The Venetians, masters of the ancient routes and commerce of India, were the first to be aware of the changes that were in operation, the consequences of which must prove so injurious to them. They secretly sent deputies to the sultan of Cairo, as much interested as themselves in opposing the interests of the Portuguese. The deputation from Venice advised the sultan of Egypt to ally himself with the king of Calcutta and other Indian powers, to attack the fleets and troops of Portugal. The republic undertook to send into Egypt and to the coasts of Arabia artisans to found cannon, and carpenters to construct vessels of war. The Egyptian monarch, whose interests were the same as those of Venice, readily entered into the plan proposed to him; and in order to arrest the progress of the Portuguese in India, he endeavoured to inspire a fear with regard to the holy places, which had so long been, and still were, objects of veneration for the faithful of the West. He threatened to raze to the ground the church of the Holy Sepulchre, to cast the ashes and monuments of the martyrs to the winds, and to force all the Christians of his states to abjure the faith of Christ. A Cordelier of Jerusalem came to Rome to express the alarms of the Christians of Palestine, and of the guardians of the holy tomb. The pope was seized with terror, and hastened to send the Cordelier to the king of Portugal, whom he conjured to make the sacrifice of his new conquests to God and Christendom.[82] The Portuguese monarch received the envoy of the pope and the Oriental Christians with kindness, gave him considerable sums for the support of the holy places, and replied to the sovereign pontiff, that he did not at all fear seeing the threats of the sultan carried out, but, on the contrary, he hoped to burn both Mecca and Medina, and bring vast regions under the law of the Gospel, if the princes of Christendom were willing to coöperate with him.
The sultan of Egypt, who received tribute from all pilgrims, did not destroy the churches of Jerusalem, but he attempted an expedition against the Portuguese, in concert with the king of Cambay and Calcutta. They equipped at Suez a fleet composed of six galleys, a galleon, and four store-ships, in which were embarked eight hundred Mamelukes. The Egyptian fleet descended along the shores of the Red Sea, coasted Arabia, doubled the Gulf of Persia, and cast anchor at the island and in the port of Diu, one of the most important points for the commerce of India. It is of this expedition the author of the Lusiad speaks in his ninth book: “With the help of the fleets from the port of Arsinoë, the Calicutians hoped to reduce those of Emanuel to ashes; but the arbiter of heaven and earth always finds means to execute the decrees of his profound wisdom.”
The expedition of the Mamelukes, notwithstanding the success it at first obtained, produced not the results that the sultan of Cairo and the republic of Venice expected. The Portuguese, in their despair, endeavoured to persuade the king of Ethiopia to divert the course of the Nile. A project for shutting up the new routes of commerce and the passage of the Cape of Good Hope was scarcely more reasonable. Instead of having recourse to arms, the sultans of the Mamelukes would have much better served the interests of Venice, and those of their own power, if they had multiplied canals in their provinces, and opened a commodious, quick, and safe passage for the commerce of India: by that means they would have preserved for the navigation of the Mediterranean the advantage it had enjoyed for ages over the navigation of the ocean; and the maritime cities of Egypt and Italy would not have seen the sources of their prosperity suddenly dried up.
Whilst the republic of Venice contemplated with terror the causes of her future decline, she still inspired considerable jealousy by the splendour of her wealth and magnificence. Many complaints arose against the Venetians, who were universally accused of sacrificing everything to the interests of their commerce, and of betraying or serving the cause of the Christians, as fidelity or treachery became most profitable to them. In a diet which Maximilian convoked at Augsburg, Hélian, the ambassador of Louis XII., pronounced a vehement discourse against the Venetian nation. He reproached them, in the first place, with having thwarted, by their hostility and their intrigues, a league formed by the pope, the emperor of Germany, the king of France, and the king of Arragon, against the Turks. The orator then reproached the Venetians with having refused to succour Constantinople when besieged by Mahomet II. “Their fleet was in the Hellespont during the siege; they could hear the groans of a Christian people, sinking under the sword of the barbarians. Nothing could excite their pity. They remained unaffected and motionless, and when the city was taken, they purchased the spoils of the vanquished, and sold to the Mussulmans the unfortunate inhabitants of Greece, who had taken refuge beneath their banners. At a later period, when the Ottomans were besieging Otranto, not only cities and princes, but the mendicant orders, sent assistance to the besieged. The Venetians, whose fleet was then at anchor before Corfu, beheld with indifference, perhaps with joy, the dangers and the misfortunes of a Christian city. No, God cannot pardon a nation, which, by its avarice, its jealousy, and its ambition, has betrayed the cause of Christendom, and appears to maintain an understanding with the Turks, in order to reign with them over the East and over the West.” Hélian, on terminating his discourse, pressed the states and the princes to combine their efforts, to execute the decrees of divine justice, and complete the ruin of the republic of Venice.
