THE GHOST OF THE CRUSADES The loss of Acre failed to stimulate the Powers of Europe to any new effort. France, always the natural home of the crusades, was too fully occupied, first by war with England and then by a struggle with the papacy, to turn her energies towards the East. But it is often the case that theory develops as practice fails ; and as the theory of the Holy Roman empire was never more vigor ous than in the days of its decrepitude, so it was with the crusades. Particularly in the first quarter of the 14th century, writers were busy in explaining the causes of the failures of past crusades, and in laying down the lines along which a new crusade must proceed. Several causes are recognized by these writers as accounting for the failure of the crusades. Some of them lay the blame on the papacy; and it is true that the papacy had contributed towards the decay of the crusades when it had allowed its own particular interests to overbear the general welfare of Christianity, and had dignified with the name and the benefits of a crusade its own political war against the Hohenstaufen. Others, again, find in the princes of Europe the authors of the ruin of the crusades; they, too, had preferred their own national or dynastic interests to the cause of a common Christianity. They had indeed, as has been already noticed, done even more ; they had used the name of crusade, from the days of Henry VI. onwards, as a cover and an excuse for secular ambitions of their own ; and in this way they had certainly helped, in very large measure, to discourage the old religious zeal for the Holy War. Other writers, again, blame the commercial cupidity of the Italian towns; of what avail, they asked with no little justice, was the crusade, when Venice and Genoa destroyed the naval bases necessary for its success by their internecine quarrels in the Levant (as in 1257), or—still worse— entered into commercial treaties with the common enemy against whom the crusades were directed? On the very eve of the fifth crusade, Venice had concluded a commercial treaty with Malik al-Kamil of Egypt; just before the fall of Acre, the Genoese, the king of Aragon and the king of Sicily had all concluded ad vantageous treaties with the sultan Kala`un. A fourth cause, on which many writers dwelt, particularly at the time when the sup pression of the Templars was in question, was the dissensions be tween the two orders of Templars and Hospitallers, and the selfish policy of merely pursuing their own interest which was followed by both in common. But one might enumerate ad infinitum the causes of the failure of the crusades. It is simplest, as it is truest, to say that the crusades did not fail—they simply ceased; and they ceased because they were no longer in joint with the times. The moral character of Europe in 1300 was no longer the moral character of Europe in Imo; and the crusades, which had been the active and objective embodiment of the other worldly Europe of I100, were alien to the secular, legal, scholastic Europe of 130o. While Edward I. was seeking to found a united kingdom in Great Britain; while the Habsburgs were entrenching themselves in Austria; above all, while Philippe le Bel and his legists were con solidating the French monarchy on an absolutist basis, there could be little thought of the Holy War. These were hard-headed men of affairs—men who would not lightly embark on joyous ventures, or seek for an ideal San Grail; nor were the popes, doomed to the Babylonian captivity for 7o long years at Avignon, able to call down the spark from on high which should consume all earthly ambitions in one great act of sacrifice.
But it is long before the death of any institution is recognized; and it was inevitable that men should busy themselves in trying to rekindle the dead embers into new life. Pierre Dubois, in a pamphlet "De recuperatione Sanctae Terrae," addressed to Ed ward I. in 1307, advocates a general council of Europe to main tain peace and prevent the dissensions which—as, for instance, in T192-had helped to cause the failure of past crusades. Along with this advocacy of internationalism goes a plea for the dis endowment of the Church, in order to provide an adequate finan cial basis for the future crusade. Other proposals, made by men well acquainted with the East, are more definitely practical and less political in their intention. A blockade of Egypt by an inter national fleet, an alliance with the Mongols, the union of the two great orders—these are the three staple heads of these pro posals. Something, indeed, was attempted, if little was actually done, under each of these three heads. The plan of an inter national fleet to coerce the Mohammedan is even to this day ineffective; but the Hospitallers, who acquired a new basis by the conquest of Rhodes in 131o, used their fleet to enforce a partial and, on the whole, ineffective blockade of the coast of the Levant. The union of the two orders, already suggested at the Council of Lyons in 1245, was nominally achieved by the Council of Vienne in 1311; but the so-called "union" was in reality the sup pression of the Templars, and the confiscation of all their re sources by the cupidity of Philippe le Bel. The alliance with the Mongols remained, from the first to the last, something of a chimera; and the last visionary hope vanished when the Mongols finally embraced Mohammedanism, as, by the end of the 14th century, they had almost universally done.
