Acknowledgments

The origins of this book reach back some twenty years, when as a graduate student specializing in late-medieval religion I first encountered the story of John of Capistrano and Belgrade. Not long after, I found myself as a novice teacher trying to help students make sense of the world in the early years of a new millennium, and like so many others, I was drawn anew to the teaching and study of the crusades. In that setting I became, again like so many others, more and more aware of the richness of the later medieval period for the study of the crusades, but at the same time aware of the comparative lack of affordable, widely available translations of the period’s source material.

As the idea of this project began to take on a clearer shape, it came to enjoy generous institutional support. Leave time and funding from the University of Alabama helped both launch and finish it. My thanks especially to the Research Advisory Council grants program of the Office of Academic Affairs, and to the College Academy of Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity (CARSCA) in the university’s College of Arts and Sciences. Along the way the faculty and staff of several libraries helped me immensely in accessing both manuscript and printed editions for the volume, especially the staff at the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota; the Vatican Secret Archive in Rome; the Bavarian State Library in Munich; and the Amelia Gayle Gorgas library at the University of Alabama.

The project has also enjoyed the generous support of a wide circle of specialists, colleagues, and friends. Norman Housley offered early encouragement and advice and helped me think through first approaches to the project. Mark Whelan read and carefully critiqued an early draft of the Introduction. Paul Cobb and Dimitri Kastritsis kindly helped an awkward interloper negotiate the rich world of early Ottoman historiography and sources, which is unfortunately still only dimly captured in the work presented here. With the same collegiality, Aleksandar Fotic and Ognjen Krešić kindly helped with first approaches to Serbia and its wider region, and especially to the later-medieval history of Belgrade. Letizia Pellegrini, Filippo Sedda, and Marco Bartoli offered warm welcomes in Italy when I first began to think about this kind of a project. Gábor Klaniczay, Stanko Andrić, and Otto Gecser were always helpful in their responses to my many emails and have kindly provided me early access to their new editions of Capistrano’s letters. Closer to home, Christine Caldwell Ames, David Bachrach, Michael Bailey, and Laura Smoller all offered their insight and encouragement at key points. But among my greatest debts are those I owe to my colleagues at the University of Alabama. Daniel Riches, Tanja Jones, and the members of our interdisciplinary community of medieval and early modern scholars offered support all along the way. I also owe a special debt to those who helped save me from myself as I fought through so many intractable passages – thanks to Daniel Riches, Kirk Summers, and Kelly Shannon Henderson for the Latin ones; Jessica Goethals for the Italian; and Rasma Lazda-Cazers for the German. Two former students, Michael Cervera and Gray Wood, read the completed draft carefully and offered valuable insights as veterans of my courses. Thanks as well to Craig Caldwell and the talented staff of the cartography lab of the University of Alabama, and especially to Alex Fries and Amber Chan for their work in preparing the maps. Yet for all this vital assistance and support, any mistakes found lurking in the volume of course remain entirely my own responsibility.

My guides through the publication process have also been invaluable. George Thompson has remained a steady and encouraging guide from the beginning. Natalie Fingerhut, Janice Evans, and the staff at the University of Toronto Press have been kind advocates and efficient colleagues on the long road to publication. I owe special thanks as well to the anonymous reviewers for the University of Toronto Press, who as specialists in crusade studies, Ottoman history, and Byzantine history offered perspective, critiques, and insights that strengthened the volume as a whole. My thanks as well to the scholars whose translations appear here alongside my own, and to all who have granted permission for the reproduction of their work.

As always, I am grateful to my wife Ashley and our family for their continued support during extended projects such as these. But above all, for this volume I am grateful to the now hundreds of students who have inspired me over so many years. They have lived through times that might seem to rival the Middle Ages for their chaos – seemingly endless wars, economic and political crises, and now a world-wide pandemic, with all of its bitter consequences. They have survived it all with resilience, diligence, and enthusiasm. It is to them, and especially to the seasoned veterans of HY 300, 388, and 442, that I dedicate these translations.

A Note on Names and Places

This volume, like so many others of its kind, presents a kaleidoscope of premodern names and places that are often difficult to render consistently in modern English. Centuries of change, so many linguistic divides, modern scholarly conventions, and a range of other factors make for a variety of possibilities. For the most part I have sought to render that variety in standard English (e.g., John for Johannes, Giovanni, János, and so on), and also to establish as much consistency and uniformity as possible among so many modern standards (so Ladislaus for Ladislas or Vladislav, Callixtus for Calixtus, Callistus, and so on). There are exceptions for translations reprinted here under copyright, where the original text remains unchanged, as well as other instances where my efforts at consistency have no doubt failed. In any event it is my hope that the text remains, above all else, readable and useful for its audience.

Introduction

This volume offers its readers access to one of the most interesting yet neglected stories in the later chapters of the history of the crusades: the events that led to the siege of the city of Belgrade in 1456, and how those events lived on in European narrative and memory. The sources collected here, some of them made available for the first time directly from archives and manuscripts, tell a compelling story. They reveal how fifteenth-century popes, like so many of their predecessors, shaped and disseminated crusading propaganda; how the princes of Europe both appropriated and resisted the energies of that same message; how ordinary people responded to the call to crusade, thousands of them soon the followers of an Italian friar of remarkable zeal and energy; how a warrior from Transylvania rose from relative obscurity to govern, for a time, Central Europe’s greatest kingdom and lead the battle for Belgrade; how an ambitious young sultan, the conqueror of Constantinople itself, ground a modest but strategically crucial city to dust with his great cannons yet still somehow failed to capture it; how those who lived through the fight remembered and shaped the stories of its horrors; and how and why all the texts and memories that emerged from the campaign mattered in ways far removed from the battlefield itself.

But even more important than the story they tell, these sources also present their readers with compelling challenges of interpretation. They raise questions, for example, about the production and resonance of crusade propaganda – why and how it took the shape that it did; whether contemporaries responded to it; and how and why they made use of it. These texts also reveal much about the complex dynamics of travel and communication in premodern settings, and how difficult it could be to stay on top of the fast-moving events of a military campaign. They force readers to confront how seemingly straightforward “eyewitness” accounts of events are in fact produced, from their very origins, through a complex process that moves from human experience to narrative and text, and how texts in turn helped shape long-term cultural memory.

To render each of these aspects of the following collection more visible, this introduction will first offer a general overview of events leading up to the battle for Belgrade in 1456. It will then turn to the historiographical frames within which scholars have recently sought to make sense of the crusades generally, and of crusading in the fifteenth century in particular. Within that context it then turns to the story of Belgrade as seen through the texts themselves, and to an exposition of some of the main issues of method and interpretation those texts raise.

Historical Frames: Political and Military Developments

The events of 1456 had their origins in developments that reached back a century and more, to the rise of the Ottoman Turks in Anatolia. Later chroniclers shrouded those origins in foundation myths: the warrior Osman (d. 1324), so they recalled around 1500, had a vivid dream foretelling the rise of his descendants to dominance. Meanwhile, Western chroniclers and humanists cast the same story in a more ominous light, presenting the Turks as a bloodthirsty, warlike people ruled by tyrants. But the myths and propaganda only concealed a much more complex and much more interesting historical reality.1

In the early fourteenth century the Ottomans were just one of many Turkish tribes active across Anatolia, their leaders only the most successful of many chieftains fighting along a fragmented frontier that for them marked the far western reaches of the Islamic world. Their presence comes more clearly into historical view in the middle decades of the fourteenth century, when, under their emir Orhan, we can see them expanding from a new center of power in Bursa in northwestern Asia minor. A turning point came at mid-century, when Orhan made the most of the opportunities afforded him by the intrigues of the nearby Byzantine court. When the emperor Andronicus III died in 1341, he left a nine-year-old child, John V, as heir to the throne, with the courtier and general John Kantakouzenos as regent. Tensions over the regency soon broke out into a cycle of court strife and civil war that lasted until Kantakouzenos abdicated in 1354. The next year Orhan and his followers, who had served Kantakouzenos ably as mercenaries, settled and fortified the Gallipoli peninsula on the Dardanelles.

Following Orhan’s death in 1362, his son and successor Murad I faced the challenge of consolidating what was still a very tenuous position. The new emir’s interests looked out along two frontiers: eastward into Anatolia and now also westward into the Balkan peninsula. Murad patiently secured the former against rival Turkish clans and established a new European center of power at Edirne (the old Roman city of Adrianople). From there his warriors came into steady conflict with both the tsars of Bulgaria and the princes of Serbia, and subjugated both over the next generation. An early and decisive battle came in September 1371, when the Ottomans dealt the Serbian nobility a crushing blow near the village of Černomen on the Maritsa River. Sofia fell in 1385, Niš in 1386. But easily the most famous battle came on June 15, 1389, at Kosovo. There Murad faced a coalition led by Prince Lazar of Serbia and his Bosnian allies. From the earliest days after the battle, accounts of the events were wildly divergent, even contradictory, some of them fueling a powerful tradition of Serbian epic poetry and cultural memory that remains alive, even hotly political, still today. In any event the immediate outcome was clear: though both Lazar and Murad I died in the conflict, the battle was an Ottoman victory, and it consolidated an Ottoman presence in Europe that would last for more than five centuries.

Leading up to Kosovo, Murad and his followers had justly earned their reputation as fierce fighters. But they had also more quietly begun to prove themselves as both shrewd and flexible rulers. Rather than put conquered peoples to the sword, Murad had left them in place as protected peoples (dhimmi), who were expected to provide tribute and troops. The arrangements extended to the Byzantines, who had been forced to submit to Murad as early as the 1370s. The experience of Ottoman power could be brutal: coerced extractions of revenue; devastating reprisals for resistance; summons to war; youth taken captive in raids or levied in “collections” (devşirme) from newly subject territories, now forced to serve the ones who had invaded and conquered them. But it should be made clear that these experiences were not terribly different from experiences under the power of countless other regimes across Europe’s long history. Moreover, it deserves emphasis that Ottoman rule had certain advantages. To many, it brought peace and stability, fostered trade and communication across what were often permeable cultural boundaries, and created opportunities for enrichment and advancement among those enterprising figures, many of them former Christians, who were eager to deploy their talents in the service of a new order.

