and Jerusalem, latter reduced basically just to the city itself and
the surrounding villages, he could still muster a force with which he believed
he could successfully defend Italy from enemy incursions and, God willing,
carry the war once again into the enemy territory.
As it happens, Charles had other plans.
Despite nearing sixty years of age, he lost none of his shrewd political acumen
that gathered German princes under his lead, and if anything, his ambitions
were only growing with time. Despite Henry’s strong hold on Italy and Sicily,
he was far outclassed by Charles when it came to the subtle arts of diplomacy,
insidious backstabbing, and navigating the seas of politics with uncanny
precision. More so the greater difference between the two had been the method
of governance of their domains, and the means by which they hoped to control
the Empire both considered their own.
Like his predecessors, Henry shared the
vision of the united Roman Empire of the West, one and indivisible, protected
by God and by the might of the Emperor. There was no place for dissent; all of
the Empire was his duty and his possession, and every man, woman, and child in
its territory was answerable to him, not to any of the lesser lords. Charles,
on the other hand, was a pragmatist, perhaps one of the most cynical figures of
his day and almost certainly without much in the way of higher ideals. Just as
the German barons elevated him to position of authority, they could take him
down just as easily if he infringed upon their privileges and practical
sovereignty. Even though he was indeed the strongest of them all, he still
could not stand against the combined might of his erstwhile allies, especially
given that they could switch their allegiance to Henry in the event of being
dissatisfied with his attempts to enforce central authority. As a result,
Charles spent more time in his own domains in Austria, and in general based his
rule on the power the Habsburg family held, essentially being the first among
(relatively) equals in Germany as opposed to the autocrats that the
Hohenstaufens attempted to be.
It was not only the question of who would
rule the Empire, then; it was also the question of how it will be ruled, and
what will become of it. Tensions reached the boiling point in early 1283 when
after a particularly nasty exchange of words between two rival Popes the Emperor
Henry ordered that his own puppet head of Church, Marcellus, be recognized as
the only true Pontiff, his opponent Urban IV relegated to the status of a
heretic and excommunicate. Not surprisingly, Charles, a staunch Catholic and
supporter of Pope-in-exile in Paris renounced all ties to the Emperor, and, on
the top of it, invited Urban to his own lands. To add insult to injury, Urban
proceeded to personally crown Charles as the Holy Roman Emperor, which to Henry
meant only one thing – declaration of war.
Even more disheartening to Henry was the
fact that the French king decided to join on Charles’ side, contributing money
and troops to the rebel in hopes of obtaining some of the former Hohenstaufen
territories bordering his own kingdom; the Hungarians and the Poles soon
followed suit. When the first enemy troops trickled down into Italy through
secret mountain passes, defeating small forces Henry stationed there to guard
pathways to his Empire, things looked bleak for the Hohenstaufen.
On Henry’s side, he could count precious few
allies. The Pisans and the Sicilians were the only ones Henry could reasonably
trust; the Venetians, despite their promises of support, were already making
deals with the Habsburgs in preparation of their domination of the Empire. The
Genovese, always unreliable and troublesome vassals in best of times, openly
proclaimed for the Habsburgs, knowing that Charles’ army was not far off, and
that a chance of Henry being able to lead a punitive expedition was slim at
best.
In two separate engagements near Milan,
Henry’s troops were defeated by a slight margin, however, he regrouped and
retreated back into Tuscany, where he spent the winter knowing that the
Austrians and the French were not far off. During the winter, more territories
declared for Charles, resulting in mass
desertion of barons from Henry. He needed a victory, and he needed it fast, if
he were to reclaim the loyalty of Central and Northern Italy, and to have a
chance of stopping the Habsburg juggernaut before it becomes an invincible
flood, ready to sweep away his empire once and for all.
Much of 1284 and 1285 was spent in
maneuvering opposing forces in Northern Italy, including Charles’ failed
invasion of Tuscany that gave Henry the exact victory he needed to convince the
barons that he still has a good chance of winning the war, and Henry’s
unsuccessful attempt to lure the Habsburg and French armies into an engagement
at Pisa, which resulted in much damage to the trading republic, but failed to
annihilate either force.
The breaking point of the war came in 1286
near Ravenna, where Henry’s heavy cavalry was lured into a headlong charge
against the Habsburg infantry only to be surrounded and mostly slaughtered by
the Swiss pikemen mercenaries in Austrian service. The remaining troops,
despite constant encouragement by Henry and his attempts to turn the tide of
the battle, lost heart and ran, resulting in a crushing defeat similar to that
Henry’s father Conrad sustained at the hands of Charles fourteen years prior.
The consequences of the Battle of Ravenna for Henry VII were nothing short of
catastrophic.
Almost overnight entire regions changed
allegiance, leaving Henry in control of only Apulia and Sicily. Rome itself,
though supposedly an Imperial capital and heavily garrisoned by Sicilian
troops, revolted, making the Pope Marcellus flee for his life; he was captured
outside of the city gates and presented to victorious Charles IV who made his
entry into the city shortly. Marcellus was then tortured in a very gruesome
manner, mutilated, and paraded through the streets of the city before being
thrown into the dungeons where, it is said, he was tearing his own flesh when
the pangs of hunger overtook him before finally starving to death.
After the news of Marcellus’ unfortunate demise
reached Henry, his heart sank. In vain he sent embassy after embassy to Charles
attempting to reach reconciliation of any kind, offering even to abdicate the
throne on condition that his infant son Manfred could continue on as the King
of Sicily. This was all to no avail. Like a hound, Charles had the smell of
blood in his nostrils, and the taste of burning flesh on his tongue; here was
the chance to finish off his long-time enemy once and for all. Naples held off
bravely until late 1287, but was eventually starved into submission by Charles
who punished the city most severely for its courageous, if foolhardy
resistance, earning a nickname for himself by which he was to be known
throughout history – Metzger, or The Butcher, ordering the slaughter of all
population except for relatively lucky few who were sold into slavery.
As Charles’ terrifying reputation spread,
Henry could only hope to use his still somewhat powerful fleet to prevent the
Habsburg from crossing into Sicily and keep at least some of his domains,
however, with the Genovese providing a fleet of their own that easily surpassed
Henry’s, he had only one place left to turn to – the Republic of Venice, the
last of the merchant city-states of Italy that did not officially declare for
Charles (albeit, it should be noted, it did enter into a secret arrangement
with the Habsburg to provide him with financial support as long as he did not
attack Venice or her colonies).
The Venetians’ price was steep, but at this
stage Henry was desperate and ready to promise everything and anything to
anyone who would provide him with much needed respite. Early in 1289 the
Venetian galleys appeared to reinforce struggling Sicilian fleet.
By then, however, it was too late. A mere
four days before the Venetians’ arrival the Genovese attacked the Sicilian
navy, utterly eliminating it and landing large Habsburg army on the island.
Henry, barricading himself in Syracuse, could only hope that some miracle would
come to provide deliverance for him and his house. The Venetian galleys could
have been just that exact deliverance he hoped for.
In April 1289, Henry boarded the Venetian
galley with his son, wife, and small retinue of loyal retainers as a broken and
sad man. Although he was treated with respect and dignity, it did little to
lift his mood. The empire he struggled so hard and for so long to preserve was
gone; an era was over. The best he could hope for, he knew, was exile in some
godforsaken castle, where his every step would be watched and his contacts
limited to servants and peasants; the worst was something he did not even want
to imagine. As the ship took him northward to Venice, he must have pondered his
fate and the future not only of himself, but of his family.
At the same time, in Venice there was a
heated debate on what should be done next. While the Venetians did not want to
alienate or anger Charles IV, they were aware that the best way to stay on his
good side is to do away with his enemy, once and for all. Besides, having a
Hohenstaufen in their hands could prove to be a very useful political tool, not
to mention that a Hohenstaufen completely dependent on Venice would not dare to
do anything that would displease the Serenissima.
Thus, the year Henry VII spent in Venice was
probably tense for him at best, his status being uncertain. Was he a ruling
monarch amongst the loyal subjects, or an exile whose sorry state is masked by
visible honors flaunted at him? And then, was he merely a pawn in a chess game
of the cunning Venetians, or was he a prisoner, awaiting for his time to run
out? Early in 1290, Henry’s wife, Maria of Habsburg died, thus convincing him
that the last link that could have led to his safety from her father Charles
was gone. At the same time, Henry’s retainers came forward to him with the
rumors that the Venetians had reached a deal with Charles to surrender the
former Emperor to his most irreconcilable enemy; then, Henry knew that it was
time to leave and hope that he could find refuge at the court of the Eastern
Emperor, as Jerusalem was on the verge of falling to the Saracen, and Carthage
descended into relative lawlessness, its barons openly aligning themselves with
Charles.
Unfortunately, Henry could not know that as
he was making the plan of his escape, the Venetians were watching, capturing
him before he could even leave the city. The next morning, an ornately
decorated galley carried another visitor into the city – Emperor Charles IV of
House Habsburg, surrounded by retinue of his elite Austrian knights, arriving
to Venice to settle an old score once and for all.
It is said that when Charles presided over
Henry’s execution in front of Saint Mark’s chapel, he made a remark that at
this point, Henry would gladly agree to be the Emperor of pigs and cows, except
that even these lowly beasts would not have him stain their ranks, making a
reference to the letter Henry sent to him years ago. We do not know if Henry
found it ironic as the executioner’s axe separated his head from his body; but
he sure must have found it disappointing.
Uncertain
Legacy (1290-1310)
To be
green in the beautiful hour of envy so divine
To be pure, to let chance form your infinite design
Let the seed awakening begin again
I hate the way you judge me
I hate that you’re above me
Can’t humanity reach a certain point of understanding?
Why do we live this way?
Why do we have to say the things that subvert the minds of youth?
Why is the world unborn as crashing seas still form?
The vision of the future is of blood
As we face the bleak horizon under crushing skies
The truth belying a future uncertain and dark
We are but one small race, all wear a human face
Yet our image is imperfect and flawed
Nevermore
– “A Future Uncertain”
When Charles IV of Habsburg entered Rome as
the now-undisputed Emperor, the atmosphere of somewhat forced cheering and
overall apathy in the crowds gathered by the local nobles to greet him only
underlined the problems he had to face in ruling the Empire. Not only the
barons whose support elevated him to his present position were unruly at the
least, they all demanded further concessions now that their protégé was in
charge of the Empire, threatening disobedience or outright rebellion should
Charles decide to play autocrat like his predecessors attempted to. Moreover,
the Pope was demanding return of Rome and territories of the Papal States,
which was a source of tension between Charles and Henry even before the latest
round of the civil war, and which Charles now had to decide what to do with.
Further on, there was a problem of Manfred
Hohenstaufen, Henry’s son and Charles’ grandson. As long as he lived, he could
provide a rallying banner for Hohenstaufen loyalists, and thus threaten a
danger of civil war again – on the other hand, he was Charles’ direct blood
kin, and thus could be used not only to pacify the regions still exhibiting
loyalty to the Hohenstaufen, but also to strengthen the position of Habsburg
family in the Empire. With Manfred being the legitimate heir to the Kingdom of
Sicily, Charles could potentially keep more direct control over the island and
southern Italy.
These were some of the problems Charles must
have pondered on as he entered Rome in late 1290 with a large portion of his
army as a precaution against any local plotters or Hohenstaufen loyalists. The
first order of business for him was to install Urban IV as the legitimate Pope
in the ancient Papal palace in the city, and to arrange for another ceremony of
coronation, this time performed in the Imperial city itself. Once the ceremony
was over, both the Emperor and the Pope knew that the current peace was fragile
at best, and the issue of Papal States needed to be resolved right away if the
current league assembled against the now-dead Henry was to transform itself
into a new incarnation of the Holy Roman Empire.
Charles was fully prepared to concede Rome
to the Pope, knowing that his own lands were too remote from Rome to exert any
real influence without dangerously overstretching his forces and exposing his
position to his erstwhile allies who would almost certainly take advantage of
his weakness should such emerge. At the same time, he had his own reservations
about making the Pope a true secular ruler with enough power to challenge the
Emperor himself – not to mention the question of feudal obligations of the
Emperor to the Pope, which the Hohenstaufens of recent simply ignored. If the
former structure of the Empire were to be restored, an arrangement had to be
made.
The main problem in the issue of the Papal
States was the Papal demand of territory in Central Italy, which Charles was
unwilling to give; it was only reduced lands around Rome itself that were
eventually conceded to the Papal administration, and even then Urban had to use
every kind of diplomatic guile he could muster and every bit of resolve to
obtain what he got, invoking the Emperor’s feudal obligations and his duty as a
good Catholic in addition to other things, playing upon Charles’ superstitions
and conscience and threatening excommunication if at least some of his wishes
were not met. It was only the mention of the massacre in Naples and refusal of
absolution that made aging and increasingly more paranoid Charles allow the
Papal States to be reinstated.
At the same time, Charles took a different
approach with the barons that supported him so far and whose involvement helped
to decide the fate of the civil war. The increased autonomy of the barons was
the price Charles had to pay for the Imperial throne, and the price he paid
willingly – almost too willingly, some wondered. At the same time, Charles took
opportunity to increase his own dominions exponentially, appointing his
children, nephews, and grandchildren to various duchies and baronies left
vacant by the civil war, or belonging to Hohenstaufen loyalists. Thus, while
the barons seemingly got what they were up in arms for, Charles was now truly
the most powerful of them, and did not depend on his Imperial title to exercise
authority, rather advancing the cause of the Habsburg family and preparing it
for dominant position in Germany.
The Kingdom of Sicily was another prize that
was too wealthy, too tempting to be ignored by the winner. True, Manfred was
the legitimate heir, but this was an opportunity was too good to miss, and when
on morning of February 18, 1291 Rome awoke to the news of Manfred’s death, few
doubted how it came about, although even fewer dared to voice their suspicions
and guesses for the fearsome reputation Charles earned during the civil war.
Charles was none too quick to announce that since he was Manfred’s grandfather
and the Emperor, he was the only authority qualified to dispose of his kingdom
as he saw fit. Understandably, some of the barons and the Pope were able to
easily see through rather thin disguise, however they were silenced by rich
presents, donations of land in Marches region to the Papal state, and, for the
most disagreeable, threats of destruction; thus, Charles had little opposition
when he announced that his grandson Rudolph should inherit Sicily as Manfred’s
cousin and one of his closest relatives.
With Manfred’s passing, the legitimate male
Hohenstaufen line came to an end; his sisters were either sent into varying
convents, or married off to Habsburg cousins in order to keep any outsiders
from potential claims on Hohenstaufen legacy. An era was over; an age of
Imperial dominance when the Western Empire was the centralized power able to
enforce its authority in the Mediterranean world; an age when the restoration
of Rome in the West seemed almost a certainty, and Papal and baronial power
appeared irrepairably broken. The Western world would not see another series of
rulers like the Hohenstaufens for many years; those that followed them would
stand by a different model of governance, being less concerned with the
increasingly more romanticized ideal of restoration of the Roman Empire in the
West, and more interested in their own petty domains and propagation of their
own houses above the ideal of the Empire as a unified whole.
Yet at the time, few realized the importance
of the events that transpired between 1286 and 1291, truly believing that Henry
and his like were simply to be replaced by Charles and his kin as the rulers of
fundamentally same state, commanding the same loyalty of the territories and
the barons and still being the supreme autocrats of the West. It would be quite
some time before the true state of affairs, that of the Empire being a loose
collection of individual princedoms tied together more through formality than
through true obedience of the feudal nobles to the Emperor. Even the Habsburg
domains, by far some of the largest amongst the nobles, were not a guarantee of
continued dominance, merely the powerbase of an individual family as opposed to
the Imperial heartland.
From 1291, Charles had two more years to
live, dying in 1293 at the age of seventy four, reigning Emperor, and the first
to die peacefully in his own bed since Frederick II’s passing more than four
decades ago. The subsequent election of the new Emperor begun as a drawn-out
political struggle escalating into small-scale armed confrontations between more
enthusiastic supporters of various candidates who presented themselves as
qualified to succeed to the throne.
Eventually, the electors agreed on candidacy
of one Adolf of Nassau, a rather unremarkable individual, and not offensive to
either of the prominent parties; while the potential Habsburg candidate, Albert
would have been very likely to secure the election, the Habsburgs carefully
distanced themselves from it, knowing that Adolf was unlikely to cause any kind
of problems, and that their own power was dependent more on their own estates
than on the Empire. For a time being, the Habsburgs were content with expanding
their own estates and influence while avoiding antagonizing the German barons.
Besides, Adolf of Nassau was already well into his sixties, making it almost
certain that most of the eligible Habsburg males would be likely to outlive him
and to be able to stand for election of the next Emperor.
With Adolf I departing towards Italy to be
properly crowned, let us take leave of the West, and put our attention towards
the Eastern portion of Christendom – the steppes and fields of the Russian
lands, to be precise. Once the initial shock of the Mongol invasion and Russian
states’ destruction or submission to the terrifying new invaders has somewhat
subsided, several native states attempted to gather the pieces of what once was
Rus, sometimes surviving only on their Mongol overlords’ sufferance, but
nevertheless harboring ambitions limited only by somewhat disheveled state of
their military and economic power.
Of these states, three were the most
prominent. The first one, the princedom of Muscowy, occupied some territory
around the city of Moscow, strategically utilizing their connections with the
Mongol khans to obtain various concessions, including even Mongol military
assistance against the more unruly Russian princes, and rights to administer
some of the territories technically in the Mongol domain, but practically under
Muscovite suzerainty. The second, the ancient trading state of Novgorod,
covered the largest area by far, having bought off the Mongols with enormous
tribute its wealthy merchants could afford, and thus suffering the least under
the Horde’s yoke. Already Novgorod repulsed numerous incursions by the Swedes
and German knights of the Livonian order into its territories, all the while
bribing the Mongols into non-interference and cultivating dynastic ties between
its princes (who were, for the most part, figureheads, with the real power
belonging to the Veche, as the assembly of the city’s leading merchants was
called) and many of the prominent nobles of Europe.
The third, and by far the smallest remaining
major Russian state was that of Tver, just south of Moscow, and until recently
a colony of Novgorod, now achieving prosperity previously not thought of due to
its terrain being extremely well suitable to defend against the Mongol
all-cavalry army, and due to the influx of refugees from the devastated areas
in the southern portions of former Rus dominions. Still in possession of
numerous ties to Novgorod, Tver soon became a major center of commerce in the
region, and, incidentally, was considered to be the most troublesome by the
Mongols, as some of its rulers made it no secret that their ultimate goal was
the expulsion of the Horde from Rus lands altogether.
While diplomacy and trade between these
three powers flourished, conflict inevitably followed. By far the most intense
rivalry was between Moscow and Tver, as both cities were relatively young, ruled
by ambitious series of autocratic princes (although, to be fair, Tver’s
long-standing special relationship with Novgorod made some of its institutions
more liberal and republican in nature, including the establishment of its own
Veche, which, however, held considerably less power than the one in Novgorod
while the prince of the city was the one truly holding the reins), and
determined to expand at each other’s expense.
In 1295, war broke out between the two, in
which Moscow used Mongol mercenaries to great furor over the Russian people.
How could it be, they said, that a state which would throw these invaders out
is invaded by the Russians willingly cooperating with the heathen barbarians?
Novgorod covertly assisted Tver through shipments of money and “volunteers” to
fight the Muscowites, who sued for peace in 1297, paying significant
reparations and agreeing to recognize the ability of Tver’s rulers to style
themselves “Grand Prince” (“Velikii Knyaz”), previously only the prerogative of
rulers of long-gone Kiev and Vladimir that passed on to Muscowy in the perilous
years following the invasion of the Mongols.
While the war did little to change the
overall situation in Russia, it signaled several important developments. First,
it broke Moscow’s pretensions at being the only legitimate successors to the
Kievan Rus’ of old with Tver’s Mikhail II assuming the title of Grand Prince.
Second, it strengthened the fledgling state to the point where the situation in
Russia was more than ever resembling a three-party stalemate hanging in an
uneasy balance, not giving preference to either of the involved parties. And
finally, and most importantly, it was the first time the Russian state was able
to fend off the Mongol army – even if the Mongol army was only scattered regiments
of mercenaries fighting on Moscow’s side. That did wonders for the morale of
Tver’s citizens, and for the state’s international reputation, even if it did
draw some ire from the court of the Mongol Khan.
