VII
What lay behind the eagerness of Urban, at the beginning of his reign, to revive the crusades? Was he burning with holy zeal to recover the sepulchre of Christ from the hands of the Moslems? Was his heart set on protecting Cyprus and Rhodes? Had he determined to leave no stone unturned to protect the Byzantines and other eastern Christians from the encroachment and persecution of Murad? His letters indicate that his chief interest was the recovery of the lost power and glory of the papacy. There is the same revelation in the letters of his immediate successor, Gregory XI. These two popes had no catholic vision. They tried to keep their position as arbiters between France and England and Spain at Avignon, and at the same time to inherit the temporal power of the decaying Holy Roman Empire by circumventing the Visconti of Milan. The great schism in the Western Church, which so aided Murad and Bayezid in laying solidly the foundations of an empire in Europe, was the outcome of the short-sighted and purely selfish policy of these two popes. How far from the truth it is to represent them as courageously, whole-heartedly, and persistently endeavouring to awaken the interest and attention of Europe in the peril from the East!
The fall of Adrianople and of Philippopolis should have been a warning to Urban. He read in it, however, not a glorious opportunity to demonstrate the solidarity of Christendom by driving the Moslems out of Europe and rescuing fellow Christians from apostasy, slavery, and death, but an occasion to force the schismatic Greeks to return to the Roman communion. Of the popes of the fourteenth century, Urban had the greatest chance to prove himself a worthy champion of Christ and civilization. For it was during his reign that the Osmanlis began their conquests and their proselytizing in Europe. At the beginning they could easily have been checked. But it never occurred to Urban that there was a common interest of Christendom higher than and outside of the Roman Church.
The fault lay not wholly with Urban and with Gregory. They reflected the spirit of their age. But it does no credit to their personal character nor to the high position which they held to say that they were the victims, rather than the masters, of the prevailing bigotry and ignorance of their generation. In the fourteenth century, the West had already begun to try to impose its commerce, its customs, its laws, and its religion upon the East. There was not, nor has there ever been since, a sympathetic ‘give and take’ between Occident and Orient. In a mint, if the coin when stamped does not correspond exactly to the mould, it is rejected. Similarly the West, when it tries to put every eastern people through its mould and finds no exact correspondence, rejects. Hence, on the one side, the scorn of the ‘I am better than thou’: on the other side, a hatred born not only of fear and of conviction of inferiority, but of a sense of injustice which is none the less vital from a knowledge that the wrong is not, and will not be, righted.
Amadeo of Savoy, uncivilized, fanatical through ignorance, the fertile breeding-ground of fanaticism, true and unchanged descendant of the Fourth Crusaders, was a prophetic figure at Constantinople in 1366. He represented the only possible type of deliverer for Byzantium. But deliverance on his terms the Greeks would not accept. Death or Islam were preferable. And who can blame them? Two years before Amadeo’s expedition, the Greeks of Crete had risen in rebellion against their Venetian overlords because an attempt had been made to impose upon them the Latin faith and rites.[285] When they were hunted down and massacred for refusing to worship after the western fashion, not only Pope Urban, but also Petrarch, wrote to the Doge congratulating him upon his valiant and successful efforts to save the Church of Christ in Crete![286]
In a letter to Pope Urban, Petrarch spoke with approval of the policy of using the Ottoman menace to stamp out the Eastern heresy. ‘The Osmanlis are merely enemies,’ he wrote, ‘but the schismatic Greeks are worse than enemies. The Osmanlis hate us less, for they fear us less. The Greeks, however, both fear and hate us with all their soul.’[287] These words of Petrarch epitomize the feeling between the Eastern and Western Churches during his own day, and, if what one can see with his own eyes in Jerusalem and elsewhere is a fair example, up to the twentieth century.[288]
If the European nations regarded the adherents of the Orthodox Church (the term Greek in its religious sense must be taken to include all the Balkan races) as ‘worse than enemies’, that is, than the Osmanlis, it is equally true that the Osmanlis found from 1350 to 1500 that the hatred of the Balkan races for the Latin Church was their most potent ally, not only in the actual conquest, but in reconciling the conquered to their fate. One does not want to detract from the genius of the early Ottoman sovereigns and from the reputation for superb fighting ability so honestly won by the Ottoman armies. But it must not be forgotten that each separate race in the Balkans preferred the rule of the Osmanlis to that of their neighbours, and that the one point in which the Balkan races were of the same mind was that Ottoman domination was preferable to that of the Hungarians and the Italians. For every crusade was a scheme for religious propaganda and territorial aggrandizement, in just the same spirit as in modern times the nations of Europe have exploited the misery of Ottoman Christians for the purpose of securing concessions.
In spite of the fact that John Palaeologos was informed by the Patriarch Philotheus that a mixed council of clergy and government officials, presided over by the empress, had been held in June 1376, and had decided against the reunion of the churches,[289] John persisted in his negotiations with the Pope. Urban did all that he could to facilitate the visit of the Byzantine emperor to Rome.[290] But at the same time he was writing to the Venetians and to the Dalmatian cities to protect the Catholics of Cattaro against the Serbian and Albanian heretics,[291] and was encouraging Louis in his suicidal campaign against the Bulgarians.
