| #### 2. THE RETURN OF ISLAM, 1291-1481 |

| #### #### The submission of the Council of Basel to Nicholas V in 1449 brings to fulfilment, after nearly ninety years of effort and strife, the determination of the popes to re-establish themselves at Rome. Never again, until the French Revolution, will the pope be forced out of Rome, and never again will there be an anti-pope. In the face of the many evident defeats which the popes sustained during their ninety years of effort, it is well to establish these two facts firmly and in all their high significance. But from that precariously won victory Nicholas V turned to find, confronting the Christian hope, the menace of an imminent Mohammedan conquest of all that remained of the Christian East. The ninety years which had seen the papacy's recovery had also seen the rise of a new power in the world of Islam, the Ottoman Turks. #### At the time when the loss of St. Jean d'Acre, the last Latin stronghold on the mainland of Syria, had plunged the West into a stupor of despair (1291), the Ottomans were no more than a petty tribe in the service of the Sultan of Iconium, a Moslem state in central Asia Minor. By the time Clement V had suppressed the Templars (1312), they had acquired a small, strategically placed, territory of their own, that ran from the Sea of Marmora to the Black Sea, behind the strip of Asiatic shore where the Byzantine Empire still held the ancient cities of Nicea and Nicomedia. Then, in the next generation, under their sultan Ourkhan (1326-1359), the organisation began that was to make the Ottomans, for the next two hundred years, an all but unconquerable scourge: the nation turned itself into a drilled and disciplined professional army, the cream of which was the corps of Janissaries recruited from Christian European children, sometimes given as hostages, sometimes kidnapped. From the middle of the fourteenth century everything fell before this new, most formidable engine of conquest. The Ottomans made themselves the first power in the Mohammedan world and they also conquered, without any great difficulty, all that remained to the emperor of his territories in Asia Minor. #### In 1356 the rivalry of a Byzantine prince, John Cantacuzene, with the emperor, gave the Turks their first footing in Europe; they became masters of Gallipoli. Nine years later they took Adrianople. And, at last, the Christian princes were roused to action. Peter I of Cyprus, with the active support of Pope Urban V, gathered a fleet which, in 1367, raided several of the Syrian ports, destroying arsenals and stocks of munitions and supplies, and thereby halting the Turks for some years. But the great princes of western Europe held aloof. From Edward III of England and Charles V of France, exhausted both of them by the first long bout of the Hundred Years' War, the pope had a flat refusal; to the maritime states of Italy, Genoa and Venice, their own commercial interests in the East were of greatest importance, and, if these called for it, Genoa and Venice would even side with the Ottomans against the crusaders. #### Yet upon these states -- and upon Venice especially -- there already lay a great deal of the responsibility for the weakness of the Christian position in the East, and for the policy of appeasement which was the only defence that the Byzantines could now contrive whenever the Ottomans increased the pressure. Venice had been the inspiration, and the chief director, of the great act of piracy which, in 1204, had virtually destroyed the Eastern empire; and, with Genoa, it had, ever since, clung desperately to the valuable territories which it had then been able to wrest from the empire. Never again, after that fatal date, was there any power in the East capable of holding off a new Mohammedan offensive should such occur. The modern country of Greece was henceforward in the hands of a medley of Latin princes, Dukes of Athens, Princes of Achaia, Counts of Cephalonia and the like; the Serbs rose to found an empire of their own on the ruins of the power of the hated Greeks; the Bulgarians, too, established themselves as independent. The territory of the empire at the time when Michael VIII negotiated with Gregory X the reunion of 1274 was, then, only a tiny fraction of that which the Latins had conquered seventy years earlier. By the time that Michael’s successors, in the fifteenth century, were once more planning a union with the West, their power had shrunk to little more than the capital and its immediate hinterland (1423). The Serbs had gone down at the bloody defeat of Kossovo (1389), and the Turks were masters of Greece and Bulgaria too. Constantinople, thirty years before its fall, was already isolated from the West. The last joint crusade to relieve it -- a great host of French, Germans and Hungarians led by Sigismund, King of Hungary [ ] -- had ended in yet another catastrophe at Nicopolis (1396), and it was only the appearance of a rival Mohammedan power, taking away the Ottomans to defend their own capital, which now saved the empire from the coup de grace. #### It is very easy to list the causes of the chronic Christian disasters; [ ] they were as evident to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as they are to us, and they were as much discussed. An abundance of writers agreed that there was no hope until the Christian princes put aside their own jealousies and vanities; until the crusading armies consented to accept some form of discipline; until there re-appeared, what had been lost for a century and more, the old religious fervour; and until the Italians could be persuaded to forgo their lucrative trade with Islam. The missionaries -- the most practical men of all -- had no hope whatever that the way of war would succeed. The sole solution for the problem of the Turks was, they held, to convert them to Christianity. #### As to practical measures, here again there was general agreement about what ought to be done, and almost never was any of it done. Egypt was the vital centre of the Mohammedan world. Egypt lived by its commerce. So let a blockade of Egypt be proclaimed, and an international fleet be formed to enforce it; especially let Venice and Genoa be