Elsewhere in the world, kingdoms rose and
fell, sometimes through conquest, diplomacy, or internecine struggle; the
moribund state of Halych-Volhyn was annexed by Poland after the line of its
rulers went extinct, whereas Lithuania earned the dubious distinction of being
the last major European state to adopt Christianity as its state religion in
1293. Jerusalem, long holding on by a thread, finally fell to the armies of
Abbasid Caliphate in 1296, even as much of the Eastern portion of the Caliphate
was lost to short lived resurgence of the Mongol assault, resulting in loss of
Baghdad in 1298. Notably, as the Abbasids’ dominion shrunk, the Caliphate’s
government, and its capital were moved further and further west, culminating in
Cairo being chosen as the permanent seat of Abbasid power. Despite eventual
recapture of Baghdad in 1307, weakening of central authority led to widespread
internal dissent in 1308 and 1309, and by 1310 only Egypt and Palestine
remained firmly in Abbasid control, the rest of their territories splintering
into independent states ruled by former Abbasid generals, nobles, and even
disinherited sons and cousins.
Of these states, the Kingdom of Antioch was
by far the most prominent, extending its power through much of the Holy Land
and bordering Armenia Minor in the northwest; to the east of the kingdom lay
the state of Syria, and further east, bordering the Mongol horde around the
still desolate ruins of Baghdad was the Emirate of Mosul. Expansion was
definitely not a priority for these exhausted and occasionally unstable states;
most of their energy was spent in internecine warfare that failed to produce
major gains for any of the sides. Just strong enough to fend off the Mongols in
the east, and encroaching Christians from Carthage, but not able to regain
their position of prominence, the Abbasids and their neighbors entered a period
frequently called “the Sorrowful Years”, in reference to the lack of unified
authority in the Middle East during the time, and the general economic and
scientific stagnation that was to prevail in the region until late XIVth
century and the rise of Khalil of Aleppo.
A few words should be spared on the Eastern
Empire, and the rule of Basil III Ergutrulos. Ever since his ascention, Basil
harbored long-ranging plans to restore the Empire to its ancient glory, and to
regain lost territories, restoring true unity to the Balkan peninsula and
Anatolia. While such designs were anything but new to all Emperors since the
fateful battle at Manzikert more than two centuries ago, Basil did something
that none of his predecessors considered seriously, at least not on the large
scale. To much criticism and opposition, he introduced the idea of attempting
to incorporate the Turkish people of Anatolia into the Empire as loyal citizens
instead of forcing them to leave the territories they occupied, leaving them
depopulated and somewhat useless to Greek agriculture due to the effect herds
of grazing sheep and other animals raised by the Turk settlers as primary
source of sustenance had on productivity of soil.
Instead, he said, these people could be made
full citizens of his Empire, being allowed to keep their possessions and
lifestyle as long as their loyalty was not in question; the fact that the
Emperor himself was of Turkish origin was a proof enough that incorporating
them would not only provide a solution to aid the Empire in reconquest of
Anatolia, but also would give it the long-term benefit of increasing its
population, manpower, and strength.
While this was never popular with the old
Greek aristocracy, the Emperor’s actions not only helped to speed up the
reconquest of western Anatolia, but also incited many of the local Turkish
rulers to voluntarily swear allegiance to the Emperor as his loyal subjects.
The capture of Iconium in 1302 finally ended the long-moribund Sultanate of
Rum; surprisingly enough for the standards of the time, there was no slaughter,
nor was there any unnecessary brutality during the capture of the city, its
former rulers allowed to live as private citizens in Constantinople, where they
could be kept under close scrutiny by the Imperial bureaucracy.
Soon, only Epirus, Bulgaria, and Armenia
Minor stood in the way of restoring the Empire to its pre-Manzikert borders. Of
these three, Armenia Minor was not only somewhat insignificant, but also provided
valuable border state between Byzantium and first the Abbasids, then the
Kingdom of Antioch. Pacifying Bulgaria was a matter of expending great deal of
time and resources which Basil believed would be used best elsewhere. Epirus,
however, despite its relatively easily defensible terrain, had somewhat low
population, and has been a tributary of Constantinople for quite some time
during Basil’s reign; at the passing of Epirus’ last Despot Nicephorus in 1308,
Basil took the opportunity to annex its territory to the Empire, preventing
Nicephorus’ heirs from ascending to power by a large Imperial army that entered
Epirote territory.
In a meanwhile, events in the west proceeded
apace. Adolf of Nassau lingered on until 1301, when the Imperial throne was opened
for election again; this time the Imperial crown went to Henry of Luxembourg,
of whom was said that his ambitions were far greater than his means, and whose
relatively brief reign was marked by general peace within the Empire,
interrupted only by revolts in Sicily, where stringently Catholic Habsburgs
were more unpopular than ever among the citizens used to cultural and religious
tolerance of the Hohenstaufens.
When Henry VIII died in 1304, the House of
Habsburg once again pitched its claim to Empire by using their considerable
political and diplomatic clout to force the election of one of their own,
Albert, yet another of Charles IV’s numerous grandchildren. It should be noted
that the Habsburgs differed from most noble houses of Europe in one important
aspect. While most European alliances were based on blood ties, the Habsburgs
took it one step further. While it was rather common for the leaders of the
same house to work together in order to achieve common goals, these
associations and alliances usually lasted only for short period of time, or
until the first opportunity to betray a kinsman that emerged too powerful or
too influential. Even if the House of Habsburg was not completely free of
internal intrigue and bickering, when it came to advancing the house as a
whole, its members presented a unified front against all outsiders, earning
them grudging respect from the other prominent families of Germany.
As such, when Albert I ascended to the
throne of the Empire, he knew that he had the might of entire House Habsburg
behind him, not only that of his own lands, which were somewhat insignificant
in comparison to some of the more prominent members of the dynasty; his own
mediocrity would be offset by the diplomatic guile and efficient organization of
the entire house, whereas his rule would be use to further advance the
dynasty’s goals. However, there were a number of challenges to his rule that
had to be dealt with first before any such thoughts could be entertained.
Most serious of those was the Sicilian
Heresy, as it came to be known. Influenced both by the Cathar teachings and
writings of Sufi scholars, a firebrand zealot named Orestes preached of evils
of material world and of the need to fight the powers that propagate such
obviously insidious trappings of flesh and temporal authority. In particular,
he lashed out violently both at the Catholic church, and at the King of Sicily
who enforced rigid Catholicism on the island.
Needless to say, something had to be done,
and quickly. Rudolph of Habsburg, King of Sicily was a relatively able
administrator, and enjoyed much support from nobility and clergy in Southern
Italy, where his personal integrity and undoubted religious faith overcame the
misgivings of some over him practically being a usurper. At the same time, his
hold on Sicily proper was only due to presence of large number of German troops
on the island, and even then, the flames of rebellion never truly went out.
In winter 1305, the powder keg that was
Sicily finally burst into explosion as some of Orestes’ most prominent
followers were detained and summarily burned at stake for heresy. Almost
overnight, both Palermo and Syracuse were in arms, expelling the Habsburg
garrisons and declaring their reluctant oaths of allegiance to Rudolph null and
void. Stranded in Apulia, Rudolph knew he could do little until the following
spring, when the weather would be more advantageous for him to conduct a
campaign and to besiege the rebel cities; his cry for help went to somewhat
reluctant Albert I who agreed to join his cousin on campaign.
The Sicilian campaign would last through
1306 and most of 1307, at which time unspeakable atrocities were committed
against the island’s civilian population by the invading army. The worst of the
offenders were Albert’s Swabians, feared widely through the island for their
apparent taste for violence, plunder and rapine. When Palermo was finally taken
in late 1307, Albert seriously considered the idea of following an example set
by his grandfather at Naples; only through intervention of recently elected
Pope Innocent V did he reluctantly agree to pardon most of the city’s
population and only to execute its most prominent citizens. Nevertheless, the
Habsburgs, already not very popular in Sicily, became an object of livid hatred
for the islanders for generations to come.
His flanks relatively secure for a time
being, Albert decided to follow up on the promise he made at his election to
ensure Papal support, that of a Crusade to restore Jerusalem to Christian
control once again. Not only it was one of the most crucial items on the Papal
agenda, he believed, but also his duty as a good Catholic to free the lands
under the infidel yoke and to restore them to the light of Christendom; not
only it was the means to increase Imperial prestige, dangerously damaged by the
Sicilian revolts, but it was also the means to unite the German barons behind
him by promises of new lands, new titles, and riches.
The Crusade did not set out until 1310, the
same year that saw the final fragmentation of the Abbasid Caliphate, which was
viewed as a golden opportunity by both the Emperor and the Pope. Little did
they know of the events that would unfold upon its arrival.
Ghosts
Of The Past (1310-1350)
Eye for an eye, our only birthright
The choice that determined what you had denied
Seething with hatred sea of rage parts
If it does not kill us it only makes us stronger
One on one, across the divide
Absurd accusations clouded by pride
Your pointed daggers seen through the disguise
If it does not kill us it only makes us stronger
Midgard
– “Supremacy”
The Crusaders’ initial aim was to once again
plant the flag of Christendom over Jerusalem, however, its leaders differed on
how to accomplish such a goal. Some advocated marching through land, traversing
the Balkans and Byzantium, and dealing with Caliphate successor states in the
Middle East before finally pressing to Jerusalem itself; Emperor Albert was of
the other opinion, that of taking naval route, using Cyprus as a base to
establish a beachhead, and eventually mounting an assault on Jerusalem
directly, attempting to bypass as many potential obstacles as possible and
taking the risk of storms and unfavorable weather to get to the Holy Land
quicker, and with less losses. Besides, Albert did not trust Basil III, his
supposed Eastern counterpart, who made astonishing strides in the last two
decades to restore lost territories to the Byzantines, and to alter the
character of his Empire to allow for better incorporation of Anatolian Turks
into the Imperial military and civil service. Given half a chance, Albert knew,
Basil would attempt to obtain an advantage over Albert and possibly even
attempt outright treachery.
It was the Papal envoys that finally
persuaded the Emperor, against his better judgment, to take the land route,
emphasizing that the two successful Crusades all took the same route through
the Byzantine lands, and that he would be able to wield much larger army than
he would otherwise, being limited by ship carrying capacity and knowing better
than to trust any of the Italian mercantile republics on the matter of naval
transportation, remembering the example of Venetian involvement in abominable
Fourth Crusade a century ago. Besides, Albert thought, what comes around goes
around; if Basil was harboring any malicious intent, Albert was perfectly
capable of the same malice himself, and, should the heretical Greeks expose any
kind of weakness that could be exploited…
In early 1310, the Sixth Crusade, Fifth
being the name usually given to Frederick II’s conquest of Tunis, set forth on
land towards the Balkans, Anatolia, and into the Holy Land. From the beginning,
it has encountered numerous difficulties, first in obtaining Basil III’s
permission to pass through Byzantine territory, then in dealing with the
uncooperative Balkan peasantry who had little desire to see these so-called
“Crusaders” take the spoils of their labor, ravage their wives and daughters,
and loot with little restraint all the while slaying any who dared as much as
to speak a word of it. As the Crusaders advanced, Basil III came to a
realization that letting them pass through presented serious danger not only to
his own people, but also to the myth of the Imperial crown as the protector of
its citizens – while the latter has been not much more than a myth by the time
of his ascent, Basil worked long and hard to make the Empire safe for its
citizenry, and achieved remarkable success in repelling various invaders while
extending its borders as Pax Byzantia ruled in its ancient borders.
Here were the men supposedly of Godly
purpose, yet behaving worse than any invader the Empire could recall in a past
century; instead of obedience and respect they had shown nothing but arrogance
and greed, not to mention the damage they had already caused. In Summer 1310,
tensions reached the boiling point as the Crusaders assaulted a small town in
Thrace that refused to give in to their demands, inflicting enormous slaughter
on the defenders. By then, Basil has had enough. Swiftly descending upon the Western
army with a force of his own, Basil’s troops overcame the bewildered invaders
in a pitched battle, killing over half of the Crusaders, and taking many
prisoner, including Emperor Albert himself.
The news sent incredible shock through the
West. The Sixth Crusade was over before it even started, and ended up in a
total catastrophe, Crusading army completely annihilated, and the Emperor
himself a prisoner of the Byzantines. Clearly, the people whispered, the
Habsburgs must have procured the wrath of the Almighty by rebelling against the
legitimate Emperors of Hohenstaufen line, of whom none remained; the Pope who
crowned these usurpers was just as guilty of treason as they were. Within a
year much of Germany and Italy was torn apart by civil strife and uprisings of
every sort; clearly something had to be done quickly before the Holy Roman
Empire became nothing but a lost symbol for which nothing stood.
By 1312 more cautious voices prevailed,
reasoning that not as much divine displeasure caused the catastrophic demise of
the Crusade as the Byzantine treachery did; therefore, the Holy Land could only
be liberated if the heretic Byzantines were swept aside and shown the error of
their ways, and true faith. Another Crusade was needed, thought the Pope and the
nobles of Western Europe; but who would lead it? Albert of Habsburg was still
the prisoner in Constantinople, the very city that had to be captured should
the Byzantines be defeated, in full power of Basil the Turk; the French king
was disinterested in an idea, knowing that he had more to gain from his attempt
to force the English to acknowledge him as their feudal suzerain; the Iberian
rulers, while determined to fight for a holy purpose, were still bitterly
divided among themselves, allying with the Muslim state of Granada as
frequently as with the fellow Christians; the only developments there as of
recent had been territorial gains made by Leon against Castile, and swallowing
of Navarre by Aragon. Germany was more divided as ever, with whatever semblance
of centralized authority had existed prior to the Sixth Crusade by now
completely collapsed; while the German princes still nominally acknowledged
recognizing the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire as their suzerain, in practice
Germany of 1312 was a mess of states that were not only answering to no
authority, but often in direct military confrontation with each other. Without
the Emperor, the Habsburgs could do little but watch their new Imperial order
disintegrate, being able to swallow some of the smaller duchies and use ongoing
conflict to arrange for strategically important marriages, but not being able
to impose peace or at least an armistice.
At the time when having a legitimate Emperor
meant everything in the West, Albert was still a prisoner, and still a holder
of the title that could not be taken away from him without causing even further
disturbances – if the Pope himself was only barely legitimate in the minds of
the people after the crisis the West just emerged from, who had the authority
to dethrone an Emperor whose only failing was the defeat he suffered at the
hands of his supposed Eastern counterpart? A stronger, more capable Pope would
have had little qualms about issuing a proclamation of a kind; Innocent V,
however, shared very few character traits with his more famous and infinitely
more ruthless namesake a century ago, and could not bring himself to the
crucial step that could save the Empire. All across Italy and Germany the
faithful prayed for deliverance from this time of troubles that they could not
foresee even as recently as two years ago.
By spring 1315 several rival pretenders to
the Imperial throne sprang up in Germany, neither of them being strong nor
powerful enough to obtain widespread acknowledgement without the support of most
powerful houses of the Empire, or the Pope; even the latter’s death did nothing
to rectify the abysmal situation, as the years of 1315 through 1336 saw
succession of short-lived Popes that were consequently elected more so to prove
convenient puppets for the cardinals and, unthinkable only few years ago,
small-time Italian rulers, than to truly govern the Christian Church and serve
as the Vicar of God. Albert’s death in 1316, still in captivity, did nothing to
help the cause of reunification either.
In 1317, knowing his frontiers rather
secure, Basil III embarked upon the last and the most memorable of his
campaigns, the one to subdue rebellious Bulgars and Vlachs. Already sixty years
old at the time and not content with the fame of being the greatest ruler since
Alexius Comnenus two centuries ago, he became obsessed with following in the
footsteps of the one he was named after, the most terrifying ruler Byzantium
had in centuries, and also one of the most admired – the man known as
Bulgaroktonos, the Bulgar-Slayer. Unlike his namesake, however, Basil III did
not take his time in subduing Bulgaria; instead, he swept through it in a
lightning-fast campaign that utilized not only the undoubted skills of his
Turcoman mobile cavalry along with heavily armed Greek klibanophorii, but also
the new terrifying weapon that would soon become commonplace in most European
armies, the cannon! While the cannons of the time were far from reliable, and
about as accurate as could have been expected, the psychological effect these
monstrosities had on hapless defenders of walled cities, or on charging
infantry in the field was enormous, especially if the men on the receiving side
of this primitive artillery had never experienced anything like it before. By
1321, Bulgaria was at large controlled by the Byzantines, although sporadic
pockets of resistance were to trouble the Byzantine governors for the next
three decades.
It was thus fitting that when Basil III died
in 1321, he was deeply mourned, and was later canonized by the Greek Orthodox
Church for his tireless efforts in converting the Turks of Anatolian interior
to Christianity. His successor, Alexius VII inherited a much stronger Empire
than any of his predecessors in more than a century; however, unlike Basil, his
son was content to consolidate his power within the existing borders rather
than push for their extension. In the long term, he proved to be right, as it
seemed that during the time known as Interregnum in the West, the Eastern
Empire was the only beacon of stability in an increasingly chaotic and
desperate world.
At this time, the magnifying glass of
history once again shifts among the years, continents, and the images of actors
in the grand play of time, this time centering its view on the British Isles,
and the kingdom of France just across the Channel from it. For many years
French aspirations in England were anything but secret; already the French held
much of Southern England, and were prevented from moving north only by the need
to keep a buffer state between themselves and increasingly powerful Scotland.
While the Scottish clans in the highlands
remained highly unpredictable and sometimes dangerous foes, the organization of
the kingdom was always tenuous at best, preventing its expansion to the south.
Now, however, the lowland feudal lords of Scotland managed to enforce their
control over their highland brethren by incessant manipulating of warring clans
against each other, and by judicious promises of rich lands of England and
plunder that lay therein. Louis XII, the king of France, was alarmed.
In 1319 he was faced with the choice of
either to allow the Scots to effectively take over the rump Kingdom of England,
and to become a major threat to the French presence in the British Isles, or to
attempt to enforce an age-old claim that the Kings of England were nothing but
French vassals in the eyes of the law, and as such should openly submit to
their rightful sovereign, risking provoking Scotland and dragging his country
into the war where he may not be able to project his full power effectively but
for the risk of leaving his own borders unguarded. The agonizing decision had
to be made, and at last Louis chose intervention, knowing well that not only he
could not afford aggressive expansionistic Scotland on his doorstep, but that
should the kingdom of England fall into their hands, he would be left with
nothing but a relatively worthless claim that he would have to fight for should
he decide to enforce it. What followed was a four-way quagmire that would leave
the countries exhausted, thousands of the continent’s best fighters dead or
crippled, and four generations of European history marred by what came to be
known as the Hundred Years War.
In truth, looking in hindsight, the Hundred
Year War did not truly last a hundred years, and was hardly a singular conflict
that usually merits the description. Rather, it was a series of conflicts that
flared up and died down for years at the time, interrupted occasionally by
frequent armistices, sometimes lasting years at the time; the flow of battle
grew and ebbed through the years, favoring one side or the other, winning
battles but never gaining decisive advantages that those battles were fought
for. In 1319, however, none knew that, both the Scots and the French expecting
a relatively quick conflict over who would rule over England.
As 1320s drew on, a single figure emerged in
Germany that commanded both deference and respect even from his sworn enemies,
and that was the source of much hope for those who were eager to see the Empire
united and whole. His name was Albert von Lichtenstein, and through dozens of
battles and exhaustive campaigns he was finally able to get the troublesome
German barons to give him grudging recognition as the King of Germany in 1324,
the direct precursor to the Imperial title itself. Known henceforth to our
story as Albert II, his reign marked a brief watershed in the troubled history
of the latter-day Western Empire, occasioning the time when swords and
war-lances were sheathed for a time being, and a semblance of normality
returned to Germany and, to a lesser extent, Italy.
Albert II was the first to set another
precedent that would prove to be increasingly influential in the later years of
the Empire. Feigning illness to mask his true desire to stay in Germany and
watch over the barons, he was the first Emperor to claim the title and be
widely recognized as such not to have been crowned by the Pope. A stronger Pope
would have been outraged and would have demanded the Emperor’s submission; Celestine
V, the Pope at the time, was nothing of a kind, being somewhat senile and known
to be merely a mouthpiece for a group of powerful cardinals and Italian nobles.
In the following years, more and more Emperors would follow his example until
Maximillian II’s declaration that Papal blessing was no longer necessary for an
Emperor to ascend to the throne, two centuries afterwards. But more on that
later.
The situation Albert II inherited from his
predecessors, none of whom were later officially recognized as the Emperors in
their own right, was quite dismal. Not only the integrity of his title has been
severely damaged, Imperial treasury empty, and lands of Germany ravaged by
constant warfare, but it became easily apparent to him that the title of the
Emperor was nearly meaningless, his own estates not being able to support
large-scale projection of power required to enforce and maintain his authority
and prestige. And then, there were the Habsburgs.
