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?