forbidden the* traitorous trade. Thus it was that, so early as 1291, Nicholas IV put a ban on the trade and raised a small fleet of twenty galleys to enforce it; and Clement V made this blockade the special business of the Knights-Hospitallers. #### But these were gestures far too slight to have any permanent effect. The popes were, already, almost alone in their understanding how truly Christendom was a unity, that no one part of it could look on indifferently while an alien civilisation and cult made itself master of another part. They were alone in their anxiety, and the Turks established themselves in Europe, to be for four hundred years and more an unmitigated curse to the millions whom they misgoverned, and, when finally expelled, to leave behind them within the very heart of those peoples, a degrading, if inevitable, legacy of feuds and pride and hate, of cruelty and treachery, the legacy which still threatens to plunge the East back into anarchy and barbarism. From the moment when the Ottomans first established themselves on European soil the popes, unhesitatingly and instinctively, in what was perhaps the most critical hour their own rule had known for a thousand years, set themselves to organise the defence of Europe against Islam. A writer of the time, one day to be pope himself, and to die at Ancona after years of exertion in this business, as the fleet he had painfully assembled sailed into the harbour of that ancient city, has vividly described their impossible and thankless task. "The titles of pope and emperor, " he says, "are now no more than empty words, brilliant images. Each state has its own prince, and each prince his own special interests. Who can speak so eloquently as to persuade to unity under a single flag so many powers, discordant and even hostile? And even should they unite their forces who will be so bold as to undertake to command them? What rules of discipline will he lay down? How will he ensure obedience? Where is the man who can understand so many languages that differ so widely, or who can reconcile characters and customs that so conflict? What mortal power could bring into harmony English and French, Genoese and Aragonese, Germans, Hungarians and Bohemians? If the holy war is undertaken with an army that is small, it will be wiped out by the unbelievers; if the army is of any great size, it will court disaster just as infallibly through the insoluble problems of manoeuvre and the confusion that must follow. To whatever side one turns, one sees the same chaos. Consider only, for example, the present state of Christendom. " [ ] #### One effect of the Ottoman conquests after their victory of Nicopolis (1396) was to convince Venice, at last, that her only chance of survival lay in making herself feared. From the beginning of the fifteenth century Venice shows a new spirit of independence in its dealings with the Ottomans; the republic was now all for a crusade, and all for a reunion of the churches which would bring to an end the most bitter of all the differences that hindered joint Christian action against the common foe. It was then by no means coincidence, or accident, that the election of a Venetian as pope -- Eugene IV -- in 1431, brought the possibility of reunion into the sphere of urgent practical affairs, nor that to this pope, from the first weeks of his reign, the Eastern question was the principal question. His plans were simple and grandiose: to reunite Constantinople and Rome and to preach a general crusade that would sweep out the Turks for ever. Here, if anywhere, is the positive intent of the pope who fought the long duel with the assembly at Basel, here is the real Eugene IV. That council was, from the beginning, wholly taken up with its scheme to make the papacy, for the future, the servant of the clerical element in the Church; and that the pope had to spend years fending off this peril was an immense distraction from the no less urgent business of the menace to the Christian East. It was not the only way in which the council hampered his action, for independently of the pope, and in a kind of competition with him, the prelates at Basel also began to negotiate a reunion scheme with the Eastern emperor and his bishops. #### These negotiations began with the council’s invitation to the Greeks to take part in its proceedings (January 26, 1433). In the end, after nearly four years, they broke down completely, partly because the council was unable to find the money to pay the expenses of the Greek delegation, and unwilling to remove to some Italian city more convenient to the Greeks. But the principal cause of the breakdown was the Greek determination not to recognise any synod as oecumenical unless the pope (as well as the other patriarchs) took part in it. It might be hazardous to negotiate a reunion with the West at all, but to discuss reunion with a council that was permanently at loggerheads with its own patriarch -- and him the pope -- would be an obvious waste of time. #### Meanwhile the pope had been extremely active. He had not only begun discussions with the emperor, but with the Christian rulers of Trebizond and Armenia too. His nuncios had penetrated to Jerusalem, and they were, ultimately, to negotiate not only with the Orthodox Churches but with the Monophysites of Syria and Ethiopia, and with the Nestorians also. By the year 1437 Eugene felt himself strong enough to risk all that the enmity of Basel could effect, and, as we have seen, on September 18 of that year he transferred the council -- reunion now its main business -- to Ferrara. #### It is interesting to note how completely the precedents of the reunion council of 1274 were now disregarded. This time the theological questions at issue were to be discussed in the council itself, and the reunion was to be the act of a council in which Greeks and Latins sat together, under the presidency of the pope. And the General Council was preceded by a synod at Constantinople in which the Greeks chose the. delegates who were to represent them at Ferrara, bishops and other leading ecclesiastics. It was a small army of some seven hundred which in the end set out, and at its head was the emperor himself, John VIII. The