CHAPTER XI
The War of the Sicilian Vespers was not responsible for the fall of Outremer; since the rise of the Mamelukes in 1250–perhaps even since the capture of Jerusalem by Saladin in 1187–this had been only a matter of time. But it certainly preoccupied the princes of Europe to the point where they could not concentrate on the plight of their fellow Christians in the east. As it was, the war was to continue for another eleven years after the destruction of Acre. It was not until 1302, after an abortive attempt to place Philip the Fair’s brother Charles of Valois on the throne of Sicily, that Pope Boniface VIII was reluctantly compelled to recognise King Peter’s son Frederick as ruler of the island, with the title of King of Trinacria105–a necessary if somewhat precious appellation since the Angevins in Naples still technically retained the Sicilian crown. Even now, however, their triumph was not as complete as the Aragonese would have liked; by the terms of the agreement Frederick was to marry Leonora, daughter of Charles of Valois, and at his death the island would revert to the house of Anjou.
Pope Boniface had been elected in 1294, after the abdication–the only one in papal history–of the saintly but incapable hermit Celestine V, whose only qualification for the Papacy was that he had once, at the court of Gregory X, hung up his habit on a sunbeam. The new Pope was his antithesis in every respect. For him the great sanctions of the Church existed only to further his own temporal ends and to enrich his family, the Caetani. Foreign rulers he treated less as his subjects than as his menials, while the rival Ghibelline house of Colonna, of which he was bitterly jealous and whose power he feared, was excommunicated en masse, its lands at Palestrina seized and devastated in the name of a Crusade. Such conduct brought the Papacy to a point of debasement from which it took many years to recover, and it made Boniface hated and reviled throughout Europe. When the Colonna all fled to France, his principal enemies in Italy became the Fraticelli, the Spiritual Franciscans, who had rebelled against the increasing worldliness of their order to return to their founder’s principles of asceticism and poverty. Boniface they loathed, not only for his wealth and arrogance but because they held him responsible–rightly–for Celestine’s abdication and his subsequent imprisonment and death.
Still more serious for Boniface was the hostility of Philip the Fair, whom he had excommunicated and threatened with deposition after Philip had forbidden his French clergy to obey a papal summons to Rome. In the spring of 1303 Philip retaliated by calling a General Council, at which he intended that the Pope himself should be arraigned. An army of 1,600 was despatched to Italy with orders to seize Boniface and to bring him, by force if necessary, to France. They found him at his native Anagni, where he was putting the finishing touches to a bull releasing Philip’s subjects from their allegiance, and took him prisoner. Three days later a popular reaction in his favour obliged them to withdraw, but their mission had not been in vain. The old Pope’s pride had suffered a mortal blow. His friends the Orsini escorted him back to Rome and there, a month later, he died.
Boniface and Philip were arch-enemies, but it was their combined efforts that finally broke the morale of the medieval Papacy and destroyed what was left of its prestige in Italy. When in 1305 another Frenchman was elected as Clement V, he had himself crowned at Lyons; there he was joined by his curia, and for the next seventy-two years there was no Pope in Rome. This was the period dubbed by Petrarch ‘the Babylonian Captivity’, but the phrase is misleading: the Popes were in no sense captive. Clement had gone to Lyons of his own free will and had no intention of becoming a cat’s-paw of the French king. Four years later, after a quarrel with Philip, he even moved his court to Avignon, precisely because the city was not then in France but just inside the Provençal dominions of the Kingdom of Naples, where papal independence could be more easily preserved. Nor did he and his successors ever voluntarily loosen their hold on Italian affairs, or ever look upon Avignon as anything but a temporary residence until such time as they could safely–and comfortably–return to Italy.
For Italy had become not only unpleasant but dangerous. There had been no crowned Holy Roman Emperor since Frederick II in 1250, and the cities of Lombardy and Tuscany, untroubled by imperial incursions, had been left to develop in their own way. In most of them their hard-won communal government had given place to despotism, as one mighty family or another–the Visconti and Della Torre in Milan, the Montecchi (Shakespeare’s Montagues) and later the Scaligeri in Verona, the Gonzaga in Mantua–asserted its domination. This mass of petty but absolute dictatorships, superimposed on a tradition of internecine strife and undermined by the hostility of a commercially-minded bourgeoisie, led to a deep unrest which permeated all aspects of north Italian life. Sometimes, admittedly, it provided a stimulus for the new spirit of artistic enquiry which was already heralding the Renaissance–Giotto was born in the year Manfred died–but more often the story is one of tyranny and unremitting bloodshed. Of the great northern sea republics, Genoa and Pisa continued at each other’s throats until Genoa’s decisive victory off Meloria in 1284; only Venice remained relatively untouched by the prevailing chaos, thanks to her sea-girt isolation, her carefully preserved oligarchy, her freedom from faction and that delicate system of political checks and balances which was to make the government of the Most Serene Republic the wonder–and the terror–of Europe.
Another haven of comparative peace in the surrounding turmoil was Florence. At that time it was the most artistically creative of all the Italian city-states, and was still more remarkable in having evolved perhaps the only successful government by artists and craftsmen that the world has ever seen. Here the effective administrative control lay in the hands of six guild-masters, called Priors of the Arts; their powers were great, but held for only two months at a time. Florence could also look back on an entrenched Guelf tradition which might have preserved her from much of the feuding that so bedeviled less fortunate cities, but towards the end of the century a rift occurred among the Guelfs, and in 1302–Pope Boniface having allied himself with the reactionary ‘blacks’–the leaders of the more moderate ‘white’ party were driven into exile.
