The Crusade in the Fifteenth Century: Converging and competing cultures

238 Pages·2016·2.05 MB·English

by  Norman Housley

The Crusade in the
Fifteenth Century
Increasingly, historians acknowledge the significance of crusading activity in the
fifteenth century, and they have started to explore the different ways in which
it shaped contemporary European society. Just as important, however, was the
range of interactions which took place between the three faith communities which
were most affected by crusade, namely the Catholic and Orthodox worlds, and the
adherents of Islam. Discussion of these interactions forms the theme of this book.
Two chapters consider the impact of the fall of Constantinople in 1453 on the
conquering Ottomans and the conquered Byzantines. The next group of chapters
reviews different aspects of the crusading response to the Turks, ranging from
Emperor Sigismund to Papal legates. The third set of contributions considers
diplomatic and cultural interactions between Islam and Christianity, including
attempts made to forge alliances of Christian and Muslim powers against the
Ottomans. Last, a set of chapters looks at what was arguably the most complex
region of all for inter-faith relations, the Balkans, exploring the influence of cru-
sading ideas in the eastern Adriatic, Bosnia and Romania.
Viewed overall, this collection of chapters makes a powerful contribution to
breaking down the old and discredited view of monolithic and mutually exclusive
‘fortresses of faith’. Nobody would question the extent and intensity of religious
violence in fifteenth-century Europe, but this volume demonstrates that it was
played out within a setting of turbulent diversity. Religious and ethnic identities
were volatile, allegiances negotiable, and diplomacy, ideological exchange and
human contact were constantly in operation between the period’s major religious
groupings.
Norman Housley is Professor of History at the University of Leicester, UK.
Crusades – Subsidia
Edited by Christoph T. Maier
University of Zurich, Switzerland, for The Society for the Study of the Crusades
and the Latin East
This series of Subsidia to the journal Crusades is designed to include publications
deriving from the conferences held by the Society for the Study of the Crusades
and the Latin East along with other volumes associated with the society.
The scope of the series parallels that of the journal itself: Crusades covers
seven hundred years from the First Crusade (1095–1102) to the fall of Malta
(1798) and draws together scholars working on theatres of war, their home fronts
and settlements from the Baltic to Africa and from Spain to the Near East and
on theology, law, literature, art, numismatics and economic, social, political and
military history.
For information on the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin
East, see the Society’s website: http://sscle.slu.edu.
Titles in the series are:
In Laudem Hierosolymitani
Edited by Iris Shagrir, Ronnie Ellenblum and Jonathan Riley-Smith
The Fourth Crusade: Event, Aftermath, and Perceptions
Edited by Thomas F. Madden
On the Margins of Crusading
Edited by Helen J. Nicholson
La Papauté et les croisades / The Papacy and the Crusades
Edited by Michel Balard
Contact and Conflict in Frankish Greece and the Aegean, 1204–1453
Edited by Nikolaos G. Chrissis and Mike Carr
Deeds Done Beyond the Sea
Edited by Susan B. Edgington and Helen J. Nicholson
Crusading and Warfare in the Middle Ages
Edited by Simon John and Nicholas Morton
The Crusade in the Fifteenth Century
Edited by Norman Housley
The Crusade in the
Fifteenth Century
Converging and competing cultures
Edited by Norman Housley
First published 2017
by Routledge
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© 2017 selection and editorial matter, Norman Housley; individual chapters, the
contributors
The right of Norman Housley to be identified as the author of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988.
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infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Housley, Norman, editor.
Title: The crusade in the fifteenth century: converging and competing
cultures / edited by Norman Housley.
Description: Series: Crusades – subsidia;
8 | Includes index.
Subjects: LCSH: Crusades--13th-15th centuries. | Christianity and other
religions--Islam. | Islam--Relations--Christianity. |
Europe--History--15th century.
Classification: LCC D172 .H683 2016 (print) | LCC D172 (ebook) | DDC
940.1/93--dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015045586
ISBN: 978-1-4724-6471-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-61515-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by GreenGate Publishing Services, Tonbridge, Kent
Contents
List of illustrations vii
Notes on contributors viii
Preface xii
List of abbreviations xiii
Maps xiv
1 Introduction 1
NORMAN HOUSLEY
PART I
Conquerors and conquered 13
2 Crusading in the fifteenth century and its relation to the
development of Ottoman dynastic legitimacy, self-image
and the Ottoman consolidation of authority 15
NIKOLAY ANTOV
3 Byzantine refugees as crusade propagandists: the travels
of Nicholas Agallon 34
JONATHAN HARRIS
PART II
The crusading response: expressions, dynamics and constraints 47
4 Dances, dragons and a pagan queen: Sigismund of Luxemburg
and the publicizing of the Ottoman Turkish threat 49
MARK WHELAN
5 Alfonso V and the anti-Turkish crusade 64
MARK ALOISIO
vi Contents
6 Papal legates and crusading activity in central Europe: the
Hussites and the Ottoman Turks 75
ANTONIN KALOUS
7 Switching the tracks: Baltic crusades against Russia in the
fifteenth century 90
ANTI SELART
PART III
Diplomatic and cultural interactions 107
8 T(cid:431)m(cid:460)r and the ‘Frankish’ powers 109
MICHELE BERNARDINI
9 Venetian attempts at forging an alliance with Persia and the
crusade in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries 120
GIORGIO ROTA
10 Quattrocento Genoa and the legacies of crusading 133
STEVEN A. EPSTEIN
PART IV
Frontier zones: the Balkans and the Adriatic 149
11 The key to the gate of Christendom? The strategic importance
of Bosnia in the struggle against the Ottomans 151
EMIR O. FILIPOVI(cid:251)
