Under the wise rule of Manuel II Byzantium recovered most of Greece and parts of Thrace. But Mohammed I reorganized the Turkish army, and Murad II led it, after a major defeat, to major victories. The Moslems still drew inspiration from the belief that to die for Islam was to win paradise; even if there should be no paradise and no houris, chey were impartial enough to consider the Greek maidens beautiful. The Christians were not so impartial. Greek Catholics hated Roman Catholics and were hated in turn. When Venetians hunted and massacred Greek Catholics in Crete for refusing to accept the Roman ritual and papal supremacy, Pope Urban V joined Petrarch in congratulating the doge on his firm protection of the one true Church (c. 1350).9 The populace and lower clergy of Byzantium repudiated all attempts to reunite Greek with Latin Christianity; and a Byzantine noble declared that he would rather see the Turkish turban at Constantinople than the red hat of a Roman cardinal.10 Most Balkan states hated their neighbors more than the Turks, and some preferred to submit to the Moslems, who taxed no more than the Christian rulers, persecuted heresy less or not at all,11 and allowed four wives.
In 1422 Murad II renewed the attack upon Constantinople. A revolt in the Balkans compelled him to abandon the siege, and John VIII Palaeologus was allowed to reign in relative peace on condition of paying a heavy annual tribute to the Turks. Murad reconquered Greece, Salonika, and most of Albania. Serbia resisted manfully under George Branković; a combined army of Serbians and Hungarians under Hunyadi János defeated Murad at Kunovitza (1444), and Branković ruled Serbia till his death at the age of ninety (1456). After victories at Varna and in the second battle of Kosovo (1448), Murad signed a peace with the Emperor Constantine XI Palaeologus, and retired to Adrianople to die (1451).
Mohammed II, surnamed the Conqueror, came to the Ottoman throne at twenty-one. He confirmed the treaty with Constantine, and sent his nephew Orkhan to be brought up (possibly as a spy) at the Byzantine court. When other Moslem powers challenged his authority in Western Asia, Mohammed ferried his army across the Straits, and left his European possessions in charge of the Vizier Khalil Pasha, known for friendliness to Byzantium. Constantine had more courage than wit; he informed the Vizier that unless the pension paid for the care of Mohammed’s nephew should be doubled, Orkhan would be put forward by Byzantium as a claimant to the Ottoman throne.12 Apparently Constantine thought that the revolt in Asia offered an opportunity to weaken the Turks in Europe. But he had neglected to secure either his alliances in the west or his communications to the south. Mohammed made peace with his Moslem enemies, and with Venice, Wallachia, Bosnia, and Hungary. Crossing back to Europe, he raised a powerful fortress on the Bosporus above Constantinople, thereby ensuring the unimpeded passage of his troops between the continents, and controlling all commerce entering the Black Sea. For eight months he gathered materials and men. He hired Christian gunsmiths to cast for him the largest cannon yet known, which would hurl stone balls weighing 600 pounds. In June 1452, he declared war, and began the final siege of Constantinople with 140,000 men.13
Constantine led the defense with desperate resolution. He equipped his 7,000 soldiers with small cannon, lances, bows and arrows, flaming torches, and crude firearms discharging leaden bullets of a walnut’s size. Sleeping only by snatches, he supervised, every night, the repair of the damage done to the walls during the day. Nevertheless the ancient defenses crumbled more and more before the battering rams and superior artillery of the Turks; now ended the medieval fortification of cities by walls. On May 29 the Turks fought their way across a moat filled with the bodies of their own slain, and surged over or through the walls into the terrorized city. The cries of the dying were drowned in the martial music of trumpets and drums. The Greeks at last fought bravely; the young Emperor was everywhere in the heat of the action, and the nobles who were with him died to a man in his defense. Surrounded by Turks, he cried out, “Cannot there be found a Christian to cut off my head?” He threw off his imperial garments, fought as a common soldier, disappeared in the rout of his little army, and was never heard of again.