Patriarch of Constantinople -- who, if the reunion were accomplished, would be, by virtue of Innocent III's decree, the first personage in the Church after the pope -- was the only one of the four Eastern patriarchs to attend in person; but the other three -- Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem -- were represented by proxies to whom they had given unlimited powers. #### The Greeks sailed from Constantinople in November 1437, and after a ten weeks' voyage, on February 8, 1438, they reached Venice. There the Doge and the papal legate received them in a scene of dazzling splendour. On March 4 the emperor entered Ferrara and on April 9 Greeks and Latins assembled in the cathedral for the first joint session, and agreed on a first decree recognising the council as truly oecumenical. #### Then the difficulties began to appear. The emperor's one anxiety was that nothing should now mar the prospect of a firm military alliance to drive out the Turks, and since the discussion of theological differences (all alleged by many of his bishops to be differences about the Faith) would be the speediest way to disturb the momentary harmony, he made every possible effort to put off the discussions. Apparently he would have preferred some act of accord in as general terms as could have been devised, to be ratified and consecrated by whatever gestures of reverence the pope cared to ask for; and the Greek bishops showed themselves, in this, the emperor's faithful and obedient subjects. It took all the tact of the Latin diplomatists -- and here, as at Basel, the principal role fell to Cesarini -- and all the good will of the pope, to keep the peace while the Greeks were slowly compelled to come to the point, to say, that is, why they thought the Latins heretics, and to listen to the Latin explanations of the Latin formularies that must -- if understood -- convince them of Latin orthodoxy. #### The four main differences were the Latin teaching about the relation of the Holy Ghost to the other two Persons of the Blessed Trinity, the Latin use of unleavened bread in the Mass (the Greeks using ordinary bread), the Latin teaching about Purgatory, and the primacy of the Roman See over the whole Church of Christ. The pope proposed that a preliminary commission -- ten Greeks and ten Latins -- should be set up to discuss these four questions. The emperor, however, would not hear of any discussion except upon the third topic; and it was only after some time that he would agree even to this. But at last the discussions on Purgatory began, and they went on steadily for two months (June-July 1438). On July 17 the Greeks agreed that what the Latins believed was not different from what they, too, believed. And then nothing more was accomplished for another three months. #### However, by October, the emperor was brought to allow that the alleged diversities in the doctrine about the Blessed Trinity night be considered, and so there began a long nine months' theological discussion. [ ] It ended, on June 8, 1439, [ ] by the Greeks accepting that the Latin doctrine that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son is not heresy, and that the Latins did not sin in adding to the creed the word Filioque to express this doctrine. Then, after another week of hesitation, the emperor once more showing great reluctance to renew the debates, the most delicate question of all was attacked -- the claim of the pope to a universal primacy in the Church. But the debates, this time, were surprisingly soon over. By June 27 agreement had been reached, and after another week's work the text of the reunion decree had been drafted. It was signed on July 5 by 133 Latins and 33 Greeks and solemnly published in a general session of the council, July 6, 1439. [ ] #### The decree is in the form of a bull, Laetentur Coeli, and published both in Latin and in Greek. While, at the earlier reunion council of Lyons in 1274, the only theological difference determined by the council was the controversy about the orthodoxy of the Filioque, now, at Florence, the council reviewed the whole position. The bull is, in form, a definition of faith made by the pope with the approval of the council (hoc sacro universali approbante Florentino concilio diffinimus) The pope, then, explicitly defines, as a truth to be held by all Christians, that the Holy (Ghost proceeds eternally from the Father and the Son, and that the addition of the word Filioque to the creed, made for the sake of greater clearness in expressing this truth, was lawful and reasonable. He defines, also, that it is indifferent to the validity of the consecration in the mass whether the bread used be leavened or unleavened; and that it is Catholic doctrine that all the souls of those who die in charity with God but before they have made satisfaction for their sins by worthy penances, are purged after death by purgatorial pains, from which pains they can be relieved by the pious acts of the faithful still alive, by prayer for example, by almsdeeds and by the offering of masses. Finally there is a detailed definition about the fact and the nature of the Roman primacy. This part of the decree calls for the council’s own words, or a translation of them. "We define, in like manner, that the holy Apostolic See and the Bishop of Rome, have a primacy (tenere primatum) throughout the whole world, and that the Bishop of Rome himself is the successor of St. Peter the prince of the Apostles, and that he is the true vicar of Christ, and the head of the whole Church, and the father and teacher of all Christians; and that to him in St. Peter there was committed by Our Lord Jesus Christ full power to pasture, to rule and to guide the whole Church; as is also contained in the acts of the General Councils and in the sacred canons. " Here, without any reference to the new theories of the last sixty years, without any reference to those decrees of the assemblies at Pisa, at Constance and at Basel, which attempted to give the new theories a place in Catholic belief, the tradition is simply and clearly stated anew. And it is also worthy of notice that, although various Greek bishops opposed the definition of Florence in its preliminary stages, for