The History of the

RENAISSANCE WORLD

From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople

SUSAN WISE BAUER

W • W • Norton & Company

New York London

Dedication

For Daniel

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

List of Maps

List of Illustrations

Preface

Part One

RENAISSANCES

One

Logic and Compromise • England, Rome, and the Holy Roman Empire, 1100–1122

Two

The Crusader Enemy • Byzantium, Venice, and the Crusader kingdoms, 1100–1138

Three

Anarchy • England, Western Francia, and the Kingdom of Jerusalem, 1120–1139

Four

The Lost Homeland • China, Dai Viet, and Khmer, 1127–1150

Five

Crusade Resurrected • The Turkish and Crusader kingdoms, with visitations from Germany and France, 1128–1149

Six

Reconquista and Rediscovery • The Spanish peninsula, 1134–1146

Seven

Questions of Authority • France and Italy, 1135–1160

Eight

The New Song • China, 1141–1165

Nine

The Heiji Disturbance • Japan, 1142–1159

Ten

Death of an Army • Goryeo, 1146–1197

Eleven

The First Plantagenet • England and Western Francia, 1147–1154

Twelve

Frederick Barbarossa • Germany and Italy, 1147–1177

Thirteen

The Almohads in Spain • North Africa and Spain, 1147–1177

Fourteen

“Many Nations” • Africa, sometime in the twelfth century

Fifteen

The Last Fatimid Caliph • The Turkish and Crusader kingdoms, 1149–1171

Sixteen

Monks and Brahmans • South India, 1150–1189

Seventeen

Conquest of the Willing • Northern India, 1150–1202

Eighteen

Death of a Priest • England and France, 1154–1170

Nineteen

Foreign Relations • Byzantium, Hungary, and the Balkans, 1157–1168

Twenty

The Venetian Problem • Byzantium and Italy, 1171–1185

Twenty-One

Resentments • England, Ireland, and France, 1171–1186

Twenty-Two

Saladin • The Turkish and Crusader kingdoms, 1171–1188

Twenty-Three

The Gempei War • Japan, 1179–1185

Twenty-Four

Kings’ Crusade • England, France, and the Turkish and Crusader kingdoms, 1188–1199

Twenty-Five

The Sack of Constantinople • Byzantium and Europe, 1195–1204

Part Two

INVASIONS, HERESIES, AND UPRISINGS

Twenty-Six

Westward • Central and South America, 1200

Twenty-Seven

The Mongol School of Warfare • China, North and Central Asia, 1201–1215

Twenty-Eight

John Softsword • England and France, 1203–1213

Twenty-Nine

Sundiata of the Mali • Africa, 1203–1240

Thirty

The Jokyu War • Japan, 1203–1242

Thirty-One

The Unwanted Throne • The old Byzantine lands, 1204–1225

Thirty-Two

The First Delhi Sultanate • Northern and central India, 1206–1236

Thirty-Three

Heresy • France, 1209–1210

Thirty-Four

Reconquest and Failure • France and the Spanish peninsula, 1210–1213

Thirty-Five

From Bouvines to Magna Carta • France, England, and the Holy Roman Empire, 1213–1217

Thirty-Six

The Birth of the Inquisition • France, 1215–1229

Thirty-Seven

Moving Westward • China, North and Central Asia, and the Middle East, 1215–1229

Thirty-Eight

South of India • India and Sri Lanka, 1215–1283

Thirty-Nine

The Fifth Crusade • Egypt and the Crusader kingdoms, 1217–1221

Forty

From the Golden Bull to the Baltic Crusade • Hungary, Poland, and the lands of the Lithuanians, 1218–1233

Forty-One

Lakeshores, Highlands, and Hilltops • Africa, 1221–1290

Forty-Two

The Sixth Crusade • The Holy Roman Empire, the Crusader kingdoms, and the Ayyubid empire, 1223–1229

Forty-Three

The Tran Dynasty • Southeast Asia, 1224–1257

Forty-Four

Young Kings • England, France, and the kingdoms of Spain, 1227–1242

Forty-Five

The Mongol Horde • Most of Asia and Europe, 1229–1248 310

Forty-Six

The Debt of Hatred • The Holy Roman Empire, 1229–1250

Forty-Seven

The Shadow of God • India, 1236–1266

Forty-Eight

The Seventh Crusade • France, Egypt, and Syria, 1244–1250

Forty-Nine

The Splintering Khanate • The Mongol conquests, 1246–1264

Fifty

The Mamluks of Egypt • Egypt, Syria, and the Mongol lands, 1250–1268

Fifty-One

Louis the Saint • France and the Kingdom of Jerusalem, 1250–1267

Fifty-Two

The Lion’s Den • Germany, Italy, Sicily, and England, 1252–1273

Fifty-Three

The Recapture of Constantinople • The Latin Empire and the empire of Nicaea, 1254–1261

Fifty-Four

The Last Crusades • North Africa, Egypt, France, Italy, and the Crusader kingdoms, 1270–1291

Fifty-Five

Kublai Khan • China, Japan, Goryeo, Champa, and the Dai Viet, 1273–1294

Fifty-Six

The Sicilian Vespers • Germany, Italy, Sicily, Aragon, and France, 1274–1288

Fifty-Seven

The Wars of Edward I • England, Scotland, Wales, and France, 1275–1299

Fifty-Eight

The Second Sultanate of Delhi • India, 1287–1300

Fifty-Nine

The End of the Papal Monarchy • France, Germany, and Italy, 1301–1317

Sixty

The Appearance of the Ottomans • Byzantium and the Turks of the Il-khanate, 1302–1347

Sixty-One

The Fall of the Khilji • India, 1303–1320

Sixty-Two

The Triumph of the Bruce • Scotland, England, and Ireland, 1304–1314

Part Three

CATASTROPHES

Sixty-Three

The Great Famine • All of Europe, 1310–1321

Sixty-Four

The Sultan and the Khan • Egypt, the Il-khanate, and the Golden Horde, 1310–1335

Sixty-Five

Mansa Musa of Mali • West Africa, 1312–1360

Sixty-Six

After the Famine • France and England, 1318–1330

Sixty-Seven

The Southern and Northern Courts • Japan, 1318–1339

Sixty-Eight

Rebellions • India, 1320–1351

Sixty-Nine

Naming the Renaissance • Germany, Italy, and France, 1322–1341

Seventy

The Cities in the Lake • Central America, 1325–1375

Seventy-One

A Hundred Years of War • France and England, 1329–1347

Seventy-Two

The End of the World • Asia, Europe, and India, 1338–1353

Part Four

REGROUPINGS

Seventy-Three

The Will to War • France, England, and the Spanish kingdoms, 1349–1369

Seventy-Four

White Lotus, Red Turban • China, 1351–1382

Seventy-Five

After the Mongols • Southeast Asia, 1351–1399

Seventy-Six

The Turks and the Desperate Emperor • Byzantium and the lands of the Turks, with side journeys to France and Italy

Seventy-Seven

The Disintegration of Delhi • India and Sri Lanka, 1352–1388

Seventy-Eight

The Union of Krewo • Poland, Hungary, and Lithuania, 1364–1399

Seventy-Nine

The Rebirth of the Mongol Horde • Central Asia, the Middle East, India, and the lands of the Rus’, 1367–1399

Eighty

Compromises and Settlements • The Korean peninsula and Japan, 1368–1392

Eighty-One

The House of Visconti and the Papal States • France and Italy, 1368–1390

Eighty-Two

Bad Beginnings • France and England, 1369–1381

Eighty-Three

Dislocation • Africa, 1370–1399

Eighty-Four

Madness and Usurpation • Castile, Portugal, England, and France, 1383–1401

Eighty-Five

The Battle of Nicopolis • The Ottoman empire, Constantinople, and the lands of eastern Europe, 1385–1396

Eighty-Six

The Union and Disunion of Kalmar • Scandinavia, 1387–1449

Eighty-Seven

The Hussite Uprising • Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Bohemia, 1388–1419

Eighty-Eight

The Taking of France • France and England, 1401–1420

Eighty-Nine

After Timurlane • The north of India, the empire of Timur, the lands of the Ottoman Turks, Egypt, and Byzantium, 1401–1415

Part Five

ENDINGS

Ninety

The Withdrawal of the Ming • China and the land of the Dai Viet, 1405–1455

Ninety-One

Failure • The old lands of the Holy Roman Empire and the remnants of Byzantium, 1412–1440

Ninety-Two

Perpetual Slavery • Portugal, Castile, and Africa, 1415–1455

Ninety-Three

The Loss of France • France and England, 1422–1453

Ninety-Four

The Fall • The Byzantine and Ottoman empires, along with Hungary, Germany, Wallachia, Bohemia, and Serbia, 1430–1453

Notes

Works Cited

Permissions

Acknowledgments

Index

Copyright

Also by Susan Wise Bauer

Maps

1.1England and the Holy Roman Empire

2.1The Lands of the Crusades

3.1England and France during the Anarchy

4.1The Kingdoms of China and Southeast Asia

5.1Aleppo and the Crusader Kingdoms

5.2Kingdom of Louis VII

5.3Conquests of Zengi and Nur ad-Din

6.1The Spanish Peninsula, 1144

7.1Peter Abelard’s France

8.1The Song and Jin at Peace

9.1Japan under the Cloistered Emperors

10.1Goryeo

11.1Anjou, Normandy, and England

12.1The Empire of Frederick Barbarossa

13.1The Kingdoms of Spain

13.2The Almohad Empire

14.1Many Nations of Africa

15.1The Conquests of Nur ad-Din

16.1The Island of Sri Lanka

16.2The Disintegration of the Chola

17.1The Ghurid Advance

18.1The Kingdoms of France and England

19.1The World of Manuel I

20.1Byzantium and Venice

21.1England, Ireland, and Western Francia

22.1The Conquests of Saladin

22.2Gisors

23.1The Kamakura Shogunate

24.1The World of the Third Crusade

24.2The Kingdom of Jerusalem

25.1The Conquest of Constantinople

26.1Central America

26.2South America

27.1The Advance of the Mongols

28.1John’s Losses and Philip’s Gains

29.1Sosso and Mali

31.1The Successors of Byzantium

32.1The Nizari

32.2Delhi under Iltumish

33.1The Albigensian Crusade

34.1The Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa

35.1The World of the Magna Carta

36.1The World of the Inquisition

37.1The Mongol Empire

37.2The Battle of Kalka

38.1The Pandya Renaissance

39.1The Fifth Crusade

40.1The Baltic Crusade

41.1Zagwe, Kanem, and Mapungubwe

43.1The Four Kingdoms of Southeast Asia

44.1The Invasions of Henry III

44.2The Spanish Peninsula, 1248

45.1Mongol Conquests in the East

45.2Mongol Conquests in the West

46.1Frederick’s War in Italy

47.1Balban’s Wars

48.1The Seventh Crusade

49.1The Four Khanates

50.1The Bahri Sultanate

51.1The Pastoureaux

52.1The Battle of Evesham

52.2The Kingdom of Sicily

53.1The Empire of Nicaea

54.1After the Almohads

54.2The Triumph of the Bahri Sultanate

55.1The Yuan Dynasty

56.1The Sicilian Vespers

57.1Wars in Scotland and Wales

58.1The Mongol Invasion of Delhi

59.1The Empire, Divided

60.1The Ottoman Invasion

60.2Serbia under Stefan Dushan

61.1The Rajput Kingdoms

62.1The Battle of Bannockburn

63.1Flood and Famine

64.1The Collapse of the Il-khanate

65.1The Height of Mali

66.1Edward III and the Valois

67.1The Southern and Northern Courts

68.1New Sultanates in India

69.1Lands Claimed by Louis of Bavaria

70.1The Aztecs

71.1The Start of the Hundred Years’ War

72.1The Spread of the Plague

73.1French Defeats

74.1The Rise of the Ming

75.1Conflict in Southeast Asia

76.1The Ottoman Empire

77.1Bahmani Expansion

78.1Poland under Casimir the Great

79.1The Advance of Timur-Leng

79.2Battle of the Terek River

80.1Joseon and Japan

81.1War in Italy

82.1Richard II and Charles VI

83.1The Hausa Kingdoms

84.1The Battle of Aljubarrota

85.1Ottoman Victories

86.1The Scandinavian Kingdoms

87.1Hussite Wars

88.1The Battle of Agincourt

89.1Timur against the Ottomans

90.1The Sea Voyages of the Yongle Emperor

90.2The Ming and the Oirat

91.1The Empire of Sigismund

92.1Portuguese Explorations

93.1The Dauphin against the English

94.1The Wars of Murad II

94.2The Golden Horn

Illustrations

4.1Central towers of Angkor Wat, Cambodia

4.2Angkor Wat bas-relief sculpture

6.1Early thirteenth-century Arabic manuscript, showing Aristotle teaching Turkish astronomers

8.1Ink Plum Blossoms, by Wang Yansou of the Song dynasty

9.1Family line of Konoe and Sutoku

9.2Detail from the Heiji Scroll: Burning of the Sanjo palace

16.1The Giant’s Tank

26.1Nazca lines: Spider

26.2Nazca lines: Dancing hands

31.1Coin of John III, showing the seated Christ on one side and John with the Virgin Mary on the other

32.1Ruins of the mountain fortress of Alamut

55.1Kublai Khan

59.1The Papal Palace at Avignon

63.1Miniature from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, showing March planting

65.1Mansa Musa of Mali on the Catalan Atlas

66.1Genealogy of Philip VI and Edward III

77.1Citadel of Gulbarga

86.1Genealogy of Margaret and Eric

Acknowledgments

MY GRATITUDE to the team at W. W. Norton for all they’ve done to support not only this volume but the two that came before it. I can’t name you all, but thanks in particular to Eleen Cheung, Melody Conroy, Julia Druskin, Ryan Harrington, Bill Rusin, and Nomi Victor.

Most of all, thanks to my longtime editor, Starling Lawrence, who has provided not only editorial guidance but also moral support, a listening ear, and the occasional robust admonition to quit whining and get on with the job. And I am greatly indebted to both Star and Jenny for the hospitality, good food, and much-needed strong drink.

A massive project like this is never a one-person job. Thanks also to the team at Peace Hill: Justin Moore, who knows more historical details (and random interesting factoids) than Google; Sarah Park, mapmaker extraordinaire and poet even-more-extraordinaire; Kim Norton, the most unflappable office manager in the known universe; Jackie Violet, whose job description keeps expanding but never outsizes her good humor; and Mark Hicks, who kept the farm from falling to pieces while I was wandering around in the fourteenth century.

Special thanks to Patricia Worth, an executive assistant who can arrange a flight to Prague, book a school speaking event, pick out linens for a bed-and-breakfast, and help castrate a goat, all in the same eight-hour workday. And no, she’s not looking for a new job.

Thanks to Mel Moore, Liz Barnes, and Achsa Fisher-Nuckols for still answering my emails and phone calls, even when those are long, long overdue; to Boris Fishman, for sharing my professional universe; to Greg Smith, for asking me how it’s going; and to Diane Wheeler, for living in this world.

My family hasn’t disowned me yet, despite my frequent lapses into history-induced catatonia. To Christopher, Ben, Dan, and Emily: I make really good cookies. Hope they make up for the number of times you have to say, “Mom?” before I emerge from the past and say, “What?” To Jay and Jessie Wise: You taught me to read. See what happened? And to Peter: Sumus exules, vivendi quam auditores. Still, but not always.

Preface

NOT LONG AFTER 1140 AD, the Italian scholar Gerard of Cremona traveled to the Spanish peninsula, hoping to find a rare copy of the thousand-year-old Greek astronomy text known as the Almagest.

His chances were better there than anywhere else in Europe. The southern half of the peninsula had been in Arab hands for centuries, and the ruling dynasties of Muslim Spain had brought with them thousands of classical texts, translated into Arabic but long lost to the vernacular languages of the West. The libraries of the city of Toledo, in the center of the peninsula, housed scores of these valuable volumes—and Toledo had now been recaptured by one of the Christian kingdoms of the north, meaning that Western scholars could visit it in relative safety.

Gerard found more than he bargained for: not just astronomy texts but classical and Arabic studies of dialectic, geometry, philosophy, and medicine; unknown monographs by Euclid, Galen, Ptolemy, and Aristotle; a whole treasury of knowledge. Overwhelmed, he settled into Toledo and set to work learning Arabic. “Regretting the poverty of the Latins in these things,” one of his students wrote, “he learned the Arabic language in order to be able to translate. . . . To the end of his life he continued to transmit to the Latin world (as if to his own beloved heir) whatever books he thought finest, in many subjects, as accurately and as plainly as he could.”1

Renaissance had begun.

THIS IS NOT a history of “the Renaissance.” Rather, it is a history of the world during the period that historians have often (although not universally) associated with a rebirth of interest in classical learning. As Gerard’s story shows, this rebirth began much earlier than the fourteenth century.

One of the first Italians to give a name to the reawakened interest in Greek and Roman learning was the poet Petrarch, who announced early in the 1340s that poets and scholars were ready to lead the cities of Italy back to the glory days of Rome. Classical learning had declined, Petrarch insisted, into darkness and obscurity. Now was the time for that learning to be rediscovered: a rebirth, a Renaissance.

Petrarch was lobbying, in a polite and academic but very pointed way, for the distinction of official Roman Poet Laureate—in that day, something perhaps equivalent to the Man Booker Prize or the National Book Award, a public recognition that he was an intellectual whose words should be heeded. As part of his campaign, he was placing himself at the head of an already-existing phenomenon. Since before Gerard of Cremona, Western scholars, many of them Italian, had been working through Arabic libraries, reacquainting themselves with Greek and Roman thinkers. So much of this intellectual groundwork had been laid already that many modern historians now speak of a “Twelfth-Century Renaissance.”

By 1340, in other words, renaissance was so far advanced that it had become visible. Historical eras are never recognizable when they begin; they can only be seen in hindsight. The Renaissance, as the following chapters will show, was rooted in the twelfth century. The twelfth century saw the real beginnings of the struggle between Church hierarchy and Aristotelian logic, a struggle which—reincarnated as a fight between scripture and science, creation and evolution—is still ongoing in the United States in 2013. The twelfth century saw the death of the Crusades, the rise of the Plantagenets, the dominance of the Japanese shoguns, and the journey of Islam into central Africa.

It was a century of renaissances, and that is where my story begins.

THE LAST CHAPTER of this history tells the story of the Ottoman attack on Constantinople in May of 1453, when the triumph of the Turks brought a final end to the Roman dream.

The cultural phenomenon known as the Italian Renaissance continued well after 1453; I do not go on, in this book, to chronicle some of its better-known accomplishments (the political philosophies of Machiavelli, the paintings of Michelangelo and Raphael, the inventions of da Vinci, the observations of Galileo). But in worldwide terms, by the time Constantinople fell, the Renaissance had begun to shade into new eras.

Like the Renaissance itself, those eras were not named by historians until much later. But the ground of the Reformation was seeded and had begun to sprout; the followers of the English scholar John Wycliffe and the Bohemian priest Jan Hus were already organizing against the authority of Rome. And the Age of Exploration was well under way. Twenty years earlier, the Portuguese captain Gil Eannes had finally pushed south past Cape Bojador. A decade after Eannes’s boundary-breaking journey, Prince Henry of Portugal sponsored the first slave market in Europe: a closely orchestrated, carefully publicized event meant to whip up widespread enthusiasm for further explorations into Africa.

The Turkish overthrow of the Byzantine Empire was a world-changer. As the historian Caroline Finkel points out, even the Turks were unsettled by Constantinople’s fall; the Ottoman chronicler Tursun Bey, the only Turk to describe the final battle, calls it a “veritable precipitation and downpouring of calamities from the heavens, as decreed by God Himself.” The transformation of Constantinople into Istanbul is an end and a beginning, an exclamation point and new paragraph in the punctuation of world events.

But the transition away from Renaissance and towards the next phase of human history is, perhaps, even more apparent in the events of the year before. The Italian pope Nicholas V had just issued a papal bull called Dum Diversas. In recognition of the expense and effort that the Portuguese had put into exploring the African coast, the Church gave official approval to the enslavement and sale of Africans by the Portuguese crown—a sanction confirmed again three years later in the charter Romanus Pontifex.

Wooing the allegiance and support of the powerful king of Portugal, the pope had transformed slavery into an institution that all Europeans could profit from without guilt. Historians do not normally speak of the Age of Enslavement, but in hindsight we can see that the decrees of the 1450s shaped the futures of three continents and began a whole new story.

Part One

RENAISSANCES

Chapter One

Logic and Compromise

Between 1100 and 1122,

the Holy Roman Emperor and the king of England both defy the pope,

and an archbishop makes use of Aristotle

THE FIRST CRUSADE had just ended—and with it, an age.

Eight hundred years after the Roman emperor Constantine led his army against his own people under the sign of the cross, Christian warriors crossed the Bosphorus Strait as a unified army of faith, roused by the supreme leader of the one Christian church to fight against Turks advancing from the east. No sooner had the Crusade succeeded than the victorious Christian knights sacrificed their allegiance to the one true faith and claimed another membership. They were, first and foremost, not sons of the church but sovereigns of their own private kingdoms.

Among the many meanings of what it meant to be Christian, one would govern the next four and a half centuries: to be a man of God meant power.

THE RIPPLES of the First Crusade spread out from Syria, in a widening circle that lapped both east and west.

In England, the wrong king inherited the throne. William II, king of the realm since 1087, was out hunting when his companion—an experienced hunter named Walter Tyrrell—drew his bow at a stag and instead hit the king. William collapsed onto the arrow and died on the spot. Rather than sticking around and explaining what had happened, Walter (according to the English historian William of Malmesbury) “leapt hastily on his horse, and with good help from his spurs got clean away. Nor indeed was there any pursuit.” Instead, the rest of the hunting party, which included William II’s younger brother Henry, went back to London and crowned Henry king of England. The date was August 5, 1100.1

In fact, Henry wasn’t William’s heir. The English throne should have gone to Henry’s older brother Robert, Duke of Normandy, but he was still on his way back from the First Crusade. Before he could claim his crown, Henry invaded Normandy.

The two brothers met in battle near the Norman village Tinchebray; the Duke of Normandy’s army was defeated, and Robert was captured and imprisoned for the rest of his very long life. He died in his eighties, still under guard. As for Henry I, he took the title of Normandy for himself, becoming (like his father the Conqueror) both king of England and Duke of Normandy.

His reign, which had begun through force and usurpation, now took a turn towards law. As one of his very first acts, he issued a new declaration: the Charter of Liberties. The first article promised that the “holy church of God” would remain free from royal control, its lands from royal confiscation. But the remaining thirteen articles were all directed towards his people—particularly towards the barons of England.

The barons: the newborn aristocracy of England. William the Conqueror had rewarded his Norman knights by dividing the newly conquered land up into parcels and handing it out. The Anglo-Saxon nobles—the thegns, or “thanes”—had once been second only to the royal family in power and influence. The wars of the Conquest had already thinned their ranks. Now, those who had survived found themselves deprived of their lands, left with only tiny private holdings of their own.2

Unlike the thanes, the Norman barons did not consider themselves landowners, only landholders. William the Conqueror brought into England a new kind of kingship. As monarch, he claimed to own the entire kingdom: all English land, all Norman land, was the possession of the king. The barons were his “tenants in chief,” and in return for their new estates, they owed the king a certain number of armed men for his use: the servitium debitum.3

This system was rooted in tenth-century Francia, where chaos and lawlessness had led the poor to serve their wealthier neighbors in exchange for protection. It became known as feudalism: an order in which service and payments (both money and crops) were exchanged for the right to live on, farm, hold a particular piece of land. In England, the feudal lords and their holdings were set down, by William the Conqueror’s scribes, in a vast two-volume record known as the Domesday Book: a ridiculously ambitious attempt to record the condition and ownership of every piece of English land. Among the names of the feudal lords, barely one percent are Anglo-Saxon. The rest had come to England in William’s service.*

These barons now owed the servitium debitum to Henry. But they remained fiercely protective of their own aristocratic privileges, and the Charter of Liberties assured them that the new king would not extort additional payments from them, or prevent them from disposing of their own possessions as they wished.

It was an odd thing for a Norman-born king to limit his own powers—a recognition that twelfth-century England was at the beginning of a new era. But the Charter of Liberties was in reality a canny strengthening of Henry’s hold on the throne. “Know that by the mercy of God,” it began, “and by the common counsel of the barons of the whole kingdom of England, I have been crowned king.” Henry was a usurper, crowned only with the support of the barons, and the Charter was designed to guard his power by keeping them on his side.

In fact, Henry intended to exercise as much authority as his people would allow. And, as soon became clear, more authority than the pope was inclined to grant him.

Like his predecessors, Pope Paschal II insisted on the papal right of investiture—the power to appoint bishops throughout Christendom. Investiture was no small matter. The bishop of a city had authority over all of its ecclesiastical resources—land, money, and men. He had as much power as any secular count or nobleman to build, collect revenue, hire private soldiers, and generally empire-build within the monarch’s own land. But unlike a count or nobleman, a bishop could not marry and pass his estate to his son; each bishop’s death presented another opportunity for either pope or king to jockey into place a loyalist who would put those massive (and ever-growing) resources at the disposal of his master. Henry, claiming his rights as God-ordained, God-appointed, God-approved monarch of England, refused to give up this privilege.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the English church, disagreed.

Anselm of Canterbury, approaching seventy at the time of the First Crusade, was an innovator, an intellectual maverick. He had been educated at Bec Abbey in Normandy, where the well-known teacher Lanfranc taught in a monastic school: a “famous centre of learning,” says the twelfth-century English historian William of Malmesbury, “where pupils on all sides were puffing out their cheeks and spouting forth dialectic.”4

Dialectic: the rules of systematic thinking and inquiry laid out by Aristotle. Such an education was new to the twelfth century. Most clerics knew very little of Aristotle; the only works of the great Greek available to them in Latin had been translated by the sixth-century Roman philosopher Boethius, who made it only through the texts on logic before he ran afoul of Theoderic the Ostrogoth and got himself beheaded.* Theoderic had merely intended to rid himself of a traitor. Instead, he rid the West of Aristotelian philosophy. No one else undertook the project, so for the next five hundred years, Aristotle was known to the scholar-monks of Europe only as a logician. And Aristotelian logic was not highly regarded by most churchmen. It promised the careful thinker a way to arrive at true conclusions that would apply, universally to the whole world, without making any reference to scripture. Aristotle offered the possibility of truth without God, of reason without faith.

Both the ninth-century Irish theologian Johannes Scotus Erigena and the eleventh-century teacher Berengar of Tours had already made use of Aristotelian categories to argue against the doctrine of trans-substantio: the assertion that the bread and wine of the Eucharist, while remaining the same in appearance, changed in substance into the body and blood of Christ.* Both men were roundly excoriated for daring to use Aristotle in the service of theology. Erigena, fumed the Bishop of Troyes, was a “master of error” who had dared to come to conclusions about “the truth of God . . . without the utterly faithful authority of the Holy Scripture,” and Berengar of Tours found his writings condemned by a series of church councils, over his objections that he was, in fact, an entirely orthodox son of the Church.5

But Aristotle’s ideas survived. Lanfranc, Anselm’s teacher, had studied logic in Italy before entering Bec Abbey: “He brought the liberal arts from Italy to France . . . and gave them fresh polish with his intellect,” William of Malmesbury tells us. Lanfranc taught his students at Bec to use dialectic as a tool for understanding revelation more clearly; and Anselm, studying beneath the master, found in Aristotelian logic a natural compatibility with his own ways of thinking.6

Anselm himself rose from student to teacher at Bec, and in those years he allowed the logic of Aristotle to penetrate further and further into his theology. He dared to ask why God should exist, in a day when no one asked such questions (an age, as G. R. Evans puts it, of “almost universal belief”); and he dared to search for answers using only reason. “I began to ask myself,” Anselm wrote, in the preface to his Proslogion, “whether one argument might possibly be found, resting on no other argument for its proof, but sufficient in itself to prove that God truly exists, and that he is the supreme good.”7 Resting on no other argument for its proof: this was Aristotelian dialectic, applied to the most central beliefs of the Christian faith. Anselm, inheriting the benefits of several generations of very cautious scholarship, had struck boldly out past the existing theological frontiers.*

He continued far into the unknown country, tackling not only the existence of God but also the particular Christian doctrines of incarnation and redemption, with reason alone. (“The following work,” he writes, in the introduction to the 1098 Why God Became Man, “. . . ends by proving by necessary reasons—Christ being put out of sight, as if nothing had ever been known of him—that it is impossible for any man to be saved without him.”)8

And as he did this, he continued to uphold, almost blindly, the right of the pope alone to appoint bishops.

Anselm spent his entire intellectual life on what must have felt like the edge of disaster: always willing to question what he had received, in faith that there was no tool of logic, no Greek syllogism, no Aristotelian category, that could shake truth. He must have feared, late at night in his rooms, that he was going too far; that one day the truth he held with all his might would indeed crumble in the face of his questions. But he continued to write and to reason.

And, perhaps to assure himself that he was still a good son of the Church, he remained, all of his life, the pope’s man. In 1093, William the Conqueror’s heir, William II, had nominated Anselm to be Archbishop of Canterbury. Anselm agreed to the appointment. But he refused to take the pallium, the cloak that symbolized his office, from William II’s hand. Instead, he insisted that the cloak be placed on the altar so that he could then pick it up. According to the syllogism in his head, this meant that he had been appointed by the pope, not the king.9

Anselm’s loyalty meant that he stood staunchly for the papal right of investiture. Eventually, he and Henry fell out so sharply over the issue that Anselm, afraid for his life, fled to Rome. While he took shelter there, Henry continued to demand his rights, Paschal II to refuse them. “It lies heavy on us that you seem to demand of us something that we can by no means grant,” the pope wrote back to the king, “. . . You will say therefore, ‘This is mine of right.’ Not so, indeed for it belongs not to emperors or kings, but to God, it is His alone.” He added, ominously, “In this matter, we would have you contemplate what you lose.”10

Which was nothing less than salvation: Paschal II had the authority to excommunicate Henry, declaring him cut off from the Church, the sacraments, and their saving power. He could even place the entire country of England under an interdict. Churches would be closed, crucifixes draped with black cloth, the dead buried in unconsecrated ground—no Masses, no weddings, no bells. Interdict was a theological weapon of mass destruction, likely to make the king who had caused it grossly unpopular with his people.11

Henry I, involved in a serious war with rebellious barons in Normandy, finally decided that he couldn’t fight both the pope and the Normans. In 1107, he agreed to a compromise; although only Paschal II could appoint English bishops, each bishop would have to go and pay homage to the king before he could take possession of the physical place in England where he would serve.

Although this still gave Henry some control over who ended up in bishoprics, Paschal II agreed, since it was clear that this was the biggest concession that the king was willing to make. But the pope saved some face by tacking onto the formal agreement, the “Concordat of London,” a further provision. Bishops had to carry out the homage part only until the “rain of prayers” offered by the faithful softened Henry’s heart and caused him to willingly abandon the practice.12

Henry agreed to the provision. Possibly he had less faith in the efficacy of the prayers than Paschal II.

This temporarily reconciled the pope and England, and Anselm returned to Canterbury, where he would serve just two more years before his death. But the struggle for supremacy was not over in England, merely in abeyance.

IN 1105, the strong-minded Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV, abdicated. This left his nineteen-year-old son and co-ruler, Henry V, in sole control of the Holy Roman Empire: the uneasy collection, under a single crown, of German duchies and northern Italian cities.

It did not, however, make young Henry the emperor. Over the previous three centuries, an uneven tradition had emerged; the heir to the empire could assume power through the right of royal inheritance, but the actual title of Holy Roman Emperor was not awarded until the pope agreed to hold a coronation ceremony in Rome.

But once on the throne, Henry V showed himself to be just as strong-minded as his legendary father. He did not intend to trade power for papal recognition, and he was willing to delay his imperial coronation until the matter of investiture had been thoroughly discussed. He began to argue, with increasing heat, for the royal right to appoint clergy within the empire; and Paschal II, at first willing to make a few concessions to keep peace with the new ruler, continued to refuse.

1.1 England and the Holy Roman Empire

Henry V was a deep man, even at a young age, and he was playing a deep game. Looking around for his most natural ally, he settled on the king of England, still unsoftened by the rain of prayers directed his way. In 1110, he negotiated a betrothal between himself and the English king’s nine-year-old daughter, Matilda, which brought him a very large dowry. Then, with Henry I’s money, he assembled an army and marched down to the Papal States of Italy to bring the controversy to an end.

With a hostile army waiting just outside his borders, Paschal agreed to a compromise. Henry V would yield his right to appoint bishops, giving the pope the right to decide who would hold spiritual authority. But in return, Paschal would give back all of the lands, political perks, and privileges that had gotten entwined, over the centuries, with the bishoprics.

This neatly pulled apart the sacred and the secular privileges of investiture. The bishops of the empire might be under papal authority, but they would no longer control the vast tracts of land that had made them powerful. It was a victory for Henry, and Paschal knew it; he insisted on keeping the terms secret as long as possible.13

Henry V, still running on his fiancée’s money, traveled to Rome in the early weeks of 1111, signed the agreement on the night of February 11, and then proceeded to St. Peter’s the next morning to be crowned. At the beginning of the ceremony, the terms of the treaty were read out. This was an unwelcome surprise to most of the gathered bishops, who hadn’t realized that the pope was willing to give away quite so many of their privileges. When the reading reached the central passage, the one that barred bishops (under sentence of excommunication) from profiting in any way from “cities, duchies, marks, counties, rights of coinage, rights of till, rights of market, militia, and castles of the kingdom,” the bishops raised so much noise and protest that the reading stopped.14

In the face of such outcry, Paschal refused to hold to the terms. At once, Henry announced that, since Paschal wouldn’t be able to carry out his side of the bargain, he, Henry, wouldn’t give up the right of investiture. Paschal retorted that he wouldn’t crown Henry emperor after all; at that point Henry ordered his men to take the pope into “protective custody” so that the bishops wouldn’t harm their shepherd.

He hauled Paschal outside of Rome and kept him prisoner for two weeks, after which Paschal issued a new decree. “Your kingdom is connected in a singular way to the holy Roman church,” it said. “Therefore . . . we concede to Your Love . . . that you confer investiture of crozier and ring on the bishops and abbots of your kingdom.”15

Henry then allowed Paschal to declare him Holy Roman Emperor, and turned for home. He had won the quarrel, but the extorted agreement was widely unpopular with both the churchmen and the German aristocrats in his own kingdom who feared his growing power. He spent the next decade putting down territorial revolts in Germany, stretched thinner and thinner by the constant warfare.

Paschal’s death, in 1118, gave him a chance to back down with dignity. In 1122, after a long series of negotiations at the German city of Worms, Henry V and the new pope Calixtus II finally came to terms. Henry V, at long last, agreed to renounce the right of investiture, and Calixtus II agreed that, in Germany only, newly appointed bishops would do homage to Henry V as king before their consecration, thus assuring that in the heartland of the emperor, loyalists alone would wear the bishop’s miter.

The Concordat of Worms, like the Concordat of London, was a pragmatic solution: a brief document, five paragraphs outlining Henry’s concessions, four listing the privileges Calixtus was yielding. It answered none of the theological questions and solved none of the underlying conflicts. The knot of secular and sacred power had not been untwisted. It had merely been hidden, temporarily, beneath a thin covering of apparent agreement.

*See Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Medieval World (W. W. Norton, 2010), pp. 547ff.

*For the career of Theoderic the Ostrogoth, who became king of Italy in the last decade of the fifth century, see Bauer, The History of the Medieval World, pp. 143–149.

*The Aristotelian distinction between essence and accident required a rethinking of the whole idea of transubstantiation; medieval theologians began to develop “a new sense of the implications of the rules derived from Aristotle’s Categories, which recognizes that, although, by definition, accidents may alter (for that is the nature of accidents), the substance does not.” Interested readers can find a fuller explanation in G. R. Evans, ed., The Medieval Theologians (Wiley-Blackwell, 2001), pp. 90ff.

*Anselm’s line of reasoning in the Proslogion is known as the “ontological argument” for the existence of God: he defines God, famously, as “that of which nothing greater can be conceived,” and attempts to prove that God necessarily exists because we are able to conceive of him. A useful summary for the nonspecialist is found in Alvin Plantinga’s God and Other Minds: A Study of the Rational Justification of Belief in God (Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 26ff.

Chapter Two

The Crusader Enemy

Between 1100 and 1138,

the emperor of Constantinople and the Crusaders

fight against each other

ALEXIUS COMNENUS, the Christian emperor of Constantinople, had distrusted the Crusaders from the beginning.

As each German and Italian and Frankish nobleman arrived in Constantinople with his own private army, ready to cross over the Bosphorus Strait and face the enemy, Alexius had demanded a sacred oath. Whatever “cities, countries or forces he might in future subdue . . . he would hand over to the officer appointed by the emperor.” They were, after all, there to fight for Christendom; and Alexius Comnenus was the ruler of Christendom in the east.1

Just as Alexius had feared, the chance to build private kingdoms in the Holy Land proved too tempting.

The first knight to bite the apple was the Norman soldier Bohemund, who had arrived in Constantinople at the start of the First Crusade and immediately became one of the foremost commanders of the Crusader armies. Spearheading the capture of the great city Antioch in 1098, Bohemund at once named himself its prince and flatly refused to honor his oath. (“Bohemund,” remarked Alexius’s daughter and biographer, Anna, “was by nature a liar.”) By 1100, Antioch had been joined by two other Crusader kingdoms—the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the County of Edessa—and Bohemund himself was busy agitating the Christians of Asia Minor against Byzantium. By 1103, Bohemund was planning a direct attack against the walls of Constantinople itself.2

To mount this assault, Bohemund needed to recruit more soldiers. The most likely source for reinforcements was Italy; Bohemund’s late father, Robert Guiscard, had conquered himself a kingdom in the south of Italy (the grandly named “Dukedom of Apulia and Calabria”), and Bohemund, who had been absent from Italy since heading out on crusade, had theoretically inherited its crown. Alexius knew this as well as Bohemund did, so Byzantine ships hovered in the Mediterranean, waiting to intercept any Italy-bound ships from the principality of Antioch.

So Bohemund was forced to be sneaky. Anna Comnena tells us that he spread rumors everywhere:

“Bohemond,” it was said, “is dead.” . . . When he perceived that the story had gone far enough, a wooden coffin was made and a bireme prepared. The coffin was placed on board and he, a still breathing “corpse,” sailed away from Soudi, the port of Antioch, for Rome. . . . At each stop the barbarians tore out their hair and paraded their mourning. But inside Bohemond, stretched out at full length, was . . . alive, breathing air in and out through hidden holes. . . . [I]n order that the corpse might appear to be in a state of rare putrefaction, they strangled or cut the throat of a cock and put that in the coffin with him. By the fourth or fifth day at the most, the horrible stench was obvious to anyone who could smell. . . . Bohemond himself derived more pleasure than anyone from his imaginary misfortune.3

Bohemund was a rascal and an opportunist, but he almost always got what he wanted; when he arrived in Italy and staged a victorious resurrection, he was able to rouse great public enthusiasm for his fight against Byzantium. In fact, his conquest of Antioch in the east had given him hero stature back in Italy. People swarmed to see him, says one contemporary historian, “as if they were going to see Christ himself.”4

Bohemund and his newly recruited army sailed confidently for the Byzantine borders in 1108. They were promptly defeated by a Byzantine army at Dyrrhachium, on the Greek coast. Bohemund’s long run of good fortune had run out. He was forced to surrender, and although he held on to Antioch, he pledged to leave it to the emperor after his death.

But despite Bohemund’s defeat, Crusader power in the east continued to expand at Alexius’s expense. In 1109, the king of Jerusalem conquered Tripoli, which gave the Crusaders control of the entire coastline.* Two years later, Bohemund of Antioch died, but his heirs refused to hand Antioch over to Byzantine rule as promised. Alexius Comnenus, occupied with the Turks, did not try to reconquer the “impregnable” city of Antioch, but he never forgave the loss.

And there were new Christian threats to the emperor’s power on the horizon, those originating in Italy.

2.1 The Lands of the Crusades

There was no “Italian kingdom.” (Italy, remarked the Austrian statesman Metternich in 1814, was only a “geographical expression,” a truth that applied to the twelfth century just as well.)5 The north of the peninsula was ruled by the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V. The center was controlled by Pope Paschal II, head of the Christian Church in the west; the south, by Norman kings. Dotted along the coast were the “maritime republics,” Italian cities that controlled coasts and harbors, and which (for all practical purposes) governed themselves. The three most powerful of these were Genoa and Pisa on the western coast, and Venice on the northern end of the Adriatic Sea.

All three had sent soldiers on crusade; all three were now allies of the Crusader kingdoms. Pisan and Venetian and Genoan ships aided the Crusader kings in their territorial struggles against Turks, supplying naval power and an ongoing supply chain to sieges and battles. In exchange, the Crusader kingdoms allowed merchants from the Italian cities to establish trading posts in the east where they carried on a growing trade in pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, and saffron—and lived free from any government but their own.6

Before the First Crusade, when Constantinople and the western knights were still on the same side, Alexius Comnenus had made his own treaty with the maritime republics; in the very first year of his reign, 1081, he had given the Venetians their own quarter in Constantinople, complete with churches and the right to carry on trade tax-free. But as the Crusader kingdoms gained power, the maritime republics became increasingly willing to turn against the Christian emperor of Byzantium.7

In 1118, Alexius Comnenus died in Constantinople, slowly suffocated by growths in his lungs and esophagus. His oldest son succeeded him as John II. Among the immediate problems that he had to solve was the attitude of the Venetians, who had grown increasingly defiant to Byzantine authority. In an attempt to cut them down to size, John Comnenus canceled his father’s 1081 treaty with Venice. This enraged the Venetians, and in retaliation Venetian ships began to pillage and raid the smaller islands of the empire.8

In the middle of this state of hostility, Venice increased its influence in the Crusader kingdoms. In 1123, a Venetian fleet helped the king of Jerusalem besiege the city of Tyre, still in the hands of the Fatimid caliphate, the Arab dynasty that had controlled Jerusalem and still ruled Egypt. The next year, the combined forces of Venice and Jerusalem brought Tyre down. In gratitude, the king of Jerusalem gave the Venetians even more privilege in Jerusalem: a street of their own, a church, a bakery, and exemption from all taxes, of all kinds.9

John Comnenus’s actions were creating an even stronger Crusader-Venetian nexus; and, realizing that this would not go well for Constantinople, John backed away. In 1126, he reaffirmed all of Venice’s privileges in Constantinople.

That temporarily relieved the quarrel between Venice and Byzantium. But Venice had shown its own motivations clearly. The Crusaders had broken the unity of the cross for political power, the chance to build their own islands of political power in the east; the Venetians had broken it for the opportunity to build a commercial empire in the same lands.

Peace did not last long. In 1136, hostility between Byzantium and the Crusader kingdoms erupted once more.

The fuse was lit by the Prince of Antioch, still a thorn in the emperor’s side. After Bohemund’s death, regents had ruled Antioch in the name of his infant son. But now Bohemund II, aged twenty-eight, was in control of his own kingdom; and he wanted to extend his possessions by taking over the Christian kingdom of Cilician Armenia, just to his north.

He was not strong enough to attack directly, but like his father, Bohemund II was a schemer. He invited the kingdom’s ruler, Leo I, to Antioch for a friendly chat, and then took him prisoner, demanding that he purchase his release by handing over the south of his country. Leo I agreed, was set free, and then immediately set about reconquering his lost lands.

The agitation attracted the attention of John Comnenus, who saw in it his own opportunity. Ignoring the Turkish Sultan of Rum, Constantinople’s old enemy in Asia Minor, John invaded the distracted Christian kingdom of Cilicia and claimed its western territories as his own. At this, Leo and Bohemund dropped the quarrel with each other and united together against their common enemy. War between the Christian Crusaders and the Christian emperor in the east was now in the open.

It was a short war. When it became clear that Byzantine armies would make quick work of Cilicia, Bohemund II swapped sides again and agreed to swear allegiance to John Comnenus. This left the diminished Cilician army all alone, isolated in the remaining eastern territories of their shrinking country. Without much difficulty, Byzantine forces overran the diminished country entirely, captured Leo I and his family, and hauled them to prison in Constantinople.10

John Comnenus himself made a triumphal entry into Antioch, with Bohemund II riding gamely at his side, and claimed formal authority as its overlord. “Be of good cheer, O men who love Christ and those who are pilgrims and strangers because of Christ,” wrote one of the court poets. “Do not fear any more murderous hands; the Emperor who loves Christ has put them in chains and broken to pieces the unjust sword.”11

But those murderous hands had themselves been Christian, and while John Comnenus had been occupying himself against his Crusader enemies, the strength of the Turkish governor of Aleppo was building towards conquest of the Christian foe.

*Tripoli retained its identity as a separate entity, but from now on was ruled by counts who paid homage to the king of Jerusalem; the first was Bertrand of Toulouse, 1109–1112. The king of Jerusalem also had authority over multiple smaller “lordships”; the thirteenth-century writer John of Ibelin says that the four most powerful of these were the Prince of Galilee, the Count of Jaffa and Ascalon, the Lord of Sidon, and the Lord of Oultrejordain. All of these titles were distinct, but firmly under Jerusalem’s oversight.

Chapter Three

Anarchy

Between 1120 and 1139, the Count of Anjou becomes king of Jerusalem,

the Holy Roman Empress becomes Countess of Anjou,

and civil war wrecks England

FOR THE LAST FIVE YEARS of his life, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V was poised to become the most powerful monarch in the world.

Matilda, daughter of Henry I of England, had spent four years betrothed to Henry V. At thirteen she was finally sent to Mainz, where she married the twenty-eight-year-old emperor in a ceremony of “fitting splendour” (Henry of Huntingdon, writing in 1129, remarks that her father was forced to levy a special tax on the English in order to pay for it). Six years later, catastrophe struck at home. Her brother, William, a year her junior and the heir to the English throne, got drunk with friends and ordered a ship put out to sea for all of them. Steering while intoxicated was as dangerous then as it is now; William of Malmesbury says that it was “already night and pitch dark when those young hotheads, drunk as well as foolish, put out from the shore. The ship sped swifter than a feathered arrow, and . . . struck, through the carelessness of her besotted crew, a rock projecting from the surface not far from shore.”1

Late November was not a good time to be wrecked in the English Channel, not even close to shore. All of the young men on the ship but one drowned; most of the bodies were never recovered.

The seventeen-year-old William was Henry’s only legitimate son, Matilda his only daughter. William of Malmesbury says, in admiration, that Henry only indulged “in the embraces of the female sex . . . from love of begetting children and not to gratify his passions, for he thought it beneath his dignity to comply with extraneous gratification, unless the royal seed could fulfill its natural purpose.” This was patriotic nonsense; Henry I still holds a record for siring more bastards than any other English king, but his legal unions were less fruitful. He married again immediately after William’s death, hoping to father another son, but none came along. Matilda, wife of the emperor, became first in line to the throne of England; Henry V was now in line to become king of England as well as king of Germany, king of Italy, and Holy Roman Emperor.2

But in his late thirties he grew suddenly and violently ill, probably with some form of cancer. He died in 1125, just before his fortieth birthday. Matilda had given birth to a stillborn child, sometime before her husband’s death, but she had no living children; and with Henry V, the Salian dynasty of emperors came to an end. The aristocrats of Germany assembled to elect another emperor (eventually they settled on the Duke of Saxony, who became Lothair III), and Matilda went home.

Henry I of England, despairing of a son, set himself to shore up his daughter’s claim to the English crown. Two years after her husband’s death, he arranged a new marriage for her, to the fifteen-year-old Geoffrey the Handsome; Matilda, in a reversal of her earlier fortunes, was twenty-five.

The marriage was politically smart and personally disastrous.

Geoffrey was the son of the Count of Anjou, and Anjou was a keystone in the power structure of Western Francia. Western Francia, like Germany, was a fragment of Charlemagne’s defunct eighth-century empire; unlike Germany, which had begun its journey towards a national identity under the guidance of Henry the Fowler in 919, Western Francia was a patchwork. Only the ring of territories right around Paris was known as France; the rest of Western Francia was governed by local noblemen, held loosely together by personal oaths of loyalty to the Capetian king.*

The Count of Anjou was one of these noblemen: loyal in theory to the French throne, but a king in his own lands in all but name. He had inherited a massive estate that bordered Henry I’s Norman lands on one side, and the king of France’s royal holdings on the other. His power was due largely to the efforts of his great-grandfather Fulk the Black, a psychotically warlike aristocrat who had burned his wife, in her wedding dress, at the stake for adultery; fought a vicious war against his own son and then forced the defeated youth to put on a bridle and saddle and crawl on the ground in humiliation; and pillaged and robbed the surrounding lands at will. Fearing a justly deserved hell, he had in his old age made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where he was rumored to have bitten off a piece of stone from the Holy Sepulchre with his own teeth so that he would have a relic to bring home.3

The current Count of Anjou, Fulk V, was more moderate than his ancestor, but no less ambitious. The marriage of his young son to the future queen of England was good for Matilda, since it brought the resources of France’s most powerful region to her aid. It would also make Fulk’s grandchildren into royalty. And it would give Anjou, in return, the protection of the English king.

Fulk V was in need of this protection for his son, because he was already planning to leave his home for another throne. In a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1120, he had befriended the king of Jerusalem, Baldwin II. Baldwin II had four daughters but no sons; he wanted to assure the succession of his oldest daughter, Melisande, to the throne of Jerusalem, and Fulk was a widower. As soon as he had arranged for the marriage of Geoffrey and Matilda, Fulk relinquished the title of Count of Anjou to his son and departed for Jerusalem. “Within a few days after his arrival in the kingdom,” writes William of Tyre, who knew Fulk, “the king gave him his oldest daughter to wife.” When Baldwin II died, in 1131, Fulk and Melisande were crowned king and queen of Jerusalem.4

Meanwhile, his son and new daughter-in-law had quarreled and separated.

Geoffrey had risen in the world, becoming count at a ridiculously young age; Matilda had sunk from empress to countess. Matilda, once married to the most powerful man in the west, had ruled Italy in her husband’s absence; now she was tied to a teenager who had been knighted a bare week before the wedding. After a single year, she walked out on her child-groom and went home.

The cause of the quarrel is unknown (Simeon of Durham says that Geoffrey “repudiated” Matilda “without respect”), but eventually Matilda’s father talked her into returning. The two must have worked out some way of coexisting; Matilda bore her young husband a son in 1133, when she was thirty-one and he was twenty, and then gave him two more in the next three years.5

In 1135, Henry I of England was in Normandy, his own land, visiting his daughter just across the border in Anjou. He had “delayed” his return to England, writes the English chronicler Henry of Huntingdon, “by reason of his great delight in his grandchildren.” One day he returned from hunting and indulged himself in a dinner of lamprey eels: “of which he was fond,” Huntingdon remarks, “though they always disagreed with him. . . . This repast bringing on ill humours, and violently exciting similar symptoms, caused a sudden and extreme disturbance, under which his aged frame sunk into a deathly torpor.” He died on the first day of December, aged sixty-eight.6

Before Matilda could cross the Channel and claim her crown, the noblemen of England—resistant both to the notion of a queen and to the French influence that would undoubtedly accompany her—banded together and proclaimed Matilda’s cousin Stephen, grandson of William the Conqueror, as king of England.

For a time, Stephen ruled unopposed. But over the first four years of his reign, he grew slowly more unpopular. He lost land to the Welsh; descendants of Romans and Irish and native Britons, the Welsh had formed a distinct kingdom in the ninth century, had paid tribute to the English kings in the tenth, and had resisted the Norman influx in the eleventh. He struggled against the Scots, the Celts of the far north; the Scottish High King David I had sworn reluctant loyalty to Henry I but now repealed his alliance and marched into the north of England. Stephen drove back the Scottish invasion with startling ferocity (eleven thousand dead, says Henry of Huntingdon), arrested two powerful English bishops and confiscated their lands, and then fell out with the Archbishop of Canterbury. His reign disintegrated into calamity.7

In 1139, four years after Stephen’s election, Matilda invaded England with troops from Anjou and Normandy. The armies of Matilda and Stephen laid the fields waste; neither king nor queen controlled the country, and the barons of England seized the opportunity to enrich themselves. “Every powerful man made his castles and held them,” says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

Then both by night and day they seized those men whom they imagined had any wealth, common men and women, and put them in prison to get their gold and silver, and tortured them. . . . Wretched men starved with hunger; some who were once powerful men went on alms; some fled out of the land. . . . [T]he earth bore no corn because the land was all done for by such doings.8

This was the beginning of the Anarchy, a fifteen-year civil war that destroyed villages, killed thousands, wrecked the English countryside, and brought its people to despair: “And it was said openly,” concludes the Chronicle, “that Christ and His saints slept.”

3.1 England and France during the Anarchy

*The Capetian dynasty ruled in Paris 987–1328; it was founded by Hugh Capet, grandson of Henry the Fowler. The Capetian king at the time of Matilda was Louis VI, nicknamed Louis the Fat (1108–1137).

