5.
Such was the condition of Christendom, thus destitute of resources, thus weakened by internal quarrels, thus bribed and retained (so to speak) by the temptations of the world, at the very time when the Ottomans were pressing on its outposts. One moment occurred, and just one, in their history, when they might have been resisted with success. You will recollect that the Seljukians were broken, not simply by the Crusaders, but also, though not so early, by the terrible Zingis. What Zingis was to the Seljukians, such, and more than such, was Timour to the Ottomans. It was in their full career of victory, and when everything seemed in their power, when they had gained the whole province of Roumelia, which is round about Constantinople, that a terrible reverse befell them. The Sultan then on the throne was Bajazet, surnamed Ilderim, or the Lightning, from the rapidity of his movements. He had extended his empire, or his sensible influence, from the Carpathians to the Euphrates; he had destroyed the remains of rival dynasties in Asia Minor, had carried his arms down to the Morea, and utterly routed an allied Christian army in Hungary. Elated with these successes, he put no bounds to his pride and ambition. He vaunted that he would subdue, not Hungary only, but Germany and Italy besides; and that he would feed his horse with a bushel of oats on the altar of St. Peter's, at Rome. The Apostle heard the blasphemy; and this mighty conqueror was not suffered to leave this world for his eternal habitation without Divine infliction in evidence that He who made him, could unmake him at His will. The Disposer of all things sent against him the fierce Timour, of whom I have already said so much. One would have thought the two conquerors could not possibly have come into collision—Timour, the Lord of Persia, Khorasan, Sogdiana, and Hindostan, and Bajazet, the Sultan of Syria, Asia Minor, and Greece. They were both Mahomedans; they might have turned their backs on each other, if they were jealous of each other, and might have divided the world between them. Bajazet might have gone forward towards Germany and Italy, and Timour might have stretched his conquests into China.
But ambition is a spirit of envy as well as of covetousness; neither of them could brook a rival greatness. Timour was on the Ganges, and Bajazet was besieging Constantinople, when they interchanged the words of hatred and defiance. Timour called Bajazet a pismire, whom he would crush with his elephants; and Bajazet retaliated with a worse insult on Timour, by promising that he would capture his retinue of wives. The foes met at Angora in Asia Minor; Bajazet was defeated and captured in the battle, and Timour secured him in an iron-barred apartment or cage, which, according to Tartar custom, was on wheels, and he carried him about, as some wild beast, on his march through Asia. Can imagination invent a more intolerable punishment upon pride? is it not wonderful that the victim of it was able to live as many as nine months under such a visitation?
This was at the beginning of the fifteenth century, shortly before young Harry of Monmouth, the idol of English poetry and loyalty, crossed the sea to kill the French at Agincourt; and an opportunity was offered to Christendom to destroy an enemy, who never before or since has been in such extremity of peril. For fourteen years a state of interregnum, or civil war, lasted in the Ottoman empire; and the capture of Constantinople, which was imminent at the time of Bajazet's downfall, was anyhow delayed for full fifty years. Had a crusade been attempted with the matured experience and subdued enthusiasm, which the trials of three hundred years had given to the European nations, the Ottomans, according to all human probability, would have perished, as the Seljukians before them. But, in the inscrutable decree of Heaven, no such attempt was made; one attempt indeed was made too soon, and a second attempt was made too late, but none at the time.
1. The first of these two was set on foot when Bajazet was in the full tide of his victories; and he was able, not only to defeat it, but, by defeating, to damp the hopes, and by anticipation, to stifle the efforts, which might have been used against him with better effect in the day of his reverses. In the year 1394, eight years before Bajazet's misfortunes, Pope Boniface the Ninth proclaimed a Crusade, with ample indulgences for those who engaged in it, to the countries which were especially open to the Ottoman attack. In his Bull, he bewails the sins of Christendom, which had brought upon them that scourge which was the occasion of his invitation. He speaks of the massacres, the tortures, and slavery which had been inflicted on multitudes of the faithful. "The mind is horrified," he says, "at the very mention of these miseries; but it crowns our anguish to reflect, that the whole of Christendom, which, if in concord, might put an end to these and even greater evils, is either in open war, country with country, or, if in apparent peace, is secretly wasted by mutual jealousies and animosities."[66]
The Pontiff's voice, aided by the imminent peril of Hungary and its neighbouring kingdoms, was successful. Not only from Germany, but even from France, the bravest knights, each a fortress in himself, or a man-of-war on land (as he may be called), came forward in answer to his call, and boasted that, even were the sky to fall, they would uphold its canopy upon the points of their lances. They formed the flower of the army of 100,000 men, who rallied round the King of Hungary in the great battle of Nicopolis. The Turk was victorious; the greater part of the Christian army were slain or driven into the Danube; and a part of the French chivalry of the highest rank were made prisoners. Among these were the son of the Duke of Burgundy; the Sire de Coucy, who had great possessions in France and England; the Marshal of France (Boucicault), who afterwards fell on the field of Agincourt; and four French princes of the blood. Bajazet spared twenty-five of his noblest prisoners, whom their wealth and station made it politic to except; then, summoning the rest before his throne, he offered them the famous choice of the Koran or the sword. As they came up one by one, they one by one professed their faith in Christ, and were beheaded in the Sultan's presence. His royal and noble captives he carried about with him in his march through Europe and Asia, as he himself was soon to grace the retinue of Timour. Two of the most illustrious of them died in prison in Asia. As to the rest, he exacted a heavy ransom from them; but, before he sent them away, he gave them a grand entertainment, which displayed both the barbarism and the magnificence of the Asiatic. He exhibited before them his hunting and hawking equipage, amounting to seven thousand huntsmen and as many falconers; and, when one of his chamberlains was accused before him of drinking a poor woman's goat's milk, he literally fulfilled the "castigat auditque" of the poet, by having the unhappy man ripped open, in order to find in his inside the evidence of the charge.
Such was the disastrous issue of the battle of Nicopolis; nor is it wonderful that it should damp the zeal of the Christians and weaken the influence of the Pope, for a long time to come; anyhow, it had this effect till the critical moment of the Turkish misfortunes was over, and the race of Othman was recovering itself after the captivity and death of its Sultan. "Whereas the Turks might have been expelled from Greece on the loss of their Sultan," says Rainaldus, "Christians, torn to pieces by their quarrels and by schism, lost a fit and sufficient opportunity. Whence it followed, that the wound inflicted upon the beast was not unto death, but he revived more ferocious for the devouring of the faithful."
2. However, Christendom made a second attempt still, but when it was too late. The grandson of Bajazet was then on the throne, one of the ablest of the Sultans; and, though the allied Christian army had considerable success against him at first, in vain was the bravery of Hunniades, and the preaching of St. John Capistran: the Turk managed to negotiate with its leaders, to put them in the wrong, to charge them with perjury, and then to beat them in the fatal battle of Varna, in which the King of Hungary and Poland and the Pope's Legate were killed, with 10,000 men. In vain after this was any attempt to make head against the enemy; in vain did Pope after Pope raise his warning voice and point to the judgment which hung over Christendom; Constantinople fell.