The History of the Crusades (vol. 3 of 3)

by J. Fr. Michaud

The paternal proceedings and counsels of the pope were neither able to calm men’s minds, nor to rekindle an enthusiasm for the holy war, in Germany, or even among the Hungarians. Ferdinand, brother of Charles V., whom the imperial power had caused to be declared king of Hungary; and the vaiwode of Transylvania, who, with permission of the Turks, reigned over the ruins of his country, were contending for this unfortunate kingdom, oppressed at the same time by its enemies and its allies. When Soliman returned, for the third time, to the banks of the Danube, called thither by a party of the Hungarian nobility, he found no army to oppose his march. The Ottomans advanced towards the capital of Austria, and prepared to invade the richest provinces of Germany. So pressing a danger determined the head and the princes of the empire to unite their forces against the common enemy. But when the Turks retired in disorder, no one thought of either fighting with them, or pursuing them in their precipitate retreat. The king of Hungary, abandoned all at once by the Germans, and fearing fresh attacks, had no resource but to sue to his enemies for peace. It is a circumstance worthy of remark, that the pope was comprised in the treaty: Soliman gave the title of father to the Roman pontiff, and that of brother to the king of Hungary. Clement VII., after so many useless attempts to interest the princes of Christendom, appeared to entertain no hope but in Providence; and exclaimed with bitterness, when approving the issue of the pacific negotiations, “We have nothing left but to supplicate Heaven to watch itself over the Christian world.”

It might be believed that the holy wars were drawing towards an end, when the head of the Church had laid down his arms, and made peace with the infidels. But this treaty of peace, like others that had preceded it, could only be considered as a truce, and war would most likely break out again when either the Christians or the Mussulmans saw any hopes of carrying it on with advantage. Such was the policy of the times; particularly that which governed the Christian and Mussulman powers in their mutual relations. Soliman had abandoned his projects upon Germany and Hungary, less out of respect for treaties, than because he was employing his forces against the Persians, or that he required his army to quell some revolts which had broken out in Asia against his authority. On the other side, Christendom left the Ottomans in peace, because it was a prey to discord; and because most Christian princes, occupied by their own interests, listened to nothing but the counsels of their ambition.

Europe had at that time three great monarchs, whose united strength would have been quite sufficient to crush the power of the Turks; but these three princes were as much opposed to each other by their policy as by their character and their genius. Henry VIII. of England, who had refuted Luther, and leagued himself with the king of France, to deliver the captive pope, had just separated himself from the Romish Church. Sometimes allied with France, sometimes allied with the emperor, occupied in bringing about the triumph of the schism of which he was the apostle and the head, he had no time to bestow upon war with the infidels. Francis I. had, in the first place, made pretensions to the imperial crown, and afterwards to the duchy of Milan and the kingdom of Naples. These pretensions, which were a source of misfortunes to himself and France, disturbed the whole of his reign, and never allowed him an opportunity for seriously undertaking a crusade against the Turks, a crusade which he himself had preached in his states. The feeling of vengeance and jealousy which animated him against a fortunate and powerful rival, inspired him twice with the idea of seeking an alliance with Soliman. To the great scandal of Christendom, an Ottoman fleet was received in the port of Marseilles, and the standard of the lilies was mingled with the crescent under the walls of Nice. Charles V., master of all the Spains, head of the German empire, sovereign of the Low Countries, and possessor of several empires in the new world, was much more anxious to humble the French monarchy, and establish his domination in Europe, than to defend Christendom against the invasion of the Turks. During the greater part of his reign, this monarch conciliated the Protestants of Germany, on account of the Ottomans; and avoided collision with the Ottomans, on account of his enemies in the Christian republic. He satisfied himself with protecting, by his arms, the capital of Austria, when threatened by the Turks; but when the pope conjured him to employ his forces for the deliverance of Hungary, he preferred attempting an expedition to the coast of Africa. A war against the Moors of Africa was more popular in Spain than an expedition upon the Danube; and Charles was more desirous of acquiring popularity among the Spaniards, than of meriting the gratitude of Christendom. The Barbary powers were recently formed, under the protection of the Ottoman Porte, and began to render themselves formidable in the Mediterranean. Charles carried his arms twice to the coast of Africa: in the first expedition, he got possession of Tunis, planted his standards upon the ruins of Carthage, and delivered twenty thousand captives, who went to publish his victories in every part of the Christian world; in the second expedition, he would have annihilated the Barbary powers, so destructive to the navigation of the Franks; but a hurricane, which destroyed his fleet and his army, dispersed the hopes of commerce and navigators.

At the time Charles experienced so great a disaster whilst combating the Mussulmans of Africa, the Ottomans, invited by Francis I., were ravaging the coasts of Italy, and had recently entered Hungary, from whence they threatened Germany.

Then fresh cries of alarm resounded all over Europe, and among those who exhorted the nations to oppose the Turks, the voice of Martin Luther was heard. In a book entitled Prayer against the Turk, the reformer condemned the indifference of people and kings, and advised the Christians to resist the Mussulmans, if they did not wish to be led into captivity, as the children of Israel had formerly been. In a formula of prayer which he had composed, he expressed himself thus: “Arise, Lord, great God, and sanctify thy name, which thy enemies outrage; strengthen thy reign, which they wish to destroy, and suffer us not to be trampled under-foot by those who are not willing that thou shouldst be our God.”