Chapter Four

The Lost Homeland

Between 1127 and 1150, the Song are exiled by the Jin,

the Dai Viet adopt the Mandate of Heaven,

and a Khmer king builds the biggest temple on earth

IN 1127, the poet Li Qingzhao and her husband abandoned their home and fled from the advancing troops of the Jurchen. They traveled south with a cartful of rare manuscripts and antique bronzes, leaving behind them a lifetime’s collection of books and art. Before they reached the southern city of Nanjing, where they would settle as refugees, the Jurchen burned their home to the ground. The Song dynasty, which had been ruling from the Yellow river valley since 960, was driven from its capital city of Kaifeng; the Song emperor Qinzong was hauled north and imprisoned until his death; the dominance of the Song over China was broken.1

“The long night passes slowly,” Li Qingzhao wrote, wistfully, of her vanished home, “with few happy thoughts / Then I dream of the capital and see the road back to it. . . .” But she never followed the road; Kaifeng was lost forever.2

For the Song dynasty, the defeat was both unexpected and embarrassing. The Song were heirs of the four-thousand-year-old Chinese imperial tradition, holders of the ancient Mandate of Heaven, heirs of the legendary Yellow Emperor.* The invading Jurchen, on the other hand, had been nomads less than a generation before. They had begun to move towards a national identity only twelve years earlier, when the brilliant and ambitious Akuta, leader of the Wanyan clan, had adopted a Chinese dynastic name for himself (the “Jin Emperor”)† and set his eyes on the conquest of the rich empire to his south.

To the Song, the Jurchen were still merely barbarians: “Our vast land now smells of goat and sheep,” complained the poet Chen Liang, also driven south by the Jurchen. But despite the scorn the Song felt for the raw northerners, the Jurchen continued, inexorably, to advance. Gaozong, younger brother of the captured Song emperor, escaped south and proclaimed himself the next Song ruler; but he was forced to reestablish his court at Lin’an, on the far side of the Yangtze river, and even there he was constantly threatened by Jurchen raids. Jurchen horsemen pressed down farther and farther into the central plains, looting and burning the towns they passed. In 1129, Yangzhou fell to the invaders; in 1130, the Jurchen crossed the Yangtze and sacked Ningbo, on the southern coast.3

The emperor Song Gaozong, who had just turned twenty when Kaifeng fell, was forced to move from hiding place to hiding place. He grew so desperate that he sent an embassy to the Jurchen generals, offering to become their vassal if the raids would only stop: “I have no one to defend me,” he wrote, “and no place to run.”4

But the Jurchen did not want vassals. The Song scorn was not entirely undeserved; the Jurchen were mounted soldiers with no experience of running a state, no mechanism for administering a conquered country. They wanted to conquer China, not govern it as an occupied land.

So Song Gaozong’s plea was rejected, and the battles continued. But this turned out to be the saving of the Song. As fighting dragged on, the northern warriors struggled with unfamiliar southern heat. The terrain, crosshatched with streams and canals, slowed their horses. They had no experience with water warfare, but they now faced the barrier of the Yangtze. The Jurchen troops, growing fatter with plunder and loot, were less inclined to ride hard and far. And the Song themselves, adjusting to their exile, were mounting an increasingly powerful resistance by ship.5

The Song, like the dynasties before them, had always supplemented land armies with sea power. More and more warcraft were built to patrol the Yangtze. The river, noted one Song official, was the new Great Wall against the barbarians. In 1132, the emperor authorized the creation of a new government agency, the Imperial Commissioner’s Office for the Control and Organization of the Coastal Areas, to take charge of the fleet. The Song warships had now become the world’s first permanent, standing, government-run navy.6

The navy tipped the struggle back towards the Song. For a decade, power teetered between the two sides, neither able to make much progress past the Yangtze. Slowly, the Song court began to accept the reality of its position: the north was, at least for the moment, lost. In 1141, the emperor Gaozong agreed to sign a peace treaty with the Jurchen. Thirteen years of war had given him no choice. He could no longer afford to mount endless expeditions into the north; the cropland in the south was untilled, the farmers drafted into the army; the only other road for the Song ended in poverty and famine.

The Shaoxing treaty was a humiliation. It referred to the Jurchen as the “superior state” and the Song as an “insignificant fiefdom,” and Gaozong was forced to accept the status of Jurchen vassal, complete with a hefty annual tribute. But it halted the fighting for two decades, and the shrunken Song, battered and shamed by the nomads, slowly began to build a new existence for itself.7

FAR SOUTH of the Yellow river, a cluster of smaller kingdoms had grown up in the shadow of the giant.

The peoples of these southern lands were known to the Chinese simply as Yueh, a blanket name for all non-Chinese living below the Yangtze. A thousand years earlier, the most northern of these peoples had fallen under Chinese rule. Invaded by the armies of the Han dynasty, the lands around the Gulf of Tonkin became Annam, a Chinese province under the control of a Han governor.8

But in the tenth century, Annam had broken away from its Chinese overlords and claimed the right to rule itself: not as Annam, a Chinese province, but as Dai Viet, an independent kingdom ruled by the Ly dynasty of kings.

Border spats with the Song continued to trouble the northern provinces of Dai Viet. In 1076, one of these spats had escalated into full-scale war, culminating in a Song invasion. At the mouth of the Bach Dang river, the Song forces were repelled by the great general Ly Thuong Kiet. He celebrated his victory with the song Nam Quoc Son Ho, “Land of the Southern Kingdom”:

Over the peaks and rivers of the South reigns our emperor.

Such is the destiny fixed forever on the Celestial Book.

How dare the Enemy invade our land?

Their foolish audacity will witness their bloody rout!9

The verse, still remembered as Vietnam’s first declaration of independence, was written in Chinese.

Ten centuries of Chinese domination had woven Chinese ways into the fabric of Dai Viet, and neither Song weakness nor Dai Viet independence could unpick it. The 1076 invasion ended with a border agreement between the two courts; it drew a line between China and Dai Viet, north of the Dai Viet capital Thang Long, that still exists today. But the border did not wall the Dai Viet away from the influence of the Song. The Ly kings, like their Chinese counterparts, were builders of Buddhist pagodas and benefactors of Buddhist monasteries. Chinese was still used in all court business; would-be officials still had to pass the Chinese civil service examination, based on the teachings of Confucius. And even as the Song court fled from the cradle of ancient Chinese civilization, the Ly dynasty adopted the Mandate of Heaven as its own. Their kings were “Southern Emperors,” ruling the “Southern Kingdoms” by virtue of their own, southern, celestial mandate; the mandate of the Song emperor ended north of Thang Long, and the powers of heaven protected the border between the two.10

4.1 The Kingdoms of China and Southeast Asia

Huddling at Kaifeng, beating off Jin raids, the Song could hardly push the point. For the next two centuries, the greatest threats to Dai Viet power would come from the south instead.

Two kingdoms lay below Dai Viet: Khmer and Champa, both shaped more by trade with India across the Bay of Bengal than by Chinese pressure from the north. The king of Khmer, Suryavarman II, had come to the throne in 1113 by fighting off his relatives. His reign continued, as it had begun, with war.

First he turned on his own kingdom. Under his predecessors, Khmer had begun to spiral down into anarchy and fragmentation; in a series of deadly internal battles, Suryavarman whipped his rebellious nobility into line. Then he turned his gaze outward. “He saw the kings of the other countries that he desired to subjugate,” a contemporary chronicle notes, “. . . [and] he himself went into the countries of his enemies.” It was his duty to subjugate the earth. Like his predecessors, Suryavarman followed the Hindu Devaraja, the god-king cult; as king of Khmer, he was an incarnation of the divine, one with the god. He was Chakravartin, ruler (on earth) of the universe.11

His first target was the coastal kingdom of Champa, immediately to his east. A series of raids into Champa created a high level of anxiety among the Sanskrit-speaking Cham; many of them fled north into Dai Viet, which gave them refuge. In 1128, Suryavarman used this as the pretext for a new offensive, this time directly against Dai Viet. He marched twenty thousand men into the country, and was unceremoniously driven back.12

Undaunted, he settled into a pattern of regular raids on his neighbors: sending armies in by land and fleets of warships around by water. But he made little headway against the Dai Viet. In Thang Long, a new king had just inherited the throne. His name was Ly Than Tong, and although he was only twelve, he was gifted with strong generals. Again and again, the Khmer forces were checked.

Champa was less fortunate. The Dai Viet had been forced, in opposition to the Song, to unite themselves; the Champa had not. In name, the country was governed by a king who ruled from the city of Vijaya, but in actuality it was an unstable confederation of local rulers, isolated from each other in a series of river valleys that ran from west to east, as likely to fight one another as to stand up to the Khmer bully.13

The Champa king, Jaya Indravarman III, had neither the army nor the resources to keep Suryavarman out. In 1132, in desperation, he agreed to join with Suryavarman as an ally against the Dai Viet. But the united Champa-Khmer army too was stampeded by the Dai Viet.14

The Champa ruler Jaya Indravarman, who comes across in the contemporary chronicles as a mild and resourceless man with no idea of what to do next, decided that he’d picked the wrong side; he made peace overtures to the Dai Viet instead. The Khmer made their next foray into Dai Viet alone. Facing their armies, the Dai Viet general Do Anh Vu is said to have sniffed, “The soldiers of the Son of Heaven quell rebellion; they do not offer battle in contestation as equals.” He then clobbered the Khmer once again.15

A less determined empire builder than Suryavarman would have given up. Instead, Suryavarman turned directly on Champa. In 1145, Khmer armies sacked the sacred temple city of My Son; the ineffective Jaya Indravarman disappeared from the historical record, never to be heard from again. Suryavarman added the north of Champa to his own kingdom and installed his brother-in-law as deputy ruler there.16

That was his last great victory. In 1150, yet another invasion of the Dai Viet failed, this time because the Khmer army was wiped out by fever as it crossed the mountains towards Thang Long. And by the end of 1150, Suryavarman too had vanished from the chronicles, his exact fate unknown. He left behind a war-exhausted country, thousands upon thousands of corpses, and the most magnificent tomb in Asia.

The Khmer capital city of Angkor, built shortly after 800 by Suryavarman’s great predecessor Jayavarman II, had grown over four centuries into a vast, sophisticated metropolis. Unwalled and sprawling across swampy ground, Angkor covered perhaps 125 square miles, 320 square kilometers: larger than any other twelfth-century city, five times the size of modern Manhattan. A million people lived within its boundaries, depending on a vast network of canals and reservoirs for drinking water. The largest reservoir, the Western Baray, had been completed in the eleventh century; eight kilometers long and two wide, it held 70 million cubic meters of water, over 18 billion gallons, enough to supply the entire state of Florida for a week.17

Between military campaigns, Suryavarman had supervised the building, in Angkor, of the temple Angkor Wat: the size of a small city in its own right, covering nearly a square mile, only a little smaller than the entire medieval city of London. Angkor Wat was intended to be his final resting place. Surrounded by its own moat and defensive wall, the temple rose up in a series of concentric squares and craggy towers. It was a stone mountain, modeled after the mythical Mount Meru, center of the world of the Hindu gods. Carved bas-reliefs showed thousands of scenes of war, court life, religious ritual; scenes from Hindu epics, depictions of the afterlife with the righteous in bliss, the rebellious crushed; a massive portrait of Suryavarman himself. Angkor Wat was dedicated to Vishnu, the god who dwelt within it. Suryavarman had been god on earth; now the temple of the god would become his tomb, so that he too would live in it forever.18

4.1 Central towers of Angkor Wat, Cambodia.

Credit: © Kevin R. Morris / Corbis

Angkor Wat had taken an almost unimaginable outlay of money and men. It was designed and built with extraordinary precision: laid out so that, at the beginning of the year, the sun would fall on the bas-relief scenes of the earth’s creation, while closer to the year’s end, it would light up scenes of apocalypse. Observation points for future eclipses of the sun and moon were calculated and built into the temple. Over two million stones, some weighing as much as eight tons, were brought to the temple from a quarry more than twenty miles away. Yet the entire temple was completed in thirty-five years; the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, 420 feet long and 226 high, took over a century.19

Khmer now boasted the most glorious temple complex in the world. But the country was drained by taxes, worn out by the demands of constant war and extravagant construction. Suryavarman’s successors gave up his hard-conquered lands in Champa and retreated, drawing back within Khmer’s old borders; the kingdom’s new and extravagant beginning had almost immediately led to an end.

4.2 Angkor Wat bas-relief sculpture.

Credit: © John R. Jones; Papilio/Corbis

* See Bauer, The History of the Medieval World, pp. 568ff.

†The Jin dynasty of the Jurchen (1115–1234) should not be confused with the earlier Jin dynasty that ruled China 265–420, or with the Later Jin Dynasty (936–947), which ruled during a period of division known as the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. See Bauer, The History of the Medieval World, pp. 13–20 and 413–418.

Chapter Five

Crusade Resurrected

Between 1128 and 1149,

the Muslims unify for successful jihad,

and in response the Christians declare a disastrous crusade

FAR WEST OF ANGKOR WAT, the Turkish governor of Aleppo was working his way towards jihad.

Zengi inherited the rule of Aleppo in 1128. He was forty-three years old, ambitious and energetic; tyrannical and aggressive, writes the Muslim historian ‘Imad al-Din al-Isfahani; so short-tempered, says another Islamic source, that he would crucify his men for offenses as small as stepping into the crops at the side of the road; an “ever-restless worm,” says the Christian chronicler William of Tyre, “mightily puffed up by his successes.”1

In theory, Zengi was the ally of the other Turkish kingdoms. The Turkish empire had been established by the great conqueror Malik Shah half a century earlier. At his death, it had fragmented almost at once. By the middle of the twelfth century, Turkish sultans ruled from Baghdad, Kirman, Syria, Khorasan, and Rum. A sixth Turkish kingdom, the Danishmends, had broken away from Rum. Independent governors, or atabegs, controlled Damascus and Aleppo.

The senior member of the most prominent Turkish clan, direct descendants of Malik Shah himself, kept the title “Great Seljuk” and claimed authority over all the rest. But this power was an illusion, the loyalty of the other Turkish rulers no more than lip service. Once the dust of the First Crusade had settled, the Muslim soldiers of Damascus and Aleppo were as likely to fight on the side of the Crusader kingdoms, against the other sultans, as to join together against the Christians.2

Zengi intended to expand his own power. At first, loyalty to his Muslim brethren did not figure in his plans. In 1130, he began to attack the outlying lands belonging to the Turkish-governed city of Damascus; in 1137, he launched a full-scale siege against the city itself.

Damascus, battered and weakened, nevertheless held out, and Zengi withdrew to reconsider his strategy. Then, in October of 1138, an earthquake centered near Aleppo struck. The walls of the Crusader castle of Harim cracked; the Muslim fortress of Athareb collapsed, killing everyone inside; the ramparts and walls of Aleppo buckled. Houses fell, stones rained down on panicked crowds in the streets, the ground opened. Ibn al-Athir records that aftershocks—perhaps as many as eighty—went on for two weeks. Contemporary chroniclers estimate the death toll at a staggering 230,000 souls.3

Earthquakes near Aleppo, which sat on a fault, were not uncommon; in fact, the entire Muslim world was seismically active. Muhammad’s birth itself was said to have been accompanied by an earthquake that shook the entire world, and Sura 99 of the Qur’an is dedicated to their place in the divine order:

When the earth convulses in its shock

and the earth unloads its burdens

. . . that day, humanity will go out

separately, to be shown their works . . .4

For the Muslims who suffered through them, earthquakes were not random geological events; a tremor was a signal, or a judgment, or a promise.

And after the Aleppo earthquake, the rhetoric of holy war began to cloud around Zengi, transforming his personal ambitions into an advance for the faith. “God did not see . . . anyone more capable of command . . . stronger of purpose or more penetrating . . . ,” wrote Ibn al-Athir. “The morale of the Infidels was weakened, and they realized that something they had not reckoned on had come to their lands.”5

When Zengi’s campaigns resumed, he turned his energies against the Christians. By 1144, he was powerful enough to lay siege to the Crusader city of Edessa. No Christian army came to Edessa’s aid. The king of Jerusalem (Fulk, the former count of Anjou) had been killed in a fall from his horse the year before, leaving Jerusalem in the hands of a powerless child. The Byzantine emperor John Comnenus had just died of a lingering hunting wound, and his son and heir, Manuel, was occupied with putting down the usual plots and revolts that accompanied the passing of the Byzantine crown. And Raymond, the Prince of Antioch (a Frankish nobleman who had claimed the title by marrying, at the age of twenty-two, the ten-year-old daughter of Bohemund II), refused to send help to his brother Crusader simply because he and Edessa’s king were on terms of “insatiable hatred.”6

In just four short weeks, Edessa fell. The attackers “put to the sword all whom they encountered,” man, woman, and child; many who escaped the sword were crushed as they attempted to flee into the last safe citadel.7

With the fall of Edessa, the language of jihad—of right and just struggle against an unrighteous enemy—ramped sharply upwards. Zengi, who now took for the first time a royal title, became known by a whole series of honorifics: the ornament of Islam, the help of the believer, God-helped king. “He will turn tomorrow towards Jerusalem!” wrote the poet Ibn Munir, summing up the hopes of the faithful.8

5.1 Aleppo and the Crusader Kingdoms

In the west, the news of Edessa’s fall inspired a new crusade.

The call itself came from Pope Eugenius III, in the papal decree (or “bull”) Quantum praedecessores, and it was designed to recall past glories. “How much our predecessors, the Roman pontiffs, did labour for the liberation of the Eastern Church!” it began, and continued on to repeat the same promises as the first call to crusade. Those who went east to get Edessa back would receive remission of sins, forgiveness of earthly debts, and eternal glory.9

By now, the First Crusade had become legendary. As the historian Thomas Madden puts it, “an entire generation of Europeans had been born and raised on the epic stories of the First Crusade. . . . There was scarcely a Christian knight who did not . . . long for the opportunity to imitate them.” At long last, imitation was possible; the knights who had grown up on tales of Christian heroism could rise above the squabbles and political maneuverings of the last forty years and join their heroes.10

Eugenius III, unable to leave Rome (which was in one of its semiregular states of ferment and chaos), handed over the preaching of the Crusade to one Bernard, abbot of the monastery at Clairvaux: a senior churchman, “venerable in life and character,” the contemporary historian Otto of Freising tells us, “conspicuous in his religious order, endowed with wisdom and a knowledge of letters, renowned for signs and wonders.” Bernard, himself a Frank, traveled through Western Francia, recruiting knights to the cause.11

He also recruited the French king. Louis VII, of the Capetian dynasty, had inherited the throne in Paris at the age of seventeen. Now only twenty-five, he already suffered from a heavy conscience. Four years earlier, fighting against the rebellious Count of Champagne, Louis had attacked the town of Vitry. The townspeople had fled into Vitry’s wooden church, and without waiting for the king’s orders, Louis’s officers had set it on fire. Everyone inside—hundreds of unarmed men, women, and children—died. Louis, barely out of his teens, stood helplessly by and listened to the screams from inside. Now, he welcomed the chance to do penance.12

5.2 Kingdom of Louis VII

In March of 1146, he announced that he intended to go on crusade and that his wife Eleanor, daughter of the powerful Duke of Aquitaine, would accompany him to the Holy Land. Eleanor, only thirteen when she had been married to Louis, was now in her early twenties. Despite seven years of marriage, she had conceived just twice, and her sole living child was a daughter; probably she hoped that the pilgrimage would put her in better standing with God, who might then grant her a male heir to the French throne.13

Blame for her infrequent pregnancies likely lay elsewhere. Louis VII had been educated for the priesthood, not the crown. The death of his older brother had unexpectedly catapulted him out of the cloisters and onto the throne, and that early schooling had left its mark. A life in the Church was a life without women; Louis had been taught that sex had the potential to deprive man of judgment and distort his view of God. Even with a lawful spouse, too-enthusiastic lovemaking could be considered sin. Overindulgence in the pleasures of the marriage bed, theologians warned, could “cripple superior masculine reasoning faculties.”14

In the twelfth-century French church, virgins stood at the top of the moral hierarchy; and, thrown back into a world where he was expected to father children, Louis seems to have attended to his marital duties with some reluctance. It was an attitude that would, very shortly, have international repercussions.

5.3 Conquests of Zengi and Nur ad-Din

By the time Louis and Eleanor arrived at Constantinople, in 1147, Zengi was dead: stabbed to death in September of 1146 by one of his own slaves, as he slept. Zengi’s son Nur ad-Din had taken up his father’s sword, and Edessa still remained in Muslim hands.

The armies of the Second Crusade were savagely battered before they ever got near their goal. Louis’s ally, the German king Conrad III (successor of Lothair III, but still uncrowned by the pope), had beaten him to the east. But instead of waiting for the French forces, Conrad’s men had set out for Antioch and been nearly wiped out by a Turkish force at Dorylaeum. “Of seventy thousand mailed knights and many companies of foot soldiers, countless in number,” says William of Tyre, “barely a tenth part escaped.” The survivors retreated to Nicaea and waited for the French. But Conrad III himself had been badly wounded, and when Louis arrived at the rendezvous point, Conrad was still unable to fight.15

The injured German king returned to Constantinople for nursing; and Louis VII took command of the combined French and German army and marched along the coast, making his way slowly towards Edessa. He had even worse fortune. In January of 1148, after two months of hard slogging, the French Crusaders were strung out and separated, marching past Mount Cadmus near Laodicea, when a Turkish army descended on them. Louis VII himself escaped, climbing up out of the gorge he was in by clutching on to the roots of trees. But his men were lost: “Our army,” writes William of Tyre, “was reduced to a very few. . . . That day the glorious reputation of the Franks was lost . . . their valor . . . crushed to earth.”16

The survivors limped and straggled their way to Antioch, which was ruled by Eleanor’s uncle Raymond of Poitiers, and took refuge there. They were too few to even attempt the siege of Edessa. Yet to return home in humiliation was unthinkable, particularly for Louis VII, who would ultimately have borne the blame for the defeat. Raymond suggested an assault on nearby Aleppo instead; it was smaller, less fortified, and also happened to be the headquarters of Nur ad-Din himself. Louis VII shrugged off the suggestion. He wanted to march on towards Jerusalem and gain at least remission of his sins for his trouble in coming east.

Raymond then chose a fatal strategy: he decided to work on his young niece and convince her to bring her husband around to his way of thinking. Eleanor was quickly persuaded, and immediately began to lobby Louis on Raymond’s behalf.

Whether this was political shrewdness on her part, or something more convoluted, will never be known. Certainly most of the Crusaders in Antioch thought that Raymond had seduced his niece; he was only in his early thirties at the time and (according to William of Tyre) “very tall . . . handsome far beyond all the kings and princes of the world . . . a charming and elegant prince.” William adds, mournfully, “He was seldom lucky”; and so it would prove.17

Subjected to unceasing pressure from both his wife and his host, Louis VII obstinately refused to even consider an attack on Aleppo. Finally, Eleanor announced that if Louis refused to follow Raymond’s plan, she would ask Pope Eugenius III for an annulment; after all, she and Louis were third cousins (as were most European monarchs, if you climbed far enough back into the family tree). This threat undoubtedly had less to do with Aleppo than with Louis’s inadequacies as a husband. Eleanor was famously rumored to have complained that she thought she’d married a king, but ended up with a monk instead.

Infuriated, Louis VII removed his wife from Antioch by force and hauled her down the coast to Jerusalem. There, he completed his pilgrimage; and she, not having any choice, accompanied him to the holy sites. Afterwards, he took her with him back up to Acre. Conrad III, recovered from his wounds, had arrived with reinforcements, and a great council of Crusader princes and warriors had been called to determine the next move in the Crusade. (Raymond of Antioch was noticeably absent.)18

After a lengthy debate, the Crusaders decided to attack Damascus, which was under the control of Nur ad-Din’s father-in-law. The siege began on July 24, 1148, and was over in five days. Nur ad-Din sent troops to relieve the city, and the Crusaders were so clearly outarmed that they hastily withdrew. Conrad III made a pass through Constantinople, on his way home, to firm up his friendship with the Byzantine emperor Manuel Comnenus; the other Crusaders dispersed.

But despite pleas from his officials back in Paris, Louis VII lingered in Jerusalem until Easter of 1149. He was reluctant to take his wife home, where she could carry out her threat of annulment. Finally, broke and unable to delay the inevitable, he and Eleanor started home, by sea—on different ships.

Once the last Crusaders were gone, Nur ad-Din invaded Antioch. Raymond and his army marched out to drive them back. In the battle that followed, the unlucky Raymond was killed. Nur ad-Din, says William of Tyre, ordered Raymond’s head cut off, and had it sent to Baghdad as a trophy; according to rumor, sealed in a silver case.19

The Second Crusade had come to an embarrassing end. Bernard of Clairvaux, who had preached with such fervor that God was with the Crusaders, blamed the Crusaders for their lack of both holiness and resolve: “The Lord,” he wrote afterwards, “provoked by our sins . . . neither spared his people nor his own name. . . . How could they advance, [since] they were continually turning back whenever they set out?” But whatever the reason for the failure, the result was disastrous; afterwards, William of Tyre notes with regret, “fewer people, and those less fervent in spirit, undertook this pilgrimage thereafter.” The crusading impulse, already aging and infirm, had been dealt a deadly blow.20

Chapter Six

Reconquista and Rediscovery

Between 1134 and 1146,

Christian kings, Almoravid warriors, and Almohad caliphs

battle on the Spanish peninsula,

while more and more Arabic books reach the west

IN 1134, the Spanish king Alfonso the Battler died after a lifetime on the battlefield.

He had drawn the four Christian kingdoms of Spain—Aragon and Navarre, León and Castile—together under the joined crowns of himself and his wife Urraca. But the south of the Spanish peninsula had never been under his control. For over four hundred years, Muslim dynasties had ruled there instead.

Nearly five decades earlier, a North African sect known as the Almoravids had crossed the Strait of Gibraltar into the Spanish peninsula. Within three years, the south of Spain was under Almoravid rule. The Christian kingdoms of the north fought back against the invaders, turning the center of the peninsula into a much contested battlefront. Their resistance gained energy when a church council at Toulouse, in 1118, gave the fight the status of crusade. Instead of traveling east, western noblemen with their private armies could now take the shorter journey west and earn the same spiritual rewards. Military orders—monks with swords—shouldered the task as well.*

But the battlefield was large, and the enemy determined. In the east, crusades were measured in years. The crusade in Spain, the Reconquista, continued for centuries.

By 1134, Almoravid power in Spain had weakened. The Almoravid ruler Ali ibn Yusuf, ruling from North Africa, was more concerned with African territories than with his trans-Mediterranean lands. Meanwhile, Christian strength had grown. Alfonso the Battler, earning his nickname, had pushed the Almoravid front back, and back, and back. For Alfonso, Spain was not merely a political realm. It was a sacred space where Christianity carried on its undying fight against evil. And so, when he died, he left his kingdom to the Knights Templar, the Hospitallers, and the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre: three of the military orders established to nurture holy warriors.

His people ignored the bizarre will. The four kingdoms split apart: León and Castile under his stepson Alfonso VII,* Aragon under Alfonso the Battler’s brother Ramiro II (a monk who gave up his vows in order to be king, finding the two incompatible). Navarre, which had been under Aragonese control for nearly sixty years, threw its support behind Garcia Ramirez, a grandson of the legendary Christian warrior El Cid; he would rule an newly independent Navarre for sixteen years, earning himself the title of “the Restorer.”

The separation of the once-united kingdoms could have provided the Almoravids with an opportunity to retake some of the lost land, but rot was spreading farther and farther into their realm. A new challenge to Almoravid power had arisen in Africa itself. A North African prophet named Ibn Tumart, a devout Muslim who had left his homeland to study his faith in Baghdad, had returned with a revelation: the end of time was near, and Ibn Tumart had been called to purify the practice of Islam and to unite its followers in dedication to Islamic law.

At twenty-eight, he was blazingly charismatic, persuasive, and driven. The thirteenth-century historian al-Marrakushi says that on the journey back to North Africa, he preached so unceasingly to the sailors on the ship where he had bought passage that they threw him into the sea (he swam along in the wake until they had second thoughts and hauled him back on board). Before his premature death in 1130, he had managed to gain an enormous following: the al-muwahhidun, or Almohads, the Unified Ones.1

One of Ibn Tumart’s followers, the soldier al-Mu’min, built on his theological groundwork and transformed the religious movement into one of conquest. By 1134, the Almohads had begun to push into the Almoravid land in North Africa. In Almohad eyes, the Almoravids were the enemy as much as the Christians farther north: Muslim but unpurified, corrupt lawbreakers.

Fighting on two fronts, the Almoravids soon found themselves overmatched on both.

On the Spanish peninsula, the Christian front had advanced to the south of Toledo. Toledo itself, hotly contested, was so dangerous a place that Alfonso VII made a nobleman he particularly distrusted its governor, a hopeful move since the previous governors of Toledo had all been killed in battle. The nearby castle of Oreja was an Almoravid base of operations, and in the spring of 1139, Alfonso VII laid siege to it: “The castle was very strong,” says the Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris, the official chronicle of Alfonso’s reign, “and was well fortified with all kinds of weapons and crossbows. Nevertheless, the emperor ordered his engineers to build siege towers and many engines with which to attack the castle, [and] he ordered sentries to be placed along the riverbank in order that he might destroy them by thirst.”2

An Almoravid army arrived from Marrakesh to help beat Alfonso VII back. But the siege dragged on, until messengers hurried down from Oreja to Marrakesh to ask for further reinforcements. They were, says the Chronica, “confounded, for events were not turning out as they had wished,” and they got no joy from Marrakesh; informed that no more reinforcements were available, they were forced to return to Oreja with the message that they “should not harbour any hope and that they should surrender the castle to the emperor.”3

Oreja surrendered in October. It was a major victory for Alfonso VII, who now set his eyes on Córdoba and Seville. Meanwhile, the Almoravids had suffered an even more serious defeat farther west. Alfonso VII’s cousin Afonso Henriques, who governed the Leonese province known as Portugal, had been carrying on the fight south of his own land. In July, he had won his first major victory against Almoravid armies: the Battle of Ourique, fought on a hilltop not far from the coast.

Few contemporary details of the battle survive; it may have been little more than a large-scale raid into Almoravid-held territory.* But Afonso Henriques, cheered on by his men, declared himself king of Portugal immediately afterwards. This made him, in theory, independent of his royal cousin, and turned Portugal into a kingdom in its own right.

Alfonso VII refused to recognize the title, but he did not immediately invade the rebellious province; he was too busy. By 1144, his army was approaching Córdoba and Seville. The Chronica tells us that they

destroyed all the vines, olive groves and fig trees. They cut down and set alight all the orchards, set fire to their towns, villages and hamlets, and sent up in flames many of their castles. They took their men, women and children captive, and seized a great booty of horses, mares, camels, mules, asses, oxen, cows and every kind of beast, gold and silver, all the valuables which were in their homes. . . . All the kingdom . . . was destroyed.4

The devastating victories placed Spain even more firmly in Christian hands.

6.1 The Spanish Peninsula, 1144

AROUND THAT SAME YEAR, the Italian scholar Gerard of Cremona traveled to the Spanish peninsula, hoping to find in the libraries of Toledo a copy of the second-century Greek astronomy text known as the Almagest.

He was not the first Western thinker to make the journey. A century and half earlier, the future Pope Sylvester II had traveled to a monastery near the Muslim-Christian border; there, he learned to use the numbering system of the Arabs, discovered by them in their forays into India. Unlike the cumbersome Roman system, these numbers (generally now known as Hindu-Arabic numerals) relied on place for their value. (“The Indians have a most subtle talent,” marveled the monk Vigila, later in the tenth century, “this is clear in the 9 figures with which they are able to designate each and every degree of each order.”) He had been followed by a whole parade of Europeans and the occasional Englishman: among them Robert of Ketton and Hermann of Carinthia, who first translated the entire Qur’an into Latin, and Plato of Tivoli, who did the same with Arabic texts on astronomy and mathematics.5

Now, with Gerard of Cremona, the rediscovery of Arabic texts surged forward. In Toledo, Gerard discovered a treasure trove of books he had never known existed. Among the books he unearthed in the dusty unused stacks of the Toledo libraries were a handful that had been translated from Greek into Arabic, but had never before been read in the Latin-speaking West: the Physics of Aristotle, containing the philosophical explorations of being that the Aristotelian texts on logic did not touch; the Elements of Euclid; the Secrets of the great Greek physician Galen.

“Seeing the abundance of books in Arabic on every subject,” one of his students later wrote, “he learned the Arabic language in order to be able to translate. . . . [T]o the end of his life, he continued to transmit to the Latin world (as if to his own beloved heir) whatever books he thought finest, in many subjects, as accurately and as plainly as he could.” By the time of his death, some thirty years later, Gerard had translated at least seventy-one major works on dialectic, astronomy, philosophy, mathematics, and medicine. A wall between the past and the present had been broken down, and more and more thinkers would step over the rubble into a new way of thinking.6

6.1 Early thirteenth-century Arabic mansucript, showing Aristotle teaching Turkish astronomers.

Credit: Bridgeman-Giraudon / Art Resource, NY

* A more detailed account is found in Bauer, The History of the Medieval World, pp. 664–666.

* León-Castile had been held by Urraca since 1109; although it was part of the united realm of Alfonso VI, the couple was deeply estranged. When Urraca died in 1126, Alfonso VII (her son with her first husband, Raymond of Burgundy) took her place, still under the overarching authority of his stepfather, Alfonso the Battler.

* In the years afterward, Ourique loomed larger and larger in Portuguese eyes: the number of Almoravid troops killed increased, the Portuguese valor expanded, and the victory swelled, until by the sixteenth century Afonso Henriques had defeated five Muslim kings after seeing, Constantine-like, a vision of Christ promising victory over the pagans. None of these details, however, are contemporary.

Chapter Seven

Questions of Authority

Between 1135 and 1160,

Peter Abelard shows the power of Aristotelian logic,

and systematic theology is born

SOMETIME AROUND 1135, the theologian Peter Abelard put the final touches on his latest project: the Theologia Scholarium, a treatise on the nature of God.

He had been polishing and revising the Theologia for fourteen years, ever since the first version of the book had been condemned as dangerous error. Back then, Abelard had been forced by a church council in Soissons to throw his book into a bonfire with his own hands. Now he hoped to defend his orthodoxy.

Instead, he would find himself facing yet another church council; and this time, the punishment would be more extreme.

For over forty years, Abelard had lived and breathed language. He had spent his teens studying the works of Aristotle in Paris and sharpening his skill with words: “I preferred the weapons of dialectic to all other teachings of philosophy,” Abelard wrote, of his own early years, “and armed with these I chose the conflicts of disputation instead of the trophies of war.” In 1102, still only in his early twenties, he set up his own school in the French town of Melun. He taught and wrote, debated and argued; and his fame as a master of logic grew. By 1114, he had become master of the cathedral school at Notre Dame, the most prestigious in Western Francia.1

Only one thing had ever distracted Peter Abelard from words: Heloise, the beautiful niece of the Parisian priest Fulbert. In a calculated act of seduction, Abelard rented a room from Heloise’s uncle and offered to tutor Heloise in order to work off his rent. “And so, with our lessons as a pretext,” he tells us, “we abandoned ourselves entirely to love. Her studies allowed us to withdraw in private, as love desired. . . . My hands strayed oftener to her bosom than to the pages . . . [and] our desires left no stage of lovemaking untried.”2

The inevitable happened; Heloise became pregnant, and Abelard took her to stay with his sister in Brittany until the baby was born.

Fulbert, who up until then had been remarkably blind to the affair, flew into a rage. Abelard apologized, groveled, reassured, and generally did his best to make amends to his powerful landlord, but the most straightforward solution—marriage—was not on the cards. The master of a cathedral school was, by definition, a churchman; celibacy was increasingly the rule for churchmen, and marriage would cut Abelard’s career off at the roots.

Unable to appease the powerful Fulbert, Abelard finally proposed a solution. He would marry Heloise, but the marriage would remain secret so that his prospects at the school would not be blighted; Heloise would come back to her home in Paris, and Abelard would find lodging elsewhere. Fulbert agreed, but when Heloise—leaving her baby son in the care of Abelard’s family—returned to live in her uncle’s house, Fulbert made her life a misery. “In his exasperation,” Abelard records, “Fulbert heaped abuse on her. . . . As soon as I discovered this I removed her to a convent of nuns . . . near Paris.”

The convent was a way station, a place for Heloise to remain safe while Abelard could figure out his next move; but convents were the traditional refuge of wives whose husbands had repudiated them, and Fulbert used the move as an excuse to take revenge. He sent hired thugs to Abelard’s lodgings in the middle of the night. They pinned the schoolmaster down, and castrated him. “Next morning,” Abelard writes, “the whole city gathered before my house, and . . . tormented me with their unbearable weeping and wailing.”3

Probably the real crowd was smaller than in Abelard’s recollections, but he was a popular teacher, and the attack was a nine-day wonder. When the fuss had died down, both Abelard and Heloise entered monastic orders, he in the abbey of St. Denis near Paris, she taking orders at the convent of Argenteuil, some twenty-five miles away. Over the next two decades they saw each other perhaps twice; but they wrote letters constantly, their marriage held together only by words.

At St. Denis, Abelard continued to study and teach, applying Greek logic to the doctrines of the Church. The first version of his Theologia argued that Plato’s philosophy of a “world soul” was actually a reference to the Holy Spirit; that through logic, any man could grasp the essence of the Trinity; that scripture was involucrum, inherently difficult and figurative, “fruitfully obscure” in a way that forced readers to use reason and dialectic as they wrestled with the meaning.4

None of this was intended to destroy the faith. Like Anselm, Peter Abelard believed that truth would withstand Aristotle’s methods. But this alarmed his more traditionally minded brethren. When they accused him of endangering the doctrines of the Church, he offered to explain why his conclusions were true: “We take no account of rational explanation,” one opponent retorted, “nor of your interpretation in such matters; we recognize only the words of authority.”5

7.1 Peter Abelard’s France

In 1121, a church council at Soissons, attended by a papal legate, ordered Abelard to throw his Theologia into the fire. He obeyed, but he did not change his views on the value of reason and logic. For the next twenty years, Abelard wrote and taught, defending his orthodoxy even while he criticized the church’s reliance on too-simple truth. He revised the Theologia twice, coming up with its final form in 1135; he assembled a whole collection of quotations from the church fathers that contradicted each other into a work called Sic et Non (Yes and No); he wrote a series of dialogues about ethics between a Christian, a Jew, and a character called the Ancient Philosopher; the Collationes, in which the Ancient Philosopher shows a clear understanding of the Highest Good—despite having only natural law to guide him.6

He was often accused of heterodoxy, potentially dangerous departures from orthodox, accepted understandings of the Christian faith. At least once, he was briefly imprisoned. But the help of powerful patrons, and the enthusiasm of his many students, kept him from out-and-out condemnation by the Church—until 1141, when the revision of the Theologia drew the attention of none other than Bernard of Clairvaux: venerable in character, conspicuous for learning, evangelist for the Second Crusade.

The two men were polar opposites: Abelard determined to bring faith and logic together, Bernard holding the authority of the Church above all. “He had an abhorrence of teachers who put their trust in worldly wisdom and clung too much to human argument,” Otto of Freising explains. When, in 1140, a local monk sent Bernard a letter highlighting Abelard’s most recent doctrinal explorations, Bernard agreed that the matter required investigation.7

He asked Abelard to come and explain himself; Abelard instead appealed to the Bishop of Sens, and then to the pope. Probably he believed that his own skill in argumentation would help him to triumph. But it was exactly this skill that frightened his traditionalist opponents: “Peter Abelard,” wrote Bernard, in his own appeal to the pope, “believes he can comprehend by human reason all that is God.”8

To give Abelard a pass was to accept the categories of Aristotle; and accepting Aristotelian thought might well throw into doubt the entire authority structure of the Christian church. In 1141, the papal court agreed with Bernard. Abelard was to be imprisoned and condemned to perpetual silence. The sentence doomed him to pass the rest of his life without words: confined in a monastery, forbidden to speak, making his wants known only with signs.

In the eyes of his followers, the silencing of Abelard was a tacit acknowledgement that Aristotelian thought was both powerful and true. “The high priests and Pharisees convened an assembly,” wrote his student Berengar of Poitiers, using a New Testament metaphor for Bernard and the papal court, “and said: What should we do, since this man speaks of many wonderful things? If we let him go on like this, all will believe him.” But for Bernard of Clairvaux, authority had been properly reasserted; the old truths preserved, the old verities reaffirmed.9

The penalty was never actually enforced. Abelard, who had been suffering already from the illness that would kill him, took shelter at the monastery of Cluny and was in the middle of writing a lengthy self-defense when he died. The abbot of Cluny, known as Peter the Venerable, exercised the authority given to him “in virtue of [his] office” and declared Abelard absolved of all his sins. He sent Abelard’s coffin to Heloise, now abbess of the Paraclete convent.

She buried him there; and when she also died, some twenty years later, she was buried beside him.10

BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX had no idea that he was fighting a rearguard action.

Already, at the cathedral school of Chartres, the accomplished master Bernard of Chartres was at the height of his teaching career, making his students thoroughly familiar with the works of Plato and Aristotle as foundation for their ongoing education in Christian doctrine. “Bernard would bend every effort to bring his students to imitate [the poets and orators] they were hearing,” writes John of Salisbury, who studied at Chartres. “In some cases he would rely on exhortation, in others . . . flogging. . . . [He] used to compare us to puny dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants. He pointed out that we see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature.”11

In Italy, a legal scholar named Gratian was already applying logic to the Church’s own proceeedings. He was creating a vast collection of Church law, putting together ecclesiastical pronouncements that contradicted each other, and then using dialectic to resolve the inconsistencies. His masterwork, the Concordance of Discordant Canons, became a core text of the Catholic church tradition (and remained part of Church law until 1918). But it was a triumph for ancient philosophy; useful though it was, the Concordance was a rationalization of spiritual decisions. It brought order by treating Church authority as a simple human system.12

And in Paris, the cleric Peter Lombard was already hard at work, lecturing and writing, developing a system of theology that would become his most famous book: the Sentences. Lombard, twenty years younger than Abelard, had come to the cathedral school of Reims in 1136, bearing a fulsome letter of recommendation from none other than Bernard of Clairvaux. By 1145, Peter Lombard was teaching at the school of Notre Dame in Paris; fifteen years later, the Sentences were being read in every cathedral school of note.13

“A most excellent work,” wrote Lombard’s contemporary Alberic of Trois Fontaines; “sane doctrine, commended by all,” commented the historian William of Tyre, who studied with Lombard for six years. The Sentences were the first major attempt by a Western theologian to link every Christian doctrine together into a coherent, logical whole. Using scripture and the Church fathers side by side, applying logic and dialectic to resolve contrary opinions, Peter Lombard created theological categories: Christology, soteriology, ecclesiology, eschatology (the study of Christ, of salvation, of the Church, of the Last Things). The Sentences provided not just a scheme for organizing theology but also a methodology: discussion, debate, systematization.

This was undoubtedly not what Bernard of Clairvaux had intended for his protégé. “The faith of the pious believes,” Bernard had written, in his condemnation of Abelard. “It does not discuss.” But Lombard’s work had given birth to the new discipline of systematic theology. In the next century, the Sentences would become the classic text for students of divine matters, shaping an entire generation of the Church with the exact tools that Bernard had feared.14

Chapter Eight

The New Song

Between 1141 and 1165,

the Song adjust to exile,

while the Jin struggle to rule an empire

IN THE TWENTY YEARS since the Shaoxing Treaty, Emperor Gaozong of the Song had gained little power: no additional lands, no towns recaptured from the Jin, no treaties made with other countries. His court, now established at Lin’an, was vexed by problems that could not be solved.*

For one, his older brother Song Qinzong, taken captive in 1127 and deported to the north, was still alive and in Jin hands. His existence meant that Song Gaozong’s authority could easily be emptied of power; the Jin could always play their trump card, send Song Qinzong back home and fatally disrupt the Song chain of command.

In addition, the court was divided about what to do next. Many of Song Gaozong’s advisors agitated for an all-out assault on the north; others recommended peace and prudence; most were heavily critical of the actions taken by the Song emperors, Gaozong’s own predecessors, just before the loss of Kaifeng.

Song Gaozong found a path through this complicated landscape by prioritizing one thing above all else: the security and stability of the imperial court. He refused to provoke the Jin. He was conservative, and he was conciliatory, and he was careful; and as a result, he lived to the unlikely age of eighty.

But his policies changed the Song. The new world of the Southern Song was one in which they did not fight, but philosophized; painted and wrote poetry, rather than agitating; traded, rather than fought; looked inward, rather than outward towards the rest of the world. The Southern Song flourished without victory.1

The inward focus produced a boom inside the Song borders. Markets and fairs grew up in the countryside. Paper money, used for the first time a century before, circulated widely. Satin weave, with its smooth surface, was manufactured in cities to the south; in fact, the name satin is a French corruption of the word zaituni, used by merchants from Baghdad as the name of Quanzhou, the Southern Song city where satin manufacturing was centered. Farming grew more systematic, as Song intellectuals bent their attention to ways of increasing crops; Chen Fu’s Agricultural Treatise, completed around 1149, laid out astonishingly effective rules for land utilization, crop rotation, and systematic fertilization. The Emperor Gaozong rebuilt a series of official kilns for firing the lovely celadon porcelain of the Song, on the outskirts of Lin’an; they were duplicates of the official kilns at Kaifeng, now lost.2

Painting and poetry flourished at the court of Gaozong, in part because Gaozong banned, in 1144, the writing of any private, non-state-sponsored histories of the past. This was intended to cut off criticism over the way his dynasty had handled the Jin invasion, but it halted only criticism written in prose. Painting and poetry soon became the safest, and clearest, way to dissent.3

“The good sword under the recluse’s pillow / Clangs faintly all night long,” wrote Lu Yu, who hoped to see the Song invade and reclaim the north:

It longs to serve in distant expeditions,

I fetch wine and pour a libation to the sword:

A great treasure should remain obscure;

There are those who know your worth,

When the time comes they will use you.

You have have ample scope in your scabbard,

Why voice your complaints?4

Landscapes were safe to paint. And so blossoming plums, once the symbol of spring and new hopes, came to symbolize the southern willingness to go into exile, the misfortune and melancholy of the displaced.

Philosophers coped with the loss of the north in another way; instead of protesting, they searched for a new kind of peace with the status quo.

Traditional Confucianism had directed its followers towards the orderly performance of duties and rituals as the path to virtue: “It is by the rules of propriety that the character is established,” Confucius himself was reported to have said. Confucian academies taught the rules of order, the duties of each man in his place and station, the importance of ceremony. They had long been used to train and prepare state officials, and as a tool for statecraft, Confucianism had never progressed very far in tackling more abstract ideas.*

8.1 Ink Plum Blossoms, by Wang Yansou of the Song dynasty.

Credit: © Smithsonian, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery

Now the philosopher Zhu Xi began to transform Confucianism from a tool of the impotent state into a philosophy for every man. He brought to Confucianism a consideration of ultimate reality; he taught and spoke of the relationship between the essence of material things (the li) and their physical existence (the qi). Li in itself does not have form that can be touched; qi gives shape to li, but at the same time obscures it. The essence, the li, of every human being is essentially good; that goodness shines through when the qi is refined, polished, brought to the place where it is transparent. And that polishing and refinement is achieved not by faithful service to the government but through private contemplation and individual education: in Zhu Xi’s own phrases, “quiet sitting” and “pursuing inquiry and study.”5

“Start with an open mind,” the sage told a student who was struggling to find the truth, “then read one theory. Read one view before reading another. After you have read them again and again, what is right and wrong, useful and useless, will become apparent of itself.” Far to the west, Peter Abelard was making the same argument for dialectical inquiry: “No theory is so false,” he wrote, in the Collationes, “that it does not contain some element of truth; no dispute is so trivial that it does not possess something that can be learned.” Abelard’s argument was sired by Aristotle, born of an intellectual preoccupation; Zhu Xi’s, produced by more political factors. Neo-Confucianism was an adaptation of the state religion to a time when the state was frozen in place; and it spread throughout the Southern Song, becoming, perhaps, the dominant way in which the Song now understood the world.6

Meanwhile, the Jin were also adapting to their new condition. Jurchen tribal ways, best suited to wandering warriors, were less than useful in running a massive complicated state filled with conquered peoples and ancient cities. To keep their new empire together, the Jin modeled themselves, more and more, on the defeated enemy to the south.

In 1149, one of Akuta’s grandsons led a palace revolt against the reigning Jin emperor (an unpopular drunkard growing increasingly paranoid and vicious) and seized the throne for himself. The Jin chronicles refuse to grant him an imperial name; he remains known, simply, as Prince Hailing.

Hailing was a lover of Song culture: a student of the Song lyric poems known as ci, an aspiring poet himself, an enthusiastic tea drinker and chess player. As soon as power was in his hands, he abolished the old honorary titles still held by the heads of the Jurchen clans, and began the decadelong process of moving the capital of the Jin out of the far northern city of Shang-ching, centered in the old Jurchen homeland, down into the cradle of ancient China: to the old city of Yanjing, which he renamed Zhongdu, the “Central Capital.” He wrapped up the move by leveling the old Jurchen tribal headquarters in Shang-ching, wiping out the past.7

Remaking the Jin government in the image of the Song was not enough; he wanted not merely to be like the Song but to possess them. In 1159, with the move to Zhongdu almost complete, he began to prepare for a massive invasion: lining up half a million horses, drafting both Jurchen and Chinese into new regiments, assembling a fleet of barges to use as warships on the Yangtze. Anyone who criticized his plans, or questioned the wisdom of the invasion, was murdered.8

The invasion began in September of 1161 and was one-sided almost from the first battle. Hailing’s patched-together sea force was outmanned and outfought by the Song navy, with its fleet of small fast attack ships and massive (up to 360 feet in length), iron-hulled, paddle-wheel war galleys, propelled by the leg power of scores of Song seamen. The Song terrified the opposition by hurling “thunderclap bombs,” gunpowder and metal pellets encased in a paper and bamboo envelope, onto the Jin boats, where they exploded in a shower of projectiles and flame.9

After a particularly unsuccessful encounter on the Yangtze near Nanjing, in early December, Hailing withdrew to plan a new assault. But his sweeping changes, his brutal repression of dissenters, and his incompetence as an admiral were too much; his own generals murdered him, in camp, on December 15. His cousin Shizong took control of the Jin and immediately opened peace talks with the Song.10

But the invasion had strengthened the prowar faction at the Song court; and instead of making peace, Gaozong finally agreed to step down in favor of his adopted son Xiaozong. Xiaozong, then thirty-five, made reluctant preparations for war, and in 1163 the Song counterattack began. But as the Song divisions began to cross over into Jin territory, the new Jin ruler sent a hundred thousand men in response, and the Song were immediately driven back.

It was increasingly clear, even to the war-minded, that neither empire would make headway against the other. In 1165, the two emperors signed the Longxing Peace Accord, setting the border between the nations at the Huai river.11

8.1 The Song and Jin at Peace

The uneasy truce would last for decades; but regret lingered. “In death I know well enough all things end in emptiness,” wrote Lu Yu, on his deathbed,

still I grieve that I never saw the Nine Provinces made one.

On the day the king’s armies march north to take the heartland,

at the family sacrifice don’t forget to let your father know.12

* Lin’an was renamed Hangzhou after the Mongol invasion of 1276; many later accounts use this name for the Southern Song years as well.

* See Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, pp. 494–498.

Chapter Nine

The Heiji Disturbance

Between 1142 and 1159,

the emperors of Japan battle with the Fujiwara clan for power,

and the Taira and Minamoto join the fight

IN 1142, a three-year-old boy was crowned emperor of Japan.

His name was Konoe, and no one expected him to actually rule; two retired emperors were already battling over that privilege. In fact, Japan was suffering from an embarrassment of emperors.

BY THE ELEVENTH CENTURY, members of the ambitious and powerful Fujiwara clan had dug themselves firmly into top positions in the Japanese government. Generation after generation, imperial princes had married Fujiwara brides. Fujiwara ministers of state, usually close male relations of the reigning empress, dominated weak or young rulers. Emperor after emperor was crowned and then retreated behind the scenes to pursue poetry and luxurious living, political ceremony and religious ritual.*

In 1068, the emperor Go-Sanjo—a younger half brother, unexpectedly crowned after the premature death of his older sibling—had broken the pattern.