Despite the setbacks suffered by the House
of Habsburg, not in the least being capture and death of luckless Albert I,
they still controlled lands greater than those of any other noble house in the
Empire. Even if their hold on Sicily has always been tenuous, the Habsburgs
ruled in Swabia, Austria, and spread their tentacled grip on many smaller
duchies, being rumored to exercise undue influence in Hungary due to family
links with its now-Angevin kings. The struggle between the Emperor and the most
influential and best entrenched house of his Empire was therefore to become the
primary leitmotif for Albert II’s reign.
Between 1324 and 1330, Albert attempted to
enact series of reforms that centralized Imperial power only to meet determined
resistance; clearly, he thought, time of the great Emperors of the past has
passed, and new realities have to be adopted if his Empire were to survive.
Perhaps alone amongst his contemporaries and rivals, he sought not only to give
himself and his house additional prestige by laying claim to the Imperial
title, but he still saw the Empire as one indivisible entity, the eternal Pax
Romana that passed on through the ages from Augustus to Constantine, from Trajan
to Charlemagne, from Marcus Aurelius to Barbarossa, and that would not be
divided again.
As early as 1325 Albert issued stern
warnings to the “powerful” within the Empire, acting quickly to bring down some
of the smaller lords who begun to question his rule. These actions brought him
the nickname of “The Wolf”, after the quick and resolute way in which he went
after the barons, and the ruthlessness exhibited by him. Emboldened by his
early success, Albert decided it was the time to go after his biggest
opponents, the Habsburg family, whose submission, to him, meant the restoration
of the true Imperial rule, much like that of the Hohenstaufens.
In 1329, Albert proposed an idea of a
Reichstag, the assembly of princes of the Empire to assist him in the
governance of the lands within its borders; his aim was likely to provide for a
counterpoint to the Habsburgs’ growing power, and to attempt to create a sense
of unity among the barons, most of whom thought of their own possessions first,
and of the Empire distant second. Needless to say, his proposal created a furor
in Germany while being met with indifference in Italy, where Imperial power
existed only on paper; Imperial interference was something few of the princes
wanted to tolerate, and in such an atmosphere of discontent the Habsburgs were
able to play their political hand remarkably well.
When in 1332 Albert II sent an offer of
alliance to his Eastern counterpart Alexius VII, tensions were high between him
and his Habsburg opponents. Not only Alexius’ father was the captor and, some
suspected, the murderer of the Habsburg Emperor Albert I, but Byzantine
ambitions in Southern Italy and Sicily were very obvious to many in Germany; an
alliance between the two Emperors could mean potential loss of Habsburg estates
in Sicily and Apulia, and a threat to the entire house. The informal leader of
the House of Habsburg, Maximillian, knew this had to be prevented at any cost.
In Constantinople, too, the matters were far
from certain. Some factions at the court favored rapproachment with the West,
hoping to regain lost Italian provinces; at the same time, the Westerners were
to be distrusted, spoke their opponents, and treated as ruthless and
treacherous enemies. While the Emperor Alexius emotionally sided with the
latter faction, the chance to regain foothold in Italy after two and a half
centuries, discounting brief spell of Manuel I’s misadventures there was too
hard to resist; it was the kind of temptation that makes men lose their minds,
but also the kind out of which great empires are born.
Therefore, the price of Byzantine alliance
was high; not only Albert had to cringingly apologize for the failed Sixth
Crusade, but he had to recognize Byzantine claims to Apulia and Sicily. In
return, the Byzantines undertook to provide financial and even military support
for the Western Emperor, and, as one of the secret provisions of the agreement
stated, provide a safe haven for Albert personally should the “enemies within”
succeed in their attempt to dethrone him.
To Maximillian of Habsburg, this mean only
one thing – war. In 1334, when the alliance between the East and the West was
solemnized, the Habsburg army set out against the forces of Albert, long before
any help from the East could arrive. To Alexius VII, this was only for the
best; with the Habsburgs distracted, Sicily was a fair game. After the Habsburg
King of Sicily refused to acknowledge the Eastern Emperor’s supremacy, it gave
Alexius a perfect casus belli to invade the island, and to restore it to the
seat of Constantinople.
At the first news of the Byzantine fleet
sailing toward Sicily, the island was at arms; even heretical, the Byzantines
were far preferable to the Habsburg rule, long unpopular and loathed among the
island’s inhabitants. The King and his court had to flee for the relative
safety of Apulia as soon as the first Byzantine troops made their landing on
the island. In 1335, the Byzantines took possession of an island once again,
making it a theme.
Further north, the Emperor Albert II faced a
number of setbacks. While a fraction of the German barons had little love for
the Habsburgs, suspecting them of desiring their lands and properties, the
majority by far preferred the status quo, and thus either stayed out of the
conflict, or occasionally openly allied themselves with the Habsburgs. Thus he
found himself outnumbered and surrounded by enemies on all sides, even as the
promised Byzantine help failed to materialize so far.
Finally, by 1336 Albert has had enough, and,
cringing teeth, offered Maximillian of Habsburg to enter negotiations. While it
might be surprising that Maximillian accepted the offer given his clear advantage
in wealth, manpower, and resources, in hindsight his motives are not hard to
understand. A weak Emperor not of Habsburg blood, but heavily dependent on the
most powerful noble house of the Empire was greatly preferable to either
disputed succession, or to drawing too much attention on the Habsburgs’ growing
power. For all energy that lesser princes expended attempting to gain the
Imperial title, the advantage they gained was surprisingly small, while most
holders of the title were more than likely to earn the enmity of the barons.
More so, Byzantine successes in Sicily were disturbing, and threatening
whatever was left of the Habsburg Italy – in itself a much more valuable
possession than the empty promises of a title.
Therefore the terms Maximillian proposed
were, at least on the surface, very magnanimous. Both sides, he suggested,
should return to status quo, as long as Albert was prepared to confirm a number
of privileges for the House of Habsburg that, accordingly to the
ancient-looking scrolls brandished by the Habsburg leaders, went back to the
time of Nero. The fact that the scrolls were almost certainly a complete
forgery, obvious even at the time of their supposed “discovery” by a loyal monk
was almost irrelevant due to the power enjoyed by the Habsburgs already, and
the lesser barons’ desire to stay on their good side lest they and their lands
suffer the wrath of the ascendant house. Finally, Albert was to lend assistance
in Habsburg campaign to retake Sicily and stop Byzantine incursions into
Apulia, in effect forcing the hapless Emperor to renege on his earlier
alliance.
As the Byzantines and the Germans prepared
for the showdown that would determine the fate of Sicily, a new and powerful
actor entered the scene. For several decades the office of the Papacy was
occupied by a number of characters of little importance and even lesser
significance; in 1336 this was about to change. The man history came to know as
Adrian VI came of humble origins, being fifth son of a Swedish fisherman that
through extreme intelligence and not a small amount of luck advanced rapidly
through the Church hierarchy, becoming a cardinal in 1331, and finally elected
Pope five years later. The first Swede ever to occupy the Holy See, Adrian set
at once to restore the fortunes of his church, and to return it to the
prominence not only in the spiritual, but also in the temporal world.
In 1337, Adrian issued a prohibition towards
both German and Byzantine Emperors to continue conflict amongst them, and to
seek Papal mediation between them. The time for his request could hardly have
been better. The lapse of Imperial authority in Italy since the death of Henry
VII resulted in much stronger ties between Italian city-states and various
feudal lords and the Papacy, which many of them attempted to dominate or
influence while the Holy Roman Empire was more concerned with its own affairs.
As a result, very few Italian leaders were ready to support the Emperor at the
potential price of their independence; instead, the Supreme Pontiff seemed like
a lesser evil, especially if he were to keep both Eastern and Western Empires
away from their homes. With the support of Italian rulers, Adrian knew that his
influence was far too significant for either side to ignore; in fact if either
Empire wanted to rule in Italy in more than a name, his cooperation would have
been essential.
The fact that the Byzantines were heretics
and schismatics, not to mention way too tolerant towards the Muslims (at least
for the standards of the time) ever since the days of Basil III did not
discourage Adrian from attempting to negotiate. True, for the Eastern Emperor
to accept Papal order would have been unthinkable, especially given the general
disdain in which the Byzantines held the Papacy; however, the Pope as a secular
ruler offering mediation was a different thing, at least in the eyes of Alexius
VII. That it held a wholly different meaning for Adrian VI did not matter;
neither the Pope nor the Western Emperor had any ability to enforce their…
understanding of the context in which negotiations would have been held.
The Habsburgs, on the other hand, found
themselves in a quandary. As professed staunch Catholic, Maximillian could not
simply ignore Papal order or force Albert to do so; at the same time it was clear
to him that Adrian had his own interests in mind first and foremost. There had
to be a way, he thought, to reach accommodation without having to fight for it,
while regaining Habsburg territories or at least ensuring that they remain
informally under the house’s control. Therefore, when Albert (or, rather,
Maximillian, who by now was practically the power behind the throne, and who
held informal allegiance of the German princes) accepted an offer of mediation
and sent his ambassadors to Rome, there were several reservations that he held.
From the beginning the negotiations proved
to be no easy task. The Germans, the Byzantines, and the Pope each had
conflicting interests in mind; however, as long as no independent accommodation
was reached between the Byzantines and the Germans, Adrian felt secure enough
to press both sides to reach an agreement beneficial to the Catholic Church the
most. In no time his legates began dropping subtle and not so subtle hints that
the disputed Sicilian territory should be placed under the safekeeping of the
Vicar of Christ, whose impartial and benevolent hand would keep an island safe,
prosperous, and neutral.
Needless to say, this suggestion did little
to appease either side; the Byzantines in particular were infuriated. Why
should we, they asked themselves, give up the spoils of our righteous conquest
to the Bishop of Rome, whose predecessors had oppressed the True Faith for
centuries, and who, given half a chance, would attempt to usurp it for his own
devious purposes? The Germans did not like the offer much either; whatever
remained of Albert’s original purpose would not see the Imperial territory
given up, although if the Papal State would nominally remain the part of the
Empire, Albert supposed, it would weaken the Habsburgs enough so that if not
him, then his successors (as long as they were not the accursed Habsburgs, he
must have remarked to himself) would have easier time dealing with them than he
did… this could have been the exact antidote to Maximillian’s looming presence
and enormous ambition.
Maximillian, of course, did not see it this
way. Placing Sicily under the Habsburg control once again was his aim at the
negotiations – besides, he suspected Albert would attempt to turn the tables on
him once again. Only one solution presented itself now; the final elimination
of Albert, and the installation of the new Emperor supremely loyal to the
Habsburg cause. That it would mean stalling negotiations until a new Emperor
could be elected would only play into Maximillian’s hands as he would attempt
to sway Italian rulers his way, leaving the Pope precious little to bring to
the bargain table, and expelling the Byzantines by force, if needed.
When in fall 1338 Albert II was found dead
in his room, rumors were abound that it was not a stroke that killed him, as
the official announcement proclaimed, but that he was instead strangled by an
assassin sent by the Habsburgs. Despite that, few mourned the late Emperor; the
barons did not trust him for the fear of imposing centralized control once
again, and later for being nothing but a Habsburg puppet; the people cared
little, for the Emperor was nothing but a fancy title for most of them in that
day and age. Using Albert’s “unfortunate passing” as a pretense to withdraw
from negotiations, Maximillian Habsburg set upon attempting to delay the
election of the new Emperor for as long as possible, all the while entering
into secret negotiations with various Italian rulers who by now began to
suspect the Pope of imperial designs of his own.
By 1339 the Byzantines, frustrated at the
negotiations being stalled, issued an ultimatum that the Western Empire
surrender Apulia as well as Sicily lest they take matters into their own hands.
This diplomatic blunder, however, had effects directly opposite to those
Alexius VII thought it would generate. Knowing that without the German presence
to counterbalance the Byzantines, the schismatics would be quite likely to make
good on their threat, Adrian swallowed his pride and set his ambitions aside,
at least for a time being, and made an unprecedented proposal to Maximillian
Habsburg to recognize him as a lawful Western Emperor in return for an
alliance.
While the webs of deceit and deviousness got
more and more tangled with each passing day in Rome, seeds of another great
power were being sown on the Russian steppes. The city-state of Tver was no
longer a city-state after openly resisting the Mongol overlords of Russia, and
winning their first victory against the major Mongol army in 1337, even as Novgorod
was rapidly losing positions on their Eastern frontier against the Muscovites. The
events of that year became the talk of entire Eastern Europe even paling the
accomplishment of Teutonic knightly order finally bringing upon the conversion
of Lithuania to the Christian faith. Even Alexius VII in faraway Constantinople
sent presents to the court of Tver’s prince Vasiliy II as a recognition of the
principality’s growing power.
However, even this early a dark cloud
appeared on the horizon, apparent to many in the great cities of the Rus – the
shadow of an oncoming struggle. It mattered little that the Mongols still
overcast the Russian lands; in their hearts, the rulers of Russia knew that the
time of Batu’s descendants was coming to an end, if not in their lifetime, then
in the lifetime of their children or grandchildren. The question was not of who
would expel the Mongols; instead, it was of who would rule the Russian lands
afterwards. Already Moscow, still tenuously allied to the Golden Horde begun making
claims against Novgorod and smaller principalities that sprung up wherever the
Horde was in retreat; the Poles made major gains in the south, taking Kiev
itself (although it must be said that Kiev after the Mongol invasion was but a
shadow of its former self, reduced almost to a size of a largish village) in
1340. The question of who would rule Russia would still take a century to
resolve.
In a meanwhile, Maximillian I of Habsburg
was invested with the crown and the scepter by the Papal legate, being the
first Emperor in centuries to have obtained the Imperial dignity without first
being the King of Germany or the King of the Romans, both being the titles
usually given to the Emperor-elect before his coronation by the Pope. In light
of the potential Byzantine invasion, Maximillian decided that the risks of
being an Emperor were warranted by the danger presented by them; moreover, he
alone had the power to make the Pope submit to his will should he decide to do
so through his diplomatic prowess and the threat of his military power.
As the Byzantines amassed large armies in
Sicily in preparations for the invasion of Apulia, a crisis erupted in
Constantinople, forcing the Empire to be turned into turmoil. The cause of this
was such: the Emperor Alexius VII had four sons, John, Michael, Alexius, and
Constantine. Of these four, the eldest, John, was the clearly recognized heir
to the Empire; however, as of late Alexius VII started having doubts about his
son’s ability to succeed. Not only John became the talk of Constantinople due
to his frequent drunken debauchery, but his gambling habits already cost his
father a fortune; something had to be done quickly. In 1341, in the midst of
preparations for the resumption of hostilities against the Western Empire, Alexius
VII suddenly and unexpectedly died, not long after letting his doubts be
publicly known, marking the beginnings of what would be known as the Byzantine
Civil War.
Over the course of the next nine years, the
four brothers, each claiming the throne for himself fought against each other.
While John III held Constantinople, Michael and Alexius removed themselves to
Asia Minor, where the powerful dynatoi provided them with money and troops. The
youngest, Constantine, rejected their offers to join in with them, and went
instead to the Anatolian interior, where he assembled an army from various
Turkic tribes and Trapezuntine Greeks.
While the story of the Byzantine Civil War
could take a whole book in and out of itself, we shall be rather brief here for
the relative interregnum in Byzantine influence in the West. Sicily, left to
its own devices after John III summoned its garrison to Greece to guard against
attacks by Michael and Alexius, quickly fell to concerned Habsburg assault in
1342, resulting in installment of Otto von Habsburg, Maximillian’s nephew as
the King of Sicily to extreme dismay of the island’s citizenry and at least
some displeasure from the Pope.
In a meanwhile, feud between Alexius and
Michael left Alexius imprisoned, blinded, and forcibly tonsured in Nicaea in
1343; Michael proclaimed that Alexius was plotting with John to overthrow “the
rightful basileus”. In 1344 Michael’s troops won a smashing victory against
John III’s army in Macedonia, however, he was unable to follow up on his triumph
due to Constantine threatening Nicaea itself.
While in the West a relative status quo was
to be maintained for most of the decade, in the East Bulgarian rebellion almost
cost John III his crown by 1346, being suppressed after a desperate battle of
Varna where small contingent commanded by John’s general Andronicus Vataces
overcame much larger, but poorly trained and undisciplined rebel army. The
turning point of the Byzantine Civil War, however, was not to come until 1348,
when John, jealous of Vataces’ increasing popularity due to a number of
victorious battles against the Bulgars and Michael’s forces attempted to have
his top general assassinated. The plan backfired; when Vataces found out about
the plot, he marched on the Blachernae Palace with his loyal troops, and
declared John III deposed. To Vataces’ credit, John suffered no blinding nor
other mutilation; however, from there on he was to be kept under strict house
arrest in one of the innumerable monasteries of Thrace.
This left the question of what should be
done now. Although Vataces was popular with the army, he was not of
aristocratic stock, and, as it was said, held no imperial ambitions of his own.
Therefore, he resolved to invite one of the remaining brothers to rule in
John’s stead. The dilemma was difficult.
Michael was the darling of the powerful
aristocracy of Asia Minor, and thus would enjoy their support in governing the
Empire – but, on the other hand, he would also be likely to give the reins of
government to the land-holding aristocracy, in particular the powerful ancient
Ducas clan that owned many estates in Anatolia. A low-born himself, Vataces
distrusted the aristocracy, believing them to serve their own ends and caring
not for the people of his stock, nor for the Empire.
Constantine, on the other hand, not only
enjoyed immense popularity with the people of the interior, but was also not
implicated in neither fratricide nor patricide; while he was indeed the
youngest of Alexius VII’s sons, he also seemed to be most independently-minded
and able of the three that still lived. While Vataces’ logic suggested that
Michael’s transition to the Empire might be smoother, his own instincts tended
to favor Constantine.
As he struggled with decision, news came to
the capital that shocked it to the core. In winter 1348, under the cover of
darkness Constantine’s troops entered Nicaea through a hidden passage under the
walls, made known by a fugitive from Michael’s government. Michael himself was
captured, tried for the mutilation of Alexius, and summarily sent to suffer the
same fate as his victim. Vataces, as the de facto ruler of the capital,
hesitated no longer.
In the first days of 1348 thirty one year
old Constantine XI Ergutrulos entered the capital, from which he intended to
leave a lasting mark upon the history of Europe.
INTERLUDE ONE – “PROMISED LAND”
May 7th, 1351 AD
Dear Elsa,
Please accept my most profuse apologies for
taking so long to write. The literate men are in short supply here in the
Baltic wastes, and I had to give much of my spoils to the glory of God’s church
to obtain the services of brother Joseph for composing this message to you. I
do confess the absolute ignorance of the written form of language, yet my
business is war, slaughter, and conquest, all in the name of our Lord and
Savior, Jesus Christ, and his own chosen Holy Empire; the measly yet precious
gift of writing one’s own letters is beyond this old soldier’s comprehension.
We have been on march for the past two
weeks, all across the land of the barbarians who even now brandish the amulets
of devils they worship. Father Thomas tells us that they had seen the light of
Christ and ascended to his promise of gentle and sweet redemption, yet the old,
savage ways are still holding sway over the souls of these people; were it not
for the Emperor’s orders, I would have been the first one to put the fear of
one true God into every single one of them.
It is one small village after another,
hidden in the patches of sinister-looking woods that seemingly go on forever;
it is rather cold for May, and provisions are frequently hard to find. Three
days ago we came upon yet another one of these damned villages, grey in the
endless rain, straw roofs of its primitive huts like islands in the dark cloud
of pouring waters. The village elder refused us the food and hospitality,
probably thinking that our vanguard was just a small troop of raiders;
regardless, for our swords were eager to drink the blood of the heathens who
would not even erect a simple church, a homage to God in their wooded hideout;
the barbarians of the land they call Lithuania, still dressed in the furs of
the beasts salvaged from the wild forests.
I ran the old man through with my blade,
cringing at the thought of his unworthy blood staining our fine German steel.
He fell without much sound, and I felt… no, not guilt, but regret that he did
not suffer as much as his fellow peasants for refusing food and shelter to the
righteous soldiers of Christ. For the cross I bear on my arms and my shield is
the cross of true faith that we are going to bring to the heretics of Novgorod
for one last time, at the tip of the sword if we must; the cross is the promise
of lands and glory for our younger sons, whom the cruel law would leave with
little to live on and only their strong arms and pure hearts to make their way
in this world.
Time and time again my thoughts go to you
and our sons, for whose inheritance I am prowling this savage land as much as
in the name of glory of the Almighty. Tell the young Ulrich that I will send him
something of interest with the next letter. I wonder if Heinrich is still
spending much time at the training field now that I am on campaign; what his
tutors were telling me before I left for the East was disturbing, for it is the
duty of the nobleman to fight in wars against the enemies of the Empire and
God, not to stick his nose into the books like a monk or, worse yet, a Jew.