Among them was Dante Alighieri, whose Divine Comedy, the greatest single achievement in the Italian language, is among many other things a profound and bitter commentary in which the poet, purporting merely to meet the leading figures of his age as he progresses through the afterworld, in fact sits in awful judgement over them. The grandeur of the conception is as breathtaking as is the technical mastery of a still developing vernacular, but the political ideas within it sometimes seem more redolent of the eleventh century than of the fourteenth. These ideas, which Dante develops more fully in De Monarchia, are in essence a return to the old dream of a worldwide Christian empire, governed in harmonious tandem by Emperor and Pope.
Just how unworkable they had become was shown in 1310 when their most active exponent, Count Henry of Luxemburg, descended into Italy as Emperor-elect. Idealistic and painfully well-meaning, Henry received his first coronation in Milan with a replica of the iron crown of Lombardy (the real one was in pawn), still stressing his impartiality between papalist Guelf and imperialist Ghibelline; but the Guelf cities of Lombardy and Tuscany left him in no doubt of their feelings towards an outmoded imperialism, and he was Ghibelline enough by the time he reached Rome–to the point indeed where he was denied entry to St Peter’s and was forced to accept the crown of empire from papal legates at the Lateran. Meanwhile in Avignon, Clement V under pressure from King Philip had turned against him, as had Charles of Anjou’s reigning grandson, King Robert the Wise of Naples. Reluctantly the new Emperor resorted to war, but it got him nowhere. In 1313 he died of a fever, having incontrovertibly proved the vanity of Dante’s hopes.
Dante had never liked King Robert, whom he describes as a ‘re da sermone’, or ‘king of talk’; in fact, Robert had the makings of a great ruler. He was a scholar, whose genuine love of literature made him a munificent patron of poets and writers–especially of Petrarch, of whom he was a personal friend and who admired him to the point where he expressed the hope that he might one day be lord of all Italy. In more peaceful times he might have raised the Regno out of the miasma in which it always seemed to be sunk; alas, he never had the chance. The endless warring with his Aragonese rivals drained his coffers, and even at home his life was a constant struggle with rebellious barons who allowed him no rest.
Robert died in 1343 to be succeeded by his granddaughter Joanna, the wife of Prince Andrew of Hungary, and for the next half-century the history of Naples becomes a nightmare. (The reader is not expected to follow the rest of this paragraph and its successor, briefly included only to illustrate the level to which Neapolitan politics had sunk.) In 1345 Andrew was assassinated, on the orders of his wife’s great-aunt Catherine of Valois but not without suspicion of Joanna’s own complicity. His brother King Lewis of Hungary, on the pretext of avenging the murder, then claimed the kingdom for himself. He expelled Joanna and her second husband, murdering her brother-in-law for good measure, but he soon returned to Hungary and the local barons recalled Joanna. Her cousin Charles of Durazzo then conquered the kingdom and imprisoned her. Soon afterwards she was murdered in her turn. On Charles’s death a disputed succession caused another civil war, and the kingdom slipped back into its old anarchy.
By the beginning of the following century Charles’s son Ladislas seemed to have won the struggle, and by 1410–thanks to the continuing papal schism106–he had three times occupied Rome itself, which the rightful Pope Gregory XII had been unable to hold. On the last occasion he had fired and sacked the city. His death in 1414 was unlamented by his subjects–at least until his sister and successor, Joanna II, dragged the kingdom down to still lower depths of degradation. In 1415 she married James of Bourbon, who kept her in a state of semi-confinement, murdered her lover and imprisoned her chief captain, Sforza; but his arrogance drove the barons once more to rebellion and they expelled him. There followed a still worse tangle of intrigues between Joanna, Sforza, her new lover Giovanni Caracciolo, her adopted heir Alfonso of Aragon and Louis III of Anjou, whom we find pitted against each other in every possible combination. Though Joanna died in 1435, it was another eight years before Alfonso finally proved victorious and achieved papal recognition as King of Naples.
The Kingdom of Jerusalem had been annihilated by the Mameluke armies, but the three great Military Orders of knighthood lived on–if for rather differing periods of time. The youngest of them, the German Order of the Teutonic Knights, moved after 1291 for a few years to Venice and then in 1308 to Marienburg on the Vistula, where it disappears from our story. The Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaller of St John of Jerusalem, on the other hand, continued to play their part in Mediterranean affairs–even though the former did not do so for very long.
Let us consider the Templars first. It is difficult for us nowadays to understand–even to believe–their influence in the later Middle Ages. Founded in the early twelfth century to protect the pilgrims flocking to the Holy Places after the First Crusade, they were within fifty years firmly established in almost every kingdom of Christendom, from Denmark to Spain, from Ireland to Armenia; within a century, ‘the poor fellow-soldiers of Jesus Christ’ were–despite their Benedictine vows of poverty, chastity and obedience–financing half Europe, the most powerful international bankers of the civilised world. By 1250 they were thought to possess some 9,000 landed properties; both in Paris and London, their houses were used as strongholds in which to preserve the royal treasure. From the English Templars Henry III borrowed the purchase money for the island of Oléron in 1235; from the French, Philip the Fair extracted the dowry of his daughter Isabella on her marriage to Edward II of England. For Louis IX they provided the greater part of his ransom, and to Edward I they advanced no less than 25,000 livres tournois, of which they were to remit four-fifths.
The Templars were most powerful of all in France, where they effectively constituted a state within a state; and as their influence steadily increased, it was not surprising that Philip the Fair should have become seriously concerned. But Philip also had another, less honourable reason for acting against them: he was in desperate need of money. He had already dispossessed and expelled the Jews and the Lombard bankers; similar treatment of the Templars–which promised to secure him all Templar wealth and property in his kingdom–would solve his financial problems once and for all. The Order would, he knew, prove a formidable adversary; fortunately, however, he had a weapon ready to hand. For many years there had been rumours circulating about the secret rites practised by the Knights at their midnight meetings. All he now needed to do was to institute an official enquiry; it would not be hard to find witnesses who–in return for a small consideration–would be prepared to give the evidence required. That evidence, when given, was more satisfactory than he had dared to hope. The Templars, it now appeared, were Satanists who at their initiation denied Christ and trampled on the crucifix. Sodomy was not only permitted but actively encouraged. Such illegitimate children as were nevertheless engendered were disposed of by being roasted alive.