Unlike the string of emperors who came before, Go-Sanjo did not have a Fujiwara mother. And resentment of the Fujiwara ministers—who had, more often than not, ruled Japan as though the entire country were a private estate intended for their pleasure—had been gathering for decades. “Emperor Go-Sanjo’s reign came at the time of a sharp turn into the Final Age,” explains the thirteenth-century Japanese history known as the Gukansho. “[He] had come to think and feel that people would no longer be at peace . . . if Regents and Chancellors continued to dominate the state, and if Emperors concerned themselves only with that which was elegant.”1

The Fujiwara clan was not the only threat to Japan’s peace. Over the previous century, noble families throughout the large central island of Honshu had been building private power. Both the Minamoto clan in the northeast and the Taira to the southwest had accumulated personal armies, granting land to local soldiers in exchange for military service: these warriors, bound by ties of loyalty to their landlords, were the samurai.*

By the time of Go-Sanjo’s coronation, local samurai militias had grown to rival any force that could be mustered by the emperor’s decree. And another host of warriors could join the game at any moment. Since the tenth century, the wealthy Buddhist monasteries in the cities of Kyoto and Nara had suffered from the attacks of local warlords looking to fill their pockets. In reaction, the monasteries had begun to recruit monks from the ranks of Japanese mercenaries and convicted criminals: the sohei, or warrior monks, chosen for the monastic life solely because they were good with their weapons.2

This was a potent mix of sword-happy men, and the emperor Go-Sanjo had to proceed carefully with his reforms. He started out by establishing a brand-new government department, called the Records Office, that required all landholders to register proof that they owned their land; this was supposed to quell the Fujiwara tendency to use public land for the recruitment of private soldiers. (The Gukansho remarks that the “entire country” had begun to seem like the estate of the Fujiwara chancellor.) He promoted a score of Minamoto officials into higher positions at court. And he did his best to organize a line of succession that would place sons of non-Fujiwara mothers on the throne. His own empress, mother of his oldest son, Imperial Prince Shirakawa, was Fujiwara, but from a much less notable branch of the family; his second son was the child of one of his lesser wives, a Minamoto daughter.3

Go-Sanjo remained on the throne only four years and then abdicated, aged thirty-nine. He had no intention of giving up his influence, though. He married Shirakawa to a Minamoto bride, supervised his coronation at age twenty-one, and then pushed through the appointment of his second son, the child with no Fujiwara connections, as Imperial Prince and heir. Then he remained behind the scenes, advising his sons and thwarting all attempts of the Fujiwara chancellor to control them.*

He was able to do this for only a few months, dying unexpectedly before his fortieth birthday. But the sharp turn he had given to Japan’s power structure survived. Shirakawa followed in his father’s footsteps, refusing to obey his chancellor and favoring Minamoto and Taira courtiers over the Fujiwara. And like his father, he abdicated at the height of his power, handing over the throne at age thirty-three and taking monastic vows. But he continued to rule actively from his monastery, exercising as much control over his young successors—first his son Horikawa and then his grandson Toba—as the Fujiwara regents had once done. It was said by his subjects that there were only three things the retired emperor could not control: the floods of the wild Kamo river, the troublesome warrior monks who lived on Mount Hiei, and the throw of the dice.4

This was the beginning of a two-hundred-year tradition of Cloistered Emperors, during which emperors abdicated at the height of their powers, leaving the throne to child heirs, and then went on ruling from behind the scenes. Everyone knew who was in charge: “After Shirakawa’s abdication,” says the Gukansho, “the state was governed for a long time by Retired Emperors.”5

9.1 Japan under the Cloistered Emperors

It was not an entirely impractical system. The Cloistered Emperor regime neatly divided time-consumingritual duties (ceremonially important but politically pointless) from the equally time-consuming duties of actual governance. The sovereign on the throne took care of the first; the ruler in the monastery, the second. It also preserved an appearance of cooperation between the emperor-in-name and his Fujiwara advisor, while the actual power struggle between king and Fujiwara clan went on, more or less, in private.

But the Cloistered Emperor system also, inevitably, multiplied the battles for power within the royal family itself.

WHEN THE THREE-YEAR-OLD Emperor Konoe was crowned in 1142, the imperial household was already filled with crackling hostilities.

Those hostilities had unfolded over three generations. Back in 1107, the emperor of Japan had been four-year-old Toba; the Cloistered Emperor, wielding the real power from the traditional monastery, was Toba’s imperious and long-lived grandfather Shirakawa. When Toba reached his teens, Shirakawa arranged for him to marry the beautiful teenaged Shoshi—his own adopted ward. Court gossip said that Shoshi was much more than Shirakawa’s ward. When Shoshi gave birth to a son and heir in 1119, the baby was generally assumed to be Shirakawa’s, even though Toba claimed the child as his own.6

The rumors got an imperial stamp of approval in 1123, when Shirakawa forced Toba to abdicate in favor of the four-year-old boy, who now became Emperor Sutoku. This relegated Toba, still just twenty-three, to a completely powerless position; he was now a Cloistered Emperor, but he was junior to his vigorous grandfather and inferior to his crowned son. Toba simmered in impotent resentment until Shirakawa finally died in 1129.

Once able to assume the real power of a Cloistered Emperor, Toba allowed his son-in-name to stay on the throne. But in 1139, Toba’s favorite wife, Tokuko, finally gave birth to a son—Konoe, his actual flesh and blood. Three years later, Toba forced Sutoku to abdicate in Konoe’s favor—just as he himself had been forced to abdicate in Sutoku’s favor, twenty years before.

9.1 Family line of Konoe and Sutoku.

This put Sutoku in exactly the same position Toba had occupied, all those years: junior Cloistered Emperor, powerless, resentful. Given the various hatreds and ambitions flying around the court, it is perhaps surprising that Konoe lasted thirteen years before someone slipped poison into his food.

At Konoe’s death, in 1155, Toba proposed that his next son (barring Sutoku, of course) become the new emperor; Sutoku objected, proposing either himself or his own oldest son as the logical candidate. Toba, who had more soldiers, won the argument; his son Go-Shirakawa (“Shirakawa the Second”) became the new emperor, and peace briefly descended on the royal house. “While Toba was alive,” the Gukansho tells us, “no rebellions or wars broke out.”7

But Toba died barely a year later. Before his funeral had even ended, the courtiers, clan leaders, and samurai were lining up behind the rival brothers, Go-Shirakawa and Sutoku had commandeered two different royal palaces to use as their respective headquarters, and the capital city was preparing for war.

The sides did not break neatly along clan lines. Taira and Minamoto clan members could be found in both armies, as could Fujiwara officials. Sutoku’s right-hand commander was the Minamoto clan leader Tameyoshi, accompanied by his son Tametomo. In The Tale of Hogen, an account of the struggle written in the early fourteenth century, Tametomo is a superhero, more than seven feet tall: “Born to archery, he had a bow arm that was some six inches longer than the arm with which he held his horse’s reins . . . [and he used] a bow that was more than eight and a half feet in length.” Tametomo’s skill was restricted, though, by the presence of his brother Yoshitomo on the other side; Yoshitomo had been one of the first courtiers to declare himself a supporter of Go-Shirakawa, and had put four hundred hand-chosen samurai warriors at the emperor’s disposal.8

The two sides finally met in battle on the night of July 29, 1156, in a brief and violent clash known afterwards as the Hogen Incident.* Tametomo picked off a number of warriors on the opposing side, but his brother Yoshitomo had the brilliant idea of sending an arsonist in to set Sutoko’s headquarters on fire. As the Cloistered Emperor’s men scrambled away from the flames, Go-Shirakawa’s archers took them down, one at a time. “Those who were afraid of the arrows and terrified by the flames even jumped into the wells in large numbers,” the Tale of Hogen says, “and of these, too, the bottom ones in a short time had drowned, those in the middle had been crushed to death by their fellows, and those on top had been burned up by the flames themselves.”

Sutoku’s forces were scattered, and the Cloistered Emperor himself was arrested and exiled. Yoshitomo had his own father put to death—a cold-blooded and vicious decision that, says the Gukansho, caused “some commotion around the country.” Tametomo was allowed to live, but the sinews of his arms were cut so that he could no longer use a bow.9

Minamoto Yoshitomo considered himself the architect of Emperor Go-Shirakawa’s victory, but when the normal business of government resumed, a Taira clan member named Kiyomori (who had joined the emperor’s cause after Yoshitomo) managed to gain a higher position at court, and the emperor’s apparent favor. Before long, Yoshitomo and Kiyomori were at odds; and the hostility between them was fanned by a Fujiwara clansman named Nobuyori, who himself felt unappreciated by the emperor. “Having noted rivalry between Minamoto Yoshitomo and Taira Kiyomori,” the Gukansho explains, “and having assumed that the victor in a war between them would seize control of the state, he allied himself with Minamoto Yoshitomo . . . and began immediately to plot a rebellion.”10

The inevitable fight—the Heiji Disturbance—broke out in 1159.

Go-Shirakawa had just abdicated in favor of his teenaged son, who became the emperor Nijo; Yoshitomo and Nobuyori waited until their Taira rival Kiyomori left the capital city Kyoto on a pilgrimage of devotion to Kumano, a sacred site nearly 175 miles of mountainous road away. When he was well away, five hundred Minamoto samurai surrounded the palace of the Cloistered Emperor Go-Shirakawa, took him prisoner, and set his palace on fire. Others kidnapped the young emperor.

9.2 Detail from the Heiji Scroll: Burning of the Sanjo palace.

Credit: Werner Forman / Art Resource, NY

Their intention was to force both rulers into declaring the absent Taira Kiyomori an enemy of the state, thus throwing the entire Taira clan into disfavor. But Kiyomori, getting word of the coup, came thundering back into Kyoto at the head of a thousand hastily gathered samurai, all loyal to the Taira cause. The conspirators were quickly overwhelmed. Young Emperor Nijo was rescued; the Cloistered Emperor escaped; and the troops of Minamoto Yoshitomo and Fujiwara Nobuyori, falling like leaves, finally scattered in the face of the Taira attack.

Nobuyori was taken prisoner, and Kiyomori ordered him taken to a nearby riverbed and beheaded. Yoshitomo managed to escape, during the battle, and fled barefoot to the south with his faithful retainer Masakiyo. But when it became clear that capture and execution was inevitable, he asked Masakiyo to behead him. Masakiyo reluctantly obeyed and then killed himself. When the pursuers caught up to the two corpses, they took Yoshitomo’s head back to Kyoto and hung it in a tree beside the imperial prison.11

In the aftermath of the Heiji Disturbance, Taira Kiyomori executed or exiled almost every important member of both rival clans. In the span of twenty years, the power of the Fujiwara had collapsed. Now the Taira clan was rising; but the Cloistered Emperor still controlled the palace, and the other clans waited their chance for revenge.

* In 884, the Fujiwara official Mototsune invented for himself the post of kampaku, or “civil dictator.” The kampaku had as much authority over a grown emperor as a regent, or sessho, had over a child ruler. By the twelfth century, the titles sessho and kampaku seem to have often been used interchangeably, but the highest post in government—with authority over the throne itself—was almost always held by a Fujiwara official. See, for example, Ivan Morris, The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan (Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), pp. 48ff.

* Stephen Turnbull provides a useful definition: “The actual definition of a samurai changed considerably throughout his history, so the reader is recommended to see the samurai initially as a high-ranking warrior in service to a master. To think of a samurai as a Japanese knight is a helpful analogy.” See The Samurai: A Military History (1977), pp. ix and following.

* Shirakawa’s younger brother died before he could take the throne, and Shirakawa’s own son became heir; he inherited the throne in 1087 as Emperor Horikawa. Because Horikawa was the son of a Minamoto mother, though, Go-Sanjo’s intentions were carried out. Horikawa died in 1107 at the young age of twenty-eight, before he was able to abdicate in favor of his young son Toba; so when Toba was coronated, Shirakawa continued to serve as Cloistered Emperor.

* Both the Hogen Incident and the Heiji Disturbance, three years later, were named after the eras in which they occurred. In Japan, a new era was often declared when a new emperor was crowned (the Hogen Era began with the coronation of Go-Shirakawa; the Heiji Era began with Emperor Nijo), but a catastrophe, triumph, or new discovery might also be marked with a new era name.

Chapter Ten

Death of an Army

On the Korean peninsula between 1146 and 1197,

the king scorns the army,

the army overthrows the king,

and both army and king submit to private power

ON THE PENINSULA east of China and west of Japan, a single king ruled over a single people. For over two centuries, Goryeo had been united under the same dynasty. Its people spoke the same language, worshipped in the same Buddhist temples, followed the same laws.*

10.1 Goryeo

This did not translate into a peaceful existence.

In the early decades of the twelfth century, two major rebellions had rocked the palace; the first led by the king’s own father-in-law, the second by a rebellious Buddhist monk who raised an army from his followers and labeled it the “Heaven-Sent Force of Loyalty and Righteousness.” Both revolts had been put down by the reigning monarch, King Injong; but they had risen out of a deep discontent that Injong did nothing to address.1

Unified though it was, Goryeo was heavily scored by internal divisions. The old families, those that could trace their lineage back to the days before unification, married among themselves, held their country estates apart, and filled most of the offices of civil government: an aristocrat could always be known, remarked the twelfth-century poet Yi Kyu-bo, by “the official tablet stuck in his girdle.”2

Military officers, on the other hand, were relegated to the lowest possible appointments. The army had served the throne loyally in putting down rebellions, and a standing force was needed to protect the northern border against wandering nomadic invaders; but the aristocracy was unwilling to allow soldiers to gain any more power. Injong’s officials had even decided to do away with the exams that allowed military men to qualify for important civil posts. There was no longer any way for a soldier to rise through the ranks and gain power at court.3

Nor were soldiers the only victims of aristocratic ambition. Since the beginning of the century, the spread of great private estates—enlarged both by royal presents and by out-and-out confiscation of the fields of the poor—had displaced more and more of Goryeo’s peasants; too many now wandered through the countryside, giving up farming for a life of banditry.4

When Injong died in 1146, his oldest son Uijong was crowned in his place: the eighteenth king of his line, heir to an uneasy kingdom. Tact and wisdom were required, but Uijong had neither. His father and mother had openly preferred their second son, Uijong’s younger brother Kyong; they thought Uijong to be a trifler, with no skill for governing. Their low opinion seems to have been shared by contemporary historians. Uijong, the chronicles tell us, was more interested in building gorgeous gardens and writing poetry than in governing. He “partied with his favorite civilian officials,” says the contemporary history Goryeosa, “exchanging poems and forgetting the time.” “With palace attendants, he got drunk daily and enjoyed himself,” another account complains.5

Uijong was only nineteen at the time of his accession, and fully aware of his family’s dislike. In 1151, after six years on the throne, he seized on a baseless court rumor that his younger brother Kyong was planning treason, and used it as an excuse to strip Prince Kyong of his titles and remove his closest friends from their official positions. Kyong had remained popular, especially with his mother’s family, and Uijong was afraid of a coup. Six years later, still worried about Kyong’s prominence, Uijong banished Kyong and his cronies from the capital city of Kaesong completely.6

At this, Kyong and his companions disappear from the chronicles. But their reflections can be seen, insubstantial as mirrored ghosts, in the events of the next decades.

Disrespect of Goryeo’s officers and scorn for their men grew more extreme. Uijong, posturing as a man of culture and peace, encouraged the disregard. Ignoring military campaigns, he built Buddhist temples and gave them names like “Tranquillity” and “Joyful Pleasure.” He dug lily ponds, traveled from one beauty spot to another, and gave alms to the poor. Meanwhile, he ordered soldiers to dig ditches and build walls for public projects and forced officers to act as ceremonial bodyguards to civil officials. Enlisted men found their salaries unexpectedly docked, or promised land tracts suddenly reassigned. On royal expeditions, military men were allowed to wait, cold and hungry, until civilians were well fed.7

In 1167, at a royal feast, a young man named Kim Ton-jung (the unruly son of the Royal Diarist Kim Bu-sik, mastermind of the official history known as the Samguk Sagi) acted out his king’s disdain by playing a practical joke on the king’s Chief of General Staff, the army officer Jeong Jung-bu. A career soldier of sixty-one, General Jeong Jung-bu was a dangerous and experienced fighter, nearly seven feet tall. Kim Ton-jung, flown with wine, set the general’s long grey beard on fire with a candle. Jeong Jung-bu was incensed, but his king was merely entertained, as Kim Ton-jung must have guessed he would be.8

General Jeong Jung-bu, as it happened, was related by marriage to two of the banished friends of Prince Kyong; two of the younger officers under his personal command, Senior Captains Yi Ko and Yi Uibang, were from the same clan as another of the exiles. After the raucous dinner party of 1167, unhappiness over Uijong’s high-handedness, simmering along in an unfocused diffusion beneath the surface, began to coalesce into a solid core of resentment around these three.

Three years later, the resentment erupted.

Civilian and military officials had gathered for a memorial service, during which the gap between them grew painfully clear: “Now the civilian officials are haughty, drunk, and full,” one of Jeong Jung-bu’s officers complained to him, “but the military officials are hungry and troubled. How long can we endure this?” Jeong Jung-bu, still smarting over Kim Ton-jung’s insult, agreed. “And thus,” the Goryeosa concludes, “they began to plot a coup.”9

Their opportunity came quickly. The next day, the king staged a boxing competition, offering generous prizes for the winner. During one of the matches, a civilian official named Han Roe mocked the losing officer, finally pushing him down on the ground to demonstrate his weakness. “The king and his officials applauded and laughed heartily,” the Goryeosa explains.

This was the match that lit a very short fuse. At twilight on that same day, Jeong Jung-bu led his co-conspirators in an attack on the palace gates. The guards, surprised, were no match for the rebels, who poured into the palace shouting, “Death to all who wear the civil official headdress!” and massacring the civilian officials. Han Roe hid under the king’s bed but was dragged out and knifed to death outside the king’s quarters. In the bloodbath, Kim Ton-jung also died.10

When it was over, an entire layer of Goryeo’s government had been wiped out: “Their corpses were piled as high as a mountain,” the Goryeosa says. Uijong survived by handing over all power to Jeong Jung-bu and his fellow officers, who spared his life but exiled him to isolated Koje Island, off the southern coast. In his place, the conspirators crowned his younger brother Myeongjong. Nearly forty, weak and accommodating, Myeongjong would sit on the Goryeo throne for twenty-seven years, wielding no power whatsoever.11

Through disregarding its soldiers, pushing them down and away, Goryeo had fallen under a military rule that would last nearly a century.

It was not a peaceful regime. For one thing, General Jeong Jung-bu had rivals. His younger allies, Yi Ko and Yi Uibang, helped him to form the Council of Generals, a group of officers who took over the job of governing that had once been held by the civilian State Council. And Yi Ko, Yi Uibang, and every officer on the Council of Generals—the Chungbang—wanted a share of their leader’s power.

For another, the exiled Uijong had supporters. He had not treated his army well, but he had been a faithful observer of Buddhist principles and a generous builder of temples; he had attempted to lower taxes; he had given alms to the poor.12

In 1173, an officer named Kim Bo-dang, stationed in the northeast of the country, managed to round up a substantial counterforce of soldiers and civilians who were still loyal to the deposed king. Kim Bo-dang had no personal connections in the Council of Generals, and although he was an army man, he had been demoted after General Jung-bu’s government came to power. He had been better off under the old regime.

The attack failed, miserably, and Kim Bo-dang was killed. But as he died, he shouted out, “The civil bureaucrats all joined in plotting with me!” The accusation set off another disastrous chain of events. Scores of civil officials who had not been killed in 1170 fell in a new purge; civilians who had once been sympathetic to the military’s plight now began to turn against the new regime.

The following year, a former civil official from the northern city of P’yongyang raised an even larger army and tried once more to drive the General and his captains out. This attack too failed, but the rebels stormed around in the north of Goryeo for more than a year before an army from the capital finally captured the ringleader and scattered his guerrilla followers. By then, Uijong was dead; one of Senior Captain Yi Uibang’s men had assassinated him in his island prison.13

Matters in the Council of Generals were equally unstable, and a fifteen-year series of murders commenced. The two Senior Captains fell out with each other, and by 1174 Yi Uibang had assassinated his rival Yi Ko. Now undisputed second-in-command to the General, he arranged the marriage of his daughter to King Myeongjong’s son, the crown prince. At this display of ambitions, General Jung-bu arranged for Yi Uibang to be murdered in turn. He controlled the Council of Generals alone for another five years, but his iron hand soon grew far too heavy. In 1179, a younger officer killed the General himself.

Chaos reigned until 1196, when two brothers of the Choe clan—Choe Chung-heon and Choe Chung-su—murdered their most powerful rival and claimed control of the Council of Generals.

The older of the two brothers, Chung-heon, had barely turned twenty-one at the time of army’s revolt. Now he was forty-seven years old, head of his clan, veteran and survivor of a quarter century of civil war. Unlike his predecessors, Chung-heon had a long-term plan. He did not intend to rule by controlling the unruly Goryeo army; the series of graves outside the capital city’s walls had convinced him of the pointlessness of such a strategy.

Nor did he aspire to claim the crown.

To put his own sons on the Goryeo throne would be to shatter the mystique of the long-lasting Goryeo dynasty; such a move might energize a whole new civilian resistance to the military dictatorship. A year after seizing power, he suggested to the now-elderly king Myeongjong that he abdicate because of his failing health. Myeongjong, probably relieved to be given a nonfatal way off the throne, quickly agreed. In his place, Chung-heon organized the coronation of Myeongjong’s younger brother Sinjong, who was even more malleable: “Sinjong was put upon the throne by Choe Chung-heon,” says the Goryeosa, “and all matters of life and death, decisions to accept or to reject, were in Choe’s hands. Sinjong stood above his subjects holding only empty authority. Alas, he was nothing but a puppet.”14

Just after Sinjong’s coronation, Chung-heon’s younger brother and co-ruler, Choe Chung-su, decided to push for the marriage of his own daughter to Sinjong’s son, now crown prince. The older brother disagreed sharply with this strategy. “Now, brother,” he is said to have objected, “although our power can shake the country, our lineage was originally humble. If we have your daughter marry the crown prince, will we not be criticized?” When Choe Chung-su ignored his counsel and pushed ahead with the betrothal, the two brothers quarreled so violently that their supporters divided and began to fight in the streets. In the struggle, Chung-su was killed.15

Now Choe Chung-heon was in sole control of the throne, and his ultimate plan grew clear. Rather than becoming head of an army administration or part of the royal family, he intended to rule as a private citizen. His own personal guards, supplemented by troops who owed loyalty directly to him, became a separate and independent army within the capital, answering only to Choe Chung-heon. At first, they simply guarded his house. As time went on, they were augmented by mercenaries, deserters from the regular army, and new allies, until Choe Chung-heon controlled thirty-six armed units of well-trained fighters. “The bravest soldiers were all Choe Chung-heon’s,” says the Goryeosa, “[and] those in the government army were all thin and weak and useless.”16

Over the next decades, Choe Chung-heon would slowly transfer more and more of the government’s powers—including tax collection and the prosecution of lawbreakers—over to his own private control. Meanwhile, he allowed the Goryeo throne, the traditional government offices, and the shell of the army to survive. The Council of Generals was given a handful of ceremonial tasks, the task of carrying out important Buddhist rituals, and the responsibility for making maps; it no longer took any part in governing the country. The military revolt had ended up by destroying not only the power of the civilian officials but the strength of the army itself.17

* There are two major systems for rendering Korean names into the Roman alphabet. The older system, McCune-Reischauer Romanization, uses phonetic symbols; the second, Revised Romanization, tries to represent Korean sounds with combinations of vowels and consonants. Some names, such as Injong, are the same in both systems, but where the transliterations differ (the name of Injong’s oldest son is Uijong in Revised Romanization, Ŭijong in McCune-Reischauer), I have chosen for simplicity’s sake to use Revised Romanization. Revised Romanization is the current official system of South Korea, although North Korea continues to use a slightly altered version of McCune-Reischauer.

Chapter Eleven

The First Plantagenet

In England, between 1147 and 1154,

anarchy comes to an end

IN ENGLAND, civil war continued.

Eight years in, Stephen of Blois still held the crown. But Matilda, daughter of Henry I, camped in the English countryside and continued to press her claims. The king’s armies controlled the southeast of England and the capital city of London; Matilda’s soldiers dominated the southwest. Between them was a wasteland: “You could well go a whole day’s journey and never find anyone occupying a village or land tilled,” the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle explains.1

In 1147, Matilda’s fourteen-year-old son Henry excused himself from his studies in Western Francia (his tutor was the well-regarded philosopher William of Conches, author of a masterwork intended to reconcile Greek natural philosophy with Christian orthodoxy) and headed to England. He had collected a small band of soldiers, probably by promising them a share of loot. As soon as he landed in England, rumors began to fly: Henry, it was said, had come with an entire army, or perhaps two, possibly with the king of France behind him, and was ready to devastate the opposition.

None of this was true. Henry’s little group of adventurers lost several initial skirmishes against detachments of Stephen’s soldiers and soon realized that there was no loot to be had. They deserted him, leaving the fourteen-year-old stranded in enemy territory. Henry sent a desperate message to his mother, but her treasury was exhausted. Finally, Stephen himself provided the money to get the child home.2

Humiliated, Henry went back to his studies. But in a short time, he was catapulted out of the schoolroom and back into war. Four years after the embarrassment in England, his father Geoffrey Plantagenet died of a fever, and the eighteen-year-old Henry became both Count of Anjou and Duke of Normandy.

Within the year, he had doubled his territories.

Henry’s overlord, the Capetian king Louis VII, was just recently returned from the Second Crusade. On the way back from Jerusalem, he had stopped off in Italy to consult with the pope over the advisability of annulling his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine. But the pope had not only refused to discuss annulment (he “forbade any future mention” of it, writes John of Salisbury, “on pain of anathema”) but had shut the estranged couple into a bedroom furnished with a single bed (“which he had decked with priceless hangings of his own”) to encourage them along.3

11.1 Anjou, Normandy, and England

This strategy backfired. Eleanor became pregnant, but her second child, like her first, was a girl. Until this point, Louis had resisted Eleanor’s unhappiness; now, the queen’s failure to produce a male heir meant that Louis resigned himself to ending the marriage. With the help of the ubiquitous Bernard of Clairvaux (who had never approved of Eleanor), he again applied to Rome for annulment. The pope yielded to the inevitable, and the marriage ended; the decree was dated March 11, 1152.

Eleanor, now aged twenty-eight, left her two girls in the care of their father and went at once to the French town of Poitiers. There, she was joined by young Henry; and on May 18, only two months after her marriage to the king ended, Eleanor and Henry were married.

More than one contemporary chronicler chalked the sudden marriage up to infatuation. Henry and Eleanor had met earlier in the year, when Geoffrey and his son visited the French court to pay their respects to the king; Henry’s mother Matilda was ten years older than his father Geoffrey—still only thirty-nine at the time of his death—so the age difference seemed perfectly normal to the young count. And since the marriage would eventually yield eight children in fourteen years (as opposed to the two Eleanor had produced in her fifteen years with Louis), sex was obviously part of the equation. But by marriage, Henry gained the vast rich territory of Aquitaine to add to his already extensive lands, and Eleanor gained the protection of the most powerful nobleman in Western Francia.

And the wedding also weakened Louis, who lost half of his domain to his rival.

Louis, motivated by equal parts fury and prudence (“He was greatly incensed against Duke Henry,” remarks Roger of Wendover, undoubtedly understating Louis’s emotions), mounted an immediate war against the newlywed Count of Anjou. But Henry was no longer the unprepared fourteen-year-old of 1147. His men drove off Louis’s attacks, and Henry’s return forays into royal land forced Louis to suggest a truce: he would recognize Henry’s claim to Aquitaine, as long as Henry would swear an oath of loyal submission to the French throne.4

Henry agreed. His power in Western Francia was secure—his lands were more than seven times larger than Louis’s royal estates—and he had his eyes on England. His mother Matilda, worn out by a decade of struggle, had retreated back to Normandy; he intended to pick up the fight.

In January of 1153, Henry once again landed on English shores, this time at the head of three thousand men. Almost at once, he took the castle of Malmesbury away from Stephen’s forces, and used it as a base to campaign forward across the countryside. By the first week of August, Henry’s troops had reached the Thames.5

Just days later, Stephen’s son and heir Eustace died of a sudden onset of seizures, and Stephen lost the heart to continue with the fight. He proposed a truce. He would continue to rule as king of England until his death; Henry would swear loyalty to Stephen as his lord. In exchange, Henry would become heir to the crown after Stephen’s death.

Stephen was by now over sixty, Henry barely twenty. The young man agreed to the terms, and the two men signed the Treaty of Wallingford in January of 1154, a mere year after Henry’s arrival in England.

For ten months, Stephen governed England as undisputed king: “At this time,” writes William of Newburgh, “he . . . began to rule as if for the first time.” But in October, presiding over a church council in Kent, he grew violently ill with “colic” and “infected piles”—probably amoebic dysentery, a constant scourge in a world with too much standing water and not enough soap. He took to his bed and died a few days later.6

Henry, in Normandy at the time of Stephen’s death, was delayed by bad weather and logistics; but he finally arrived on English shores on December 7, to the cheers of the battered populace. “They had experienced the misery of the previous reign, under which so many evils had sprouted,” William of Newburgh says, “and they hoped for better things from the new ruler.” He and Eleanor were crowned king and queen of England on December 19, at Westminster Abbey. Within a week, Henry had begun to sweep the muck out of England’s war-soiled halls.7

It was a happy coincidence between a country’s need and a monarch’s personality. Henry was by nature unable to sit still. His invasion of England at the age of fourteen was merely the first symptom of an energy that overflowed, his entire life, onto everyone around him. “If the king has promised to spend the day anywhere,” wrote his secretary Peter of Blois,

you may be sure that he will start off early in the morning. . . . You may see men running about as if they were mad, urging on the pack-horses, driving chariots into one another, and everything in a state of confusion. . . . He never sits down except when on horseback or at meals. On a single day, if necessary, he travels a journey of four or five days. . . . He does not loiter in his palace like other kings, but hurrying through the provinces he investigates what is being done everywhere.8

He was, always, active. He heard Mass every day, but found it so impossible to sit still that he whispered orders to his officials all during the service and, when silence was unavoidable, drew pictures. His favorite priests were those who were fastest at chanting the Mass, so that he could get on to the next thing. When his intentions were blocked, he flew into immediate and prodigious rages, once ripping off his clothes and hurling them around the room in a fury at some dereliction of duty by his constable. He was constantly traveling and often away from his wife’s bedroom; but despite this, Eleanor had given him a son before the coronation and was again pregnant, in what must have been a most satisfying thumb in the eye to Louis VII.9

On Christmas Day, six days after the ceremony, Henry ordered the foreign mercenaries who had flocked into England during the Anarchy expelled; he also ordered all castles built without royal permission—over a thousand by this point—to be demolished. Both decrees cut to the heart of his biggest problem: the noblemen of England, the barons who had built the castles and employed the mercenaries, had grown, during the Anarchy, as powerful as the throne.

A few of them resisted this royal attempt to take back the reins. Henry immediately laid siege to the rebellious castles and confiscated them. The quick response discouraged others from following suit. The barons resigned themselves to the rule of the Plantagenet king; the Anarchy was finally over; and England (at least for a time) was at peace.10

Chapter Twelve

Frederick Barbarossa

Between 1147 and 1177

the Holy Roman Emperor loses Italy,

but tightens his fist around Germany

SHORTLY AFTER the death of Peter Abelard, the authority of the Church was lent to another cause: the expansion of German power.

In March of 1147, Bernard of Clairvaux was traveling through the center of Germany, attempting to rouse German knights to take part in the ailing Second Crusade. In Frankfurt, he was met by a delegation of German Crusaders with a special request: they wanted to fulfill their crusading vows, but not by heading east. Instead, they suggested that they could also advance the kingdom of God by attacking the Slavic tribes known collectively as the Wends, just north of the German border.*

Unlike the Slavic tribal peoples of earlier centuries, the Wends were settled farmers. But they were, for the most part, not Christians. Drawing them into the Christian realm of Germany seemed to Bernard like a logical extension of the Crusade; he had, after all, been preaching for months that the purpose of crusade was to submit the heathen to the power of God. He agreed with the German warriors: the Wends should be attacked, and the fight should continue “until such a time as, by God’s help, they shall be either converted or wiped out.” Pope Eugenius III blessed the effort, and the Wendish Crusade began.1

Bernard had expected the Germans to overrun the entire Wendish territory, giving the Wends the options of baptism or death. But the Wendish Crusade had no clear leader; the Danes who had joined the German forces soon split off to make their own raids; the Germans themselves disagreed on strategy. In a matter of months, the entire attack had fizzled out. Nothing had been gained except a small amount of loot. Not a single Wend had been baptized.2

As a holy war, the Wendish Crusade was a failure.

As a political maneuver, it was more successful. One of the bands of German Crusaders was headed by the eighteen-year-old Henry the Lion, who had a grudge against the king of Germany. Henry’s father, Duke of Bavaria and Saxony, had opposed the election of Conrad III (at present still crusading in the east), and Conrad III had punished him by seizing the family lands as soon as the German crown was on his head. After the deposed Duke had died, Conrad III gave Saxony back to young Henry the Lion; but he did not return Bavaria, and Henry the Lion wanted it back.

In the middle of the Wendish Crusade, Henry the Lion managed to make a treaty with the most powerful of the Wendish leaders. Bolstered by this new alliance, he immediately reclaimed the dukedom of Bavaria. He was building his power, wooing allies, reinforcing his army. By 1152, he had become one of the most powerful noblemen in Germany.

In that year, Conrad III of Germany died. Led by Henry the Lion, the German electors gave the crown of Germany not to Conrad’s six-year-old son but to one of Henry’s own cousins, the thirty-year-old Frederick of Swabia.

Frederick was, in Otto of Freising’s words, a “lover of warfare . . . conspicuous for the extension of his kingdom and conquest of peoples.” He was also an adept politician; he rewarded his cousin Henry for his support by officially restoring the title Duke of Bavaria. Scrupulous in his religious observances, an enthusiastic hunter, a moderate drinker, sporting an auburn beard (earning him the nickname of “Barbarossa,” or “Red-Beard”), Frederick would rule Germany for nearly fifty years; and he would struggle with Henry the Lion for at least half of that time.3

He began his reign with a letter to Pope Eugenius III, announcing his election and spelling out exactly how authority in his kingdom was going to be divided. “There are two things by which this world is chiefly ruled,” he wrote, quoting the well-known words of the fifth-century pope Gelasius I, “that is, the sacred authority of the pontiffs and the royal power.” In other words, the empire had been given to him by God, not by the pope. He was perfectly happy to cooperate with, and even protect, the Church; but he intended to control his own affairs within his own domain. “By our careful application,” he concluded, “the catholic church should be adorned by the privileges of its diginity, and the majesty of the Roman Empire should be reformed, by God’s help, to the original strength of its excellence.”4

Eugenius III heard the message loud and clear. He promised to crown Frederick as Holy Roman Emperor, the title Conrad had never achieved, in exchange for Frederick’s help with a couple of nagging earthly problems; the Norman kingdom of Sicily was encroaching on the papal lands from the south, and the secular officials of Rome (the “Roman commune,” the senators who ran the city’s affairs) were agitating for more independence from papal power within the city itself.5

By the time Frederick arrived at Rome, with a fairly good-sized German army behind him, Eugenius III had died. His successor Adrian IV* (the only Englishman to ever hold the position) fulfilled the papal side of the bargain, and Frederick Barbarossa was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in June of 1155.

But whipping Italy into shape turned out to be a long-term project. The people of Rome were in no mood to acknowledge the German king. In fact, says Otto of Freising, they were “infuriated . . . that the emperor had received the imperial crown without their assent.” Right after the coronation, they rioted in the city streets; Barbarossa’s men killed over a thousand Romans as they fought their way out of the city and back to their camp.6

The mood north of the Papal States was no more welcoming.

Otto of Freising notes, with surprise, that the north of Italy had developed a very peculiar kind of society. Instead of loyalty to a king, Italians felt loyalty to their cities. “Practically that entire land is divided among the cities,” he writes, “. . . and scarcely any noble or great man can be found in all the surrounding territory who does not acknowledge the authority of his city.” So instead of reducing a single rebellious country to submission, Frederick Barbarossa found himself forced to address the loyalty of each city, one by one. The Genoese responded by building a whole series of new walls and openly defying the emperor. The consul of Milan persuaded a handful of other cities to join him in an anti-imperial coalition. Pope Adrian IV, reading the generally anti-Barbarossa mood of the peninsula, reversed himself and made a treaty with the Norman enemy to the south. He died shortly afterwards, before Barbarossa could come back to Rome and punish him, and two popes were elected in his place; a legitimate pope, Alexander III, appointed by the cardinals in proper ecclesiastical fashion; and an “antipope,” Victor IV, appointed by Frederick Barbarossa and installed in Rome by Frederick’s soldiers. Alexander III fled into Western Francia and excommunicated the antipope Victor IV, who paid no attention.7

Meanwhile, Henry the Lion was ruling the north and east of Germany in practical independence: a kingdom within the empire. In 1156, he began to push farther east against the Slavic territories. The following year, he founded the city of Munich on the Isar river, so that he could dominate the salt trade that crossed the river there; in 1159, he built a port at Lübeck to draw merchant ships in.

But he remained Frederick’s ally, accompanying his cousin into Italy to help him fight against the rebellious Italian territories. In 1162, with the help of both Henry the Lion and the armies of Pisa (Pisa had decided that there was more to be gained in fighting for the emperor, than against), Frederick Barbarossa finally conquered the stubborn city of Milan. It had been hostile to him since his coronation; it had caused him untold trouble, money, and men; it had been under siege for nearly eight months; and when the starving people finally surrendered, Barbarossa forced hundreds of the city’s elite to approach him barefoot, smeared with ashes, and kiss his feet. He then allowed his men to sack the city, burn its houses, and pillage its churches; when they were done, Milan no longer existed. All of its people were taken away and resettled in other villages.8

12.1 The Empire of Frederick Barbarossa

To remind his rebellious subjects that God had given him his imperial crown, Barbarossa took Milan’s most sacred relics—the bones of the Magi, the three kings who (tradition said) had brought gifts to the baby Jesus after his birth—back to the German city of Cologne. He installed them in the cathedral there, as patrons of the city; lending their recognition of a king greater than themselves to none other than Frederick Barbarossa. Three years later, he directed his puppet antipope in Rome—now Paschal III, appointed by Frederick in 1164 when Victor IV died—to canonize Charlemagne. Now he could claim that his royal office was holy in more than one way: given to him by God, first established by a saint.9

None of this helped him hold on to the Italian kingdom. The northern cities had been too independent for too long, and the old symbols of imperial authority counted for nothing with the tradesmen and guildsmen, merchants and artists, of Verona and Parma, Bologna and Venice. In 1167, the cities of the north banded together against Frederick’s claims, forming the Lombard League.

Frederick’s answering invasion was halted when his soldiers were attacked by a sudden and devastating epidemic of malaria. “A wind came from the southern zone with thunder and lightning,” wrote the Italian chronicler Godfrey of Viterbo, poetically. “Every man was drenched as the heat of the sun decreased, and became ill with a terrifying fever. . . . The soldiers ached with pain in their heads . . . and internal organs and legs.”10

The weakened imperial army crawled away, and the Lombard League consolidated its power. Together, the cities of the League began to rebuild Milan. They also joined together to build a brand new city, blocking the pass that the German armies used to descend into Italy. This new city they named Alessandria, in honor of the exiled pope.11

The malaria was bad luck, but when Frederick finally returned to Italy with fresh forces, he found that the Lombard League had passed beyond his control. In 1176, the combined armies of the League defeated the imperial forces decisively at Legnano; and Frederick, a realist, decided to abandon the struggle.

In 1177, at Venice, he made peace both with the cities of the League and with the legitimate Alexander III. The cities of the League were given the undisputed right to govern themselves. The antipope in Rome, Paschal III, had died in 1168; Frederick now abandoned his successor, the antipope Callixtus III, and recognized Alexander III as the sole authority over the Papal States.

It was not all bad news for Frederick, though. Returning to Germany, he confiscated the lands of Henry the Lion, who had refused to accompany him into Italy for the final confrontation, and drove his cousin into exile. Henry’s lands, which had grown to cover much of the north and the east, were partitioned up among less powerful noblemen who owed Frederick favors. Frederick had lost northern Italy; but now Germany was more firmly his than ever.

* The Wends were made up of a federation of five tribes: the Wagrians, Abotrites, Polabians, Rugians, and Liutizians. See John France, The Crusades and the Expansion of Catholic Christendom, 1000–1714 (Routledge, 2005), pp. 111ff.

* Eugenius died in 1153 and was succeeded by Anastasius IV, who held the pontificate for less than a year before dying; Adrian IV was elected on December 3, 1154.

Chapter Thirteen

The Almohads in Spain

Between 1147 and 1177,

the Almohads destroy the Almoravids

but fail to capture the Spanish peninsula

BY 1147, Alfonso VII of León-Castile had pushed the southern front of Christian conquest more than halfway through the old Almoravid lands. In that same year, Alfonso I of Portugal captured Lisbon from its Muslim inhabitants, shoring up his claim of a royal title. And in the same year, the Almoravids fell. The Almohads stormed Marrakesh, under al-Mu’min’s direction, and brought the weakened Almoravid rule to an end.1

The remnants of the Almoravid empire lingered on in Spain, cut loose from its roots. The city of Granada, now independent of Marrakesh, remained in Muslim hands; but without direction from Africa, it began to chart its own political course, making overtures of alliance to Alfonso VII himself. The cities of Valencia and Murcia formed a mini-kingdom ruled by Ibn Mardanish; he also decided to make peace with the Christian king of León-Castile, agreeing to become a vassal of Alfonso VII in exchange for peace.2

But this independence was short-lived. “When all the provinces of Morocco were submissive to al-Mu’min,” the historian al-Marrakushi tells us, “he turned his armies to the eastern areas of North Africa, and then towards Spain.” In 1155, Granada was forced to surrender to Almohad armies and acknowledge al-Mu’min’s lordship. Two years later, the Almohads had advanced north of Granada, taking Ubeda, Baeza, and Almería from Alfonso’s very hands.3

On the way home from the defeat at Almería, Alfonso VII fell ill. He died in August of 1157, leaving Castile and León in the hands of his two sons Sancho and Fernando.

The division of the kingdom set the two brothers and their heirs against each other, severing the last unity among the four Christian kingdoms. Sancho died after a single year on the throne of Castile, and his three-year-old son Alfonso VIII inherited it, plunging Castile into a struggle between noble families for control of the regency; the king of Navarre, son of Garcia the Restorer, took advantage of Castile’s weakness to claim a few border towns for himself.4

13.1 The Kingdoms of Spain

But the Muslims in the south were on no better terms than the Christians of the north. Spain remained a secondary priority for the Almohad caliph, who was still shoring up his hold on North Africa. Granada had surrendered, but Ibn Mardanish of Valencia and Murcia refused to submit to Almohad rule, holding on to his alliance with the Christians of Castile instead; and Granada was constantly on the edge of rebellion against Almohad domination.5

Many of the peoples living in the contested and chaotic areas fled. Among them was Rabbi Maimon ben Joseph, who in 1160 took his wife and grown children and left the peninsula. Like many other Jews, the ben Joseph family had been living under steadily worsening conditions. An Almohad decree in 1146 had commanded all Jews (and any Christians who might be living in the Muslim areas) to convert to Islam, but even Jews who converted were required to wear distinctive black tunics and black caps to set them apart. As Almohad power in Spain grew, the decree was more and more often enforced. “[I am] like one who is drowning,” Maimon ben Joseph wrote, just before leaving his home. “We are almost totally immersed. . . . Overwhelmed with humiliation, blamed and despised, the seas of captivity surround us and we are submerged in its depths.”6

Conditions in the Christian kingdoms were only slightly better; and ben Joseph’s family, like many others, crossed over to the North African coast. Eventually they reached Egypt and settled there, under the more benevolent government of Saladin. There, ben Joseph’s older son Maimonides began to practice as a physician. He also started work on a massive, fourteen-volume summary of Jewish law, which he hoped would give the scattered and perplexed Jews a guide for living in troubled times.

Meanwhile, the Almohad grip on North Africa had tightened.

13.2 The Almohad Empire

The Almohad caliph ‘Abd al-Mu’min had brought all of North Africa under his control: “Through him,” wrote the Almohad historian al-Marrakushi, “God stamped out disbelief in Ifriqiya.” He was planning a massive transfer of forces over to the Spanish peninsula, in preparation for a full-scale assault on the Christian resistance.7

But in 1163, he died before launching his invasion. He had fathered fifteen sons, so for several years his son and successor Yusuf I had to spend most of his strength fighting off brotherly challenges to his caliphate. Struggles on the Spanish peninsula continued, small army against small army, border spats and guerrilla warfare. The unsettled times allowed mercenaries and adventurers to prosper.

One of the most famous of these was Gerald the Fearless, a Portuguese soldier of fortune who assembled an army of freebooters and campaigned recklessly into the area known as the Extremadura: outside Portuguese borders, well into Almohad territory. Sometime around 1165, he attacked the city of Evora. Later chroniclers insist that, when his soldiers balked, Gerald went up the walls himself by driving spears between the stones as a makeshift ladder and came back down with a couple of heads. Evora’s coat of arms commemorated the event, as did the epic poem Os Lusiadas, written in the sixteenth century by Luis Vaz de Camões:

Watch this one, shinning down his lance

Back to the ambush, with the heads

Of the two watchmen, and so captures

Evora with subterfuge and daring.8

The capture of Evora was the first in a series of victories for Gerald the Fearless and his band; he went on to seize at least four more towns.

The successes alarmed the Almohads, but were even more troubling to the Christian kings; Gerald seemed to be on the path to a private kingdom of his own. When Gerald laid siege to the Almohad city of Badajoz in 1169, Afonso Henriques of Portugal and Ferdinand II of León banded together to drive him off.

Gerald now found himself without a home. He made overtures of peace to the king of Portugal; Afonso Henriques, who broke his leg in the fight for Badajoz and was never again able to ride without pain, was not forgiving. So in 1172 Gerald offered to enter the service of the Almohad caliph Yusuf I instead.

The caliph accepted his allegiance and stationed him in the Moroccan desert. This was not a posting that showed great faith in Gerald’s loyalties, and, sure enough, within months Gerald was carrying on a second set of secret negotiations with Afonso Henriques, proposing to hand over his new territory so that the Portuguese would have a base of operations from which to attack the Almohad heartland. Yusuf I, getting wind of the messages, sent soldiers to arrest Gerald; whether or not by design, they killed him in the process.9

The siege of Badajoz had temporarily put the Almohad ruler of Badajoz and the two Christian kings on the same side. This blurring of allegiances troubled Yusuf I, and in the summer of 1171 he transported twenty thousand soldiers across the Strait of Gibraltar, aiming to firm up his hold on the Muslim territories. Within the year, he had whipped most of the Muslim cities into line.10

In 1172, he made his first foray against the Christian position. He laid siege to the city of Huete—and failed.

There were multiple reasons for the failure. At least one eyewitness suggests that Yusuf I, perhaps underestimating his enemy, wasn’t particularly engaged in the siege; instead of appearing on the battlefield, he remained in his tent, carrying on philosophical discussions with his advisors. The twenty thousand Almohad troops were an uneasy mixture of local Spaniards, Arabs, and North Africans; they all had their own native commanders and did not act easily in unison. They were forced to forage farther and farther afield for food. A message came from the pope to Huete, promising the city’s defenders remission from sin for their efforts and stiffening their resolve. And just as the inhabitants began to suffer from thirst, a massive rainstorm refilled the city’s reservoirs.11

When the news went around the Almohad camp that Alfonso VIII of Castile (now eighteen and ruling in his own name) was approaching to lift the siege, the Almohads gave up their position and retreated. It was an embarrassing defeat for Yusuf I, although not fatal; he would soon regather himself and relaunch the war.

But Huete was a turning point for the Christian kingdoms, which now began to readjust their attitudes towards each other. By 1177, all five of the Christian kings had sworn out treaties or created marriage alliances. The political unity of Alfonso the Battler had become a unity of purpose; and the latticework of allegiances woven by the Christian enemy would prove almost impossible for the Almohads to penetrate.

Chapter Fourteen

“Many Nations”

In the twelfth century,

Muslim kingdoms occupy the center and east of the African continent,

and lie side by side with much older traditions

until the two come into conflict

THE ALMOHAD EMPIRE that had spread across the north of Africa was not the only Muslim kingdom on the African continent. In the center of Africa, just west of Lake Chad, a Muslim king named Dunama ruled over the state of Kanem.

Kanem was, in the words of the tenth-century Arab geographer al-Muhallabi, a kingdom of “many nations”: a mix of peoples.* The nomadic Zaghawa, who had migrated south from an increasingly hostile Sahara Desert perhaps four hundred years before, had settled near Lake Chad and adopted some of the customs of the villagers there; in Kanem, farmers and seminomadic herdsmen seem to have existed side by side. Their wealth, al-Muhallabi notes, “consists of livestock such as sheep, cattle, camels, and horses. The greater part of the crops of their county is sorghum and cowpeas and then wheat. . . . Their means of subsistence is crops and the ownership of livestock.”1

In the tenth century, Kanem still held to its native customs: “Their religion is the worship of their kings,” al-Muhallabi writes, “for they believe that they bring life and death, sickness and health.” But by Dunama’s day, Islam had come to the shores of Lake Chad. Dunama’s father Humai had been tutored by a Muslim scholar, from whom he learned the basics of the faith; the Girgam, the royal chronicle of Kanem’s rulers, says that Dunama himself made two successful hajjes, sacred pilgrimages to Mecca.

Kanem’s chronicle is unusual. Oral tradition is the only guide we have to the early history of the majority of African states, and many have no written history until the arrival of Europeans in the sixteenth century. But the Girgam, like most king lists, is not a neutral document. It preserves what appears to be a much older oral king list, stretching back at least eleven generations before the conversion of Humai. But among those kings is the biblical patriarch Abraham, apparently a Muslim gloss on the native past; and the list also displays a clearly Arab desire to identify the earliest Kanem kings as Arab, rather than as African. The eighth king of Kanem, the list assures us, was “as white silk,” and the first king identified as “a black man, a warrior hotter than fire” is the thirteenth-century ruler Dunama II.2

But the first Dunama was undoubtedly black, most likely Zaghawa in ancestry. His dynasty, the Saifawa, ruled from the capital city Njimi, the exact site of which is still unknown. Humai’s Muslim tutor, and the conversion of the Saifawa to Islam, came by way of the trade routes to North Africa.

Those trade routes, crossing the Sahara, had existed since 600 BC. Even with camels, used since the first century, the passage across the desert took three months or more. From the west and center of the continent came gold, kola nuts, ivory, copper, and salt, which was for centuries the most valuable African export, mined at the desert towns of Taghaza and Bilma. The later traveler Ibn Battuta described Taghaza as “the most fly-ridden of places,” a hideous village where

houses and mosques are built of blocks of salt, roofed with camel skins. There are no trees there, nothing but sand. In the sand is a salt mine; they dig for the salt, and find it in thick slabs. . . . No one lives at Taghaza except the slaves of the Mesufa tribe, who dig for the salt; they subsist on dates imported from Dar’a and Sijilmasa, camels’ flesh, and millet.3

The slaves at Taghaza were most likely prisoners of war, taken captive and sold by their African captors to African purchasers. Since ancient times, the defeated were enslaved and sold, and not just within Africa; slaves were another major export, sold to Arab merchants along the trade route. Since Islam forbade the enslavement of fellow Muslims, the African tribes outside the Muslim world provided a valuable source of labor.4

Three major routes served the merchants who traded in African goods and slaves. The western route passed through Taghaza and led down to the Niger river; the central route ran from Tunis down towards the inland bend in the Niger. Under Dunama I, Kanem took control of the easternmost trade route, the one that passed by Lake Chad, up through Bilma, and ended in Tripoli.

14.1 Many Nations of Africa

The trade route made Kanem wealthier, and Dunama I increased his own fortunes by doing a brisk trade in slaves. This had long been a privilege of the king: “He has unlimited authority over his subjects,” wrote Al-Bakri in the eleventh century, “and enslaves from among them anyone he wants.” A Muslim king could not enslave Muslim subjects, but apparently the conversion of Kanem had not yet trickled down from palace to peasant; Dunama had plenty of non-Muslim subjects to enslave. On both his first and second pilgrimages to Mecca, the Girgam relates, he took three hundred slaves to sell in Cairo. He intended to do the same on his third pilgrimage, but drowned on his way across the Red Sea when his ship sank.5 Kanem would not come fully into the fold of Islam until the reign of Salmama I at the end of the century, three generations later.

Farther to the east, the island nation of Kilwa was already thoroughly Muslim.

Like Kanem, Kilwa has a written royal chronicle. Around the tenth century, according to the Kilwa Chronicle, an Arab prince named Ali ibn al-Hassan was driven from his home in the prosperous city of Shiraz, just east of the Persian Gulf. He came to Kilwa with his six brothers and his father, sailing in seven ships. Swahili peoples lived on the island, and on the nearby coast; Ali bought Kilwa from them in exchange for cloth and settled there as the island’s king, founding the Shirazi dynasty.6

It is impossible to know how much of this story actually dates from the early history of Kilwa, since the oldest surviving version of the Chronicle is a sixteenth-century Portuguese translation done by the explorer João de Barros. There is no proof that Ali ibn al-Hassan, whose coins still survive, came to the Swahili lands from the outside; like the details of the Kanem king list, the tale might be rooted in the Arab assumption that a civilized, organized Muslim kingdom could not have been founded by native Africans. And archaeological investigations suggest that Ali himself probably lived closer to the twelfth century than to the tenth. But ruins of mosques and prayer rooms do suggest that, by the tenth century, Arab merchants were not only trading with but also settling into the Swahili villages of Kilwa and the coast.7

Although the chronology of the Shirazi sultans is difficult to pin down, around 1150 Kilwa was probably ruled by Dawud b. Sulayman, who boasted the title “Master of the Trade.” He controlled a kingdom that encompassed the islands of Pemba, Zanzibar, and Mafia, as well as Kilwa itself, and stretched to the coast of the mainland.8

This Kilwa empire flourished through trade. Song pottery along the coast testifies to sea trade with the southern dynasty of China; ivory from the south passed through Kilwa on its way north. Dawud b. Sulayman’s greatest achievement was to negotiate a monopoly in the trading of gold through the city of Sofala. From the middle of the twelfth century on, merchants coming to the eastern coast of Africa for gold traded through Kilwa’s increasingly wealthy port cities.9

IN THE WEST OF AFRICA other dynasties ruled over kingdoms and tribes that had not yet been touched by Islam. But because written chronicles came with Islam, the history that we have of these dynasties remains in the realm of legend, shading into myth and then imperceptibly into history.