The victors massacred thousands, till all defense ceased. Then they began that rampant plunder which had so long been the substance of their hopes. Every usable adult among the defeated was taken as a prize; nuns were ravished like other women in an impartial mania of rape; Christian masters and servants, shorn of the garb that marked their state, found themselves suddenly equalized in indiscriminate slavery. Pillage was not quite uncontrolled; when Mohammed II found a Moslem piously destroying the marble pavement of St. Sophia, he smote him with the royal scimitar, and announced that all buildings were to be reserved for orderly rapine by the Sultan. St. Sophia was transformed into a mosque after proper purification; all its Christian insignia were removed, and its mosaics were whitewashed into oblivion for 500 years. On the very day of the city’s fall, or on the ensuing Friday, a muezzin mounted the tallest turret of Hagia Sophia and summoned the Moslems to gather in it for prayer to victorious Allah. Mohammed II performed the Moslem ritual in Christendom’s most famous shrine.
The capture of Constantinople shook every throne in Europe. The bulwark had fallen that had protected Europe from Asia for over a thousand years. That Moslem power and faith which the Crusaders had hoped to drive back into inner Asia had now made its way over the corpse of Byzantium, and through the Balkans to the very gates of Hungary. The papacy, which had dreamed of all Greek Christianity submitting to the rule of Rome, saw with dismay the rapid conversion of millions of southeastern Europeans to Islam. Routes of commerce once open to Western vessels were now in alien hands, and could be clogged with tolls in peace or closed with guns in war. Byzantine art, exiled from home, found refuge in Russia, while in the West its influence disappeared with its pride. The migration of Greek scholars to Italy and France, which had begun in 1397, was now accelerated, fructifying Italy with the salvage of ancient Greece. In one sense nothing was lost; only the dead had died. Byzantium had finished its role, and yielded its place, in the heroic and sanguinary, noble and ignominious procession of mankind.
IV. HUNYADI JÁNOS: 1387–1456
The population of Hungary, numbering some 700,000 in the fourteenth century, was a fluctuating mixture of Magyars, Pannonians, Slovaks, Bulgars, Khazars, Patzinaks, Cumans, Slavonians, Croats, Russians, Armenians, Wallachians, Bosnians, and Serbs: in summary, a minority of Magyars ruling a majority of Slavs. In the nascent cities a mercantile middle class and an industrial proletariat began to form in the fourteenth century; and as these were mostly immigrants from Germany, Flanders, and Italy, new racial tensions were added to the ethnic maze.
When Andrew III died, ending the Árpád dynasty (907–1301), a war of succession further divided the nation, and peace returned only when the higher nobility, having made the monarchy elective, conferred the crown of St. Stephen upon Charles Robert of Anjou (1308). Charles brought with him French ideas of feudalism and chivalry, Italian ideas of business and industry. He promoted the development of Hungary’s gold mines, encouraged enterprise, stabilized the currency, cleansed the judiciary, and gave the nation a competent administration. Under Charles and his son Louis, Hungary became a Western state, eager to win the help of the West against the proliferating East.
Louis I, wrote Voltaire, “reigned happily in Hungary forty years” (1342-82), and (not so happily) “in Poland twelve years. His people gave him the surname of the Great, which he well deserved; and yet this prince is hardly known in [Western] Europe, because he did not reign over men capable of transmitting his fame and virtues to other nations. How few know that in the fourteenth century there was a Louis the Great in the Carpathian Mountains!”14 His character mingled urbane culture and chivalrous sentiments with military ardor and capacity. He indulged occasionally in wars—to avenge his murdered brother in Naples, to recover from Venice the Dalmatian ports that had long seemed to Hungary its due outlets to the sea, and to check the aggressive expansion of Serbia and Turkey by bringing Croatia, Bosnia, and northern Bulgaria under
Hungarian control. By example and precept he spread the chivalric ideal among the nobility, and raised the level of manners and morals in his people. During his reign and that of his father, Hungarian Gothic achieved its finest embodiments, and Nicholas Kolozsvari and his sons carved such notable statuary as the St. George now in Prague. In 1367 Louis founded the University of Pécs; but this, along with much of Hungary’s medieval glory, disappeared in the long and exhausting struggle with the Turks.
Louis’s son-in-law, Sigismund I, enjoyed a reign whose length (1387-1437) should have made possible long-term and farsighted policies. But his tasks were greater than his powers. He led a huge army against Bajazet at Nicopolis, and barely escaped from that disaster with his life. He realized that the Turkish advance was now the paramount problem of Europe; he devoted great care and failing funds to fortifying the southern frontier, and built at the junction of the Danube and the Save the great fortress of Belgrade. But his election to the Imperial office compelled him to neglect Hungary during long absences in Germany; and his acquisition of the Bohemian crown widened his responsibilities without enlarging his capacities.