In the years after the battle of Kosovo, Murad’s son and successor Bayezid continued Ottoman expansion with a swiftness and boldness that earned him the compelling nickname Yıldırım, “Thunderbolt.” He suppressed longstanding rivals in Anatolia. He married the daughter of Lazar Hrebeljanović of Serbia and recognized Lazar’s son, Stefan Lazarević, as a vassal. With support from these new Christian Serbian troops Bayezid’s raiders continued to subdue Bulgaria and Wallachia, and through the 1390s he worked to secure the southern shores of the Danube with a string of new fortifications. He also turned his full attention to Constantinople. Already in the early 1390s the city’s hinterlands were almost entirely in the hands of Ottoman forces. In 1394 Bayezid then launched a full siege of the city. His troops blocked all entrance and exit along its ancient land walls and deployed a small fleet to interfere with any relief by sea. Food shortages, skyrocketing prices, profiteering, and all of the other sufferings of a protracted siege soon began to devastate those who remained in the beleaguered capital.2

During the siege, in the summer of 1396, Bayezid learned of the arrival of a crusading army from the West. A force of as many as twenty thousand troops, led by King Sigismund of Hungary, had begun to lay siege to the city of Nicopolis (modern Pleven, Bulgaria) on the Danube. The “Thunderbolt” now hastened there with ten to twenty thousand troops of his own. The armies met on September 25, the battle still one of the most famous in all of later crusading history: the valor and ambition of the heavily armed Western knights proved their undoing, as their bold advances against the sultan’s infantry and archers led them right into the hands of the sultan’s cavalry, Bayezid’s vassal Stefan Lazarević and his Serbians among them. King Sigismund himself barely escaped with his life.

The string of conquests that culminated in the victory at Nicopolis were dramatic, but they both fostered and signaled the beginnings of a much quieter and equally decisive process of institutional growth. The precise chronology of the changes is often unclear and still contested, but the broad lines of development are clear enough: an emerging Ottoman polity was centered on the person of the Ottoman ruler – for his dominance now recognized as a sultan – who was surrounded by a court that included his extended family and an array of functionaries. An imperial council of viziers, judges, treasurers, and a chancellor all advised the sultan on major decisions regarding war and other matters of policy and administration. These deliberations were often inseparable from the affairs of the empire’s new network of provinces, already taking root under Bayezid. Subject peoples who had been paying tribute and supplying troops were increasingly brought under direct Ottoman rule. Provincial governors-general (beylerbeys) administered justice and granted estates to the overlords of smaller districts (sanjaks). The oldest anchors of power remained centered on Anatolia, and above all Bursa. But the territories to the west were now of equal if not greater importance. With Edirne as its capital, the province the Ottomans called Rumelia, the “land of the Romans,” would be vital for generations. The Danube and its tributaries; the old Via Egnatia and its string of cities and fortifications; their peoples, who became so many laborers, traders, and captives; and perhaps above all the region’s crops, timber, and mineral resources – all of these made the region, as it had long been, a place worth fighting to keep.

The institutions and resources of the provinces in turn supported the annual advance of the sultan’s growing army.3 Older traditions of the early gazi warriors remained, above all in the work of the “raiders” (akınjıs) who sought plunder and captives along the provincial frontiers. But the heart of the sultan’s force was increasingly built around several corps of elite provincial cavalry from Anatolia and Rumelia, and around a new elite infantry force, the janissaries (yeñi çeri). At the same time the Ottoman military had begun to learn from, and to adapt for its own purposes, the full range of tactics and technologies characteristic of “Renaissance” warfare: the art of blockades, of mining, of urban siege, as well as naval combat, at first on the waters of Central Europe’s largest rivers, and eventually on the Aegean and the Mediterranean.

From the middle of the fifteenth century Ottoman forces also increasingly adopted and refined the art of combat with gunpowder weapons, their efforts often aided by founders and combat engineers from Central and Western Europe. Alongside increasingly large (if cumbersome and inefficient) cannons for destroying walls, a range of smaller mortars rained down their shells unpredictably on urban populations, while janissaries and others deployed a range of smaller firearms. One account from the later fifteenth century likely reflects what had much earlier become a standard order of battle and standard tactics: janissaries, by mid-century outfitted with handguns and other firearms, guarded a central position (and also the sultan, if he had taken the field personally). Rumelian and Anatolian cavalry guarded the wings. Regular infantry (azaps) occupied the most forward positions, often along with raiders who sought to draw the enemy into contact.4

Yet like so many other polities of the era, for all its power this early Ottoman regime in many ways remained fragile, its fate highly contingent and susceptible to sharp reversals of fortune. Only a few years after his victory at Nicopolis, Bayezid found himself facing ruin at the hands of a rival from the East. Timur (whose name, appropriately, meant “iron”) arose from the Turkish and Mongol world centered on Samarkand in Transoxiana (modern Uzbekistan). By 1400 his conquests reached from India to Syria, and after he had captured Baghdad, Aleppo, and Damascus from the Mamluks, he set his sights on Bayezid. The decisive blow came at Ankara in July 1402. Timur captured Bayezid, and the Thunderbolt died in captivity. The decade and more of civil war and instability that followed not only threatened to bring an end to early Ottoman successes but also proved a decisive time of recovery and retrenchment for the Ottomans’ main rival along the Danube frontier, the Christian kingdom of Hungary.5

Stung by his bitter defeat at Nicopolis, King Sigismund of Hungary now learned from the experience and took advantage of a season of Ottoman division and weakness. He worked to make Western European powers more aware of the Ottoman advance, especially in the era of the Council of Constance (1414–18), and lobbied successfully for aid from the Venetians and figures like Portugal’s Pedro of Coimbra. Closer to home, he undertook a series of sophisticated, interwoven, longer-lasting reforms intended to establish a firm line of defense against Ottoman advances.6 He also cultivated alliances with both his own nobility and key families in Serbia, Bosnia, and elsewhere, hoping to create a diplomatic buffer zone against Ottoman influence.7 To that end the king’s Order of the Dragon, established in 1408, proved a useful means of patronage. Sigismund also outlined a detailed system for organizing and funding troops, as well as an auxiliary force of commoners funded by peasant holdings (portae) across the kingdom (the militia portialis).8

But above all, Sigismund worked to strengthen his southern frontier. A key figure in that construction effort was Pipo Scolari, a Florentine merchant whose career mirrored those of the best condottieri, the Renaissance mercenary generals of his Italian homeland.9 Gifted in both finance and war, he came to Hungary through his commercial ties, rose to become a valued administrator of its royal salt monopoly, and was eventually made Count of Temesvár. He was also a veteran of Nicopolis who laid claim to leading a string of victories against the Ottomans. By his death in 1426, Pipo had used his military and financial experience to help design and construct or remodel a network of modernized fortifications stretching from southeastern Hungary to the Adriatic, many of which would protect the region through the end of the fifteenth century. Perhaps more than any other military or political measure, this project made good on Hungary’s claim to stand as the antemurale Christianitatis – the “bulwark of Christendom” against the Ottoman advance.

Among the many strategic locations across that region, Belgrade was one of the most crucial.10 Settled atop a rocky promontory at the confluence of the Danube and the Sava rivers, the city had for centuries been a key site of settlement and fortification, reaching back to the days of Roman Singidunum. By the later Middle Ages, it was known as the “White City” to the many who fought for it, traveled through it, or lived in its streets – Latin Nandor Alba or Alba Graeca; Byzantine Veligradon; Hungarian Nándorfehérvár; German Griechisch Weissenburg; Serbian Beograd. By 1400 it was a Hungarian outpost on the Danube frontier of a border region known as the banate of Macsó, but for a time thereafter it was once again in Serbian hands. After Bayezid’s capture and defeat in 1402, the Serbian prince Stefan Lazarević – whose father King Lazar had died with Murad at Kosovo, and who had fought for his new Ottoman overlord at Nicopolis – renounced the Ottomans and sought favor with both Constantinople and Hungary. He was granted the title of despot in 1402, and a year later King Sigismund of Hungary recognized him as overlord of Macsó and Belgrade. Stefan was also soon granted membership in the king’s new Order of the Dragon, as well as extensive lands and privileges in Hungary.11 In return, the prince recognized the crown of Hungary as his suzerain, worked to reorganize the banate of Macsó in ways that rendered its military support stronger and more efficient, and served as Sigismund’s watchful ally on the Danube.

Despot Stefan also shrewdly exploited his titles and privileges to establish Belgrade as a shining Serbian capital.12 He launched an ambitious program of patronage whose many elements framed his city as a new Jerusalem. Remodeled churches and chapels in Belgrade’s Lower Town recalled the Kidron Valley and Gethsemane. Relics of Constantine and of a ninth-century sainted empress, Theophano, tied it to the Holy Land and imperial glory. The literary works of figures like Constantine the Philosopher clothed the city in a sacred light.13 But above all Stefan built up Belgrade militarily.14 Archaeologists have now recovered his extensive restructuring of the city’s defenses, an undertaking that unfolded in several phases. Stefan first had a new palace constructed on the site of older Byzantine fortifications. The same phase also saw the refurbishment of walls along the banks of the Danube and the construction of a new tower and walls to protect a small inlet on the Sava. Engineers also enclosed the site of the old Roman camp with the latest in military architecture: a ring of towers and seven-meter walls atop a stone escarpment that loomed over a deep dry moat and was armed at key positions with the latest gunpowder weapons. The new enclosure, some fifty thousand square meters in all, came to be known as the Upper Town, a settlement for local elites drawn to the despot’s protection and patronage. Merchants and commoners, too, were brought to the despot’s new capital, and the rapid growth of their communities fostered still more construction. As the Lower Town began to fill with these new settlers, a new run of some three hundred meters of towers and walls and escarpments enclosed it. The churches of the city were refurbished as well, above all an episcopal complex dedicated to the Dormition of Mary.15

Despot Stefan’s death in July 1427 ushered in a period of still more transformation, both for Belgrade and for its region. By treaty, the fortress and garrison came once again under the control of King Sigismund and Hungary and were thus integrated into the king’s network of Danubian fortifications.16 In return, Hungary recognized Stefan’s nephew George Branković as heir to his titles and lands in both Serbia and Hungary. A little more than a decade thereafter Serbia was all but gone, Branković on the run, Hungary on the verge of civil war, and the walls of the White City under Ottoman siege.

The most important catalyst for these rapid changes was renewed Ottoman pressure under the banners of Bayezid’s grandson, Sultan Murad II. Though he seems to have been something of an ascetic figure, more inclined to literature and art than war, Murad II was nevertheless a capable and often shrewd ruler who took his position seriously and could move decisively. When the Byzantine emperor Manuel II released Murad’s uncle Mustafa and supported him as an Ottoman rival, Mehmed responded with a bold, if brief, siege of Constantinople in June of 1422.17 By 1430 Murad had captured the key Aegean port of Thessalonica. He then turned his attention more fully to Albania and to the remnants of a fragmented Serbia, now ripe for renewed exploitation.