East of the Volta river and west of the Niger lay the city of Ife, one of the most splendid in Africa. Ife had existed for hundreds of years as a smallish village, since, perhaps, the fourth century BC. Around 700 it had begun to grow. By the ninth century AD, Ife was a walled city with a palace and court, paved streets lined with elaborate sculptures of terra-cotta and bronze.10

The Yoruba peoples claimed Ife as the origin not only of their civilization but of all the peoples of the world. Oral tradition preserves the legend of their creation: One day, the creator god Ólodùmarè looked out from the lower heavens over the endless waters below and decided to create the earth. He descended to the surface of the waters by climbing down a chain, holding a gourd of earth and a five-toed chicken. He piled the dirt onto the water and set the chicken on top of it; the chicken, scratching in the dirt, scattered it across the surface of the water and created the earth. Then Ólodùmarè granted the power to create life to another deity, Obatala (an orisha, a manifestation of one of the facets of Ólodùmarè himself). Obatala made man and gave him power, and then his sixteen sons spread out among the peoples of the earth and established sixteen kingdoms among them.11

Like all origin stories, this one (which has many variations) reflects the world of its makers. The Yoruba, united by a common language, were never a single state; there were many rulers, many chiefs, many centers of Yoruba power. Ife held pride of place among all Yoruba cities, but never dominated the political life of the Yoruba.

On the eastern side of the Yoruba lands, the Yoruba peoples blended into the Edo: hunters and farmers, living in small villages that had slowly grown and spread towards each other, their walls finally meeting to form a sprawling honeycomb of a city. This city was Benin, ruled by a king with the title Ogiso and made prosperous by a northward trade in cotton cloth, salt, pottery, and copper. Edo oral tradition preserves the names of thirty-eight Ogisos; the last Ogiso king, Ogiso Owodo, ruled sometime between 1100 and 1200.* His rule was a disaster, and after forty-one years on the throne he was driven from his country by his own subjects. For seven or eight decades, Benin fell apart into mini-kingdoms ruled by local nobility.12

Finally, fed up with the interregnum and with the tyranny of their overlords, the people of Benin sent a messenger to Ife, asking for a prince of the Yoruba to come and rule over them. A younger royal son named Oranmiyan answered the call; arriving in Benin, he married the daughter of one of those tyrannical local nobles, sired a son, and tried to govern the city. The effort turned out to be unrewarding: “This,” he is said to have exclaimed, “is a land of vexation!” In Yoruba, the phrase is Ile-Ibinu, from which the name Benin is derived.13

He installed his son Eweka as ruler of Benin and left the city, returning to his home in Ife. Thus Yoruba blood entered the royal line of the Edo, and Eweka became the founder of the Second Dynasty of Benin, establishing Benin City as his capital and building a palace there. He claimed a new royal title for himself: Oba, the king with a link to the divine. By tradition, Eweka’s dynasty has continued unbroken until the present day, and the Oba of Benin (in 2011, Erediauwa I, a Cambridge graduate and onetime Gulf Oil employee crowned in 1979) claims to represent all of the Edo people.

AS THE SECOND DYNASTY began in Benin, the kingdom of Ghana, home of the Soninke people, was already declining.

Ghana had no written history of its own, but stories of the kingdom had filtered north along the trade routes since at least the tenth century. In 1068, the Cordoban scholar Abu Abdulluh al-Bakri had combined the work of Arab geographers and travelers’ tales into his Book of Highways and Kingdoms. He described Ghana as a kingdom suspended halfway between Islam and native custom, where African Muslims and traditional priests existed side by side:

The [capital] city of Ghana [Kumbi-Saleh] consists of two towns situated on a plain. One of these towns, which is inhabited by Muslims, is large and possesses twelve mosques, in one of which they assemble for the Friday prayer. There are salaried imams and muezzins, as well as jurists and scholars. . . . The king’s town is six miles distant from this one. . . . Around the king’s town are domed buildings and groves and thickets where the sorcerers of these people, men in charge of the religious cult, live. . . . When the people who profess the same religion as the king approach him they fall on their knees and sprinkle dust on their heads, for this is their way of greeting him. As for the Muslims, they greet him only by clapping their hands.14

But Ghana had barely entered written history before the kingdom fell on hard times. Almoravid troops invaded in 1076, hoping to seize control of the lucrative western trade route, and occupied the capital of Kumbi-Saleh; Ghana’s king, driven out, lost control first of the edges of his empire and then of its heartland. The Soninke began to migrate outwards from the enemy-controlled center, and Soninke nobles established their own small kingdoms in Ghana’s outer reaches.

One of these kingdoms was controlled by the Sosso clan of the Malinke tribe. Even before the fall of Kumbi-Saleh, the Sosso had resisted both Islam and royal control. Almoravid intervention allowed them to claim independence, and then to whip the surrounding clans into obedience. By 1180, the Sosso clan leader Diara Kante commanded enough troops to invade Kumbi-Saleh itself and drive the Almoravids out. In 1200, Diara Kante was succeeded by his son Sumanguru Kante, who took up both his crown and his sword.15

In the next century, Sumanguru would prove to be a fierce opponent both of the slave trade and of Islam, foreshadowing, in his fears, the coming threats to Africa’s own ways.

* Medieval African history is complicated by the multiple identities that any one African could claim. For the purposes of this narrative, I will use “people” to refer to a linguistic group (the Zaghawa people all spoke the same Saharan language; this is sometimes called “ethnicity” and sometimes “tribal identity”); “tribe” for a group united, however loosely, by blood relationships; “clan” for an individual family group; and “kingdom” for a political unit. A citizen of the Kanem kingdom might belong to either the Zaghawa or the Sao linguistic group, as well as having a separate tribal and clan identity. In African history, the term “tribe” is particularly difficult to define; it is used by different scholars to indicate blood relationship, political unity, linguistic unity, etc. In this history, it will always imply blood ties.

* Benin’s early history is impossible to date with precision. Most reconstructions are based solely on the work of the Benin historian Jacob Egharevba, who collected the oral traditions and put them down in writing in the twentieth century—long, long after the fact. Stefan Eisenhofer provides a useful overview and discussion in “The Benin Kinglist/s: Some Questions of Chronology,” History of Africa 24 (1997): 139–156.

Chapter Fifteen

The Last Fatimid Caliph

Between 1149 and 1171,

Nur ad-Din captures Egypt,

but Saladin rules it

THE HOLY WAR was failing, but the jihad was gathering strength.

With most of Antioch’s territory in his hands, and the Crusaders out of his way, Nur ad-Din rode onwards to the coast and bathed himself in the Mediterranean. It was a symbolic baptism, first carried out by the Assyrian conqueror Sargon centuries before, meant to show that his dominance—now, the dominance of Islam—covered the entire land of Syria, all the way to the sea.1

In fact, he didn’t control all of Syria; the city of Antioch itself was still free of his control, as were both Damascus and Jerusalem. But Nur ad-Din was now, in the eyes of his coreligionists, the flowering of his father’s goal: the head of the jihad, the hope for the future of Islam’s unity, the narrow wedge that would bring the Prophet’s hope to the world. He was Champion of the Faith, his followers boasted: the Pillar of Islam, the Vanquisher of the Rebels.2

15.1 The Conquests of Nur ad-Din

A few Muslims disagreed; Damascus remained aloof until 1154, when Nur ad-Din’s father-in-law was five years dead. Nur ad-Din’s brother-in-law was unable to hold the city against him. Finally annexing Damascus, Nur ad-Din held all of the land across the coast; his domain stretched from Edessa to the south of Syria.*

But the Kingdom of Jerusalem resisted.

The weak child who had succeeded Fulk of Anjou was now twenty-four: Baldwin III of Jerusalem, Matilda’s half brother, clung to his place in the land where he had been born. His French father was long dead, his mother herself a foreigner by blood but a native by birth. He was defending the only world he had ever known; Nur ad-Din was trying to find a better one.

A series of misfortunes kept Nur ad-Din from throwing all of his strength against Jerusalem. The contemporary historian Ibn al-Qalanisi tells us that “continuous earthquakes and shocks” troubled Syria, destroying castles, citadels, and dwellings; Nur ad-Din, now transformed from a warrior to the ruler of a state, was obliged to put most of his energies into rebuilding and providing “solace to those . . . who had escaped with their lives.”3 And then, in 1157, Nur ad-Din suddenly became ill. He was so sick that he divided his kingdom between his brothers and prepared to die.

Baldwin III took advantage of the lull to negotiate an alliance with the Byzantine emperor, Manuel I Comnenus; he sealed the alliance by marrying Manuel’s thirteen-year-old niece. Meanwhile, Nur ad-Din unexpectedly recovered, but remained weak. Uncertain of his future, he suspended hostilities to perform the sacred pilgrimage to Mecca; and, rather than face the combined armies of Jerusalem and Constantinople, he decided to negotiate a truce of his own with Manuel.

But despite his weakness, he outlived Baldwin III. Late in 1162, Baldwin too was struck with sudden illness. William of Tyre is certain that he was poisoned by a court enemy; whatever the cause, he was “seized with a fever and dysentery” and lingered for several months, fading in strength.4 He died in February of 1163, childless, and his younger brother Amalric became king of Jerusalem.

Nur ad-Din declined to use the occasion to his advantage. “When it was suggested to Nur ad-Din,” writes William of Tyre, “that while we were occupied with the funeral ceremonies he might invade and lay waste the land of his enemies, he is said to have responded, ‘We should sympathize with their grief and in pity spare them.’ ” Nur ad-Din’s illness had changed him; the ruthlessness that had terrified his own men had faded.

Amalric I, now king of Jerusalem at the age of twenty-seven, immediately took steps to increase his own power. The alliance with Manuel I of Constantinople guaranteed him support to the north. To the east, Nur ad-Din was too strong for attack. The Mediterranean lay on the west. The only direction in which he could expand was south; and so he fixed his eyes on Egypt.

Crusaders had contemplated the conquest of Egypt for years; in fact, Baldwin III himself had made an expedition down to al-Arish, on the eastern edge of the Fatimid domain, and had returned to Jerusalem only when the Fatimids offered to pay him a yearly tribute. Amalric, claiming that the Fatimids had failed to pay up, assembled an attack force that would proceed south both by land and by sea. To bolster his navy, he recruited ten war galleys from the Pisans. In exchange, he gave Pisan merchants an outpost in Jerusalem: land of their own just above the harbor of Tyre.6

In the face of the coming assault, the Fatimids sent north to Nur ad-Din, asking for reinforcements.

This began a merry-go-round of alliances that brought to mind the elastic allegiances that had followed the First Crusade. Nur ad-Din, not anxious to get involved in a long war in North Africa but unwilling to see Egypt go to his enemy, sent troops to support the Fatimid vizier Shawar (the vizier, not the teenaged caliph, held the real power in the Fatimid government). Amalric’s invasion was driven back; and Egypt remained Fatimid.*

But the Fatimid vizier Shawar soon found that he had invited serpents into his garden. The captain of Nur ad-Din’s Turkish troops was a lifelong Kurdish officer named Shirkuh; he had served under Nur ad-Din’s father Zengi as well, and now he saw the chance to better himself. “By his deeds and possibly by his words,” William of Tyre writes, “he showed that he intended, if fortune favored him, to bring . . . that kingdom under his own power.”7

Realizing that Shirkuh’s ambitions were a greater threat than the Crusader armies, Shawar reversed himself and sent an embassy to Amalric I, offering alliance and tribute payments if the Jerusalem armies would return to Egypt and help him fight against the Turks. Amalric, who had just returned to Jerusalem, about-faced with even greater alacrity and headed back down to Egypt; and together, the Muslim Fatimids and the Christians of Jerusalem drove Shirkuh out.

The victory gave Jerusalem control over a spit of land reaching down to the point of the Red Sea. But Shirkuh, returning to Nur ad-Din’s side, did not give up hope. “After his return from Egypt he continued to talk about the project of invading it,” says the Chronicle of Ibn al-Athir. “He was extremely eager to do this.” In late 1166, nearly three years after leaving Egypt, Shirkuh returned, with Nur ad-Din’s reluctant blessing, a full complement of Turkish troops, and his nephew Saladin to serve as his second-in-command.8

Amalric and Shawar met Shirkuh in the Nile valley in March of 1167 and were defeated. Shirkuh took Alexandria and put Saladin in control of it; the Franks and Fatimids besieged the city, but Saladin held it. Finally, a joint embassy of Crusaders and Muslims proposed a cease-fire. They handed over a fair amount of cash, and in exchange, the Turkish invasion halted at Alexandria—for a time.

Amalric went back to Jerusalem, where he once again juggled his alliances. His experiences in Egypt had made it clear that he would never take Egypt without substantial help; and so he proposed to Manuel I that the armies of Jerusalem and Byzantium join together, march on Egypt, and drive out both Fatimids and Turks.*

The joint invasion, like Amalric’s first two, was a disaster; and yet more fault lines appeared in the Muslim and Christian coalitions. The Byzantine-Crusader forces captured the eastern Egyptian city of Tanis in late 1168, but massive Turkish reinforcements arrived from Nur ad-Din, and the Fatimid leadership was divided. Part of the army supported Shawar in his fight against the Christians while others joined with the Christians to fight against the Turks.9 The combined Christian army was forced to retreat.

Now Shawar had two problems to deal with: the inevitable return of the Christian army, and all the Turks who were occupying Egypt. He was popular with no one. His initial alliance with Jerusalem had angered many of the Egyptians, particularly those in Cairo, and his resistance to Shirkuh—now camped just outside of Fustat, on the outskirts of Cairo—had turned him into Nur ad-Din’s enemy. He contemplated inviting Shirkuh and his officers to a banquet, arresting them, and then recruiting their troops for himself, but his son threatened to tell Shirkuh of the plan unless he abandoned it: “That we should be killed as Muslims when the land is held by Islam,” he said, according to Ibn al-Athir, “is better than that we should be killed after the Franks have taken it; for it would only take their hearing that Shirkuh had been arrested to see the Franks’ return.”10

So Shawar held his peace. On January 18, 1169, he rode to Shirkuh’s camp to discuss the future. On the way, he was met by Saladin and a small party of soldiers, who detoured him to the grave of the great ninth-century lawmaker Imam al-Shafi’i and murdered him.11

This left Shirkuh in control of Egypt. He paid nominal homage to the Fatimid caliph Al-Adid, now barely twenty and completely powerless in affairs of state, but for all practical purposes Shirkuh had added Egypt to Nur ad-Din’s empire.

Two months later, Shirkuh died after overeating fat meat at a banquet; his move from soldier to ruler had happened at the very last moment of his life. His nephew Saladin took his place as administrator of Egypt.

Seven months later, the Crusader-Byzantine army returned to lay siege to the port city of Damietta, 120 miles north of Cairo.

The siege was the last pathetic move in a doomed campaign. The Byzantine ships dispatched to support the Crusader land force were underprovisioned, already running low when they arrived, and the Jerusalem army refused to share any of its food. Meanwhile, Saladin had no difficulty resupplying Damietta by sea with money, weapons, and stores. He spent, says Ibn al-Athir, “untold sums of money” on Damietta, knowing that if the city fell, the Christians would have a foothold that he might never undo. Rain soaked the Crusader tents for weeks on end; the Byzantine generals quarreled with the Jerusalem commanders over strategy; a score of the anchored Byzantine vessels were destroyed when the Egyptians sent a fireship into their midst. “The feeling was almost unanimous,” writes William of Tyre, “that our toil was being wasted.” After fifty days, the Christians gave up and went home, blaming one another for the loss.12 Once again, crusade had failed.

By 1171, Nur ad-Din felt secure enough in his grasp of Egypt to order that the young caliph’s name be dropped from public prayers; this was equivalent to announcing the overthrow of the Fatimid dynasty. Saladin, whose job it was to enforce this decree, feared public protest. He stalled, argued, and waited. Just as Nur ad-Din was growing angry with him, the caliph fell ill (by all accounts, of natural causes). As he sickened, Saladin sent out letters ordering the change.

No one in the young caliph’s family told him of his de facto deposition. “ They said, ‘If he recovers, then he will get to know,’ ” writes Ibn al-Athir, “‘but if he is to die, it is not right to distress him with this turn of events before he does.’ He died on the day of ‘Ashura [September 13, 1171], still unaware.”13

The Fatimid caliphate, which had ruled in North Africa since 909, was done; and although Nur ad-Din now claimed Egypt, Saladin was its true ruler. In the next years, the common cause that was supposed to unite them would prove even more fragile than the unity of faith between the Crusader kingdoms and Constantinople.

*In 1159, the Byzantine emperor Manuel I took control of the remmants of Antioch.

*This is a deliberate simplification of a much more complicated set of circumstances that also involved an internal struggle between Shawar and a rival for the viziership, Dirgham. The end result was the same: the Crusaders retreated, and Shawar found himself dealing with Shirkuh’s ambitions instead of Dirgham’s.

*Manuel may have proposed the expedition first, but William of Tyre believed that Amalric originated the idea; it is impossible to know for sure.

Chapter Sixteen

Monks and Brahmans

Between 1150 and 1189,

the king of Sri Lanka takes control of both his island and its monasteries,

and a Hindu prophet tries to bring new power to the people

JUST OFF THE SOUTHERN TIP of the Indian subcontinent, a Buddhist hero was crowned king.

A century earlier, the island of Sri Lanka had been dominated by the empire of the Chola: the greatest southern Indian empire that had ever existed, a rich kingdom that stretched east all the way to the islands of Java and Sumatra and north as far as the Narmada river. The Chola king was a devotee of the Hindu god Shiva; temples to Shiva and lingams—seamless pillars with no features, representing the all-encompassing, transcendent essence of Shiva—dotted the massive expanses of Chola land.

That land had reached its greatest extent in the late eleventh century. And then, bits of it had begun to flake away. Off the southern coast, a rebel named Vijaya Bahu had declared himself king of the entire island; Chola troops, crossing the water, managed to retake the north, but Vijaya Bahu held on to the south until his death.

His sons and grandsons ruled after him, but the island remained splintered even after the Chola abandoned their claim. The ancient chronicle of Sri Lanka’s kings, The Mahavansa, laments that Vijaya Bahu’s descendants “divided the land among themselves and possessed it in portions.” The largest Sri Lankan kingdom was centered at Vijaya Bahu’s own capital city, Polonnaruwa; other royal cousins ruled in the Southern Country and in the smaller realm of Ruhuna.1

Around the middle of the century, a nephew of the ruling sovereign of Ruhuna began to grow restless. His name was Parakrama Bahu; he was also nephew to the Southern Country sovereign, and cousin of the king in Polonnaruwa. He could expect, eventually, to inherit one of these territories. But The Mahavansa tells us that Parakrama was more ambitious than this; the thought of ruling over a single principality made him restless, and he hoped “to make the whole island graceful by bringing it under the canopy of one dominion.”2

16.1 The Island of Sri Lanka

He intrigued with one uncle, fought against the other, and convinced his cousin to make him heir. By 1153, he had gained the crowns of all three kingdoms, and for the first time in centuries Sri Lanka was united under a single ruler.

In over thirty years of reign, Parakrama managed to combine carefully targeted practical renovations with canny religious reform. He lowered taxes (a highly popular move) and channeled the remaining revenues into cleaning up and restoring the irrigation systems that made Sri Lanka fertile. (“In a country like this,” he is said to have remarked to his ministers, “not even the smallest bit of rain ought to be allowed to flow into the ocean without profiting man.”) Canals and causeways that had fallen into disrepair were cleaned out and rebricked. He ordered a small reservoir on the outskirts of the city enlarged and combined with other storage tanks, creating a massive new reservoir that became known as the Sea of Parakrama, and on an artificial island in its center he built a beautiful three-story palace that overlooked the new waters. Near the northern town of Mannar, he had an even larger reservoir built: the Giant’s Tank, an engineering feat that produced a massive artificial lake with completely man-made embankments on a sloping plain. The Giant’s Tank turned the dry, salty north of the island into an area so fertile that it is still known today as the Rice Bowl.3

16.1 The Giant’s Tank.

Credit: © 2009 Dhammika Heenpella / Images of Sri Lanka

None of this work was cheap, but the resulting crops balanced out the expense:

He drained great marshes and bogs, and made the water discharge itself into rivers, and formed paddy fields, and gathered together a store of grain. . . . Thus did this wise ruler make the revenue that was obtained from the new paddy fields alone to be greater than the revenue which had been derived from the old paddy fields in the [entire] kingdom; and when he had accomplished this he made the country so prosperous that the inhabitants should never know the evils of famine.4

The sequel to The Mahavansa credits Parakrama Bahu with building (or rebuilding) 165 dams, nearly 4,000 canals, and nearly 2,500 reservoirs.5

His religious reforms were equally energetic.

Parakrama’s ancestor Vijaya Bahu, driving away the Hindu occupiers, had ruled his new kingdom as a Buddhist king. In the century since, Buddhist temples and monasteries had risen to replace the Shiva shrines. The most magnificent of these temples was the home of the Buddha’s Tooth; the tooth, said to be one of the seven unburned relics that survived the Buddha’s cremation, had been brought to the island in the fourth century and been kept safe from the Hindu regime. Parakrama himself had fought for the Buddha’s Tooth, taking it away from a rival ruler in his battle to unify the island and enshrining it in his capital city.6

But the Buddhism of the island was still interlaced with Hindu practice, and its monks and priests were divided and quarreling. Three nikayas, or monastic orders, struggled for dominance in the capital. They feuded over the rules of monasticism, the interpretation of Buddhist scriptures, and control of the temples. Parakrama’s kingdom had barely begun its existence as a single nation, and for the monks, who were the heart of the country’s religious practice, to remain divided into three parts would only serve to drive wedges into the barely joined fractures between the old three nations.

Seeking help, Parakrama Bahu turned to Mahakassapa, the senior monk at a nearby forest monastery. Forest monasteries had a character different from that of city or village monasteries; the monks tended to be more austere, less interested in political wrangling, stricter in practice. Forest monasteries were places of quiet meditation, not loud conflict; in the forest, removed from the centers of power, the monks were thought to gain a detachment and clarity that was missing from the bustling, wealthy monasteries of the cities.7

In 1165, acting on Mahakassapa’s advice, Parakrama Bahu summoned the leaders of all three nikayas to a council. There he declared that as king—his sacred right to rule proven by his victories over his enemies and by his protection of the Buddha’s Tooth—he would abolish all three monastic orders. Instead, there would be only two kinds of monks: gamavasin and arannavasin, village dwellers and forest dwellers. To prevent quarreling, he himself would act as head of the practice of Buddhism in his country. The monks would no longer debate the final interpretation of scriptures; instead, he himself, with Mahakassapa as his advisor, would decide on the correct ways of understanding the canonical laws. Together they would produce an official katikavata, a royal lawbook laying out exactly how Buddhism should be practiced; and this would have the same force as divine law.8

This marked an enormous departure from the past. Buddhist monarchs had always acted as the protectors and patrons of Buddhist monasteries, giving them grants of land and wealth, looking out for their survival. In Buddhist tradition, the monarch was both cakravartin (the king through whom dharma, all that is good and right, will spread across the universe) and bodhisattva (a manifestation of the Buddha himself, an enlightened one who had chosen to remain in the world in order to bring it salvation).

But Parakrama Bahu now claimed a much more pragmatic right. He removed many of the monks from the monasteries altogether and declared them laypeople. Then he ordered all ordinations to the Buddhist priesthood to take place in the capital city; that way, he could supervise them, and block any too-ambitious candidates from even entering the monasteries. And he himself would regulate their behavior.9

Divided and leaderless, the monastic orders could not resist the whirlwind reforms. Within the decade, Buddhist monasticism had been transformed into a powerful attractant force, inclined to pull the country together rather than throw it apart. And the practice of Buddhism itself had been made part of the framework of the new state: transformed, by its royal supervisor, into a secular force.

WHILE SRI LANKA coalesced into a single nation, the Chola empire was falling apart. For at least a thousand years, India had been a land of many minor kingdoms; for at least a thousand years, attempts to corral them into one fold had yielded temporary, illusory unity, followed by disintegration.

The enormous Chola realm of the twelfth century had been bordered, on the north and the east, by two related dynasties known as the Chalukya. The Eastern Chalukya had been conquered and forced into the empire two centuries before; their cousins, the Western Chalukya had been persuaded and bribed into alliance. But right around the time of Vijaya Bahu’s rebellion, the younger brother of the Western Chalukya king attacked his older sibling and took away his throne by force. Immediately, he broke the tradition of alliance and began to fight against the Chola instead.

A hundred years of warfare followed, and the constant drain of men and money opened gaps in the walls of both empires. A handful of vassals made successful bids for independence: the Hoysala and Seuna, Kakatiya and Kalachuri, all fighting for control of their own lands.

In 1157, the Kalachuri king Bijjala II scored a great victory, capturing the Western Chalukya capital Kalyani and forcing the Western Chalukya king himself to flee. Like Parakrama Bahu to the south, Bijjala II now governed a fragmented kingdom that encompassed more than one previous kingdom. Unlike Parakrama, he was unable to use religion to build a fence around it.

Not long after the conquest of Kalyani, Bijjala II’s trusted prime minister Baladeva died. Following the minister’s own dying recommendation, Bijjala II recruited Baladeva’s nephew as the new prime minister over the freshly expanded kingdom. This nephew, still only in his midtwenties, had already gained a reputation for both piety and intelligence. His name was Basava, and after considering the pros and cons of the appointment for some time, he decided to accept it and moved to Kalyani.10

Bijjala had no idea that he had recruited a zealot. According to Basava’s later biography, the Basava purano, Basava took the position only because it would give him the power to spread his own particular message. He was a devotee of Shiva; and not just a devotee, but a fanatic. To Basava, Shiva was the only deity, sustaining all the world, equally present with and gracious to all men and women. He had gathered around him a sect of like-minded worshippers, all of whom wore a tiny lingam suspended from a cord around their necks or left arms. Nicknamed lingayats, lingam wearers, these disciples devoted themselves to finding a greater love for God; for them, all of their labor in the world was worship of Shiva, who had created the material world and was honored by their work within it. As one follower wrote,

16.2 The Disintegration of the Chola

Let it be only a kare leaf,

If it come from dedicated work,

Is worthy to be offered to Linga . . .

For, as work is worship,

God is present in the work which we perform.11

Simple though it was, the philosophy of the lingayats clashed dangerously with the political realities of twelfth-century India.

Like the Buddhist monasteries of Sri Lanka, the Hindu temples of central India were supported by royal grants of cash and tax-free farmland. The Brahman priests who served in them accepted the king’s money and land; in return, they supported the king’s policies. They held themselves apart in their own caste, marrying within their own kind and keeping their priestly lands inside their own class. But the Brahmans were powerful not only through wealth but also through the temple service itself. They presided over a system of Hindu worship that was complicated and inflexible, and yet was the only way to reach the divine presence. Without Brahman guidance, the Hindu worshipper was lost.12

But the philosophy of Basava and the other lingayats did away with the Brahmans. For them, each worshipper came to Shiva alone, on his own terms, in a personal encounter that was inward and mysterious and needed no temples, no sacrifices, and no Brahmans. The only service Shiva required was dedicated manual labor—the very activity that Brahmans, by law, were to shun. Even more worrying, lingayatism did away with all sorts of other barriers and divisions within Hindu society. Women and men were equally welcome. In the worship of Shiva, there was no class privilege or shame. The lowest ranks of Indian society—those who worked with their hands—were honored rather than shunned. Lingayatism spread rapidly through Bijjala’s kingdom; and it threatened both the Brahman monopoly and the royal authority that the Brahmans spent their lives shoring up.13

Basava short-circuited his own success by getting reckless with the king’s treasury. He spent a good deal of Bijjala’s money on feeding, supporting, and entertaining his fellow lingayats. Around 1167, Bijjala II became aware of the theft. He retaliated by blinding two of the most prominent lingayats, an indirect and unproductive punishment that ultimately killed both the king and his minister. There are at least four different versions of what happened next, but it seems that Bijjala was assassinated by one (or more) indignant lingayats; Basava fled, but Bijjala’s son and successor, Someshvara, sent troops to pursue him. Basava was captured and executed (or, possibly, died accidentally while on the run).

The sect, however, survived. Its disciples became known as Virasaivas, and for centuries Virasaivas would challenge the traditional castes and classes of Hinduism.

RELIGIOUS REFORM NOTWITHSTANDING, neither kingdom lasted for long.

In 1186, Parakrama Bahu died after thirty-three gloriously successful years. A string of successors to his throne were, in fairly short order, assassinated, imprisoned, blinded, and exiled; the careful unity Parakrama had constructed fell apart again, and the island lay open to occupation and conquest once more.14

Bijjala’s sons Someshvara and Sankama, ruling his kingdom one after the other, kept their father’s dominion together a little longer. But after Sankama’s death, in 1181, two more young sons of Bijjala rose to the throne; and slowly, their inexperience weakened the country beyond repair. The Western Chalukya king Somesvara IV recaptured the old capital of Kalanyi, and the Kalachuri kingdom was reabsorbed into the Western Chalukya; but its days too were numbered. In 1187, Somesvara IV was killed in battle against the former vassal kingom of the Hoysala, and within two years the Seuna and Hoysala and Kakatiya had divided the corpse of the old Chalukya dominon among themselves.15

Chapter Seventeen

Conquest of the Willing

Between 1150 and 1202,

the Hindu dynasty of the Sena overthrows the Buddhist kingdom of the

Palas and, in its zeal, accidentally opens the door to Islam

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE CENTURY, a subject prince in northeastern India named Vijay Sen finished throwing off the restraints of his masters.*

This was nothing new. For at least a thousand years, the kingdoms of the subcontinent had preserved a family likeness in the manner of their rising and falling. A warrior would conquer himself a kingdom by beating the nearby clan leaders into submission; he would found a dynasty, and his sons and grandsons would rule the stitched-together realm by continually persuading, bribing, and bashing the restless chiefs under them to fall back into line. The kingdom would expand; the king would hand over more and more governing power to his deputies in the far-flung areas of his land; and, inevitably, one of those deputies would rebel against his distant overlord and conquer himself a kingdom by beating the nearby clan leaders into submission.

As often as not, the new dynasty was a cousin of the old; and so sharp lines of distinction between them are hard to draw. More often than not, the new kingdom shared its language, its customs, its religion, and its stories with its predecessor. But Vijay Sen gave the ancient pattern a tweak.

His overlord was Ramapala, king of the Pala empire. The Palas had ruled in the eastern Ganges delta (an area often given the geographical name of “Bengal”) since the eighth century. Tradition held that the dynasty’s founder, Gopala, had been elected by his fellow commoners to bring peace and justice to the delta; it had been, says an inscription commemorating Gopala’s reign, a state ruled only by “the Law of the Fishes,” with the large and powerful devouring the weak in a sea of chaos.1

Gopala was a devout Buddhist and spent a good part of his twenty-five-year rule building temples and establishing religious schools to guide his people into the right path. The Buddhism of the Palas was wide and flexible. Like the classical Buddhism of earlier centuries, it taught that all physical things are transient, and that only enlightenment could reveal the physical world as the unreal and passing thing it is.* But the Palas also followed teachings and practices from several different strands of Buddhist thought, made use of sacred scriptures written in many different languages, and drew rituals from Hinduism into the circle of their Buddhist orthodoxy.2

17.1 The Ghurid Advance

Although the Pala kings who followed Gopala were more often Hindu than Buddhist, their Hinduism was as flexible as Gopala’s Buddhism. They continued to build Buddhist temples and to give lavish gifts of land and money to Buddhist monasteries. Monks came from China, from the far southern island of Sri Lanka, and from the mountain kingdom of Nepal to study in the Pala realm. The Odantapuri monastery, built under the patronage of Gopala and his son, had a thousand regular residents; according to a later sixteenth-century historian, as many as twelve thousand monks might gather there for special occasions.3 The Pala realm became an oasis for Indian Buddhism, which over the last centuries had been losing ground to traditional Hinduism.*

Vijay Sen did not take after his Pala overlords. His grandfather was a stern Hindu warrior from the south who had moved into the delta to live out his declining years; his father had claimed the right to rule a small patch of land around the old man’s settling place. Vijay Sen himself was a devotee of the gods Shiva and Vishnu, rigidly devoted to the practices and rituals of his Hindu upbringing. In his eyes, Buddhism was an aberration.

He began his career of conquest early in the twelfth century, still a very young man, using his father’s estate as his base of operations. At first, he maintained a façade of loyalty to his king, conquering the local chieftains in the name of Pala domination. But when his overlord Ramapala died in 1120, he abandoned this fiction. Ramapala, a competent administrator and experienced warrior, had ruled for forty-three years; his successors were weak and ineffective, and lost more and more of their territory to Vijay Sen.

By the late 1140s, Vijay Sen was in his early sixties. He had spent his entire life at war, and he could claim the rule of a realm that spread across the delta. His son Ballal Sen was his heir, his grandson Lakshman Sen one of his chief generals. In 1150, Lakshman Sen led his grandfather’s army in an attack against the Pala capital city of Gaur, and against the Pala king himself.

The Sena army overran the city, and the king, Madanapala, fled north into the territory known as Bihar. In exile, he continued to call himself the king of Gaur and to claim rule over the old Pala territory. But most of it now lay in Sena hands.4

The triumphant Vijay Sen celebrated by building the great temple of Pradyumnesvara and celebrating the ancient Hindu ritual of the Great Gift within it. The Great Gift ceremony was a modified form of an ancient kingly ritual, in which Hindu priests—Brahmans—would consecrate a horse and set it free to wander for a year. At the end of that time, the king would kill the horse with his own hands, and his queen would lie down under a golden blanket with the corpse and act out sexual congress. The strength of the sacred horse and the king were one, both passing into the queen so that her sons would also be filled with divine strength.5

By the twelfth century, only the symbolism of this startling ritual remained; Vijay Sen simply gave away a golden horse and chariot, with appropriate prayers and rituals. He also gifted his Brahmans with tracts of land. It was much less dramatic than the horse sacrifice (and less entertaining for onlookers), but the meaning was the same. As a Hindu king, ruling over a land that he now declared to be a Hindu realm, Vijay Sen stood in the gap between heaven and earth, and the kingly rituals over which he presided brought the divine into the world of men. “He was never tired of offering sacrifices,” explains one of his inscriptions, “and through his power Dharma [the rightful cosmic order], though she had become one-legged in the course of time, could move about on the earth.”6

This was not the malleable world of the Palas. It was a world of hierarchy, in which Vijay Sen as king stood in the central and most important place; below him, his Brahmans, his priests; below them, aristocratic warriors and landowners; and under their control, peasants who farmed the land.

This arrangement of classes, or “castes,” was not as inflexible as later Western writers would make out.* Far from dividing society tidily into four classes, caste groupings had scores of subdivisions and minor groups, and the lines between them were often fuzzy; for example, Hindu scriptures forbade Brahmans to use the plow, so priests who were given royal gifts of land became, out of necessity, landowners who controlled peasant farmers (who did the actual work). There was also a certain amount of movement between castes. A local leader could be ritually “upgraded” by his king into a higher caste, increasing his authority; new castes could emerge (as had the kayasthas several centuries earlier, a class of professional scribes who gained almost as much power as the priests).7

But flexible though it was, the caste system gave both Vijay Sen and his heir Ballal Sen, who inherited the throne of the new Sena kingdom in 1158, a way to keep order; and both paid marked attention to the privileges and duties of each class. Marriage between the classes was carefully regulated, to the benefit of the crown; Ballal Sen, who composed several treatises on the subject, passed a law allowing Brahmans, natural allies of the throne, to marry more than once, thus inflating the number of Brahman babies.

The Palas had paid no attention to caste whatsoever; the change was a jarring one for the people of Bengal, as was Vijay Sen’s abrupt halting of all royal patronage of Buddhism. His disdain for the Pala religion, and his son’s strict monitoring of caste, turned the Sena kingdom into a tinderbox of resentment.

When a new army came into view on the western horizon, a spark fell into the fuel.

MORE THAN A CENTURY EARLIER, the Muslim kingdom of the Ghaznavid Turks, founded on the east edge of what we now think of as Middle Eastern land, had pushed its way through the Khyber Pass into India; the Ghaznavids had then lost hold of their Middle Eastern territories, becoming simply a north Indian kingdom. In 1150, the Ghaznavid kingdom was in the hands of Bahram Shah, at the end of a particularly splendiferous thirty-five-year reign. Bahram Shah was a vassal of the Turkish sultan of Khorasan, Ahmed Sanjar, at that time the senior member of the clan (the “Great Seljuk”). Bahram was a patron of poets, mathematicians, and philosophers. At his court, a visitor might find the poet Firdausi, originally from Khorasan, busy composing his epic history called the Shahnameh (now considered the national epic of Iran), or the astronomer Al Biruni, hard at work on one of his 146 books on science and mathematics.

But all was not well on the Ghaznavid borders. The control of the Great Seljuk over his lands was weakening; his superiority over the other Turkish sultans had long been in name rather than in fact. Another of the Great Seljuk’s vassals, a clan known as the Ghurids, was agitating for freedom.

The Ghurids lay on Bahram Shah’s western flank; he feared them as much as the Great Seljuk did. He had attempted to stave off an attack by marrying his daughter to one of the members of the ruling family of Ghur but when intelligence reached him that his son-in-law was planning an attack, Bahram Shah had him poisoned.

Instead of heading off hostilites, the murder ignited them. The dead man’s brother, ‘Ala’ al-Din Husain, took revenge by leading an army into Bahram Shah’s territory. The Ghaznavid army tried to face the Ghurid clan down with a vast front of elephants, but Husain and his men triumphed. The Tabakat-i-Nasiri, written by the Persian historian Minhaj Siraj Juzjani, tells of Husain’s rallying of his warriors, tasking each with the job of bringing one elephant to the ground. “Each of those champions attacked an elephant,” Juzjani writes, “and got beneath the armour of the animals, and with their poniards [daggers], ripped open the bellies of the elephants.” At least one champion was crushed beneath his falling prey, but the Ghurid infantry advanced behind this offensive, protected by the karwah, a mobile breastwork made of bull hide and coarse cotton cloth. “When the foot-soldiers of Ghur place this screen upon their shoulders,” says the Tabakat-i-Nasiri, “they are completely covered from head to foot by it . . . like a wall; and no missile or arms can take any effect on it, on account of the quantity of cotton with which it is stuffed.”8

Pushing steadily forward, the Ghurid front chased the retreating Ghaznavid army all the way back to Bahram Shah’s capital city. For seven days, Husain and his army sacked, burned, stole, and destroyed. As a final touch, Husain had the bodies of the previous Ghanznavid rulers dug out of their tombs and burned in the streets. The raid earned him the title of Jahan-Suz, World-Burner.9

Husain had never intended to conquer Ghaznavid land, and with his feelings relieved, he returned home. But Bahram Shah never recovered from the attack. He died in 1152, a little more than a year later.

The Ghurids did not launch a second campaign until after Husain’s death in 1163. Under another member of the clan, Ghiyas ad-Din Ghuri, they made their first move in the opposite direction, towards Khorasan. With the help of his brother Muhammad, Ghiyas spent over a decade expanding his borders west of the Himalayas, freeing himself from the domination of the Great Seljuk and systematically taking away the land that had once belonged to his overlord.

Finally, in 1175, the Ghurids began an eleven-year push into the north Indian lands of the Ghaznavids, led by Muhammad in the name of his brother Ghiyas. The Ghaznavid sultan Khusrau Malik, grandson of Bahram Shah, was forced back, year by grim year, until his kingdom had shrunk to a tiny patch of land around the city of Lahore. Muhammad, says the Tabakat-i-Nasiri, “used to advance every year from Ghazni” with his Ghurid army, “and to possess himself of portions of Hind and Sind, until in the year 577 A.H. [AD 1181] . . . he appeared before the gate of Lahore, and extorted a son and an elephant from Khusrau Malik, and then retired. Thus matters went on until the year 583 A.H. [AD 1187], when he brought an army against Lahore and reduced it.” Khusrau Malik was executed, as was his son and heir; and the Ghaznavid kingdom came to a final end.10

The Ghurids had defeated the Muslim enemy, but there was no reason for the sultan Ghiyas and his brother Muhammad to give up the conquest of India. With Lahore reduced to rubble, they turned their men towards the Hindu kings farther east.

The center of northern India was home to a cluster of warrior clans, each ruling its own small kingdom: the Rajputs, “sons of kings.” The Rajput rulers had invented wonderful myths for themselves, claiming to have been created from a cauldron of fire, in ancient times, to replace a warrior race that had grown corrupt and evil; the truth was that they had grown up from the remnants of empires overthrown by the Ghaznavids themselves, on their first advance into India 150 years before. The four most powerful of the Rajputs were the Parihars, Ponwars, Solankis, and Chauhans, and the Chauhan ruler Prithvi Raj stood directly in the Ghurid path.11

In his first foray against the Chauhan king, in 1191, Ghiyas ad-Din Ghuri was badly defeated and fled. Prithvi Raj, encouraged by the ease of his victory, did not shore up his defenses; his army, reinforced by his Rajput allies, was numbered at 300,000 horsemen and 3,000 elephants, twice the size of the Ghurid force, and he was unworried. But when Ghiyas returned a year later, the outnumbered Ghurids—meeting the Rajputs in the Second Battle of Tarain—outmaneuvered and outfought the Hindu defenders. Prithvi Raj was taken captive and executed.

The Hindu chroniclers blamed Muslim ferocity for the victory; the Islamic historians suggested that the rivalry between Rajput kingdoms led the combined army to fight with weakened intensity. The credit probably goes to the well-trained Ghurid horsemen, who overwhelmed the poorly armed, sketchily prepared Chauhan foot soldiers, drafted from the peasant ranks to pad out the defense. But with the Chauhan army scattered, the Rajput kingdoms had lost their strongest defense. One by one, they began to fall. The Ghurids took Delhi in 1193; a Hindu king would not rule there again for four hundred years. In 1199, a Ghurid army reached Bihar, where the last Pala king still clung to the illusion of his power, and destroyed even the last remnants of Pala power.12

In 1202, the Ghurid front reached the empire of the Sena.

Lakshman Sen, son of Ballal and grandson of Vijay Sen, had finally been crowned king, in 1179 at the age of sixty; he had spent his life watching his vigorous grandfather and father rule the Sena kingdom. Now he faced a greater threat than any they had known.

The confrontation was an anticlimax. Lakshman Sen had inherited not just the Sena empire but the resentment of its people. Oppressed by the overregulation of caste and the slighting of the traditional Buddhist institutions, his subjects welcomed the Ghurids as their deliverers.13

The Ghurid army had not even reached the capital city of Gaur before Lakshman Sen fled. He retrenched himself in the city of Vikrampur, and—as the Pala had before him—continued to claim the name of king, even as his realm shrank away to nothing.

The Ghurids entered Gaur in triumph, claiming it for their sultan Ghiyas. They faced almost no opposition. The people of Bengal knew little of Islam, but too much of the rigid Hinduism of the Sena; they were ready to embrace the Muslim sultan, if only to rid themselves of the Hindu king.

*Vijay Sen is also written Vijayasena; his immediate successors, Ballal Sen and Lakshman Sen, are also known as Ballalsena and Lakshmanasena.

*By the fifth century, Buddhism had divided into two main schools, known as Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism. Theravada Buddhism emphasized reasoning and wisdom, downplayed the importance of rituals in favor of private meditation, and valued monasticism as the highest path; Mahayana Buddhism elevated compassion, laid great weight on the importance of ritual, and saw enlightenment as accessible to all (laypeople included). A useful introduction to the difference is found in Huston Smith and Philip Novak, Buddhism: A Concise Introduction (HarperSanFrancisco, 2003), pp. 63–73; see also Bauer, The History of the Medieval World, pp. 98ff. The Buddhism of the Palas tended towards the Theravada school but incorporated many other elements. “Classical Buddhism” is a shorthand phrase for those elements held in common by Theravada, Mahayana, and most other practitioners of Buddhism.

*“Hinduism” is a term that covers a vast range of beliefs and practices which developed over five thousand years. Most forms of Hinduism share the following beliefs: one divine essence, that can, however, be manifested in multiple ways, so that the gods and goddesses of Hindu practice are to be understood as many faces of the one divine; life as a cycle that repeats again and again; humans as two-part beings, containing both an unchanging essence of the divine (the atman) and a personality (jivatman), which is made up of experience, character, and all those things that differentiate us from one another. In Hindu practice, the actions of the jivatman produce karma: good actions and intentions produce good karma, bad choices produce bad karma. The Hindu believer strives to produce good karma by living by dharma, what is good and right. A life lived by dharma produces good karma, with the result that the believer’s reincarnation in the next cycle of life will be as a higher and better being. Ultimately, the believer hopes that, after many reincarnations, he will perfect the ability to live by dharma; as a result, he will finally be freed from his jivatman, his personality, and consist only of atman, the essence of the divine. At that point, he will become one with the divine “like the river merges into the sea”—he will lose his distinctiveness as a single person and be freed from the cycle of reincarnation. Jeaneane D. Fowler’s Hinduism: Beliefs and Practices (Sussex Academic Press, 1997) is an excellent nontechnical introduction to the basics of Hinduism and its many variations.

*“Caste” is an immensely complicated system, and the subject of too many detailed scholarly studies to list here. I have here taken the position of Bernard S. Cohn, who held that although caste has always been a essential element of Hindu culture, the British, in their attempts to understand a strange and foreign system, “reduced vastly complex codes and their associated meanings to a few metonyms.” See his Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 162. For our purposes, it is enough to note that, although Indian caste was less flexible than European socioeconomic categories, the move from peasant to landowner in the north of India was not much more difficult than, say, the move from peasant to knight in twelfth-century Germany.

Chapter Eighteen

Death of a Priest

In England, between 1154 and 1170,

Henry II establishes English criminal law,

and his archbishop is murdered

IN ENGLAND, Henry II was ruling over his barons and his people with little opposition. But the English church was a more difficult subject.

During the Anarchy, the church had gradually taken on more and more responsibility for administering justice. Like secular courts, church courts had judges, scribes, registrars, and summoners—all church officials. They had been in operation since 1072, when William the Conqueror had given the English church the right to deal internally with all matters involving either clergymen or violations of church law: in his own words, “any matter which concerns the rule of souls.” Cases tried in secular courts could be appealed to the king; if you were convicted in a church court, your last resort was the pope. The ultimate penalty in the church court was excommunication; in the secular court, death.1

“The rule of souls” was an ambiguous phrase, and by the end of the Anarchy, the church had drawn all cases involving oath breaking and sexual morality into its sphere, as well as matters of actual church administration. Even more drastic: all clergy accused of misdeeds—no matter what their crimes—were being tried in church courts, and in church courts alone. Rape and murder, punishable by the king’s courts with death, could be punished in church courts only with imprisonment.

As a result, the number of people claiming to be “clergy” ramped sharply upwards. Entrance into the service of the English church had not yet been formalized with a series of tests, oaths, and rituals. If you could read and write Latin, you could claim to be a clerk; if you shaved the top of your head (the “tonsure”), you could claim to have taken monastic vows. The claim itself instantly removed you from the king’s reach.2

Early in his reign, Henry II was twice thwarted by church courts, once when he tried to convict an archdeacon of blackmail, and again when he attempted to prosecute another archdeacon for poisoning his superior. Both men (“criminous clerks,” in Henry’s words) were acquitted by church courts.3 Henry had a low tolerance for being crossed in any situation, and as he reduced the power of the barons back within lawful limits, he found it particularly exasperating that an entire class of Englishmen lay beyond law’s reach.

To reduce the power of the church courts back within bounds, Henry needed a sympathetic Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1161, the aged archbishop Theobald of Bec (chosen by King Stephen back in 1138) died. To replace him, Henry chose a man he thought was his own: his royal chancellor, tutor of his son and heir, Thomas Becket.

Becket, then in his midforties and at the height of his political career, had not originally been educated for the church. He was the son of a merchant, but in his early twenties a family friend had procured him an interview with Theobald. The archbishop, says one contemporary account, “perceiving him to be intelligent of face, received him with favour and honour, and bade him stay on.” Despite his poor Latin and his nonexistent knowledge of canon law, Becket proved industrious, reliable, and quick. The archbishop gave him increasing responsibilities, remediated his education, and in 1154 made him the Archdeacon of Canterbury.4

Formally, the archdeacon was the oculi episcope, the eyes of the bishop; less formally, the bishop’s watchdog. The archdeacon was an efficient executive who carried out the archbishop’s decrees. It was more of a middle-management job than a priestly vocation, and it suited Becket’s efficiency. Shortly afterwards, Henry II appointed Becket to be his chancellor, another executive role; he acted as the king’s chaplain, but his primary job was that of chief clerk, overseeing the score or so of lesser clerks who drew up the king’s decrees and wrote out his charters. It was an important position; the royal chancellor kept the king’s seal, attended all his councils, and was in the king’s confidence.

But it did not require, any more than the archdeaconry, much in the way of spiritual skill or theological conviction.

By necessity, Henry II spent a great deal of time in his chancellor’s company; and he discovered that he liked Becket. The two men hunted together, ate together, drank together. Thomas, well-off for perhaps the first time in his life, copied the king’s spending habits and supplied himself with lavish meals and clothes, even keeping a couple of exotic monkeys for pets and two wolves to act as hunting dogs. Henry had every reason to think that Becket was a loyal and (more importantly) pliable servant. The king nominated him to fill the vacant position, and on May 23, a month after Theobald’s death, the required assembly of bishops and barons obediently elected Becket, and the chancellor became archbishop.5

With his elevation to the highest office of the church, Becket went through a startling and unexpected change. “As if transformed to another man,” writes one of his biographers, William of Canterbury, “he became more restrained, more watchful, more frequent in prayer, more attentive in preaching.” Although he had never taken monastic vows, he began to wear a monk’s hair shirt—a stiff, prickly, vermin-infested garment of goat hair, meant to mortify the flesh—beneath his ecclesiastical robes. He began to eat and drink sparingly, to pray late into the night, to condemn the luxury in which he had once lived: “Every day in his private cell on bended knees he would wash the feet of thirty paupers in memory of Christ,” remarks Herbert of Bosham, in awe.6

Contemporary chroniclers chalk this metamorphosis up to a road-to-Damascus experience with God, an awakening to divine call. But it is not so out of line with Becket’s previous twenty years of service. He had always been efficient, conscientious, adaptable; and his new persona was exactly suited to the archbishop’s role. To be archbishop meant to hold a loyalty higher than that of archdeacon to bishop, or of chancellor to king.

At first, the change did not strike Henry as ominous. He began to carry out his planned reforms. He announced to his bishops that he would push for clergymen convicted in church trials to be automatically stripped of their titles, making them fair game to be retried in secular court; and then he drew up a document specifying exactly how far the “rule of souls” stretched, and placed it before Becket for his approval.

This document, the Constitutions of Clarendon (after the royal palace at Clarendon where it was composed), made the king’s authority supreme. Clergymen accused of crimes would be tried in the king’s courts and, if convicted, would be punished by secular law. Bishops, in return, were to stay out of the affairs of laymen. No royal official could be excommunicated unless he had first been convicted by a secular court of wrongdoing; quarrels between clergy and laymen were to be settled by secular, not church officials; anyone appealing the decision of a church court should come to the king, not bypass him and go to the pope. The Constitutions, if made church law, would have emptied the church courts of power.7

But they could not become law without the archbishop’s seal; and Becket, knowing exactly where his new loyalties lay, refused to sign them.

Henry’s notorious temper flared. Suddenly afraid for his life, Becket fled from England in the middle of the night. He intended to appeal to the pope, but instead of traveling directly to Rome, he took shelter with Louis VII of France.

Louis, now on his third wife, was happy to disaccommodate Henry II; he provided the exiled archbishop with shelter, housing, and protection. A contentious three-way correspondence between king, archbishop, and pope was launched, and the long-distance quarrel dragged on for over five years. “I have waited for the Lord to look down on you so that you may change your ways,” Becket wrote to his king, two years into his exile. “You are the son of the Church, not its director; it becomes you to follow the priests in ecclesiastical matters, not to go before them. . . . You should humbly and speedily yield in those things which you are usurping against the divine ordinance. . . . For the Most High is drawing his bow to shoot openly at you who refuse to repent.”8

Henry, unmoved by the threat of divine retribution, refused to give way.