This discourse, in which the name of Christianity was invoked, but which breathed nothing but vengeance and hatred, made a lively impression upon the assembly. The passions which inflamed the diet of Augsburg, and which left no room for a thought of a war against the Turks, but too plainly showed the state of agitation and discord in which Christendom was then plunged. It is not consistent with our purpose to speak of the league formed, in the first place, against Venice, or of the league afterwards formed against Louis XII., or of the events which brought trouble into Italy, and even into the bosom of the Church, then threatened with a schism.
At the council of the Lateran, convoked by Julius II., the disorders of Christendom were deplored, without the least remedy being proposed for them. They touched upon the war with the Turks, without bestowing any attention upon the means for carrying it on. The exhortations of the pope, which were supposed to be animated by an ambitious policy, inspired no confidence. The pontiff, whom Voltaire represents as a bad priest but a good prince, entered in an active manner into the wars between Christian powers. Since war was carried on in his name, he could not fill the honourable part of a conciliator, and enjoyed no longer the consideration attached to the title of Father of the Faithful. He was not able to reëstablish the peace he had himself broken, and found it impossible to direct an enterprise against the infidels.
The preaching for a crusade, so often repeated, no longer made any impression on men’s minds; misfortunes which never arrived had been so often announced to nations, that they ceased to awaken any alarm. After the death of Mahomet, the Turks seemed to have renounced all idea of conquering Europe. Bajazet at first attacked the Mamelukes of Egypt without success; he afterwards sunk into voluptuousness and the pleasures of the seraglio, which gave the Christians a few years of repose and safety. But as an indolent and effeminate prince did not fulfil the first condition of Ottoman despotism, which was war, he irritated the army, and his pacific tastes brought about his fall from the throne. Selim, who succeeded him, more ambitious and more cruel than Mahomet, accused of poisoning his father, and covered with the blood of his family, had scarcely attained empire before he promised to the janissaries the conquest of the world, and threatened, at the same time, Italy, Germany, Persia, and Egypt.
In the twelfth and last sitting of the fifth council of the Lateran, Leo X. took upon him to preach a crusade against the redoubtable emperor of the Ottomans. He ordered to be read before the fathers of the council a letter from the emperor Maximilian, who expressed great grief at seeing Christendom always exposed to the invasions of a barbarous nation.
At the same time the emperor of Germany, writing to his counsellor at the diet of Nuremberg, expressed the desire he had always felt of reëstablishing the empire of Constantine, and delivering Greece from the domination of the Turks. “We would willingly,” said he, “have employed our power and even our person in this enterprise, if the other leaders of Christendom had assisted.” When reading these letters of Maximilian, we might be led to believe that this prince was touched more than others by the misfortunes of the Greeks and the perils of Christendom. But the inconstancy and levity of his character would not allow him to carry on with ardour an enterprise to which he appeared to attach so much importance. He passed his life in forming projects against the Turks, and in making war against Christian powers; and in his old age consoled himself by thinking that the glory of saving Europe might perhaps one day belong to a prince of his family.
Whilst the Christian princes were thus reciprocally exhorting each other to take arms, without any one of them renouncing the interests of his own ambition, or offering an example of a generous devotion, Selim, after having conquered the king of Persia, attacked the army of the Mamelukes, dethroned the sultan of Cairo, and united to his vast dominions all the countries that the Franks had inhabited or possessed in Asia. Jerusalem then beheld the standard of the crescent floating over its walls, and the son of Bajazet, after the example of Omar, profaned by his presence the church of the Holy Sepulchre.[83] Palestine only fell under a fresh domination, and no change took place in the fate of the Christians. But as Europe dreaded the Turks more than the Mamelukes, against whom war had ceased to be carried on, the news of the conquests of Selim spread consternation and grief everywhere. It appeared to Christendom as if the holy city passed for the first time under the yoke of the infidels; and the sentiments of grief and mourning that the Christians then experienced, necessarily revived the idea of delivering the tomb of Christ.