The new despot George Branković now found himself in increasingly precarious circumstances. He continued to maintain his ties to the North, above all through the marriage of his daughter Katarina to Ulrich II of Celje in 1434. At the same time, exiled after the loss of Belgrade to the Hungarians, he sought to create another cultural capital on the Danube, this one at his new home of Smederevo. Now a home to refugees from Murad’s advances to the south, the new despot’s city soon boasted a remarkable library of Latin, Greek, and Slavonic texts whose coterie of readers had connections with Italian humanists. But Branković had also to yield to the constant pressure of Ottoman raids, and in 1435 he married his daughter Mara to Murad, offering Serbian territory as her dowry.18

The balancing act worked only for so long. In August 1439 Murad attacked and captured Smederevo and drove Branković into exile in Hungary. The next year, in early June of 1440, the sultan then launched an attack against Belgrade.19 The Hungarians had entrusted the city to the ban (vice-regent) of Croatia, Matthew Talovac, who along with his two brothers had a prominent role in defending the region. It was Matthew’s brother John, a Hospitaler and prior of Vrana on the Adriatic coast, who was now in charge as castellan, and who organized a defense against Murad. The siege, according to the brief surviving accounts of it, seems to have lasted at least until the middle of June. Murad himself took the field with his janissaries and the Rumelian guard, deployed a fleet of ships on the Danube, bombarded the city, and worked to undermine its walls. Though the sultan ultimately withdrew, his effort was a success, insofar as it seems to have been shrewdly timed to coincide with what was becoming a deep political crisis in Hungary.

King Sigismund had died in December 1437. His successor Albert II of Hapsburg had ruled for only two years, and he died suddenly in October 1439, leaving behind a pregnant widow, Elizabeth. She gave birth to their son Ladislaus (known, in the wake of his father’s death, as “the Posthumous”) in February 1440. Elizabeth had the infant boy crowned in May. But by June, as Sultan Murad’s troops surrounded Belgrade, the Hungarian magnates rejected the child king and moved to crown Ladislaus III Jagiello of Poland as their king. Elizabeth and her son fled to the court of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III, and the two factions went to war.

The intrigue and intricacies of these crucial months and years are less important here than they were for the career of arguably the most important figure in the events of 1456, John Hunyadi. Not least because of his role in those events, the centuries of cultural memory they inspired have transformed Hunyadi into a seemingly timeless hero. Perhaps more than any other character in Belgrade’s drama he remains a hero today, shaped and reshaped by creative, sometimes divisive projects of myth and memory that have been fueled by modern ethnic and national identity. But the story of Hunyadi as a fifteenth-century figure, understood properly in his own context, is the more interesting one by far.20

Born around 1406, John was the son of a lesser Wallachian nobleman who in return for his service to Sigismund of Hungary had received an estate in Hunedoara (in modern Romania). By around 1430 John’s own service to Sigismund had earned him access to royal circles, and in 1433 he had risen high enough to accompany the king as far as Milan on his coronation journey to Italy. There he is said to have studied the art of war in the circles of the Visconti, providing the foundation for what became his legendary military career. His earliest victories came in the civil war of 1440–1 when he sided with the magnates and Ladislaus III against Elizabeth and her infant son. With the support of the young Nicholas of Ilok, ban of Macsó from 1438 and one of the wealthiest magnates in Hungary, Hunyadi took to the field and gradually defeated the queen’s forces across the kingdom’s southern territories. In return, Ladislaus III granted Hunyadi titles and estates that gave him joint authority (with Nicholas of Ilok) over Transylvania and the southern counties of Hungary, as well as command over the network of fortifications protecting the Danube frontier, including Belgrade. From that position of strength Hunyadi helped bring papal negotiators to Hungary, and an end to the civil war by 1442. Hunyadi also continued to take the fight to the Ottomans. In the spring of 1442 he defeated a major offensive led by Mezid Bey, and also dealt a major defeat to Şehabeddin Pasha, beylerbey of Rumelia, in Wallachia later that same year.21 Soon after, and more famously, Hunyadi then played a leading role in a crusade proclaimed by Eugenius IV.

Events leading to that crusade were set in motion some years before, in 1437, when a Byzantine delegation led by Emperor John VIII himself departed to Italy to negotiate a reconciliation of the centuries-old theological divisions between the Latin and Greek churches. The ultimate aim of the Byzantine delegation was to secure, in return for an agreement to unite their churches, Latin military aid for the Greeks.22 Months of vigorous exchange and negotiation followed the delegation’s arrival in Italy in 1438, much of it focused on matters that extended far beyond theology. While John VIII and others renegotiated vital commercial treaties with the Florentines, and while scholars and bookmen like Archbishop Bessarion of Nicaea and the humanist Traversari exchanged ideas and texts, theologians debated papal authority, the procession of the Holy Spirit, and the doctrine of purgatory. The negotiated settlement they reached, proclaimed on July 6, 1439, in the solemn decree Laetentur coeli, was worded carefully enough to allow all sides some room for preserving their own interpretations. But the decree was clear enough in its recognition of papal primacy that Eugenius IV was willing to call for a new crusade against Murad II.

By October of 1443, the campaign was underway. Led by King Ladislaus III of Poland and Hungary and John Hunyadi, an army of some twenty-five thousand Transylvanians, Hungarians, Poles, and others had moved across the Danube in a rapid, late-season campaign designed to catch the Ottomans off guard. Though the army was eventually driven back after a battle in the frozen Zlatitsa pass in December, the stories that made their way back to Buda and beyond – along with a few captured banners – were enough to inspire hope. Summer peace negotiations proved illusory, and by the fall of 1444 another land force of some twenty thousand had crossed the Danube. The decisive battle came on November 10 at Varna on the shores of the Black Sea, where a force under Murad II vastly outnumbered and soon outflanked and overwhelmed the crusaders. King Ladislaus III, who led a final charge before being captured and beheaded, was among them.23

But even in defeat, it had become impossible not to recognize Hunyadi’s importance as an aggressive and agile leader. He had proven himself to be always willing to take his troops on the offensive, able to learn from experience, and able to adapt. At Varna and then at a second major battle at Kosovo (the site of Serbia’s defeat and Murad I’s death in 1389), Hunyadi continued to develop an intimate familiarity with Ottoman ways of war, including the famous tactic of feigned retreat that would play an important role in the outcome at Belgrade in 1456.24

It was above all this reputation as a commander that brought Hunyadi ever more political recognition.25 In June of 1446 the Hungarian estates had appointed him as regent for the young Ladislaus V, who was at that time still the ward of Frederick III in Vienna. And even after his release and recognition as king, Ladislaus V recognized Hunyadi as “captain-general,” a title that conferred broad military, financial, and administrative powers. Hunyadi was also granted the title of “perpetual count” of Beszterce (Bistrița in modern Romania). Hunyadi thereby retained his position as the de facto leader of the armies stationed along the frontiers of the “bulwark of Christendom.”

In 1451, while Hunyadi was still regent, Ottoman diplomats brought offers of peace to those frontiers. They came in the name of a new sultan, Murad’s son and successor Mehmed II. The terms established a three-year truce with Hungary, and with Serbia not only a truce but the return of the Serbian princess Mara – daughter of the Despot Branković, Murad II’s widow after some fifteen years of marriage, and Mehmed II’s mother. Hunyadi and Branković no doubt welcomed a respite from years of Ottoman pressure. But for Mehmed II the gestures of peace were only one part of a larger strategy that combined well-timed diplomacy and targeted military action, all of it a prelude to the young sultan’s greatest ambition: to capture the city of Constantinople.26

Mehmed’s first moves were to subdue the encroachments of his rival Karaman in Anatolia and to send his ambassadors to Serbia and Hungary to secure a truce along Rumelia’s northern borders. He then launched a series of raids in the Peloponnesus to secure his southern flank. By August of 1452, his engineers had finished their construction of a fortress on the European shores of the Bosporus. Rumeli Hisarı (the “European castle”), also called (perhaps more descriptively) Boğazkesen, the “strait cutter” or “throat cutter,” towered some two hundred feet over the waters below, as it still does today, its cannons securing control of all traffic through the crucial waterway between Europe and Asia Minor. Final preparations for the siege then began in earnest in early 1453, above all with the forging of the sultan’s massive bombards. These weapons, which terrified the defenders of Constantinople and have fascinated ever since, were a marvel. The largest among them was nearly ten yards long and could cast stones weighing nearly two thousand pounds. The massive weapon, a “monster” in the words of the chronicler Doukas, was forged in Edirne, and for an arduous two months, hundreds of men and scores of oxen hauled it some 150 miles to Constantinople.27 Mehmed II awaited its arrival there, flanked by his Rumelian and Anatolian guards and surrounded by his janissaries. It was placed in front of the Saint Romanos gate, along with three smaller guns. Nine other guns faced Constantinople’s other main entrances. They began their fateful work on April 12, and within days large sections of the walls, unscathed for a thousand years, begun to crumble.

Yet for all of the sultan’s might, the outcome of the siege he had begun was far from inevitable. Though the defenders of the city were far too few – some six thousand Byzantine defenders under Emperor Constantine XI, some three thousand Venetians under Giovanni Giustiniani, and a small fleet of Venetian and Genoese ships – they put up a valiant defense. They countered repeated attempts by Ottoman sappers to undermine the walls near the Blachernae palace. They worked tirelessly to repair the walls and towers ruined by the sultan’s cannons. They took aim, too, with their own gunpowder weapons, many of them smaller cannons that were as accurate as they were lethal. Genoese sailors repeatedly ran the sultan’s blockades to bring in supplies. Even the sultan’s cannons had their limits. For all the terror they inspired, the latest weapons were inefficient and fragile – they took hours to load, fire, cool, and reload, and their overheated bronze barrels were constantly in danger of fracturing. For nearly a month, the Ottomans made relatively little progress. Only the sultan’s determination, the creativity of his combat engineers, and some good fortune eventually broke the stalemate. Laborers cleared a path through the forested hills of Pera to the north, laid down tracks with greased rollers and railings, and hauled six dozen warships overland from the Bosporus Strait and down into the waters of the Golden Horn. They also constructed a pontoon bridge – some one thousand barrels tied together with iron hooks and topped with planks – across the waters of the Golden Horn to the siege army’s positions outside the city. The dramatic move served its purpose as part of the sultan’s larger strategy: it forced the city’s defenders to stretch themselves still more thinly along its walls. Meanwhile the cannons continued their steady, grinding work. By late May the walls had been broken up enough to be scaled, the moats before them filled. The hour came for a final assault.

Early on the morning of May 29, 1453, a first wave of troops – the sultan’s more expendable Christian vassals – charged the walls. A second wave of Anatolian troops followed, then a third and final wave led by Mehmed’s janissaries. Amid the final charges the Venetian captain Giustiniani was wounded, and a small contingent of Ottomans slipped in a small gate near the Blachernae palace. The vivid (and often conflicting) accounts of what happened next, many of which soon evolved into myth and legend, have fueled the fascination with the story ever since: how the janissaries plundered the city’s houses and churches; the flight to Hagia Sophia, where crowds of refugees awaited their deliverance at the hands of angels; how a desperate Byzantine emperor himself rushed headlong into the fight – his corpse, clad in purple shoes, later pulled from a pile of bodies, his head displayed in the center of the city until nightfall.28 But for all of the drama of the narratives, in reality the number of casualties from the fall of the city was no more than a few thousand. A few thousand more, at most, escaped by Venetian and Genoese ships. The rest were captured and sold into slavery or left in the city to do the hard work of building a conquering sultan’s new imperial capital.