Tell his Franciscan tutors to praise the importance of physical courage, and
valor in battle over the doubtful virtue of a librarian, for one day he will be
riding in my place with the mighty army, taking his place in an assault on the
heathens and heretics.
We shall cross into the lands of Novgorod in
three days’ time, and the next letter I send will follow soon. Then, we shall put
heretics to flight, and raise the banner of the Roman Empire and Emperor
Maximillian over the ramparts of their city just as brother Joseph and his
fellow servants of the Lord raise the flag of the true Christian faith over its
inhabitants’ souls. Until then, pray for the glory and valor of our arms in the
coming battle, for our victory is truly a great work for the Lord, and for the
Empire.
We shall prevail, for God is with us!
Your loving husband,
Conrad, Graf von Gottingen
May 28th, 1351
Dear Elsa,
The past three weeks had been insane with
preparations for march on Novgorod, and it is only in these twilight hours that
brother Joseph could take down my thoughts and put them to paper in preparation
for the couriers who will leave home to Germany. Oh, how I envy those lucky men
that get to see our homeland, feel the tender embraces of their wives and
children, and sleep in a warm bed, not in the haystack that most of us here are
forced to substitute for real shelter.
It still rains all the time, and the sky is
grey only with occasional flashes of lightning cutting through. At least we are
no longer in this damnable forest, and no longer have to worry about the
heathen scum hiding in the underbrush with their primitive bows and arrows.
Only two days ago, just as we began to see the clearing far ahead the
barbarians ambushed a group of scouts, leaving a few of them dead. They are
nothing more than an annoyance to us, my dear, but an annoyance nevertheless.
Once the proud and insolent Novgorodians are subdued, I will personally lead a
troop into these forests and burn every single one of these bastards on the
stake in the name of the Lord for all the hassle they caused us.
In two days’ time we shall send out the
messengers ordering the heretics to lay down their arms and accept the
judgement of their betters; should they refuse our most reasonable and just
offer, our steel will write their epitaphs upon the chains of slavery that
their women and children will inherit for the defiance of their fathers. Brother
Thomas says that such thoughts are sinful, however, to hell with that, I say!
Are we not the soldiers of Christ doing his work?
Yours truly,
Conrad Graf von Gottingen
June 16th, 1351
Dear Elsa,
A week ago we had received the response from
Novgorod, and just as I had thought, our messenger was lucky to escape with his
head still attached. No matter though, they shall not know what hit them when
the pride and glory of the Imperial army, when our broadswords run them through
and separate their limbs from their bodies, they shall repent their sins.
Forgive me for such bloodlust in my thoughts
and words, but the thought of battle is the only thing that can dull the pain
of unfulfilled craving to be with you at home in Gottingen, among our people and
in the land where my father’s and grandfather’s bones are resting in their
sacred sleep. Every moment that passes brings the return home so much closer,
and the sweet taste of impending victory in the East is only a sign of what is
to come to all who would wish us ill.
We expect to engage the heretic army in a
month’s time; should I fall in the fray ensuring the victory of our holy
Crusade, know that I would fall with your name, and names of our children on my
lips alongside the name of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Pray for our
arms’ victory in the oncoming war!
In the name of the Lord,
Conrad Graf von Gottingen
April 22nd, 1354
Dear Elsa,
This is the first letter that I write to you
with my own hand, a necessity as well as a blessing of the circumstance that
brought me to this godforsaken land, and the first time I was allowed to
subject parchment to the tender mercies of Kniaz Mikhail’s couriers. Please
forgive me for such a long time before managing to send a word to you and our
sons; despite the unfortunate circumstances of our parting, the joy of our
reunion will bring balance to our home again, and this message is a mere
forerunner of my impending arrival back to the sweet, sweet lands we call home.
The last you have heard from me was almost
three years ago, just as we were riding on to meet the army of Novgorod in
battle to decide once and for all who shall lord over this land, and whose
divine inspiration we were to bring to its people – the word of our holy father
the Pope, or the misguided schismatic teachings of the heretic Greek Patriarch.
We rode on with certain knowledge of victory and of promised heavenly reward
should we fall in the fray, the promise of lands for our sons and rich dowries
for our daughters, the promise of absolution, never knowing what awaited us
ahead.
The battle was over, and what a slaughter it
was! We fed the fields of Novgorod with our blood, and that of our enemies,
giving the crows, ravens, vultures, and wolves a saga to remember for years to
come, slaying their knights and footmen by score only to see more take their
place in the ranks of the heretic horde. It was at dusk that we charged into
the lines of Novgorod’s infantry, and until the very dusk we fought even as our
weapons grew dull and useless, grabbing swords and war axes out of the hands of
our still living and breathing enemies, or even worse, fallen comrades;
struggling with our horses as their strength gave out and we dismounted,
fighting on foot with every weapon conceivable under the sun; and when the
weapons gave out and there were none to harvest from the bodies of the fallen
we fought with our arms, legs, and teeth, hammering out the path for our escape
from the encirclement, for despite all of our bravery and skill of our finest
warriors, the day was lost, with nary a third of our number escaping with our
lives from the blood-soaked fields.
Yes, our brothers in arms fell to the
swords, spears, and arrows of the Novgorodians as our valiant knights fought in
vain with the reins of our horses, frightened by the infernal noises of the
Russian cannon the likes of which I had never seen; for these horrid weapons
were mounted on the wagons our scouts mistook for supply train, or, better yet,
for the decadent riches the merchant princes of Novgorod are rumored to haul
with them on campaign to provide for their luxurious and sinful lifestyle.
To be truthful, the damage their cannons
have done was slight; yet our horses, the lifeblood of any campaign, were
frightened to the point of throwing off their riders; only through enormous
exertions of strength was I able to keep Blackheart, my war mount under
control. And before the end of the day we learned that it was not the wanton
luxury and decadent pleasures the Russians had thrived on in the midst of war,
but the loud songs of steel and gunpowder singing hymnals to their victory.
I fought for hours that seemed like an
eternity, surrounding myself and my few companions with mounds of dead flesh of
our assailants, yet to no avail, locking my back to two of foot soldiers of my
regiment, Swabian peasants by the looks of them, but brave and valiant in
battle as any gallant knight or noble. Finally, even these two guardian angels
gave way and fell; only through a blind stroke of fortune the Russian’s mace
did not crack my skull open, merely knocking consciousness out of me.
When I woke up the next day I was in a cage,
surrounded by the men that were once my comrades and fellow crusaders, all
bruised, pleading for help and broken in body and spirit. Our guards, large
bearded Russians say nary a word to us; even if they could understand the
German tongue, they kept silent and menacing like the gargoyles that I had once
seen at the great cathedral in Paris. Rarely we were able to catch a glimpse of
Novgorodian knights, speeding by and exchanging stories of their victory with
smiles on their faces and drinking from the large jugs that were probably
filled with the finest wine taken from our camp. As for us, we were barely alive
in the sun that only decided to come down to laugh at our defeat, mocking us
with its hordes of flies and other flying vermin, putrid stench of death rising
from the parts of the cage where some of my unfortunate compatriots passed on
to their heavenly reward.
In a week’s time we arrived in the city of
Novgorod itself hidden behind massive walls, only then realizing the futility
of our endeavor. For the city seemed almost as grand and majestic as fabled
Constantinople, and certainly more grandiose in its splendor than most great
cities of Europe I had ever witnessed; its people were a legion standing on the
street corners, cheering on their victorious army as it marched through the
wide cobbled streets, displaying the wealth and power of their kind for all the
world to see. They threw dirt, rotten food, and all kinds of garbage at us as
if we were some common criminals; there were some of us that cursed back at
these cowardly devils, safely separated from us by the steel of the cage and
iron of our manacles. Then, I saw our surviving footmen levy march in the midst
of Russian army, and my heart sank, for there was not even the hateful
protection of the cage to shelter them from the torrents of abuse hurled at
them by Novgorodians young and old, men and women as they limped through the
streets of the city.
Eventually our sorrowful and shameful
journey came to an end, made known not as much by anything other than a
relative lull in the hail of waste thrown at us. Truly, we had not seemed much
like an army then, more so like a ragtag coterie of bandits from the mountains
near Tirol; yet this was not the end to our disgrace and misery. Still chained
and bound, we were paraded in front of richly dressed men that I took to be
their “Veche”, the ruling council – merchants all to the last. The thought of merchants
ordering the princes around and passing judgement on their superiors still
fills me with spite and rage, and I spit at the ground at the sight of this
collection of moneylenders and greedy maggots masquerading as men of privilege
and honor.
At last, our solemn procession came to the
stop, and a group of heavily armored men with some insignia on their
breastplates appeared, apparently a bodyguard for whoever passes for prince in
this northern Babylon. I could barely hold my contempt for a man who would
allow the traders to rule in his name, thinking him to be nothing but an
unthinking brute, a savage barbarian fit only to be a lapdog of his greedy
masters jumping at their word to do their bidding.
The sight of Novgorodian prince himself did
little to dispel my loathing of him and his kind, not only an abomination in
name, but a heretic to the boot, for the scarred, heavily bearded face of the
man told stories of unmentionable excesses on the field of battle, and of
unspeakable cruelty befitting one living in the unforgiving and bestial land
such as this. It was the face that seemed to inspire fear and wanton terror,
not the face of a prince and a nobleman.
He walked towards us captives, sizing us
down with the stare that could barely betray the bloodlust behind his thoughts,
then exclaimed something loudly in that barbaric tongue of his. To my horror,
two of his guards dragged one of my companions from our sorrowful procession;
it was with shock that I recognized duke Henry, the second-in-command in our
ill-fated expedition. The barbarian said something again in a loud voice to the
apparent cheering of the crowd; then, he grabbed an enormous two-handed sword
from one of his guards, who managed to step backwards as if in protest of the
inhumanity of his lord’s intentions. With one swing he cut duke’s head off his
shoulders, kicking it and letting it roll down the street to be abused by the
citizenry of this foul city.
The barbarian prince walked closer, no doubt
picking the next victim to satisfy his craving for Catholic blood. It was then
that I determined that should I fall by the Russian blade, it will be through
no idle acceptance of my fate, but in the last act of war that I could carry in
the name of everything true and holy, an act of vengeance for my fallen battle
brothers, and a sign that the Divine Providence, and more so the Reckoning
finds sinners and heretics even in the moment of their apparent triumph.
As the prince’s figure drew closer, his eyes
centered on me; one word, I thought, and my life will be thrown away in vain
just like that of my commander before me. With one inhumane bellow of rage, I
defied my shackles and the surprised guards, hurling myself at the Russian and
hoping that I could break his neck before his minions finish the job he
undoubtedly had in his twisted black mind. Alas, days of exertions of the body
and deprivation of food, water, and sleep took their toll; the beast-man,
though duly surprised and astonished, had nevertheless managed to meet my
unfortunate assault with fists size of large boulders, it seemed, knocking the
daylight out of me. The last thing I thought I would see were the hate-filled
eyes of the man as he would drive the bastard steel of his through my body,
leaving it breathless to join with my fallen comrades in the Kingdom of Heaven.
Yet this was not to be; as his minion brutes
belatedly proceeded to hold me, the man turned his back to me, facing the
crowd. He said something in Russian to the bewildered crowd that seemed
surprised by this turn of events, then he turned again to face me.
“If kill me you must,” I spat through blood
in my mouth, “then let me die a man, with sword in my hand, or be damned to the
deepest darkest hell!”
The man’s face turned into a grin; I had no
inkling on whether he understood the word of what I spoke, but in my
desperation it mattered little. He said something to one of his lackeys, and
the bloody sword used to decapitate my commander only minutes ago was brought
into the light again, reflecting red on its stained blade for all to see. I
stared at the prince, determined to meet my maker with my eyes wide open,
defiant to an end. Yet still I was not prepared for the sounds of clear German
speech coming from his heathen throat.
“If you come to our land with a sword,” he said,
laying his hands on the handle of the weapon, “then by the sword you shall
die.”
The shock of this beastly figure speaking a
civilized language stunned my tongue, yet the lack of fear in my eyes must have
given him the answer he needed, for he handed the sword back to one of his
guardsmen. “You are brave,” he spoke to me with an apparent mixture of loathing
and, dare I say, admiration; “yet your courage is misguided.”
“Look around,” he said, waving his hand
around towards the column of prisoners. “Are these not the men who thought
themselves worthy of a higher purpose? Are these not the men who believed that
the Almighty gave them right to lord over their equals and to slay their
brothers in Christ for a worldly gain? You, who wear a cross on your chest, how
could you ever subscribe to such an ungodly endeavor?”
He went on to chastise me as if he were a
bishop preaching to the sinners on a podium of a great cathedral, except that
his church was his city, his flock were the very people he swore to protect.
The beast-man spoke of brotherly love that the teachings of our Lord and Savior
induced us to carry into this world, and how our ideals were perverted by the
power hungry men who had claimed to have seen the light of God, yet stayed in
the total and absolute darkness. Such was the strength of his conviction that
even as I struggled with rage that I felt only moments ago, tears came to my
eyes when I realized this man, the barbarian I wrote of before had a demeanor
as noble and worthy as any of the great princes of the Empire.
Yes, he said, blood has been shed, and those
responsible had paid dearly for the privilege to make war on the lands of
Novgorod. As he spoke the words, he looked at the direction of duke Henry’s
breathless corpse, now beset with the flies and laying in dirt, and exposed to
the crowd’s humiliation.
“This was your leader who thought he could
take away our freedoms and make the Lord Great Novgorod submit to a foreign
ruler. We offer a hand of peace to those that come in peace, but those whose
lust for wealth and lands leads them here will only find death.”
So spoke Mikhail Vasilyevich, Kniaz (which
is their word for the prince) of Novgorod. When he was done, I braced myself
for the inevitable, yet the sword thrust I waited for never came. Instead, the
guards led most of us towards what I assumed to be prison; my fate, as I soon
found out, was different. The Kniaz said something to one of his men, pointing
at me, and before I had a chance to resist, four giant Russians dragged me towards
my unknown destiny.
As it turned out, Mikhail Vasilyevich was
intrigued by the German knight who fought on even in spite of utter defeat.
Those were his own words, not mere outbursts of sinful pride from this old
soldier; for all my life I had known little but war and battle, having fought
in innumerable campaigns under the banners of the Empire and coming away with
my life from all of them, yet never had there been a praise of my valor like
this one. I was placed in one of the innumerable towers rising into the sky
above Novgorod, where my battle wounds slowly healed under the tender care of
Russian physician whose name I could never pronounce, let along remember.
Still I knew I was prisoner, and kept alive
only on the mercy of Mikhail Vasilyevich himself, having little to do but rot
in my captivity. The Kniaz visited me several times over the next two months,
asking about my travels and campaigns I had fought in, however the only other
company I had were the four burly guards that never spoke. It was not until
much later that I found out the guards were warrior priests, akin to the
knights of our own Livonian order, under the oath of silence until they were
given permission to speak again by their abbot. So, I thought, this was the
reason the Novgorodians fought with the fury and skill worthy of the most noble
knights of Europe, the faith of the city’s inhabitants giving them a second
sword and a second shield.
When I asked the Kniaz about this, he
smiled, and told me that unlike us in the West, the Novgorodians needed no
promised land, no holy pilgrimages, for their promised land was right under
their feet; it was their home, and the roots that gave their people such a
solid foundation worth fighting and dying for. They desired little of other
nations save for their friendship, tolerance, and commerce, he said; they were
reluctant warriors, but warriors nevertheless, and any man foolish enough to
threaten their sacred homeland learned that quickly enough.
Over the next year I picked up enough
Russian to carry on a simple conversation; then, I fell sick. Near death, I
called for a priest of my own Catholic faith, knowing that the end was near;
brother Joseph, one of my former companions in the crusade was still living in
the city, citing it as his calling to bring the true faith to the heretics. It
is ironic, I say, that his simple efforts to appeal to the goodness and
humanity in the hearts of the Novgorodians after he was let go of the prison
did more to convert the select few to the faith of our fathers than the entire
crusade; but God does work in mysterious ways.
Miraculously I survived the bout with
disease, although to this day I still feel its aftermath in pains that
sometimes attack my limbs and joints at times when it rains; then, I pleaded
with brother Joseph to teach me to read and write. It is thanks to this most
patient of all teachers that I write this letter to you in my own hand rather
than having to occupy the holy man’s time that could be used for godly works.
I feel the coming of old age upon me, and
the grip of death marching ever near, the one last battle this old soldier will
not be able to win; thus I finally persuaded Kniaz Mikhail Vasilyevich to let
me see those dearest to me before the shadow of the reaper completely overtakes
what is left of my years. He was right; there is no promised land, there are no
sacred pilgrimages but one.
I am coming home.
With love,
Conrad Graf von Gottingen
In
The Shadow Of Death (1350-1400)
In one last breath
You'll feel this damned old soul
You'll see the things I see
For all these years
Of pain and sacrifice
You'll know the pain I know
Of all these things
I offer unto you
Infernal wisdom waits
Now unleashed
Like the flames of hate
My sacrifice is made
Every note
And every word you hear
Comes from deep within
An angry soul
That twists and turns inside
Pondering this life
Crimson eyes
Staring through your lies
Awakes the inner rage
Take my knife
Make my sacrifice
You¹re my burnt offering
Spill your blood
Offer me good omen
Make the sacrifice, the hours close at hand
Burn your soul
Offer me good omen
Take your very life, this I command
Iced
Earth – “Burnt Offerings”
The fate of Conrad von Gottingen after the
writing of the letters kindly submitted by late Graf’s descendants is
relatively obscure; despite believing himself close to death at the time his
last letter was written, he lived on for twenty more years, dying in his bed in
1374, aged sixty two. The rest of Europe, however, was not as fortunate.
As the German barons grumbled with discontent,
Maximillian decided that in order to contain them and to reduce the problem of
nobility dangerously increasing in proportion to the overall population, a
military expedition had to be organized to take more land from a weaker,
preferably Pagan, Muslim, or, for the lack of former, heretical nation, serving
the purpose of not only spreading Catholicism throughout Europe, but also
distributing large surplus of landless nobles among the new Imperial dominions,
and expand the Habsburg power to lessen its dependency on baronial support. In
1351, the expedition set towards the Russian trading state of Novgorod, whose
wealth, lands, and relatively remote location virtually guaranteed that
Novgorod would face the Imperial army alone, with no overt support from any of
its enemies.
Passing through only nominally (but
sufficiently so, in the eyes of the Pope) Catholic Lithuania, the German army
engaged the Russians with the results described by late Graf von Gottingen; a
humiliation for the Empire and its Emperor followed. In 1353 Maximillian made
grudging peace with Novgorod’s prince Mikhail IV, paying significant ransom for
the German captives as the only means to ensure the barons of his goodwill
towards them, and to prevent now all-too-sudden threat of deposition. In truth,
Maximillian put his trust into the success, or at the very least an honorable
end to the Second Baltic Crusade (the first one being the name generally given
to Livonian Order’s gradual conversion of Lithuania to Christianity), not the
all-out disaster the Germans encountered. Thus burdened with the heavy weight
of loss, Maximillian of Habsburg died in 1355 just as the word of a new menace
begun to spread through the Christendom.
The first mention of the Great Black Plague
of the XIVth century came in a chronicle from 1354, describing the virulent
disease ravaging a Greek trading post on the Sea of Azov. Through Genovese and
Byzantine traders, the disease spread both to Italy and Asia Minor by 1355,
recorded as being solely responsible for the deaths of half of the population
of Thessaloniki, and insurmountable misery elsewhere. Very few cities were
spared the ravages of the plague; chief amongst them was Venice, which instituted
strict quarantine enforced by its formidable navy and the city’s unique
location.
Another city that suffered less than would
be expected from a bustling metropolis its size was Constantinople, saved by
timely intervention of Constantine XI, whose draconian measures of allowing no
ships into its great harbors and closing its gates to all outsiders. The
flipside of such a quarantine was the famine that followed, for the city’s
formidable food reserves were still not sufficient to feed its half-million
strong population. By 1356 many of the city’s citizens were starving, and the
Emperor had to put down at least two major attempts to remove him from the
throne; many of the city’s poor were thrown outside the walls and left to their
own devices in the plague-ravaged countryland just as the churches filled with
frightened, hungry masses for the sermons of firebrand preachers with flames of
doom in their eyes.