18.1 The Kingdoms of France and England

Reforms to the secular laws proved simpler. Two years after Becket fled the country, Henry issued another set of decrees, this time making them public at the criminal court held at Clarendon in 1166. The act, known afterwards as the Assize of Clarendon, laid out exactly how criminals were to be tried in the king’s courts: by “twelve of the more lawful men . . . upon oath that they will speak the truth.”9

This system of trial by jury was not new to England, but it had never before been the law of the land, ordered by the king and enforced by his officials. The Assize of Clarendon changed the nature of criminal acts; it transformed them from local, personal insults into offenses against the king’s peace and even the king himself. Crime was no longer a parochial affair: “If any sheriff shall send word to another sheriff that men have fled from his county into another county on account of robbery or murder or theft,” the assize says, “. . . the sheriff who is informed shall capture them . . . and keep them in custody.”10

The Assize of Clarendon became the foundation of English criminal law, and the notion at its center is the core of modern Western legislation: the peace of a realm is, in itself, an entity that can be offended; crime is not a personal, but a national, problem. It was a brilliant and nation-changing piece of legislation, pushed through by a man whose restless energy gave him flashes of insight far beyond his century.

But Henry’s insight failed him when it came to his archbishop. Increasingly, Becket’s principled refusals seemed, in the king’s eyes, like personal insults.

In 1170, after years of complicated negotiations between the two men, Henry and Becket traveled to a meadow outside the French town of Freteval, to make a final effort at compromise. This time, both men had trump cards to play. The pope had given Becket the authority to place all of England under an interdict, should Henry not allow him to return. And Becket wanted to take part in the coronation ceremony of Henry’s fifteen-year-old son, once his beloved pupil, as Henry’s co-ruler and heir.*

The two men met in the center of the meadow and talked, alone, for a long time. No one overheard their conversation, but when the conversation was finished, Henry declared that Becket could return safely to England and take up his authority again; Becket, for his part, would carry out the coronation ceremony, guaranteeing the younger Henry’s claim to the throne.

Nothing was said about the Constitutions of Clarendon. Nor was the question of ultimate authority ever raised. It was an agreement that left all of the major issues not only unresolved but apparently undiscussed. And, like most unresolved conflicts, it ended in disaster.

Becket did not return to England immediately. In his absence, his Canterbury estates had been handed over to his archdeacon, one Ranulf de Broc. Becket refused to come home until they had been restored to his ownership: “It is not in our mind to return to him as long as he has taken away a single yard of the church’s land,” he wrote to the pope.

In the meantime, Henry spoke unguardedly in front of his courtiers, leaving them in no doubt of his opinions: the agreement reached at Freteval was unsatisfactory, he still believed that the Constitutions of Clarendon should enter into English law, and Becket was still his antagonist. Reading his king accurately, Ranulf de Broc made no effort to return Becket’s Canterbury estate; instead, he sent his men to strip the lands of everything useful before Becket could return. “Before the archbishop’s men could get [possession] of the manor,” one of Becket’s biographers records, “there was nothing left on them—not an ox nor a cow, capon or hen, horse, pig, sheep or full bin of corn.”11

Finally Becket decided that he’d better take back the lands himself. He set sail for England, arriving on December 1. And almost at the moment he arrived in England, he pronounced excommunication on two of the king’s chief officials, as well as on the Archbishop of York.

This was a declaration of war. Excommunication of royal officials was expressly forbidden in the Constitutions of Clarendon; Becket was sending an unambiguous message that he was ready to take up the battle once more. When the news of the excommunications was carried to Henry II—just then, in Normandy, preparing to celebrate Christmas—he flew into one of his notorious tempers. “Such fury, bitterness, and passion took possession of the king,” wrote the contemporary chronicler William Fitz Stephen, “as his disordered look and gesture expressed, that it was immediately understood what he wanted.”12

What Henry wanted was never made explicit; no contemporary chronicler seems to have heard the famous rhetorical question “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?” But four of the most prominent men in England—“barons of his household,” writes Herbert of Bosham, who was there, “magnates of substance, notable even amongst his great friends”—left Normandy at once and headed for England. They traveled to the estates of Ranulf de Broc, the archdeacon who had ransacked Becket’s Canterbury lands (Becket had excommunicated him too), borrowed a band of armed men from him, and went to Becket’s residence at Canterbury.13

The events of the next hour were witnessed by a score of men: Becket’s household, his clerks, and the monks who were singing in the cathedral at the time. The four barons confronted Becket in his rooms and demanded that the archbishop withdraw his excommunications, acknowledge the king’s authority, and leave the country. He refused and made his way into the church to lead the service of vespers, taking up his place next to a pillar that stood between altars dedicated to the Virgin Mary and Saint Benedict.

A Cambridge clerk named Edward Grim was in the cathedral, waiting for the service to begin. He wrote, later,

Then they laid sacrilegious hands on him, pulling and dragging him that they might kill him outside the church, or carry him away a prisoner, as they afterwards confessed. But . . . he would not be forced away from the pillar. . . . Joining his hands, [he] lifted them up and commended his cause and that of the church to God. . . . Scarce had he said the words when the wicked knight [Reginald Fitz Urse, a royal relation], fearing lest the archbishop should be rescued by the people and escape alive, leapt upon him suddenly and wounded [him]. . . . Then he received a second blow on the head, but still stood firm. At the third blow he fell on his knees and elbows, offering himself a living victim, and saying in a low voice, “For the name of Jesus and the protection of the church I am ready to embrace death.” Then the third knight inflicted a terrible wound as he lay, by which the sword was broken against the pavement, and the crown, which was large, was separated from the head; so that the blood white with the brain, and the brain red with blood, dyed the surface of the virgin mother church. . . . In order that a fifth blow might not be wanting to the martyr who was in other things like to Christ, the fifth (no knight, but that clerk who had entered with the knights) put his foot on the neck of the holy priest and precious martyr, and, horrible to say, scattered his brains and blood over the pavement, calling out to the others, “Let us away, knights; he will rise no more.”14

When news of the murder was brought to the king, he shut himself in his rooms for three days, refusing to eat or speak.15

The four assassins were never punished, even though their crime was clearly condemned by Henry’s own Assize of Clarendon; and there seems to be little doubt that Henry knew of the plan and gave it his tacit approval.

Yet his involvement does not mean that his grief was false.

In the struggle between divine authority and secular power, it was not yet clear which would prove the stronger. But it was no longer possible for both to rule, side by side. The murder of Henry’s old friend was the inevitable result of the course he himself had set. Necessary though it might have been, he could grieve over the forces that made it inevitable—and over the end of a world where God and the king could coexist in peace.

*Henry II had already given the Archbishop of York permission to coronate young Henry, and the ceremony had taken place in June; Becket was offered the chance to take part in a second coronation that would supersede the first (and make very clear that Becket was still the senior churchman in the land).

Chapter Nineteen

Foreign Relations

Between 1157 and 1168,

the emperor of Byzantium expands his borders

and inadvertently sets Serbia free

IN 1157, the Great Seljuk of the Turks died, broken.

Ahmed Sanjar had begun his reign as supreme Turkish sultan with a huge realm under his hands, the largest a Muslim ruler had held since the days of the old Abbasid caliphate.* By the end of his life, he had lost the Ghurids, who were busy plundering the eastern reaches of the lands he had once ruled; he had been driven out of his lands Transoxania (east of the Oxus river) by nomadic Chinese tribes called the Western Liao; Nur ad-Din, theoretically owing him allegiance, was doing as he pleased in the Mediterranean lands. At the very end of his life, Sanjar had tried to put down a native revolt in Khorasan itself and had failed so badly that the rebels had actually taken him captive and pillaged his capital city of Merv. His greatest achievement had been to build himself a gorgeous mausoleum in the city of Merv, where he was now laid to rest.1

He was the last Great Seljuk. No one else even tried to claim that the Turkish lands were a unity. Khorasan became a no-man’s-land, and from the Oxus to the Mediterranean shore, each Turkish sultan looked out for his own interests.2

This changed the landscape for the Byzantine emperor. The First Crusade had been sparked by Constantinople’s fear of a united Turkish front. Now Manuel I was looking at a fractured landscape filled with separate powers.

Almost all of them were threats; and the most dangerous enemies were no longer Turkish.

At its height under the emperor Justinian, six hundred years earlier, Byzantium had stretched from the tip of the Spanish peninsula, across North Africa and Egypt, up the Mediterranean coast, across Asia Minor, Greece, and all of Italy. Since Justinian, it had been shrinking. At his coronation in 1143, Manuel had been crowned emperor over Greece, half of Asia Minor, and the western and southern coasts of the Black Sea. And this was an improvement; his grandfather Alexius had inherited an empire that included little more than Greece, and only ceaseless campaigning by Alexius and his son John had recovered the lands that Manuel now ruled.

In the first decade and a half of his reign, Manuel had not managed to improve his position much. He had attacked the Sultan of Rum, who lay just east of his Asia Minor lands, but had taken no land away; he had forced the princes of Antioch and Jerusalem to swear allegiance to him, but he did not control their kingdoms. And in 1156, his yearlong campaign to take southern Italy (the “Dukedom of Apulia and Calabria”) away from the Normans had ended in complete embarrassment. His general John Ducas, attempting to force the surrender of the coastal city of Brindisi, had been trapped by the Norman navy and captured, along with what remained of the Byzantine fleet.

Encouraged by the Byzantine defeat in Italy, the Prince of Antioch decided to try his own fortunes against the bruised Byzantine troops. After the troublesome Raymond of Antioch had been decapitated by Nur ad-Din, the rule of Antioch had passed to his young wife, Constance, granddaughter of the original Prince of Antioch, Bohemund the rogue. Now the mother of four, Constance was still only twenty-one years old. She held the rule of Antioch by blood right, but her cousin the king of Jerusalem, the Patriarch of Antioch (the senior clergyman in the city), and her overlord Manuel himself all insisted that she marry and proposed useful (and pliable) prospects.

Constance rejected them all and instead married the French crusader Raynald of Chatillon, a young opportunist only two years her senior who had lingered in the east after the disastrous end of the Second Crusade. It was probably the first adult choice she’d ever had the opportunity of making, and it turned out to be a poor one. Raynald, handsome and dashing, was also reckless, spoiled, and a very bad judge of a fight. He decided to free Antioch from Manuel’s control, and proposed to start by attacking the island of Cyprus, a peaceful and well-to-do Byzantine possession.3

To prepare for the fight, he first ordered the Patriarch of Antioch, a wealthy and worldly Frankish nobleman named Aimery of Limoges, to lend him the necessary funds. Aimery, who hadn’t approved of the marriage in the first place, refused; so Raynald had his henchmen waylay the patriarch and beat him up. Then, says William of Tyre, Raynald “forced the aged priest . . . although an almost helpless invalid, to sit in the blazing sun throughout a summer’s day, his bare head smeared with honey.” After a few hours on top of the Antioch citadel, battling the insects, the patriarch handed over the funds.4

This childish exercise in power was followed by a much more serious action: Reynald approached one of Manuel’s bitterest enemies and proposed an alliance.

This was Thoros II, the exiled prince of Cilician Armenia. His kingdom had been overrun by Manuel’s father twenty years earlier, and Thoros II, probably still in his teens, had been taken to Constantinople in chains along with his father the king and his older brother. Both had died in captivity; only Thoros had survived, escaping from his prison in 1142 by some unknown means and returning to his occupied country. He had been fighting a desperate guerrilla war ever since, with its high point in 1152 when he managed to kill the local Byzantine governor.

At Raynald’s suggestion, the two men joined together into an anti-Byzantine assault force; with the patriarch’s money, they sacked a few outposts and then headed for the island of Cyprus. Cyprus, unaccustomed to war, had only a small garrison, headed up by the Emperor Manuel’s own nephew. The combined Antiochene-Armenian troops overwhelmed the garrison and, given free reign by their commanders, proceeded to murder and sack their way through the island. Crops burned, herds were stolen; the old and young who fell in their way were viciously slaughtered, the women raped. Gregory the Priest writes that Raynald, in a gesture of mockery, had the noses of the priests cut off, and sent them back to Constantinople to present themselves to the emperor.5

Manuel was furious. The Normans had been a strong foe; Raynald was merely an annoyance to be swatted. In person, Manuel led a massive Byzantine army across into Cilicia and rapidly retook the land Thoros had claimed; Thoros escaped to a ruined castle deep in the mountains just in time.

Raynald was not so lucky. When he got news of the size of the approaching army, he realized that he would never be able to fight it off; his only hope lay in humility. He put on sackcloth and went to Manuel’s camp barefoot. There he threw himself in the dust in front of the emperor and begged for pardon. “He cried for mercy,” notes William of Tyre, with distaste, “and he cried so long that everyone had nausea of it.” Manuel let him weep for some time before deigning to notice that he was even present. Finally, he agreed to forgive Raynald, on condition that the Prince of Antioch surrender the citadel of Antioch to imperial control and house a detachment of the Byzantine army in his city indefinitely.6

Raynald had no choice but to agree. In 1159, Manuel entered Antioch as a conqueror, wearing the imperial diadem and his purple robe (with mail beneath it), surrounded by courtiers, guards, and attendants. The emperor’s flags were flown from Antioch’s walls, and Raynald himself was forced to walk on foot, bareheaded, beside the emperor’s stirrup. After sixty years of hostility, Antioch was finally in imperial hands.7

Raynald himself did not trouble Manuel again. A year later, he took a band of his men on a livestock-stealing foray across the countryside. Near Edessa, as they were driving a slow and unwieldy herd of stolen horses, cattle, and camels, he was caught and imprisoned by the governor of Aleppo, Nur ad-Din’s younger brother. No one offered to pay a ransom for Raynald, and he spent the next sixteen years in an Aleppo prison.

His wife Constance took up the rule of Antioch, and the year after Raynald’s capture she achieved the greatest advance in Antiochene politics yet; she made a match between her daughter Mary, child of her dead husband, Raymond, and the widowed emperor himself. The forty-three-year-old Manuel and the sixteen-year-old Mary (“fair in face,” says the historian Nicetas Choniates, “and of incomparable beauty”) were married on Christmas Eve, 1161.8

IN THE REMAINING YEARS of his reign, Manuel struggled more with the west than with the east, more with his Christian neighbors than with the Turks. To his north lay the kingdom of Hungary, and to his west the territories of Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia, all of them contested lands, all of them teetering uneasily between alliance and hostility.

Hungary, settled by an alliance of Magyar tribes at the end of the ninth century, had by the end of the tenth reached a stable and Christianized existence under a Church-recognized king; Croatia, part of the old Roman province of Illyricum, had been claimed as an independent realm by a younger branch of the royal Hungarian family. In 1102, King Colomon of Hungary had drawn it under his authority by crowning himself both king of Hungary and rex Croatiae. This “personal union” didn’t merge the two countries into one. Instead, the Croatians continued to live by their own laws, speak their own language, and serve in their own army, with loyalty to the same sovereign serving as the sole point of unity between themselves and the Hungarians.9

The rest of old Illyricum was divided into Dalmatia, an ancient coastal region that had once spoken its own language and by now had been folded into Croatia, with the king of Croatia as its protector and ruler; Bosnia, settled by another wave of Slavic tribes, but under Hungarian control since 1137; and Serbia. The Serbs, sharing a language and an old tribal identity, were divided into two territories under two families of princes who sometimes cooperated with each other, but were more often at odds. The Prince of Duklja, the coastal land, was a Byzantine vassal; Raska, the inland territory, was also more or less under Byzantine control, since Manuel had sent soldiers to help a younger brother push an elder off the throne.

19.1 The World of Manuel I

In 1161, the powerful and elderly Hungarian king Géza II died. His young and inexperienced heir was Stephen III, only fifteen when he inherited his father’s crown. Manuel I, who had long hoped for a chance to reduce Hungarian power, chose to weaken his northern neighbor by meddling in the succession. He sent weapons and money to Stephen’s two uncles, both of whom mounted challenges for the throne; and in 1164 a Byzantine army crossed the Danube in support of Stephen’s younger brother Béla.

Stephen fought back. The Byzantine-inspired civil strife dragged on until 1167, when a Byzantine army—reinforced by Turkish mercenaries and strengthened by the emperor’s personal soldiers, the Varangian Guard—met a massed Hungarian force at Semlin. Despite a letter from the emperor ordering him to delay because the astrological signs were unfavorable, the Byzantine general Andronicus led the attack and won a staggering victory. Stephen III kept his throne but was forced to accept a peace that handed over control of Croatia, Dalmatia, and eventually Bosnia to Byzantium, which was exactly what Manuel had intended.10

But Manuel’s triumph had a sting in the tail. The resentful Hungarians sent troops into Serbia to help out a budding independence movement there; it was led by the Raskan prince Stefan Nemanja, the brother of the Byzantine-supported ruler of Raska. With Hungarian help, Stefan Nemanja deposed his brother and declared himself Grand Prince of all Serbia.

Sometime late in 1168, Manuel sent an army to drive the upstart out, but Nemanja’s army met the Byzantine troops in the north of Serbia, near the Sitnica river. In the fighting that followed, Nemanja’s brother drowned in the Sitnica. But the Serbs managed to drive the Byzantines back; the Byzantine army retreated without victory, forced to give up control of the Serbian lands.

Stefan Nemanja now ruled a newly independent Serbia. His dynasty, the Nemanjić, would remain on the Serbian throne for two centuries. Manuel’s landgrab had extended the Byzantine borders; but it had also, unintentionally, set Serbia free.11

*The “Abbasid caliphate” was established in AD 750 by Abu al-Abbas, a caliph from the clan of the Prophet himself who was elected in opposition to the reigning caliph, Marwan II. Marwan II belonged to the Arab clan of the Banu Umayya, the clan of Muhammad’s companion Uthman. After his election, Abu al-Abbas had managed to wipe out most of the surviving Umayyad clan members, bringing an end to the era of the “Umayyad caliphates” which had ruled since the Prophet’s death, and introducing the Abbasid caliphate in its place. (See Bauer, The History of the Medieval World, pp. 363–370.) The Fatimid caliph who controlled Egypt and Jerusalem and the Abbasid caliph who still ruled in Baghdad were enemies of each other (as well as enemies of Byzantium and the Crusader kingdoms).

Chapter Twenty

The Venetian Problem

Between 1171 and 1185,

Manuel I falls out with Venice

and lights a fuse in Constantinople

NOW THAT HE CONTROLLED Croatia and Bosnia, Manuel had become a neighbor to the maritime republic of Venice.

Venice: the wealthiest of the Italian sea-trading cities, queen of the trade routes, and wary of any threat to her dominance. Until this point, Manuel and the Venetians had been on friendly but fragile terms. The Venetians traded tax-free in some parts of the empire and had their own quarter in Constantinople, and in exchange had sent ships to help out with Manuel’s doomed invasion of southern Italy.

Venice’s goal wasn’t friendship with Byzantium. Instead, the Venetians wanted to keep the competing rulers in Italy in balance, so that no one would gain enough strength to dominate Venice. The Norman kingdom of southern Italy (the “Dukedom of Apulia and Calabria”) had been joined to the Norman kingdom of Sicily around 1130, when a single Norman count had inherited both titles, and the entire realm was now ruled by the young Norman nobleman William the Good. As long as Frederick Barbarossa and William the Good were both struggling for control in Italy, Manuel’s presence would help prevent either from taking over.

But as Manuel approached along the coast, the balance of power seemed to be tilting his way. To restore the useful tension that kept them independent, the Venetians now offered to make a treaty with Hungary, and the Doge of Venice—the chief magistrate and prince of the city—offered to ratify it by marrying both of his sons to Hungarian princesses. When Hungary had controlled the land next door, the Hungarian king had been their enemy; now he was a useful counterweight.1

Manuel, stung, retaliated by doing a balancing act of his own. He granted both the Pisans and the Genoans, Venice’s rivals, more trading privileges and enlarged quarters within Constantinople itself.

20.1 Byzantium and Venice

At this, the whole scale fell over. An enraged mob of Venetian expats attacked and sacked the new Genoese quarter, tearing off roofs, knocking over walls, and leaving it uninhabitable. Manuel sent a sharp message to the Doge, Vitale Michiel, demanding that Venice both rebuild the quarter and pay damages to Genoa. The Doge refused, blaming the destruction on the citizens of Constantinople. Manuel had anticipated the refusal; he had already sent secret messages all across Byzantium, ordering his officials to arrest every Venetian citizen on Byzantine soil at one time. The date set was March 12, 1171.

On that morning, the emperor’s decree was carried out. Men, women, and children were taken into custody and imprisoned; all of their property—houses, shops, ships, land—was confiscated. In Constantinople, the Venetian captives very soon filled up the prisons, and monasteries were pressed into service.2

This gave Manuel over ten thousand hostages to hold against future Venetian aggression. But Doge Vitale Michiel, apoplectic with fury, declared war anyway. The Venetians spent four months building a special war fleet to retaliate, and then set sail for Byzantine territory. The first city they came to was Chalcis, the largest city on the Greek island of Euboea. They laid siege to the city; the Byzantine governor there, alarmed by the size of the fleet and unwilling to act as a sacrifice to the quarrel, offered to play mediator with Manuel if the Venetians would lift the siege.3

Mindful of all those hostages, the Doge—who was leading the fleet in person—agreed. He chose two of his men to accompany the Byzantine officials to Manuel’s court, and the Venetians removed themselves to the island of Chios, where they settled in and waited for the negotiations to proceed.

Even though he was feeding all of his Venetian prisoners at his own expense, Manuel decided to play the waiting game himself. When the ambassadors from Venice arrived, he explained that he couldn’t see them yet, but that another embassy would certainly receive his full attention. The ambassadors went back to Chios, then back to Constantinople again. All of the back-and-forthing took time; and although this could have backfired on Manuel, luck was on his side. The Venetian camp at Chios was struck with plague; one contemporary report says that more than a thousand people died in the first few days of sickness.

Manuel continued to stall, the Venetians continued to die, and finally Vitale Michiel surrendered to the inevitable. He loaded the survivors onto his ships and staggered home. According to Manuel’s private secretary John Cinnamus, the emperor sent a blistering letter after him. “Your nation,” it began, “has for a long time behaved with great stupidity”:

Once you were vagabonds sunk in abject poverty. Then you sidled into the Roman Empire. You have treated it with the utmost disdain. . . . Now, legitimately condemned and justly expelled from the empire, you have in your insolence declared war on it—you who were once a people not even worthy to be named, you who owe what prestige you have to the Romans; and . . . you have made yourself a general laughing-stock. For no one, not even the greatest powers on earth, makes war on the Romans with impunity.4

This certainly proved true for Vitale Michiel; when he arrived in Venice, his angry subjects assassinated him for his failure.

Manuel had triumphed in this round. Venice was humiliated, and Stefan Nemanja, the Grand Prince of Serbia, had lost his strongest ally. Manuel marched into Serbia, invaded the capital, and forced Nemanja to swear himself back into vassalhood. Hungary he left alone; he now controlled the coastal territories and had no need to push the issue further.

Manuel still did have a problem: all of those expensive-to-feed Venetian captives in his jails and monasteries. He solved the dilemma by ignoring it. Over the next few years, while he carried on tricky and unsuccessful negotiations with Venice, the Venetian captives seeped out of their prisons a few at a time and limped back home.

MANUEL DIED IN 1180, after thirty-seven years on the throne of Constantinople. He had increased the empire’s power, but ruined its alliances; Byzantium had very few friends left in the west.

His death was followed by five years of violent chaos that damaged the empire still further. His young wife Mary of Antioch had finally given him a son and heir, but Alexius II was still only eleven, and Mary was his regent.

Within the year, Mary had made herself vastly unpopular. As a westerner herself, she was inclined to grant too much favor to the Italian merchants in Constantinople and too little to the citizens of the empire itself. She took as her chief advisor another unpopular official, Manuel’s nephew Alexius; a slug, according to the chronicler Nicetas Choniates, “accustomed to spend the greater part of the day in bed, keeping the curtains drawn lest he should ever see the sunlight . . . also he took much pleasure in rubbing his decaying teeth.”5

Hearing of the unhappiness in Constantinople, Manuel’s cousin Andronicus Comnenus—exiled to Paphlagonia some years earlier for agitating against the throne—set sail for the city. He had always been a popular member of the royal family, and when the people of the city heard that he was on his way, they celebrated by rioting. The riot turned into a bloodbath. Pisans, Genoans, and any remaining Venetians in the city were lynched. By the time Andronicus arrived, hundreds had died.

He rode into the city as its savior. The remaining Italians were rounded up and sold as slaves to Turkish merchants; the incompetent Alexius was arrested and blinded; Andronicus confined both Mary and the young Alexius II to the palace.

Mary was found strangled, not long after, and Andronicus had himself crowned as Alexius’s co-ruler. The joint rule lasted for less than a year. Once Andronicus felt himself secure on the throne, he ordered the fourteen-year-old Alexius strangled as well.6

His violent rule was short, and ended as it had begun, with murder. Andronicus’s method of keeping power was to eliminate anyone who seemed to pose a danger to him. “He left the vines of Bursa weighed down,” one chronicler notes, “not with grapes, but with the corpses of those whom he had hanged; and he forbade any man to cut them down for burial, for he wished them to dry in the sun and then to sway and flutter . . . like the scarecrows that are hung in the orchards to frighten the birds.”7

After two years of this, his subjects had had enough.

In 1185, Andronicus sent an official to arrest and execute (on no good grounds) a distant royal cousin named Isaac Angelus. Angelus, a mild man by all accounts, turned on the hangman and killed him. Instantly, the people of Constantinople hailed him as a hero and shouted for him to be crowned as emperor.

Andronicus, outside the city at the time, rushed back to restore order. But the mob turned against him, and his own guards refused to fight their fellow countrymen. Isaac Angelus seems to have decided that the crowd’s feelings needed an outlet; he ordered Andronicus’s right hand cut off and his right eye gouged out and then turned Andronicus over to the crowd for punishment. “Carried away by unreasoning anger,” writes Nicetas Choniates, “. . . there was no evil which they did not inflict wickedly on Andronikos.”

He was slapped in the face, kicked on the buttocks, his beard was torn out, his teeth pulled out. . . . Some struck him on the head with clubs, others befouled his nostrils with cow-dung, and still others, using sponges, poured excretions from the bellies of oxen and men over his eyes. . . . Thus reviled and degraded, Andronikos was led into the theater in mock triumph sitting on the hump of a camel. When he dismounted, he was straightway suspended by his feet. . . . Even after he was suspended by his feet, the foolish masses neither kept their hands off the much-tormented Andronikos, nor did they spare his flesh, but removing his short tunic, they assaulted his genitals. A certain ungodly man dipped his long sword into his entrails by way of the pharynx; certain members of the Latin race raised their swords with both hands above his buttocks, and standing around him, they brought them down, making trial as to whose cut was deeper.8

After long agonizing hours, Andronicus finally died. The body was left hanging for several days before it was cut down and tossed into the gutters. The dynasty of the Comneni had come to an end. Byzantium—friendless, simmering with hatred, filled with fear—was in the hands of Isaac Angelus.

Chapter Twenty-One

Resentments

Between 1171 and 1186,

Henry II of England fights the Irish,

his own sons,

and the French

BY 1171, Henry II of England had recovered somewhat from his guilt over Becket’s murder; at least, enough to invade Ireland.

He had been given an open door by the Irish king Diarmait Mac Murchada, ruler of the eastern kingdom of Leinster. Leinster, as the thirteenth-century historian Gerald of Wales points out, was “separated only from England by the sea which flowed between,” making it a natural target for the English. But Henry’s path into it was indirect. A few years before, Mac Murchada had rashly visited the wife of the neighboring king of Meath, in her husband’s absence; she had “long entertained a passion” for Mac Murchada, Gerald assures us, “and allowed herself to be ravished, not against her will.” The king of Meath, returning home, was not pleased. He gathered his own men together and then called on the High King of Ireland to help him avenge his honor.1

The High King of Ireland was Rory O’Connor, king of Connacht. For centuries, one Irish king out of the handful that ruled the island had borne the title of High King. But, as contemporary historians point out, the designated High King was always ruler co fresabra: with opposition. The High King’s authority was constantly challenged by his peers, and Rory O’Connor was no exception; he had already been forced, more than once, to fight to defend his title; and now he decided to make a friend of the king of Meath. Together, the two drove Mac Murchada out of Leinster.

Mac Murchada, catching a favorable wind, went across the Irish Sea and appealed to the English throne for help. Henry II was himself in Western Francia, occupied in yet another struggle with Louis VII of France over control of his lands there; but he knew that anything that created chaos in Ireland was bound to be good for the English. He sent back a message giving all of his knights permission to help Mac Murchada recover his throne, and promising them “favour and licence” in exchange.2

The most prominent knight to take up the challenge was Richard de Clare, son of the Earl of Pembroke. Nicknamed “Strongbow” for his skill, de Clare had fought in his early twenties for King Stephen, against Henry’s mother Matilda; and when Henry finally claimed the crown, he had refused to allow Richard to inherit the title of earl. Now, de Clare saw the chance to gain a crown instead. He agreed to fight for Mac Murchada in exchange for the chance to inherit the throne of Leinster; Mac Murchada’s oldest daughter Aoife agreed to marry the Englishman, to seal the deal.

This arrangement worked out better for Richard than for his new father-in-law. By 1171, the English had helped Mac Murchada reoccupy his kingdom, but during the protracted struggle Mac Murchada’s own son was killed, and Mac Murchada himself took ill and died in the first week of May, not long after his sixty-first birthday.

Strongbow and Aoife could now claim to be king and queen of Leinster, but Henry II—finally returning from Western Francia—intervened. He did not want one of his knights establishing an independent monarchy right across the water, and so he assembled an army at the western port city of Gloucester, ready to sail to Ireland. Strongbow, still fighting off the combined forces of the king of Meath and the High King, hurried to Gloucester and assured the king of his loyalty. “He succeeded at last . . . in appeasing the royal displeasure,” says Gerald of Wales, “upon the terms that he should renew his oath of fealty to the king, and surrender to him Dublin . . . with the towns on the sea coast, and all the fortresses.” Richard would rule as king of Leinster, but only by Henry’s permission; and the English king would take direct control of the port cities.3

With this settled, Henry and his army sailed across to Ireland to help Richard drive off the High King’s attacks. They landed at the southern port of Waterford on October 18, 1171, and marched north towards Dublin. Before they could arrive, most of the Irish kings had hurried to meet him and offer their submission. No single Irish kingdom could muster a force large enough to drive the king of England away; their alternative was to unify by submitting fully to the High King, which most were unwilling to do. “Thus did all the princes of Ireland, except for those of Ulster [in the north], severally make their submissions,” says Gerald of Wales, “. . . they all became vassals to the king of England.” By 1175, Henry and Rory O’Connor had drawn up a formal agreement, the Treaty of Windsor, that divided Ireland into two separate spheres: one directly under Henry’s control, the other ruled by the High King as Henry’s vassal.4

Ulster was another story. The kings who ruled there, descendants of the ancient and contentious clan of the Uí Néill, declined to submit to the English in any form; and the north of Ireland remained entirely out of Henry’s hands.

21.1 England, Ireland, and Western Francia

ON THE DOMESTIC FRONT, Henry was now running into trouble.

Eleanor of Aquitaine, nearing fifty, had given her husband eight children, five of them sons. Four of the boys had survived childhood: Henry the Younger, not yet twenty; Richard, two years younger; Geoffrey, born the year after Richard; and John, only five years old when Henry invaded Ireland.

Louis VII of France, Eleanor’s ex-husband, was legitimately worried about Henry’s power; the English monarch was expanding his reach, and his lands in Western Francia bordered Louis’s own. But it is hard to imagine that Louis did not feel some personal pique against the man who had succeeded where he had failed.

The constant squabbles between the English and the French kings had been temporarily smoothed over by Henry’s agreement, in 1169, to divide his lands in Western Francia among his three elder sons: Henry the Younger got Anjou and Maine; Geoffrey got Brittany; Richard, his mother’s favorite, was awarded the Duchy of Aquitaine. (John got nothing, earning him the derisive nickname “John Lackland.”) This broke up the united English front facing Louis, but he was not yet satisfied, particularly since Henry kept his fist closed tight over his sons. He was, says Gerald of Wales, “the kindest of fathers . . . during their childhood and youth, but as they advanced in years looked on them with an evil eye. . . he could never bear to think of them as his successors.” The French lands were theirs in name, but Henry ran their domains for them.5

Louis, who had betrothed the daughter of his second marriage to Henry the Younger as part of a peace deal, was undoubtedly aware of this state of affairs; he played on Henry’s natural resentments. He suggested to young Henry, privately, that he ask for the right to rule part of his father’s domain independently: Normandy or Anjou, perhaps. Or, failing that, England itself.6

Henry II refused, curtly (and not unreasonably). And so Henry the Younger ran away from home. “He seethed and growled against his father,” writes William of Newburgh, “and secretly took refuge with his father-in-law the king of France, intending to cause his father annoyance.” When Henry II sent a message to Louis VII, demanding that his son return home, Louis VII retorted, “The king of England is here, and gives no instruction to me.”7

This was a clear statement of war on Louis’s part and treason on young Henry’s, and the English barons immediately began to take sides. A good number of them defected to the rebellious son’s side; Henry, an authoritarian and controlling king, had made enemies. “Those men who joined the party of the son,” writes the contemporary historian Ralph of Diceto, “[did so] not because they regarded his as the juster cause, but because the father . . . was trampling upon the necks of the proud and haughty, [and] was dismantling or appropriating the castles of the country.”8

They were shortly joined by Henry’s younger brothers, Geoffrey and Richard.

Eleanor herself, who was at Poitiers with her sons when the revolt began, seems to have encouraged her sons to rebel against their father. She and Henry had been on increasingly poor terms since Becket’s murder; and Henry had at least one mistress, the famously beautiful Rosamund Clifford. (William of Newburgh excuses this, pointing out that Henry was faithful until Eleanor hit menopause.) Once Geoffrey and Richard were safely with Henry the Younger, Eleanor herself prepared to flee from Poitiers to the court of Louis VII; reversing her path twenty years earlier from Paris to meet her bridegroom. Before she could get to Louis’s lands, though, Henry II’s men caught up with her, and Henry ordered her to be kept under guard in Chinon Castle. She would remain under house arrest for the next fifteen years, separated from contact with her sons.9

Widespread though the rebellion was, Henry II put it down briskly. The last major engagement was Louis VII’s siege of Rouen, in Normandy, in August 1174. Henry, arriving with reinforcements, sent out a special force of Welsh mercenaries to cut off the French supply route through the woods, and the Welsh troops (“nimble and familiar with woodland,” William of Newburgh observes) descended on supply trains, destroyed them, and then disappeared back into the forest. “The news was spread abroad that the woods were thronged with Welshmen,” William tells us, and before long the French army lost heart. Louis VII, seeing the futility of fighting on, deserted his troops and retired to his capital, where he sent messages offering to come to terms. Geoffrey and Henry the Younger had already agreed to surrender to their father; only Richard was still holding out, laying siege to his father’s castles in Poitou, his mother’s native land. With Louis and his brothers deserting the cause, Richard was left with only a handful of men.10

Henry advanced into Poitou, forcing his son to retreat. By the end of September, Richard could no longer hold out. He went to his father’s camp as a suppliant, threw himself on his face, and burst into tears.

In victory, Henry was relatively gracious. He restored most of the Western Francia territories to his sons (but continued to control them). The English nobles who had joined the revolt were, by and large, released and pardoned. Henry the Younger was forced to take a strict oath of homage to his father, and the status quo was—more or less—restored.

But the hostility between the king and his sons was not repaired; nor was the king of France reconciled.

IN 1180, LOUIS VII OF FRANCE died in Paris, aged sixty. The crown went to his fifteen-year-old son, Philip II Augustus; Louis’s third wife, Adele of Champagne, had finally borne the French king his only male heir.

The young king’s lands were circled around by noble estates, ruled by powerful French dukes: Flanders, Burgundy, Toulouse. Louis VII had ruled as monarch only in the territory immediately around Paris; in the farther reaches of Western Francia, the French noble families, landholders and rulers of great estates, paid homage and did as they pleased.11

Even at fifteen (or, perhaps, because he was fifteen), Philip wanted more power.

He had barely begun his reign when the Duke of Burgundy tried to take advantage of the young king’s inexperience by demanding that some of the king’s vassals switch allegiance to him instead. Philip II immediately marched into Burgundy, attacked the fortress of Chatillon, and captured the duke’s oldest son; he did not release his prisoner until the Duke of Burgundy had backed down. When the Count of Flanders tried to claim territory that belonged, by right of inheritance, to Philip’s new wife Isabelle, Philip went to war with him and fought for the next four years over the debated land.12

All of this fighting was expensive, and Philip—showing for the first time the ruthlessness towards civilians that would mar his reputation forever—chose a new strategy to raise money. In 1182, he ordered all Jews expelled from France; the king confiscated their lands, seized their synagogues, and wiped out all debt owed to them—as long as the debtors paid one-fifth of the outstanding loan into the royal purse.13

The Jews were a natural target. European Christians had long shared the ancient Christian suspicion of Jews as complicit in the crucifixion of Christ, and during the First Crusade this had hardened into open hatred. “We wish to attack the enemies of God in the East, after traveling great distances,” wrote the eleventh-century French chronicler Guibert of Nogent. “However, before our eyes are the Jews, and no people is more hostile to God than they are. Such an arrangement is absurd.”14

Philip was still only in direct control of a small part of Western Francia, so most of the banished Jews did not go far. But the decree uncovered another aspect of the young king’s personality. He was harshly inflexible in matters of religion, and his reign was marked by increasingly strict laws against swearing, blasphemy, gambling, and other church-condemned pastimes.

A year after the expulsion decree, Henry the Younger was struck by dysentery and died, aged twenty-seven. His widow Margaret—Philip II’s older half sister—had given him only one child, and the baby had died three days after birth.

Seeing another chance to replenish his treasury, Philip II demanded that Henry II of England return Margaret’s dowry to the French throne. This, naturally, led to an argument; and by 1186 the quarrel was sliding towards open war.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Saladin

Between 1171 and 1188,

Saladin seizes his master’s lands

and retakes Jerusalem

WHILE HIS MASTER Nur ad-Din celebrated the unification of the Muslim states from Edessa to Cairo, Saladin, the deputy governor of Egypt, began to close his own hands around his domain.

Saladin’s biographer ibn Shaddad, determined to paint his subject as the ideal Muslim ruler, gives us inadvertent glimpses of the real man: a devout believer, but also pragmatic, hardheaded, calculating. He studied his faith, but “his studies did not dig too deep” or lead him into unpopular theological controversy. He fasted during Ramadan, but his fasts “fell a little short” when the demands of war called him to be at his strongest. He never made the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that would have taken him away from his restless realm: “He always intended and planned it,” ibn Shaddad explains, “[but] was prevented because of lack of time.” His desire to see Islam triumph was genuine: “In his love for the Jihad on the path of God he shunned his womenfolk, his children, his homeland, his home and all his pleasures, and for this world he was content to dwell in the shade of his tent with the winds blowing through it left and right.”1

But this did not eclipse his personal ambitions, as became very clear to Nur ad-Din in October of 1171. Saladin had invaded Crusader territory and laid siege to the southern castle of Montreal. He was close to forcing its surrender when Nur ad-Din approached from the opposite side. Rather than completing the conquest and handing the castle over, Saladin withdrew and allowed the Christian enemy to stay in place. Ibn al-Athir tells us that he was afraid to clear Nur ad-Din’s path to Egypt: “If Nur ad-Din comes to you here,” one of Saladin’s officers says, “. . . he will exercise his authority over you. . . . [I]f he wishes, he will dismiss you and you will be unable to resist.”

Saladin returned to Egypt and wrote to Nur ad-Din, excusing himself on the grounds that he feared a coup was developing in his absence. Nur ad-Din was not fooled. “His attitude towards him changed,” Ibn al-Athir writes, “and he resolved to enter Egypt and expel him.”2

But before Nur ad-Din could bring Saladin to heel, he was struck with quinsy: a throat abscess, caused by tonsillitis, which precipitated a massive infection and shut his body down. He died in Damascus, refusing treatment. (“A sixty-year-old,” he snapped at his doctor, “is not to be bled.”) He left his kingdom to his eleven-year-old son, al-Salih Ismail.3

Now Saladin took the offensive. He rode north and entered Damascus as al-Salih’s protector and guardian: “Aware that [Nur ad-Din’s] son was a child . . . incapable of taking on the defense of the lands against God’s enemies,” his biographer explains, “he made his preparations to march to Syria, since it is the cornerstone of Muslim territory.”4

For a year or so, Saladin acted as al-Salih’s general and regent. His presence in the boy’s kingdom was not a peaceful one; al-Salih himself appealed to his subjects to eject the usurper. (“This wicked man, who repudiates my father’s goodness to him, has come to take my lands,” he told the men of Aleppo, who obediently rebelled.) But Saladin’s Egyptian troops quelled revolt after revolt. After a victory against the combined armies of Aleppo and Mosul in April of 1175, Saladin decreed that his own name should be substituted for young al-Salih’s in the Friday prayers. No more coins were to be struck in al-Salih’s name. In May, the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, which Saladin now controlled, prudently declared Saladin to be Sultan of Egypt and Syria; a letter sent to the caliph by Saladin’s secretary Qadi al-Fadil explained that only Saladin was strong enough to protect Nur ad-Din’s accomplishments, and that his “sole purpose” was to keep the Islamic cause unified and strong.5

The next few years saw Saladin doing just that. He married Nur ad-Din’s widow, some ten years his senior, and laid claim to his predecessor’s lands. He fought rebellious Muslim governors and encroaching Crusader armies; when politic, he made treaties with the Crusaders instead. He set up a formal Office of the Navy and channeled a good deal of revenue into building additional ships to bulk up the Egyptian fleet. In 1181, young al-Salih died of “colic,” a convenient name for stomach upset caused by natural or other means, and Saladin’s rule was no longer troubled by questions of legitimacy.6

He was now strong enough to face the Crusader kingdoms head on, provided that they did not all unify against him at the same time. And in 1187 he was given the chance he needed.

The year before, the king of Jerusalem—nine-year-old Baldwin V—had died. There was no clear successor to his crown; his mother, Sibylla, and his guardian, Raymond, ruler of Tripoli, both laid claim to Jerusalem. Leading Sibylla’s cause was a familiar old troublemaker: Raynald of Chatillon, once Prince of Antioch, newly out of his Aleppo dungeon cell, sixteen years older but still reckless, dishonest, and power hungry. He masterminded a plan to shut Raymond out of Jerusalem while Sibylla (and her deeply unpopular husband Guy) were crowned king and queen of the city.7

Raymond, incensed, went straight to Saladin and offered friendship in return for troops, intending to use Saladin’s men to break back into Jerusalem and claim its crown. Meanwhile, Raynald of Chatillon, who was incapable of getting along with anyone for long, fell out with Sibylla and Guy and stormed out of Jerusalem. In early 1187, he and his men attacked a large and wealthy caravan that was traveling from Syria to Egypt under Saladin’s protection. Raynald himself took “every last man” prisoner and stole the baggage. Saladin threatened to attack, if the men were not released and the goods restored. Queen Sibylla and King Guy, seeing the writing on the wall, ordered Raynald to make restitution; Raynald refused. (In response, Saladin vowed to kill Raynald “if he ever had him in his power.”) The Crusader alliance was fractured; Saladin’s time had come.8

“He wrote to all his lands,” Ibn al-Athir tells us, “summoning men to the Jihad. He wrote to Mosul, the Mesopotamian regions, Irbil and other places in the east, and to Egypt and all of Syria.” As this massive force gathered, Raymond and Raynald, realizing that catastrophe was unfolding over them, both hurried to Jerusalem with their armies.

The Crusader coalition, some twenty thousand men, gathered at Sephoria, a well-watered and provisioned city in the north of the Kingdom of Jerusalem; from there, they could block Saladin’s path to Jerusalem itself. But rather than facing them directly, Saladin—in command of nearly thirty thousand troops—moved sideways and sacked the city of Tiberias, trapping Raymond’s wife in the citadel with the surviving defenders. “His purpose in besieging Tiberias had only been that the Franks should leave their position,” writes Ibn al-Athir; between Sephoria and Tiberias, the land was bare, shelterless, and dry.9

After some argument, the Crusaders decided to cross the desert and relieve Tiberias. The early July sun roasted the Crusader army as it plodded along. The only cistern they came to was guarded by Saladin’s men. By the time they met Saladin, on the plain beneath the extinct volcano peaks known as the Horns of Hattin, soldiers and horses alike were nearly incapacitated by heat and thirst. The Battle of Hattin, fought on the morning of July 4, was a rout. Within six hours, says the French account of the battle, the Crusaders were slaughtered; Raymond escaped, but Raynald of Chatillon, King Guy, and the commanding officers of both the Templar and the Hospitaller orders were taken prisoner.10

Saladin, ordering King Guy and Raynald of Chatillon brought into his own tent, offered the king (“near dead from thirst,” Ibn al-Athir says) a cold drink. Having drunk, Guy turned to Reynald and offered him the rest. The code of Muslim hospitality dictated that no host could kill a man who had drunk his water or eaten his food; Saladin at once said, “Not with my permission did this accursed man drink water and so gain my safe-conduct.” He rose, and beheaded Raynald with his own scimitar.11

After this, Saladin ordered the captured Templars and Hospitallers executed; their single-minded defense of the holy sites was too dangerous. But King Guy and the other officers who had surrendered were well fed and made comfortable in their imprisonment.

Saladin and his army marched on to Acre, arriving at the city’s walls a week later. Acre had almost no defenders left; they had all gone out to join the coalition at Sephoria. The city’s inhabitants, who had heard of Saladin’s mercy towards his captives, offered to surrender in return for safe-conduct. Saladin agreed; he then entered the city through the open gate and celebrated Friday prayers in the old Acre mosque, which had been transformed into a church and now was restored to its original purpose.

After this, most of the Holy Land was his. Ascalon surrendered, on the same terms, on September 4; the city of Jerusalem, on October 2, after Saladin had again guaranteed the safety of its Christian inhabitants, even allowing those who left the city to take their money and belongings with them. “On top of the Dome of the Rock was a great gilded cross,” writes Ibn al-Althir. “When the Muslims entered the city on the Friday, several men climbed to the top of the dome to displace the cross. When they did so and it fell, everyone in the city and outside, both Muslims and Franks, cried out as one. The Muslims shouted ‘God is great!‘ in joy while the Franks cried out in distress and pain.”12

22.1 The Conquests of Saladin

BACK IN WESTERN FRANCIA, the battling kings of France and England had arranged a parley for January of 1188 at Gisors, where a huge elm tree marked the border between Henry’s lands in Normandy and Philip’s royal domain.

22.2 Gisors

They had barely arrived when the Archbishop of Tyre asked for an audience. Tyre still held out against Saladin; the elderly archbishop had left the city in a galley with black-painted sails to bring the news to the west. Now he begged both kings to abandon their own hostilities and to take the cross in a third crusade. Pope Gregory VIII had already authorized the Crusade, issuing a call for a seven-year truce all throughout Europe so that kings and armies could pour their energies into recovering Jerusalem.13

Both Henry and Philip accepted the challenge. Hostilities were put on hold, and preparations began for the journey east. The seventy-year-old Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, announced his intentions to join as well. All of Europe seemed to be turning east.

“The news reached Saladin,” writes William of Tyre, “that the emperor of Germany, the king of France, and the king of England and all the high barons overseas had taken the cross to come against him. He was not at all pleased.”14

Chapter Twenty-Three

The Gempei War

In Japan, between 1179 and 1185,

the Taira clan is laid waste,

and the rule of the shoguns begins

IN THE TWO DECADES since the Heiji Disturbance, Taira Kiyomori had been steadily rising through the ranks of Japanese courtiers.

He was helped out by the Cloistered Emperor Go-Shirakawa, who needed the support of Kiyomori and his samurai to keep his power over the increasingly rebellious Emperor Nijo. With Go-Shirakawa’s support, Kiyomori became in turn a member of the State Council, Captain of the Palace Guards, Chief of the Central Police, and finally Prime Minister. His brother Yorimori became the Cloistered Emperor’s chancellor, his son Shigemori military commander of the capital city. When the Emperor Nijo died of a sudden illness at the age of twenty-two, Kiyomori arranged a marriage between his own daughter Tokuko and Nijo’s successor, the Emperor Takakura (Nijo’s younger half brother). The imperial offices were falling, one by one, under Taira control.1

Go-Shirakawa’s scheme to boost Taira power had succeeded too well, and by 1179 the Cloistered Emperor found power slipping from his hands. He needed to check Taira ambitions; and so he intervened sharply in Kiyomori’s affairs, confiscating land that Kiyomori had commandeered and returning it to its original Fujiwara and Minamoto rulers.

He believed that the time was ripe to bring the Taira crashing down, but he was wrong. Kiyomori could still raise a larger samurai force than any of his rivals; he marched thousands of Taira-loyal warriors into Kyoto, put Go-Shirakawa under house arrest, and then forced the young Emperor Takakura to abdicate in favor of Takakura’s baby son Antoku—Kiyomori’s own grandson.2

Taira Kiyomori now stood at the crest of his power. He was grandfather of the Emperor, master of the Cloistered Emperor, virtual ruler of Japan. His climb had taken over twenty years. “As Prime Minister,” the epic history Tales of the Heike tells us, “Kiyomori now held the entire realm within the four seas in the palm of his hand.” His ultimate victory lasted less than a year; and then he died, of a sudden severe fever, in March of 1181.3

Already, the backlash was building.

Its architect was one of the survivors of the Heiji Disturbance: Minamoto Yoritomo, son of the beheaded Yoshitomo. Thirteen at the time of the Disturbance, Yoritomo had been exiled by the victorious Kiyomori, rather than executed. The act of mercy had been a strategic error. In his banishment, says the Gukansho, Yoritomo “had been thinking deeply about world affairs.” He was now in his early thirties, and for two decades had been gathering allies and planning his revenge.4

He began in the southern cluster of volcanic islands known as the Izu Islands, where he had lived since his father’s death, and traveled up the eastern coast. This was traditionally Minamoto territory, and he was able to collect volunteers as he went. In a series of small battles—some defeats, but more victories—his army slowly gained strength, until he was able to establish himself strongly in the coastal city of Kamakura.

23.1 The Kamakura Shogunate

Meanwhile, Kiyomori’s son Munemori was gathering Taira adherents in Kyoto. But fourteen months of wretched weather—alternating drought and flooding, followed by a severe food shortage and then by plague—delayed the confrontation. So did the unexpected rise of a third party: Yoritomo’s cousin Yoshinaka, seven years his junior. An ambitious and skilled samurai who had lost his father in the Taira purges of 1159, Yoshinaka preferred to fight on his own account, rather than join his cousin’s campaign. He claimed the western city of Shinano for himself, and before long had accumulated an even larger following than Yoritomo.5

Munemori decided to tackle his biggest enemy first. Rather than marching directly against Yoritomo, he assembled a huge army—contemporary chronicles put it at a hundred thousand men—to drive forward against Yoshinaka.

Munemori was not a gifted strategist. He apparently believed that numbers would win the day, but his massive army was filled with press-ganged peasants, farmers, and woodcutters. When it approached Yoshinaka’s front, the Minamoto samurai stalled until nightfall by engaging the samurai of the imperial army in courteous traditional duels. As soon as dark fell, Yoshinaka ordered a herd of oxen, equipped with pine torches lashed onto their horns, driven straight at the enemy. Panicked, the inexperienced Kyoto army stampeded into a nearby narrow valley called Kurikara Pass, where the men were pinned down and slaughtered. “The mountain streams ran with their blood,” says the Tales of the Heike, “and the mount of their corpses was like a small hill.”6 Hearing of the defeat, the sitting emperor and his Taira adherents fled from Kyoto, and Yoshinaka marched straight there and occupied the city—where he was welcomed by the Cloistered Emperor Go-Shirakawa, who had been canny enough to switch allegiances and join the Minamoto cause.

The Battle of Kurikara had punctured Taira power, and over the next two years it deflated with astounding rapidity. From Kyoto, Yoshinaka pursued and destroyed as many Taira clan leaders as he could find; from his eastern headquarters, Yoritomo did the same. The five years of destruction between 1180 and 1185, the Gempei War, saw the almost complete destruction of the Taira by the Minamoto.

The culminating battle of the war took place on April 25, 1185, when a Taira fleet that carried the eight-year-old Emperor, Kiyomori’s grandson, and his grandmother, Kiyomori’s widow, was trapped at the strait of Dan-no-Ura and battered to pieces by the Minamoto navy, under the command of one of Yoritomo’s brothers. As the enemy closed in, the Emperor’s grandmother took her grandson in her arms and leapt from the ship. They were followed by their courtiers and by the defeated Taira samurai, dragged to the bottom by their armor.

Munemori, who had been responsible for the defeat at Kurikara Pass and had not managed to distinguish himself since, refused to jump until one of the Taira courtiers, embarrassed by his leader’s cowardice, pushed him off the side. He was a good swimmer, though, and one of the Minamoto boats fished him out of the water and took him prisoner. He was beheaded at Kamakura a few days later.