On Friday, 13 October 1307, the Grand Master of the Temple, Jacques de Molay, was arrested in Paris with sixty of his leading brethren.107 To force them to confess, they were first tortured by the palace authorities and then handed over to the official inquisitors to be tortured again. Over the next six weeks no less than 138 Knights were subjected to examination, of whom–not surprisingly–123, including de Molay himself, finally confessed to at least some of the charges levelled against them. Philip, meanwhile, wrote to his fellow monarchs urging them to follow his example. Edward II of England–who probably felt on somewhat shaky ground himself–was initially inclined to cavil with his father-in-law, but when firm instructions arrived from Pope Clement–who was only too willing to assist the French king in any way he could–he hesitated no longer. The English Master of the Order was taken into custody on 9 January 1308. All his Knights followed him soon afterwards.
The Templars had their champions. When de Molay was interrogated by three cardinals sent expressly to Paris by the Pope, he formally revoked his confession and bared his breast to show unmistakable signs of torture. At Clement’s first consistory, no less than ten members of the Sacred College threatened to resign in protest against his policy, and early in February the Inquisition was ordered to suspend its activities against the Order. But it was impossible to reverse the tide. In August the Grand Master, examined yet again, renewed his former confessions.
The public trial of the Order opened on 11 April 1310, when it was announced that any of the accused who attempted to retract an earlier confession would be burned at the stake; on 12 May fifty-four Knights suffered this fate, and in the next two weeks nine others followed them. The whole contemptible affair dragged on for another four years, during which Pope and King continued to confer–a sure sign of the doubts that refused to go away–and to discuss the disposition of the Order’s enormous wealth. Meanwhile Jacques de Molay languished in prison until his fate could be decided. Not until 14 March 1314 did the authorities bring him out on to a scaffold before the Cathedral of Notre-Dame to repeat his confession for the last time.
They had reason to regret their decision. As Grand Master, Jacques de Molay can hardly be said to have distinguished himself over the previous seven years. He had confessed, retracted and confessed again; he had shown no heroism, few qualities even of leadership. But now he was an old man, in his middle seventies and about to meet his God: he had nothing more to lose. And so, supported by his friend Geoffroy de Charnay, he spoke out loud and clear: as God was his witness, he and his Order were totally innocent of all the charges of which they had been accused. At once he and de Charnay were hurried away by the royal marshals, while messengers hastened to Philip. The King delayed his decision no longer. That same evening the two old knights were rowed out to a small island in the Seine, where the stake had been prepared.
It was later rumoured that, just before he died, de Molay had summoned both Pope Clement and King Philip to appear at the judgement seat of God before the year was out, and it did not pass unnoticed that the Pope was dead in little more than a month, and the King killed in a hunting accident towards the end of November.108 The two men faced the flames with courage and died nobly. After night had fallen, the friars of the Augustinian monastery on the further shore came to collect their bones, to be revered as those of saints and martyrs.
Although the Knights Hospitaller of St John had played no part in the persecution and ultimate annihilation of the Templars–and it would be unkind even to suggest that they experienced even a touch of Schadenfreude–there is no doubt that they were far and away the greatest beneficiaries of their brothers’ demise. By a bull dated 2 May 1312, Pope Clement had decreed that all the Templars’ wealth and property–outside the kingdoms of Castile, Aragon, Portugal and Majorca, on which he deferred his decision–should devolve upon the Order of the Hospital; even though King Philip received most of his expected rewards, it was the Hospitallers who suddenly found themselves richer than they had ever dreamed.
In its origins, their order was older even than that of the Templars. An early hospice for pilgrims to Jerusalem had been established by Charlemagne, and had been active until 1010 when it was destroyed by the fanatically anti-Christian Caliph Hakim; the site was purchased in about 1023 by a group of merchants from Amalfi, who re-established it under the authority of the Benedictines. Soon afterwards it was dedicated to St John the Baptist, and by the time of the Latin conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 its director, Brother Gerard, had made it the centre of its own religious order with a single aim: that of tending, and if possible healing, the sick. It was Gerard’s successor, a certain Raymond of Le Puy, who revised its rule and gave it its second purpose: the military protection of Christian pilgrims. From the 1130s onwards both the Templars and the Hospitallers were taking a regular part in the wars of the Cross. Both were religious orders, whose members took the usual monastic vows; but whereas the Templars were a purely military organisation, the Hospitallers never forgot that they were primarily a nursing brotherhood, whose duty it was to minister to ‘our lords the sick’. When not actually fighting, they were constantly occupied with the building and furnishing of their hospitals, and their standard of medical treatment was the highest in the medieval world.
After the fall of Acre and the end of Frankish Outremer, the Knights of the Hospital first took refuge in Limassol, but they had no wish to subject themselves to the house of Lusignan and in 1306 their Grand Master Foulques de Villaret–with the willing permission of Pope Clement–came to an agreement with a Genoese pirate named Vignolo de’ Vignoli for a concerted attack on the island of Rhodes, then part of the Byzantine Empire. It was, geographically, a perfect choice. The most easterly island of the Aegean, it lay only ten miles off the coast of Asia Minor, the intervening channel carrying much of the merchant shipping that plied between the ports of western Europe and those of the Levant. Its mountain ridge, rising to some 4,000 feet, offered several vantage points from which lookouts could keep a watch on both Asia Minor and the islands of the Dodecanese; on clear days even the outline of Mount Ida in Crete–well over 100 miles away to the southwest–was clearly visible. The fields were rich in orchards and vineyards, ensuring copious supplies of food and wine. Vast pine forests provided virtually limitless wood for shipbuilding. Moreover, the people boasted a seafaring tradition that went back to the days of antiquity. The Roman navy of the east had been largely staffed by Rhodians, as had successive Byzantine fleets. If the Knights, hitherto based firmly on land, were now to become men of the sea, they could not hope to find better instructors in shipbuilding, seamanship and navigation.