Sources in Scholarly Context: The Middle Ages, the Crusades, and the Problem of “Lateness”

The craft of historical interpretation presents its practitioners – masters and apprentices alike – with a multifaceted and often paradoxical challenge of representation. As John Gaddis has noted, the historian is at once working within and as an heir to history, yet somehow positioned above and beyond it, surveying it from a supposedly impartial, detached, even “scientific” perch, yet in a way that is always culturally and personally engaged. From that position, the historian must make crucial choices about subject matter, representation, and interpretation – about where and why to focus a given inquiry; about what (or how much) to leave in or out; about proportion, scale and scope, purpose and perspective; about where and how to assign causation and meaning. All of this means that we are compelled, like a fine clothier (in Gaddis’s apt metaphor), to “tailor” our representations into “fitting” representations, however partial or imperfect, of the many pasts that interest us. It means that any given work, inevitably, is both shaped by and reflective of an author’s own circumstance and perspective.29

Historical eras, too, are subject to similar dynamics of representation. Students of early European history do well to remember that the entire structure of their field of study is predicated on a certain narrative artifice. The very concept of the “Middle Ages,” after all, emerged only slowly, in the wake of so many thinkers whose partisan representations worked in some way to define their present (“reborn,” “reformed,” “enlightened”) against a “medieval” past.30 Each generation has done the same since, and we remain heirs, often unwittingly, to the tenacious and sometimes contradictory narratives they have left behind. Europe’s formative thousand years, as it has been called, thus appears by turns as an era of darkness and semi-pagan superstition, an age of pristine faith, or as the foundation that shaped the modern world until the eighteenth century.31

As with the Middle Ages generally, so too with the crusades. From the earliest years of the twelfth century to our own day, each generation has read the phenomenon unleashed in 1095 through the lens of its distinct historical moment.32 Medieval chroniclers and Renaissance historians preserved accounts of every campaign, collecting and often reshaping them in ways that reflected their own needs and experiences. In the wake of the Reformation, Protestant polemicists like John Foxe presented the crusades as a superstitious corruption of Christian ideals, while Catholics countered this understanding by holding the crusades up as an institution established in defense of the faith. Already by the seventeenth century the crusades had inspired a cacophony of competing, often contradictory interpretations: they were an expression of heroic idealism; a grand, uniting European enterprise; a marker of progress and civilization; an example of barbaric superstition, of sinful, wasteful, violent folly. It was that last strain of thought, famously, that won out in the eighteenth century.

Looking back on what had come to be called Europe’s “Middle Age,” leading lights of an Age of Reason poured out their vitriol on the whole era, and the crusades in particular. David Hume denounced them as “the most signal and most durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation,” a movement that reflected a continent “sunk into profound ignorance and superstition.”33 Nineteenth-century Romantics then took their turn, recovering what they saw as the pure faith and noble idealism of the crusaders. In the twentieth century, the legacies of colonialism and two world wars, the 1960s, the Cold War and its aftermath all shaped a range of debates that remained vital through the end of the century and beyond: how to define a crusade; how to assess matters of crusader piety, intentions, and motivations; how to assess the nature of Latin rule in the Levant; how to understand ties between crusading and European culture generally.34

The events of September 2001 and their long global aftermath then reshaped the study of the crusades yet again. A history of armed combat between Christians and Muslims took on a new energy and urgency, not least because of so much misplaced popular enthusiasm and the inevitably distorted appropriations of crusading in the public sphere.35 Nearly every military campaign from Urban II’s call to the First Crusade in 1095 to the fall of Acre in 1291 soon received fresh treatment, and these appeared alongside a flood of new synthetic surveys, historiographical studies, textbooks, and source translations. At the same time, scholars launched a series of thematic investigations that explored the world of the crusades from fundamentally new angles, again in ways that reflected their own time. The rise of postcolonial studies and Edward Said’s influential theory of Orientalism, for example, highlighted the importance of balancing Western and Christian sources and perspectives with careful studies grounded in Islamic sources and the many complex local environments of the Levant.36 New work on a range of other themes signaled analogous shifts in other areas of crusade scholarship: in an age of revolutionary transformations in communication, for example, a fresh emphasis on preaching and propaganda, narrative and memory; in an age of performance, a turn to liturgy; and amid ongoing contemporary struggles over equality, fresh work on questions of gender.37

Many of these scholarly transformations are ongoing. Some have hardly only begun, or have only begun to intensify, over the last twenty years. It would be impossible to do justice to the full range of all the latest scholarly findings here. But a discussion of a few salient themes can help clarify some of the most important developments and underscore the particular contribution of this volume. The most important issue at stake concerns how scholars have come to approach the period after the supposed “end” of crusading.38 With so much crusade scholarship having been focused – and often still focused – on the traditional topic of the campaigns of the “classical” era of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the story of what came after – the “crusades after the crusades,” as one Italian scholar has cleverly called them – long remained in the shadows.39 For most, the neglect was (and remains) rooted in older, half-conscious prejudices about the “later” Middle Ages generally. Just as the era was long dismissed as one of waning and crisis, so too did this perception hold with the crusade: its ideals were supposedly increasingly secularized, its institutions ineffective, its enthusiasm faltering.40

But from very early on, a few pioneering scholars were aware of the richness and potential of this later period. At the end of the nineteenth century, the prodigiously energetic Romanian nationalist and politician Nicolai Iorga drew together collections of key fifteenth-century documents from European libraries and archives. In the 1930s the Egyptian Aziz Atiya authored a first survey of the period in English, and in the 1970s Kenneth Setton turned to unexploited archival materials in Rome and Venice as the main sources for The Papacy and the Levant (1204–1571), a massive four-volume treatment of later crusading.41 Building on these foundations, by the 1990s a generation of scholars began to extend and refine our understanding of later crusading through at least three independent but broadly related and fruitfully overlapping scholarly efforts.

The first and most fundamental set of projects has been inspired by Norman Housley, whose early monographs on the papacy and crusading laid the foundation for two broad surveys, The Later Crusades and Religious Warfare in Europe.42 More recently, and more directly relevant to the sources collected here, Housley and others then turned to more detailed investigations of the fifteenth century in particular. A pioneering volume of collected essays highlighted crusading propaganda and its reception and implementation.43 Another milestone followed with Housley’s Crusading and the Ottoman Threat, which offered a broad analysis of ideology, strategy, finance, communication, and more, each theme read against the particulars of distinct chronological periods and settings.44 An international collaboration under Housley’s direction also brought together a network of scholars from across Europe to produce a series of innovative conferences and edited volumes. Even a cursory survey of the themes treated in this corpus of essays suggests the creativity and significance of this new work and its questions: how popes, princes, cities, and other constituencies shaped and pursued goals that reflected their various perspectives and regional circumstances; how ideals became action, or failed to, with detailed attention to matters of communication, logistics, finance, and diplomacy; how crusades resonated, or failed to, through the full range of medieval culture, from liturgy and pageantry to art and literature.45 Meanwhile, both in concert with and independently of these networks and their publications, scholars continue to fill in the broader picture with studies dedicated to a wide range of topics. Daniel Baloup has led a team of colleagues who have investigated topics ranging from strategy, logistics, and diplomacy to liturgy and memory. Benjamin Weber has authored a monumental study of the fifteenth- century papal efforts at crusade. Iulian Damian has published a monograph and several articles focused on the key figure of John of Capistrano.46

A second set of projects emerged from a small cohort of scholars of the Italian Renaissance. In 1995 James Hankins noted that crusading, though at the time hardly a field associated with the Renaissance, was a prominent theme in Quattrocento humanist literature, especially in the wake of Mehmed II’s conquest of Constantinople. Hankins argued compellingly for what made that literature distinct: not only its classicizing style and tone, but its settings, themes, and uses, and above all its importance as a means of articulating an emerging European identity.47 A decade later, Margaret Meserve traced the complexity of relationships between oral reports and early print for the dissemination of news surrounding the fall of Negroponte and authored a seminal monograph on the history of Islam in the writings of Renaissance humanists.48 In a similar vein, Nancy Bisaha placed the crusades at the center of Renaissance humanists’ project of shaping images of Greeks and Turks in ways that reflected and reinforced Western identity. She also authored important essays on the work of the crusading pope Pius II, and on the place of “late” crusading in the long-term development of human rights.49 Historians of Italian Renaissance art, too, have detected crusading themes in the cultural production of the 1440s and 1450s emerging from the courts of Mantua and Ferrara.50 Such work has helped historians further escape tired generalizations about the sterility, ineptitude, and decline of later crusading. The place of the crusades in the treatises, histories, images, objects, and other cultural products of the Renaissance reveals complex and fruitful interaction of old and new, and the resonance of crusading quite apart from its geopolitical and military failures.

Recent advances in late Byzantine and early Ottoman scholarship, to note a third cluster of projects, have also helped transform our view of fifteenth-century crusading. Well into the twentieth century, reflecting lines of interpretation that reached back to the medieval and Renaissance sources themselves, scholars often read the Latin, Byzantine, and Ottoman worlds against one another, and the story of the later crusades as an inevitable clash between mutually antagonistic civilizations.51 But for many years now our best scholarship has fundamentally rejected such extremes and sought a more nuanced, less prejudicial account. The work of Jonathan Harris, among many others, has explored the complexities of the story that culminated in 1453. The “end of Byzantium” was something other than a story of the clash of civilizations. It was rooted precisely in the intimate connections between the Ottoman and Byzantine worlds, generations old by the middle of the fifteenth century, the result of a complex set of historical accidents, and driven by geopolitical concerns and self-interest. Meanwhile Cemal Kafadar, Daniel Goffman, and Colin Imber have made possible what Goffman has called an “Ottomancentric” scholarly view, one that seeks to reclaim the full nuance and complexity of the Ottoman world, and of its ties with Europe.52 As Goffman has noted, the Ottoman sultans were no more or less warlike or brutal than their fifteenth-century counterparts in England, France, or Germany. The Ottomans’ commercial and diplomatic ties, their cultural ambitions as heirs of Rome, even their common ground in the Abrahamic faiths, all tied them back to the “Greater Western World,” even as the Ottomans also maintained a certain “responsive plasticity” that allowed them to co-opt and adapt elements from all parts of their empire, creating an enduring “Euro-Ottoman symbiosis.”53

Amid these broader reconsiderations, scholars have turned with particular energy and focus to Eastern Europe, and especially to the region still known, however problematically, as the “Balkans.” Once dismissed as backward and marginal, the region is now central to new projects that seek to decenter and rethink traditional geographies. The cultural zone that reached from Rome and central Italy across the Adriatic toward Hungary, Serbia, Romania, and the Black Sea was long a crossroads for the Latin, Greek, Slavic, and Ottoman worlds, a frontier whose complex interactions are now being sorted out more fully. It is a setting that remains difficult to access for most, not least because nationalist and Cold War legacies long shaped scholarship in the West, and especially graduate training, in ways that militated against scholarly collaboration. Discussion of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance were (and remain) for most scholars a conversation conducted in English, French, German, or Italian, not Hungarian, Romanian, Serbian, or Turkish.