Not surprisingly, Constantine was detested
for such harsh measures, and several outlying provinces quickly rose up in
revolt under generals proclaimed Emperors by their own troops, chief among them
Andronicus Ergutrulos, the Emperor’s uncle previously thought of as harmless
and trustworthy and left in command of large force on the Eastern frontier of
the Empire. The other contenders for the throne included such prominent leaders
of the day as Nicetas Botaneiates, the Strategos of Cappadocia, and Michael
Argyros, Drungarios (or High Admiral) of the Byzantine Black Sea fleet;
however, none of these enjoyed as high a degree of legitimacy or popular
support as Andronicus, who quickly secured important fortresses and begun
negotiations with Michael Argyros, promising him the title of Sebastokrator and
the hand of one of his daughters in marriage should he throw his lot in with
Andronicus instead of attempting to claim the purple for himself.
While the Eastern Empire was torn apart by
yet another round of civil strife, the Plague continued to ravage the West.
Maximillian’s elected successor, Adolph II lived only for few months after
being crowned, succumbing to the plague in late 1356; his successor-to-be
(usually counted as Otto V, even if he did not actually reign and only received
the crown of Germany, not that of the Western Empire) contracted the disease
while on the trip to Rome to receive the Pope’s blessing, and died shortly
thereafter. Clearly, the wrath of God was upon the godless Western Emperors –
or so thought the Pope Adrian, witness to the ravages of an invisible killer
that made no difference between peasant, clergyman, noble, or infidel, killing
all in its way.
Although by now well into his late sixties,
Adrian lost none of his energy nor determination in claiming that until God’s
wrath subsides, no Emperor could be crowned, and the Vicar of Christ should
assume temporal as well as the spiritual authority in the Empire. After all,
the city of Rome itself had strangely suffered somewhat less from the Plague
despite only mild quarantine measures (ironically, in the last several decades
researchers pointed out that the true cause for Rome’s relatively low, albeit
still formidable death toll was much more prosaic, owing more to the accidental
introduction of different species of a rat into the city that drove away
so-called “roof rats” - the species frequently living in the roofs of the
houses responsible for spreading the disease by the means of fleas living on
their fur were now displaced by the species mostly living in the cellars and
lower levels of dwellings known as the “Norwegian rat”), meaning that God’s
favor was clearly with His church.
The Plague also had some unexpected results.
In lower England, decimation of the French garrisons through disease allowed
for a sneak English attack on the French-controlled territory, taking Essex and
advancing into Kent all the while being barely held back in Devonshire. With French
dominion of England seriously challenged, and the Scots adding Wales to their
dominions, the struggle for the British Isles became a three-way conflict
instead of being previously thought of as the matter of contest between
Scotland and France, England entering the fray as a full-scale participant on
the battle for dominance on the British Isles.
In Iberia, in a meanwhile, Granada suffered
a crushing defeat to the forces of Leon, losing much of its northern frontier;
while Castile attempted a land grab of their own, however, the armies of Leon
turned on them, reducing Castile to a smallish kingdom in the northwestern
corner of the peninsula. The Granadans, still reeling from their defeat, begun
major persecution for all non-Muslims in the country, believing them to be
potential traitors; as a result, a major exodus of Christians of every
denomination begun towards every land that would have them.
The descendants of Cathar refugees that fled
Languedoc a century ago, however, found themselves in between a rock and a hard
place. Their faith outlawed in all of Christian Spain and in most of Europe,
they had little reason to be optimistic – besides, with the Plague rampant,
most states shunned accommodating foreign refugees in first place. Desperate,
they used all of their available funds to bribe Marinid officials for the
ability to acquire several seaworthy ships, which set sails for the Balearic
Islands in early 1360, where the Cathar colony set up its virtual independence.
In the next century, however, the Balearics would acquire much darker
reputation due to the number of pirates operating from the islands with the
Cathar leaders turning the blind eye as the pirates provided the islands with
their only means of naval protection and with a steady source of income.
Indeed, by the end of the XIVth century the words “Cathar” and “pirate” were
nearly synonymous in much of the Mediterranean.
In the lands formerly of the Rus, the
fragmentation of the Mongol Horde proceeded fast apace. Independent princedoms
were declaring themselves within the Mongol lands almost daily, and no sooner
could the Khan put down one rebellion than another two flared up elsewhere. A
Russian warlord Dimitri Obolenskiy won series of victories against both the
regional Mongol forces and the Poles, culminating with his capture of Kiev in
1359, and the crowning of him as the Grand Prince of Kiev, much to the chagrin
of the others claiming the title of the Grand Prince in Moscow and Tver;
Dimitri claimed his state to be a direct successor of Kievan Rus of old and
established sovereignty within the borders enjoyed by Kiev prior to the Mongol
conquest. A Mongol prince Giray, shunned and disempowered by the Khan due to
his potential claim to the Mongol throne, rebelled and set up a Khanate in Crimea,
taking Byzantine settlements there one by one until only Cherson was still in
Greek hands.
The Plague seemed to affect the Mongols
slightly less than their European neighbors, probably due to some sort of prior
immunity they developed along the way of their conquests, but little progress
was made by the Khan – instead, political instability resulted in a number of
Mongol generals striking out on their own while the Sarai could do little but
threaten and watch. In addition to Giray’s Khanate of Crimea, the Khanates of
Kazan, Astrakhan, and Caucasus sprung up, the latter one founded by a general
of mixed Mongol and Georgian blood who ended up staging what was essentially a
coup in the Kingdom of Georgia but claiming it was a conquest of the kingdom in
order to prop up his prestige among the other Khanates.
As Europe stood in fear of the Plague and
internal strife, the Habsburgs reaped a harvest of titles and lands in Germany
and Austria due to inheritances from the noble lines dying out in the Plague; while
the Habsburgs themselves were not immune to the disease, losing a fair number
of their own, the extensive marriage network established by the heads of the
House over the past seventy years began to bear fruit, resulting in bountiful
inheritances that truly established an “Empire within Empire”, as a
contemporary remarked upon. By now, nearly the entire southern half of German
Holy Roman Empire was in some way or another controlled by a member of House of
Habsburg.
Despite Maximillian I’s reign ending in a
near-disaster, his successors were able to mitigate the damage done to the
house reputation by shifting attention of the German nobles to other matters,
namely the plague itself, and the lack of need to expand to other lands in its
wake. At this time, the House of Habsburg was headed by one Francis, son of
Maximillian, considered a brilliant, albeit ruthless and duplicitous diplomat
by contemporaries. The question in front of Francis was that of the status of
the house; while with respect to sheer wealth and power the Habsburgs were
unrivaled amongst the noble houses of the Empire, they normally did not even
carry a kingly title, relegating them nominally to a lower position than a
number of European rulers, some of whom were the electors in the Empire. Worse
yet, with the Pope refusing to crown the next Emperor until “God’s punishment
was through”, even the Imperial prestige earned by several Habsburg Emperors
did little to elevate the house’s nominal standing.
Instead of antagonizing the Pope and making
him the potential rallying point of any dissenter movements, Francis negotiated
a settlement with the Pope that was taught to aspiring diplomats for centuries
to come. No, he stated, the House of Habsburg never laid claim to the Empire as
its own, instead being content with its ancient special privileges as
protectors and servants of Christendom in the Empire’s borders. And despite the
failings of those of us, he continued, that are only human, it must be
remembered that it was the Habsburg that brought peace and tranquility to the
Empire, and it was the Habsburg that defeated the heresies that plagued the
souls of its people.
Yet, Francis wrote to the Pope, was it not
an unspeakable injustice that the Empire’s most prominent and noble house still
had to contend with being below many of its lessers on the feudal ladder as the
mere Dukes, whereas some of the lesser German electors brandished titles of
Princes and Kings? If the Vicar of Christ were to accept the House of Habsburg
as one of the pillars which would support the Empire’s ecclesiastic foundation
with its temporal might, would it not be prudent to acknowledge the debt the
Empire had to the house for delivering it from the heretical Hohenstaufens, and
bringing peace to the lands in the years past?
The subtlety was not lost on the Pope
Adrian, who was beginning to feel vulnerable in Italy with the military force
definitely no match for the German armies, or, for that matter, for the
concerned Byzantine attempt at the peninsula should it ever occur. It was, he
concluded, better to deal with the devil he knew well and to obtain his
political and military support than it was to be left open for any adventurous
prince with the desire to add the Imperial title to his resume. Besides,
Francis did not ask for much; a recognition of a title above that of a Duke
that would be inherited by his successors was all he wanted. Or was it?
Despite his doubts, in 1361 aging and by now
increasingly more senile Adrian reluctantly proclaimed that from now on, the
head of House of Habsburg was to carry the title of Caesar, or Kaiser, in part
in recognition of their enduring service to the Empire and the Christian faith,
in part due to their willingness to be the pillar that supports the Holy See
and its faithful flock. The title, Adrian declared, was to be equivalent to
that of a King elsewhere, but, as he was careful to point out, did not
constitute automatic Emperorship, given with the title of Imperator Augustus
that was the Pope’s to give.
To Francis, this mattered little. The fact
was that he practically got himself crowned Emperor by skillfully manipulating
his opponents, and without even claiming to be one. It is thus true to his
designs that the history books do generally count Francis and his successors as
Holy Roman Emperors whether or not they were actually crowned as such. With the
notable exception of a brief interlude in the XVth century, every Holy Roman
Emperor from then on was a member of the House of Habsburg, and was the
possessor of the title of a Kaiser.
In a meanwhile, the Eastern Empire was
catapulted headlong into the series of events known from thereon as the Second
Byzantine Civil War, raging across Anatolia and the Balkans even as the ravages
of the Plague subsided. For seven years the fighting was inconclusive, despite
Andronicus eliminating all other contenders for the throne and facing off
against the reigning Emperor only. Finally, in 1363 the rebel suffered a
crushing defeat at the hands of the loyalist army led by Constantine XI
himself, seemingly deciding the fate of the war.
Although Andronicus managed to escape with a
small retinue of loyal bodyguards and his war treasury, it seemed that his days
were numbered. Already most territories that previously pledged allegiance to
him surrendered to the victorious Imperial army, and garrisons of the
rebel-held cities opened their gates to the loyalist troops; the peasantry of
Anatolia, previously thought of by Andronicus as the main pillar on which his
power stood, watched impassively as the Imperial army marched to the East.
Indeed, as soon as the plague subsided, Constantine opened the gates of the
capital again, temporarily converting much of the Imperial navy into transports
to deliver vital cargo of grain and other food to the city; the very citizens
that were starving only months ago praised the wisdom of the Emperor, now that
the ravages of the plague became well-known. From the city’s four hundred
thousand-strong population, the death toll was minimal despite the many
discomforts suffered by its people; in a meanwhile Adrianople (where most of
the refugees from the capital went), Nicaea, and Thessaloniki were all
devastated, some losing as much as a half of their population to disease. Thus
when a wayward scholar nicknamed the Emperor “Draco” after a semi-mythological
Athenian ruler, Constantine adopted the moniker with a certain degree of pride,
knowing that his harsh, but effective measures saved the capital from certain
devastation. Of course, Constantine wisely chose to ignore the fact that the
very measures that saved the capital not only almost cost him his throne, but
resulted in much misery during the civil war.
Sensing everything lost, Andronicus went to
the only source of help he could turn to – the Kingdom of Syria, ruled from
Aleppo by a young, yet ambitious prince Khalil. Despite being only nineteen at
the time, Khalil made no secret of his desire to see the Muslim world reunited,
by force if necessary; dismissed by most of his peers as a dreamer, he
nevertheless has proven to be much more formidable than anyone could suspect.
Therefore, Andronicus’ arrival at Aleppo was an event as fortuitous as any
Khalil could ever hope for.
Promising not only most of his treasury, but
also the disputed border provinces to Khalil should he be provided with the
troops, in 1364 Andronicus arrived in Aleppo, attempting to garner support
against his nephew. The Syrian King’s advisors were enthusiastic; here, they
said, was the chance to strike at the Greek Empire while it was still
recovering from civil strife, and, should they succeed, bring the proud
Byzantines to their knees – something not even the Caliphate at its height
could do. Despite their urgings, Khalil had his own reservations in committing
to what was essentially a foreign war with little to gain. He had Andronicus
ambushed and killed, taking his treasury and sending ambassadors to Constantine
with the head of his wayward uncle along with the letter confirming the peace
treaty and asking for an alliance with the Emperor.
With his Western frontier thus quiet, and
with his finances strengthened considerably by late Andronicus’ treachery,
Khalil began campaigns of conquest that were to last for the next thirty years
of his reign, culminating with his capture of Cairo in 1389 and the end of the
Abbassid reign as most of the Muslim world once ruled by the Abbassids was now
under control of Aleppo. His campaigns are better told elsewhere; it suffices
to say that to this day Khalil is revered across the Muslim world as one of its
greatest leaders, the bringer of unity and the one factor that allowed the Arab
states to regain their cultural and technological prominence in the world of
the time.
To Constantine XI, still hunting down small
groups of bandits that claimed loyalty to Andronicus before his death in
Anatolia, death of his uncle and the end of large-scale fighting in the civil
war meant that he could finally focus on foreign goals, chief of which was the
restoration of his Empire’s power and influence in Europe, which was damaged by
civil strife and discord. His first step was to send an embassy West, not to
the Pope, to the shock of the many, but to the “Caesar” Francis, revealing
Constantine’s obvious understanding of who was the true power in the Western
Empire.
By 1366, an agreement between the East and
the West was hammered out, resulting in a marriage of Constantine’s daughter
Zoe to Francis’ son, another Francis, along with the promise of renewed
alliance and cooperation in expelling the Moors from Jerusalem. In truth, both
Constantine and Francis knew that the latter goal was simply a convenient
pretext for the marriage alliance; the former had just made a profitable
trading arrangement with the Abbassids (in whose power Jerusalem still remained
until 1373), and the latter had no stomach for massive undertaking such as the
Crusade – neither had any intentions of supporting, let alone initiating the
new Crusade. The old Pope Adrian would have protested vehemently, but Adrian
was dead, having passed on peacefully in Rome; the College of Cardinals was
still debating on the successor – thus there were no opponents of the agreement
that, many hoped, would heal the rifts between the East and the West.
Although the plague has subsided by 1360,
there has been a definite lack of desire to appoint an Emperor both from the
Pope and the Habsburgs; the status quo satisfied both sides well. When the new
Pope, Innocent VII was elected in 1367, tensions between the two were at a much
lower point than any time in the last century; they were to remain as such
throughout the rest of Francis I’s reign.
While the East and the West both enjoyed a
period of relative domestic and foreign tranquility, the British Isles were
torn apart by warfare where the borders and alliances shifted nearly every
minute. By 1370 the French were finally able to gain a distinct advantage over
the British, leaving only small pieces of territory still in British hands due
to an alliance of convenience with the Scots; the French king believed that the
sooner the English resistance is quelled, less of a thorn in his side it will
be – even if the partition of England agreed between him and his Scottish
counterpart was only a temporary measure, it satisfied both antagonists as to
be able to focus on each other instead of losing men and resources to guerilla
raids by the increasingly desperate English.
The partition, as one could expect, was not
to last long; even as the King of England was formally forced to give up the
crown and the title, now having to style himself the “Prince of Norfolk” and
swearing the oath of fealty to the French, tensions began to grow between the
French and the Scots. Finally, in 1378 a dispute over who should have control
over a particular county erupted into a full-scale conflict, which was to stain
English countryside with blood of both French, Scots, and English for the next
six decades before its final resolution. But more on that later.
By 1373 Constantine XI, nicknamed Draco by
his subjects, was finally able to concentrate on the idea of recapturing former
Imperial territories from the “barbarians” that, in his eyes, occupied them
unlawfully for hundreds of years. Since the end of the Second Byzantine Civil
War and recovery from the worst of the Plague, the Imperial economy has
improved dramatically, raising the standards of living and creating a
significant population surplus that wanted new lands, new frontiers to settle,
and new ways to make a living. With the aristocracy of Byzantium suffering
somewhat less during the Plague than the aristocracy of the other nations,
there was still a relative surplus of younger sons of noble families that had
little perspective in the civil service, and next to no chance to inherit any
meaningful portion of the familial estates; the Imperial army was the one
outlet popular amongst them, for it was not the question of if the Emperor
orders foreign conquest; it was the question of when.
The Balkans, Constantine thought, provided
perfect area for expansion. Not only they were in his eyes simply wayward rebel
provinces of the Empire, but their people were for the most part Orthodox, and
the strategic position of various Balkan states allowed for the Imperial forces
to be within striking distance of Venice and in a position to threaten Hungary
or Austria should the need ever emerge. Using bandit raids on border
settlements as a pretext for invasion, Constantine ordered his generals to
march against Serbia and Bosnia, and attempt to bring them back under the rule
of the rightful Emperor.
Francis I died in 1374; through liberal
“donations” Constantine kept the Pope and his son-in-law Francis II calm while
the Imperial war machine rolled over the Serb resistance. Still, despite a very
concerned and dedicated effort, the conquest and the subsequent pacification of
Serbia and Bosnia was to take the remainder of Constantine’s reign – and even
then the conquest was not as complete as the Byzantines would have wanted to
believe. By the time of Constantine’s death in 1389 most of Serbia was under
direct control of the Byzantines with the exception of a small enclave in the
northwest of former Serb kingdom, and the ruler of Bosnia was forced to
acknowledge Byzantine Emperor as his feudal suzerain.
It would not have been a far stretch to
assume that any semi-competent Western Emperor would have been alarmed;
however, while Francis II was far from incompetent, he had to face a growing
crisis at home. With German nobility severely reduced by the Plague, most of
the lesser nobles owing allegiance to the Habsburgs struggled to retain their hold
on the lands still under their control; more and more commoners were promoted
to positions of responsibility and authority that were suddenly freed up now
that there was not enough high-born or well educated nobility and clergy to
take them. Even Francis himself was forced to give much greater say in the
matters of government to representatives of the merchants, craftsmen, and even
few peasant-born advisors that advanced through the ranks of German society due
to luck and individual talents. As a result, while the Western Empire was
attempting to cope with significant changes in the nature of its society,
Francis has to tread very carefully not to upset a delicate balance that
emerged.
Besides, there was a shift in the public
aspirations in the West. The crusading spirit was no longer there; the need for
expansion subsided, at least temporarily. In the place of the Holy Roman Empire
that was still one and indivisible, at least theoretically, a century ago, was
a gathering of small states of varying power that agreed to recognize the
concept of the Empire itself only in theory, and as the means to band together
should an outside invader ever threaten them. There were no further grand
undertakings on the part of the Empire – only by the individual houses within
it; and the House of Habsburg was still the chief amongst them.
Popes came and went; few were able to leave
more than a small mark on history. By 1384, however, with the ascent of
Celestine VI to the throne of Saint Peter, the Holy See was to obtain one of
its most easily recognizable and prominent advocates, as well as one of the
greatest Popes of the century.
Celestine was one of the youngest to ever
rise to the Pontificate, aged only twenty seven at the time; many whispered
that he only got advanced due to unspeakable intrigues of his mother, who was
rumored to have been the mistress of several prominent cardinals. No one
expected him to amount to anything significant other than to serve as a
convenient figurehead for the Church; his health was known to be poor and
wanting, suffering from epilepsy and experiencing constant seizures, Celestine
was not expected to live long. To surprise as much his own as that of his
opponents, Celestine VI was to live to the ripe old age, dying at eighty five
years old in 1442 and having survived numerous cardinals, Emperors, heresies,
and plots all the while proving himself possibly one of the most important
theologicians of not only the XIVth and XVth centuries, but of the entire
period we came to know as the Late Middle Ages, and being the instrumental
force behind the Seventh (commonly known as the Last) Crusade.
Celestine took little time in asserting his
power, proving once and for all to the cardinals that the seemingly meek body
hid the will of steel. After the deaths of several prominent Roman nobles on
the grounds of “supporting heresies”, the cardinals were quick to fall in line
and to follow the orders of this unlikely master. In 1387, Celestine took an
unprecedented step and launched a campaign of conquest against the declining
trade republic of Pisa, taking personal command of the Papal army on several
occasions; the city surrendered on May 30th, 1388, and was added to
the Papal dominion.
The second test of Celestine’s abilities as
a leader came in late 1390 when Sicily revolted once again against the detested
Habsburg rule, expelling the Habsburg king and inviting King Pedro VIII of
Aragon to assume the crown of an island. Knowing that several rival powers
hungrily eyed the island of Sicily, Celestine decided that he could not only
serve as an arbiter, but promote the interests of both his religion and the
Papal State itself, shrewdly maneuvering between the Habsburgs, the king of
Aragon, the Byzantine Emperor, and the French ambitions. The Sicilian people,
he declared, did not wish to be ruled by Habsburg king, choosing instead an
equally pious and magnanimous king of Aragon; however, there was a point of
contention that Sicily was a part of the Holy Empire; Aragon was not.