Murmurs had several times arisen against Luther, who was accused of having, by his doctrines, weakened the courage of the Germans. Some time before the period of which we are speaking, he published an apology, in which, without disavowing the famous proposition censured by the pope, he gave to his words a different sense from that which the court of Rome gave them, and which he himself, no doubt, had given them in the first instance. All his explanations, which it is not very easy to analyze, were reduced to this idea:—“That it was allowable to fight with the Turks, but that it was not allowable to fight with them under the banners of Christianity.” Although the leader of the Reformation required all the qualities of a perfect Christian in the warriors called upon to fight the Mussulmans, and although he drew all the principles of his preaching from the religion of Christ; the standard of the cross in a Christian army, caused him, he said, more horror than the sight of the demon. The true motive for his repugnance for a crusade may be easily guessed; a crusade appeared necessarily to require the concurrence of the pope; and the concurrence of the pope, in a war which interested Christendom, was the thing in the world most dreaded by Luther. He had so strong an aversion to the court of Rome, that in his writings he asks himself if war ought not to be made against the Pope as well as the Turk; and in the excess of his hatred, does not hesitate to answer, against the one as against the other.

We will not repeat here the declamations and the sophisms of Luther. Through the puerile subtleties and the contrary reasonings which he employs for his justification, we must, however, remark the distinction he has made between civil authority and ecclesiastical authority: it is to the first, says the reformer, that it belongs to combat the Turks; the duty of the second is to wait, to submit, to pray, and to groan. He adds, that war was not the business of bishops, but of magistrates; that the emperor, in this circumstance, ought to be considered as the head of the German confederation, and not as the protector of the Church, nor as the support of the Christian faith; a title which can only properly be given to Jesus Christ. All these arguments, doubtless, had something reasonable in them; and the opinion of Luther upon the civil authority, although he might have adopted it only out of opposition to the papal power, would have obtained the approbation of enlightened minds, if he had not employed, in supporting it, all the passion of irritated pride; and if his apology, in particular, had not been stained by abuse which decency will not allow history to repeat.

Not content with this apology, which had for title, Of the War against the Turks, Luther, two years after the siege of Vienna, published another work, entitled, A Military Discourse, in which he also urges the Germans to take arms. This second discourse begins, as the first had done, by theological distinctions and subtleties; by declamations against the pope and the bishops; by predictions upon the approaching end of the world; and upon the power of the Turks; which the author finds clearly announced in Daniel. Although he endeavours to prove, as in his first writing, that the war against the Mussulmans is not at all a religious war, but an enterprise entirely political; he promises, not the less, the palms of martyrdom to those who shall die with arms in their hands. He represents this war as agreeable to the Divinity, and as the duty of a true disciple of the Gospel. “Thy arm and thy lance,” says he to every Christian soldier who shall take arms against the infidels, “shall be the arm and the lance of God. In immolating Turks, thou wilt not shed innocent blood, and the world will consider thee as the executioner of the decrees of divine justice; for thou wilt but kill those whom God has himself condemned. The Turk,” adds he, “ravishes terrestrial life from Christians, and procures them eternal life; he at the same time kills himself, and precipitates himself into hell.” Luther appears to be so penetrated with this idea, that he is on the point of deploring the fate of the Mussulmans; and to chastise indifferent Christians, and pusillanimous Germans, he has no punishment to wish them, unless it be that they should become Turks, and thus be the property of the devil.

A short extract is not sufficient to show what whimsical and singular ideas are contained in Luther’s discourse; it may, however, be easily perceived how much this kind of preaching differs from that of the orators who preached the crusade in preceding ages. In the second part of his discourse, the leader of the Reformation addressed himself to the various classes of society; to the nobility, who are immersed in luxury and pleasures, but for whom the hour of fight is at length come; to the citizens and merchants, for too long a time addicted to usury and cupidity; to the labourers and peasants, whom he accuses of deceiving and robbing their neighbours. The tone of the preacher is full of an excessive severity; he speaks like a man who feels no sorrow at the misfortunes which are about to happen, because he has foretold them, and his warnings and prophecies have been despised. He says, with a sort of satisfaction, that after days of joy and debauchery, after seasons of festivity and pleasures, comes the time of tears, miseries, and alarms. He finishes by a vehement apostrophe, addressed to all who shall remain deaf to his voice, and whom the enemy shall find without defence: “Listen now, then, to the devil in the Turk, you who are not willing to listen to God in Jesus Christ; the Turk will burn your dwellings; he will bear away your cattle and your harvests; he will outrage and slaughter your wives and your daughters before your eyes; he will impale your little children upon the very stakes of the hedge which serves as an inclosure to your heritage; he will immolate you yourselves, or will carry you away into Turkey, to expose you in the market, like unclean animals; it is he who will teach you what you will have lost, and what you ought to have done. It is to the Turk belongs the task to humble the haughty nobility, to render citizens docile, and to chastise and tame the gross multitude.”