First, however, the island had to be conquered. Its people put up a stubborn resistance, and it was only after two years’ hard fighting that the city of Rhodes itself, with its two magnificent harbours, eventually fell to the Knights. On 15 August 1309 it opened its gates, and a year later became the official headquarters of the Order. An agreement was quickly reached with the pirate Vignolo according to which, in return for one-third of their revenues, the Knights were to keep the whole island except two small villages, plus the neighbouring islands of Kos and Kalymnos and several others of the Dodecanese. It was an excellent bargain. After nineteen years, they once again had a permanent home–on an island which, by a subsequent papal decree, was their property absolutely. In these new circumstances they were not only an order of knighthood; they were a sovereign state. Now at last they were able to resume their continuing war against the infidel, with its avowed object of ‘reducing to silence the enemies of Christ’, but even as they did so they never forgot that they had another duty, more pressing still. One of their very first tasks on settling in Rhodes was to start work on their new infirmary. It was to become the best and most celebrated hospital in the world. The great ward–which remains today almost exactly as it was when the Order left it nearly five centuries ago–could accommodate no less than eighty-five patients, all tended by the Knights themselves.
They also established a completely new administrative structure. The head of state was the Grand Master; beneath him the Order was divided into eight langues, or tongues–those of France, Provence, Auvergne, England, Italy, Germany, Aragon and Castile–each of which enjoyed a considerable degree of independence. In order to bind together this motley collection of races and languages, it was decided that each tongue should assume responsibility for an individual task. Thus the Admiral was almost invariably an Italian, the Grand Commander a Provençal, the Marshal an Auvergnat and the Grand Bailiff a German. The English provided the Turcopolier, who was charged with the coastal defences of the island. Every Knight without exception was required to wear on his gown or cloak the characteristic eight-pointed cross, ‘to put him in mind of bearing always in his heart the cross of Jesus Christ, adorned with the eight virtues that attend it’.
Within the tongues, the Knights were of three main classes. First were the Knights of Justice, who were recruited only from the aristocratic families of Europe and were required to give proof of their noble blood. Next in the hierarchy came the serving brothers, who were of slightly lower social status; some would be soldiers, some diplomats and civil servants, others would work in the hospital. The third category was formed by the chaplains who served in the churches and chapels. Each Knight was required to serve two initial years on probation, one of which would be spent in the galleys. Only then was he required to take the oath:
You promise and vow under God, and unto our Lady, and unto our Lord St John Baptist to live and to die in obedience. You likewise promise to live without property of your own. There is also one other promise, made only by the Order: to be the serf and the slave of our lords the sick.
Many remained abroad for the best part of their lives, in the Order’s local commanderies, but all without exception were bound to return instantly to Rhodes when summoned.
As the fourteenth century wore on, it is not altogether surprising that the Knights began to compromise on some of their early ideals. Although their hospital continued to flourish and to attract patients from all over the eastern Mediterranean, their own steadily increasing wealth–combined, perhaps, with the near-perfect climate in which they lived–led to a gradual relaxation of their once austere monastic habits. But they never neglected their military duties. They continued to police the narrow seas; their consuls in Egypt and Jerusalem watched over the interests of the Christian pilgrims; and they kept up the pressure against the Turks, substantially delaying their development as a first-rate naval power. In 1348, in alliance with Venice and Cyprus, they took Smyrna (lzmir), successfully defending it against a Turkish counter-attack ten years later; and in 1365 they participated in the last effort ever made to rescue the Holy Land from the infidel.
Their ally and inspiration on this occasion was King Peter I of Cyprus, the first monarch since St Louis to be fired with a genuine Crusading spirit. In 1362 he set out on an extended tour of the west to seek support for his plans. Pope Urban V in Avignon, the Emperor Charles IV in Prague, John II of France and Edward III of England all promised help, and there was a useful naval contribution from Venice. The expedition assembled in Rhodes in August 1365, with a navy estimated at some 165 ships, including 108 from Cyprus–by far the largest combined force since the Third Crusade. Only after the whole fleet had set sail was it announced that the first destination was Alexandria. The Crusaders landed there on 9 October; two days later the city was theirs.
What followed was a massacre–a massacre worse, if anything, than that by the soldiers of the First Crusade in Jerusalem in 1099 or that by the Franks in Constantinople in 1204. The slaughter was indiscriminate. The important Christian and Jewish communities suffered as much as the Muslim majority; churches and synagogues as well as mosques were put to the torch. Five thousand prisoners were captured and sold into slavery. King Peter, horrified at the turn events had taken, did his best to restore order and to hold what was left of the city, but the army, having possessed itself of all the plunder it could carry, was impatient to be off before an avenging Mameluke army arrived from Cairo. The King had no course but to order his fleet back to Cyprus. Even then he hoped to sail back on a second expedition to the east, but on arrival at Famagusta the entire army disintegrated, knights and foot-soldiers alike thinking only of returning home with their loot as quickly as possible.
This was the last Crusade, and the most shameful of them all; it set back the cause of progress in the Mediterranean by the best part of a century. When it took place, the Franks and the Mamelukes had been at peace for fifty years and more. Pilgrims were travelling freely to the Holy Places; trade was flourishing between the west and the Muslim world. Now, at a stroke, all the old enmities were revived: native Christian communities began once again to suffer persecution, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was once again closed to pilgrims. To the Mamelukes of Egypt, the Christian Kingdom of Cyprus was once again their arch-enemy. Sixty years later they were to have their revenge.