Therefore, Celestine wrote to both Pedro and Francis, the solution would be to
allow Pedro to keep the crown of Sicily, but make him subordinate to the
Emperor in the feudal structure – and to the “acting Emperor” or Kaiser
Francis.
This proposal would have been normally
unacceptable to the proud Aragonese, however, if Aragon were to be considered a
part of the Holy Roman Empire, its monarch would stand a good chance of getting
elected to the Emperorship itself, since the Habsburg Kaisers did not appear to
have any ambitions to claim the throne (which they held de facto, if not de
jure). To Francis, losing Sicily was not a pleasant alternative; however,
Apulia and Naples were still Habsburg dominions, and while Pedro might not have
thought much about Francis’ feudal suzerainty, knowing that there would be
little way for it to be enforced, Francis realized that the amount of power
obtained from that was worth much more in the long term than the short-term
inconvenience of having to give up a rich, but troublesome island.
Therefore, the agreement was hammered out in
early 1392 just as another piece of disturbing news arrived on the scene. In
February 1392, after a year-long siege, the city of Carthage fell to the forces
of Khalil of Aleppo, who by then assumed the title of Caliph and ruled most of
the territory of old, pre-division Abbassid Caliphate.
The Kingdom of Carthage, which we had
largely ignored for most of this story, was a rather odd construct, established
during the Hohenstaufen high point, and existing as essentially a loose confederation
of baronies and princedoms from there on. Technically, the Holy Roman Emperor
was also automatically the King of Carthage; however, with the overall decline
of Imperial authority and the interregnum following Adrian’s claim on the
Emperor’s duties, the throne was vacant, technically Papal responsibility, but
practically ruled by shaky alliance of several powerful barons.
When in 1389 internal conflicts between the
barons resulted in a de facto civil war, the losing baron, Ulrich von Staub
pleaded with Khalil for help against his opponents, hoping to end the
internecine conflict in a prompt and decisive manner; alas, this was not to be,
for shortly after Khalil’s forces crossed into Tunis, von Staub was slain in a
minor engagement, fighting alongside his knights. From there on, most of the
remaining German barons submitted to the rule of the Caliph, who, as they
heard, was of an enlightened and tolerant bent; the few that desired to contest
the conquest gathered a rather large army and confronted the Caliph, however,
due to their mutual suspicions of each other and struggle over who would be the
supreme commander, the knights of Carthage suffered a defeat of enormous
magnitude, survivors retreating in to the fortress of Carthage itself and
sending desperate pleas to Europe for help. It was not long before they were
able to plead their case in person, for Khalil had survivors rounded up,
boarded upon a ship, and sent to Europe with the message not to interfere in
North Africa, which he considered his domain. Furthermore, he told them, should
the Christians choose to disregard the teachings of Prophet Jesus and not let
the sleeping dogs lie, he will teach them the meaning of holy war.
It is likely that both the luckless barons
and their conqueror knew well that there was next to no likelihood the capture
of Carthage will remain unanswered; however, Khalil was now setting his sights
on Sicily, once an Arab dominion, and still possessing a significant Arab
population on the island. All he needed was the pretext, and he believed his
army and navy more than capable of making good on a threat and then some.
These plans may have very well been brought
to fruition if not for the hand of fate signaling for an unexpected twist. In
early 1393 Khalil of Aleppo was murdered by a drunken eunuch over some small
grievance; rumors abounded that his murder was the result of a plot by his son
Nasir, impatient to inherit and fearful that his brothers might be preferred in
line of succession. At any rate, the Byzantine Emperor Nicephorus IV, late
Constantine’s son, no longer considered himself bound by his father’s treaty
with Khalil marking their respective spheres of influence; knowing that the
reborn Caliphate was at its weakest during the succession crisis, he enthusiastically
sent delegates to Rome, where Pope Celestine VI was preaching Crusade.
At any other time Celestine would have
probably rejected offers of crusade participation from the schismatic Greeks,
expecting there to be a plenty of good Catholics willing to strike at the
infidel, and fearing, rightfully so, of the Byzantine influence spreading to
North Africa. This time, however, support in the Catholic world was scant, as
most major powers were preoccupied with other affairs – France with its war in
England, Aragon suspiciously eyeing Leon across the border all the while
attempting to maintain and strengthen its rule in Sicily, Hungarians wary of
the Byzantine conquests nearby, and the Habsburgs more concerned with keeping
status quo within their domains than in foreign adventures of any kind. Still,
there were a number of adventurers pledging their arms to the proposed Crusade,
many of whom were of peasant or bourgeois origin, denied opportunity in their
own lands that could be obtained with the force of arms abroad. There was a
definite lack of crowned heads to lead the Seventh Crusade, but Celestine did
not worry at the least about it; after all, the ambitions of powerful rulers
doomed more than one expedition with great designs. It was just that there had
been too few Catholic Europeans willing to lay their lives on the line for the
holy war…
As shocking as the papal announcement of
allowing the schismatic Nicephorus IV to take the cross was, it generated a
rush of pledges from various European rulers wishing to participate in the
Crusade – officially to send the Saracen menace back where it came from, but
practically because of their fear of growing Byzantine power, and determination
to limit its growth to the best of their ability. To Celestine VI this was a
great diplomatic triumph; indeed, he went as far as to pledge a force of Papal
troops to the Crusade, making it truly the Holy War with even the Supreme
Pontiff contributing the military muscle for the good of all Christendom.
The great armies were therefore gathered in
two separate places: Pisa for the Western Crusaders, and Constantinople for
their Eastern counterparts. From there on, it was agreed, both armies shall
mount a naval assault on Carthage, gaining an important foothold in North
Africa and bringing Christian forces within a striking distance of the heart of
Muslim Empire in the East – Egypt. In April 1395, fleets of the Eastern and
Western halves of Christendom sailed on, carrying thousands of eager and well
armed troops to their destination.
Having to travel longer distance, the
Byzantine fleet arrived later, delayed by both the weather and a major
engagement against the Caliphate’s navy near Crete. Some in the West pointed to
potential different reason for this delay, however; while the Western fleet was
able to advance practically unopposed, save for few minor engagements, the
Western army was still estimated to be no more than half of the Eastern one,
only about thirty thousand strong and, while formidable by itself, it did not
possess the overwhelming power to completely eliminate Arab menace alone. By
arriving late, the Byzantines not only would land on territory under friendly
control, but also would let the Western army bear the brunt of casualties.
As the story goes, the Western army met with
several initial successes, taking numerous small towns and fighting several
pitched battles against the local garrisons. Carthage itself, however, proved
impregnable to frontal assault, and even the primitive artillery available to
the Crusaders could not breach its massive walls, ironically enough
strengthened by generations of paranoid German barons. In July 1395, the main
Arab army arrived, under command of general known only as Hassan and
strengthened with the veterans of late Khalil’s campaign. The resulting battle
is not described in much detail in the European sources, and for a good reason:
the Western Crusaders did not give a very good account of themselves when faced
with a numerically superior, well trained and well equipped enemy. Falling back
to the original landing site, the Crusaders realized that their position was
becoming desperate should the Byzantines be delayed any longer.
Luckily for them, masts of the great
Byzantine war fleet appeared on the horizon just days after the hasty retreat;
from the Imperial ships, thousands of disciplined, heavily armored soldiers
dismantled, augmented by fearsome klibanophorii shock cavalry and Byzantine
versions of the field cannon designed to sow fear and destruction amongst the
enemy field troops by attaching several barrels together, allowing
unprecedented volleys of death to be sent towards the enemy. This kind of
weapon became known as the “Organ Gun” due to its uncanny visual similarity to
the musical instrument, although due to difficulties in manufacturing these
inventive cannon and levels of craftsmanship required, it would be years before
they would be adopted by most armies. For now, gunpowder technology was still
in its infancy, and heavy cavalry was still the king of the battlefield.
The Byzantine troops wasted no time in
advancing towards the Arab army and forcing a decisive engagement. Surprised to
see numerous fresh troops arriving on the field where he only expected to find
tired, demoralized, and broken army, Hassan nevertheless pressed with an
attack, knowing that there was still relative numerical parity, and the quality
of his troops was at the very least comparable, if not superior to the enemy.
Alas, the Byzantine preference for heavily armed and armored troops spelled
doom for lighter, more maneuverable, but more vulnerable Arabs as the element
of surprise, meticulous yet effective tactics, and wise choice of terrain
decided the battle in favor of the Byzantines.
It must be pointed out that the Battle of
Carthage was not a one-sided slaughter – the Arab army was forced to limp back
to Egypt with significant casualties, however, it was not destroyed or rendered
unable to fight, just largely devoid of offensive power. For Nicephorus IV,
this was perfectly acceptable; while he considered Egypt to be a legitimate
target and a possible future objective, he still had the annexation of Armenia
Minor, as well as quelling the last vestiges of resistance in Serbia on his
hands, preferring to settle the matter diplomatically now that the superiority
of his arms had been proven. Therefore when Caliph Nasir was presented with an
offer to surrender the former Kingdom of Carthage to the Byzantines in return
for cessation of hostilities (and, as it has been revealed later, promise of
trade concessions within the Empire and a non-aggression pact), he did not
agonize much over the decision, choosing to agree rather than waste resources,
money, and manpower over a piece of land of questionable value.
The Western Crusaders and the Pope were
initially outraged, but could do very little, now that the Western Crusading
army was either destroyed, or in no condition to contest rulership of Carthage.
It is generally agreed by the future historians that Nicephorus IV’s handling
of their demands to hand over Carthage to the ruler chosen by the Western
Emperor was what determined the shape of relations between the East and the
West for the next three centuries; had he been just slightly more willing to
give in, or to offer a compromise, the diplomatic crisis could have been
avoided. There is, of course, a significant minority of historians arguing that
the confrontation between the East and the West at this stage was practically
inevitable due to the growing power of the Eastern Empire and its ideas on
expansion towards the West, and into the territories the Byzantines considered
to be rightfully theirs; however, the truth lies hidden beyond the centuries,
and we can only surmise as to the reasons for the epic struggle that followed
over the next three centuries and that was fought as much on the battlefield as
it was in the courts of the rulers, in throne rooms and taverns, parlors and
salons of noble ladies and on the narrow streets where the assassins’ blades
make quick work of their intended victims.
As it was, Nicephorus bluntly and without
much ceremony ordered the Westerners to pack their possessions and to sail back
whence they came from, unless they were prepared to swear allegiance to him and
the Eastern Empire, and renounce the “Papist superstition”, as Catholicism was
frequently called in the East at the times relations with the West were cold or
worse. To the Pope’s protests he replied that the victor takes the spoils of
war, and he fully intended to make good on that. Such bellicose posturing did little
to improve reputation of Nicephorus IV in the Western courts, but it definitely
raised his standing at home due to strong mistrust the Byzantines of all
origins felt towards these Western “barbarians” claiming to be heirs of Rome.
It is thus fitting that Nicephorus IV
emerges from the pages of history as more of a soldier-Emperor with less than
stellar diplomatic skills – appropriately enough for the man who gained the
Byzantines their first stronghold in North Africa since the VIIth century
through what could be only construed as ruthless and opportunistic tactics with
no regard for the well-being of his allies or for the diplomatic consequences.
To him, the saying that “might makes right” was the axiom by which he lived and
died; only the relatively short span of his reign prevented him from attempting
more conquests, as he undoubtedly saw himself another Justinian, and fully
intended to live up to his famous role model.
In a meanwhile, Francis II sent ambassadors
to the Pope pointing out that to deal with this heretic, an Emperor was
required, someone strong enough to lead the rulers of Europe in a show of unity
and strength, and to oppose the Byzantines politically as much as militarily.
In his letters, Francis offered himself to this “unwelcome, but necessary
duty”.
The Pope Celestine, although unwilling to
lessen even his theoretical authority, did realize that there was hardly a man
in Europe better qualified for the job than Francis, whose extensive alliance
and marriage networks ensured cooperation from rulers from within and without
the Empire, in command of powerful armies, and possessing of not a little
diplomatic clout. Therefore, he sent the Imperial crown to Francis, instructing
him to be the worldly leader of the Empire with the title of Augustus, while
praising him for his continued obedience to its spiritual leader and the faith
he represents. The latter passage was intended for setting a legal precedent of
strictly determining where the Emperor’s authority ended, and who was supreme in
the Empire; Francis could not care less as he accepted the crown from the Papal
legate in 1396. He and the Pope were working for the same goal, and were two of
the same, power-hungry, unscrupulous, yet with excellent diplomatic abilities
and willingness to sacrifice for the gain that may not materialize quickly – to
them both the ends justified the means. Therefore Francis was perfectly willing
to accept supposed Papal supremacy on paper as long as it did not interfere
with his plans; Celestine was willing to allow Francis free hand outside of
Italy for the promise of Habsburg protectorate.
In 1398, Nicephorus IV was killed in a border skirmish while personally
leading his guards against the Serb rebels; his successor was his son Alexius
VIII, whose first act upon claiming the throne was to order immediate blinding
or castration of all his brothers, therefore rendering every other potential
claimant to the throne ineligible and securing his power against potential
rebellion. Ironically it could be said that the civil wars and brutal
internecine slaughter that often accompanied succession in the Eastern Empire
in late XIVth and XVth centuries were what made it stronger during the time by
eliminating potentially weak monarchs before they had a chance to rule and
bring down the entire establishment with ill-advised actions or misguided
policies; it has been argued that this inhumane, yet surprisingly effective
mechanism was responsible for a string of effective and powerful monarchs from
the ascent of Constantine XI Draco all the way through the succession of
Nicephorus VI more than two hundred years later, when succession laws were
outlined in a more direct manner.
Despite the manner in which Alexius VIII ascended the throne, his reign
was characterized more by diplomatic finesse than by overt aggression, with the
threat of brute force always present in the wings, but never openly flaunted in
front of his opponents. When, however, the circumstances required it, his
military was brutal and efficient, as witnessed in subjugation of southern
Georgia and naval assault on Crimea. Alexius VIII is often overlooked as a
competent, but unspectacular Emperor during his thirty two year reign, however,
the Imperial expansion initiated by his son and continued by his grandson would
have been much more difficult without the solid political and economic
foundation secured during his mostly peaceful reign.
Although the news of Nicephorus’ death were well received in the West,
Francis II was still suspicious of his Eastern counterpart, who wisely chose
not to give a casus belli by any rash or poorly thought-through action, instead
in 1399 offering the Western frontier of his North African possessions to
Francis to allow settlement of Germans and establishment of separate “Duchy of
Mauritania”, with the Marinid portion of North Africa to expand to should there
ever be a need to do so. Still, despite these diplomatic overtures, relations
between the East and the West continued to gradually deteriorate, although it
would still be some time before the war of words fought in the throne rooms
became the contest of arms fought on the battlefields of Europe and Middle
East.
Rise Of The Heresy (1400-1430)
Halford - “Golgotha”
While the Eastern and the Western Empires conducted their clandestine
diplomacy under thinly veiled threats of war, our story shifts once again to
the long-suffering island of Sicily, now under the rule of Aragon. The
Aragonese presence on the island was somewhat of a paradox; though on one hand
purveyors of devout Catholicism, the Aragonese had to account for lacking
manpower to effectively enforce their religion upon the island’s non-Catholic
inhabitants, and were ill-prepared to deal with any threat of insurrection
should their policies prove as unpopular as those of their predecessors;
therefore, Aragon had to show more lenience in its rule of Sicily than it ever
had in the past, and for a period of fifteen years the unspoken agreement
between the island’s inhabitants and their erstwhile king was followed without
questions.
By 1407 the king of Aragon realized that in Sicily, he had a perfectly
positioned center of maritime trade between the Caliphate across the sea to the
south, Byzantium to the east, German and Italian states to the north, and
Iberian peninsula to the west. Combined with the island’s already considerable
wealth, developing Sicily as a source of Aragonese wealth was just too great a
temptation not to follow. By this time, Pedro VIII was dead, succeeded by his
son Alfonso – however, the change in leadership did not signal a change in
policies, and development money poured across the Mediterranean to expand
cities, develop the harbors, and improve public works on the island.
The people were quick to notice the effort Aragon was putting into its
Sicilian venture, along with a generally liberal social climate prevalent on
the island, much to the dismay of Pope Celestine; traders flocked to Sicily
from every corner of the Mediterranean, making the island rich and its master
in far-away Aragon even richer. However, not all looked upon Alfonso’s newfound
economic success with kind eyes.
Chief amongst those who were appalled at the situation in Sicily were
the Pope and the Byzantine Emperor, former concerned (rightfully so) with the
lack of enforcement of stringent Catholicism on the island, and latter
concerned with trade revenues Sicily took from Constantinople, previously
considered the preeminent center of trade in the Mediterranean. A formal
alliance between the two would have been next to impossible due to the strain
on Catholic-Orthodox relations caused by the Seventh Crusade, however,
diplomats often disguised as traveling priests, mercenary soldiers, or visiting
aristocrats began to circulate between Rome and Constantinople with alarming
frequency.
Under most circumstances Celestine would not have bothered to deal with
the heretic, kinslayer, and a likely backstabber that Alexius VIII was;
however, after the death of Francis II in 1402 and his successor Charles V
being occupied by rebellion of German barons, there was no other nearby power
capable of providing assistance to the Pope’s plans. Thus the Holy See and
Second Rome could have been best described as odd bedfellows, if not outright
enemies agreeing only that Sicily under the rule of Aragon as it stood was a
menace to both.
There was another problem, besides conflicting ambitions. The
Byzantines were prepared to send money or agents to destabilize Sicily enough
to make Aragonese control troublesome at best, but sending an army was out of
question for Alexius, who realized that in the aftermath of his father’s
diplomatic blunders the presence of Byzantine troops in Sicily could be
considered a reason enough for the Westerners to set aside their present differences
and unite for long enough to start a full-scale war, an event Alexius wanted to
avoid at all costs. The Papal States, while covering a respectable amount of
territory in Italy, did not possess the military power to invade the island and
enforce the Papal will, especially since a number of other powers would
consider Papal invasion a legitimate casus belli to attempt to claim an island
for themselves; calling upon the Habsburg king of Naples was out of question
since the memory of the Pope mediating the dispute between the Habsburgs and
the Aragonese was still fresh in his mind, and any arrangement that did not
result in complete return of Sicily under the Habsburg rule was out of
question.
The Byzantines wanted their old province back, but were unwilling to
commit major military forces to the operation; the Pope wanted a Catholic
Sicily with zero tolerance for any practices that strayed from the path of the
True Faith – preferably not in Byzantine hands, and preferably without
implicating the Pope to the king of Aragon, who still possessed sufficient
military might to threaten the Pope directly. The king of Aragon simply wanted
to keep the island in his hands by whatever means necessary.
When in 1408 Alexius VIII was distracted by raids on his territory from
the Khanate of Caucasus and committed significant military forces to
suppressing this threat to his borders, it became clear to the Pope that the
Byzantines were not the place to look for help. Instead, after realizing that
the negotiations went nowhere, Celestine turned to an old and time-honored idea
originally initiated during the Pontificate of Innocent III – the Inquisition.
He took great pains in maintaining the overall appearance of willing to
continue negotiations with the Byzantines while utilizing some clever and
undoubtedly inventive diplomacy to suggest to Alfonso of Aragon that the
Byzantine agents have infiltrated Sicily to a great extent, sowing discord and
general dissatisfaction with his rule. Instead of succumbing to the vices of these
heretics, Celestine proposed, would the Sicilians not better be served by
groups of dedicated missionaries who would also do the double duty in weeding
out and nullifying Byzantine infiltrators? In spring 1409, such proposal was
sent to the court of Aragon along with the implied mention that while there was
a Kaiser in the Empire in the person of Rudolph I (the son and successor of
Charles V, who died after a bout with dysentery while campaigning against the
last vestiges of baronial rebellion), the throne of Emperors was vacant, and
the Papal favor went a long way…
Under most circumstances Alfonso would have rejected the Papal offer
out of hand, not willing to risk widespread rebellion for essentially no gain;
however, with the Byzantine interest in the island being certain and supported
by undeniable proof, albeit greatly exaggerated by the Papal envoys, allowing
the missionaries on the island could have been a reasonable price to pay for
undisputed control of Sicily, especially should the Imperial title be thrown
into the equation (which the Papal envoys emphasized to great lengths).
Granted, Alfonso had very little trust in the envoys’ promises, however the
Byzantine threat was real enough for him to allow the missionaries in.
It is clear that by 1410 or so the Pope Celestine begun to see himself
as an arbiter of sorts, the ultimate authority on all matters temporal and
spiritual in nature in all of Christendom. After all, he could look back at his
Pontificate and claim most of it as an undisputed success – Muslims expelled
from Carthage, imposing his judgment on kings and what passed for an Emperor in
the west, and achieving a string of diplomatic victories unrivaled by any of
his predecessors. Now, his thoughts turned to matters of theology, and the
challenge of reconciling his spiritual status with possessing temporal power as
a head of state.