various reasons, no one of them ever urged against the papal claim the theories set forth so explicitly at Constance and at Basel. [ ] #### The union of East and West once more established, the Greeks left Florence with their emperor (August 26, 1439). To John VIII it had been a disappointment, which he did nothing to disguise, that the council had been so purely a theological conference, that none of the great princes of the West had appeared, and that it had not, in the manner of the famous council of 1095, been the starting point of a great military effort. #### But the Council of Florence did not break up when the Greeks departed. Its later history is indeed not very well known to us; all the acts of the council, the official record of its proceedings, have disappeared, and when the most interesting events were over the contemporary historians lost interest in the council. It continued, in fact, for another six years or so, at Florence until 1442 and in its final stages at Rome. It is not known how or when it actually ended; [ ] But in the years while it was still at Florence the council was the means for other dissident churches of the East -- some of them heretical bodies -- to renew their contact with the Roman See, to renounce their heresy and to accept again its primatial authority. Thus in 1439 the Monophysite churches of Armenia, led by the Patriarch Constantine, made their submission; [ ] in 1441 the Monophysites of Ethiopia (Jacobites) did the same [ ] and the Monophysites of Syria too; in 1445 the Nestorians (Chaldeans) of Cyprus came in, and also the Maronites. #### The Council of Florence is perhaps chiefly important to us as the General Council which, of all the long series, was most visibly representative of Greeks and Latins, where the differences which for so many centuries had sundered them were discussed in all possible detail, and at great length, through eighteen successive and eventful months; a council whence there emerged a detailed agreed statement about the supreme earthly authority in the Church, so explicit and so all- embracing that, after five hundred years, it still retains all its practical usefulness. [ ] But to the pope, as well as to the Greeks, the council was an assembly of Christians met to cement a new unity under the menace of imminent catastrophe. The Greeks had come from a city that seemed doomed; it was to a land fighting its last battles against an invader that they went back. The year in which the Greeks appeared at Ferrara, Transylvania was invaded and Belgrade attacked. In 1442 there was a second invasion of Transylvania, and from its bloody scenes there at last appeared a great military commander on the Christian side, the Hungarian nobleman John Hunyadi. For a time the Turkish advance was halted, and their armies defeated. The pope again deputed Cesarini to organise a crusade, and in 1443 the combination of the great cardinal, John Hunyadi and Ladislas of Poland drove the Turks out of Servia and Bulgaria, and forced a ten years' truce on them. The sultan -- Murad II - - was so discouraged that he went into retirement. But when reinforcements came in to the Christian armies, in 1444, Cesarini persuaded Hunyadi -- against his better judgment -- to break the truce and to invade Bulgaria. This brought Murad into the field once more. There was a bloody battle outside Varna (November 10, 1444) and the Christian army was destroyed. Ladislas and Cesarini were among the slain. #### The sultan now turned south and made himself master of the Morea (1446) and two years later, on the already fatal field of Kossovo, he destroyed yet another Hungarian army which Hunyadi had managed to raise. In 1451 Murad II died. His successor was the still greater Mohammed II, who almost immediately began the long-distance preparations for the capture of Constantinople. Against him there was nothing but the personal valour of the emperor -- Constantine XII -- and his handful of an army. The emperor, like his brother and predecessor, John VIII, stood by the union with the pope, and his fidlity cost him the support of the mass of his people. So bitter, indeed, was the anti-Latin spirit in the capital that even after thirteen years the emperors had not dared to publish officially the reunion decrees of the council. In all that time, the prelates who had accepted the papal authority for political reasons, and against their own real convictions, and the very much smaller band who had never, even at Florence, accepted it at all, had made good use of their unhindered freedom to campaign against the Latins. Never did the mass of the Greeks hold the Latins in greater detestation than in these last years and months before the Turk administered the final blow. It was, indeed, in these very months that the famous saying (or its equivalent) was first uttered, " Better the turban of the Prophet than the Pope's tiara. " #### By this time the pope of the reunion council was dead, and in his place there reigned the great humanist and patron of Greek letters Thomas of Sarzana, Nicholas V. Like his predecessor he did the little that was possible to help the city, endlessly pleading with the princes of the West, and gathering what money and ships and men he could. It was a great misfortune that this pope was by nature what we have lately come to call an " appeaser. " The Christian cause had suffered so badly that Nicholas V had almost come to dread the thought of an offensive. Especially did the disaster of Kossovo in 1448 fill him with dismay, and he strongly urged the Hungarians to keep to a war of defence. But to the emperor at Constantinople, who was again appealing piteously in 1451, the pope sent a strong warning that so long as the Greeks trifled with their pledged word and refused in their pride to submit to the divinely founded authority of the pope, they could hardly expect anything but chastisement from the justice of God; [ ] the emperor must make a beginning and, without further delay, proclaim the divine faith to which he has pledged himself. But the pope did not merely lecture the emperor. He sent all the aid he could, money to repair the fortifications, a little fleet, and, as his legate, one of the