In 1369, John Palaeologos left the government of Constantinople to his elder son Andronicus, and set out for Rome, where, on October eighteenth, he made his profession of faith in the presence of four cardinals, and confirmed it by a golden bull. The next morning, at St. Peter’s, he formally abjured the errors of the Orthodox Church before the high altar, with his hands in those of the Pope.[292] The Pope accepted him as a ‘son of the Church’, promised that he should be relieved of the Turk, and gave him letters earnestly recommending his cause to the princes of Christendom.[293]
Urban V was quick to use the prestige which he believed the adhesion of John Palaeologos had given him. He announced broadcast the happy consummation of his efforts, stating that the Byzantine emperor had done homage to the Vicar of Christ in St. Peter’s.[294] But letters sent during the same winter to the Greek clergy, urging them to accept the action of their emperor,[295] and other letters from his secret correspondence of this year, indicate how little faith he had in the Emperor’s sincerity or ability to fulfil his promises. Was the abjuration in St. Peter’s a farce, in which Emperor and Pope allowed themselves to trifle with holy things, each for the sake of his immediate advantage?
John had hoped that his adhesion to the Roman Church would bring to him grants of money, ships, and men from the Latin princes, and that an army would rally around him to fight the Osmanlis. But not only did he return from France ‘with empty hands’, but he was detained at Venice because of debts owing to merchants. In vain he begged Andronicus to send the money for his release. The son who had four years before been charged with being party to his father’s imprisonment in Bulgaria was no more filial at this humiliating crisis. He answered that there was no money in the treasury, and that he could get nothing from the clergy. But his younger son, Manuel, brought from Salonika the ransom.[296]
John Palaeologos returned to his capital poorer than when he left. He brought no help from Europe, and he had bound himself publicly by oath to an obligation which he had known he could not fulfil. He had broken faith with Murad, who during these years had been growing more and more powerful. There was nothing for him to do but to make himself tributary to Murad in order that he might enjoy ‘up to the end of his life’ his last possessions in peace.[297] Three years later, in 1373, when his ambassador John Lascaris failed in a second attempt to get aid from the Western princes,[298] the Byzantine emperor recognized Murad as his suzerain, promised to do military service in person in Murad’s army, and gave to him his son Manuel as hostage.[299]
Urban died a few months after John’s visit to Rome. Gregory XI, who succeeded him in December 1370, had little hope of carrying on further negotiations with the Eastern Church; for the Greek ecclesiastics were stubborn in their determination to maintain the absolute independence of the patriarchate. The Genoese and Venetians were fighting bitterly in Cyprus. In 1371, Gregory made a strong appeal to France, England, Venice, and Flanders to co-operate with Genoa in saving the last Christians of the Holy Land.[300] There was no response.
That Gregory realized clearly the peril to Christendom in the advance of Murad’s armies is shown in two remarkable letters written to Louis of Hungary in May and November 1372. His words were prophetic. He urged Louis to resist the Osmanlis before they advanced farther into Europe. They had already entered Serbia. He trembled to think what would happen if they pushed through Albania and secured a port on the Adriatic. Unless Louis entered without delay into an alliance with his Christian neighbours, how could he protect his own kingdom and all Christendom from the Mohammedan peril.[301] Seconding this warning to the King of Hungary, the Pope commanded the Hungarian and Slavic archbishops to preach the crusade in Hungary, Poland, and the Dalmatian cities. Everywhere special boxes were placed in the churches for collecting funds. A tithe was levied on the monasteries and abbeys of Hungary and Dalmatia. Louis, with five of his most powerful nobles, took the cross, and swore to the Pope that he would put an army in the field within a year.[302] Louis asked Venice for triremes, but when the Venetians found that he intended them to be a donation for ‘the common cause’, they found that they could not build them.[303] Padua declined an invitation to guarantee the cost of construction. The Hungarians did not fulfil their promises. In fact, there is no evidence that they made any effort to acquit themselves of their oath.
When John Palaeologos made a last desperate appeal to the Pope, before he entered into his third and final compact with Murad, Gregory, in receiving the imperial envoy, burst into tears, and promised that he would save Constantinople, if only the Byzantine emperor would cause his people to renounce their heresies and return to the Roman Church. In 1375, he wrote once more to Louis to inform him that Constantinople was in danger of capture from Murad.[304] Letters in the same year to Edward of England pictured the Ottoman advance and the peril of Christendom, urged a general war against the Osmanlis, and asked for a subsidy to provide galleys ‘to prevent the crossing into Europe of more Turks, because Constantinople is in imminent danger’.[305] The letters of Gregory XI to the Christian princes prove conclusively that the full import of Murad’s early successes was understood by the Pope and was impressed upon both secular and ecclesiastical authorities throughout Europe.
But both John and Gregory lost heart. Neither was able to fulfil the compact made in Rome. Gregory could not unite Christendom to relieve the Byzantines. John could not persuade the Byzantines to renounce, as he had done, the ‘Greek heresies’. So, as we have seen, he became Murad’s vassal.[306] The Pope, involved in the quarrel of Emperor Charles IV and the Duke of Bavaria with the Marquis of Brandenburg, and anxious over the outcome, for the papacy, of the continual unrest in the Italian cities, returned from Avignon to Rome in 1378. He died a few months later.[307] The struggle arising from the election of Gregory’s successor gave birth to the ‘Great Schism’. This left Murad a free hand in subjugating the Balkan peninsula.