It would be unfair to attach too much of the blame for this catastrophe to the Knights of the Hospital. Their lives were, after all, dedicated to the saving of life rather than to the taking of it; their vow of poverty ruled out any form of looting; and they had lived long enough in the east to understand the principles of coexistence. There can be little doubt that they were as shocked as anyone by the behaviour of their allies, and they would certainly have done their best to exercise a moderating influence; their guilt, such as it was, was guilt by association only. Nonetheless, the massacre at Alexandria signals the low point of their history, and marks their record with its blackest stain. For the rest, idle and ineffectual as they frequently were, it remains a fact that throughout their 213-year residence in Rhodes and for much of their 268-year occupation of Malta which followed it, the Knights Hospitaller of St John of Jerusalem were to be a beneficial–and occasionally dramatically decisive–force in Mediterranean affairs.
The palace of the Alhambra at Granada is one of the most superb Islamic buildings remaining anywhere in Europe. No visitor can fail to be seduced by the grace of its architecture, the delicacy of its carving, the play of sunshine and shadow in its courts and gardens. The horseshoe arches, the swirling Arabic calligraphy, the stalactite vaulting, all radiate the spirit of Islam at its elegant best. Then, suddenly, there comes a surprise. In three of the alcoves of the Sala de los Reyes – it is sometimes known as the Sala de la Justicia–are some extraordinary ceiling paintings. They are painted on leather, which might be thought unusual enough, but what makes them more remarkable still is their subject. In the central alcove ten men of Moorish appearance are sitting at a council meeting, while to each side there are scenes of hunting, fighting, chess-playing and the making of courtly love, all in the manner of Christian Europe in the later Middle Ages. The style suggests the mid-fourteenth century, so they must be virtually contemporary with the palace itself, which was completed in about 1350; but how did they come to be painted? The tenets of Islam strongly discourage figurative art in any form, and particularly representations of the human figure;109 and Muslim Granada still had a century and a half to go. We can only conclude that an Islamic ruler commissioned a Christian artist to provide them, which in turn suggests that at this time at least the two religions had achieved a happy and harmonious coexistence.
One reason for this is that by the third quarter of the thirteenth century the Reconquista had run out of steam. King Pedro III of Aragon was fully occupied with his Sicilian adventure, while his contemporary Alfonso X ‘the Wise’ of Castile, cultured and erudite as he may have been, was far more interested in negotiating for the crown of the Holy Roman Empire and establishing his dynastic claims to Gascony than he was in smiting the infidel. As for Alfonso’s son Sancho IV and Sancho’s grandson Alfonso XI–whose long minority led to civil war and thirteen years of chaos until the cortes of Castile declared him to be of age in 1325–they had more than enough to do in repelling invasions by the Berbers of Morocco; their successes were welcomed rather than lamented by the Muslim rulers of Granada.
With the accession to the Castilian throne of Alfonso XI’s son Pedro I–better known by his well-deserved appellation of Pedro the Cruel–in 1350, it looked for a moment as if Christian–Muslim coexistence might again be threatened. But Pedro was in the early part of his reign primarily concerned with his domestic life: imprisoning his unfortunate wife, Blanche of Bourbon, almost certainly murdering her (though only after contracting a bigamous marriage), and later being himself kept under restraint by his enemies in the palace. Free again in 1356, he perpetrated a whole series of further murders before in 1360 finding himself faced with a civil war led by his bastard half-brother, Enrique of Trastamara. In the efforts of both sides to acquire international support Castile was suddenly swept up into the Hundred Years War, with Pedro being backed by the English–notably Edward the Black Prince–and Enrique by the French. The English alliance did not last long; Edward, revolted by Pedro’s faithlessness and brutality, soon afterwards returned to England, sick of the disease that was to kill him a short time later. Pedro, left on his own, was soon overpowered by Enrique and his ally, the famous French knight Bertrand du Guesclin. On 23 March 1369 Enrique stabbed Pedro to death in du Guesclin’s tent, simultaneously becoming King Enrique II of Castile. As Pedro’s successor, he could only be an improvement.
In 1371 there was forged one of Spain’s few familial links with England, when Edward III’s oldest surviving son, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, married Constance, Pedro’s illegitimate daughter, and in absentia styled himself King of Castile. It was another fifteen years before he set foot in Spain to claim his inheritance; finally, on 7 July 1386, accompanied by his wife and two daughters, he sailed from Plymouth with an army of 20,000 men. A month later he landed at Corunna and soon made himself master of most of Galicia, in the northwest corner of the country. Then, in the spring of 1387, he joined forces with his son-in-law King John I of Portugal (now married to his daughter Philippa) for a joint invasion of Castile. The expedition was a failure: disease spread rapidly through the camp, the Duke himself was stricken, the conquered territories were lost again and the army was forced to retire across the Pyrenees. At last in 1389 Gaunt signed a treaty surrendering his claim to the throne in exchange for a payment of 200,000 crowns, a generous annual pension and the marriage of his daughter Catherine to the future Enrique III of Castile. Altogether, he had gained a good deal more than he deserved.
Throughout this time the Muslims of Granada lived happily and in comparative peace. The same could not, alas, be said for the Jews. Financially, Enrique relied on them as did everyone else, but during the civil war he had deliberately stirred up hatred against them, and as the century progressed so anti-Semitism intensified, finally bursting out in 1391 like a forest fire. It began in Seville on 6 June. Many of the Jewish population fled for their lives; many others, as synagogues were forcibly Christianised, submitted unwillingly to conversion. From Seville the flames spread quickly, first through Andalusia and thence to the rest of the peninsula, even beyond the Pyrenees as far as Perpignan. After a while, inevitably, there came a lull; but the fires continued to smoulder throughout the century that followed, until in 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella were to sign the fateful edict banishing all Jews from the territory of Spain.