Greek bishops who had been resolute for reunion at Florence and consistently loyal to it since, Isidore, once the Metropolitan of Kiev, and now a cardinal. #### On December 12, 1452, the union of the churches was at last proclaimed, in a great ceremony at Santa Sophia [ ] -- and from that day until the very evening before the city fell, the mass of the people avoided the church as though it were plague stricken. #### It was nearly five months later than this that the pope's ships arrived, after fighting their way through the blockading fleet (April 20, 1453). Outside the city, and all around it, was the vast Mohammedan host, 160,000 regular troops. Within the walls perhaps 7,000 men stood by the emperor, nearly two-thirds of them Westerners, Italians chiefly. The population, cursing their emperor and dreading Mohammed, awaited in passive superstition the arrival of a miracle. But after two months of siege the city fell (May 29, 1453). Its capture was the crown of a hundred years of Moslem victories, and immediately it gave to the Ottoman achievement a solidarity, a consistency and an air of permanence it had never hitherto possessed. Their hold on this city which for one thousand five hundred years had been a key point of world strategy, gave to the Turks a kind of prestige as invincible which the race never lost. #### Its more immediate effect was to make it certain that the yoke laid upon the Christians of south-east Europe would not be lifted for centuries, and that the tyranny would, in the near future, extend to yet further provinces of what had once been Christendom. The West, Christian Europe, has now before it -- and will continue to have before it down to our own time -- the permanent anxiety of the "Eastern Question"; and the popes, since they at least realise the menace and resist it, are henceforward burdened with a second, [ ] and permanent, major distraction from their duty to attend to the badly-needed reform of Christian life and thought. It is perhaps this last effect of the Turkish conquests which was the most disastrous of all, from the point of view of religion. Even had the popes been able to bring about the impossible, to put new life into the France of Charles VII, to unite in immediate harmony the England of the Wars of the Roses, to banish the Hussite feuds still eating away the vitality of Germany, and then, uniting these mutually antagonistic national interests and combining these princes with those maritime states of Italy whose policy was in its inspiration the least Christian of all, to launch a well-planned, well-organised joint attack at a distance of months of marching from its bases and even had the attack been successful and the Turks, five hundred years ago, been crippled for ever, what could the papacy thereby have gained for religion? Territories where the victorious Latin princes would assuredly have been the rulers, and where populations violently attached to their anti-Latin prejudices would continue to prefer the temporal rule of Islam to the spiritual rule of the pope. Nothing but a succession of miracles -- suspensions of the laws of the nature of things -- in the fields of diplomacy and war could have now brought the Christian cause to triumph over the Turks, and nothing but a new series of miracles could have saved the lands so liberated from the bloody anarchy which had been their fate already for generations wherever Latins ruled Greeks and hellenized Slavs. [ ] It is, however, rarely given to any man to see the problem of his own hour in all its dimensions. What is demanded of him, by posterity, is that he shall have faced the crisis generously, with a total abandonment of self-interest. By this test the popes of this generation must be judged to have succeeded, and in the continuous nine years' effort of the two popes Calixtus III and Pius II, the papacy now reaches to heights unscaled since Gregory X. #### When Nicholas V died (March 24-25, 1455), fifteen cardinals met to elect his successor. [ ] Seven were Italians, there were two Frenchmen, two Greeks, and four Spaniards. An Orsini party in the Sacred College favoured a French pope, while a Colonna party aimed at another Italian. The only way out of the deadlock was to elect a cardinal who was neither, and for a brief moment it seemed that the new pope would be the Greek Bessarion, the hero of the reunion party at Florence, a fine scholar, a theologian, and a good administrator; in many ways the most noteworthy churchman of his age. But prejudice was too strong, and jealousy of the neophyte. There was next a movement to elect, from outside the cardinals, the Friar Minor Antonio of Montefalcone; and then, "as it were to postpone the contest, " [ ] on April 8 the cardinals elected an aged Spaniard, Alonso de Borja. [ ] #### Calixtus III -- this was the new pope's title -- came of a race for which militant opposition to Islam, still, after seven centuries, in occupation of the south of Spain, was of the essence of Catholicism. He was, moreover, a Catalan, and the kingdom of Aragon, in whose service he had spent the greater part of his life, was the greatest of the Christian maritime powers. The pope began his reign by a solemn public vow to work for one thing only, the expulsion of the Turks from Europe and the liberation of their Christian victims. Then he set himself, with wonderful energy and skill, to reorganise the crusade. Indulgences were announced, tithes decreed, the date of departure fixed and legates sent to all the Christian princes, cardinals to the chief of them, bishops and the new Franciscan Observants [ ] to the smaller states. Calixtus made his own generous personal contribution, sending jewels to the saleroom and his plate to the mint, and even selling off castles. The restoration plans of Nicholas V were abruptly halted. Sculptors were set to cut stone cannon balls, and architects bidden design ships and engines of war. There was to be an expedition by land under the command of the Duke of Burgundy, [ ] while the sea warfare would be the task of the pope's old master the King of Aragon and Naples. [ ] There was already a small papal fleet in existence, and it was now ordered into the Aegean to succour the