|
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.
|
|