True, the Donation of Constantine gave his predecessors the right to
dispose of the Western Empire as they see fit; however, in the centuries since
the claim was first made its validity eroded significantly to where many openly
questioned its legitimacy, and some went as far as to call it a complete
forgery. Therefore, some reconciliation had to be made that did not depend on a
validity of the document that even Celestine himself had doubts about. At once
the Pope set to work, appointing commission of several cardinals and bishops
over whose meetings he presided as he saw fit, with the goal of examining the
scriptures for irrefutable evidence that the Vicar of Christ is indeed
justified in acting as a temporal power.
Working day and night for several years, frequently in debate and
disagreement, the commission finally presented its findings in 1414. Despite
having searched the holy writings for clues and evidence of temporal claims of
the Papacy, the passage that the commission decided to base its claim on was
the same one frequently cited as instituting the Pontificate as such, in the
Book of Matthew:
Matthew XVI: 18-19
Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona! For flesh and
blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell
you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of
death shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of
heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever
you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven
In particular, the last
sentence was interpreted by Celestine and his subordinates as meaning that only
the Pope himself as the direct successor of Saint Peter was to be the bridge
between this world and the next by the means of Christian faith, and the Pope’s
actions on Earth determined the accessibility of heaven to the believers.
Moreover, this also directly implied that since “whatever you bind on earth
shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in
heaven”, the Pontiff could not make an error of judgment, for his actions
were directly connected to heaven, and who but the holiest of men could claim
direct connection to such?
Thus was born the
doctrine known thereon as the Papal infallibility, a concept that the true
Pope, as the Vicar of Christ, could not make an error of judgment, and thus a
Papal testimony on any subject matter would be considered the final verdict on
it. Understandably, the announcement split Catholic clergy into those who
accepted the findings of the Papal commission, and those who took them with a
healthy dose of skepticism, citing the examples of Popes past making errors of
judgment that were frequently costly, and occasionally outright disastrous; the
Papists countered this claim with one of their own, declaring in retrospect,
the errors of the previous Popes were part of the God’s plan for this world,
and that some of those making said mistakes were not even true Popes as per se,
instead being usurpers and impostors.
The debate reached a
boiling point in 1417, when Celestine himself forbid denouncement of the
commission’s findings under the pain of formal excommunication; Rudolph I of
Habsburg, as de facto Emperor, readily agreed to enforce the reigning doctrine
in the lands under his family’s control, as the Habsburgs’ special status
within the Empire came about through the formal Papal announcement, and the
doctrine of infallibility was indeed retroactive… Within three years, most of
the dissenting voices had been silenced, occasionally through threats of
violence, but more frequently by less subtle and pointedly brutal means.
Thousands had been known to perish in the flames of Church-sanctioned burnings
of heretics, presided over by the unseen but ever present watch of the Holy
Inquisition.
Of those that still
chose to deny the Pope, few sanctuaries remained; some attempted crossing over
into the Byzantine Empire or into the lands of the Rus, where Papal supremacy
was not only openly questioned, but also outright dismissed as having no
theological grounds. More of the heretics from Southern Europe fled into the
Muslim-held lands, where at least some semblance of religious tolerance still existed
(with Granada being the one notable exception).
Of the purveyors of
heresy, the one Alessandro del Piazza was the most prominent. Formerly a
Catholic Cardinal, he was one of the few to disagree with the consensus of the
Papal commission, defying the Pope in refusing to acknowledge his claims of
temporal as well as spiritual power. If the Pope was to be the worldly ruler,
he claimed, what use was the Empire, long thought of amongst the theologicians
as the temporal arm of the Church? And how could supposedly the holiest of all
men order and participate in slaughter, conquest, or wars of revenge –
decidedly the activities unbefitting any good Christian, let alone the head of
God’s Church? It was the Church’s duty to provide absolution to the worldly rulers,
to keep them from straying from the righteous path – but the worldly duties,
del Piazza argued, should be left to men of the world. And if in recognition of
this the Holy Father failed, how could he be infallible?
Even before the heresy
was officially anathemized, del Piazza realized that his hopes of finding
support in Italy to reverse the doctrine were slim; a failed assassination
attempt further convinced him that this fight could not be won via dispute. Yet
where could such as he go as not to be used as a pawn in some sort of political
game, sacrificed for minor gains without achieving anything? There was only one
alternative.
In 1417, same year as
Celestine issued the proclamation of the new dogma, del Piazza boarded a
merchantman bound for the Balearic Isles. From the beginning, his voyage was
anything but an easy one, surviving sea sickness, a bout with pirates, and a
run-in with the Genovese patrol that nearly ended up sinking del Piazza’s ship
near Sardinia, however, at last he was safe from the Papal persecution amongst
the most unlikely of all allies – the Cathar principality of the Balearic
Islands, where the former cardinal found refuge and begun to earn a modest keep
by teaching children of local elite classical philosophy.
It was there that del
Piazza begun to question his earlier faith, and examine the theology behind
Catharism. By now, the Cathar faith had changed significantly from its
emergence over two centuries prior, having been heavily influenced by
interaction with Granada’s Muslim majority and Sufi mysticism, somewhat popular
amongst the educated in that state. While there are better treatises written
throughout the ages examining the Cathar doctrine and its influence on the
Sundering, it is worth noting that the core of the heresy was still the idea
that the material world represented evil, whereas spiritual world was the only
source of goodness and, coincidentally, the only place there true goodness
could exist in its pure and unaltered form; at the same time, the Cathar belief
of early XVth century included the idea that God had enough concern for the
physical world to send an apparition known as Jesus, teaching the way to God.
At the same time,
several concepts previously crucial to the Cathar faith began to fade away, in
particular the idea that all believers were to lead the life of the Perfecti if
they were to achieve heavenly reward, and not be reborn once again upon the
earth. Instead, the earlier belief that the Perfecti were able to wipe away
one’s sins and allow the believer to reach heaven was further developed,
favored by the ruling elite of the principality in that the worldly pleasures
and worldly matters could be pursued by “lesser” men (meaning anyone but the
Perfecti) without recrimination as long as they repented before their passing
and were “purified”.
This understandably
created a controversy within the Cathar society, with most of the ruling elite
and the powerful Seafarer Guild (the pirate organization that provided for the
islands’ protection and for much of its income) favoring the new interpretation
of the doctrine, whereas a number of diehards clang to the old one. By the time
of del Piazza’s arrival, the Balearics had just emerged from what essentially
was a small scale civil war, with the “worldly” faction prevailing.
To the exiled cardinal,
it was an ultimate irony that the faith founded as a protest against
Catholicism acquired more than superficial similarity to it, in particular the
practice of purifying one’s sins before death while allowing for life of luxury
beforehand being very similar to the newly created practice of selling
indulgences by the Church in order to raise funds, proving that salvation was
less of an individual struggle than something provided by a qualified holy man.
Nevertheless, a scholar in him was intrigued at the opportunity to study a
different set of beliefs first hand, even if the Catholic in him was horrified
at the thought.
As Alessandro del Piazza submerged into the intricacies of the Cathar
theory, our attention shifts once again, this time to the land once occupied by
the Kingdom of England, but now practically divided between Scotland and
France. In this turbulent scenario of a country torn by warfare and foreign
conquest, the most unlikely character has emerged out of nowhere and into the
spotlight – Anne of York, more commonly known as Virgin Anne.
Little is known about her whereabouts, although in light of the
subsequent events it is unlikely that she was a simple peasant girl as the folk
tales like to portray her; more likely she was an illegitimate daughter of an
aristocrat, or even somehow related to the royal line, now merely existing as
the “Dukes of Norfolk”, since it is very unlikely someone of low social
standing would even be allowed anywhere near the royals’ palace, let alone have
a relatively easy time obtaining an audience. Nevertheless, when Anne appeared
in front of the “Duke” Henry in 1421, claiming that she had seen a vision of
Virgin Mary that commanded her to personally lead English armies to victory in
an uprising that would “make Albion greater than the barbarian and the Gaul”,
Henry did not take long to be persuaded – the folk story claims that several
miraculous events took place to change Henry’s opinion, however, some scholars
speculate that Henry was already considering fully fledged rebellion, and Anne
simply provided a convenient rallying cry for his followers.
The rest of the story of how the Hundred Years War ended could be told
rather quickly. The English troops turned against the French first, initially
with the enthusiastic Scottish help, retaking London in fall 1423 and having
Henry formally crowned there in early 1424. While the Pope refused to
acknowledge the newly crowned king, the truth of the matter was that Celestine
had no effective power north of the Channel, and therefore the proclamation was
largely ignored.
Then, it was the Scots’ turn. By 1428 most formerly English territories
had been liberated, and Wales set up as an English puppet-state with Henry’s
son Edward given the crown there. Although the Scots originally hoped that by
using up all their manpower and resources in expelling the French the English
would be easy prey to uncontested Scottish control of the island, even their
best troops were crushed by the victorious English led by Anne of York, already
a legend in her time after winning a number of crucial battles seemingly on
enthusiasm alone. Even Anne’s death in 1429 did little to stem the tide of
English advance, stopping only once the entire south of Britain was under
control of the English crown.
With the French and the Scots beaten, thoughts of king Henry turned
towards the south, where in Rome the Pope Celestine refused to acknowledge his
rightful claim, and went as far as to excommunicate the King. To add insult to
injury, during the war, the coffers of England were nearly bled dry despite the
victories; at the same time, the Church of England got richer, if anything,
through tithing the peasants and their feudal masters no matter who their
allegiance belonged to. Clearly, something had to be done about the “state
within the state”, as Henry called the Catholic Church. As Henry pondered what
action to take, time went on. The year was 1430.
Lion And The Heretic (1430-1442)
Paralyse the actions of the
weak
Force fed propaganda preying
on the meek
Individuals resisting defeat
Manipulate the colonies
infected by their seed
Vampires of possession
Shroud of cold distrust
Watching as you finally fall
Then drag you through the
dust
The only way to save your
soul
From scum with hearts of
stone – reconquering the throne
Kreator – “Reconquering The
Throne”
Much could be said about long and distinguished reign of King Henry VI
of England, both with respect to his undoubted military prowess, the general
luck that seemed to follow him and his nation, and long string of diplomatic
successes that resulted in forging of what would eventually turn into the
British Empire centuries later. In 1430, however, his position was still rather
precarious, owing his continued existence not only to strikes of military
fortune, but also to somewhat lessened belligerence on the part of his
neighbors. Scotland was hesitant to commit more men and resources to a hard and
potentially futile battle; France, albeit lacking in neither manpower nor
ambition, was temporarily paralyzed by an internal crisis resulting from king
Charles IV’s handling of the war, and wracked by rebellion of a number of
lesser members of the royal family, claiming that Charles’ relative
incompetence in England warrants his removal, and replacement with someone more
capable. That left Henry with a short window of opportunity that he intended to
use to its fullest extent.
In 1430, Henry entered negotiations with Charles IV of France, offering
his help in quelling the rebellion as well as cessation of his formal claim
upon old Norman territories in France in return for recognizing him as the
lawful King of England, and for a treaty of non-aggression. While the English
claim on some of the French territories dated back centuries and by now had
been nothing more than a formality, this concession was a major step towards
changing England’s place in the continental politics, and separating its
history from its common past with France.
As much as Charles loathed the idea of accepting help from the hated
English, his fortunes were in decline, having suffered several minor (but
significant for the enemy morale) defeats at the rebels’ hands, and therefore
acceptance of Henry’s terms was the relatively honorable choice that he could take
while claiming at least a partial victory through cessation of the English land
claim in France. By 1433, the loyalist forces had defeated the rebels with help
from somewhat sizeable English expeditionary force. The warming relations
between the two powers were even further cemented by a marriage of Henry’s
daughter to one of Charles’ sons, future Philip VI in 1434.
While the French civil war came closer to its conclusion, Henry began
looking for different allies that could help him to bring England to a position
of dominance in Europe, and effectively oppose any of those desiring England’s
lands and crown. In 1435, he entered an alliance with Denmark, adding Norway to
the “Northern Alliance” a year later, and a number of small Northern German
states within the next decade.
However, while all of these were significant accomplishments for a man
that less than two decades ago could not even call himself by his rightful
kingly title, Henry VI is usually remembered for a different act, the one that
earned him the epithet of The Heretic outside of his own borders (where his
accomplishments resulted in a different nickname, Henry the Lion – ironically
resulting in much confusion of him with Barbarossa’s old opponent in papers of
less attentive history students throughout the continent), for in 1437 he
finally resolved to act against the power of the Catholic Church in England,
placing it under the most severe restrictions, and confiscating much Church
wealth. While not going as far as to renounce the Catholicism altogether, he
placed a retroactive tax upon the Church property that happened to be so
oppressive that most of it was collected by the English tax collectors as the
payment of “back taxes”. Despite the churchmen’s protests, the English treasury
began to fill up rather quickly due to this and other radical, yet effective
measures, setting the country’s economy on solid footing for the first time in
decades.
To understand why Henry not only resolved upon a previously unthinkable
action, but was able to suffer little of the consequences of such a radical
move, we need to examine the historical background against which his decision
was made. Throughout the end of the Hundred Years War, Anne of York became one
of the most beloved figures in all of England due both to her stunning military
successes, and her apparent life of asphyxiating piety that left her character
unblemished in the time when even the most well-reputed figures of prominence
had a number of skeletons in their collective closets. The sequence of events
resulting in her premature death is too long and complex to be related here;
however, it must be said that she is believed to have been betrayed to the
Scots by a member of her retinue, a Catholic priest named Mark Baker. After
suffering through a humiliating trial where she was accused of witchcraft, Anne
was sentenced to being executed by the tribunal comprised almost exclusively of
clergy and presided over by a bishop; her execution was said to have been so
brutal that even seasoned veterans of the war went pale at the sight of badly
mangled and burned corpse of England’s savior.
With continuous Papal refusal to repel the judgment and to clear their
heroine’s name, the English people had little love for the Papacy, whom they
perceived as covertly aiding their Scottish and French enemies; the Papal
refusal to recognize the King of England as such did little to endear Celestine
and his followers to the people of a nation so proud of their recently won
independence. Moreover, recent events in Europe suggested that there was
preciously little the Papal allies could do at the moment, for in 1436,
tensions finally erupted in Sicily when the Papal emissaries accused a
prominent local citizen of witchcraft and promptly sentenced him to be burnt at
stake.
Within a day Sicilian citizenry was in arms; mobs broke into the jail
housing the supposed heretic, brushing away meager resistance of the guards.
The inquisitors themselves barely escaped with their lives, disguising
themselves as beggars while making their way to the harbor and back to Italy.
While the Aragonese attempted their best to pacify the island without retorting
to extreme measures, another source of trouble was brewing in the East –
Michael VIII, the Byzantine Emperor was reported to make preparations for
assault on Sicily.
It must be said that Michael, commonly considered as an Emperor in
Nicephorus IV’s mold, ascended the throne with more than a little blood on his
hands even by the standards of the time. At the time of Alexius VIII’s passing
in 1430, the Emperor left two sons and six grandsons behind, all with ambitions
and designs on the throne; of these, then-seventeen year old Michael was the youngest
grandson of Alexius, and as such was considered an unlikely candidate, instead
expecting Michael’s uncle John to inherit. Knowing that his fate would be
sealed should John succeed, Michael formed a conspiracy with his brothers
Demetrios and Thomas, descending upon their unsuspecting uncle with a troop of
Bulgarian mercenaries during late Alexius’ funeral and slaughtering John along
with his many supporters. As brutal and barbaric as this act seemed to the
citizenry of Constantinople, Michael was able to fabricate an accusation that
John and his sons poisoned Alexius, hoping to inherit; aided with liberal gifts
to the citizens and many prominent nobles, and with the veiled threat of force,
the city was pacified within days.
This left three brothers and their father Basil theoretically primed
for succession; however, Michael was not content with a mere assurance of
succession for his branch of the family. Within a week of John’s death, what
appeared to be a hunting accident took the life of Demetrios; ever the
conniver, Michael made all evidence point to Thomas, and took it upon himself
to avenge the “fratricide”. While theoretically Basil V was crowned Emperor
along with his last surviving son, the father was not to last long, already a
broken man due to losses of most of his family and with a gnawing suspicion
that his youngest son was responsible. When in 1431 Basil died, officially of
grief and wounds sustained years ago during the military campaign, but more
probably due to liberally administered dose of poison, Michael VIII became the
sole ruler of the Eastern Empire at the age of eighteen.
If there were fears that the new Emperor’s only real talent was in
disposing of unwanted or troublesome family members, they soon proved to be
unfounded, as despite such an ominous beginning, the rest of Michael’s rule was
characterized by a dazzling combination of military victories and domestic
policies that owed more to good common sense than to bloodthirst. Within a year
of his succession Michael proved to be every bit the autocrat that his
grandfather was, retaining most of the advisors from the previous regime and
continuing with the domestic and military reforms started by Alexius. In 1434,
Byzantine troops seized Antioch, and a year later they threatened Aleppo
itself, which was saved only by a rather humiliating treaty the Caliphate was
forced to sign, forcing it to pay tribute to the Empire as well as to provide
safe pilgrimage route to Christian pilgrims heading towards Jerusalem.
In 1436, as Sicily erupted into flames of discontent once again,
Michael saw the opportunity presented in the West, and began to gather an
invasion force, making every apparent intention of attacking in Sicily and
reintegrating the island into the Eastern Empire the part of which it once was.
In a meanwhile, the situation on the island stabilized somewhat, but only barely
so, after the king of Aragon promised the islanders to expel the Inquisition;
nevertheless, to Celestine and his Habsburg allies this was simply a casus
belli. In early 1437, the Papal and Habsburg armies invaded Sicily, presumably
to suppress the Heresy, but in fact with the plan to divide the island between
their respective domains.
It was at this stage that Henry of England knew his numerous enemies
were not only preoccupied at other fronts, but also unable to threaten him in
any manner other than verbally; the great seizure of Church’s property followed
shortly thereafter. More importantly, Henry hammered out alliances with a
number of Mediterranean states, including, scandalously enough, Muslim Granada
and Orthodox Byzantium. More importantly though, another group asked Henry for
protection and offered their allegiance to him – Cathars of the Balearic
Islands, who realized that even far-away, England could be counted upon to
provide reasonable degree of safety through their network of allies in an increasingly
more hostile and intolerant world.
To one resident of the Balearic Islands, the union with England was a
godsend. Old Alessandro del Piazza, though condemned a heretic and sentenced to
death on the continent, longed for return to civilization; despite mysticism of
the Cathar ways and their religion intriguing him to no end, the Balearic
civilization was still strange and alien to him; even if his home in Italy was
forlorn, he hoped to end his days among the people that were at least good
Christians. In 1438, del Piazza began his maritime travel north via Granada,
stopping over in Leon, and finally making it to London.
Upon hearing of such a distinguished visitor, Henry decided that the
time was right for yet another ambitious endeavor. Long has England been
considered backwater of Europe, neither the cultural nor the educational
center. Hence, Henry declared, in order to raise the generations of men to
serve England in the years to come, the University of London must be founded,
staffed by the best thinkers in Europe. The former cardinal was even further
delighted to receive an offer to head the new university, reporting straight to
the King himself.
Over the course of his life with the Cathars, del Piazza wrote a number
of treatises on their culture, religion, and the way of life, previously
unknown to the Christian world at large. While most of his works were not to be
published until after his death, the Italian soon became center of intellectual
and religious debate in London, freely dispensing his knowledge and
participating in discussions with aspiring theologicians attending the
university, ultimately reaching attention of nobility and even the royal court.
Despite his death in 1441, his ideas and experience found fertile soil in the
minds of Englishmen, sowing the seeds which would not be reaped for quite some
time.
Among del Piazza’s students, the most famous one was a young priest
named John Byrnes, the man many felt was directly responsible for the
Sundering. It was to him that the responsibility of publishing del Piazza’s
works and memoirs fell, and, combined with his own works that were to be
unleashed upon the world in the following several decades, Byrnes began the
process that led England towards the course it was to follow for a significant
portion of its history. It must also be noted that 1439 invention of the
printing press in Novgorod and subsequent spread of the invention westward,
from which England (as by then an ally of Novgorod) benefited, did much to
increase the rate of literacy in Europe; by the end of the XVth century, it was
rare for a city dweller to be completely illiterate, and amongst the clergy and
the nobility, illiteracy was considered to be a shameful deficiency. With these
potent weapons, the new heresies spread much more rapidly, acquiring followers
with speed previously unheard of.