Later, one of the surviving members of his family remarked that Munemori’s disgraceful behavior wasn’t surprising; everyone in the clan knew that he wasn’t a real Taira. His mother had confided to them all, after the debacle of Kurikara, that she’d bought him from an umbrella seller as a baby.7

With the mass drownings, the history of the Taira in Japan came to an abrupt and utter end. Minamoto Yoritomo claimed the lordship of Japan, driving his cousin from Kyoto and taking for himself the prestigious title of utaisho, Commander of the Inner Palace Guards: a warrior’s title for a victorious fighter. Another of Go-Shirakawa’s grandsons, the three-year-old Go-Toba, was crowned Emperor. But Yoritomo controlled Japan’s fighting forces, and the Cloistered Emperor Go-Shirakawa, who had an unerring instinct for staying on the right side in a fight, recognized his rule. The struggle for power had ended as it began, with a toddler on the throne and power in the hands of others.8

Seven years later, in 1192, Yoritomo accepted from the young Emperor’s hands the title of shogun: Military Commander in Chief, supreme commander of Japan. The authority to rule had shifted again, from Cloistered Emperor to soldier; and for many centuries to come, the shogun would rule as second emperor of Japan.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Kings’ Crusade

Between 1188 and 1199,

three kings go on the Third Crusade,

and Richard Lionheart comes to an unexpected end

EASTER OF 1189 was the appointed time. On that date, the kings of England, France, and Germany would depart for the Holy Land, prepared to drive Saladin out. “Let your hearts be strengthened in the Lord,” Henry II of England wrote to the beleaguered bishops in Jerusalem and Antioch. “Sooner than you could believe . . . vast multitudes of the faithful will by land and sea come to your rescue.”1

He was a skilled king, but a poor prophet.

The peace with Philip lasted barely six months; in July of 1188, Henry was forced to abandon his preparations in England and return to France to protect his lands there. And an unexpected development was complicating his relations with Philip. Richard, Henry’s oldest surviving son, had struck up a friendship with the enemy. “Richard remained with the king of France,” says the English chronicler Roger of Hoveden, “though much against the will of his father, and the king of France held him in such high esteem, that every day they ate at the same table, and from the same dish, and at night their beds were not separate.”2

As the historian John Gillingham points out, this phrase doesn’t necessarily suggest sex; Ralph of Diceto uses the same wording to describe Henry the Younger’s amicable relationship with his father in 1175. Rather, Richard and Philip had identified with each other. Their cause was the same: both of them wanted Richard to inherit the throne of England.

After Henry the Younger’s death, Henry II had not settled on one of his surviving sons as heir. Geoffrey had died in 1186, accidentally killed at a jousting tournament. Richard, the natural choice, was still fiercely loyal to Eleanor and hostile to his father; Henry had not forgotten Richard’s long holdout in Poitiers, back in 1174. John, on the other hand, had been young enough during that earlier rebellion to escape full blame and seemed to be rising in Henry’s estimation. Henry had already named him Lord of Ireland, intending to give him the kingship of the Irish lands.

Richard, watching his father shower John with favors, could see his throne slipping away. So could Philip II, who wanted the Western Frankish lands bordering his own governed by a sympathetic king of England, not a mere duke subject to a younger brother’s decrees.

In the fall of 1188, Philip and Richard together summoned Henry to a conference at Bonsmoulins, on the eastern edge of Normandy. There they demanded that the king name Richard his heir and require the barons of England to swear loyalty to him at once.

Henry II refused. Now aged fifty-six, he had spent thirty-five years ruling both England and his family, rejecting all attempts to block his will, demolishing opposition, ignoring threats. He would not be bullied by his own son and Louis’s stripling successor.

According to onlookers, the conversation began to degenerate into shouts; and then, to drawn swords. No one struck, though. Instead, Richard turned his back on his father and went on his knees to Philip II, swearing homage to the king of France in place of his father.

That night, Henry sent the English knight William Marshal after Richard, hoping to persuade his son to return to England. But Richard had already left his quarters and could not be found. Marshal did make a new discovery: The night before, Richard had sent out perhaps two hundred letters. He was already raising his supporters to fight; he had never intended to make peace with his father.3

Henry returned to England and, entirely abandoning his plans for crusade, began to prepare for all-out war instead. But over Christmas he began to grow ill. Contemporary chroniclers mention a fever, arthritis, and a fistula: most likely an abscessed anal gland, in itself miserable but not fatal, which eventually escalated into a septic infection and attacked the king’s joints. Over the next seven months, Henry became progressively sicker, even while he tried to prosecute the war against his son. Philip and Richard, aggressively pushing forward against the English-held lands, scored victory after victory. In July of 1189, so ill that he had to be supported by two of his knights in order to stay on his horse, Henry II agreed to meet the two rebels and yield to their demands. These had expanded: Henry was now required to give up any claim to the allegiance of all English knights who had gone over to Richard’s side.*

Almost unable to stand, Henry took the required oaths and then came forward to give Richard the customary kiss of peace. Gerald de Barri, Henry’s royal clerk and chaplain, records that as the king kissed the air beside Richard’s ear, he whispered, “God grant that I may not die until I have had my revenge on you.”4

Back at his headquarters in the castle of Chinon, Henry received the list of knights who had deserted his cause for Richard’s. At the head of the list was his son John. Until that moment, says Roger of Hoveden, Henry had not known that his favored son had crossed over to the enemy. “Surprised at this beyond measure,” Roger of Hoveden concludes, “[he] cursed the day on which he was born.” He had already lost the ability to stand. On his deathbed, he made his last confession; and on July 6, 1189, Henry II died in the thirty-fifth year of his reign.5

Richard claimed the English throne. He was now thirty-one, an experienced soldier and politician, dazzling in person: nicknamed “Lionheart” by his soldiers, tall, golden-haired, “of a shapely build” with “straight and flexible limbs,” possessing the valor of Hector, the greatness of Alexander, and the manhood of Roland (at least according to the anonymous starstruck author of the Itinerarium Regis Ricardi). He released his mother Eleanor from her long house arrest and then, immediately after, announced that he would fulfill his father’s undone vows by going on crusade.6

Crusades were expensive. Richard ransacked the treasury, sold state offices to the highest bidder, and collected 10 percent of the kingdom’s goods and cash as a “tithe Saladin” (a “violent extortion,” says Roger of Wendover, “which veiled the vice of rapacity under the name of charity”). On August 16, 1190, Richard and Philip—having sworn an oath to divide all proceeds from their conquests equally between them—departed from Marseille, bound for Jerusalem.7

BY THEN, Frederick Barbarossa was dead.

He had left Germany in April 1189, sailing along the Danube to Vienna, and then traveling along the long difficult land route through the kingdom of Hungary (where he was joined by the king of Hungary’s brother with some two thousand troops) and then over the rough terrain of Serbia and Bosnia.* When he reached the border of the Byzantine empire, he found himself facing an unexpected enemy. Isaac Angelus, who had now been on the throne of Constantinople for four years, had originally guaranteed the Crusaders safe passage through his lands, but the approach of a huge German force supplemented with Hungarian, Bosnian, and Serbian soldiers was giving him pause. Byzantium and the Holy Roman Empire had been jostling each other for decades; he might well be giving a conquering army an open door into his empire.

24.1 The World of the Third Crusade

So he sent guerrilla bands to harass the Crusaders. “As soon as we reached the borders of our imperial brother, the emperor of Constantinople,” Frederick himself wrote, “we suffered no small loss by robbery of goods and killing of our men; and this is known without doubt to have been instigated by the emperor himself.” Vexed, he sent envoys to Constantinople to object; Angelus threw them in jail. Tensions escalated until Frederick sent a message back to his son and regent in Germany, Henry VI, asking him to get from the pope permission to declare a crusade against Byzantium so that he could attack Constantinople.8

At this threat, Isaac Angelus offered to let the crusading army pass, as long as it stayed south, far away from Constantinople. In the spring of 1190, Frederick Barbarossa’s army finally crossed over into Asia Minor, at the far end of the Sea of Marmara, and began a wearying march through Turkish-held lands towards the Christian kingdom of Armenia, where the men could gather themselves for the assault on Saladin.

They arrived at the Armenian border in June of 1190. Hearing that the king of Armenia himself had come to greet him and was waiting on the other side of the shallow Saleph river, Frederick Barbarossa began to ford the river on horseback. Somehow, he fell; and in waist-deep water, surrounded by his own men, the emperor drowned.9

Without their leader, the German army divided. Some of the men headed back home to swear loyalty to the new emperor, Henry VI. Others pushed on, but plague and heat began to diminish their number. “Disease and death fell upon them,” writes the Arab chronicler Ibn al-Athir, “and they reached Antioch, looking as though they had been exhumed from their graves.” The king of Antioch, Bohemund III, was not particularly pleased to see them: “He encouraged them to join the Franks at Acre,” Ibn al-Athir says, “. . . but mortality was high among them, and only about a thousand of them were left.”10

The few who straggled on found the former King Guy of Jerusalem camped outside Acre’s walls. Guy had been freed by Saladin the previous winter after taking an oath not to fight against the Muslims, which he promptly broke by laying siege to Saladin’s stronghold at Acre. The siege had begun in August of 1189, and the pathetic German reinforcements did nothing to tip the balance towards the besiegers; Acre was still under siege when Philip II of France finally arrived, in April of 1191. “Considering how many noblemen have been at this siege,” Philip is said to have remarked, “it is extraordinary how slow they have been to take it.” But the Frankish reinforcements—six ships, rather than the huge numbers of men Guy had hoped for—also proved inadequate to bring Acre down.11

24.2 The Kingdom of Jerusalem

Meanwhile Richard, who (like Philip) had traveled by sea, had been shipwrecked on Cyprus. He had paused to capture the island from its Greek governor and did not arrive at Acre until early June.

His fleet—twenty-five ships, laden with men and provisions—heaved to on the horizon like the Second Coming, and the Crusaders welcomed him as the savior of the Crusade. “All the people were in transports,” the Itinerarium Regis Ricardi tells us, “shouting out congratulations and blowing trumpets . . . and there was great joy because the desire of all nations had come. . . . Nor was it easy to find any one who did not share in the general joy and welcome.”12

Philip was one. The hero’s welcome put him into an extremely poor temper, not sweetened by Richard’s refusal to hand over half of Cyprus. (The Crusade, in Richard’s eyes, hadn’t started until he got to the Holy Land, so Cyprus was his personal conquest.)* Philip had also been suffering from various fevers, rashes, and stomach ailments ever since his arrival. He was sick of crusade, sick of Richard, sick of Acre. Communication between the two kings broke down so thoroughly that, at one point, Philip was negotiating Acre’s surrender on one side of the city while Richard was attacking it on the other.13

Finally, the garrison at Acre—with Saladin’s approval—agreed to a truce. The soldiers would surrender the city, their lives would be spared, and in return Saladin would release all of the prisoners he still held, pay a substantial sum over to the Crusader war effort, and also return the fragment of the True Cross that had been taken from Jerusalem during the conquest.

The city duly surrendered. But on either Saladin’s side or Richard’s (depending on whose chronicles you read), the deal broke down. On August 20, Richard marched out nearly three thousand prisoners and slaughtered them within sight of Saladin’s headquarters.*

This ended the possibility of any more negotiations, and Saladin prepared his army for an all-out war. Richard took command of the Crusader army; Philip had decided to go home.

Roger of Hoveden, who traveled back with the French king (and recorded his every move in excruciating geographical detail), writes that Philip stopped in Rome, on the way, and “said many evil things of the king of England” to Pope Celestine III. He wanted the pope to release him from his treaty of friendship with Richard, so that he could attack Richard’s lands in the English king’s absence. Celestine refused. Still bound by the oath, Philip made a deal with the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI instead: “to lay hands upon the king of England, in case he should pass through his territory.”14

Unaware of the Christian hostiles arraying against him, Richard was marching south towards the port city of Jaffa, which he hoped to capture in order to assure a steady stream of supplies for his army. Saladin attempted to block him, and the two generals met north of Arsuf, on September 7, 1191.

Possibly Saladin had underestimated his enemy; Richard planned the battle carefully, breaking the opposing line in three places with his cavalry so that his foot soldiers could rush through into the body of the Muslim army. Ibn Shaddad, who himself fought in the battle, says that the Muslim front was “broken utterly . . . the Muslims were, in fact, in a complete rout.” It was a devastating defeat for Saladin, and a turning point in the war; Saladin would never face Richard in pitched battle again.15

Over the next year, the two men sparred, raided, and negotiated, always through intermediaries; when Richard suggested a face-to-face meeting, Saladin refused, explaining that kings could not fight properly against each other once they had met. It was becoming clear to both that victory would go to neither. Richard was too strong to be driven away; Saladin was too powerful to relinquish Jerusalem. Meanwhile, Richard was hearing alarming reports from home: Philip II was trying to persuade Richard’s younger brother John to seize Richard’s English territories and was planning on taking the lands in Western Francia for himself.16

After lengthy negotiations, representatives from both sides agreed to a treaty at the city of Ramla. The terms, finalized and sworn to on September 3, 1192, imposed a three-year peace. Richard would hand over captured territories to Saladin; Christian-held land on the coast would be left alone; Christian pilgrims would be allowed to visit Jerusalem and other holy sites unmolested. Richard arranged for Guy, the ousted king of Jerusalem, to rule in Cyprus instead; Acre was declared the new capital of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which survived as a tiny Crusader territory on the coast that no longer included the city of Jerusalem itself.17

Richard, heading home, found himself in greater danger from his fellow Christians than he had been from the Muslim army. He was captured on his way back through the Holy Roman Emperor’s territory, and imprisoned (as per Henry VI’s agreement with Philip) until February 1194. Instead of handing him over to Philip, Henry VI used the opportunity to raise cash: he ordered that Richard buy his freedom, a ransom demand recorded (delicately) in Richard’s own letter to his mother and the English barons who owed him allegiance:

We are prolonging our stay with the emperor, until his business and our own shall be brought to an end, and until we shall have paid him seventy thousand marks of silver.* Wherefore we do beg of you . . . that you will use all earnestness in raising the said sum of money.

The royal treasury was empty; Eleanor and the English barons (who hoped for royal favor in return for their efforts) raised the money by collecting gold and silver from the churches, confiscating the year’s crop of wool, and charging a 25 percent tax on the income of all Englishmen.18

While they were engaged in this effort, Saladin himself died in Damascus of a fever; his sons fought between themselves for his kingdom. Richard, finally ransomed and set free in early February of 1194, returned to mount his own war against Philip and his brother John, who had fled England and taken refuge at the French court. (“Take heed to yourself,” Philip had famously written to John, as soon as he heard of Richard’s release, “for the devil is let loose.”)19

The Third Crusade, beginning with yet another burst of religious fervor, had ended with political compromise between the Crusaders and their enemies, and with bloodshed between men of the same faith. Crusade had become simply another name for war; and its participants were more likely than not to die at the hands of their fellow believers.

Richard himself died in 1199, right after he and Philip agreed to a five-year truce in their ongoing war. One of the noblemen in Aquitaine, the Viscount of Limoges, had discovered a buried stash of gold and silver on his estate, put there for safekeeping by some earlier tenant and never retrieved. He sent Richard, as his liege lord, a portion of it, but Richard demanded the whole thing. The viscount refused to hand it over. Richard reacted with the same savagery he had displayed at Acre; he laid siege to the viscount’s castle, and when the knights defending it offered to surrender it in exchange for safety, Richard announced that he would storm the castle and hang them all.

He was riding around the castle on a reconnoiter when an archer on the walls loosed an arrow at him. It struck him in the arm; a wound, says Roger of Wendover, of which “he thought nothing.” But the doctor who extracted the arrowhead made a mess of the job, and the wound turned gangrenous. Twelve days later, the forty-two-year-old king died in his campaign quarters.

England and Western Francia he left to his brother John, the last surviving son of Henry II. He had ordered most of his body buried at the feet of his father, “whose destroyer he confessed himself to be.” But his heart was buried at Rouen and his intestines were buried at the Viscount of Limoges’s castle. “He left his entrails [to them],” Roger of Wendover concludes, “not considering them worthy of any other part of him.”20

*Another sticking point was the finalization of Richard’s betrothal to Philip’s half sister Alys. The marriage had been contracted in 1169, when Alys was eight and Richard eleven, as part of a peace deal with Louis VII. As was often done, Alys had been sent to live at the English court until she came of age. Henry had not yet approved the finalization of the marriage; rumors had spread that he himself had seduced Alys once she grew older (although there is no proof of this), and Richard himself was not enthusiastic about the match. But Philip II insisted that the wedding take place, and Richard had reluctantly agreed. As part of the 1189 treaty, Henry gave consent for the ceremony. It was never performed, however, and eventually Alys went home. She married a French nobleman in 1195.

*Bosnia was now under the ruler Ban Kulin; he had been appointed by Manuel I as a Byzantine vassal ruler, but had then pushed the Byzantine armies out of Bosnia and begun to rule independently. King Béla III of Hungary had claimed domination of Croatia and Serbia around 1180, just after the death of Manuel I; Byzantium, in no shape to send troops, had yielded the lands. As the historian John Fine points out, it was better for the empire if the contested territories belonged to Hungary, which was friendly to Constantinople, rather than to Venice, which wasn’t. See John Van Antwerp Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Late Twelfth Century to the Ottoman Conquest (University of Michigan Press, 1987), pp. 5–7.

*Richard had also just broken his betrothal to Philip’s half sister Alys.

*According to Ibn al-Athir and ibn Shaddad, Richard killed the prisoners before Saladin had a chance to fulfill his side of the bargain; William of Tyre’s Continuation insists that Saladin reneged multiple times first, and Roger of Hoveden accuses him of killing some of his prisoners before Richard killed any of the Acre garrison.

*Athough there is no good way of finding an exact equivalent in modern currency, this amount was worth about three times the king’s annual revenue from his own kingdom; roughly twelve million U.S. dollars. Henry would also demand an additional 30,000 marks.

Chapter Twenty-Five

The Sack of Constantinople

Between 1195 and 1204,

Crusaders serve themselves,

and Constantinople falls

THE FINAL CRUSADE of the twelfth century was a sordid series of landgrabs that barely bothered to wave the cross.

In 1195, the emperor Isaac Angelus lost his throne when his older brother, Alexius, mounted a revolt; Isaac Angelus had grown unpopular after a series of fruitless military ventures, and Alexius was able to claim popular support. He imprisoned his brother and then blinded him, after which he allowed the disabled ex-emperor to live in relative comfort. Isaac’s thirteen-year-old son, also named Alexius, was taken prisoner as well; but by 1201 his uncle had decided to give him the freedom to move about the city. According to Nicetas Choniates, the boy, now nineteen, paid a Pisan merchant ship to smuggle him through the Hellespont and out into the Mediterranean.1

The ship docked at Sicily. From there, young Alexius made his way to the royal court of Germany. The Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI had died unexpectedly of malaria in 1197, at the age of thirty-two. The German noblemen had elected his younger brother Philip as his successor (although Philip had not yet received the crown of the empire from the pope’s hand); and Philip had married young Alexius’s sister, Isaac Angelus’s second daughter, Irene.

Alexius’s arrival at his sister’s palace in Germany soon galvanized the Fourth Crusade.

This Crusade was already sputtering, very slowly, towards the Holy Land. Since August of 1198—eight months after his election—Pope Innocent III had been pleading for a renewal of the crusading effort. He had sent a letter to every head of state in Europe, begging each to commit to a March 1199 departure for the Holy Land. The usual rewards were offered—full pardon for sins and eternal salvation, plus the more immediate promise of debt relief—but this call to crusade had a distinctly judgmental tone. “The Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ is held in hostile hands,” Innocent wrote, “. . . [while] our princes . . . give themselves over to adulterous embraces . . . and harass one another in turn with inexorable hatred.” Indeed, England and France were at war; the kings of Christian Spain were fighting each other instead of the Almohads; Philip II of France had shut his wife in a convent so that he could marry again; Philip of Germany was struggling with a splinter group of nobles who had elected the second son of Henry the Lion, Otto, as a rival king. There were plenty of sins that needed forgiving.2

But all this Christian infighting meant that none of these kings were secure enough to leave their thrones untended and go on crusade. By 1201, King Emeric of Hungary was the sole monarch to answer the pope’s call. But he had been joined by a healthy contingent of French noblemen, German barons, and English knights, and popular enthusiasm for another crusade had been whipped into froth by a charismatic French preacher named Foulques who had traveled through the countryside, calling on the faithful to take the cross. A crusading army had come to life, but without kings, royal navies, or royal treasuries, it had no good way to get to Jerusalem.

The French Crusader Geoffroy de Villehardouin, who wrote an eyewitness account of the Fourth Crusade, tells us this problem was addressed by six French noblemen who went to Venice (where they would find “a greater number of ships . . . than at any other port”) and negotiated with the Doge of Venice for a fleet that would transport them to the Holy Land. The Doge, Enrico Dandolo, was ninety years old and nearly blind, but in full possession of his wits. When negotiations were finished, the Crusaders had agreed to pay 85,000 marks—a quarter again as much as Richard the Lionheart’s ruinous ransom—for ships and provisions.3

But when the Crusaders assembled at Venice in June 1202, as planned, less than a third of the expected force showed up—and a good many of the would-be holy warriors were too poor to chip in. The Crusaders managed to collect less than a quarter of the required payment. And there lay the fleet in front of them, out of reach.

Enrico Dandolo let them fret for a while before making a proposal: Venice had lost one of its treasured strongholds, the port city of Zadar, to Hungary. If the Crusaders would stop off on their way to the Holy Land and conquer it, they could have the fleet.

There were a few dissenting voices, but since the alternative was going home in humiliation, the Crusaders finally agreed. Despite age and blindness, Dandolo himself accompanied them to Zadar, where a nasty siege was laid into place—despite protests from the walls that the Crusaders were attacking a Christian city, held by a king who was himself a Crusader (although King Emeric hadn’t yet made a move towards the east). As a last resort, the defenders hung crucifixes from the parapets. But, encouraged by Dandolo, the Crusaders carried on with the siege until the city surrendered.4

By now it was nearly December, a bad time to travel by sea, and the Venetians and Crusaders decided to winter at Zadar. They divided the city in half and occupied it. Zadar was now home to over ten thousand bored, sword-carrying men, and at least one vicious armed brawl left both Venetians and Crusaders dead in the streets.

Meanwhile, young Alexius’s sister Irene had “beseeched her husband Philip of Germany to do his utmost to succor her father . . . and to help her brother, who was homeless and without a country and wandered about like the planets.” Philip was very willing to do so. Pope Innocent III had refused to crown Philip as Holy Roman Emperor, instead declaring his rival Otto be the emperor elect. Now Philip was being asked to help restore the rights of another Christian emperor; removing a usurper from the throne of Constantinople would certainly show Philip to be fulfilling the role of Holy Roman Emperor, no matter what the pope said.5

As he was unwilling to leave Germany open to Otto, Philip himself couldn’t go to Jerusalem. Instead, he and young Alexius concocted a plan: they would send envoys to the Crusaders at Zadar and ask them to help Alexius get the throne back. “Since you are on the march in the service of God, and for right and justice,” Philip wrote, “it is your duty . . . to restore their possessions to those who have been wrongfully dispossessed.” More concrete incentives were offered as well; Alexius was promising ten thousand men and 200,000 silver marks, which would solve all of the financial troubles of the Fourth Crusade.6

The Crusaders did not embrace this deal at once; in fact, they divided into three parties. One was all for marching to Constantinople, since this gave the entire Crusade the best chance of success. A second group insisted on going straight to the Holy Land. The third lobbied for going to Egypt first and attacking the sultan who controlled Jerusalem before tackling the city itself.

Eventually, the Constantinople party won the day. But the arguments continued all winter. “I can assure you,” writes Villehardouin, “that the hearts of our people were not at peace, for one party was continually working to break up the army, and the other to keep it together.” A good number of the lower-ranked Crusaders deserted. Shortly after Easter, 1203, the whole army left for Corfu, where they would meet Alexius; as they departed, they destroyed the city behind them.7

It was late June before the entire fleet finally reached the Bosphorus Strait. Young Alexius had apparently convinced them that the people of Constantinople would immediately rally to him, and that any fighting would be brief. Instead, the city closed against him. The Crusader army was forced to lay siege to it.

As sieges go, it was a brief one. The attack began on July 5. Ten days later, the first Crusader knights managed to scale the walls and enter the city. They were driven back, but a second assault then began, with Venetian warships hurling stones and arrows from the water while scaling ladders were put into place. “The din was so tremendous,” says Villehardouin, “that it seemed as if both land and sea were crumbling.” The attackers finally broke into the city itself, driving the panicked inhabitants in front of them. To block the approach of the emperor’s royal guard, they set the city on fire.8

That night, the emperor packed up his treasures and fled from the city. The blinded Isaac Angelus was sprung from prison by his supporters within the city, and by morning he was back in his palace, sitting on his throne.

There was a very brief respite of rejoicing, during which young Alexius was crowned as his father’s co-ruler; and then the Crusade derailed permanently.

Alexius, aware that his uncle still had partisans in the city, was afraid that the exiled usurper would return as soon as the Crusaders left. He offered to pay the army to stay until the following spring. Another argument erupted between the Crusader parties. In the end, they remained in Constantinople; but once again they were divided, bored, and aimless. They began to fight with the natives. A second fire, deliberately set by an unknown culprit, destroyed another huge swath of the city, this time wiping out the homes of the most powerful and wealthy inhabitants. Alexius, discovering that the royal treasury had been thoroughly raided, could pay his hired troops only by collecting special taxes. He tried breaking into the tombs of the previous emperors for their jewels, and even so could raise a mere fraction of the money needed. By January, everyone hated him.

Finally his own trusted lieutenant, a veteran named Mourtzouphlus, led a midnight raid on the young emperor’s bedchamber and took him prisoner. With the full support of the Byzantine army, he declared himself emperor, taking the name Alexius V Ducas. Old Isaac, now almost entirely senile, died (conveniently) sometime in the next few days; young Alexius was kept prisoner for several weeks, until the new emperor ordered him strangled.9

The Crusaders now realized that they were never going to get paid; and they were too broke to make it to either Jerusalem or Egypt. Constantinople was still a rich city, even after Alexius’s depredations. Alexius V Ducas was a murderer and usurper. Their duty was clear. They needed to seize Constantinople and bring justice to the palace. The clergymen who had accompanied the expedition assured them that bringing Constantinople back under the authority of the Church of Rome, after its long estrangement, was a valid crusading goal and would be rewarded with remission of sins.

Alexius V Ducas and the Byzantine army fought back. The struggle between Crusaders and the imperial army began on April 8, 1204; within four days, the troops of Constantinople were in full flight. Late on the night of April 12, Alexius V Ducas himself escaped through the Golden Gate.

On the morning of April 13, Constantinople lay under Crusader control, and the Crusaders began to strip the city clean. “Gold and silver, table-services and precious stones, satin and silk,” writes Villehardouin, “mantles of squirrel fur, ermine and miniver, and every choicest thing to be found on this earth. . . .”

So much booty had never been gained in any city since the creation of the world. Everyone took quarters where he pleased, and there was no lack of fine dwellings in that city. So the troops of the Crusaders and the Venetians were duly housed. They all rejoiced and gave thanks to our Lord . . . that those who had been poor now lived in wealth and luxury.10

Ibn al-Athir writes that, during the three-day sack of the city, the Crusaders killed priests, bishops, and monks, and destroyed churches. The altars were stripped, icons smashed apart, jewels pried out of sacred vessels, relics stolen. The eyewitness Nicholas Mesarites tells us that, in their greed, the Crusaders stripped women to see “whether a feminine ornament or gold was fastened to the body or hidden in them.” And there was worse to come.

They slaughtered the newborn, killed matrons, stripped elder women and outraged old ladies. They tortured the monks, they hit them with their fists and kicked their bellies, thrashing and rending their reverend bodies with whips. . . . [M]any were dragged like sheep and beheaded, and on the holy tombs, the wretched slew the innocent.11

By the second day of the sack, many of the Crusaders were thoroughly drunk from looting Constantinople’s luxurious wine cellars. They were, says Nicetas Choniates, braying like salacious asses at the very sight of women, and a sickness of rape swept through the city. No one was spared: virgins, married women, the old, even nuns were violated in the streets. Men who tried to stop the assaults were run through, decapitated, or left to die in the streets with their limbs hacked off. Nicetas himself managed to get his pregnant wife out of the city by smearing her face with mud and shielding her with his own body.12

Finally, when the looting and murder had run its course, Crusaders elected one of their own, the Count of Flanders, to be the new emperor: Emperor Baldwin I. Constantinople had been transformed into the capital of yet another Crusader kingdom: the Latin Empire.

And that was the end of the Crusade. Not a single Crusader made it to Egypt, let alone Jerusalem.

Innocent III, appalled at the bloody ending to his treasured cause, sent a fierce reproof from Rome: “They who are supposed to serve Christ rather than themselves,” he wrote, “. . . have bathed those swords in the blood of Christians.”13

25.1 The Conquest of Constantinople

But self-service had been a part of the crusading impulse since Bohemund’s refusal to give up Antioch. The rot that had set in after the First Crusade had eaten through to the surface; when a crusade offered power, the chance to grasp a kingdom would always trump the cause of Christ.

Part Two

INVASIONS,

HERESIES, AND

UPRISINGS

Chapter Twenty-Six

Westward

Around 1200,

a Mayan empire grows in Central America,

and the Inca slaughter the villagers of the Cuzco valley

ACROSS THE ATLANTIC, two new stories were unfolding.

On the Central American land bridge, the city of Chichen Itza, ruled by Toltec invaders, was itself facing invasion.* Its king carried out bloody rituals of human sacrifice, pouring out the sacred earth-restoring liquid in an attempt to keep his kingdom safe. But the sacrifices failed him. Sometime around the turn of the century, the Mayan king Hunac Ceel launched an attack against Chichen Itza’s imposing walls. To carry out his assault on his huge neighbor, he had hired seven generals and their troops from the fragmented lands farther to the southeast.

With the help of these mercenaries, he captured Chichen Itza; the city fell, a slightly later chronicle tells us, “because of the treachery of Hunac Ceel,” which suggests that the conquest may have come about through trickery and betrayal, rather than simply through force of arms. However it began, the invasion ended with Chichen Itza sacked and burned, its sacred reliefs shattered and defaced, the places of offerings laid waste; the people fled outwards and took refuge in other cities.1

This was only the beginning of a larger campaign. Over the next decade, Hunac Ceel conquered a good part of the Yucatán peninsula and made his home city, Mayapan, the center of a small but vigorous Maya empire. Mayapan was smaller than Chichen Itza, but carefully laid out as a military fortress: it was easy to defend, hard to besiege.2

Hunac Ceel’s descendants ruled over the northern Yucatán peninsula for the next two centuries. The empire survived in part because of the strong central control wielded from Mayapan itself; the conquered aristocrats were required to live in the capital city, under the eye of the kings, while their estates farther away were administered by stewards on their behalf. It was a strict and unforgiving regime, but effective; and the empire flourished. “The natives lived together in towns in a very civilized fashion,” wrote the Spanish bishop Diego de Landa, who saw the empire of Mayapan in its final years. “In the middle of the town were their temples with beautiful plazas, and all around the temples stood the houses of the lords and priests. . . . They had their improved lands planted with wine trees, and they sowed cotton, pepper, and maize, and they lived thus close together for fear of their enemies.” The well-guarded borders held; force of arms had finally brought a long period of peace and prosperity to at least one part of the fragmented landscape.3

26.1 Central America

BY THE TWELFTH CENTURY, myths and rituals had begun to illuminate the Mesoamerican world. But South America remained largely voiceless. The ruins left behind suggest that large empires were much more common here than in the equally silent lands of North America; for centuries, these empires rose, flourished, and fell without leaving words behind them.

They left us puzzles instead.

26.2 South America

The Andes Mountains march along the western coast of the entire continent: a range over four thousand miles long (the longest in the world), three hundred miles wide, its highest peak soaring up to nearly twenty-three thousand feet.* South of the equator, the mountains create a rain shadow: a stretch of desert blocked by the peaks from moisture-bearing winds. The winds, hitting the mountains first, drop all of their water; by the time they flow over the summits and down to the desert, they are entirely dry. The Atacama Desert, on the South American coast, gets less than an inch of precipitation per year.4 On its driest sands, rain falls perhaps once every forty or fifty years.

But in scattered places across the desert, underground rivers rise abruptly to the surface. Around the oases created by this subterranean water, the Nazca people lived.

They left pottery and ruins behind them: no chronicles, no legends, no lists of kings. Instead, they created enormous patterns on the dry ground by sweeping stones and debris away from the desert floor to reveal the lighter sands beneath. The lines of lighter ground form enormous spirals, grids, and figures of animals: a spider, a bird in flight, a fish, a monkey. The pictures are enormous: a hummingbird 305 feet long, a parrot whose head is nearly 70 feet across, a 150-foot spider. The outsider, standing in the desert, would see only a random path stretching to the horizon. The Nazca initiate saw instead the tip of a bird’s wing, the end of a lizard’s tail, the hand of a dancing man. Only from very high up can we see what the Nazca line drawers held in their minds.5

26.1 Nazca lines: Spider.

Credit: © Charles and Josette Lenars / Corbis

26.2 Nazca lines: Dancing hands.

Credit: © Kevin Schafer / Corbis

No single explanation accounts for the Nazca lines. The archaeologist Maria Reiche, who first mapped out the figures in the 1940s, believed that the lines charted astronomical movements, but many of the lines can’t be associated with any known movement of the stars. Some of the drawings, but not all, seem to mark out underground water flow. Possibly the paths were used for sacred walking rituals, a practice carried on in later Andean cultures—but there is no way to know whether the rituals existed this early. The only certain conclusion is that the Nazca people carved themselves into the landscape of their home. In the words of the art historian George Kubler, the lines “inscribe human meaning upon the hostile wastes of nature.” The lines carry a story; we may never know what the meaning of the story is.6

A little farther to the north, in slightly more hospitable surroundings, the Moche people constructed mud-brick buildings instead of desert patterns. In the northern valley that served as the center of a growing empire, the Moche built two gigantic hill complexes of temples, palaces, courtyards, administrative buildings, and cities of the dead: the Place of the Sun, the Huaca del Sol, and the Place of the Moon, the Huaca de la Luna. Their craftsmen produced 143 million adobe bricks for these buildings, each stamped with the symbol of its maker.7

As the Moche conquered their way into the surrounding hills and valleys, they built a grid of wide, well-designed roads and put into place a sophisticated system of communication: relay runners traveled the roads, carrying messages marked with cryptic symbols on lima beans. At its height, the Place of the Sun and the Place of the Moon lorded it over fifteen thousand square miles of territory. Vast irrigation canals, some running nearly a hundred miles through the Moche state, provided the growing villages with water. Figurines and paintings preserve the likenesses of the Moche kings and noblemen, but we know no names.8

By the twelfth century, both the Moche and the Nazca were long gone. The Nazca were brought low by a drought that probably dried up even the underground rivers of the Atacama Desert, at least for a time. The uninhabitable desert preserved the mysterious Nazca glyphs in the sand for centuries. In the rain shadow, no water fell to wash the lines away.

Farther to the north, the Moche suffered from the double blows of alternating drought and flood. The ruins in their valley reveal that crop-killing dryness alternated with torrential downpours caused by more and more frequent El Niño events: warm currents that raise the surface temperature along the coast and produce strong, disruptive thunderstorms. Floods and mudslides ravaged the Moche valley. Winds and tides drove coastal dunes farther and farther inland, spreading sterile sand across fertile fields.9

At the height of the floods and storms, the Moche tried to appease whatever deities governed the sky and winds. Three children, sacrificed together, are buried in a ceremonial plaza at the Place of the Moon, at the edge of a drastic mudslide. More sacrificial victims, buried in at least two different ceremonies, lie above and beside them. But the bloodshed did not stop the violent weather, or halt the slow and eventual collapse of the Moche empire. The sands covered the cities on the outskirts. The irrigation canals, blocked by mud and cracked by earthquakes, were abandoned; and, like the Nazca, the Moche faded away.10

The peoples who succeeded them, some time later, were known as the Chimu. They built their towns partly on top of Moche ruins and did not try to spread their empire over nearly as great an area. The smaller kingdom survived into the fifteenth century, long enough to leave an oral history behind it; later Spanish historians, recording the stories they had heard from the conquered Chimu, tell of a bearded man named Tacaynamo who arrived on the South American coast from the sea. He beached his balsa wood raft and settled in the old Moche land. His son and his grandson conquered more and more of the nearby river valleys and established a royal dynasty.11

By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Chimu capital, Chan Chan, covered some nine square miles and was home to perhaps thirty thousand people. This was a fairly sparse population, for such a large city (the ancient Central American city of Teotihuacan had occupied about the same area and had over two hundred thousand inhabitants), and ruins suggest that Chan Chan was more a center for pilgrimage than an actual living city.12

The Chimu were still flourishing when, right around the year 1200, an unimportant tribe called the Inca settled on their southern border. They began to build tiny scattered villages on the rocky sides of the central Andes. Even the most prosperous of these villages, known as Cuzco, was a shabby agricultural outpost, occupied by llama herders and farmers scratching out a living in cold high-altitude fields.13

Later, the Inca would claim that their first king began to rule in Cuzco at this time. His name in legend was Manco Capac; he was the oldest of eight siblings who (in the way of mythical founders) “had no father or mother.” Instead, the eight brothers and sisters emerged from a hill covered with gold, and immediately embarked on conquest: “Let us seek out fertile lands,” they said to each other, “and where we find them, let us subjugate the people who are there, and take their lands, and wage war on all those who do not receive us as lords.”14

The truth behind the story lies in the Inca will to conquer: they had taken the site of Cuzco away from its original inhabitants. The conquest had also been savage: Manco Capac and his family tore the unfortunate villagers into pieces, ate their hearts and lungs, ripped pregnant women open. The natives of the Cuzco valley, the stories conclude, “were utterly destroyed.”15

For the next two centuries, the Inca would remain in the valley they had conquered. But the seizing of Cuzco was only the first act in their history. The second act would more than match the first for bloodshed.

*See Bauer, The History of the Medieval World, pp. 574–582.

*Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Andes, has an elevation of 22,841 feet. It is the second-highest mountain among the “Seven Summits,” the nickname for the highest elevations on the seven continents; among the Seven Summits, only Everest (29,029 feet) is higher. Over a hundred peaks in the Himalaya range are taller than Aconcagua, but the Andean mountain is the highest summit outside Asia.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The Mongol School of Warfare

Between 1201 and 1215,

Genghis Khan learns how to fight the civilized world

SINCE 1165, the Jin in the north of China and the Song in the south had kept a fragile peace. But now, a first whisper of unease came from the lands to the north.

Ranging across the flat northern grasslands known as steppes were a loosely related set of tribes known collectively as “Mongols.” They had already migrated southward from the taiga, the cold northern pine forests; according to their own chronicles, the thirteenth-century The Secret History of the Mongols, they had descended from the union of a forest doe with a predatory blue-grey wolf. Every Mongol tribe had its own khan to lead it, and the khans and tribes struggled with each other for power. But within each tribe, clans and their chiefs fought constantly among themselves for horses, wives, loot, and the chance to rise to leadership of the tribe.1

Temujin, son of the chief of the Borjigid clan, was born near the sacred mountain of Burkhan Khaldun in 1167; The Secret History says that the newborn was “clutching in his right hand a clot of blood the size of a knucklebone.” At the age of nine, he was betrothed to the ten-year-old daughter of a clan leader from another tribe, and was sent (as was traditional) to live with the bride’s family. Days later, his father died, and Temujin ran away from his prospective father-in-law and returned home.2

This was the beginning of a fraught adolescence. Temujin and his family were driven from their home by another clan, the Taichi’ut, who hoped to gain the khanship of their tribe; the exiles spent the next years scrounging for food in the cold wastes of the Khentil mountain range. Temujin was later captured by the Taichi’ut clan chief and escaped, still wearing the wooden collar used to confine him. By the time he turned sixteen, he was an adult with fully fledged instincts for survival.3

Now old enough to be considered the head of his clan, Temujin revisited the home of his betrothed bride, Borte, and insisted that her father honor the arrangement. He then approached the khan of the nearby Kerait tribe and negotiated an alliance. The khan, an experienced middle-aged soldier named Toghrul, had been a friend of Temujin’s dead father; but he was more impressed with the gifts Temujin brought than with the obligations of that old attachment.

Almost immediately, Temujin was forced to call on both of his new allies for help. Another three-tribe coalition, known collectively as the Merkit, invaded his camp while he was away and kidnapped Borte.

Kidnapping was the second most popular way for a Mongol to get a wife; Temujin’s own mother had been kidnapped, decades before, from a Merkit tribesman, and the raid was both revenge and an attempt to check Temjuin’s growing power. It backfired. Temujin, Toghrul, and Temujin’s childhood friend Jamuqa joined forces (perhaps ten thousand horsemen, converging on the Merkit camp) and wiped the Merkit out. The Secret History celebrates the victory with song:

. . . [W]e tore their livers to pieces.

We emptied their beds

And we exterminated their relatives;

The women of theirs who remained,

We surely took captive!

Thus we destroyed the Merkit people.4

(Borte was rescued as well, an event that gets much less space in The Secret History than the victory in battle.)

A series of other victories followed. Temujin’s star was rising, and by 1200 or so he expected to be elected Great Khan, the warleader of the entire Mongol confederation. Instead, in 1201—the Year of the Hen in the Mongol calendar—his opponents banded together to throw their weight behind Jamuqa.

This was the end of the friendship between the two men. As children, they had sworn a blood-brothers oath of loyalty; now they were enemies. Between 1201 and 1204, the Mongol tribes divided into two factions behind the two leaders.

But through a combination of persuasion and conquest, Temujin’s following swelled while Jamuqa’s shrank away. When Temujin’s old ally Toghrul hesitated, unsure which man to join, Temujin attacked the Kerait tribe and forced it to submit. Toghrul fled westward, into the territory of the Naiman tribe, where he was accidentally killed by a border guard. Outnumbered and outmanned, Jamuqa followed him.

In 1204, Temujin pursued his old friend into Naiman territory and wiped out the men who had given Jamuqa shelter: “[He] utterly defeated and conquered the people of the Naiman tribe on the southern slopes of the Altai,” says The Secret History. Jamuqa escaped into the mountains and lived there as an outcast until he was finally taken prisoner by Temujin’s men.

Brought before Temujin, he asked one last favor from his childhood companion: “Let me die swiftly,” he said, “and your heart will be at rest. And . . . let them kill me without shedding blood.” To die without bloodshed was the privilege of an honorable warrior, and Temujin granted the request. As Jamuqa left his presence, two guards broke the prisoner’s back.5

Now Temujin was without rival; all he had to do was return to the Mongol heartland, to the foot of Burkhan Khaldun, and claim the title Great Khan. But before he turned back east, he sent his lieutenant, Ilah Ahai, on an exploratory raid into the nearby kingdom of the Western Xia.*

27.1 The Advance of the Mongols

Like the Jin, the people of the Western Xia had once been nomads who aspired to be like the Song. While the Jin and Song battled, the Western Xia king Li Renxiao had been building schools for Confucian learning, endowing Buddhist temples, putting into place a Song-style examination system for civil servants. Under his rule, Western Xia merchants used iron coins to trade with both Jin and Song. He supervised the editing and revision of hundreds of volumes of Buddhist treatises in Tangut, the native language of the Xia. He ordered the Western Xia law codes collected into twenty volumes, written in the distinctive Tangut script (modeled on Chinese characters).6 In 1190, just before Li Renxiao’s death, his court scholars assembled a Tangut-Chinese dictionary (A Timely Gem), containing the earliest complete bilingual glossary in the world.*

Li Renxiao himself died in 1193, aged seventy; his son Weiming Chunyou now sat on the throne. He paid little attention to the Mongol raid into his territory. For his part, Ahai returned to Temujin with camels and livestock, and with reports that the Xia had fortified cities.

The Mongols had no experience fighting against cities. Temujin took note of the richness of the Western Xia land, but then turned away and returned to his homeland. There, in 1206, all of the Mongol tribes gathered together to acknowledge him as their khan. Jamuqa had held the title Great Khan, Gur Khan; to set his rival apart, the Mongols hailed him as Genghis Khan.

There is still no firm agreement as to what Genghis means: something like “Khan of All Oceans,” which is to say, Universal Khan. It was an invented title, a brand new label for a man who did not fit the Mongol mold. Already, Genghis Khan was evolving an idea of what a khan could be: much more than the leader of nomadic raiding parties. He had organized his personal bodyguard into ranks and offices; it was now ten thousand men strong and would become the center of his empire, traveling with him wherever he went as a nomadic center of government, the “state on horseback.” He had taken prisoner, in his wars against the Naimans, an educated man kidnapped by the Naimans themselves from the Turks; after a long conversation with this scholar, Genghis Khan ordered him to create an alphabet capable of reducing the Mongolian language to writing. This script would be used for the first Mongol state records, the first Mongol book of legal decisions.7

The Mongols were surrounded by undefeated peoples on three of the four points of the compass: Goryeo to the east, the Jin to the south, and the Xia to the west. Of the three, the Western Xia were the most vulnerable. They were less powerful than the Jin, reached across open land rather than a mountainous peninsula neck.

Weiming Chunyou had just been displaced on the throne by his more aggressive cousin Li Anchaun. When the Mongol invasion began in 1209, Li Anchaun assembled a sizable army to meet it and set up a defensive front at a mountain pass north of the Xia capital Chung-hsing. For a time, the Mongols were halted. Only when they resorted to their traditional mode of fighting—pretending to withdraw, drawing the Western Xia forces out of their entrenched position to follow, and then closing around them to fight in the open—were they able to drive the Xia army away from the pass. But their next task was equally unfamiliar: to lay siege to the fortified city of Chung-hsing itself.

Faced with this novel problem, Genghis Khan came up with an original solution. He ordered his soldiers to dam the nearby branch of the Yellow river, hoping to flood the capital out.

Seeing the dam take shape outside his walls, Li Anchaun sent a desperate appeal to the Jin for help. But the newly crowned Jin emperor, Weishaowang, was fighting off challenges to his legitimacy, and he shrugged off the request: “It is advantageous to my state if its enemies attack each other,” he told his councillors. “What grounds do we have for concern?”8

Genghis Khan’s experiment didn’t work; the inexpertly built dam broke and flooded the Mongol camp instead. But with no reinforcements coming from the Jin, Li Anchaun decided to make peace with the enemy. He bought Genghis Khan off with tribute and a royal marriage to one of his daughters.9

Genghis Khan accepted the truce—for the moment—and immediately turned to attack the Jin. He had learned from the unsuccessful campaign. He always learned.

It took the Mongols four years to battle their way to the northern capital of Zhongdu; four years of raids and retreats, advances and reorganizations, short rations and costly battles: hard lessons in how to conduct a war with a settled people. But the Mongol soldiers were accustomed to desperate discomfort. They had always lived on the move; they had never been at peace. The expertise gained in each sally, each siege, figured in the next battle plan. By 1214, Genghis Khan knew how to besiege a walled city, how to withstand an attack of heavily armed infantry, how to drive an entrenched force backward.

In the spring of 1214, Genghis Khan reached Zhongdu and laid siege to the capital. The Jin emperor retreated quickly to his southern headquarters, the old Song capital of Kaifeng, leaving a governor in charge of Zhongdu. This was not a popular move, and a scattering of the Jin troops, disgusted by what they saw as a cowardly retreat, deserted the Jin cause and went over to the enemy, bringing with them yet more knowledge in how to conduct a war against an empire.

The siege went on for more than a year. The people of Zhongdu began to starve. They ate horses, dogs, trash; eventually, the corpses of the dead. In the summer of 1215, the desperate governor took poison, and the city’s defenses collapsed.

The Mongol besiegers broke into Zhongdu and spread through its streets, murdering, looting, and burning. This is what they would have done to another conquered tribe; but Zhongdu was magnitudes larger, with more plunder and victims than they had ever seen before.

They had become skilled conductors of war, but they had no experience as victors over a sedentary people, and they destroyed Zhongdu. Much of the city burned. Thousands were killed, their corpses piled in huge heaps outside the walls. The contemporary history Tabakat-i-Nisiri says,

When a few years later Baha ad-Din, leader of a mission from Sultan Muhammad of Khwarazm, approached the capital he saw a white hill and in answer to his query was told by the guide that it consisted of bones of the massacred inhabitants. At another place the earth was, for a long stretch of road, greasy from human fat.10

The northern lands of the Jin had played host to the Mongol school of warfare, and in the process had been laid waste.

*The Western Xia are also known as the Xi Xia (Pinyin) or Hsi Hsia (Wade-Giles); they are often called the Tangut, after the dominant ethnic group within the kingdom.

*To be precise, the “earliest bilingual glossary with both source and target language explanations in the world.” See Heming Yong and Jing Peng, Chinese Lexicography: A History from 1046 BC to AD 1911 (2008), pp. 377–378.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

John Softsword

Between 1203 and 1213,

John of England loses his Frankish lands

and makes too many enemies

THE LIONHEART WAS DEAD, and his brother John sat on the English throne.

The years since his coronation had not been good ones. As soon as John inherited the rule of England, Philip ceased to be his ally. Philip’s intention had always been to reduce the power of the English crown; John, the thorn in Richard’s side, was a welcome friend to the French king, but King John of England was his enemy.

John’s older brother Geoffrey, dying before his father in 1186, had left only two daughters; but his wife Constance had given birth to a son named Arthur seven months later. As soon as Richard was dead, Philip insisted that Arthur, not John, was rightfully king of England. He welcomed Constance and the twelve-year-old Arthur to his court in Paris. The dukes of Anjou, Maine, and Tours—all English-held lands—joined him in rejecting John’s claims.1

Three years of struggle followed. There were multiple battles, complicated negotiations, and at least two temporary truces. John used every weapon at his disposal, including marriage; he had divorced his first wife for failure to bear him an heir in 1199, and in 1200 he set his sights on the young daughter of the Count of Angoulême. Isabella of Angoulême—perhaps twelve or even younger—was already betrothed to the son of the Count of Marche, a marriage that would have created a strong, French-loyal enclave right in the middle of the land John wanted for himself. “Seeing that John, king of England, had a fancy for her,” says Roger of Hoveden, “her father . . . gave her in marriage to John, king of England.” This earned John the fury of the Count of Marche, but prevented the count’s son from gaining Angoulême for himself.2

Nothing worked. By April of 1203, John had lost almost every English possession in Western Francia. And then, at the very end of July, he had a piece of luck.

In Poitiers, John’s men took nearly two hundred French knights captive. Among them was Arthur himself. This was a blow to Philip’s cause; Roger of Wendover says that, getting word of the capture, he retreated “in vexation” back to Paris. But John had a talent for turning gold into mud. He sent Arthur to Rouen, with orders that he be guarded. “But shortly afterwards,” Roger of Wendover adds, “the said Arthur suddenly disappeared. . . . John was suspected by all of having slain him with his own hand; for which reason many turned their affections from the king from that time forward . . . and entertained the deepest enmity against him.”3

Nothing was ever known for sure about the boy’s death. Certainly Philip, who had used Arthur against John just as he had used John against Richard, made no effort to find him. But the disappearance, joined with John’s complete inability either to finish the sieges he had begun or to relieve castles under French attack, spelled disaster for the English king. His English allies were losing enthusiasm both for the fight and for their king, and Gervase of Canterbury tells us that the French had begun to call him, mockingly, Johannem Mollegladium: John Softsword.4

Late in 1203, John deserted Normandy—his last remaining possession in Western Francia—and retreated back across the English Channel. Richard had recovered almost all of the lands in Western Francia that had belonged to his father; John had lost them again.5

FOR THE NEXT EIGHT YEARS, the French and English kings circled each other in a hostile holding pattern.

John, left only with England, Ireland, and his mother’s ancestral lands in the Duchy of Aquitaine, devoted himself to refilling his war-depleted treasury. At his coronation, he had accepted numerous bribes and payments from men who already held royal office and hoped to keep it under the new regime. The royal financial records known as the Chancellor’s Roll document scores of “presents” to the king, not only from officials but from towns and cities as well, accompanied with messages hoping for “goodwill,” “peace,” and “loving treatment.”6

And he had taken full advantage of the royal custom, ongoing since the days of Henry, of collecting a fee called scutage from the English barons. Instead of going to war, a baron could buy the right to stay at home with a cash payment. Since John’s reign had begun with war, he had already leveled a demand of scutage every single year since 1199.7

Neither of these methods had created much goodwill towards John, and the heavy scutage in particular had set his barons on edge. With the war over, he dared not continue to collect the fees. Instead, early in 1207 he called the bishops and abbots of England to a council in London and informed them that all of the priests and parsons in England would be required to pay taxes on the revenue from all church-held land. The bishops and abbots refused, indignantly: “The English Church,” they announced, “could by no means submit to a demand which had never been heard of in all previous ages.”8

28.1 John’s Losses and Philip’s Gains

Undaunted, John used the consecration of the new Archbishop of Canterbury in June as an excuse to seize church property. Pope Innocent III had chosen, to fill the empty post, the English churchman Stephen Langton, who had been teaching in Paris for years and had just been made a cardinal in Rome. Innocent had not asked for John’s approval, and John flew into a convenient rage: He knew nothing of Langton, he told the pope, except that the man had “dwelt much among his enemies,” and he was incensed that Innocent had not bothered to ask for his consent to the appointment. “He added,” says Roger of Wendover, “that he would stand up for the rights of his crown, if necessary, even to death.” He then refused to allow Langton to enter England, and confiscated all of Canterbury’s estates—and their revenue—for himself.9

Innocent at once put the entire country under interdict, which did not bother John in the slightest. Instead, he confiscated more church property, under the excuse that the clergy who held them only did so on condition that they perform their job, which they obviously could not do under current conditions.10

The interdict dragged on, and the people of England suffered. “All church services ceased,” writes Roger of Wendover; “. . . the bodies of the dead too were carried out of cities and towns, and buried in roads and ditches without prayers or the attendance of priests.”11

Meanwhile, John went on refilling the royal coffers. His ongoing quarrel with Philip gave him another way to raise revenue: confiscation of the lands of those English nobles he suspected of divided loyalties. One such was Simon de Montfort, who inherited the English title Earl of Leicester from his uncle, but who was himself born near Paris, son of the Count of Montfort-l’Amaury. Under the excuse that de Montfort was bound to be a vassal of the king of France, John allowed him to inherit the title, but in late 1207, took the lands for himself; and de Montfort joined the growing rank of Englishmen who hated their king.