population of the islands still in Christian hands. During the winter of 1455-1456 the pope set up shipyards along the Tiber, and at an immense cost built a second fleet of twenty-seven ships. #### The difficulties which had hampered earlier popes did not disappear. From no one of the Western princes was there any real response to the pope's enthusiasm. Hardly any of the money laboriously collected from the clergy and people ever reached the pope. The Kings of France and Denmark and Aragon, and the Duke of Burgundy himself, simply transferred it to their own use. In France it was even denied that the pope had any right to levy taxes on French Church property, and Calixtus was threatened with a General Council should he not withdraw the tax -- a threat which this tough old man met by excommunicating those who had signed this protest. In the first summer of the reign war broke out in central Italy -- a war in which the King of Naples secretly helped the freebooter Picinnino against the pope, while the papal fleet (commanded by an Aragonese archbishop), instead of sailing to the Aegean, joined itself to the Aragonese fleet in an attack on Genoa. Nor was the new fleet, at first, a more useful instrument. It was not until August 6, 1456, that the cardinal who commanded it -- Scarampo -- could be persuaded to leave the security of Naples. And by that date the one great event of the war was over, the relief of the besieged city of Belgrade. #### The conqueror of Constantinople, Mohammed II, who had in 1455 made himself master of Serbia, next planned the conquest of Hungary, the last power between himself and the West. Throughout the winter and spring (1455-1456) he made his careful preparations, and in June 1456 he moved, with a well-equipped force of 150,000 men. In July he laid siege to Belgrade. Against all likelihood the siege was raised, and Mohammed was forced to retire, with heavy losses in men and in material. The heroes of this amazing feat were the nameless thousands whom the sanctity and burning eloquence of the General of the Observant Franciscans, St. John Capistran, had recruited for the new crusade, whom the genius of the Spanish cardinal legate, Juan Carvajal, had organised, and whom John Hunyadi led. [ ] The first stage of the victory was the five-hour fight on the Danube (July 14) when the crusaders forced their way through the Turks into the city and the citadel. Just a week later the sultan ordered a general assault. The Turks persisted for two days, and then they retired, in great confusion. Mohammed brought off his army indeed, but his losses were extremely heavy. #### Hopes ran high at Rome, when the splendid news came in, and the pope, to commemorate for ever a victory which he regarded as a patent answer to his crusade of prayer, founded the new feast of the Transfiguration of Our Lord (August 6). Elsewhere the great victory was readily interpreted as a proof that no further effort was needed. In Servia itself the very worst happened. Hunyadi died -- of the plague -- only three weeks after the rout, and St. John also died, a few weeks later (October 23). And next, when the weakling Habsburg King of Hungary -- who had fled to Vienna as Mohammed's armies neared Belgrade -- arrived with reinforcements (November), there was so violent a quarrel between Germans and Hungarians that the crusade broke up. #### So much had the energy and faith of Calixtus III accomplished in one short year, and to so little had it all been brought. But the failure did not break the pope's spirit, nor halt his effort. A new Christian champion -- Skanderbeg -- now appeared in Albania, [ ] and in August 1457 the little papal fleet won a battle off Mitylene, when twenty-five enemy ships were captured. #### But the catastrophe which followed the relief of Belgrade was really the end of anything that Calixtus, at his great age, could expect to accomplish. Two years later he died, on the very feast he had founded, August 6, 1458. #### As in 1455, and 1447, the vacant see was soon filled. On August 19 the Cardinal of Siena was elected, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini. He chose to be called Pius II, from devotion it may be thought to Virgil, rather than to the distant memory of that Pius I who was almost Virgil’s contemporary. For Aeneas Sylvius, fifty-three years of age at his election, had been for a good thirty years and more one of the brightest figures in the revival of classical letters. He was not so learned as Nicholas V, nor had he that pope's natural affection for the sacred sciences. But much more than that enthusiastic collector of manuscripts, he had been throughout his life a most distinguished practitioner of the new literary arts. He had written poems in the classical metres, histories, romances even, and as a practical professional diplomatist he had shown himself a finished master of the new, highly-stylised oratory. His whole career had been rather that of a cultivated man of the world than of a priest, and in fact it was not until he was past forty that Aeneas Sylvius took the great step of receiving Holy Orders. What had delayed him for years he himself set down, with stark directness, in a letter to a friend: "Timeo continentiam. " His life as a layman had, indeed, been habitually marked by the gravest moral irregularities, and it was partly due to his way of life that at fifty-three he was prematurely old and broken, white-haired and crippled with gout. But the mind was as keen as ever, the enthusiasm for letters burned no less brightly, and the whole man, like another St. Augustine, was now devoted to the interests of religion. #### The contrast between Pius II and his predecessor could not have been greater, save for one thing, his resolute will to free Christendom from the menace of Islam. With Pius II, too, this was the primary task before the Holy See. In a speech made on the very day of his election, the pope had made this clear. Given the many successes of his long diplomatic career, it was not strange that the pope should begin his reign by yet another effort to achieve the needed European unity, nor that the means he proposed was a congress of the sovereign princes. On October 12, 1458, he