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De toutes choses ne m’est demeuré que l’honneur et la vie qui est sauve..
‘All that is left is honour …’ King François I of France writing to his mother, after his defeat and capture at the Battle of Pavia, 1525. His opponent, Charles V, as a monarch of the early modern era, had moved very far from the world of the medieval knight-errant.
Charles V was no romantic, and whilst the Holy Roman Emperor burned with the fury of a zealot equal to that of any Crusader, he was also a supreme politician and was certainly no believer in the old ways of warfare. His final defeat of Francis I, the avatar of chivalry, in Italy was undertaken through a war of attrition that employed full-time professional troops and mercenaries. This would also be the key to his frustration of the ambitions of Suleiman on the eastern front. In 1527 Croatia accepted Austrian-Habsburg rule, in truth there was very little choice available to the Croatians, and the troops of the Croatian lords were assimilated into the Habsburgs’ Militargrenze or military frontier. The Militargrenze at this point meant nothing more than a collection of strongholds and minor forts manned by paid-for border troops, the core of which was the standing army that the Habsburgs had formed after their humiliation by at Domažlice in 1431 by Prokop the Bald during the fifth Crusade against the Hussites. The Militargrenze overlooked the main Ottoman invasion routes into Central Europe and its troops continued the fight against the Ottomans for entire campaigning seasons and beyond with raids and probing patrols.
Land warfare was becoming the domain of the foot-slogger and of entrenched musketry. The long seventeenth century opened with a nine-year Habsburg-Ottoman war, the torture of Germany by the Thirty Years War, of which the Ottomans could take very little real advantage due to the stolid Habsburg border defences, and the failure of the second Ottoman siege of Vienna.
At the century’s end we see the Ottomans losing Hungary, and the debacles of the second Battle of Mohacs and Senta, as well as the rise of Russia at the Turks’ expense. By the time of the Treaty of Karlovitz in 1699 the Ottoman Empire was a second-rate power, defeated not by dashing knights but by trade strangulation, stagnant technology and worldview, harem politics and accidental economic warfare.
There was also a psychological ‘turning in’ and avoidance of change related to the militarisation of Turkish society, a malady from which the Mamluks had also suffered. Furthermore the Crusades and the Mongol invasions had left deep scars on the Muslims of the Middle East, and caused them to destroy the Syrian coastline and to fall behind in the naval arms race that was eventually going to decide the contest with the Europeans. An idea of this pervasive dread of a repeat of events is held in the fourteenth-century Arabic myth that each new king of Cyprus would slip across to the ruins of Acre during a moonless night to have their coronation take place in the Crusader capital.
The Europeans seized their moment to look beyond the local theatre of war with their neighbours, and the invading armies of Napoleon in 1798 effectively brought modernity to the Middle East, though unfortunately in the form of massed regiments of infantry with rapid-fire musketry, mobile artillery and organised supply chains. That the Holy Land fell once again to Europeans in 1917 is not then surprising. That it fell to Europeans with Asian empires was arguably the result of a Crusading ethos.