Over the next five years, John socked away an astonishing amount of tax money, confiscated treasure, and church funds. In 1210, he followed Philip’s example and ordered all the Jews in England imprisoned, “in order to do [his] will with their money.” Those who resisted were brutalized; a rabbi in Bristol, refusing to pay up, had one tooth knocked out by John’s men every morning for a week before he gave up and agreed to hand over his savings. “The corn of the clergy was every where locked up . . . for the benefit of the revenue,” Roger of Wendover tells us, and everywhere barons were forced to pay the king fines for trespasses as small as putting a fish weir into a river without John’s express permission. Resentment built, and built, and built. By 1213, it had hit a fever height and the king knew it.

He did not reform his financial policies, though. Instead, he “began to suspect everyone,” says the contemporary Barnwell Chronicle, “and went everywhere armed, with armed men.”12

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Sundiata of the Mali

Between 1203 and 1240,

the clans of the Malinke fight over Ghana’s land,

and the slave trade north grows

GHANA HAD FALLEN: first to Almoravid invasion and then to the rebellion of the Sosso, a once-subject clan in the south. Around 1203, just a few years after claiming the kingship of the Sosso clan itself, the clan chief Sumanguru overran the capital city of Kumbi-Saleh. The last remnants of Ghanan power fell into his hands; the entire country was his.

This must have been a great military campaign, but the warriors who fought with Sumanguru did not, like the chroniclers of the West, record its battles. All that we know of Sumanguru comes from the Epic of Sundiata, a tale told orally, for centuries, by professional bards known as griots. “He was skilled in warfare,” the tale tells us,

His father was a jinn,

His mother was a human being. . . .

The authority of kingship was given to him;

His power as a king was great;

He used to make hats out of human skin,

He used to make sandals out of human skin.1

This is not a flattering depiction, but at the very least we can gather that Sumanguru was no more or less ruthless than Simon de Montfort, far to his north, or Genghis Khan, directing his operations far to the east.

The heartland of Ghana was much-coveted ground: watered by both rivers and sweet wells, says the Arab geographer al-Idrisi, with fish, elephants, giraffes, rice, and sorghum in abundance; so full of gold, writes the thirteenth-century cosmologist al-Qazwini, that it “grows in the sand of this country as carrots do in our land, and the people come out at sunrise to pluck the gold.” Sumanguru did not hold his conquests easily. Not long after his destruction of the old Ghana government, he faced a challenge to his authority from another clan in the Malinke tribe; the Keita, to his southeast.2

The Keita, unlike the Sosso, were Muslim. They had traded up the Niger river valley, through the central trade route that led to Tunis, for generations, and Islamic beliefs had filtered back down to them along with the northern goods. They were also disinclined to submit to Sumanguru. Under their king Nare Fa Maghan, the Keita fought back. Before Nare Fa Maghan’s death, sometime around 1217, Sumanguru’s armies sacked the capital city of the Keita nine separate times. Each time, the Keita regathered themselves and again rebelled.3

When Nare Fa Maghan died, his oldest son inherited the rule of the Keita. Instead of continuing to fight, he decided to make peace with the aggressive enemy. Peace meant submission, but the new king was willing to pay the price; in addition, he handed over his sister in marriage to Sumanguru. For a time, the Sosso controlled almost all of the old Ghana territory.4

But the Keita remained restless, and it soon became apparent that the marriage treaty had been a ruse.

In the Epic of Sundiata, Sumanguru’s bride tries to wheedle out of him, on their wedding night, the secret of his invulnerability on the battlefield: “What is it that can kill you?” she says, before she allows him to lay a hand on her. “If you do not tell me, you will not know me as a wife.” (At this, Sumanguru’s mother—unexpectedly close to hand—remarks, “Why would you spill your secrets to a one-night woman?” Soothing the old lady, Sumanguru promises to tell his new wife the secret once his mother is safely asleep.)

The secret, it turns out, is witchcraft; Sumanguru is a practitioner of the dark arts. Once she has learned this, the princess tells her groom that she’s having her period and can’t sleep with him after all; and the next morning she escapes home to tell her brothers her discovery. Armed with the materials for a hastily assembled spell against the sorcerer, her brother Sundiata—younger brother of the king—sets off to destroy Sumanguru.5

The Epic of Sundiata, told for hundreds of years before it was first written down early in the twentieth century, reflects the hostility of the Islamic Keita towards the non-Muslim Sosso. Sumanguru remained an implacable enemy of Islam, refusing to allow his people to observe its practices, executing Muslims who fell into his hands. But there was another edge to the hatred between the two clans as well. Sumanguru also resented the thriving trade in African slaves that the Keita carried on, selling their captives north to Muslim traders. No abolitionist, Sumanguru was prone to turn his own captives into slaves; but he fought against the custom of selling them into Islamic lands and drove Muslim merchants from every territory he conquered.6

This did not improve his popularity, and Sundiata had little trouble gathering allies to fight against the autocratic ruler. “All the rebellious kings of the savanna country had gathered [with him],” the Epic tells us. “On all sides, villages opened their gates to Sundiata. In all these villages Sundiata recruited soldiers.” A long and catastrophic civil war began. By 1230, Sundiata had inherited his brother’s royal title of king; by 1235, his allies had driven Sumanguru’s army backwards to his capital city; and by 1240, Sumanguru had fled, his empire in fragments, and his palace burned to the ground by Sundiata’s men.

The short-lived Sosso kingdom collapsed. “After the destruction of Sumanguru’s capital,” the Epic concludes, “the world knew no other master but Sundiata.” Sundiata seized control of the old Ghana lands, claimed Kumbi-Saleh as his own, and established his own empire; it became known as Mali.7

29.1 Sosso and Mali

In the Epic of Sundiata, the king of the Keita is an Islamic hero, victor in the war against the animistic and violent Sumanguru: “In the same way as light precedes the sun,” it explains, “so the glory of Sundiata, overleaping the mountains, shed itself on all the Niger plain.” He was proclaimed “King of Kings” by the Malinke, and over the next two decades followed Sumanguru’s example, conquering the outlying territories until Mali stretched past Ghana’s old boundaries to unite a new expanse of western African land.

But along with Sundiata’s triumph came a renewal of the slave trade. Before Sumanguru, Kumbi-Saleh had hosted a thriving slave market; now, under the rule of Sundiata, the markets revived and grew larger and busier. Slave traders came down the central trade route to Sundiata’s new capital city, Niani; and Mali grew richer and richer.8

Chapter Thirty

The Jokyu War

Between 1203 and 1242,

the emperor challenges the shogunate,

and the shogunate triumphs

IN 1203, the new shogun of Japan found himself under house arrest. He was twenty-one, and had been shogun for less than four years.

The shogunate itself was only eleven years old. It had been the masterwork of his father, Yoritomo; and at Yoritomo’s death, in 1199, it was still a complicated and delicately balanced creation. Kamakura, the eastern city that served as the shogunate’s headquarters, was filled with samurai who had a shot at real political power for the first time. Samurai had wielded plenty of clout in Japan over the previous century, but they had always done so in the service of someone else: a government minister, a clan leader, an ambitious official. Samurai swords could determine the outcome of a war, but the samurai themselves had never ascended high enough in the Japanese bureaucratic hierarchy to decree what issues were worth fighting over.1

Yoritomo, himself a soldier, had spent much of his life in exile, far from the courts of influence. He had been an outcast with no political pull, and so he had forged a new path back into the center of the official hierarchy. At the beginning of his rebellion, he had promised the samurai in the east that if they swore an oath of allegiance to him, he would guarantee them the estates, the titles, and the offices that none of them yet owned.2

When he made the promise, he possessed none of the things he had sworn to give away; nor would he have them, unless the samurai swore the oath and joined their strength to his. The shogunate had begun as a lottery: he had convinced them to buy their way into it, and only then had been able to create the pool of power he would then share out. That he was able to do so, based only on his family name and what must have been astounding personal charm, changed Japan’s political landscape forever.

Under Yoritomo, the samurai began to take hold of that promised political might. But the shogunate at Kamakura (also called the Kamakura bakufu, or “system of government”) could not possibly control Japan. Minamoto Yoritomo did not command the sort of administrative network needed to run a country. Even his warriors were still banded together in traditional uneven clusters, owing loyalty to different lords and obligations to different clans; there was no accepted military structure, no clear lines of command. The Kamakura bakufu could not replace the ancient authority of the emperor in Kyoto; instead, the shogun would have to make use of it.3

Which meant keeping a cordial relationship with Kyoto.

Yoritomo knew this. His negotiations with the pragmatic Cloistered Emperor Go-Shirakawa, right after the victory of 1185, had gotten him official, imperial recognition of his Kamakura-based military government in the east. (“I have been unselfishly taking upon myself the concerns of the Emperor for the sake of the Imperial House,” he reportedly told Go-Shirakawa. “With . . . military backing I was able to subdue the Emperor’s enemies.”) The shogunate would not take over the rule of Japan; instead, it would exist as one of two powerful cores around which Japan’s political elite traveled, in an elliptical and unstable orbit. The emperor retained his ritual importance; the cloistered emperor, his administrative authority; and the shogun at Kamakura, the power to use force.4

Almost the first law issued by the new government at Kamakura was a regulation called Goseibai shikimoku: “No person, even one whose family have been hereditary vassals of the shogun for generations, shall be able to mobilize troops for military service without a current writ.”5 Sanctioned violence would remain the exclusive right of the shogunate for the next century and a half.

That right was a prize to be grasped, and when Yoritomo’s twenty-year-old son Minamoto Yoriie became shogun in 1202, his grandfather grasped it. Hojo Tokimasa, father of Yoritomo’s redoubtable widow, declared himself to be regent for his grandson. In 1203, Tokimasa set up a thirteen-man council to assume the power of the shogunate. He himself kept the ultimate power of the regency, naming himself shikken (Regent of the Shogun) and keeping Yoriie himself under close armed guard at a distant mountain temple near the coast. There Yoriie was said to have “entered the priesthood,” which was a euphemism for house arrest.6

This made the dual government of Japan even more complicated. At Kyoto, the emperor on the throne did not exercise actual authority; that belonged to the Cloistered Emperor. And at Kamakura, farther east, the shogun in name did not rule either; his shikken made decisions for him. The two powerful cores of Japanese policy had evolved into binary stars.

When young Yoriie showed a disinclination to fade meekly into the woodwork, instead attempting to organize an armed uprising against his grandfather, Tokimasa arranged for his assassination. “Lay Priest Yoriie,” says a contemporary account, “was . . . stabbed to death at the Shuzen Temple. We hear that because Yoriie could not be easily subdued, his enemies killed him by tightening a rope around his neck and pulling out his testicles.”7

Tokimasa then appointed the dead man’s younger brother Sanetomo shogun in his place, keeping for himself the power of the regency. At this, Yoritomo’s widow—Hojo Masako, a vigorous and active woman in her late forties, who had always ridden by her husband’s side, eaten with the men, and taken an active part in military matters—turned against her father. She suspected that he was arranging the assassination of Sanetomo as well, and she rallied her own followers against Tokimasa.

These allies included her older brother Yoshitoki, who was equally appalled that their father had been plotting against his own grandchildren. Gathering armed retainers behind them, the brother and sister arrested Tokimasa and forcibly exiled him to the eastern province of Izu. Yoshitoki took the title of shikken, and the siblings controlled the shogunate together. “In the eastern provinces,” says the court priest Jien, who in 1219 wrote a history of Japan called the Gukansho. “Yoshitoki and his sister Masako administered the affairs of the military government. . . . So this country of Japan really is a state where ‘women are the finishing touches.’”8

This had saved Sanetomo’s life, but the young man, aged twenty-one when he became shogun, lasted only six miserable years. Sanetomo, not unreasonably, became increasingly paranoid and drowned his fears in wine. In 1219 he was assassinated by his own nephew, son of the dead Yoriie, for vengeance’s sake.

For seven years, the shogunate remained empty, while the shikken and his sister ruled the east. And this gave the Cloistered Emperor at Kyoto a chance to unbalance the system.

Crowned at age three, Go-Toba had been only twelve when the Cloistered Emperor Go-Shirakawa died and Yoritomo became shogun. He had remained on the throne six more years, fathering a son at sixteen. In that time, Japan had no Cloistered Emperor, which struck Jien—serving, at the time, as Go-Toba’s personal priest—as less than ideal. “Go-Shirakawa [used to] administer state affairs,” he writes in the Gukansho. “It was . . . now strange to have no Retired Emperor performing such functions.”9

Finally, in 1198, Go-Toba had retired to the role of Cloistered Emperor, leaving his toddler son on the throne. This was not, in his eyes, a retreat. “Go-Toba himself wanted to abdicate,” Jien says, “because he wished to conduct state affairs in his own way.” As Cloistered Emperor, Go-Toba aspired to be as powerful as his grandfather Go-Shirakawa. He controlled court appointments; he approved or denied requests for promotions; he managed domestic crises; he arranged for his own young son, rather than the future heir of the reigning emperor, to become Crown Prince. His personal crest, a double flower with sixteen petals, was later adopted by the Japanese court as a symbol of the imperial right to rule; from this, the emperor’s seat acquired the nickname of the Chrysanthemum Throne.10

Go-Toba also came increasingly to believe that the siblings Yoshitoki and Masako intended to split Japan in half: two countries, one ruled by emperor, the other by shogun. And gossip that reached him from the east led him to think that the samurai—particularly those farther west—were tired of the dominance of the Hojo, the clan of Yoshitoki and Masako. The fourteenth-century Japanese chronicle known as The Clear Mirror, fictionalized in places and taking poetic license in many others, nevertheless preserves the Cloistered Emperor’s suspicions—and his decision to take action against the shikken and his allies.

The whole realm had fallen under the sway of Yoshitoki, a man whose power all but surpassed that of Yoritomo in the old days. Naturally enough, his shocking excesses inspired secret thoughts of opposition in Retired Emperor Go-Toba’s mind. The senior nobles and courtiers close to the ruler, the junior north guards, the west guards, and all the other private sympathizers with the imperial plans engaged in military pursuits day and night. . . . Meanwhile, news of Retired Emperor Go-Toba’s plans leaked out in spite of every effort at secrecy, and the authorities in Kamakura . . . adopted countermeasures.11

With his cover blown, Go-Toba ordered his imperial retainers to attack the shogun’s representative in Kyoto, an inoffensive deputy who panicked and disemboweled himself when he saw the emperor’s men bearing down on him. (“The retired emperor,” says The Clear Mirror, “considered it a good beginning.”)12

In retaliation, Yoshitoki ordered “a mighty host, a veritable cloud of warriors, to march against the capital.” Go-Toba had the bridges destroyed in their way, but the shogunate’s attack was short and devastating. The army from Kamakura “burst into the capital like a tidal wave on a rocky shore,” concludes The Clear Mirror, “causing indescribable dismay and confusion among people of all ranks . . . [and] the imperial army went down to defeat after a poor show of resistance.”13

Go-Toba, taken captive, was politely but firmly exiled to a distant island off the western coast, where he spent the last eighteen years of his life writing despairing poetry. The reigning emperor, his twenty-four-year-old son Juntoku, was exiled to a separate island.

To replace them, the shikken and his sister chose both another emperor and another Cloistered Emperor, coronating Go-Toba’s half brother Go-Takakura for the latter job (even though he had never been an actual emperor) and Go-Takakura’s ten-year-old son Go-Horikawa for the Chrysanthemum Throne itself. Permanent representatives of the shogunate were installed in Kyoto and given the job of directing the new royal family. Go-Toba’s supporters lost their estates; instead, the Hojo siblings awarded them to Kamakura supporters, displacing western support for the emperor and replacing it with eastern strength.14

The grandly named Jokyu War had been brief, and Go-Toba’s rebellion had backfired. The shogunate at Kamakura had gained power, and Kyoto had lost it; the balance had tipped towards the shogun.

For the next two decades, it would sink yet further towards Kamakura. In 1224, the shikken Yoshitoki died at sixty-one; his son Yasutoki became the third shikken. When the redoubtable Masako died, the following year, Yasutoki finally had real power. Aged forty-two, he was an experienced soldier (he had led the attack on Kyoto in 1221) and well liked: “trustworthy and wise,” one account tells us, “. . . a compassionate man, benevolent towards the people . . . he appreciated the quality of reason.” Until his death in 1242, he worked to create the layers of administration that the shogunate lacked: inventing new positions for secretaries and executives, constructing a hierarchy of councils and committees, and collecting into a single lawbook the laws that would govern the Kamakura shogunate.

This book, the Goseibai Shikimoku, was a grab bag of fifty-one unconnected regulations, some new and some already long observed, disorganized and lacking in the “quality of reason” that Yasutoki prized. But it served the shogunate as a starting place; over decades, it would be amended, added to, and edited. And it concluded with a solemn promise that turned the shogunate firmly away from its untidy beginnings, towards a more rational future:

In deciding upon matters of right and wrong, the members of the Council will disregard family ties and likes and dislikes, and will follow where reason directs, stating their views according to the knowledge deep within their hearts, without fear of colleagues or powerful families.15

Chapter Thirty-One

The Unwanted Throne

Between 1204 and 1225,

the Latin Empire at Constantinople is challenged

by three Greek empires, plus Bulgaria

AS SMOKE ROSE from the sacked buildings of Constantinople, the Count of Flanders ascended his new throne as Emperor. There he sat, in Constantine’s old place, with scepter in hand, dressed in silk and jewels, presiding over “great rejoicings,” over “feastings and ceremonies,” over the old empire of the Greeks: now, the empire of the Latins in the east.1

He did not rule all of Byzantium, though. In March, just before the final assault on the city, the Crusader leaders and the Venetian doge had agreed that conquered land (and any loot worth more than “five sous,” perhaps equivalent to $100) would be divided up fairly between the Venetians and the Crusaders. After Baldwin’s coronation, the division was made official in a signed treaty, the Partitio Romaniae. Baldwin I was given the entire Crusader share of Constantinople itself, which worked out to five-eighths of the city, plus Thrace, the northwest of Asia Minor, and a few outlying islands: the center of the empire. The Venetians took three-eighths of the city of Constantinople for their own, plus the scattering of islands between Venice and the Dardanelles: seafaring possessions, for a seafaring people.

And a third realm was created especially for the French Crusader Boniface, Marquis of Monferrat, who had been the other leading candidate to be elected emperor. “Each enjoyed the support and approval of many persons,” writes Gunther of Pairis, “and . . . one could not easily be preferred over the other.” Baldwin’s election had been by a slim margin, and the Crusaders were afraid that, in a fit of pique, he might go home and take his soldiers with him. So he was given a consolation prize: a principality of his own centered at Thessalonica, subject to Baldwin of Constantinople, but essentially Boniface’s to run as he pleased.2

Another complication threatened Baldwin’s authority. There were two ex-emperors still wandering around Byzantium: Alexius III, the uncle of young (now dead) Alexius, who had precipitated the whole Crusade by stealing the throne from Isaac Angelus, and who had fled in July 1203 as the Crusaders approached; and the usurping Mourtzouphlus, who had murdered young Alexius and had escaped from Constantinople on the night of April 12.

31.1 The Successors of Byzantium

Mourtzouphlus, after hanging around Constantinople for a few months (“not yet removed more than four days’ journey,” says the Crusader Geoffrey de Villehardouin, who wrote an eyewitness account of the first years of the Latin Empire), had attempted to join forces with his predecessor; but Alexius III, welcoming him with deceptive friendship, had ordered Mourtzouphlus seized and blinded in the middle of the night. Not long after, Mourtzouphlus escaped and was captured by Baldwin’s men as he stumbled sightless through the countryside.

Mourtzouphlus was a king killer, a traitor; Baldwin and his nobles decided to make an example of the man who had dared to lift his hand against God-appointed authority. “There was in Constantinople,” writes Villehardouin, “a column, one of the highest . . . ever seen; and Mourtzouphlus [was] taken to the top of that column and made to leap down, in the sight of all the people, because it was fit that an act of justice so notable should be seen of the whole world. . . . [A]nd when he came to the earth he was all shattered and broken.” A few weeks later, Boniface found the other ex-emperor hiding in Thessalonica and imprisoned him.3

But Baldwin’s rule remained precarious.

Just because Constantinople was under Crusader control did not mean that the rest of Byzantium was ready to fall meekly into line behind Baldwin I. To the people of the eastern empire, the western Crusaders were aliens: “Latins” instead of “Greeks,” speakers of alien tongues, holding allegiance to a different Church.* Since 1054, the Christians in the east had recognized the bishop of Constantinople, the Patriarch, as their head, but the new Latin emperor was loyal to the far-distant pope in Rome. At the time of the Crusader takeover, a Venetian “Patriarch” had been appointed by the victors to replace the native head of the eastern church, bringing it back under the authority of the pope; and the Greek bishops had been forced to swear obedience to Rome.4

This only deepened the eastern resentment of the western interlopers; and within the year, three relations of the deposed royal house had challenged the new Latin emperor.

Alexius Comnenus, the twenty-two-year-old grandson of the much-tormented Andronicus (publicly and violently murdered by Constantinople’s people in 1185), had already proclaimed himself emperor at Trebizond, on the shores of the Black Sea. Late in 1204, Alexius III’s son-in-law, an experienced soldier named Theodore Lascaris, raised a rebellion against the Latin Emperor with the city of Nicaea as his headquarters. And early in 1205 Alexius III’s young cousin Michael declared himself ruler over the northwestern Greek region known as Epirus.

Now there were three “Greek” states—the Empire of Trebizond, the Empire of Nicaea, and the Despotate of Epirus*—each one ruled by Byzantine royalty, each king claiming to be the rightful successor to the Byzantine crown and the loyal protector of the Greek Orthodox Church. “And thenceforth,” Villehardouin tells us, “from day to day, did evil tidings begin to come to [Constantinople], that everywhere the Greeks were rising, and that wherever the Greeks found Franks occupying the land, they killed them. . . . Then the Emperor Baldwin and the Doge of Venice . . . took counsel together, for they saw they were losing the whole land.”5

WEST OF CONSTANTINOPLE lay the lands of the old Bulgarian empire, a kingdom established in the seventh century and then swallowed by Byzantium in the first decades of the eleventh. In the chaos surrounding the murder of the emperor Andronicus, three Bulgarian brothers (“descended from the family of the former kings,” according to a contemporary account) had raised a private army and declared Bulgaria free again. Their “empire” consisted only of a small patch of land on the southern banks of the Danube, and within a decade the older two brothers, Peter and Asen, had been assassinated by other Bulgarian rivals.6

But the third brother, Kaloyan, had clung to power. He had fought his way into Thrace, and in 1204 had talked Innocent III into crowning him basileus, Emperor of the Bulgarians.

Byzantium had been the enemy of Bulgaria, and now the Latin Empire had succeeded to that position. As the Greeks revolted, Kaloyan came eastward to join them against Baldwin’s rule.

In April 1205, Baldwin I left Constantinople at the head of a Crusader army and marched west towards the rebellious city of Adrianople. Kaloyan was approaching from the other direction, intending (says Villehardouin) to “succour Adrianople with a very great host . . . full fourteen thousand . . . who had never been baptized.”7

When the armies met, on the plain outside Adrianople, the Crusaders were badly outmaneuvered by the lightly armed, mobile Bulgarian army. A score of Crusader knights were taken prisoner; many more were killed on the field. Baldwin I himself was captured and hauled off into obscurity. His exact fate was never known, although the Constantinople native George Akropolites, born a generation later, passes on the rumor that Kaloyan himself killed Baldwin and turned his skull into a goblet (“after it had been cleaned of all its contents and decorated all around with ornament”).8

With its emperor dead and its leaders in chains, the Latin army retreated from Adrianople. The Latin moment of dominance, the chance to seize the power of the old Byzantine empire, had passed by.

Over the next two decades, power seeped away from Constantinople; first slowly, and then in a torrent.

Baldwin’s brother Henry, a vigorous and competent military man in his early thirties, was crowned the second ruler of the Latin Empire. He fought back successfully against the aggressive attempts of Theodore Lascaris of Nicaea to expand his lands, finally forcing the Nicaeans to sign a temporary truce with Constantinople. In 1208, he managed to drive Kaloyan’s nephew and successor Boril back, capturing the southern Bulgarian city of Philippoupolis and making it part of the Latin Empire. And three years later, Henry forced young Michael, ruler of the Despotate of Epirus, to sign a peace treaty with Constantinople.

But at Henry’s death in 1216, the crown of Constantinople was tossed into the air. His brother-in-law Peter claimed the throne; but Peter was in Western Francia, and as he journeyed towards his new capital city, he was waylaid. Young Michael of Epirus had died the year before; the Despotate was now ruled by his ambitious half brother, Theodore Comnenus Ducas. Theodore hoped to challenge the Latin Empire for control of the lands near the Black Sea, and when he learned that the new Latin Emperor was attempting to pass through his lands on the way to Constantinople, he ordered Peter taken prisoner.

Like Baldwin in the hands of the Bulgarians, Peter disappeared into the shadows; no one knew how or where he died. His wife Yolanda, who had traveled ahead of her husband, ruled as his regent (the “Latin Empress Consort of Constantinople”) until her own death in 1219, aged forty-four, mother of ten.

No one wanted to be the next emperor.

The shrunken, leaderless, beleaguered Latin Empire was no longer the prize it had once been. For nine hundred years, since Constantine had chosen the city on the Bosphorus as his own, Constantinople had been a glittering treasure: besieged, desired, aspired to. Now no one could be found to take its throne. Yolanda and Peter’s oldest son, Philip, was happily ensconced in Western Francia and refused to leave it. The title was offered instead to the couple’s second son, Robert of Courtenay; and after two years of stalling and delay, he finally accepted. He arrived at his new kingdom in 1221, to an underwhelmed subject population: “Robert dealt with affairs rather feebly,” says George Akropolites.9

Meanwhile, over in the Empire of Nicaea, Theodore Lascaris was prospering. He had fought off an attack from the Sultanate of Rum, and in the climactic struggle had himself met the sultan on the battlefield, and killed him with his own sword. He also had added Paphlagonia to his dominions and annexed part of the Empire of Trebizond, enlarging Nicaea further. The senior churchman in his empire, the Patriarch of Nicaea, had begun to act as the head of the Greek church, taking it on himself to consecrate the Archbishop of Serbia with his own hands (the prerogative of pope or patriarch). What remained of Greek culture seemed, more and more, to be centered in Nicaea. It was, in the words of the contemporary Greek monk Michael Acominatus, a new “capital, hurled by the barbarian inundation, out of the walls of Byzantium to the shores of Asia,” a “miserable fragment” that had survived and prospered thanks to Theodore Lascaris himself. “You ought to be called forever the new builder and peopler of the city of Constantine,” Acominatus wrote, “. . . a savior and universal liberator . . . No one of the emperors who reigned over Constantinople I consider equal to you.”10

In 1222, the year after the ineffectual Robert’s arrival in Constantinople, Theodore Lascaris died, not yet aged fifty. He left the enlarged Empire of Nicaea to his son-in-law John III Vatatzes.

31.1 Coin of John III, showing the seated Christ on one side and John with the Virgin Mary on the other.

Credit: © 2012 PBJI Ancient Coins

Like Henry of Constantinople, John was an energetic and competent soldier, a good strategist, and an ambitious man. In 1224, he captured most of the Latin Empire’s land south of the Sea of Marmara; and by 1225, Robert was begging him for a peace. The treaty the two emperors swore out left nothing to Robert but the city of Constantinople itself.

John III had barely begun his conquests; in the decades to come, he would fight against Epirus and Thessalonica as well as the Latin Empire. But like his father-in-law, he did so in the name of the true Constantinople. The coins he minted for himself showed, clearly, his place in the cosmos; on one side, the seated figure of Christ; on the other, John III and the Virgin Mary, the mother of God, clasping hands over the scepter of Nicaea.11

*The split between the western and eastern branches of the Christian church is covered in Bauer, The History of the Medieval World, pp. 584–595.

*Despot was the title often given, in Byzantium, to a high official who was also heir presumptive to the imperial throne; a despotate was the land ruled by the heir.

Chapter Thirty-Two

The First Delhi Sultanate

Between 1206 and 1236,

the Muslim kingdom in northern India asserts itself against Hindus,

but cannot survive the leadership of a woman

IN 1202, the Muslim Ghurids had advanced into the Ganges valley, pushing the Sena into oblivion, welcomed by the people who had found the strict Hinduism of the Sena kings distasteful. The Ghurid sultan, Ghiyas ad-Din Ghuri, had only months to cherish his victory. He died of a sudden illness in Herat, back west of the Himalayas, leaving his brother Muhammad at the head of the brand-new Ghurid empire.

Muhammad Ghuri, deputized by Ghiyas to rule the Indian territories, had always been loyal to his older brother; now he was rewarded with the Ghurid crown. This was not good news for Ghiyas’s son Mahmud, who had expected to take over his father’s throne. Instead, Muhammad made his nephew deputy ruler of the western territories only. Mahmud was known for his love of wine and women, not for his skill as a governor, and Muhammad Ghuri was inclined to reward talent over blood. He had no children. Instead, the Tabakat-i-Nasiri tells us, he “purchased a number of Turkish slaves, and greatly valued them all, and raised them to competence and wealth.” Those slaves who served him well as soldiers were rewarded with deputy governorships of their own, so that Muhammad’s empire was ruled, under his watchful eye, by a network of nephews, cousins, and Turkish warriors who had begun their careers in slavery: the mamluks.1

“One obedient slave is better than three hundred sons,” an eleventh-century sultan had written, “for the latter desire their father’s death, the former his master’s glory.” The reliance of Islamic rulers on Turkish slave soldiers had been growing, over the previous decades. Young men bought at slave markets were placed in regiments, trained as soldiers, and separated from their old lives; given new names, new identities, cut off from all ties except those between slave and master. This dependence created loyalty; the master was the slave soldier’s employer, protector, and champion.2

When the mamluks converted to Islam—as they almost always did, once they were placed in a world where Islam was all they knew—they were set free; Islamic law forbade Muslims to keep each other in slavery. Highly skilled, guaranteed security if they stayed, mamluks generally remained on in the service of their ex-master. They almost always became part of the most elite corps; the invention of the stirrup meant that mounted soldiers were now the most powerful fighting force in the world; cavalry charges had become vital for victory, and the Turkish soldiers had grown up on horseback.

Muhammad Ghuri had placed mamluks in powerful governing positions over his conquered cities. When he died unexpectedly, the mamluks reshaped India.

In 1206, he had just put down a rebellion in the Punjab and was traveling back to Lahore, in the Ghurid heartland. Camping beside the Indus during the night, he was asleep when an assassin emerged from the dark (or, in some accounts, from underneath the surface of the river), stabbed him to death, and disappeared. He had been king of the Ghurids for less than four years.

The Tabakat-i-Nasiri attributes the murder to “a disciple of the Mulahidah.” Mulahidah is the Persian name for a particular sect of Shi’ite Muslims* much feared (and grudgingly admired) by the Crusaders, who had another name for them: the Assassins. According to twelfth-century travelers’ tales, the Mulahidah lived in the impregnable fortress of Alamut, in the mountains south of the Caspian Sea, and swore absolute allegiance to a leader known as the Elder, or the Old Man. If he ordered them to kill his enemies, they went out, dagger in hand, to fulfill the command unquestioningly. “They believe,” writes the Crusader Jean de Joinville, in his Chronicle of the Crusade, “that when a man dies for his lord, or in any good cause, his soul goes into another body, better and more comfortable; and for this reason the Assassins are not greatly concerned if they are killed when carrying out the commands of the Old Man of the Mountain.”3

This was colorful but not exactly accurate. The Mulahidah, better known to Western historians as the Nizari, had gathered, right at the end of the eleventh century, behind a charismatic Shi’ite leader named Hasan Sabbah, who hoped to lead a Muslim opposition against the advancing Turks. Sabbah had seized the mountain castle of Alamut around 1090, and with his followers had strengthened its defenses and then captured other nearby castles as well. By 1150, Sabbah had been followed by two successors, each of whom did the same, and his sect had established itself as a small mountain state, firmly opposed to Turkish power.

32.1 Ruins of the mountain fortress of Alamut.

Credit: © Getty Images

32.1 The Nizari

One of Sabbah’s political strategies had been the strategic murder, carried out by young devotees of the Nizari cause called fidaiyan (singular fidawi), of prominent Turkish leaders. The fidaiyan, not afraid to sacrifice their lives on their missions, were often successful, and increasingly feared; so much so that almost every twelfth-century assassination was chalked up to them by their Turkish and Sunni Muslim enemies. It was, in fact, hostile Sunni historians who first suggested that the fidaiyan were drugged with hashish into willingness to carry out their suicide missions. Hashishin became a derogatory Sunni term for the fidaiyan (who probably used no hashish at all); Crusader accounts picked up the term and Latinized it into Assassin; and thus the English language gained a new word for political killings, assassination.4

Muhammad Ghuri had mounted at least one campaign against the mountain state of the Nizari, and it is certainly possible that a fidawi was dispatched to remove him. But other accounts credit the Ghurid king’s death to an attack of conquered and resentful Khokars from the Punjab, or perhaps the machinations of one of his own officials. Whoever carried it out, Muhammad’s death brought an immediate end to the adolescent Ghurid empire. Within months, the whole huge expanse had fallen apart again under Ghuri’s rivaling successors. His nephew claimed the western territories as an independent king, and three of his Turkish slaves turned governors did the same over their own lands: one in Ghazni, a second in the Sind, and a third, Qutb-ud-din, in Lahore.

Qutb-ud-din outshone them all. He declared himself sultan of the north Indian lands, and although he ruled for only four years before dying in a fall from his polo pony in 1210, his sultanate lasted for over three centuries. The four years of Qutb-ud-din’s rule, after all, had built on the previous twenty years of his service to the Ghurids in northern India; and during those decades, he had worked hard to help the two Ghuri brothers transform their realm into a Muslim land. In his hands, it became a particularly Indian Muslim land: free from domination that came from beyond the mountains, but also a land where the old religious traditions were firmly stamped down into the mud. “He purged by his sword the land of Hind from the filth of infidelity and vice,” writes his contemporary, the Persian historian Hasan Nizami, “and freed the whole of that country from the thorn of God-plurality, and the impurity of idol-worship, and by his royal vigour and intrepidity, left not one temple standing.”5

At his death, Qutb-ud-din’s son Aram Shah set himself up as the next ruler of the north Indian kingdom. At once, he lost the southern cities of Gwalior and Ranthambore to revolt, and the eastern Bengalese province to the governor his father had appointed there, one Ali Mardan. Exasperated by this incompetence, a party of dissidents at Delhi invited one of Qutb-ud-din’s own Turkish slave officers (or ghulams), Iltumish, to come into that city and establish himself as a rival for the sultanate.6

Iltumish had not only been a trusted lieutenant of the dead sultan but was also his son-in-law; given that there was no neat tradition of father-to-son succession in the Muslim sultanates of India, he had as good a claim to the throne as Aram Shah. He accepted the invitation, and when Aram Shah marched south towards Delhi to drive him out, Iltumish met his brother-in-law outside the walls of Delhi and killed him in battle.

For the next twenty-five years, Iltumish would rule from Delhi, which became the capital of his sultanate. All twenty-five of those years were spent fighting. It took him another six years to drive out the other Turkish pretenders to power in Ghazni and the Sind, finally bringing both under his control by 1217. The city of Lahore (troubled, says Nizami, by “calamities, and changes of governors, and the sedition of rebels, [and] the flames of turbulence and opposition”) by itself held out until 1228, and Bengal was not completely under his control until 1231.7

32.2 Delhi under Iltumish

At the same time, Iltumish did his best to invade the still-Hindu lands that had not fallen to Ghurid rule. The kingdom of Orissa, on the eastern coast, suffered from fighting on its northern borders but managed to hold off the newcomers. A few Rajput kingdoms survived in central India, battered but still unconquered. Mewar, some 280 miles inland from the Indian Ocean, was chief among them; Iltumish mounted a major assault against the Hindu ruler of Mewar, Jaitra Singh, but although he was able to sack the city of Aghata, Jaitra Singh held out against him.

The repulse of the Muslim forces from Mewar was hailed, by the Hindus of India, as a religious victory. Iltumish, after all, was a Muslim ruler, remembered in his inscriptions as “protector of God’s territories,” builder of mosques and minarets. Halfway through his sultanate, the caliph in Baghdad—still holding on to the bare remnants of Abbasid power—recognized his rule by awarding him both a robe of honor and the ceremonial title Sultan-i-azam, “Great Sultan,” legitimate and God-ordained ruler over his conquered lands; this gave Iltumish and his successors the right to use the title “Auxiliary of the Commander of the Faithful” on their coins. The Hindu deities, as an inscription celebrating Jaitra Singh’s resistance exclaims, were “intoxicated with a drink of the blood” of the Muslim soldiers who had attacked them. Jaitra Singh’s successful defense of his crown was also a defense of the Hindu world against the Muslim invaders.8

Yet at the same time, Iltumish was pragmatically aware that the Hindus in his realm had to be treated gently. He promised them the status of dhimmi: non-Muslim subjects of a Muslim king, allowed to hold property and to claim legal rights but exempt from Islamic requirements, like resident aliens in a modern nation-state. Like the Crusaders, Iltumish was savvy enough to separate political realities from religious aspirations.9

In 1236, the Sultan of Delhi—now in his twenty-sixth year of rule—was campaigning against rebels hiding in the Salt Range mountains, north of his capital, when he became too ill to sit on his horse. He was carried back to Delhi and died there in April.10

He had fathered at least four children, three sons and a daughter; his oldest son, who had been governing Bengal as his vice-regent, had died prematurely seven years earlier, and his two younger sons were (in his eyes) weak and incompetent. So, shocking his people to their core, he left the title of Sultan of Delhi to his daughter Raziyya, twenty-one years old; in the words of the historian Peter Jackson, with “all the attributes of a successful ruler except one . . . she was not a man.”11

Raziyya had her supporters, but although they managed to engineer her enthronement, another equally strong cabal threw its weight behind her trifling (but male) brother Firoz (“a weak and licentious prince”). Raziyya claimed and held on to the title Sultan, but she found herself continually thwarted not just by her Hindu enemies, but by the subjects in her own sultanate who did not acknowledge her sovereignty. She was, according to all accounts, a competent, clear-thinking, strategic ruler, but even her attempts to prove her worth by wearing male clothing and armor threw the Sultanate of Delhi into a long and violent chaos. Raziyya, would-be defender of Islam, threatened Delhi’s very existence as an Islamic state; and it was, almost, unable to survive the contradiction.12

* After the death of Muhammad himself in 632, the leadership of the new Muslim community was claimed by the Prophet’s old friend Abu Bakr, who had the support of many of Muhammad’s followers. Others, though, believed that Muhammad’s closest male relative, his son-in-law Ali, should be the Prophet’s successor. Although Ali himself agreed to accept Abu Bakr’s headship, a subset of Muslims continued to insist that only Ali and his successors were divinely appointed, and that Abu Bakr and his immediate successors were illegitimate usupers. They became known as “Shi’ite” Muslims (the “party of Ali”), while the supporters of Abu Bakr became known as “Sunni” Muslims. As Farhad Daftary points out in his study of the Isma’ili sect, the early history of the Shi’ite movement is “shrouded in obscurity,” but within a century the Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims had already developed significantly different theological doctrines, traditions, and laws. The events surrounding Abu Bakr’s succession are described in Bauer, The History of the Medieval World. pp. 295ff; Daftary’s useful capsule explanation is found in chapter 2 of The Assassin Legends: Myths of the Isma’ilis (I. B. Tauris, 1995).

Chapter Thirty-Three

Heresy

Between 1209 and 1210,

the knights of the Albigensian Crusade

attack the Christians of southern France

WHILE JOHN LACKLAND was refilling the English treasury, Philip II of France was carefully firming up his hold on the newly conquered lands in Western Francia. The defeat of John had almost doubled the size of his kingdom. Now he had to make marriages between his relatives and the noble families of Western Francia, give gifts of land and privilege, and mount the occasional short, sharp siege to remind his new vassals where their loyalties lay.1

In 1209, he found himself facing a new crisis—and this one had not been generated by his counterpart across the English Channel. In the south of France, in the lands between the Rhone river and the rough Pyrenees range, a heresy had grown into a way of life.

Heresy: a departure from orthodoxy that was not merely dangerous, but placed the thinker outside the gates of the kingdom of God. Heresy was more than error. Error was wrong belief; error became heresy when the believer, confronted by the Church’s condemnation, refused to give it up.

Disagreements about Christian doctrines went all the way back to the days of the apostles, when (according to the Book of Acts), the leaders of the Christian church met in Jerusalem to discuss which Jewish laws Gentile converts should follow. Afterwards, the apostle Paul himself used the decisions of this first church council to point out—rather sharply—errors in the way his fellow apostle Peter was handling himself around Gentiles.*

But he did not label Peter a heretic. For heresy to exist—not just individual error, but belief that stepped all the way outside the framework of the Christian faith—there had to be a framework.

This had been provided by the emperor Constantine all the way back in 325, when he had called all Christian bishops together at Nicaea to hammer out a creed, a statement of orthodoxy. The Nicene Creed was the first official fence built around the Christian faith to define who was in and who was out.*And the Nicene Creed, approved by Constantine, also created the ability to punish heresy with the sword. Before Nicaea, Christians could accuse each other of error all they wanted, but argument and excommunication were the sharpest swords they could wield. After Nicaea, bishops had much more power: they could ask the emperor to enforce the creed he had sponsored with political might.

Not everyone thought this was a good idea—particularly those who happened to be on the outside of the creed. Writing nearly a century later, Augustine notes that the fourth-century heretics known as Donatists complained that “the apostles never sought such measures from the kings of the earth.” But, Augustine continues, that was only because in the apostles’ day, the kings of the earth didn’t believe in Christ. Now, a Christian king could serve God “by enforcing with suitable rigor such laws as ordain what is righteous, and punish what is the reverse.” This included not just wrong actions, but wrong beliefs.

“Why,” Augustine asks, “should adulteries be punished by the laws, and sacrilege allowed? Is it a lighter matter that a soul should not keep faith with God, than that a woman should be faithless to her husband?”

It is indeed better . . . that men should be led to worship God by teaching, than that they should be driven to it by fear of punishment or pain; but . . . many have found advantage (as we have proved, and are daily proving by actual experiment) in being first compelled by fear or pain, so that they might afterwards be influenced by teaching. . . . Why, therefore, should not the Church use force in compelling her lost sons to return?2

In the medieval world, heretics had often been duly compelled by fear and pain. But they were not, generally speaking, punished with the sword.† The Theodosian Code of 438 made heresy an imperial crime, but most of the penalties deprived the heretics of property and certain rights; heretics could be fined or exiled, and were not allowed to serve in the imperial service. And although heretics who persisted in gathering followers and teaching them were threatened with “the sharp goads of a more severe punishment,” this was rarely carried out.3

Nor had there been, in the previous centuries, any large-scale effort to hunt down heretics and execute them. Teachers who published and gathered students, such as Peter Abelard, often drew the notice of their fellow priests, but like Abelard they were usually threatened with imprisonment and financial loss, not death.*

But in the previous century, heresies had begun to spring up, particularly across the south of Francia, with renewed vigor.

Most often, these heresies were the teachings not of academics or priests but of charismatic laypeople who gathered larger and larger popular followings. These charismatic heretics had different preoccupations, but at some point all of them made the same claim: the organized Church was fallen and corrupt and had nothing to do with true spiritual life. In Milan, a band of dissidents claimed that the Holy Spirit visited them daily, making priests and pope completely unnecessary. At Cologne, a small group of rebels against Rome began to preach that “he who sits in the Chair of Peter has lost the power to ordain,” because the papacy had been “corrupted through involvement in secular business.” In the last quarter of the twelfth century, a wandering preacher named Peter Waldo gathered an enormous following by preaching that the Church hierarchy was corrupt, that priests ought to give up their positions and work with their hands, and that it was “a bad thing to found and endow churches and monasteries.” His followers, known as the Waldensians, traveled through the French countryside, preaching a stripped-down, evangelical-style gospel of repentance: “They say,” writes the thirteenth-century chronicler Reinerius Saccho, “that the doctrine of Christ . . . is sufficient for salvation without the statutes of the church.”4

None of this was good news for the pope, but until the fall of Constantinople, the attentions of Rome had been focused farther to the east. And the locals were often tolerant of the heretics. “Why do you not expel these people and shun them?” a priest in southern Francia demanded of a local knight. “We cannot do that,” the knight answered, “for we were raised with them, and we have relatives among them, and we see that they lead honest and decent lives.”5

But with the Crusades once again failing, Innocent III was willing to look closer to home. And the heresy now flourishing in the south was stronger and more radical than any seen before. The believers called themselves the Pure Ones: in Greek, katharos; to the church they opposed, the Cathars. Cathar beliefs were complicated, and the Cathars themselves had already split into more than one sect.* But all Cathars were dualists, dividing all things in the universe into good and evil, light and dark. As their contemporary Pierre des Vaux de Cernay writes, they held that there were two creators: “. . . one of invisible things, whom they called the benevolent god, and another of visible things, whom they named the malevolent god. The New Testament they attributed to the benevolent god but the Old Testament to the malevolent god, and rejected it altogether.”6 To be pure, the Cathars resisted as much interaction with the material world as possible: they fasted, rejected sex, and suffered through marathons of prayer and meditation.

They also rejected the orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation, since this required the benevolent God to tie himself to the enslaving, corrupt material world. This made Catharism a dangerous heresy; but even more dangerous, as de Cernay notes, was their attitude towards the authority of the church. “They said,” he writes, “that almost all the Church of Rome was a den of thieves, and that it was the harlot of which we read in the Apocalypse.”7

These beliefs, quietly spreading through the south since the 1140s, had found a particularly receptive home in the southern province of Languedoc, bordering the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean Sea. Languedoc was a relatively lawless chunk of Western Francia, where the authority of the local counts was weak and the local priests were poor, uneducated, and superstitious. To the people of Languedoc, Catharism offered a new kind of power: an authority centered only within themselves, a chance to rise through the ranks of the Cathars to the shining elite ranks of the perfected.

Innocent III had not been unaware of the gathering Cathar strength. In 1203 he had sent papal representatives to Languedoc to evaluate the strength of the movement, and in 1206 he had granted the request of a local priest to be allowed to preach in Languedoc, in an effort to evangelize the Cathars back into the orthodox fold. The priest, Dominic de Guzman, hailed from just over the mountains in Castile. He believed that the Cathars could be turned back to orthodoxy, if they saw that an orthodox clergyman could also lead an ascetic and pure lifestyle; he had met the papal representatives on their journey through Languedoc and been unimpressed by their approach. They were, he thought, displaying altogether too much pride and pomp. “It is not by the display of power and pomp, calvacades of retainers, and . . . gorgeous apparel, that these heretics win proselytes,” he complained. “It is by zealous preaching, by apostolic humilty, by austerity. . . . Zeal must be met by zeal; false sanctitity by real sanctity; preaching falsehood by preaching truth.” He himself traveled through Languedoc barefoot, arguing with the Cathars one on one.8

But this humble approach made little headway, and the Cathars continued to flourish.

Meanwhile, the official representatives of the pope were experiencing the same lack of success. Finding the Cathars themselves deaf to their preaching, they traveled to Toulouse and demanded a meeting with Raymond VI, the Count of Toulouse, the overlord of Languedoc.

Raymond VI, himself an orthodox Christian, was one of the powerful noblemen who had long ringed the land of the king of France and restricted his power. He was inclined to act as independently as possible. When the legates arrived and insisted on seeing him, they ordered him imperiously to take action against the heretics in his land; Raymond, set on edge by the abrasive assumption of authority, refused to listen.

At this, one of the legates, Pierre de Castelnau, summarily excommunicated him. This brought any discussion to an immediate end. Raymond dismissed the legates brusquely and shut his gates against them.

William of Tudela, who knew all the parties involved and wrote his own account of the events that followed, tells us that as the legates traveled back northwards, “an evil-hearted squire, hoping to win the count’s approval, stepped like a traitor behind the legate, drove his sharp sword into his spine, and killed him. . . . You can be sure that the pope was not pleased.”9

He was, in fact, furious. No one accused Raymond himself of involvement, but Raymond certainly expressed no sorrow over Pierre de Castelnau’s death. The growing ecclesiastical problem had now been joined by a political one.

Thanks to the resurrection of the crusading impulse, Innocent III had a solution to hand. He declared a crusade—not just against the Cathars but against the orthodox Raymond as well. All of Raymond’s subjects were absolved from their obedience to him; anyone who took up the sword against the Count of Toulouse would be given absolution of sin and all the privileges awarded to Crusaders who had made the long, dangerous journey to Jerusalem; and anyone who took wealth or property away from a Cathar could keep it.10

Once again, the idea of crusade had expanded. For the Wendish Crusade against the Slavic tribes in northern Germany, it had been puffed into a size that could accommodate war against non-Christians living in Christian lands. Now it was distended further, to encompass not only unorthodox Christians but a thoroughly orthodox brother whose only offense was his refusal to take political commands from Rome.

In the past, the pope had used spiritual weapons—excommunication and interdict—to face such defiance. Now the sword of crusade was added to his armory.

Languedoc was close, its castles were wealthy, and the prospect of gain was great. By the middle of 1210, ten thousand Crusaders strong had gathered in Lyons, ready to march south. King Philip II himself begged off, offering as an excuse the need to stay in Paris and keep his defenses against John strong. But among the Crusaders assembled at Lyons was Simon de Montfort, the dispossessed Earl of Leicester. Barred from England, he had found a new cause in Western Francia.

Raymond was stubborn, not stupid. When he heard of the huge force assembled against him, he sent the pope a message of abject repentance, and joined the Crusade himself.

The war that followed lasted twenty years. It was known as the Albigensian Crusade, a name taken from one of the Cathar sects known as Albigenses, but it was fought, wholesale, against all Cathars, all supporters of Cathars, and anyone suspected of Catharism: a vicious and indiscriminate war.

At first, the Crusaders organized under the supreme command of one of the surviving papal legates: Arnold, the Abbot of Cisteaux. He led them southward to the city of Béziers, south of Lyon, across the Hérault river. Béziers was home to both Cathars and orthodox Christians, and the bishop of Béziers (“an excellent man,” says William of Tudela) went out to remonstrate with the army. He was told that if the Catholics would “quit the city and leave the heretics behind,” they would be spared. But when he returned to Béziers with this message, the citizens refused to desert their homes. “The majority of the townspeople said . . . that the crusaders should not get so much as a pennyworth of their possessions from them,” William adds. It was clear, even across a stone wall, that the Crusaders, zealous for the cause of the Church, were not unmindful of the wealth of Languedoc.11

This presented the Crusaders with a small problem, and several of the French knights came to the Abbot of Cisteaux asking how they were supposed to tell the Christians and the heretics (bonos et malos) apart during a siege. “Kill them all,” the Abbot answered. “The Lord knows which ones belong to him.”12

Caedite eos: Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius. The sentence, recorded by the scholar-monk Caesarius of Heisterbach in his Dialogue of Miracles, may not be exactly what fell from the Abbot’s lips, but the sack of Béziers that followed suggests that the order was conveyed. De Cernay tells us that when the city’s defenses were breached, “almost all” of the inhabitants were killed, “from the youngest to the oldest.” “They killed everyone who fled into the church,” William of Tudela writes, “no cross or altar or crucifix could save them . . . they killed the clergy too, and the women and the children. . . . So terrible a slaughter has not been known or consented to, I think, since the time of the Saracens.” The city burned, with many of the survivors trapped inside the flames. It was July 22, 1209.13

33.1 The Albigensian Crusade

The Crusaders then marched on towards the city of Carcassonne, arriving there on August 1 and laying siege to the walls. Carcassonne was already overstuffed with refugees who had fled into it in front of the advancing army. After just two weeks, the populace surrendered.

After Carcassonne, the Abbot of Cisteaux expressed a wish to go back to his monastery. So the Crusaders elected a new leader: Simon de Montfort, who had distinguished himself in the fighting. Innocent III confirmed the election by declaring Montfort not only general of the Crusaders but also ruler of all lands “conquered or to be conquered” during the Crusade.