announced to the cardinals that he proposed to call this congress to meet at Mantua in the June of 1459, and that he would himself preside at it. On January 22 -- in the face of much criticism -- he set out from Rome. Travelling by slow stages, halting at Perugia, Siena, Florence, Bologna and Ferrara, he at length came to Mantua, on May 27. #### The seven months of the pope's stay at Mantua [ ] were an all but unrelieved disappointment. Of all the princes invited not one had even troubled to send an envoy. The very cardinals had secretly worked to dissuade the princes, and now they did their best to persuade the pope to abandon the scheme. Scarampo especially, the late admiral of the papal fleet, showed himself hostile and contemptuous, and presently returned to Rome. The emperor, whose interests Pius II had served magnificently when he was his secretary, chose this moment to proclaim himself King of Hungary, and thereby to begin a civil war in "this kingdom which is the shield of all Christendom, under cover of which we have hitherto been safe. " [ ] The King of France, with whom the emperor was plotting to force a transfer of the congress to some imperial city, made it clear that he would not co-operate in the war unless the pope acknowledged the claims of the House of Anjou to the kingdom of Naples, and he underlined his hostility by scarcely veiled threats to renew the anti-papal agitation and feuds of Basel and Constance. The Venetians were so indifferent that the pope told them plainly they were thought to hold more with the Turks than with the Christians, and to be more interested in their trade than in their religion. [ ] #### It was not until September 26, four months after the pope's arrival at Mantua, that enough envoys had appeared for the congress to hold a meeting. And though the pope, and various envoys, remained on for another four months it never met again. The pope thought it more practical to deal with the various ambassadors individually. #### The delegates from France did at last arrive, in November 1459, but their real business was to bully the pope and to coerce him into a change of policy in Naples. [ ] But Pius II was resolute, and so far from cowed by the king's hostility that he took the offensive, and demanded a revocation of the Pragmatic Sanction of 1438. The Bishop of Rome, he said, was only allowed in France such jurisdiction as it pleased the Parlement to grant him. Were this to continue, the Church would become a monster, a creature with many heads. And to clinch the matter he published, from Mantua, the famous bull Exsecrabilis, [ ] condemning as a novel and hitherto unheard-of abuse, the practice of appealing from the pope to some future General Council. #### The congress formally ended with a bull proclaiming a three-years' crusade and announcing new grants of Church revenues for its support. On January 19, 1460, the pope left Mantua. It was not until October 6 that he was back in Rome, after an absence of nearly two years. #### The response of Europe to the new appeal was as poor as ever. Eleven months after the return of the pope to Rome the news came, in September 1461, that Mohammed had overrun the last Christian state in Asia Minor, the empire of Trebizond, and that he was master of the Black Sea port of Sinope. Then it was once more the turn of the Balkan states and Greece. Lesbos was captured in 1462, and Bosnia was conquered in 1463. The Venetian admiral had looked on unmoved while the Turks too k Lesbos, but their attack, later that same year, on the republic's colonies at Lepanto and in Argolis brought the war party in Venice into power. Pius II, though under no illusions about the nature of the new Venetian zeal for a crusade, [ ] thought the moment had arrived to publish the resolution to which he had come in March 1462 -- the resolution of a brave man indeed, but of one who has all but despaired of his generation, and who will all but demand that Providence shall save it by a miracle. Venice, at last, had been persuaded by events that the only way of salvation for a Christian state was to defeat and destroy for ever the Turkish forces. Hungary, whence alone could come the military complement to the maritime power of Venice, was at last delivered from the war with Frederick III. [ ] The French still resolutely held themselves aloof; Florence thought that Venice and the Turks should be left to fight each other until neither was strong enough to be dangerous to anyone else. But on September 12, 1463, the Venetians signed an offensive alliance with Hungary, and on September 23 the pope announced his resolve. To kill for ever the often-heard gibe that pope and cardinals would do anything except expose themselves to suffer in the Holy War, Pius II would personally lead the crusade, and all the cardinals would go with him, save only the sick and those needed for the vital administration of the Church. #### "Whatever we do, " said the pope, "people take it ill. They say we live for pleasure only, pile up riches, bear ourselves arrogantly, ride on fat mules and handsome palfreys, trail the fringes of our cloaks and show plump faces from beneath the red hat and the white hood, keep hounds for the chase, spend much on actors and parasites, and nothing in defence of the Faith. And there is some truth in their words: many among the cardinals and other officials of our court do lead this kind of life. If the truth be told, the luxury and pomp of our court is too great. And this is why we are so detested by the people that they will not listen to us, even when what we say is just and reasonable. . . . Our cry [ ] 'Go forth' has resounded in vain. If instead, the word is ' Come, with me, ' there will be some response. . . . Should this effort also fail, we know of no other means. . . . We are too weak to fight sword in hand; and this is not indeed the priest's duty. But we shall imitate Moses, and pray upon the height while the people of Israel do battle below. " #### So did the pope speak to his cardinals, and although there were political realists among them who only sneered, the majority caught something of his devoted spirit. To the princes who looked on unmoved at the last preparations, at