More fundamentally, the “Balkans” remain in the shadows of a stubborn, lingering prejudice. Though we have worked to recover Byzantium and the Muslim world from Orientalism, scholarship on southeastern Europe has not yet been accessible enough to break the stereotype of the region as somehow backward, dark, exotic, and ambiguous. But a number of studies, many in English, have now shed light on the region in the crucial period of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the complexities of the story of the growing Ottoman presence there.54 Debate surrounds even the most basic concepts – conquest, transition, and integration each captures something of the changes, but each also has its limits. Scholars struggle to balance evidence of accommodation (istimalet) and interaction with the harsh realities of raiding, warfare, enslavement and deportation, rebellion and resistance.55 In that setting, a frontier so vibrant with new winners and losers, crusading appears as only one of the region’s many possibilities for military and diplomatic engagement; a symbolically and ideologically charged option, but one whose tremendous potential energy nevertheless had to be set off by particular circumstances. Within such a framework, the career of John Hunyadi and the Crusade of Varna (1444) have recently received more detailed treatment, as has the broad sweep of Ottoman-Hungarian conflict from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries.56

In light of these new directions, the history of crusading has become one of the most energized and challenging fields in the study of medieval history overall. This volume offers itself as a modest contribution to that field. In one sense, it makes no claim to originality. At its center is a story whose main outlines, main characters, and challenges of interpretation have been well known for a very long time.57 But these sources have never been fully drawn together for a wider audience in quite the way they have been here. They are presented as a focused case study that both renders Belgrade’s story more accessible and in doing so also raises a number of broad issues of method and interpretation. The final section of this introduction articulates how the sources and structure of this volume engage many of these issues.

Framing the Sources: Selection, Structure, and Significance

Source collections, like all works of scholarship, position themselves within certain debates and frame their own issues and arguments. Their selection of materials, the manner in which the material is excerpted and arranged, introduced and annotated, all reflect an effort to raise issues and stake claims, implicitly or otherwise. This collection is no exception. It seeks to make clear through source material on Belgrade how this crusade reflected the full range and vitality of fifteenth-century culture. The collection also highlights the ways in which Belgrade, perhaps more than any other crusade of its era, poses distinct challenges of interpretation. A survey of the sources presented here, the story they tell, and the structure of their presentation will prepare the way for readers to make sense of it all for themselves.

On June 29, 1453, one month to the day after the start of the siege of Constantinople, refugees brought word of the sultan’s victory to Venice. By early July, Serbians and Venetians had brought the news to Austria, and soon after the news finally reached Rome itself. Among the most powerful reactions was that of the humanist churchman Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II, who wrote to Pope Nicholas V from Austria. “I grieve that Saint Sophia, the most famous church in all the world has been ruined or polluted,” Aeneas famously lamented. “Here is a second death for Homer, and for Plato too.”58 By early fall, Pope Nicholas V, the former Tomasso Parentucelli, whose love of books and buildings helped shape his reputation as the famed “Renaissance” pope, was at work on the formal call to crusade Etsi ecclesia Christi, issued on September 30, 1453 (document 1).59 In February 1454, Duke Philip of Burgundy responded by staging an elaborate feast, the famous “Feast of the Pheasant,” in which he demonstrated – at least by way of a splendid performance – his serious intention to uphold his family’s tradition of crusading.60

Meanwhile diplomats made their way to other courts across Western Europe in the hopes of organizing whatever response to the call might be forthcoming. Their efforts had met with fragile success in Italy by the following April, when the rival powers of the peninsula agreed to the Peace of Lodi.61 To the north, a series of three diets met over the next year.62 At Regensburg in May the results were ephemeral. Nicholas V, wary of councils, and Emperor Frederick III, wary of both the pope and his many other rivals, both stayed away. Those who did attend – Philip the Good of Burgundy and Margrave, Albrecht Achilles, among others – could agree only to hold another meeting at Frankfurt in October. At that meeting Piccolomini, a leading humanist of the day, delivered the stunning oration “The Fall of Constantinople” (Constantinopolitana clades) (document 2).63 But the complexities of collective mobilization strangled any real results, and only preliminary agreements could be made at the second diet, among them to hold a third assembly at Wiener Neustadt in February of 1455. As that diet concluded in April, word arrived that Nicholas V had died after a long illness. Shortly after, news came that Mehmed II had conquered the Serbian city of Novo Brdo, along with its silver mines (document 3.1). Nearly two years of planning seemed to be getting nowhere.

The election of Nicholas V’s successor reinvigorated the faltering enterprise. On April 8, 1455, the college of cardinals chose an aging Catalan bishop, Alfonso de Borja, as a compromise candidate. Many thought the seventy-seven-year-old would be an easy mark for political manipulation.64 But as Pope Callixtus III, he took to the cause of crusading with surprising vigor and conviction. In May 1455 he reissued Nicholas V’s call from the previous September, adding practical clarifications regarding its provisions. He took firm control of a reformed and refocused institutional apparatus of preachers and indulgence collectors, especially those active in Italy.65 He sent legates to the courts of Western Europe’s major powers, funded and built a crusading fleet to operate in the Aegean, and set a departure date of March 1, 1456.

Among the new pope’s most important allies in this renewed effort was John of Capistrano, a Franciscan friar from central Italy who more than any other figure became the most visible and vocal leader of the new crusade.66 Friar John was at the height of his career in Italy as a reformer and popular preacher in April of 1451, when his reputation drew the attention of Emperor Frederick III and his secretary Piccolomini. They invited Friar John to come north to Vienna. He was armed not only with his own forceful personality and intellectual skill but also with the relics of his recently sainted mentor Bernardino of Siena, whose canonization Capistrano himself had largely orchestrated. The friar preached to crowds in the thousands, and his popularity quickly propelled him on a tour that ensured he would never return to his homeland. Over the next two years he traveled from Austria and the borders of Bohemia across Saxony, Silesia, Poland, and Moravia, preaching hundreds of sermons (with the aid of his interpreters) whose full cycles sometimes lasted days on end.

By 1455 events had transformed the friar’s mission into a crusade. In the summer of that year, he began an ambitious preaching tour that took him through Hungary, Transylvania, and Romania – “to the farthest frontiers of Christendom,” as he himself put it in one letter (document 3.5). Throughout the journey, over some twelve months and perhaps four hundred miles in all, Capistrano channeled all of his considerable talent and energy – and his often irascible temperament – into recruiting and organizing a volunteer army that could serve effectively in the field. Together with Cardinal Juan Carvajal, papal legate to Hungary, he worked to negotiate the fraught relationships among the Hungarian princes and others along Europe’s southeastern frontier (documents 3.5–3.8). Capistrano had also to work with Hunyadi, who as a seasoned warrior was understandably skeptical of, and on occasion openly irritated at, the prospect of so many untrained volunteers thrusting their way onto the battlefield (document 3.9). An assembly for planning the campaign against Mehmed opened at Buda on February 6, 1456, and on February 14 Carvajal solemnly proclaimed Callixtus III’s crusading bull to the crowd. Capistrano himself proudly took the cross from the legate, and over the next months he worked tirelessly to raise an army of volunteers. By late June, as the armies began to gather before Belgrade, Callixtus III issued a solemn bull, Cum his superioribus (document 5.1), calling all of Europe to prayer, and offering generous indulgences in return for their devotion. Soon after, Capistrano wrote a hurried appeal to the region’s princes: if they did not want to fight the Turks in their very homes, they should hasten to Belgrade to join the fight there (document 3.10).

The evidence of that fight, which began only days after Capistrano’s last letter, is at once abundant and problematic. Part II of this volume presents a collection of seven accounts from three eyewitnesses to the events: John of Capistrano, John Hunyadi, and John of Tagliacozzo, one of Capistrano’s closest followers. Capistrano and Hunyadi wrote three letters each (documents 7–11 and 13), all but one of them within days of the battle – and one of them, Capistrano’s first, written within hours after its conclusion. Though brief, these letters thus seem to provide remarkably immediate access to the battle for Belgrade through the eyes of its two leading protagonists. Tagliacozzo’s letter, somewhat longer and composed only a week after the battle, provides still another direct witness (document 12).

Part III then follows the news of the events as it echoed across Central and Western Europe. Its mix of private letters and public diplomatic correspondence illustrates the complex short-term dynamics of communication and flow of information after Belgrade, which in principle remained an active campaign after the raising of the siege. In these texts we see a pope and a king basking in the glow of a shocking underdog victory (document 21), a legate’s pleas for secular powers to capitalize on the victory’s momentum (document 15), a city council spreading joyous news (document 18), and private correspondents caught in a swirl of rumor and lamenting the confusion of a campaign whose sudden and unexpected victory caught everyone by surprise (document 14).

Following these brief accounts, Part IV contains John of Tagliacozzo’s Story of the Victory of Belgrade (document 25). This text, too, is a letter, sent to John’s Franciscan brother, James of the Marches, on the fourth anniversary of the battle for Belgrade. In one respect its basic structure and many elements of its account share much with Tagliacozzo’s early report from the immediate aftermath of the battle. But this later account is also quite different, and much more complex. It is a long, richly detailed, and dramatic account that has long stood as easily the most important single source for the battle itself.67

Collectively the documents in Parts II–IV thus provide the main outlines of the key events of 1456. By the first week in July a large Ottoman force had encircled Belgrade. A flotilla of two hundred ships and over sixty galleys positioned itself on the Danube. On the land before the walls of the city, a force of perhaps as many as sixty thousand was digging in, so many in number that their white tents seemed (as Tagliacozzo put it) to cover the land “like snow.” Their formation most likely reflected the standard Ottoman deployment for a siege – the sultan, on higher ground and guarded by his janissaries, at the center, with Rumelian and Anatolian cavalry guarding the wings. Meanwhile combat engineers erected the series of earthworks and artillery positions that would take down the walls of the fortress. The defenders of Belgrade, watching it all unfold, numbered a pitiful fraction of their besiegers: a garrison of some seven thousand soldiers under the command of Hunyadi’s brother-in-law, Michael Szilágyi.

In early July, the sultan’s guns roared to life. The walls of the ancient Danube town in the end stood no chance. Soon after, Hunyadi made his way down to the city with a flotilla on the Danube, supported by a relief army moving along the shore. The overall numbers are difficult to pin down, not least because the flow of troops caused the force to fluctuate considerably – estimates range from ten to thirty thousand.68 In any event, Hunyadi’s own hardened veterans and mercenaries formed the core of the force. The rest were Capistrano’s untrained mob of volunteers: the farmers, artisans, and clerics he had recruited in the spring and early summer of 1456 across southern Hungary.