At the beginning of Boccaccio’s Decameron, ten young people flee Florence because of plague. That plague, better known as the Black Death, hangs like a baleful miasma over the second half of the fourteenth century. It had first appeared in Constantinople in the spring of 1347, brought almost certainly by ships escaping from the already plague-ridden Genoese trading colony of Caffa (now Feodosiya in the Crimea), which was then under siege by the Mongols. The city had suffered many similar visitations over the centuries, but never one so virulent or on such a scale. The fatal bacillus was–as we now know–introduced by fleas which were in turn usually (though not invariably) carried by the rats that infested all ships coming from the east. Curiously enough, these rats were themselves relatively new arrivals in Europe, the first of them having probably been brought in on ships carrying Crusaders back from Palestine; but they were rapid and indefatigable breeders, and by mid-century there were more than enough of them to propagate the disease throughout the European continent. We need not necessarily believe the anonymous contemporary chronicler from the Italian town of Este, who claims that in Constantinople plague accounted for eight-ninths of the entire population; to the Byzantines, however, it must have seemed the final proof of what they had suspected for so long: that the Holy Virgin, their patron and protectress, had after more than 1,000 years at last deserted them.
The Mediterranean proper had its first taste of the Black Death early in October 1347, when twelve Genoese galleys arrived in Messina. They too had probably come from Caffa; it was certainly from there that yet another Genoese fleet was to transmit the infection, in January 1348, to Genoa, Venice and Sicily. From there it spread north to Corsica and Sardinia, south to Tunis and North Africa, west to the Balearic Islands, and thence to Barcelona and Valencia on the Spanish coast, and, inevitably, across the straits to south Italy, whence its progress up the peninsula was swift.
Of all the Italian cities, Florence suffered most. Contemporary assessments are famously unreliable, but there is good evidence to show that out of a total Florentine population estimated at some 95,000, between 50,000 and 60,000 were dead within six months of the outbreak. Boccaccio himself provides us with an unforgettable description: the headlong flight of whole populations from the cities and towns, abandoning their houses and possessions; the way in which the sick–even sick children–were left to their fate, with no one daring to approach them; the mass burials in hurriedly dug trenches; the untended cattle wandering free through the countryside. In Venice, when the epidemic was at its height, 600 citizens a day were said to have perished; in Orvieto, out of every family of four, one of the parents and one of the children could statistically expect to die; in Siena–where the deaths were estimated at 50,000, two-thirds of the population–they were in the process of building the cathedral, which was to be one of the greatest in Christendom. The workmen all died; construction was abandoned, and although activity was resumed towards the end of the century the building has not to this day been completed as planned. As for Italy as a whole, to say that it lost a third, or slightly more, of its total population would probably not be very far wrong.
In France the story was much the same. The plague began, predictably enough, in Marseille. A few weeks later it had reached the Pyrenees, and by August 1348 it was raging through Bordeaux. To the east, it struck papal Avignon in March, killing at least half the population, including every single one of the English community of Austin Friars in the city. Pope Clement VI himself retired to his private apartments, where he received no one and spent the entire day and night roasting himself between two blazing fires. (The treatment proved successful; he survived.) Meanwhile, the pestilence sped up the Rhône valley to Lyons, and by June was working its way through Paris itself.
Wherever it struck, the more pious of the population withdrew to pray; particularly in the major cities of the north, however, the predominant reaction to imminent death seems to have been a feverish and frenetic gaiety. And why not? If God had deserted his people, why should his commandments be obeyed? If their lives were to be so cruelly cut short, let their last days be devoted to pleasure, whether that of the table, the bottle or the bed–or, ideally, all three. In Paris–where such delights have never been undervalued–there seems to have been what amounted to an almost complete breakdown in morality, both private and public.
Across the length and breadth of the Mediterranean, the story was much the same. In Cyprus, where the onset of the plague coincided with a severe earthquake and tidal wave, it led to a panic-stricken massacre by the landowners of all their Arab slaves, for fear that they might take advantage of the prevailing chaos by staging a revolt. On the Dalmatian coast, the citizens of Salona (Split) had a different hazard to endure: packs of ravening wolves, descending on the city from the mountains and attacking both sick and survivors alike. Such was the mortality that piles of unburied corpses were left in the streets for weeks at a time.
In Spain, having first appeared in the coastal cities, the plague moved slowly but persistently through the Kingdom of Aragon. Its king, Pedro IV, somehow survived; but he lost first a daughter, then a niece, and finally in October his second wife, Eleanor of Portugal. The scourge then spread, first to the Muslim lands and thence to the army of Castile, at that time engaged in a vigorous campaign of reconquest in the south under the leadership of King Alfonso XI himself. In 1344 he had taken Algeciras; he was now before Gibraltar. The besiegers of the Rock–unlike its defenders–remained unaffected throughout the summer of 1349, but early in March 1350 the dread sickness struck. Alfonso’s generals implored him to withdraw into isolation until it should have run its course, but he refused to leave his men. He died on Good Friday, 26 March, the only ruling monarch to fall victim to the Black Death. Joanna, daughter of Edward III of England, died at Bordeaux on the way to her wedding with Alfonso’s son, Pedro the Cruel. The territory of Castile itself, though it did not escape entirely, certainly got off lightly–thanks, it was widely believed at the time, to the eagerness of the landowning classes to make over their property to the Church. When the emergency was past, it was found that they had done so on such a scale as seriously to upset the economic balance of the country; in 1351 King Pedro I was obliged to order the ecclesiastical authorities to make full restitution of all that they had received.