Two years after his death the spreading Turks invaded Hungary. In this crisis the nation produced its most famous hero. Hunyadi János received his surname from the castle of Hunyadi in Transylvania, a stronghold granted to his father for services in war. János—i.e., John—was trained for war almost daily in his youth. He distinguished himself in a victory over the Turks at Semendria, and the new king, Ladislas V, made him commander-in-chief of the armies resisting the Turks. The repulse of the Ottomans became the absorbing devotion of his career. When they entered Transylvania he led against them newly disciplined troops inspired by his patriotism and his generalship. It was in that battle that Simon Kemény, beloved in Hungarian literature, gave his life for his leader. Knowing that the Turks had been instructed to seek out and kill Hunyadi, Simon begged and received permission to exchange costumes with him. He died under concentrated assaults, while Hunyadi directed the army to victory (1442). Murad II dispatched 80,000 new troops to the front; Hunyadi lured them, by feigned retreat, into a narrow pass where only a fraction of them could fight at one time; and again Hunyadi’s strategy triumphed. Harassed by revolts in Asia, Murad sued for terms, and agreed to pay a substantial indemnity. At Szeged, King Ladislas and his allies signed with Murad’s representatives a truce pledging both sides to peace. Ladislas swore on the Bible, the Turkish ambassadors on the Koran (1442).
But Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini, papal legate at Buda, presently judged the time propitious for an offensive. Murad had moved his army to Asia; an Italian fleet, controlling the Dardanelles, could prevent its return. The Cardinal, who had distinguished himself for probity and ability, argued that a pledge to an infidel could not bind a Christian.15 Hunyadi advised peace, and the Serbian contingent refused to violate the truce. The envoys of the Western nations agreed with Cesarini, and offered to contribute money and men to a sacred crusade. Ladislas yielded, and in person led an attack upon Turkish positions The promised reinforcements from the West did not come; the Ottoman army, 60,000 strong, eluded the Italian admiral, and crossed back to Europe. At Varna near the Black Sea—his standard-bearer holding the dishonored treaty aloft on a lance—Murad inflicted an overwhelming defeat upon Ladislas’ 20,000 men (1444). Hunyadi counseled retreat, the King ordered advance. Hunyadi begged him to stay in the rear; Ladislas plunged into the van of the fight, and was killed. Cesarini did not quite regain his honor by losing his life.
Four years later Hunyadi tried to redeem the disaster. Forcing his way through a hostile Serbia, he met the Turks at Kosovo in a furious engagement that raged for three days. The Hungarians were routed, and Hunyadi joined them in flight. He hid for days in a marsh; starving, he emerged, and was recognized by the Serbians, who handed him over to the Turks. He was released on promising never to lead an army across Serbian soil again.
In 1456 the Turks laid siege to Belgrade. Mohammed II aimed against the citadel the heavy artillery that had shattered the walls of Constantinople; Europe had never known so violent a bombardment. Hunyadi led the defense with a skill and courage never forgotten in Hungarian poetry.16 At last, preferring the anesthesia of battle to the agonies of starvation, the besieged rushed from the fortress, fought their way to the Turkish cannon, and so decisively vanquished the enemy that for sixty years thereafter Hungary was spared any Moslem attack. A few days after this historic defense Hunyadi died of a fever in the camp. Hungary honors him as its greatest man.
V. THE TIDE AT FULL: 1453–81
The Turks now resumed the conquest of the Balkans. Serbia finally succumbed in 1459, and remained a Turkish province till 1804. Mohammed II took Corinth by siege, and Athens without raising a lance (1458). The conqueror, like Caesar, gave the Athenians easy terms out of respect for their ancestors, and displayed a cultivated interest in the classical monuments. He could well be genial, having avenged not only the Crusades but Marathon. Bosnia, whose port and capital, Ragusa, had by some veneer of culture received the title of the South Slavonic Athens, accepted Turkish rule in 1463, and adopted the Moslem faith with an ease that startled the West.