The first combat came on July 14, when Hunyadi’s ships, supported by locals from the port at Belgrade, engaged the Ottoman blockade northwest of the city. Hunyadi’s ships broke through, and after several hours of fighting on the water they had captured or sunk most of the ships in the Ottoman fleet. The relief army moved into Belgrade, and Capistrano’s followers camped across the Sava River at Semlin. Over the next days, Ottoman cannons continued to blast away at Belgrade’s walls, and mortars terrified the inhabitants of the city. The guns fell silent on July 20, and on the evening of July 21 the sultan launched a full ground assault. Light infantry led the way, followed by the elite janissaries. They were soon able to break through the many gaps in the walls that had been opened up by the cannons. In part their advance may have been possible because Hunyadi had deliberately withdrawn to the citadel that Stefan Lazarević had refurbished decades before. From there the garrison’s defenders launched a counterattack that drove the Ottomans from the Upper Town. The fighting among the ruined walls was fierce – as Hunyadi later recalled, in an oft-repeated line, it unfolded “not in a fortress, but in a field” – and seems to have lasted well into the next day.

Mehmed and his generals soon realized that the city would not fall so easily, and they changed tactics. The sultan ordered a feigned retreat, hoping to draw the defenders out for a battle in the open field. It was a tactic Hunyadi knew well, and he ordered his troops to hold back. Capistrano’s followers, though, seem not to have known, or not to have cared. They advanced across the Sava, by some accounts under Capistrano’s direction, and began pillaging the abandoned Ottoman positions. A full counterattack soon erupted. Whether by accident or by design, the end result was the same: Belgrade’s defenders captured the Ottoman artillery positions and drove the sultan’s troops all the way back to his own tents. There, again, Mehmed himself is said by at least some accounts to have been wounded, and to have killed many with his own hands. Reinforcements soon arrived to prevent a total rout, but by nightfall the conqueror of Constantinople had been forced to retreat.

Such is the basic story in broad, often vivid outline. Yet even as they reveal that story, the sources in Parts II–IV in other respects repeatedly undermine its coherence. Careful reading shows these accounts to be by turns incomplete, competing, even contradictory on key points. In part the issue is as old as Thucydides: in the chaos of battle, inevitably, accounts of what happened, even from eyewitnesses, are partial and confused. But the problem is also rooted in the fact that so many stakeholders sought, from the earliest moments after the battle, to appropriate its events for their various purposes. Capistrano’s first letters are radically different, in some ways, from Hunyadi’s. Other reports in the days and weeks that followed were shaped by the complex intersection of fact and rumor, of oral and written reports. In that respect they also represent another instance of the rapid dissemination (and distortions) of information via what for this era can properly be called “news.”69 These sources thus present a rich paradox: on the one hand, we have an abundance of detailed accounts of an event, many from those who lived through them and who wrote only days, even hours, after its unfolding. On the other hand, we have so many perspectives, and so many different accounts, that the exact course of some of the crucial moments of the siege has never been fully understood. As one leading scholar put it over sixty years ago, Belgrade “is one of those historical events that remain inadequately known despite an abundance of source material, because from the very outset the eyewitness reports were used as partisan documents.”70 Figuring out “what happened” has therefore long proven tenaciously difficult.

Recent scholarship has begun to ask different questions, however, and thus to change what is at stake in these texts. For decades now historians have developed more sophisticated theoretical frameworks around the idea of history as narrative representation, and in that context Marcus Bull has recently framed a new interpretive challenge for crusade studies: greater awareness of the complexities involved in moving from personal experience of an event to a supposedly unmediated “eyewitness” narrative.71 Meanwhile others have emphasized the role of history and historical narrative in shaping collective cultural memory. In light of this work, students of the crusades now confront the idea that our sources never merely narrate facts; those sources are also themselves culturally positioned representations, each of which reflects the distinct perspectives, needs, and experiences – whether on the battlefield or far from it – of those who lived through the crusading era.72

These kinds of approaches have begun to shape recent scholarship on crusading narratives, such as those about Mehmed II’s siege of Rhodes in 1480, which have now been edited and studied with great care.73 These new approaches are of clear relevance in our readings on Belgrade. In part they help explain – and enliven – the many gaps and contradictions across the patchwork of evidence found in the sources gathered in Parts II and III of this volume. They help make sense of the ways in which key facts of the battle were not only contested, but shaped and appropriated for self-serving purposes. Callixtus III, for example, who called Europe to prayer on the eve of the battle (document 5), who trumpeted the victory in so many letters afterward (document 21), and who commemorated it with an elaborate new liturgical feast whose legacy remains alive in modern Hungary (document 24), was only one of many figures who sought to make the most of the story. Attentiveness to the dynamics of narrative, memory, and propaganda also help explain how these sources can so effortlessly combine “eyewitness” experience and compellingly vivid, realistic detail with propaganda rooted in omens and pious miracle stories. Scholars long sought to separate “fact” from “pious fiction” in these accounts, the real and reliable from the fantastical. In light of recent work, however, that is perhaps a somewhat misguided line of inquiry. The sources collected in Parts II–IV allow readers to puzzle over the evidence and wrestle with the interpretative challenge for themselves.

A final section, Part V, extends these readings into the realm of long-term cultural memory. In the years and decades after 1456, a diverse cohort of authors recycled, revised, and reshaped the earliest accounts of the battle and brought its story to life anew in a range of genres: chronicles, memoirs, letters, sermons, liturgies, poems, images, and sculptures. Only a small portion of this material can be presented in Part V, which focuses mainly on passages from a few of the most familiar chronicles of the fifteenth century. While the clerical perspectives of an Austrian priest shaped the work of a figure like Thomas Ebendorfer (document 26), the cultural aspirations of the “Renaissance” royal court of Hunyadi’s son Matthias Corvinus shaped the account of the notary John Thurocz (document 31). In the same years a range of chroniclers from the Ottoman world stitched the story of Belgrade into their larger accounts. Eyewitnesses like the merchant Jacopo Promontorio (document 29) and the Serbian janissary Konstantin Mihailović (document 34) offered brief but vivid accounts of the events in their memoirs. Greek authors like Chalkokondyles (document 27) and Kritoboulos (document 28) clothed Mehmed II’s loss in a classical light, while Ottoman chroniclers (documents 30, 32, and 33) subsumed the sultan’s defeat into a larger story of the inevitable rise of a new and glorious Ottoman regime.74 Even these few selections are enough to show how strongly the story of the battle continued to resonate long after the summer of 1456, and how forcefully the era’s dynamics of narrative, memory, and propaganda remained at work.

Conclusion: Belgrade as a Fifteenth-Century Event

The era of “later” crusading has long been somewhat peripheral to a story grounded in an earlier, supposedly golden, age of Urban II and Bohemond, Richard and Saladin, Enrico Dandalo and Louis IX. To the extent that this may still be true, this volume offers itself as another resource for integrating the later story with the earlier. Its texts provide another space for students and scholars to explore the richness of the “later” period on its own terms, and to work through points of comparison and contrast, continuity and change. Readers may discern in these sources a range of issues of organization and logistics, for example, that are in one sense familiar carryovers from earlier campaigns: the call to crusade, indulgences, diplomacy, preaching, rituals of taking the cross. They may also discern evidence of what military historians have called the “face of battle.”75 Tagliacozzo’s extended narrative, in particular, offers up striking representations of what must have been the human experience, and heavy human cost, of armed combat: the confusion and horrors of the fight; women caring for the wounded and dying, and sometimes pressed into desperate battlefield roles; harried refugees and humiliated captives; bodies burned, lacerated, ritually humiliated, rotting. There are other glimpses of the experience as well: the sultan’s massive army and its janissaries, to say nothing of his thunderous cannons; innocents terrified by his mortar rounds; the resonance of humanist oratory and historiography; the energies of fifteenth-century piety and prophecy; and perhaps above all the energy of a crusader camp filled with commoners, by turns raucous, violent, populist, and pious, even musical – all of it shaped and harnessed by a stern Observant Franciscan who was both powerfully steeped in and also unafraid to manipulate its loyalty.

More broadly than these issues of continuity and change in the history of crusading itself, these sources also speak to the distinctiveness of the era of Belgrade generally. Students still too often encounter that era in fragmented and competing ways. For some, it is the heart of the “late” Middle Ages: an era of famine, plague, and war, of peasant rebellion and crisis in the church, all of it ending in reforms that anticipated the Reformation. For others, it is the Quattrocento, an age of humanists and their love of the Ancients. For still others it is the beginning of the “early modern,” an elusive time of transition from Christendom to Europe, to sovereignty, secular diplomacy, and revolutionary changes in military affairs.76 Amid so many competing narratives, each with its own compellingly broad vistas, these sources have the power to draw the era’s many strands together. Belgrade emerges as a story that reflects the multiplicity of the “late-medieval,” with its indulgences and war masses, Capistrano’s revivalist preaching, and the populist piety of the Holy Name of Jesus among his poor followers. Yet it is also a story whose dynamics intersect with traditionally “Renaissance” themes – a future pope’s humanist oratory; Gutenberg’s earliest typesetting, used for Callixtus’s bulls; the frenetic travel, diplomacy, and communication among fifteenth-century cultural brokers; the textual communities of northern European monks, scholastics, humanists, and historians who remembered Belgrade, and many crusades besides, for generations after 1456. All of this is reflective of what scholars now recognize as a distinctly vibrant fifteenth-century religious and cultural landscape.77

NOTES

1 For an accessible but substantive overview of the material surveyed here, see Paul Cobb, The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), especially ch. 9. See also Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1481 (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1990); Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). For Byzantine perspectives, an accessible overview is Jonathan Harris, The End of Byzantium (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). For the Balkan world, John Fine’s The Late Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Late Twelfth Century to the Ottoman Conquest (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994) remains an important starting point. See also Nikolay Antov, The Ottoman “Wild West”: The Balkan Frontier in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

2 For a brief survey, see Harris, End of Byzantium, 7–14. See n. 1 above in this introduction. For more details on the devastating economic consequences of the siege, see Nevra Necipoğlu, Byzantium between the Ottomans and the Latins: Politics and Society in the Late Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), ch. 7.

3 The best overview remains Imber, Ottoman Empire, ch. 7, especially 252–80. See n. 1 above in this introduction.

4 Imber, Ottoman Empire, 276–7. See n. 1 above in this introduction.

5 Pál Engel, The Realm of St. Stephen: A History of Medieval Hungary, 895–1526, trans. Tamás Pálosfalvi (London: Tauris, 2005). For military affairs, also see Tamás Pálosfalvi, From Nicopolis to Mohács: A History of Ottoman-Hungarian Warfare, 1389–1526 (Leiden: Brill, 2018), especially chs. 1–2.

6 Mark Whelan, “Catastrophe or Consolidation? Sigismund’s Response to Defeat after the Crusade of Nicopolis (1396),” in Between Worlds: The Age of the Jagiellonians, ed. Christopher Nicholson, Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, and Florin Ardelean (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2013), 215–27; Pálosfalvi, From Nicopolis to Mohács, 18–25. See n. 5 above in this introduction.