At the same time the Orthodox world, far from being the land of
bloodthirsty and illiterate barbarians many liked to paint it as in the West,
was growing in power. By early 1400s the four-way struggle over who would rule
what would eventually become Russia polarized into two factions – one that of
Moscow and Kazan Khanate, by now a Muscovite vassal state, and another of
Novgorod and Tver. In 1428 the latter alliance invaded the Muscovite lands,
initiating the war that was to last for the next decade until 1439 capture of
Moscow itself by Tverian soldiers. From there on, Muscowy began to fade into
irrelevance, first with its rulers forced to give up its claim to the title of
Grand Prince and to acknowledge superiority of Princes of Tver, then with it
being forced to split into two principalities, that of Vladimir (subordinate to
Tver), and Moscow proper, subordinate to Novgorod. By 1500 the principality of
Moscow lost the last traces of its once proud independence, and was formally
annexed to Novgorod, only few years after Vladimir became official part of
Tver.
The reborn Kievan Rus enjoyed a number of successed as well, expanding
northward to where its borders met those of Tver and forcing the king of Poland
into payment of an annual tribute. With such resolution of conflict in Russia,
three principalities emerged, all sharing just enough common understanding to
prevent a full-scale war, but eyeing each other with wary suspicion, knowing
that their peoples’ full potential and impact on history may never be realized
without one nation strong enough to unify all of Russian blood in to a mighty
Empire. For now, another contest between these states was that of ideologies,
with Tver employing the form of state most consistent with Byzantine autocracy,
where the Prince held all power and the citizens’ assembly’s role was gradually
diminished along with that of the aristocrats; Kiev, on the other hand, had
more in common with highly aristocratic feudal societies of Central Europe due
to looking in that direction to expand. Finally, Novgorod’s dependence on
maritime power and its continuous interaction with nations of Northern and
Western Europe led it towards becoming somewhat of a curiosity, a de facto
republic not dissimilar to that of Venice with the title of the Prince being in
effect little more than that of a highly ranked general and official
spokesperson for the state. Sooner or later, the three vastly different
worldviews were bound to crash, deciding the fate of Russia and its people.
While the forces of Aragon clashed against the Papal-Habsburg alliance,
Michael VIII of Byzantium decided upon a daring move. Instead of attempting to
attack in Sicily or Apulia as he had been widely expected to, Michael ordered
his generals to march through the Balkans and towards Venice. He believed that
Venice would prove to be a strategically invaluable stronghold to not only
cement his hold on the Balkans, but also to provide a base for future expansion
into Italy, frustrating the Habsburgs whom he perceived to be significantly
weaker than the Eastern Empire, unified by the sense of purpose.
In 1440 Michael’s army lay siege to Venice just as the newly built
grand Byzantine fleet faced off against numerically inferior, but more
experienced and better equipped Venetians. The subsequent naval battle went
down in history as the greatest naval engagement in the Mediterranean since
Actium a millennium and a half ago; for three days and two nights the Byzantine
galleys and dromons attempted to maintain the blockade of Venice just as the
Venetians tried in vain to break through. On the morning of the third day,
however, the situation changed once again with the arrival of the Genovese
navy. Although the Venetians and the Genovese had little love for each other
due to centuries of military and trading competition that frequently grew into
outright conflict, to Genovese an idea of Byzantines in Northern Italy was an
abomination; better to save an old rival from complete annihilation after its
main power had been already broken, they reasoned, than to let an aggressive
conqueror whose appetite would only grow with time in close to home.
The arrival of the Genovese turned the scales of battle against the
Byzantines, however at the great cost to the once-proud Venetian navy. Out of a
hundred ships that The Most Serene Republic brought into battle, only thirty or
so were seaworthy at its conclusion; even though the Byzantine losses were much
greater, they were replaceable, whereas the Venetian ones were not.
This Pyrrhic victory enabled Venice to continuously bring in supplies
and reinforcements, however, tensions ran high between the Venetians and their
erstwhile Genovese suppliers, whom the Venetians greatly mistrusted. Still,
this uneasy partnership did much to frustrate the Byzantine commanders, who
could not mount an effective assault on the city, and whose blockade was
incomplete without the once-proud Byzantine navy, now rotting on the bottom of
the Adriatic Sea. By 1442, Michael has had enough; the Venetians could not
expel the Byzantine army, yet the Byzantines could not force an unconditional
surrender. Therefore, Michael had to contend with the retaking of formerly
Venetian Dalmatia and Istria, leaving the city itself an independent nation.
There were other reasons for Michael’s decision to end the Venetian
War. In late 1441, the sheer numbers of Habsburg and Papal troops finally
turned the tide of the war in Sicily; the writing on the wall was clear. Once
Sicily was pacified, Leopold I of Habsburg would undoubtedly decide to
interfere in the war that, as far as he was concerned, was fought disturbingly
close to his domain. It was more important to Michael to obtain better
defensive position should Leopold attack, and to protect his flanks; by now
Michael began to see himself in a position similar to that of Justinian, and
Italy was the prize he intended to obtain, and to keep.
At this stage, machinations of Henry of England began to bear fruit no
one truly expected. With the Northern German territories always culturally and
economically closer to the Baltic world than to Mediterranean one, it was no
wonder that Henry’s allies in Denmark, Sweden, and Novgorod often engaged in
very profitable trade with the North German city-states, that now made a pact
amongst themselves to provide for advantageous trade terms, as well as military
cooperation and protection against anyone desiring their considerable wealth,
calling their union the Baltic League. The earlier Habsburg policy of focusing
on their own lands and allowing lesser princes to do what they want in their
territories led to effective disintegration of the Imperial authority in
Northern Germany, as the Habsburg rulers failed to enforce their will or to
maintain peace amongst the lesser feudal lords. Now, some of the still
technically Imperial subjects decided to take matters into their own hands.
To Henry and his allies, this was a welcome development, and much of
English and Byzantine gold began to pour into the Baltic League coffers,
causing Leopold to address the matter immediately lest northern territories
renounce the Empire altogether. In this climate, the Byzantines were able to
consolidate their Balkan gains relatively unmolested while their Emperor made plans
for the next conquest that would restore to his Empire its former glory.
In a meanwhile, in 1442 the Pope Celestine died in his sleep from
advanced age. With his death, the Church lost last of its great Popes for many
centuries to come; during his Pontificate the Papal States not only increased
in size considerably, but also gained much in prestige; the authority of the
Papacy has been at its greatest in over two centuries, never to be regained to
this extent again. The doctrines promulgated in his reign were to shape the
ecclesiastic policy of the Church for centuries to come, just as the precedent
of ruling over large portions of Italy and even parts of Sicily gave the
succeeding Pontiffs even more claim of earthly rule. Ironically enough, however,
the very practices that elevated the Papacy to the height of its temporal glory
were also the ones that led to its inevitable decline as a worldly and even as
a spiritual power.
Shadows Of Troy (1442-1485)
You're living in a lie
Your tears, repentance fills your eyes
Your life, is not what it seems to be
For you breed agony
Your tortured mind will cry out, take my soul
Die for me, die for my sins for I've seen
My cold and bitter end
Trapped illusions of your fate
Your end is only what you've made
Return, and taste reality again
Your sudden faith is all in vain
Your whithered voice is chanting I'm impure
Die for me, die for my sins for I've seen
My cold and bitter end
Standing at the altar, hands in prayer
Your crystal image shatters
Despair
Suffering, no one can help you now
Betrayed by your worn and tattered vows
You're living in a lie
Your tears, repentance fills your eyes
Your life stands for nothing but your shame
No one else will bear your blame
My mortal life of anguish I've endured
Die for me, die for my sins for I've seen
My cold and bitter end
As you feel the lies hypocrisy chokes the life from you
Die for me, die only for me
Sanctuary – “Die For My
Sins”
The first half of the XVth century saw a spectacular rise of England
from essentially a French vassal-state to a major European power on its own,
forging alliances with variety of states including even the mighty Byzantine
Empire, and succeeding in earning respect and admiration of even its staunchest
enemies. When Henry the Lion (or Henry the Heretic, depending on whom you ask)
died in 1444, the kingdom he left to his son Edward was much stronger than
England has ever been in its history.
And then, Edward began to rapidly destroy all his father worked so long
and hard to build. An attempt at reconciliation with the Papacy was only the
first sign of what was to come; a crackdown on the University of London and on
all who strayed from the Catholic dogma followed. When Edward decided to impose
trade sanctions against Orthodox Novgorod and Byzantium, and to break all ties
with the Muslim Granada, this was the last straw for many aristocrats and
merchants whose well-being depended heavily on income brought in by trade with
those nations. By 1446, it was not hard to find willing participants in the
coup, and when late in the year the English Parliament declared Edward deposed
and ordered his imprisonment, there were precious few the monarch could count
on to maintain his rule.
As a result, what could have been a major civil war ended instead as a
mere shadow of an insurrection, with the King captured within months of his
deposition, and put into the great Tower of London, to be kept prisoner for the
remainder of his life. More surprising, however, was the choice of his
successor.
Henry left behind two sons and four daughters; of the sons, Edward was
now deposed, and his brother Arthur was known to be even more fanatically
Catholic than Edward. Two of Henry’s daughters were married into royal families
of Europe; one was a nun. That left Anne, Henry’s third daughter, as the sole
legitimate heir to the throne, or, as many in the court of England saw it, as a
pathway to the throne for any noble ambitious or lucky enough to convince her
to marry him. What they did not count on was Anne herself.
Despite the very idea of woman as a sole ruler being an anathema to
many, the alternative was a civil war or a prospect of foreign invasion;
finding a suitable husband for Anne could wait until later. The crowning of
Anne I as the first Queen of England was therefore arranged for in early 1447,
an unprecedented occasion, yet the one the English needed as a reprieve from
tumultuous two years that preceded it.
From the very beginning, Anne proved herself to be a sovereign very
much in the mold of Henry, making a quick reverse on her brother’s ill-fated
policies and reestablishing alliances with Byzantium, Novgorod, and Granada
within a year of her ascent. The fact that she continuously refused marriage
offers from a variety of suitors that would have been thought more than
suitable in other circumstances (including, not in the least amongst them,
Michael VIII of Byzantium, looking to join England to his empire after an
opportunity provided by the death of his first wife) was usually overlooked as
trade kept English coffers full, and her renewed network of alliances kept her
strong.
In this atmosphere, John Byrnes’ scholarship not only prospered, but
gained a number of new converts by teaching heretical doctrines such as
irrelevance of the Pope, evil of the organized Catholic Church (who had been
very much responsible for the death of the people’s one-time heroine, given
much credit of the England’s liberation from French and Scottish oppressors),
and even claiming that it was not possible to fully belong to both spiritual
and material worlds, as the former was pure, whereas the latter was impure and
tainted with evil of its creation.
As Catholicism was increasingly unpopular in England, the state spent
less and less effort in suppressing what could have been potential heresies; an
oath of loyalty to the crown was enough in most cases, and an identity as
English gradually became more important than religious identity. This brought
on numerous diplomatic issues with staunchly Catholic Scotland and France,
however, growing English naval might persuaded the latter that diplomatic table
was far preferable to the field of battle, and battle-hardened English armies
made a good argument against the former that invading under the banner of
Catholicism would not only be unwanted by the English population, but also
foolhardy with many wary English troops watching the border. In this
atmosphere, the publication of “The Perfecti Manifesto” by John Byrnes in 1449
provided a unique and an unprecedented opportunity for his ideas to be not only
accepted, but proliferated at an amazing rate amongst the literate, which by
then included not only most of the nobility and merchants, but also the growing
middle class and even many members of the working class.
Within weeks of the work’s publication and its subsequent spread to the
homes of most literate Londoners, there had been instances of desecration of
the Catholic churches and occasionally outright robbery of church property; it
was not long before the book was anathemized in Italy by Pope Martin V, to whom
the very ideas expressed in the book were not only the most dangerous heresy,
but an outright denial of Christianity as such. The Papal threat of
excommunication was, however, a futile endeavor, for in 1450 Queen Anne of
England shocked the world by officially refusing to recognize Papal authority,
and by proclaiming herself the head of Church of England, an independent
Christian church, and the first one of a kind since the Orthodox Christianity
went its own way many centuries ago. The Byzantine acceptance, grudging as it
was, was soon to follow, simultaneously offering Anne to select a churchman to
obtain the title of Patriarch of England, as even for Michael VIII’s sense of
realpolitik and his willingness to forego religious or cultural considerations
in the name of profit, the idea of having a woman as the head of the church was
too much to take.
What was so threatening about Byrnes’ “Manifesto” that an entire
clerical hierarchy found itself expelled, its treasury confiscated, and its previously
dominant position challenged? It is easy to look at it in the hindsight of
history, given that Byrnes’ ideas were relatively mild in comparison to those
that led to the rise of an Unholy Empire a generation later, and speculate that
Edward’s lavish spending on Church-related matters and return of much property
seized during Henry’s reign was not only disastrously unpopular, but also
fiscally irresponsible, resulting in severe shortages in English finances that
were resolved by dealing English Catholic church a final blow from which it
would never recover; it could also be said that Anne resolved to remove the
last vestiges of baronial power, which had more often than not manifested
itself through bishop-princes of various areas elevated to their positions
during the Hundred Years’ War, and not willing to give up any of their ancient
privileges.
Yet, the “Manifesto” contained a number of ideas considered quite
radical for the time, blending Cathar teachings with nascent nationalism that
for the first time attempted to distance the concepts of religion and nation,
stating that since God was of pure spiritual world, the earthly Church could
never attain purity necessary to truly communicate with Him, and as a result
could wield no power over the people, which was the prerogative of secular
rulers. It was, Byrnes declared, an individual’s ability to communicate with
the divine, and only those willing to dedicate their entire life to deeds of
asceticism and mortification were able to reach such communion; anyone actively
participating in the worldly matters had to, therefore, reach communion through
such ascetics and holy men, whom he called “Perfecti”, “the Perfect Ones” after
the Cathar custom.
As Byrnes went on further, his tone seemed almost accusatory not only
against the Papacy and its manipulation of European affairs, but also against
their Habsburg allies and their so-called “Holy Roman Empire” which, he
declared, was neither holy, nor Roman, nor even a true Empire as much as a
collection of kingdoms all taking their orders from the servant of the devil
and deceived into buying indulgences for the sins they had no way of escaping,
for they were of flesh and blood, and attended to affairs of the temporal
world, while the people offering forgiveness were none the better. This did
little to endear this new heresy to many on the continent, however, with the
English channel a secure wall against invasion on one side, and pikes,
longbows, and cannon of the English army on the other, little could have been
done to stop the heresy that threatened to disrupt the fabric of Western
Christendom itself.
While the Queen herself did not officially declare support for the
heresy, she did, however, give it an unofficial shroud of protection, favoring
its adherents in civil and ecclesiastic service, and specifically forbidding to
persecute Byrnes and his followers and readers. To her, it was simply an excuse
to not only obtain justification for giving up much of the enforced puritanism
of the late Middle Ages, but more importantly a way to permanently eradicate
the influence of Catholicism and, through it, power of the Pope and of the
Emperor in England. Ironically, with the propaganda campaign designed to make
England’s turning away from Catholicism final and irreversible came another
unlikely development.
During the middle of XVth century, England was almost certainly one of
the most liberal countries in Europe, with an added advantage of being able to
protect itself and even threaten its major opponents, therefore creating a safe
haven for many free-thinking philosophers, scientists, and religious leaders
who would have been burned at stake on the mainland. In this atmosphere, arts
and sciences flourished, leaving us with many wonderful relics such as Thomas
Whitford’s “O Blessed Avalon”, or Robert Byron’s great painting of Christ’s
ascention from the temporal world into the world of pure spirit. Of these
works, the aforementioned “O Blessed Avalon” was in particular notable for
being frequently compared to Virgil’s “Aeneid” in the sense of creating a
distinctly English work that praised and exalted the English nation as the
descendants of the other band of Trojans fleeing their desecrated city and
destined to create a great nation. Weaving in both Arthurian and Carolingian
mythos along with British history and folklore, Whitford managed to create a
work that even today is taught as a required curriculum in most schools. Yet,
his poem did more for the English nation than it could have ever hoped to,
giving the people of England pride in their country, and making it clear in no
uncertain terms that England, not any other nation was the true heir of Ilium,
and therefore the heir to the greatness that Rome once was.
In Rome and in Vienna, by now the primary seat of the Habsburg power,
the power players of continental Europe saw red, with calls for Crusade against
the apostate English lessened only by the Byzantine proclamation that England
was its trusted friend and ally, and any attempt on England would be answered
by an attack on Italy and Austria. Truly, this was the Empire’s darkest hour,
and newly elected (or, to be more precise, newly ascendant) Maximillian II of
Habsburg was not quite prepared to face the calamity brought on by this new
heresy.
Finding himself in rather desperate straits as the heresy spread
rampant not only in Britain, but also in northern Germany and around the
Baltic, where local rulers took it as an excuse to hoard the Church property
and to expel Catholic inquisitors, Maximillian knew time was short, and
therefore announced in 1450 that no longer an Emperor-elect had to travel to
Rome to receive crown from the Pope’s hands; instead, the title was given
automatically upon one’s election, and the ceremony of coronation would be
performed as a state, not a church occasion. In less of a dire situation, the
Pope Martin V would have vehemently protested, however he realized that it was
more valuable for him to have a legitimate Emperor at the time of crisis than
to waste time trying to get one crowned while Europe appeared to be a powder
keg ready to explode.
In 1451, Maximillian’s attempt to bring the Baltic League states into
the Catholic fold started with a major military campaign that pressed hard into
the League territory; at the same time, while initially successful in the
field, the Habsburg armies proved unable to successfully besiege the League
cities, thanks in no small part due to continued English and Novgorodian navies
supplying their allies with ammunition and provisions. Elsewhere, calls were
issued to crowned heads of Europe to pick sides in the struggle that the
Catholics described in apocalyptic terms, naming Michael of Byzantium the
Antichrist and Anne of England the Whore of Babylon and calling upon all good
Christians to avenge the desecration of Catholicism in the lands held by the
heresy.
The following three decades saw some of the most brutal and intense
fighting the European continent had seen to date, and went down in history as
what we now call The Sundering, the splintering of Western Christianity into
the Catholic and Puritan branches, the latter named so after the claim of the
English to follow the true, pure version of Christianity, uncorrupted by
worldly matters exactly as it was intended by Our Lord and Savior. While the
exact history of the Sundering War is better left to military historians, it
suffices to say that by 1453 Europe was polarized into two loose factions: on
the Catholic side, the Habsburg Emperor, the Papacy, and the French fought
against the English, the Baltic League, Novgorod, and Byzantium.
The states of Iberia refused both sides’ offers to join, with Granada
providing financial support to the English, but otherwise fearful of
intervention lest the Christian Spanish states unite in their common goal of exterminating
Muslim presence on the peninsula; Leon was more interested in wiping the last
vestiges of Castile off the map (in which endeavor it has succeeded by 1460),
whereas Aragon, normally staunchly Catholic, refused to join the Papacy,
remembering how late Celestine’s greed took the prosperous island of Sicily off
their hands. As Tver continued to eat away at the remnants of the once-great
Golden Horde, and the Byzantines continued to encroach on the Catholic
dominions in North Africa, finally taking the moribund Duchy of Mauretania as
their own, another power was quickly rising to greatness in the war-torn
atmosphere of Sundered Europe.
In 1457 Lithuania and Poland entered into a personal union under King
Kaczimier of Poland, who inherited both crowns through his relation to deceased
Lithuanian Grand Duke. In 1461, Hungary faced a succession crisis of its own,
when its nobles had to choose between two candidates for the crown: the
Habsburg duke Rudolph, or a native Hungarian aristocrat. When the Hungarian
contender was found murdered in his bed, suspicions ran high; instead of
automatically electing the Habsburg, however, the Hungarians looked north to
the union of Poland-Lithuania, which was growing prosperous through its
professed neutrality in the ongoing war. Thus, in 1462 the Triple Crown of
Poland-Lithuania-Hungary came into being, with Kaczimier accepting the
Hungarian offer and initiating series of reforms that gave rise to the modern
concept of a federation, the first major one of its kind widely believed to
exist after the shadow of the Sundering.
On the other fronts, the war continued unabatedly, with the Scots
wisely refusing to be drawn in due to powerful English war machine on their
borders, and lack of navy in the employ of the Catholic powers. At the same
time, the Caliphate watched warily, reluctant to throw its lot in with the
hated Catholics, but also knowing that in case the Catholic powers are utterly
crushed, there would be nothing stopping Byzantium from regaining its ancient
territories other than the Byzantine ambitions in Italy.