12 Between two worlds or a world of its own? The eastern
Adriatic in the fifteenth century 169
OLIVER JENS SCHMITT
13 The Romanian concept of crusade in the fifteenth century 187
SERGIU IOSIPESCU
14 Conclusion: transformations of crusading in the long
fifteenth century 206
ALAN V. MURRAY
Index 211
Illustrations
Map 1 The Middle East xiv
Map 2 The eastern Balkans xv
Map 3 The western Balkans and Italy xvi
Map 4 The Mediterranean Sea xvii
Table 6.1 Multiple creations of legates mid-1400s to early 1500s 81
Figure 13.1 Mircea, prince of Wallachia confirms the alliance treaty
with Wladislaw Jagello, king of Poland, on 20 January
1391 in Lemberg (Lwów) 189
Figure 13.2 Silver ducat of Mircea, prince of Wallachia, with imperial
symbols (front and reverse) 192
Figure 13.3 The Cavalcade of the Holy Cross in the church of P(cid:259)tr(cid:259)u(cid:288)i 202
Figure 13.4 The Siege of Constantinople, exterior painting, church of
Moldovi(cid:288)a monastery 203
Contributors
Mark Aloisio is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the University
of Malta, having previously been Assistant Professor at Colorado State
University (2008–12). He gained his BA at the University of Malta, his MPhil
at Cambridge and his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His research inter-
ests centre around the history of the Mediterranean in the later Middle Ages
and especially Sicily, southern Italy and Malta from the twelfth to the fifteenth
centuries. He is particularly drawn to the intersection of commercial and
financial activities with political, social and cultural developments. His Land,
Community and State in Late Medieval Sicily: Sciacca and its Hinterland,
1392–1458 is forthcoming.
Nikolay Antov is Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the King
Fahd Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Arkansas. Following
training at the American University in Bulgaria and Bilkent University
in Turkey, he completed his doctoral studies in 2011 at the University of
Chicago. Antov specializes in the history of the early modern Ottoman Empire
(fifteenth to seventeenth centuries), focusing on the Ottoman Balkans. His
research interests include the formation of Muslim communities and relations
between Muslims and non-Muslims in the Ottoman Balkans, state–nomad rela-
tions and the consolidation of early modern Ottoman imperial institutions. He
is currently working on a book project on the formation of one of the most
important Muslim/Turkish communities in the Balkans – that in Deliorman
(NE Balkans) in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries.
Michele Bernardini received his PhD from the Istituto Universitario Orientale
of Naples in 1991. Since 1992 he has been Professor of Persian Language
and Literature in the Istituto Universitario Orientale (now Università di Napoli
– ‘L’Orientale’). He is co-editor of the Journal of Eurasian Studies and a mem-
ber of the scientific committee of the Series Catalogorum (Rome and Paris).
Bernardini is the author of a number of works on Persian history and historiog-
raphy during Mongol and post-Mongol times. His recent publications include
Storia del mondo islamico (VII-XVI secolo), II. Il mondo iranico e turco
(2003); Mémoire et propagande à l’époque timouride (2008); with Roberto
Tottoli and Maria Luisa Russo, Catalogue of the Islamic Manuscripts from
Contributors ix
the Kahle Collection in the Department of Oriental Studies of the University
of Turin (2011); and with Donatella Guida, I Mongoli. Espansione, imperi,
eredità (2012).
Steven A. Epstein received his PhD from Harvard University in 1981. He
has taught at Harvard, the University of Colorado, and since 2003 at the
University of Kansas, where he is Ahmanson-Murphy Distinguished Professor
of Medieval History. Epstein has written on medieval Genoa and on various
topics in economic and social history. His recent publications include Purity
Lost: Transgressing Boundaries in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1000–1400
(2007), The Medieval Discovery of Nature (2012) and The Talents of Jacopo
da Varagine: A Genoese Mind in Medieval Europe (2016).
Emir O. Filipovi(cid:252) received his PhD from the University of Sarajevo in 2014.
He has written extensively about chivalry, heraldry and courtly culture in the
Bosnian kingdom in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and has recently
concentrated on researching the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans. He is cur-
rently Lecturer in Medieval Bosnian History at the University of Sarajevo.
Jonathan Harris is Professor of the History of Byzantium at Royal Holloway,
University of London. His research focuses on Byzantine history in the period
900–1460 and on relations between Byzantium and the West, especially
during the Crusades and the Italian Renaissance. His recent publications
include Constantinople: Capital of Byzantium (2007); The End of Byzantium
(2010); editor with Catherine Holmes and Eugenia Russell, Byzantines,
Latins and Turks in the Eastern Mediterranean World after 1150 (2012);
Byzantium and the Crusades, second edition (2014); and The Lost World of
Byzantium (2015). Along with Georgios Chatzelis, he is currently preparing
an annotated English translation of the Sylloge Tacticorum, a tenth-century
Byzantine military manual.
Norman Housley received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1979.
He held research fellowships at Cambridge and Liverpool, and since 1983 has
taught at the University of Leicester, where he has been Professor of History
since 1992. He has also held visiting fellowships in Oxford, Princeton and
Washington DC. Housley has written and edited many books about the history
of the crusades, especially the crusades after 1200. His recent publications
include Religious Warfare in Europe, 1400–1536 (2002); Contesting the
Crusades (2006); Fighting for the Faith. Crusading to the Holy Land (2008)
and Crusading and the Ottoman Threat, 1453–1505 (2012). Housley is cur-
rently researching a project entitled ‘Crusading and Conciliarism, 1400–1500’.
He is also Principal Investigator for a Leverhulme Trust International Network
on the theme ‘Reconfiguring the Crusade in the Fifteenth Century: Goals,
Agencies and Resonances’.