7 Fine, Late Medieval Balkans, 457–66. See n. 1 above in this introduction.

8 András Borosy, “The Militia Portalis in Hungary Before 1526,” in From Hunyadi to Rákóczi. War and Society in Late Medieval and Early Modern Hungary, ed. János M. Bak and Béla K. Király (New York: Brooklyn College Press, 1982), 63–80.

9 For basic biographical information on Pipo Scolari, see “Pipo of Ozora (1369–1426),” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare and Military Technology, ed. Clifford Rogers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). See also Katalin Prajda, “The Florentine Scolari Family at the Court of Sigismund of Luxemburg in Buda,” Journal of Early Modern History 14 (2010): 513–33.

10 The best general overview of the city of Belgrade remains the account of Marko Popović, Beogradska Tvrdjava [The Fortress of Belgrade] (Belgrade: Beograd Arheološki Institut, 2006), with a helpful English summary at 321–31.

11 Fine, Late Medieval Balkans, 500–2, 509–10. See n. 1 above in this introduction. See also Mihailo Popović, “The Order of the Dragon and the Serbian Despot Stefan Lazarević,” in Emperor Sigismund and the Orthodox World, ed. Ekaterini Mitsiou (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2010), 103–6.

12 Popović, Beogradska Tvrdjava, especially the English summary at 320–25. See n. 10 above in this introduction.

13 For accessible English-language treatments of art and culture in the age of Stefan Lazarević, see the recent work of Jelena Erdeljan, e.g., Chosen Places: Constructing New Jerusalems in Slavia Orthodoxa (Leiden: Brill, 2017), especially 178–87, and “Strategies of Constructing Jerusalem in Medieval Serbia,” in Visual Constructs of Jerusalem, ed. Bianca Kühnel, Galit Noga-Banai, and Hanna Vorholt (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 231–40.

14 Miloš Ivanović, “Militarization of the Serbian State under Ottoman Pressure,” Hungarian Historical Review 8 (2019): 390–410; Marko Šuica, “Effects of the Early Ottoman Conquests on the State and Social Structure of the Lazarević Principality,” in State and Society in the Balkans before and after Establishment of Ottoman Rule, ed. Srđan Rudić and Selim Aslantaş (Belgrade: Belgrade Institute of History, 2017), 7–19.

15 Popović, Beogradska Tvrdjava, 324. See n. 10 above in this introduction.

16 See Pálosfalvi, From Nicopolis to Mohács, 70 and n62 for the disputes surrounding this turn of events. See n. 5 above in this introduction.

17 For a brief but vivid portrait of Murad II, and a survey of the events of 1422, see Harris, End of Byzantium, 90–6. See n. 1 above in this introduction. See also Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 5–10.

18 Fine, Late Medieval Balkans, 529–30. See n. 1 above in this introduction. For Mara’s remarkable story see Mihailo St. Popović, Mara Branković: Eine Frau zwischen dem christlichen und dem islamischen Kulturkreis im 15. Jahrhundert (Mainz: Rutzen, 2010).

19 For a succinct recent summary of the siege and its sources, see John Jefferson, The Holy Wars of King Wladislas and Sultan Murad: The Ottoman-Christian Conflict from 1438–1444 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 235–46.

20 For a general overview, see the essays in Extincta est lucerna orbis: John Hunyadi and His Time, ed. Ana Dumitran, Lajos-Loránd Mádly, and Alexandru Simon (Cluj-Napoca: IDC Press, 2009).

21 Pálosfalvi, From Nicopolis to Mohács, 92–105, is attentive to the challenge of the scant or otherwise problematic source material for these events. See n. 5 above in this introduction.

22 Harris, End of Byzantium, ch. 6. See n. 1 above in this introduction. See also the essays in Giuseppe Alberigo, ed., Christian Unity. The Council of Ferrara-Florence (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1991).

23 Primary sources for the campaign as a whole are found in Colin Imber, The Crusade of Varna, 1443–45 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006). The introduction to Imber’s volume also provides excellent context. See also Imber, “The Crusade of Varna, 1443–1445: What Motivated the Crusaders?,” in The Religions of the Book. Christian Perceptions, 1400–1660, ed. Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 45–65. See also the comprehensive

campaign history by Jefferson, The Holy Wars of King Wladislas and Sultan

Murad. See n. 19 above in this introduction.

24 Pálosfalvi, From Nicopolis to Mohács, 141–66 (see n. 5 above in this introduction); Emanuel Antoche, “Hunyadi’s Campaign of 1448 and the Second Battle of Kosovo Polje (October 17–20),” in Reconfiguring the Fifteenth-Century Crusade, ed. Norman Housley (London: Palgrave McMillan, 2017), 245–84.

25 See the succinct summary of Hunyadi’s rise in Pálosfalvi, From Nicopolis to Mohács, 92–105. See n. 5 above in this introduction.

26 For this famous campaign, in addition to the older account of Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror, 75–101 (see n. 17 above in this introduction), see both the accessible account of Harris, The End of Byzantium, especially chs. 8–9 (see n. 1 above in this introduction), and above all the monumental study of Marios Philippides and Walter K. Hanak, The Siege and the Fall of Constantinople in 1453: Historiography, Topography, and Military Studies (London: Routledge, 2011).

27 Philippides and Hanak, Siege and Fall, 413–29. See n. 26 above in this introduction. For general context see also Imber, Ottoman Empire, 269–71 (see n. 1 above in this introduction) and more fully Gábor Ágoston, Guns for the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

28 For a sampling of the stories see Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror, 93–4 (see n. 17 above in this introduction), and for a comprehensive analysis see Phillipides and Hanak, Siege and Fall, ch. 4, especially 231–9 (see n. 26 above in this introduction).

29 John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

30 A useful scholarly appraisal appears in Timothy Reuter, “Medieval: Another Tyrannous Construct?” The Medieval History Journal 1 (1998): 25–45. A more popular appraisal is in Jacques LeGoff, Must We Divide History into Periods?, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

31 On this complex dynamic with respect to issues of religious history, see the still foundational essay by John Van Engen, “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem,” The American Historical Review 91 (1986): 519–52. For a North American perspective see also the reflections of Paul Freedman and Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Medievalisms Old and New: The Rediscovery of Alterity in North American Medieval Studies,” The American Historical Review 103, no. 3 (1998): 677–704. For a challenging reconsideration of periodization see Constantin Fasolt, “Hegel’s Ghost: Europe, the Reformation, and the Middle Ages,” Viator 39 (2008): 345–86.

32 A strong account of this rich history is available in Christopher Tyerman, The Debate on the Crusades (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011).

33 Accessible selections from Hume can be found in The Crusades: A Reader, ed. S.J. Allen and Emilie Amt, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 388–92 (here 388 and 390).

34 A good synthesis up to the early 2000s is available in Norman Housley, Contesting the Crusades (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). See also the essays collected in the multivolume survey edited by Andrew Jotischky, The Crusades (London: Routledge, 2008).

35 See generally the essays collected in Andrew Albin, Mary Carpenter Erler, Thomas O’Donnell, Nicholas L. Paul, and Nina Rowe, eds., Whose Middle Ages? Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), and for the crusades especially, see the contributions of Nicholas Paul (“Modern Intolerance and the Medieval Crusades,” at 34–43) and Adam Bishop (“#DeusVult,” at 256–64), both with suggestions for further reading. See also Jonathan Phillips and Mike Horswell, eds., Perceptions of the Crusades from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century (Andover: Routledge, 2018) and Mike Horswell and Akil N. Awan, eds., The Crusades in the Modern World (Andover: Routledge, 2018).

36 Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012) and Cobb, The Race for Paradise (see n. 1 above in this introduction).

37 Foundational works on preaching include Penny J. Cole, The Preaching of the Crusades to the Holy Land, 1095–1270 (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1991) and Christoph T. Maier, Preaching the Crusades: Mendicant Friars and the Cross in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). On the importance of narrative, see Marcus Bull and Damien Kempf, eds., Writing the Early Crusades: Text, Transmission and Memory (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2014), and on memory, Megan Cassidy-Welch, ed., Remembering the Crusades and Crusading (London: Routledge, 2017). On liturgy see M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons: Liturgy and the Making of Crusade Ideology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017), and on gender Susan Edgington and Sarah Lambert, eds., Gendering the Crusades (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) and also Natasha R. Hodgson, Katherine J. Lewis, and Matthew M. Mesley, eds., Crusading and Masculinities (London: Routledge, 2019).

38 Housley, Contesting the Crusades, ch. 6. See n. 34 above in this introduction.

39 Marco Pellegrini, Le crociate dopo le crociate: da Nicopoli a Belgrado (1396–1456) (Bologna: Il mulino, 2013).

40 For a general assessment of the era, see Howard Kaminsky, “From Lateness to Waning to Crisis. The Burden of the Later Middle Ages,” Journal of Early Modern History 4 (2000): 85–125. Revealing for contemporary scholars’ approaches to periodization and the crusades is a recent online bibliographical project, which asked this generation’s leading historians to reflect on “the most important books on the crusades” (https://apholt.com/2017/07/27/historians-rank-the-most-important-books-on-the-crusades ). A cursory survey of their reflections suggests that only around two percent of the titles that came to mind concerned themselves with the period after 1291. I am grateful to my colleague Michael Cervera for this reference.

41 Nicolai Iorga, Notes et extraits pour servir à l’histoire des croisades au XV. siècle, vol. 4, 1453–1476 (Bucharest: Acad. Roumaine, 1915); Aziz Suryal Atiya, The Crusade in the Later Middle Ages (London: Meuthen, 1938; repr., New York: Kraus, 1970); Kenneth M. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant (1204–1571), 4 vols. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1976–8). For an appraisal of these works in the larger arc of historiography, see Tyerman, The Debate on the Crusades, 200–11 and especially 208–11. See n. 32 above in this introduction.

42 Norman Housley, The Later Crusades, 1274–1580: From Lyons to Alcazar (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) and Religious Warfare in Europe, 1400–1536 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

43 Norman Housley, ed. Crusading in the Fifteenth Century: Message and Impact (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 2004). The introduction is especially useful for its broad appraisal of the field of “late” crusading to the end of the twentieth century, and especially of the foundational work of Iorga and Setton.

44 Norman Housley, Crusading and the Ottoman Threat, 1453–1505 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

45 Norman Housley, ed., The Crusade in the Fifteenth Century: Converging and Competing Cultures (London: Routledge, 2017) and Housley, ed., Reconfiguring the Fifteenth-Century Crusade (see n. 24 above in this introduction).

46 Daniel Baloup and Manuel Sánchez Martínez, eds., Partir en croisade à la fin du Moyen Âge: financement et logistique (Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Midi, 2015); Daniel Baloup, Benoît Joudiou, and Jacques Paviot, eds., Les projets de croisade: géostratégie et diplomatie européenne du XIV^e au XVII^e siècle (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2014); Benjamin Weber, Lutter contre les Turcs: les formes nouvelles de la croisade pontificale au XVe siècle (Rome: École française de Rome, 2013); Iulian M. Damian, Ioan de Capestrano și Cruciada Târzie (Cluj-Napoca: Academia Română/Centrul de Studii Transilvane, 2011).