the strenuous efforts to raise funds, the sale of vestments, chalices, and other plate, the renewed appeals to Florence, to Milan, and to Siena, and to the rest, at the slow labour of turning into an ordered force the thousands of poor men who came in from France, Germany, the Low Countries, from Spain and Scotland too, to seek victory and salvation with the pope, Pius II spoke his last word on October 22, 1463. "Think of your hopeless brethren groaning in captivity amongst the Turks or living in daily dread of it. As you are men, let humanity prompt you. . . . As you are Christians, obey the Gospel and love your neighbour as yourself. . . . The like fate is hanging over yourselves; if you will not help those who live between you and the enemy, those still further away will forsake you when your own hour arrives. . . . The ruin of the emperors of Constantinople and Trebizond, of the Kings of Bosnia and Rascia and the others, all overpowered the one after the other, prove how disastrous it is to stand still and do nothing. " The time was indeed to come when some of those who heard this would see the Turks masters of Hungary as far as Buda, masters, too, of the whole Mediterranean marine. #### All through that winter, 1463-1464, the work of preparation continued, and the pope remained fixed in his resolve, though even his own subjects had to be constrained to subscribe to the war fund, though there were cardinals who used every chance to hinder and to destroy the great work, and though the French king, Louis XI, threatened an alliance with the Hussites and a new council once the pope was out of Rome. #### On the day fixed, June 18, 1464, after a great ceremony in St. Peter's, Pius II left the city for Ancona, the port of assembly. He was already an old man, broken with years of gout and stone. The intense heat tried him further. It took him a month to reach Ancona, and by this time he was seriously ill. In the port all was confusion, crowded with Spanish and French crusaders -- all of the poorest class -- unorganised, leaderless and at daggers drawn. As August came in, and the temperature mounted, the plague broke out. The papal fleet had been delayed in its voyage from Pisa, and of course there was not a sign of any vessel from Venice. A new siege of the pope now began, to persuade him to abandon the expedition and to return to Rome. But the onetime elegant aesthete was long beyond the power of arguments addressed to his material happiness. He held firm to his resolve to sacrifice himself utterly, and tortured now by new anxieties as to the loyalty of Venice as well as by his fiendish bodily pain, Pius II slowly came to his end, with the disgusted among his cardinals occupied only with chances and prospects in the conclave that could not now be far off. At Ancona, in the night before the feast of Our Lady's Assumption, the pope died. He had had his last view of the world he had so loved, the antique world and the new, two days earlier, when carried to the window of his sickroom he saw the first of the Venetian galleys round the mole that runs outs beyond the triumphal arch of Trajan. #### The body of the dead pope was taken back to Rome, and the cardinals hastened to follow it, for the funeral service and the conclave. The crusade had died with the pope. The doge used the opportunity of his presence at Ancona to make clear to the cardinals how ill-advised he thought the whole affair; and the cardinals, anxious above all else to get the expedition off their hands, made over the crusade fleet to him -- to be restored should the pope whom they were about to elect require it for a crusade. They also paid to the doge -- for transmission to the King of Hungary -- what remained of the treasure collected, 40,000 ducats. The doge returned to Venice on August 18, and gave orders immediately that the great fleet should be dismantled. #### The cardinals were all back in Rome by August 25, and on the 28th they went into conclave. [ ] The election was soon over, for on the very first ballot they chose as pope a rich Venetian noble, forty-eight years of age, Cardinal Pietro Barbo, a nephew of Eugene IV. He took the name of Paul II. Personal leadership of the crusade was never any part of his policy. But Paul II was far from sympathising with the selfish policy of the great #### . city whence he came. He gave what aid he could to Hungary in the crisis of 1465, and to Skanderbeg when hard pressed at Croja two years later. But Albania fell to the Turks in 1468, and the important Venetian possession, Negrepont, in 1470. Here, for the moment, the tale of Moslem success ended. After twenty years of conquest the effort of Mohammed II was coming to a halt, and his death in 1481 gave relief to the West for a generation. #### The last events in the drama of Mohammed's reign were first the naval expedition, organised by Sixtus IV in 1473, which took and sacked the Turkish ports of Attalia (whereupon dissensions, and the return home of the Neapolitan contingent) and of Smyrna (after which the Venetians deserted); and finally, in 1480, a Turkish invasion of Italy and the temporary occupation of Otranto (August 11). [ ] Had Mohammed's successor been such another as himself, nothing could now have saved Rome and Italy. The pope prepared to flee; Avignon was got ready for his court; [ ] a an immense effort was made to raise an army and equip a fleet, and then, on June 2, 1481, the welcome news came that Mohammed II was dead. Special services of thanksgiving were held, and it was in a wholly new spirit of confidence that the fleet sailed to besiege Otranto. After ten weeks of vigorous resistance the Turks surrendered. And then, as always, the coalition broke up. The pope's scheme of an attack on Valona, in preparation for an attempt to free Albania, came to nought. Plague broke out in the papal ships, the men refused to serve any longer, winter was at hand, and so, despite the pope's energy, all the advantage was lost. The Turks were no longer attacking -- when next a soldier of genius appeared among them it was Syria and Egypt that would attract him -- and the Christian states were only too willing to leave them undisturbed in their new empire. ####  |