Isolated enterprises somewhat of the character of a crusade but hardly serious enough to be dignified by that name, recur during the 14th century. The French kings are all crusaders—in name—until the beginning of the Hundred Years' War; but the only crusader who ever waged war in Palestine and sought to shake the hold of the Mamelukes on the Holy Land was Peter I., king of Cyprus from 13S9 to 1369. Peter founded the order of the Sword for the delivery of Jerusalem; and instigated by his chancellor, de Mezieres (one of the last of the theorists who speculated and wrote on the crusades), he attempted to revive the old crusading spirit throughout the west of Europe. The mission which he undertook with his chancellor for this purpose (1362-65) only produced a crop of promises or excuses from sovereigns like Edward III. or the emperor Charles IV. ; and Peter was forced to begin the crusade with such volunteers as he could collect for himself. In the autumn of 1365 he sacked Alex andria; in 1367 he ravaged the coast of Syria, and inflicted serious damages on the sultan of Egypt. But in 1369 he was assassinated, and the last romantic figure of the crusades died, leaving only the legacy of his memory to his chancellor de Me zieres, who for nearly 4o years longer continued to be the preacher of the crusades to Europe, advocating—what always continued to be the "dream of the old pilgrim"— a new order of knights of the Passion of Christ for the recovery and defence of Jerusalem. De Mezieres was the last to advocate seriously, as Peter I. was the last to attempt, a crusade after the old fashion—an offensive war against Egypt for the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre. From 135o onwards the crusade assumes a new aspect; it becomes defensive, and it is directed against the Ottoman Turks, a tribe of Turco mans who had established themselves in the sultanate of Iconium at the end of the 13th century, during the confusion and dis placement of peoples which attended the Mongol invasions. As early as 1308 the Ottoman Turks had begun to settle in Europe; by 135o they had organized their terrible army of janissaries. They threatened at once the debris of the old Latin empire in Greece and the Archipelago, and the relics of the Byzantine em pire round Constantinople ; they menaced the Hospitallers in Rhodes and the Lusignans in Cyprus. It was natural that the popes should endeavour to form a coalition between the various Christian Powers which were threatened by the Turks; and Venice, anxious to preserve her possessions in the Aegean, zeal ously seconded their efforts. In 1344 a crusade, in which Venice, the Cypriots and the Hospitallers all joined, ended in the con quest of Smyrna; in another crusade, led by Humbert, dauphin of Vienne, ended in failure. The Turks continued their progress; in 1363 they captured Philippopolis, and in 1365 they entered Adrianople ; the whole Balkan peninsula was threatened, and even Hungary itself seemed doomed. Already in 1365 Urban VI. sought to unite the king of Hungary and the king of Cyprus in a common crusade against the Turks; but it was not till 1396 that an attempt was at last made to supplement by a land crusade the naval crusades of and Master of Serbia and of Bulgaria, as well as of Asia Minor, the sultan Bayezid was now threatening Constantinople itself. To arrest his progress, a crusade, preached by Boniface IX., led by John the Fearless of Burgundy, and joined chiefly by French knights, was directed down the valley of the Danube into the Balkans; but the old faults stigmatized by de Mezieres, divisio and propria voluntas, were the ruin of the crusading army, and at the battle of Nicopolis it was signally defeated. Not the Western crusades but an Eastern rival, Timur (Tamerlane), king of Transoxiana and conqueror of southern Russia and India, was destined to arrest the progress of Bayezid; and from the battle of Angora (1402) till the days of Murad II. (1422) the Ottoman power was paralysed. Under Murad, however, it rose to its old height. To meet the new danger a new union of the Churches of the East and the West was attempted. As in Io74 Gregory VII. had dreamed of such a union, to be followed by a joint attack of East and West on the Seljuks, so in 1439, at the Council of Florence, a new union of the two Churches was again attempted and temporarily se cured, in order that a united Christendom might face the new Turkish danger'. The logical result of the union was the crusade of 1443. An army of cosmopolitan adventurers, led by the cardinal Caesarini, joined the forces of Wladislaus of Poland and John Hunyadi of Transylvania, and succeeded in forcing on Murad II. a truce of ten years at Szegedin in But the crusaders broke the truce, to which Caesarini had never consent ed; and, attempting to better what was already good enough, they were defeated at Varna. Here the last crusade ended; and nine years afterwards, in 1453, Mohammed II., the successor of Murad, captured Constantinople. It was in vain that the popes sought to gather a new crusade for its recovery; Pius II., who had vowed to join the crusade in person, only reached Ancona in 1464 to find the crusaders deserting and to die. Yet the ghost of the crusades•still lingered. It became a convention of diplo macy, designed to cover any particularly sharp piece of policy which needed some excuse ; and the Treaty of Granada, formed between Louis XII. and Ferdinand of Aragon for the partition of Naples in 1500, was excused as a thing necessary in the inter ests of the crusades. In a more noble fashion the crusade survived in the minds of the navigators; "Vasco da Gama, Christopher Columbus, Albuquerque, and many others dreamed, and not insincerely, that they were labouring for the deliverance of the Holy Land, and they bore the Cross on their breasts." "Don Henrique's scheme," it has been said, "represents the final effort of the crusading spirit ; and the naval campaigns against the Muslim in the Indian seas, in which it culminated 4o years after Don Henrique's death, may be described as the last crusade."