The most valiant opponent of the Turks in the second half of the fifteenth century was Scanderbeg of Albania. His real name was George of Castriota, and he was probably of modest Slavonian lineage; but legends precious to his people endow him with royal Epirote blood and an adventurous youth. In his boyhood, we are told, he was given as hostage to Murad II, and was brought up at the Adrianople court of the Ottomans. The Sultan so liked his courage and bearing that he treated him as a son and made him an officer in the Turkish army. Converted to Mohammedanism, George received the mighty name of Iskender Bey—i.e., Alexander the Prince—which busy time shortened to Scanderbeg. After leading the Turks in many battles against the Christians, he repented his apostasy, and plotted escape. He renounced Islam, seized the Albanian capital Kruja from its Turkish governor, and proclaimed revolt (1442). Mohammed II sent army after army to chasten him; Scanderbeg defeated them all by the rapidity of his military movements and the genius of his elusive strategy; finally Mohammed, distracted by larger wars, gave him a ten-year armistice (1461). But the Venetian Senate and Pope Pius II persuaded Scanderbeg to break the truce and renew the war (1463). Mohammed, denouncing the Christians as literally faithless infidels, returned to the siege of Kruja. Scanderbeg defended it so tenaciously that the Sultan again raised the siege; but amid the debris of victory Scanderbeg died (1468). Kruja surrendered in 1479, and Albania became a province of Turkey.
Meanwhile the insatiable Mohammed absorbed the Morea, Trebizond, Lesbos, Negroponte (the old Euboea), and the Crimea. In 1477 one of his armies crossed the Isonzo, ravaged northeastern Italy to within twenty-two miles of Venice, and then, laden with booty, returned into Serbia. Frightened Venice, which had fought long and tenaciously for its possessions in the Aegean and the Adriatic, yielded all claim to Kruja and Scutari, and paid an indemnity of 10,000 ducats. Western Europe, which had failed to help Venice, denounced her for making and keeping peace with the infidel.17 The Turks had now reached the Adriatic, and only the waters that Caesar had crossed in a rowboat separated them from Italy, Rome, and the Vatican. In 1480 Mohammed sent an army across these waters to attack the Kingdom of Naples. It took Otranto with ease, massacred half the 22,000 inhabitants, enslaved the rest, and cut an archbishop in two.18 The fate of Christianity and monogamy teetered in the scales. Ferrante of Naples ended his war with Florence, and sent his best forces to recapture Otranto. Mohammed had entangled himself in besieging Rhodes; amid that enterprise he died; Rhodes remained Christian till Suleiman; the Turks left Otranto, and retired into Albania (1481). The Ottoman tide for a moment ceased to flow.
VI. THE HUNGARIAN RENAISSANCE: 1456–90
In the half-century of security that Hunyadi had won for Hungary his son Matthias Corvinus led the nation to its historic culmination. Matthias was only sixteen at his accession, and not entirely
royal in form; his legs were too short for his trunk, so that he seemed tall only when on a horse; however, he had the chest and arms, the strength and courage, of a gladiator. Not long after his coronation he challenged to single combat a German knight of massive frame and power, who in a tournament at Buda had felled all competitors; and Matthias threatened to have him executed if he failed to fight with all his vigor and skill. The Hungarian historians assure us that the young King, aided by the horns of this dilemma, decisively vanquished the giant.19 Matthias matured into a good soldier and general, defeated the Turks wherever he encountered them, absorbed Moravia and Silesia, failed to conquer Bohemia. He fought four wars against the Emperor Frederick III, took Vienna, and annexed Austria (1485); the first Austro-Hungarian Empire was Hungarian.
His victories made the monarchy transiently supreme over the nobility; here, as in Western Europe, centralization of government was the order of the day. At Buda, and in the King’s palace at Visegrad, his court equaled any royal grandeur of the age; great noblemen became his servitors; his ambassadors were noted for the splendor of their dress, equipage, and retinue. Matthias’ diplomacy was cunning and unscrupulous, amiable and generous; he bought with gold what would have cost twice as much by arms. Meanwhile he found time and zest to restore every department of the government, and to labor in person as a careful administrator and impartial judge. Roaming in disguise among the people, the soldiery, and the courts, he inspected at first hand the behavior of his officials, and corrected incompetence and injustice without favoritism or fear. He did what he could to protect the weak from the strong, the peasants from their rapacious lords. While the Church continued to claim the country as papal property, Matthias appointed and disciplined prelates, and enjoyed the furore when he made a seven-year-old Italian lad the primate of Hungary. The merchants of Ferrara, with rival humor, sent the new archbishop an assortment of toys.20