47 James Hankins, “Renaissance Crusaders: Humanist Crusade Literature in the Age of Mehmed II,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 49 (1995): 111–207. Hankins credits humanist crusading literature with an “articulation of a new secular identity for western Europe” (123) and with the development of the idea of the West as the “true heir to Greek and Latin antiquity, and therefore the heartland of civilization” (124).

48 Margaret Meserve, “News from Negroponte: Politics, Popular Opinion, and Information Exchange in the First Decade of the Italian Press,” Renaissance Quarterly 59 (2006): 440–80; and Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

49 Nancy Bisaha, Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). See also her essays “Pope Pius II and the Crusade,” in Crusading in the Fifteenth Century, 39–52

(see n. 43 above in this introduction); and “Reactions to the Fall of Constantinople and the Concept of Human Rights,” in Reconfiguring the Fifteenth-Century Crusade, 285–324 (see n. 24 above in this introduction).

50 Tanja L. Jones, “Ludovico Gonzaga and Pisanello: A Visual Campaign, Political Legitimacy, and Crusader Ideology,” Civiltà Mantovana 49 (2014): 40–57.

51 The most spectacular expression of this model is found in Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (London: Penguin, 1996). For one of many rebuttals see “Umej Bhatia’s Analysis of the Crusades and Modern Muslim Memory,” in The Crusades: A Reader, 422–5. See n. 33 above in this introduction.

52 See the introduction to Goffman, Ottoman Empire, especially 4–8, for a discussion of Orientalist legacies. See n. 1 above in this introduction for this and other titles.

53 Goffman, Ottoman Empire, 7–9. See n. 1 above in this introduction.

54 See the essays in Oliver Jens Schmitt, ed., The Ottoman Conquest of the Balkans: Interpretations and Research Debates (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2016). The extensive introductory remarks by Schmitt (7–46) are especially useful for addressing problems of conceptualization and method. See also Antov, The Ottoman “Wild West.” See n. 1 above in this introduction.

55 For sophisticated theoretical reflections on the problem of “Balkanism,” see the introduction to Mariâ Nikolaeva Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

56 See the works of Imber (see n. 1 above in this introduction), Jefferson (see n. 19 above in this introduction), and Pálosfalvi (see n. 5 above in this introduction).

57 In the nineteenth century, the story of Belgrade was central to Ludwig Pastor’s classic narrative of the history of the papacy, The History of the Popes, from the Close of the Middle Ages. Drawn from the Secret Archives of the Vatican and Other Original Sources, 4th ed. (St. Louis: Herder, 1923), 2: 389–428. In early-twentieth-century studies, the battle for Belgrade was the climactic moment of Johannes Hofer’s biography of John of Capistrano: Johannes Kapistran. Ein Leben im Kampf um die Reform der Kirche, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Rome-Heidelberg: Kerle, 1964), especially vol. 2, chs. 13–14. The siege also received brief attention as part of Franz Babinger’s biography of Mehmed II (see n. 17 above in this introduction). The best recent treatments are in Italian: Gábor Ágoston, “La strada che conduceva a Nándorfehérvár (Belgrade): L’Ungheria, l’espansione Ottomana nei Balcani e la vittoria di Nándorfehérvár,” in La campana di Mezzogiorno. Saggi per il quinto centenario della bolla papale, ed. Zsolt Visy and Mihály Zöldi (Budapest: Edizioni Universitarie Mundus, 2000), 203–50; and Pellegrini, Le crociate, 272–315 (see n. 39 above in this introduction). For the most accessible English treatments, see Kenneth Setton’s Papacy and the Levant, 179–89 (see n. 41 above in this introduction), and Norman Housley, “Giovanni da Capestrano and the Crusade of 1456,” in Crusading in the Fifteenth Century, 94–115 (see n. 43 above in this introduction). For a concise summary see also Pálosfalvi, From Nicopolis to Mohács, 179–87 (see n. 5 above in this introduction).

58 Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, 2: 150. See n. 41 above in this introduction. For broader context on Piccolomini, see the works of Meserve and Bisaha cited in n. 48 and n. 49 above in this introduction.

59 Lawrence G. Duggan, “Were Nicholas V and Pius II Really Renaissance Popes?,” in Where Heaven and Earth Meet: Essays on Medieval Europe in Honor of Daniel F. Callahan, ed. Michael Frassetto, Matthew Gabriele, and John D. Hosler (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 63–80.

60 There is a massive literature on this topic, but see the useful overview of Jacques Paviot, “Burgundy and the Crusade,” in Crusading in the Fifteenth Century, 70–80. See n. 42 above in this introduction.

61 For a succinct and still reliable presentation of context and negotiations, see Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2009), especially ch. 1.

62 The sources are available as part of the monumental editorial project focused on the German imperial diets of the later medieval and early modern eras. For Regensburg see Helmut Weigel and Henny Grüneisen, eds., Deutsche Reichstagsakten. Ältere Reihe. XIX/I (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1969). For the sources for Frankfurt and Wiener Neustadt, see Johannes Helmrath and Gabriele Annas, eds., Deutsche Reichstagsakten unter Kaiser Friedrich III. Reichsversammlung zu Frankfurt 1454 (=Deutsche Reichstagsakten. Ältere Reihe. XIX/2) and Reichsversammlung zu Wiener Neustadt 1455 (=XIX/3) (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2013).

63 See Norman Housley, “Pope Pius II and Crusading,” Crusades 11 (2012): 209–47, and Crusading and the Ottoman Threat, ch. 5 (see n. 44 above in this introduction), for the wider cultural contexts of oratory and communication. See also Duggan, “Were Nicholas V and Pius II Really Renaissance Popes?” (see n. 59 above in this introduction).

64 Miguel Navarro Sorní, “Calixto III y la cruzada contra el Turco,” in Alessandro VI dal Mediterraneo all’Atlantico, ed. Maria Chiabò, Anna Maria Oliva, and Olivetta Schena (Rome: Roma nel Rinascimento, 2004), 147–67.

65 Weber, Lutter contre les Turcs, especially ch. 4. See n. 46 above in this introduction.

66 The standard biography remains Hofer (see n. 57 above in this introduction); but for an accessible overview of Capistrano’s travels after 1451, see Kaspar Elm, “John of Capistrano’s Preaching Tour North of the Alps,” in Religious Life between Jerusalem, the Desert, and the World: Selected Essays by Kaspar Elm, trans. James Mixson (Leiden: Brill, 2016), ch. 7. More recently there has emerged an international collaborative project to edit Capistrano’s correspondence led by Letizia Pellegrini, its aims and stakes surveyed in Letizia Pellegrini and Ludovic Viallet, “Between Christianitas and Europe: Giovanni of Capestrano as an Historical Issue,” Franciscan Studies 75 (2017): 5–26. The first volumes have now appeared: Paweł Kras and James D. Mixson, eds., The Grand Tour of John of Capistrano in Central and Eastern Europe (1451–1456) (Lublin: Catholic University of Lublin, 2018) and Paweł Kras et al., eds., Corpus epistolarum Ioannis de Capistrano, t. 1: Epistolae annis MCDLI–MCDLVI scriptae quae ad res gestas Poloniae et Silesiae spectant (Warsaw-Lublin: Polish Academy of Science, 2018). Another volume of the epistolary focused on Capistrano’s Hungarian letters, under the direction of György Galamb and Otto Gecser, is in preparation. For Belgrade and its aftermath specifically, see Housley, “Giovanni da Capestrano” (see n. 57 above in this introduction) as well as Stanko Andrić, The Miracles of St. John Capistran (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2000).

67 The issues were first surveyed thoroughly in Johannes Hofer, “Der Sieger von Belgrad 1456,” Historisches Jahrbuch 51 (1931): 163–212. See also the appendix (Excursus 24) to Hofer’s biography of Capistrano (see n. 57 above in this introduction); and Franz Babinger, “Der Quellenwert der Berichte über den Entsatz von Belgrad 1456,” in Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1957), 1–69.

68 See the remarks of Housley, “Giovanni da Capestrano,” 99–100 (see n. 57 above in this introduction); Ágoston, “La strada che conduceva a Nándorfehérvár,” 242–4 (see n. 57 above in this introduction); and Pálosfalvi, From Nicopolis to Mohács, 180 (see n. 5 above in this introduction).

69 For these dynamics at work around the story of Joan of Arc, see Daniel Hobbins, “Jean Gerson’s Authentic Tract on Joan of Arc: Super facto puellae et credulitate sibi praestanda (14 May 1429),” Mediaeval Studies 67 (2005): 99–156. For the nature of news in an environment of early print after the siege of Negroponte in 1470, see Margaret Meserve, “News from Negroponte” (see n. 48 above in this introduction).

70 Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time, 143–4. See n. 17 above in this introduction.

71 Marcus Bull, Eyewitness and Crusade Narrative: Perception and Narration in Accounts of the Second, Third and Fourth Crusades (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2019). See also Bull’s “Eyewitness and Medieval Historical Narrative,” The Medieval Chronicle 11 (2017): 1–22, and “Narratological Readings of Crusade Texts,” in The Crusader World, ed. Adrian Boas (London: Routledge, 2016), 646–60.

72 On the theme of crusading memory specifically, see Megan Cassidy-Welch and Anne Lester, “Memory and Interpretation: New Approaches to the Study of the Crusades,” Journal of Medieval History 40 (2014): 225–36, building on the work of Nicholas L. Paul and Suzanne M. Yeager, eds., Remembering the Crusades: Myth, Image, and Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). See also Nicholas Paul, To Follow in Their Footsteps: The Crusades and Family Memory in the High Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).

73 See the sources translated in Theresa M. Vann and Donald J. Kagay, Hospitaller Piety and Crusader Propaganda: Guillaume Caoursin’s Description of the Ottoman Siege of Rhodes, 1480 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015).

74 The fields of Byzantine and early Ottoman historiography are rich, challenging, and now the subject of a rapidly expanding literature. They are also well beyond my own expertise. I have therefore had to rely here on the work of others, or on partial modern translations of original sources. The introductions to the texts reproduced here, especially the works of Kaldellis (document 27) and Kastritsis (document 33), provide useful orientations to these wider fields.

75 An invocation of John Keegan’s famous title, The Face of Battle (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976).

76 To note only one useful recent title in this vast field, see the essay collection edited by Philippe Contamine, War and Competition between States (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001).

77 See in this regard the concluding remarks to Housley, Reconfiguring the Fifteenth-Century Crusade, 325–31. See n. 24 above in this introduction. For broader context see Daniel Hobbins, Authorship and Publicity Before Print: Jean Gerson and the Transformation of Late Medieval Learning (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), and John Van Engen, “Multiple Options: The World of the Fifteenth-Century Church,” Church History 77 (2008): 257–84.