The Black Death took a greater toll of life than any known war or epidemic in previous history. Its effect on international trade was dramatic, but relatively short-lived; more lasting was the alarming reduction of the amount of land under cultivation, owing to the deaths of so many labourers. This compelled the landowners drastically to increase wages, which in turn brought a weakening of the formerly rigid stratification of society as the working people began for the first time to travel about in search of employment or higher pay. In the arts–particularly painting and sculpture–there was a greater preoccupation with death than before; in matters spiritual, the obvious inefficacy of prayer and the powerlessness of the Church against the plague shook the faith of many Christians. After 1350 Europe would never be quite the same again.
When the Roman Emperor-elect, Lewis IV of Bavaria, marched down into Italy in 1327 for his imperial coronation, it was with an attitude very different to that adopted by his predecessor, Henry of Luxemburg.110 This time there was no idealism, no pretence at impartiality, no nod in the direction of Avignon. Lewis arrived at the invitation of the Ghibellines of Italy, bringing with him the most formidable of all the anti-papalists of his time, Marsilius of Padua. Only two years previously this ex-Rector of the Sorbonne had published his Defensor Pacis, in which he argued that the whole edifice of papal domination and canon law was contrary to the basic principles of Christianity. Such company was unlikely to increase Lewis’s popularity at Avignon, and long before he reached Rome he had incurred a double sentence of excommunication and deposition from Pope John XXII; but by this time the papal prestige in Italy had sunk even lower than the imperial, and the decree went largely unheeded. When Lewis was crowned by Sciarra Colonna, representing the people of Rome, at St Peter’s in January 1328 and three months later formally pronounced the Pope heretic and deposed, it almost looked as though he might re-establish imperial control; but when he advanced south into Neapolitan territory King Robert of Naples, grandson of Charles of Anjou, proved a far more serious adversary. Robert was his military match, and on returning to Rome Lewis found that the pendulum had swung. He realised, too, that he could never hope to establish a stable order in Italy until he was certain of Germany, where the situation was fast deteriorating. The year 1330 saw him back beyond the Alps. He too had learned his lesson: Italy had outgrown imperialism, even if she was not yet ready for a unity of her own making.
Between the south and the north the difference was still immense, so deep that the effects of it can still be felt today. The Kingdom of Naples, under Robert and his flighty successor Joanna I, could boast an enlightened and cultivated court and two of the best universities in Italy: Frederick II’s foundation in Naples itself and the world-famous school of medicine, already more than five centuries old, at Salerno. Outside these centres, however, the land was dominated, just as in Norman days, by an irresponsible and obstreperous baronage. Sicily, under the house of Aragon, was less encumbered by feudalism and economically more coherent, but was otherwise permeated by much the same atmosphere of stagnation and inertia.
In the north, on the other hand, there is no escaping the sense of overpowering vitality. Gradually, as the fourteenth century progresses and the smaller city-states are drawn into the orbit of the larger, the great spheres of influence begin to appear: Venice, richer and more magnificent than ever, slowly outdistancing Genoa–by now her only serious maritime rival–and for the first time annexing important parts of the Italian mainland–Padua and Vicenza, Treviso and Verona–while still extending her influence beyond the Adriatic as one of the great powers of Europe; Milan, under the superb house of Visconti, flooding like a great tide over Lombardy and Piedmont and finally to engulf even Bologna, the centre of papal power in north Italy; and the Florence of Giotto, Orcagna and Andrea Pisano, her staunch republicanism foiling every attempt by a would-be despot, her great merchant bankers developing the art of international finance to undreamed-of levels of efficiency and sophistication. One of the advantages of Roman over canon law was that it made usury respectable; the way was now open for full economic growth and for the long-term credits which made possible the wealth and splendour that still dazzle down the centuries.
Across the centre of the peninsula and well beyond the effective control of their absentee landlord in Avignon, the Papal States succumbed in their turn to the prevailing fashion for despotism. The Este of Ferrara, the Pepoli of Bologna, the Malatesta of Rimini and their like might call themselves papal vicars and punctiliously acknowledge the suzerainty of St Peter, but within their respective cities their power remained absolute. Only in Rome itself, despite the attempts of the Colonna and their rivals the Orsini, was popular republican feeling strong enough to hold its own, but Rome was by now perhaps the saddest place in Italy. Deserted by the Popes, its principal raison d’être, its population reduced by malaria, famine and factional strife to a pitiable 20,000, the capital of Western Christendom had sunk to a level of degradation such as it had never before known. More than any other city, it now needed a leader who would focus its aspirations and restore its self-respect. At the moment of its darkest despair, it found one.
Cola di Rienzo, son of a Roman washerwoman, was a visionary, a fanatic, a superb showman and a demagogue of genius. In 1344, when he was thirty-one, he launched his campaign against the aristocracy of Rome, inflaming the popular imagination with his evocations of the city’s past greatness and his prophecies of its glorious rebirth. Such was his success that three years later, on the Capitol, he was invested with the title of Tribune and limitless dictatorial powers; then, summoning a ‘national’ parliament, he solemnly conferred Roman citizenship on all the cities of Italy and announced plans for the election of an Italian Emperor. But appeals for Italian unity, whether pronounced by a German prince or a Roman demagogue, were doomed to failure. By the end of 1347 not only the other cities but the Roman mob itself had turned against Cola and forced him into exile. Seven years later he managed to return, but the old magic was gone; the mob, fickle as always, rose against him almost at once. In vain he showed himself on the balcony of the Capitol, clad in shining armour and bearing aloft the banner of Rome; they only jeered the louder. Disguising himself as a beggar, he tried to flee, but the gold bracelets glinting under his rags betrayed him. Minutes later his body was hanging by the feet in a public square–a fate eerily similar to that which befell, in the mid-twentieth century, his closest and most successful imitator.
And yet, in his comet career, Cola had somehow managed to clear the minds of his fellow citizens of much of the cumbersome detritus of the Middle Ages and to give them a new awareness of their classical past. What he had accomplished in the political sphere was paralleled in the world of letters by his friend and supporter Francesco Petrarch. It was in 1341, only twenty years after Dante’s death, that Petrarch was crowned with the poet’s laurels on the Capitol, but in those twenty years lay all the difference between late medieval scholasticism and the humanism of the Renaissance. Petrarch had none of Dante’s gigantic vision, but his more slender genius led the way forward to a fresh, uncluttered outlook, based to some extent on the troubadour poets of Sicily and Provence but drawing its chief inspiration from the Latin authors of antiquity.
This new conception of the classical past as a signpost to the future led to a similar revival of interest in the literature of ancient Greece, long forgotten in the west and even in the Byzantine Empire largely neglected. This was principally the achievement of Giovanni Boccaccio, Petrarch’s most gifted disciple, who kept for three years in his house an aged Greek of disgusting personal habits, preparing one of the first–and worst–translations of Homer into Latin. But it is not for his classical scholarship that Boccaccio is now remembered. His Decameron is a comparatively youthful work, but with it he did for Italian prose what Dante and Petrarch had done for poetry, simplifying it, refining it and forging it into a new literary instrument. The style which he developed, racy and astringent, gave the Decameron a European reputation, starting a revived narrative tradition that can be traced through Chaucer and Shakespeare to La Fontaine and beyond.
To the Popes at Avignon, the impact of Cola di Rienzo and the success of the Decameron must have sounded a new note of danger. If the fullness of papal power were not soon reasserted in Italy, it would be lost forever. Cola’s return to Rome had coincided with the appointment of Cardinal Gil Albornoz as legate to Italy, with the express task of bringing the States of the Church back into the papal fold. This terrifyingly able Spaniard succeeded to the point where, in 1367, Pope Urban V ventured to re-establish himself at the Lateran. He received a vociferous welcome from the people of Rome, and soon afterwards became the first and last Pope to receive visits from both Eastern and Western Emperors. But he was an old man; he soon grew homesick and, in 1370, despite warnings from St Bridget of Sweden that a return to Provence would be fatal, the attractions of Avignon became too strong for him. St Bridget was right. Within a few weeks he was dead.
Urban had shown with painful clarity why the Papacy had been so long absent from its rightful home. All the Avignon Popes and most of their curias had been Frenchmen–notoriously unwilling travellers at the best of times–to whom the ruins of Rome, insalubrious and smelly, must have constituted little enough temptation. It would take a serious crisis in Italy if, after seventy years, the papal conscience was to be reawakened. That crisis was not long in coming. In the States of the Church Albornoz had been succeeded by a horde of grasping French legates who made no secret of being out for what they could get and soon drove the unhappy cities to a state of open rebellion. In doing so they did not hesitate to make use of the so-called Free Companies–bands of foreign mercenaries who, when not otherwise employed, roamed the countryside supporting themselves on protection money, highway robbery and blackmail. In 1375 one of the worst of these, the English Company of Sir John Hawkwood, was despatched by the legate in Bologna to lay waste the Florentine harvests. To the Italian cities it seemed that papal iniquity could be carried no further. A wave of rabid anticlericalism swept through Tuscany, Umbria and the Papal States, and by the end of the year no less than eighty towns had expelled their papal garrisons.
Away in Avignon, Gregory XI acted quickly and firmly. Florence, the ringleader of the rising, was placed under an interdict; all the Christian princes of Europe were commanded to seize Florentine goods wherever they might be found and to sell all local Florentine merchants into slavery. These were fearsome measures, but they had no effect. Gregory saw that his only hope lay in an immediate return to Rome. Spurred on by the entreaties of St Catherine of Siena–carrying on where St Bridget had left off–he embarked with his reluctant curia at the end of 1376 and on 17 January 1377 made his formal entry into the city. It was a sad homecoming; in Florence his troops were taking hideous vengeance, while even in Rome his position was by no means secure. He was in fact seriously contemplating a return to Avignon when, fortunately for Rome, he died in the following year. The Romans had not always treated their Popes with particular affection or respect, but they were determined not to let them go again. ‘Romano lo volemo, o almeno italiano!’111 they shouted throughout the ensuing conclave, and they got what they wanted–up to a point. The new Pope, Urban VI, showed every sign of being mentally unhinged and indeed tortured at least four of his cardinals to death, but he was at least an Italian.
The period of the Avignon Popes marks the close of the Middle Ages. When Clement V left Italy the old order was dying, but little had yet appeared to take its place. Though the imperial throne was temporarily vacant, men still remembered the magnificent Frederick, and wept for Manfred and Conradin. Papal pride had been brought low. Scholastic philosophy had reached, with St Thomas Aquinas, at once its highest pinnacle and its logical conclusion. It remained only for Dante to sum up, in the Divine Comedy, the achievements and the failures, the wisdom and the blindness, the ideals, the hopes and the fears of medieval Italy.
Gregory XI returned to a land which, though in some respects unchanged, in others could never be the same again. Unity was as remote a possibility as ever: Guelf and Ghibelline, their original differences long forgotten, still hammered away at each other and the blood continued to flow as it always had, copious and unavailing. But seventy years without a Pope or an effective Emperor had removed the old polarities, and in 1347–48 the Black Death seemed to draw yet another curtain across the past and to expose the present yet more mercilessly to the winds of change. The secular, enquiring spirit which now spread over the land was not in itself new. Its roots went back to Roger of Sicily and his Greek and Arab sages, to Frederick and his falcons, to Manfred and his troubadours, to Arnold of Brescia and the scholastics, to the doctors and lawyers of Salerno and Bologna. But the fourteenth century had given it a new momentum–in the political sphere with Cola di Rienzo and the despots of the north, in the cultural with Petrarch and the humanists, in the theological with Marsilius of Padua–and at the same time the papal barriers that had so long blocked its progress suddenly disappeared. The Renaissance was under way.