Simon de Montfort, now aged forty-nine, was at loose ends after losing his lands to King John. He was “a tough fighting man,” writes his contemporary William of Tudela; tall, broad-shouldered, and handsome, says the French chronicler Pierre des Vaux de Cernay, “extremely experienced in warfare, tireless . . . and totally dedicated to the service of God.” Montfort had followed Philip II on the Fourth Crusade but had left it at Zara, when it began to lose its focus. Now Montfort became the strategist and driving force of the Albigensian Crusade and, soon, the agent of its greatest cruelties.

After wintering in Languedoc, Montfort led the Crusader armies westward across southern Francia. In the spring of 1210, he arrived at the town of Bram, protected only by a wall and single gate from attack. Inside Bram, once again, Catholics and Cathars joined to fight against the attack.

Within three days, Bram fell, and Montfort displayed for the first time the vindictiveness that would mark his campaigning. As punishment for resisting the armies of God, he ordered the eyes of the defenders put out (“over a hundred in number,” says Pierre des Vaux de Cernay) and their noses cut off.14

After Bram, a string of towns and castles fell to Crusader attack: Alaric, Termes, Lastours, and Minerve, where Monfort ordered 140 captured “perfected heretics” burned alive, both men and women.

And watching Montfort and his companions laying claim to one tract of Languedoc land after another, Raymond VI of Toulouse began to see that the Crusade would, ultimately, bring an end not just to Catharism but to his own power.

*See Acts 15, the account of the council in Jerusalem, and Galatians 2:11–16, where Paul corrects Peter’s errors in his dealings with Gentiles.

*See Bauer, The History of the Medieval World, pp. 3–12.

†The Gallic bishop Priscillian, executed in 385 for teaching magic to his followers, is thought to have been the first Christian heretic to suffer death.

*An isolated execution of heretics had taken place in 1022, when a handful of men and women in Orleans, claiming secret knowledge that was available only to initiates, had been burned to death with the approval of Robert the Pious, second king of the Capetian dynasty; but this was the first official execution for heresy in over seven hundred years. In 1028, the Archbishop of Milan had offered a handful of ascetics who rejected the Church’s authority the choice between recantation and death by fire; several chose fire. Two other burnings of heretics followed, one in 1114 in Soissons and a second in 1143 at Cologne; but in both cases the heretics, after speaking publicity about their anti-orthodox opinions, were tossed into bonfires built by indignant laypeople, without the approval of the local clergy; these were more like lynchings than executions.

*Catharism was closely related to an earlier belief system preached in Bulgaria by a tenth-century priest named Bogomil. Bogomilism spread from Bulgaria down into Serbia and Bosnia, and eastward as far as Constantinople, and Bogomil missionaries traveling to Italy and Western Francia probably provided the seed from which Catharism grew. However, Bogomilism never posed a serious political threat to the Bulgarian kings, and the patriarch of Constantinople was never in a position to organize a campaign against it. The sect survived into the fourteenth century, but then seems to have disintegrated on its own. Dimitri Obolensky provides a useful and readable overview from an eastern perspective in “The Bogomils,” Byzantium and the Slavs (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994), chap. 10.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Reconquest and Failure

Between 1210 and 1213,

Pedro the Catholic triumphs in Spain

and fails in France

ON THE SPANISH PENINSULA, the Christian kings had fallen out with each other. Thirty years earlier the five kingdoms in the north and the west had presented a united front to the Almohad Muslims of the south. But for decades this unity had been fracturing.

Portugal and León were at odds; so were Navarre and Castile. Sancho I, son of the founder Afonso Henriques, ruled in Portugal and fought off constant attacks against his northern border from Alfonso IX, king of León. When he wasn’t attacking Portugal, the king of León was helping the king of Navarre—Sancho the Strong, a giant of a man, over seven feet tall—attack Castile. The king of Castile, Alfonso VIII, was Sancho’s first cousin, but this did not protect him from Navarre’s hostilities.

The fifth kingdom, Aragon, was ruled by Pedro II, great-grandson of Ramiro the Monk. In November of 1204, just after Constantinople’s fall, he had journeyed to Rome to be crowned by the pope. He was the first king of Aragon to receive this honor, and in return he promised Innocent III and his successors a perpetual tithe of 250 gold mazmudins. The mazmudin was a coinage borrowed from the Almohads; the tribute was worth, perhaps, a decade and a half of annual wages for an Aragonese craftsman. Pedro II also promised to defend the faith and persecute heresy and wickedness whenever it reared its head in Aragon, earning him the nickname “Pedro the Catholic.”1

The Albigensian Crusade put Pedro the Catholic into a difficult position. Raymond of Toulouse was his brother-in-law; Pedro’s older sister Eleanor had married the Count of Toulouse in 1200 (she was his sixth wife; he had outlived three and divorced two), creating an alliance between the two men with bordering lands. Now the Catholic king found his relative and ally falling out with the powerful Simon de Montfort, and (by extension) with the pope himself.

Pedro did his best to walk in the middle. In 1210, he traveled to his brother-in-law’s lands and met with Montfort himself, proposing a truce with the Crusader general. As part of the treaty, he offered to betroth his own son and heir, three-year-old James, to Montfort’s own young daughter Amicia. This would eventually make Montfort the father-in-law of the queen of Aragon, and Montfort agreed.

As a sign of goodwill, Pedro sent the toddler to live with his prospective bride’s family. Then he returned home, where another fight awaited him.

For at least two years, he had been raising funds for a major invasion of the southern Spanish lands. The Almohad caliph Muhammad al-Nasir, grandson of Abu Ya’qub Yusuf, had himself been agitating for war since at least 1207; although he had, as yet, been restrained by the advice of his councillors, who were nervous about the strength of the Christian kingdoms.2

Now, Pedro II decided, the time had come to break the stalemate. As soon as he arrived back home, he launched a preliminary anti-Almohad campaign by invading the Muslim city-kingdom of Valencia, attacking the Muslim city Adamuz, and folding the Muslim town of Castielfabib into his own kingdom.

Meanwhile, Raymond of Toulouse drew further away from the Catholic cause.

He had not yet finished fulfilling all of the penances that had been laid on him by the pope in 1209 as a condition of his reinstatement in the Church’s good favor, and he continued to drag his feet. In early 1211, another letter from Rome arrived for the count, insisting that he make good the penance and join fully in the fight against his heretical vassals. In addition, since his zeal was in question, he was to dismiss his mercenary soldiers, require his knights to dismantle their castles and strongholds, and give the clergy of the orthodox Church supreme authority “in everything they might require.”3

This was no more or less than a demand that he give up all authority over his realm, and Raymond refused, indignantly. He retreated to Toulouse and his own estates; and there in the summer of 1211, Simon de Montfort laid siege to him, laying waste all of the surrounding countryside.

Pedro II was going to have to choose sides, but he was not immediately in a position to throw his weight either onto Raymond’s side or onto Montfort’s. Muhammad al-Nasir had assembled a vast Almohad army at Rabat, in North Africa, and in May 1211 the Almohad troops had begun to cross the Strait of Gibraltar.4

Alfonso VIII of Castile hurried to Pedro’s side, but the kings of León, Portugal, and Navarre refused to join the coming fight (in fact, Sancho the Strong contemplated joining with the Muslim forces against his neighbors). Castile and Aragon were braced alone to meet the storm.

Al-Nasir’s forces swarmed forward across southern Spain, forcing the surrender of the Castilian fortress of Salvatierra. Set in the midst of Muslim lands, Salvatierra had been Castile’s strongest outpost; a symbol of Christian power, nicknamed the “right hand of the Lord of Castile.” Alarmed by the ease of the Muslim advance, Pedro II sent a strategic message to Rome. Al-Nasir, he wrote, had sent him a letter warning, “You have inflicted many damages on us, and you say that this has been ordered by the lord of Rome. Once we have subdued your lands, we will go to Rome and bring misery upon its lord.”5

The threat of invasion galvanized Innocent III to resort, once more, to his most powerful weapon. In January 1212, he declared another crusade. Once again, those who fought against the enemy—this time the Almohads, on Spanish ground—would receive remission of sin, forgiveness, eternal glory.6

The well-used strategy once again proved its power. Sancho the Strong of Navarre relinquished his plans to join the infidels, and agreed to ally himself with Castile and Aragon instead. A score of powerful French knights temporarily left the Albigensian Crusade and journeyed east, assembling at Toledo. By June, the new Crusade was ready to begin. The joint Spanish force, reinforced by Crusaders, began its march from Toledo south; and the Almohad troops, assembled at Córdoba, marched north under the personal command of al-Nasir.

On July 16, the Muslims and Christians met at Las Navas, in the very south of Castile. The Crusader force had divided into three, each wing commanded by one of the Spanish kings. In a pincer move, two wings crushed the Muslim center, while Sancho the Strong (according to battlefield tales told afterwards) burst through the chains of men protecting al-Nasir’s personal tent and raided it himself. Al-Nasir, who had remained at the back of the assault, fled on horseback. His men, routed, retreated in his wake.

“It was publicly reported, that about 100,000 Saracens fell in the battle,” reports William of Puylaurens, “. . . as the King of the Saracens fled in shame.” The tapestry that had covered the entrance of al-Nasir’s tent was sent to the monastery of Las Huelgas, where it still hangs. Al-Nasir himself backed across the strait into Africa, where he seems to have fallen into a depression; he lingered at Marrakesh, taking no steps to reassure his army, until his death the following year.

The victory in the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa rested heavily on the Christian side of the balance, and it never righted itself towards the Muslim side again. The Almohad empire, already tottering, soon lost its hold on even the remaining Muslim territories in Spain; and in Africa, al-Nasir’s young successor Yusuf II lost territory after territory, his governors breaking away one at a time to establish their own dynasties.7

After Las Navas, the kings of León, Castile, and Portugal agreed to a truce. Pedro II spent several months organizing affairs at home, and in January of 1213 rode back across the Pyrenees to the side of his besieged brother-in-law. Fresh from the great victory in Spain, he had every confidence in his ability to solve this problem as well.

He attempted to negotiate a peace between Raymond of Toulouse and the belligerent Simon de Montfort, even sending to Pope Innocent III and asking him to order Montfort to stand down. But nine months of correspondence, argumentation, threat, and counterthreat drew all of the parties farther apart. Simon de Montfort ignored appeals from both sides; Innocent III, getting contradictory reports from Pedro II and his legates, reversed his own position several times.

34.1 The Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa

Meanwhile, the people of Toulouse suffered from hunger and disease, lost crops and slaughtered livestock, burned homes and fields.

By fall, Pedro and Raymond had decided to mount a direct attack on Montfort’s most central fortification, the castle at Muret: “a garrison,” writes William of Puylaurens, “which was causing great difficulties for the city of Toulouse.” They were joined by a “great many men” from the neighboring territories. Simon de Montfort’s violent and unceasing campaigning had increasingly seemed less for the church than for himself, and the local nobility wanted him gone, crusade or no crusade.8

On September 12, a sizable army of knights from Aragon and Toulouse attacked Muret. With only fifteen hundred men at his disposal, the badly outnumbered Simon de Montfort managed to rout them. The king of Aragon was “so severely wounded,” says the anonymous conclusion to William of Tudela’s account, “that his blood spilled out on the ground and he fell his full length dead.” His men scattered, many of them drowning as they tried to flee back across the Garonne.

Raymond too was forced to flee. Simon de Montfort marched into Toulouse and claimed it as his own. He had won control now of all of Languedoc; and Pedro II, victor over the Muslim enemy, had fallen at the hands of his Christian brothers.9

Young James, his heir, was still in the hands of Montfort. The people of Aragon pled with Innocent III to order his release, and Montfort reluctantly obeyed. But with a five-year-old king on the throne, Aragon remained in chaos. “Happy would Pedro have been,” a Castilian account lamented, “had he concluded his life immediately after the noble triumph in the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa.”10

Chapter Thirty-Five

From Bouvines to Magna Carta

Between 1213 and 1217,

John of England fails to regain his French lands,

forfeits control of England,

and loses his life

AT THE BEGINNING OF 1213, Innocent III decided that the interdict on England was clearly not going to resolve the quarrel over Stephen Langton’s appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury.

Once again, he reached for his weapon.

“Being deeply grieved,” writes Roger of Wendover, “he decreed that John king of England should be deposed from the throne of that kingdom.” And then he went one step further.

[He] wrote to the most potent Philip, king of the French, ordering him, in remission of all his faults, to undertake this business, and declaring that, after he had expelled the English king . . . he and his successors should hold possession of the kingdom of England for ever. Besides this, he wrote to all the noble knights, and other warlike men throughout the different countries, ordering them to assume the sign of the cross and to follow the king of the French as their leader, to dethrone the English king, and thus to revenge the insult which had been cast on the universal church.

Anyone who provided either money or his own sword to help overthrow John, promised Innocent, would receive the benefits of crusade, exactly “like those who went to visit the Lord’s sepulchre.”1

The ideal of crusade had become so diffused that it had lost any form or definition. Now crusade could be declared against a Christian king who held to the Nicene Creed: a king who ruled an ancient part of Christendom and was himself the son and brother of Crusaders.

Philip was not one to turn down such an opportunity. He immediately put his oldest son Louis—now twenty-five—at the head of an invasion force, promising him the crown of England should the war succeed (and also extracting from him a series of oaths promising that he would govern England only under his father’s direction). A number of the Western Frankish nobles joined him, with the notable exception of the Count of Flanders, who had fallen out with Philip and refused to be part of the campaign.

At this, John (not unlike Raymond of Toulouse, four years earlier) decided that it was time to get right with God. In May, before Philip could launch his fleet from the French coast, John was “roused to repentance.” He met with the pope’s legate in London, agreed to Stephen Langton’s appointment, and publicly acknowledged the pope as his spiritual head (accompanied, to sweeten the deal, with a thousand pounds of silver as tribute to Rome). The legate then went straight to Paris and forbade Philip to attack his newly restored brother in Christ.2

Philip was greatly put out. He had, he complained, already spent sixty thousand pounds putting his invasion force together, in obedience to the pope’s command, and he had been counting on “the remission of his sins.” But both the legate and Innocent III were unmoved. If Philip attacked John, he would now find himself on the wrong side of crusade.

Fortunately for John, Philip found another object of wrath: the Count of Flanders, who had broken his vassal’s oaths by refusing to attack England. French ships and soldiers had already assembled for crusade; Philip decided to use them to firm up his control over Flanders. He ordered the fleet to sail out of the mouth of the Seine and turn east, making its way along the coast to the Flanders coastline, while he invaded from the south of the county.

The count, “much alarmed at this attack,” immediately sent word to his two most natural allies: John of England, who was Philip’s enemy; and the Holy Roman Emperor, Otto IV.

Otto, who had struggled with Philip of Germany for the right to be called emperor, had finally gained the title when his rival was murdered in 1208, by a distant half-drunk cousin who had some personal grievance with him. (The cousin was then decapitated, so a full explanation was never gotten.) He was crowned in 1209 and promptly fell out both with Philip of France, his rival for power on the continent, and with Innocent III, who excommunicated him the year after his coronation, when Otto refused to hand over the control of Italian lands to the papacy.3

John, meanwhile, could not turn down the chance to recover Normandy from France. He too agreed to join the fight. Tens of thousands of soldiers*—German, Flemish, Dutch, Frankish, and English—assembled at Valenciennes, under the personal command of Otto IV. John himself, no battlefield general, stayed in Poitou, but sent his bastard brother William Longsword to command the English archers.

Philip II of France, grateful now that he was not in Languedoc fighting heretics, called his own royal forces to muster at Tournai. With him stood another pretender to the German throne: Frederick, king of Sicily, who hoped to seize both the German throne and the title of emperor.

On July 27, 1214, as Philip was leading his troops towards Lille—intending to find advantageous territory on which to fight—the English and German allies intercepted the French army on the river plain near the bridge of Bouvines. It was Sunday, a day on which Christian kings were not supposed to wage war, and Otto IV was inclined to delay the inevitable battle. It seemed to him, says Roger of Wendover, “improper . . . to profane such a day by slaughter and the effusion of human blood.” But after consultation with the English barons, he decided to seize the opportunity.4

Seeing that the enemy was preparing to fight, Philip drew up his own troops, their backs to the river, and ordered the bridge itself at the rear broken down so that, should they decide to flee, they would be able to do so only through the opposing line. Even more usefully, he assured them that the war against the excommunicated Otto and his allies fell firmly into the category of crusade. He took steps to play this drama out: first arming himself, and then taking the time to celebrate Mass at a nearby chapel with his own barons. When they emerged from the chapel, they carried with them the oriflamme, the red silk banner that represented the presence of Saint Denis, patron saint of France, and thus of divine favor.5

In the blinding heat of the July afternoon, the French began the fight with a cavalry charge against the Flemish mounted knights. Violent fighting followed, but ultimately the greater experience (and better equipment) of the French soldiers began to pay off. The English and German allies were slowly driven back, until the lines broke. The English baron Hugues de Boves, who had insisted on the Sunday engagements, fled with his men. Several Flemish dukes followed him. Otto IV continued to fight, remounting three times after his horses were killed beneath him. But soon it became clear that the battle was lost, and he fled, leaving his imperial banner behind him.

Young Frederick drove Otto back to his family lands and claimed his title; he was crowned Frederick II, king of the Germans (although not yet emperor), in Aachen on July 25. The Count of Flanders and William Longsword, both taken prisoner during the battle, were hauled to Paris. Philip agreed to exchange William for a French nobleman taken captive by the English, but the Count of Flanders was not so lucky. He was imprisoned in the Louvre, where he remained for the next twelve years.6

When news of the defeat reached John, he exclaimed, “Since I became reconciled to God, woe is me; nothing has gone prosperously with me!”

35.1 The World of the Magna Carta

ON SEPTEMBER 18, at the great castle of Chinon in the Loire river valley, John and Philip agreed to a five-year truce that confirmed Philip’s control over all the lands lost in 1206. After the humiliating treaty was signed, John retreated over the English Channel. He would never leave England again.

But his homecoming was not a happy one.

“About this time,” says Roger of Wendover, “the earls and barons of England assembled at St. Edmonds . . . [and] after they had discoursed together secretly for a time, there was placed before them the charter of king Henry the First. . . . [A]nd finally it was unanimously agreed that, after Christmas, they should all go together to the king and demand the confirmation of the aforesaid liberties to them.” Henry I’s Charter of Liberties, used to shore up support for his claim to the throne, had listed fourteen rights of church and barons that the king pledged not to violate. But more importantly, it began, “All the evil customs by which the realm of England was unjustly oppressed will I take away, which evil customs I partly set down here.”

This made the Charter an instrument by which the barons could keep on enumerating evil customs. And chief among those was John’s continuing taxation. He had demanded yet another scutage to pay for the failed campaign in Western Francia; most of the barons had refused to pay it, but the demand still hovered over them.7

When John arrived back in England, he furiously insisted that the scutage be paid at once. At this, the boldest of the English barons gathered and demanded that John affirm the Charter or prepare for war.

John stalled, sending Stephen Langton to negotiate with the barons, promising to hear them as long as they would write out exactly what they meant by “evil customs.” In January of 1215, three months after his return to England, he met the leaders of the opposition and received the twelve-item list they had appended to the Charter of Liberties. First on the list was a demand that the king concede his right to “take a man without judgment.” Eight was a provision limiting scutage to “one mark of silver” per baron (John’s most recent demand had been for three), an amount that could be raised only with the consent of the barons themselves.8

No taxation without consent, limitation of the king’s power to seize and punish: it was, as the contemporary Chronicle of Melrose remarks, “a new state of things . . . in England; such a strange affair as had never been heard.” The Chronicle is incredulous: “The body wished to rule the head, and the people desired to be masters over the king,” it marvels. But John had pushed his barons too far, and the defeat at Bouvines had weakened him just enough for them to push back.9

For five months, John put his noblemen off with promises and additional requests for clarification. The twelve-item list grew to forty-nine.* By the last week of April 1215, it had become clear that the king was not going to yield. On May 3, the chief barons of England renounced their allegiance to the crown of England. Two weeks later, a group of the rebels seized London on Sunday morning, while most of the population was busy attending Mass, and installed one of their own as the new acting mayor of the city. “They then . . . sent letters throughout England,” says Roger of Wendover, “to those earls, barons, and knights, who appeared to be still faithful to the king . . . and advised them . . . to stand firm and fight against the king for their rights and for peace. . . . [T]he greatest part of these, on receiving the message of the barons, set out to London and joined them, abandoning the king entirely.”10

With the party of the barons growing daily, John decided to negotiate. He was short on money, suffering from a severe attack of gout, and had no intention of keeping to any promise made under duress in any case. He sent word to the rebel barons by way of William Marshal, now close to seventy and in his forty-fifth year of service to the English throne, that he would meet them at a time and place of their choosing.

They chose a field lying between Staines and Windsor: Runnymede, a water meadow on the Thames. On June 15, the “whole nobility of England . . . in numbers not to be computed” assembled on one side of the field; John, carried on a litter because of the severity of his gout, and his few remaining supporters on the other. “At length,” Roger of Wendover writes, “king John, seeing that he was inferior in strength to the barons, without raising any difficulty, granted the underwritten laws and liberties, and confirmed them by his charter.”11

The Magna Carta, the Great Charter confirmed by John at Runnymede, bears the date June 15, 1215; but in fact John and the barons negotiated with each other for most of the week, amending and adding to the articles before the charter was finally sworn out. In its final form, the Magna Carta provided the barons with multiple layers of protection against the king’s whimsy; it protected their goods, their lands, and their inheritances against John’s arbitrary decrees; it rested the final decision over fines and scutages in the “common counsel of our realm,” a gathering of churchmen, earls, and barons (known, since William the Conqueror, as the Curia Regis, and now invested with additional powers). “No one,” read Article 39,

shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed or outlawed or exiled or in any way ruined, nor will we go or send against him, except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land.12

To make sure that the charter was observed, the Magna Carta also appointed a committee of twenty-five barons who had the power to confiscate royal castles, lands, and possessions, should John refuse to abide by its terms.*

This was a massive shift in authority, but John signed it; in large part, because he’d already laid plans in place to get out of it. Before coming to Runnymede, he had written to Innocent III, pointing out that should the barons deprive John of kingly authority, they would also be depriving Innocent III—the papal overlord of England, to whom John had sworn loyalty as a vassal—of his spiritual authority. Innocent III, ever mindful of his own power, reacted as John had hoped. On August 24, he announced that the Magna Carta was annulled. “On behalf of Almighty God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,” he wrote to England, “. . . and by our own authority . . . we utterly reject and condemn this settlement, and under threat of excommunication we order that the king should not dare to observe it.”13

John, who had spent five perfectly happy years living under papal condemnation, at once piously decided to obey God rather than man. He had retreated, after Runnymede, to the Isle of Wight. Armed with papal permission, he emerged to gather an army of foreign soldiers: mercenaries, men from Aquitaine, papal loyalists. The run-up to the Magna Carta had been bloodless; even the capture of London had been achieved without battle. Now war began.14

The Magna Carta had not been intended to establish a democracy; and from the beginning of the fighting, the barons hoped not to do away with the king but to find a better one. They now decided, Roger of Wendover writes, “to choose some powerful man as king, by whose means they could be restored to their possessions and former liberties; and . . . they unanimously determined to appoint Louis, son of Philip the French king, as their ruler, and to raise him to the throne of England.”15

Philip, once again seizing the chance to do his enemy a disservice, agreed to this plan. On May 21, 1216, Louis—aged twenty-nine, married to Princess Blanche of Castile—landed in England. “As soon as Louis arrived in England,” the Chronicle of Melrose records, “William Longsword, brother of the king of England, and many others, deserted the king and passed over to Louis.” He marched to London unopposed; John, realizing that few of his French soldiers would fight against their own prince, had retreated to Canterbury. The barons welcomed Louis to the city, and proclaimed him king of England there.16

In the next months, Louis fought his way through the south of England, laying siege to both Dover and Windsor, driving John back towards the Welsh border. Both armies were given to “rapine and robbery, and . . . the destruction of property,” and anarchy once again swallowed the countryside. Like the war between Stephen and Matilda, the Barons’ War seemed poised to drag on indefinitely. But in early October, John came down with a fever after a difficult journey. “His sickness was increased by his pernicious gluttony,” Roger of Wendover writes, “for that night he surfeited himself with peaches and drinking new cider.” Like Stephen, seventy-five years before, John had come down with dysentery. He died on October 18, 1216, aged forty-nine; he had been king of England for eighteen and a half years.17

Prince Louis now assumed that England would fall complete into his hands. But with John gone, William Marshal—regent for John’s nine-year-old son, Henry—swore that young Henry would cleave to the Magna Carta. Meanwhile, the barons had been rethinking their plan. Louis’s French troops had not made themselves popular. They had treated the barons with arrogant disdain, and Louis himself had been quick to claim for his own personal possession the castles and lands he had seized in his war against John. Slowly, the barons began to trickle back over to the house of Plantagenet.

By the following summer, it had become clear to Louis that his hopes of an English crown were doomed. In September, he gave up and went home (“in lasting ignominy,” Roger of Wendover says). The ignominy was, possibly, made more bearable by the terms of his departure; to hasten him on his way, William Marshal handed over ten thousand silver marks from the royal treasury.18

*Historians differ over the size of the armies that fought at Bouvines; estimates range from 20,000 to 80,000 or more.

*The original twelve-item list is usually known as “The Unknown Charter,” while the forty-nine items are known as “The Articles of the Barons.”

*Magna Carta is one of the most exhaustively studied documents in Western literature and cannot be treated thoroughly in a history of this breadth. J. C. Holt’s Magna Carta (Cambridge University Press, 1965) is the best starting place for the general reader; the Unknown Charter, the Articles of the Barons, and the Magna Carta can all be read in full in English Historical Documents, vol. 3, 1189–1327, ed. Harry Rothwell (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1975); 1215: The Year of Magna Carta, by Danny Danziger and John Gillingham (Touchstone, 2005), gives a detailed account of the events surrounding Runnymede. An extensive bibliography of the best-regarded studies can be found in Michael Van Cleave Alexander, Three Crises in Early English History (University Press of America, 1998), pp. 114–120.

Chapter Thirty-Six

The Birth of the Inquisition

Between 1215 and 1229,

the Fourth Lateran Council calls for crusade,

the Albigensian Wars end,

the Franciscan and Dominican orders are recognized,

and the Council of Toulouse authorizes a new form of inquiry

THROUGHOUT 1215, priests and bishops had been making their way to Rome: singly, in pairs, in bands, arriving at the great city and taking up temporary lodgings. The newly appointed Latin patriarch of Constantinople was among them. So were the senior churchmen from Acre and the other Crusader cities in the east. Ambassadors from the kings of France, England, Germany, and a score of other sovereigns joined them. Innocent III had summoned a church council, and the entire Western world had responded.

On November 11, the Fourth Lateran Council began.* There were, says Roger of Wendover, more than eight hundred abbots and priors in attendance, and over four hundred bishops and archbishops. Dominic de Guzman, who had tried fruitlessly to convert the Cathars by preaching to them a decade earlier, was present. So, in all likelihood, was an obscure Italian monk from Assisi named Francis; he had gathered together a small band of devout men who had followed his call to strictly observe Matthew 19:21 (“If you will be perfect, go, sell all that you have, and give it to the poor”), and five years earlier Innocent III had given him permission to establish his own monastic order. They called themselves the Lesser Brothers, or Minor Friars; eventually they were nicknamed the Franciscans, after their founder.1

Innocent III intended for the Fourth Lateran Council—the greatest church assembly in a century—to address matters of doctrine and heresy. But the exiled Raymond of Toulouse was also present, along with his son and a handful of his supporters; he had come to plead for the restoration of his lands, currently in the hands of Simon de Montfort.

Contemporary accounts suggest that Innocent III was inclined to give Toulouse back to the count; Simon de Montfort had not proved to be a righteous ruler of the conquered lands. “He destroys Catholics just as much as heretics,” Innocent is said to have complained to his legates, “[and] serious complaints and bitter accusations reach me every month.” But the majority of the priests present objected, arguing that Raymond would once again give shelter to heretics. Saving his firepower for doctrinal issues, Innocent III yielded. Simon de Montfort was given permanent dominion over Toulouse, with only Raymond’s family lands in Provence held in reserve for his son.2

With Toulouse disposed of, the Fourth Lateran Council went about its business, confirming a staggering seventy articles of doctrine (all of them, says Roger of Wendover, were read aloud to the full council, “which seemed agreeable to some and tedious to others”) and issuing, as had almost become routine, a call for yet another crusade to the Holy Land. As far as Innocent was concerned, the Albigensian Crusade was at an end. But the wronged Raymond of Toulouse was not resigned to his exile. Simmering with fury, he left Rome and made his way to Avignon, in Languedoc, where he began to collect an army.3

Simon de Montfort was, by now, deeply unpopular in southern France, and Raymond had no trouble assembling a sizable band of supporters. He occupied the lands east of the Rhone without difficulty, and more than one town opened its gates to him willingly. Simon de Montfort, alarmed, hired additional knights (“with the promise of high rates of pay,” says Pierre des Vaux de Cernay) from France. But Raymond advanced steadily; and Montfort was fighting near the Rhone when the city of Toulouse itself revolted against him and sent Raymond an invitation to reenter as count and lord. Raymond marched into Toulouse in triumph on October 1, 1217.4

Meanwhile, Innocent III had died suddenly of an embolism, aged fifty-six, while visiting the central Italian town of Perugia. The cardinals of Rome went immediately into conclave to elect his successor, neglecting to bury the dead pope’s body; two days later, the theologian Jacques de Vitry found Innocent III’s body decomposing in the church of St. Lawrence, stripped of its gold-trimmed robes by thieves. His successor, the Roman priest Honorius III, immediately put most of his energies into the proposed Crusade, paying little attention to Languedoc except to authorize the creation of a new monastic order led by Dominic Guzman. This Order of Preachers, soon known simply as Dominicans, renewed Dominic’s efforts to conquer the Languedoc heresy by converting, rather than murdering, its inhabitants.5

Simon de Montfort laid siege to Toulouse, but his constant assaults on the city’s walls were always driven back by the citizens, who joined Raymond’s knights in building new defenses and operating the mangonels, catapults that hurled boulders over the city’s walls at the attackers: “Knights and citizens handled the stones,” says the contemporary Song of the Cathar Wars, “as did noble ladies and their daughters, young men, little girls and boys, everyone, great and small, and they sang songs and ballads as they worked.” Nine months into the siege, a stone pitched from a mangonel worked “by little girls and men’s wives” struck Simon de Montfort between the eyes and shattered his skull. A knight nearby hurriedly covered the body with a cape, but word of Montfort’s death spread at once, and his men immediately abandoned the siege.6

Toulouse rejoiced, but when Honorius III heard the news he announced a revival of the Crusade against Languedoc. Philip II of France sent a sizable force of archers and knights under the command of Prince Louis (newly returned from his unsuccessful bid to seize the English throne) to join Montfort’s son Amaury, aged twenty-three, in a renewed attack on the rebellious southern provinces.7

This campaign failed, disastrously. In one of the first engagements of the resurrected Albigensian war, Louis and Amaury besieged and captured the small town of Marmande. Probably hoping to terrify the rest of Languedoc into surrender, the two men authorized the massacre of Marmande’s inhabitants. “No one was left alive, man or woman, young or old,” says an eyewitness account. “Limbs and bodies, flesh and blood, broken fragments of human organs lay in every open place. The ground, the streets . . . were red with blood.”8

The strategy backfired. Resistance stiffened. Prince Louis took his army on to Toulouse and laid siege to it, but after six weeks Louis decided that the city was far too strong. He lifted the siege and went home. “He had achieved little,” writes William of Puylaurens, and Honorius agreed: “A miserable setback,” he wrote, of Louis’s defection.9

With Louis gone, Amaury de Montfort had no hope of retaking his father’s conquests. When Raymond of Toulouse died in 1222, after nearly seventy turbulent years of life, his son claimed his countship as Raymond VII.

The following year, Philip II Augustus of France also died. He had ruled France for over forty-two years, and in that remarkably long reign had doubled its territory, extended the power of the throne to unheard-of lengths, reduced the independence of its dukes, counts, and barons. Philip II had turned Western Francia into the nation-state of France.

Louis, inheriting the throne as Louis VIII, lived only three years before dying of dysentery, aged thirty-eight. His twelve-year-old son was crowned Louis IX; and Blanche of Castile became Louis’s regent, effective ruler of France. To bring peace to the south, Blanche offered the younger Raymond of Toulouse a treaty. If he tore down Toulouse’s newly constructed defenses, yielded several castles, and swore to fight Catharism, the French throne would recognize him as the rightful ruler of Toulouse. In addition Raymond would have to spend four thousand silver marks to establish a new university in Toulouse where right theology and proper doctrine would be taught.

Raymond VII agreed to the deal, which was signed in Paris in 1229. The Treaty of Paris brought Toulouse more firmly under the control of the French throne, but it also brought peace to the young count’s battered domains.

As further proof of his willingness to exterminate heresy, Raymond played host to a church council that met in Toulouse late in 1229. The council affirmed the establishment of the new University of Toulouse and laid out exactly how the extermination should proceed. “We appoint,” the council’s written canons explain, “that the archbishops and bishops shall swear in one priest, and two or three laymen of good report . . . in every parish . . . who shall diligently, faithfully, and frequently seek out heretics in those parishes.” When heretics were located, their houses were to be burned; if they repented “through fear of death,” they would merely be exiled and forced to wear crosses of colored cloth sewn onto their garments.10

This method of searching out heretics by appointed committee diffused the hunt out among both priests and laypeople: both were now authorized to inquire into the orthodoxy of their neighbors. Young Raymond had brought an end to the Albigensian Crusade; but in doing so, he had allowed the Council of Toulouse to establish the Inquisition.

36.1 The World of the Inquisition

*“Lateran councils” were those held in Rome itself, at the hall known as the Lateran Palace.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Moving Westward

Between 1215 and 1229,

the Mongols set their eyes

on lands west of the Oxus river

THE JIN CAPITAL ZHONGDU had fallen to Mongol siege, and the north of the Jin empire was in Mongol hands.

Four years in China—during which a multitude of Jin soldiers, officials, and councillors had been enfolded into the ranks of his advisors—had taught Genghis Khan that there was more than one way to build an empire. He did not give up the conquest of the Jin, a long and involved campaign of sieges and skirmishes that would drag on another nineteen years and he also sent troops to fight their way westward towards the Oxus river. But in an innovative and strange move for a Mongol, he also made moves towards diplomacy.

Just on the other side of the Oxus lay the kingdom of Khwarezm, a Turkish possession that had broken away from Khorasan after the Great Seljuk’s death, half a century earlier. It was ruled by Shah Ala ad-Din Muhammad ibn Tekish, who had set out in 1200 to turn himself from a minor sultan into a major power by conquering the old lands of the Great Seljuk himself. While Genghis Khan was fighting in northern China, Shah Ala ad-Din was battling towards Baghdad, hoping to seize control of the caliphate there.1

Hearing of the Mongol advance, the Shah left the battlefront to return home. When he arrived, he found three Mongol ambassadors waiting for him, sent by Genghis Khan with presents of precious metals and semiprecious stones, rhinoceros horns and white camel wool. The Shah’s secretary, Muhammad al-Nasawi, records the message that accompanied the gifts. “I am familiar with the magnificence of your empire,” Genghis Khan wrote, tactfully,

and I know that your authority is recognized in the majority of the countries of the world. Therefore, I consider it my duty to strike up friendly relations with you. . . . You know better than anyone else that my provinces are nurseries for soldiers, of mines of silver, and that may produce an abundance of things. If you would agree that we open up, each from our own side, an easy access for negotiations between our countries, this will be an advantage for us all.2

There is no reason to think that he was insincere. He already ruled a larger swath of the world than any Mongol had ever dreamed of, and a treaty with Khwarezm would have opened up brand-new trade routes and the opportunity to gain unheard-of wealth. But the Shah, perhaps soured by two decades of war, saw only a threat. He bribed one of the ambassadors to act as a spy; and then, when a second delegation came from the Khan, had them arrested and murdered. (“He seized the negotiators,” says al-Nasawi, “and so they disappeared forever”—not the last time this technique would be used on suspects.)3

So began the disruption of the west.

“This movement of anger,” al-Nasawi wrote, several decades later, “brought about the ruin and depopulation of the earth. . . . From all sides poured torrents of pure blood.” In person, Genghis Khan led a vast army—200,000 strong, a combined force of Mongols and soldiers drafted from the conquered lands—westward. They rode through the dry wastes of the Gobi Desert, across the Altai Mountains, over the rough rocky ground between the Altai and the Aral Sea, to the borders of Khwarezm. In 1219, the horde descended on the border city of Otrar.4

The Shah, believing that the nomadic Mongols would be difficult to defeat on open ground but unable to take fortified cities, had divided his troops up among his frontier fortresses. Genghis Khan left two of his sons to besiege Otrar and sent a second division under his oldest son, Jochi, to blockade the nearby river city of Khojend. He himself led a third army to Bukhara, the wealthiest and largest city east of the Oxus river.5

In short order, all three cities were crushed. In Otrar, the official responsible for the murder of the Mongol ambassadors was taken prisoner and executed by having molten gold poured into his eyes and throat. The garrison at Khojend tried to escape along the riverbank at night, but Jochi’s men chased the soldiers away from the river and through the desert until, one by one, they fell to Mongol arrows or exhaustion. In Bukhara, the townspeople surrendered almost immediately, but a small royal detachment held out in the city’s citadel. Genghis Khan ordered the citadel stormed, with Bukhara’s civilians driven in front of his own men as a shield. After twelve days of assault and slaughter, the citadel too was taken; the defenders were massacred.6

Hearing of this efficient shattering of his frontier, the Shah fled westward. Genghis Khan sent his two highest-ranking generals, Jebe and Subotai, to pursue him, but Ala ad-Din escaped by boat into the Caspian Sea and took refuge on an island, where he died less than a year later. His son and heir, Jalal ad-Din, slipped away to the east, leading five thousand men to a safe haven in the north of India.

Jebe and Subotai, with twenty-five thousand soldiers behind them, continued around the southern end of the Caspian Sea, up into the Kingdom of Georgia.

Georgia, crisscrossed with mountain ranges and deep valleys, had always been home to a disunited array of tribes and peoples. At the beginning of the twelfth century, a vigorous young Christian king known as David the Builder had managed to bring the patchwork of native mountain tribes, Turks, refugees from Cilician Armenia, and various Muslim settlers under his rule; by the end of the same century, his granddaughter Tamar governed a Christian Georgia that covered almost all of the land bridge between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea.7

Now under the rule of Tamar’s son George IV, the Kingdom of Georgia was able to field an impressive number of troops to meet the Mongol invasion. But Jebe and Subotai crushed the Georgian army near the capital city of Tbilisi, staged a fake withdrawal, and then stormed back to kill the survivors. The king, badly wounded, was forced to give up the south of his country.8

Meanwhile, Genghis and his sons had turned back eastward to conquer Samarkand and then after a brief rest had continued the devastating sweep across Khwarezm. Cities that surrendered were generally looted and then put under Mongol governorship, but their citizens were mostly spared; cities that resisted were exterminated. At Tirmidh, where the people refused to surrender, Genghis Khan ordered the entire population driven outside the city walls and put to death, giving each of his warriors the task of executing a certain number of men, women, and children. At Merv, by conservative accounts, seven hundred thousand people were massacred; some contemporary chroniclers put the total at more than a million. At Nishapur, four hundred useful artisans were spared. Everyone else was beheaded; the Mongols piled the heads of the men in one place, the heads of women and children in another. Two massacres were carried out in Balkh, one when the city first fell, a second after the false withdrawal of Genghis’s men lured survivors out of the nooks and crannies where they had hidden. “Wherever a wall was left standing,” writes the thirteenth-century historian Juvaini, “the Mongols pulled it down and for a second time wiped out all traces of culture from that region.”9

Meanwhile, Jalal ad-Din had claimed his father’s title of Shah of Khwarezm, and was gathering himself to attack the Mongol rear. Receiving word that the new Shah’s forces had managed to defeat a Mongol outpost, Genghis Khan turned and began to ride eastward, back towards India. His vendetta against the Shah was still alive; he traveled, says Juvaini by day and night, not even stopping for food. He caught up with Jalal ad-Din on the banks of the Indus river, and drove him and his men steadily backwards into the water. Most of the Shah’s men were killed by Mongol arrows as they struggled in the water; the whole river, Juvaini writes, was “red with the blood of the slain.” Jalal ad-Din himself managed to flounder through the Indus on horseback and emerged on the other side, only to flee into the distance. His wives and children, left behind, were taken captive; all of his male children were put to death.10

37.1 The Mongol Empire

After the Battle of the Indus, Genghis Khan himself returned east, to his ancestral lands in Mongolia. His task, it seems, was done.

But he left his son Jochi in charge of a substantial Mongol army in the west. This force continued to raid the lands east of the Black Sea, and eventually a coalition of worried peoples, including Georgians and detachments from the Turkish tribes who had settled north of Georgia, assembled on the banks of the Kalka river in an attempt to drive the invaders out.

The coalition was shortly joined by the Grand Duke of Kiev, a prince from the Rus’ tribes who occupied the cold lands just southeast of the Baltic Sea.11

The Rus’, Christian since the tenth century, had been mostly occupied with internal matters since their conversion. Each major city of the Rus’ was ruled by a prince who (like the Turkish sultans) paid lip service to the overall rule of a Grand Duke, but protected his own power, sometimes viciously. The ruler of Kiev had most often claimed the title Grand Duke, but for the last half century, his authority had been constantly challenged by the rulers of the city of Novgorod.

The current Grand Duke of Kiev, Mstislav III, had no worries about the Mongols; they were still far to the south. But the fight against the Mongols would most certainly increase his standing among his own people. In response to appeals from his southern neighbors, he recruited the nearby princes of Galich, Chernigov, and Smolensk, and led a force of eighty thousand Russian warriors south to the Kalka river.

The joint army was disorganized, the command divided, and half of the troops advanced towards the waiting Mongols before the Kievans even knew that battle had begun. The contemporary Russian history known as the Chronicle of Novgorod says that his first wave, instantly repelled by Jochi’s men, panicked and stampeded back through Mstislav’s camp, leaving him to fend off the advancing Mongol front. He held out for three days before the Mongols overwhelmed his position and took him captive. He was put to death, the Chronicle tells us, by suffocation; the Mongols forced him and his captive men to lie beneath boards and then “took seat on the top to have dinner. And thus they ended their lives.”12

Jochi chased the retreating Rus’ survivors westward, raiding and killing as he went. But when he reached the shores of the Dnieper river, he halted and turned back eastward, ready to travel home. He had carried out his orders; the Khwarezm had been punished, the west successfully raided, and Genghis Khan had no further intentions in this direction.

37.2 The Battle of Kalka

Instead, the Khan had turned to finish destroying the Western Xia. He was still directing this campaign when he died. After a bad hunting fall in 1225, he had suffered from recurring fevers and muscle spasms that grew gradually worse. Sometime in 1227, in an unknown camp south of the Li-p’an Mountains, the Universal Khan of the Mongols drew his last breath. His death was kept secret, by his own wish, until his generals finished demolishing the last Xia strongholds in September of 1227.13

HE LEFT HIS CONQUESTS, which stretched westward to the Caspian Sea and southward to the Hindu Kush mountains, to his sons.

Jochi had died a few months before his father, so the lands awarded to him—the western territories he had himself helped reduce—were divided between his two sons. Genghis Khan’s youngest son Tolui received the Khan’s own homeland. Chagatai, the second son, was given his father’s lands in Central Asia.

The third son of the conqueror, Ogodei, received the title of Great Khan of the Mongols.

This had been Genghis Khan’s own wish. He had fallen out with Jochi repeatedly, and he suspected that his second son Chagatai was unequal to the job: “As Genghis Khan was aware that his nature was excessively sanguinary, malevolent, and tyrannical,” writes Juvaini, “he did not bequeath the sovereignty to him.”14

This created a certain amount of dissension, but by 1229 the Mongols had agreed to recognize Ogodei as Genghis Khan’s rightful successor. The new khan’s first act was to dispatch forces westward. What Genghis Khan had seen as land to be raided, his sons saw as the new battlefront. And thanks to their father’s training, they knew how to fight successfully against the settled west.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

South of India

Between 1215 and 1283,

Sri Lanka is divided between Hindu and Buddhist kings,

and the Pandyas of the south bring an end to the Chola empire

IN 1215, the Hindu nobleman Magha fled south, along the eastern coast of India. The sultan of Delhi was bearing down on him from the north; so he left his lands in Orissa and, followed by his own private army, set out to find a new country.

Orissa, now ruled by a string of powerful Hindu kings descended from Chola royalty, was not a place where an ambitious soldier could establish his own power. Nor was the kingdom of Chola, directly south of it, shrunken from its twelfth-century height but still strong. Magha kept going south, crossing over the Palk Strait, and came to the shores of Sri Lanka.

Parakrama Bahu’s carefully constructed kingdom, well watered and prosperous, held together by the net of state-sponsored Buddhism, lay open to invasion. Three years earlier, a newcomer from the south of India had arrived and taken the throne for himself; a Buddhist newcomer who, although a foreign invader, ruled (in the words of the Culavamsa, the chronicle of kings written in Sri Lanka’s Pali language) “without transgressing.” But he could not raise enough support to fight back against Magha, who had swelled his private army to over twenty thousand by hiring south Indian mercenaries.

Magha stormed the north of the island with savagery. He wrecked Buddhist shrines, destroyed sacred writings, forced his captives to convert to Hinduism, confiscated the land that he overran, seized crops and livestock and treasure for his own. He was, in the words of the Buddhist Culavamsa, “a man who held to a false creed, whose heart rejoiced in bad statesmanship, who was a forest fire for the burning down of bushes in the forest of the good.” He captured the capital city of Polonnaruwa, burning parts of it, took the king captive and put his eyes out. He then established himself as king, using his standing army of thousands to keep power over the inhabitants.1

But he did not take the whole island.

“During this alien rule,” says the Culavamsa, “. . . virtuous people had founded [villages] on several of the most inaccessible mountains, and dwelling here and there protected the laity and the [Buddhist] Order so that they were at peace.” In the face of the foreign regime, the native Sri Lankans had retreated farther south into the mountains, where Magha’s mercenaries could not easily reach them. One of the refugees, a man who took the royal name Vijaya Bahu III, claimed descent from the great fourth-century king Sirisamghabodhi, a ruler revered for his moral excellence. It was a convenient lineage; Sirisamghabodhi had fought off rebels and had sacrificed himself for his people.2

Vijaya Bahu rallied together the scattered sanghas, the different Buddhist houses that had been dispersed throughout the safe places, and united the remaining Sri Lankans behind him. His center of operations was the mountain settlement of Dambadeniya; it became his capital. When he discovered that several monks had taken the Buddha’s Tooth* with them in their flight from Polonnaruwa, he ordered the sacred relic brought to him, and mounted a great festival celebrating his re-enthronement as Sri Lanka’s true king. His efforts created a boundary between his conquests and those of the Hindu invaders, dividing the island into two realms: the Buddhist kingdom of Dambadeniya, and the Hindu realm of Polonnaruwa.3

In 1236, when Vijaya Bahu III died, his son took the name of his great predecessor and ruled as Parakrama Bahu II. In his hands, the rebel kingdom of Dambadeniya became a settled place of learning, a refuge for Pali speakers and writers, a center for Sri Lankan Buddhism. Vijaya Bahu III had ordered all of his subjects who had “good memory” and who were “skilled in quick and fair writing” to record everything they could remember of the destroyed Buddhist scriptures, rebuilding a massive library; Parakrama Bahu II had immersed himself in it, earning a reputation for learning. Like the first Parakrama, he weeded out unworthy monks and “purified the Order of the perfectly Enlightened One.” The great religious festivals were resurrected, the rituals performed, temples and monasteries built. The Culavamsa spends chapter after chapter after chapter listing his perfections, his accomplishments, his virtues. Dambadeniya was rising to the heights of the old Polonnaruwa kingdom.4

In 1255, Magha died in Polonnaruwa. He had stayed on the throne for four decades, which suggests that his rule had moved beyond mere military domination; but the Buddhist chronicles have nothing but scorn and hatred for him and his Hindu regime, so that his accomplishments are hard to trace. Nor is it known whether he had an heir. But no one replaced him on the throne at Polonnaruwa, and the north separated into patches of private power, ruled by chieftains called vanniya.5

The northern lands thus were easy grounds for adventurers, who crossed over to Sri Lanka in increasing numbers, driving its native peoples farther and farther south.

One of these, Chandrabhanu, seems to have come from southeast Asia; he was, according to the Culavamsa, “a king of the Javakas,” who landed “with a terrible Javaka army under the treacherous pretext that they also were followers of the Buddha.” But most of the newcomers were from the south of India, where the Pandyan kingdom had managed to free itself from the overlordship of the Chola.6

Under the splendid Jatavarman Sundara, the renaissance of Pandyan power stretched from the central coastal city of Nellore, all the way down to the Indian Ocean. Now Jatavarman pushed the Pandyan kingdom into the north of the island as well. In 1263, he removed the “king of the Javakas,” Chandrabhanu, from his brand-new Sri Lankan throne and put the northern part of the island entirely under Pandyan domination. “Emperor of the three worlds,” Jatavarman’s inscriptions name him; his lands encompassed the north of the island, his own Pandyan realm, and had swallowed the west of the Chola as well.7

38.1 The Pandya Renaissance

The Chola, reduced to a strip of land around the capital city of Thanjavur, soon disappeared. After 1279, there are no more records of Chola kings; the Pandya had taken their place as lords of south India.

But neither the Pandyan kingdom nor their Tamil tongue completely claimed Sri Lanka. In the southern half of the island, both the Dambadeniya kingdom and the Pali language survived.

In 1283, an embassy from Dambadeniya arrived in Egypt, hoping to arrange a trade treaty with the sultan in Cairo. “They arrived at the port of Ormus,” says a contemporary Arabic account, “proceeding up the Euphrates to Baghdad, and thence to Cairo.”

A letter from the king was presented to the Sultan, enclosed in a golden box, enveloped in a stuff resembling the bark of a tree. The letter was also written in indigenous characters upon the bark of a tree. As no person in Cairo could read the writing, the ambassador explained its contents verbally, saying that his master possessed a prodigious quantity of pearls, for the fishery formed part of his dominions, also precious stones of all sorts, ships, elephants, muslins and other stuffs, bakam wood, cinnamon, and all the commodities of trade. . . .8

Parakrama Bahu’s successors still ruled in Dambadeniya; and from underneath the shadow of south India, they were reaching out to the rest of the world.

*See Chapter 16, p. 111.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

The Fifth Crusade

Between 1217 and 1221,

another crusade to Egypt fails

WHILE THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE was languishing towards its slow end in France, the Crusade authorized by the Fourth Lateran Council was limping towards Egypt.

The conquest of Egypt had been a Crusader goal for over half a century. Now governed by Saladin’s brother al-Adil (who had ended the squabble between Saladin’s sons by taking the Ayyubid throne himself), Egypt still controlled the city of Jerusalem. Al-Adil was seventy-two and in poor health, but still capable of mounting a sharp resistance.

“The army of the Lord assembled in great force at Acre,” writes Roger of Wendover, “under the three kings of Jerusalem,* Hungary, and Cyprus. There were also present the dukes of Austria and Bohemia, with a large knightly array from the kingdom of Germany, and several counts and men of rank.” Missing were all of the greater powers of Europe: the kings of England and France; the king of Germany and hopeful emperor, young Frederick II (although he had promised to arrive just as soon as his German crown was secure); any of the Spanish rulers.1

Andrew II of Hungary, the most powerful sovereign to take the cross, did so reluctantly, and only because he had promised twenty years to go on crusade and had still not fulfilled his vows. Nor did he stay long. He arrived at Acre in the late summer of 1217, realized that there weren’t enough soldiers to do anything effective, made a couple of desultory raids into Muslim territories, and then declared his vow fulfilled and went home.

The meager Crusader force remaining waited until the spring of 1218; Frederick II of Germany had promised, faithfully, to join their cause. In April, the hoped-for German Crusaders finally arrived, although without Frederick. He was still fighting against supporters of the deposed Otto in Germany, and again made his excuses.

The Crusaders, led by King John of Jerusalem (actually regent for his young daughter Yolande, but still the most powerful sovereign present), decided to make for the Egyptian port city of Damietta, which was under the governorship of al-Adil’s oldest son, al-Kamil. Conquering Damietta would give them a good strong base from which to attack the Egyptian capital of Cairo.

39.1 The Fifth Crusade

They sailed for Damietta, arriving in May, and found themselves faced with a triple set of walls. Damietta could not be broken into; it would have to be starved out, and it was supplied with food and water by a branch of the Nile that was protected by a tall, fortified tower; from the tower to the walls of Damietta, says the Arab historian Ibn al-Athir, “massive iron chains [were] slung across the river . . . to prevent ships arriving from the sea from travelling up the Nile into Egypt.”2

All summer, the Crusader forces labored to get past the chains and block the Nile. Late in August, they finally succeeded in scaling the fortress tower and cutting the chains. Immediately, al-Kamil sank cargo ships in the Nile in front of the city, creating a reef too shallow for the Crusaders to sail past.

This meant that the Crusaders had to spend the next winter dredging out a canal that would allow them to sail around the reef. This was unrewarding and bitterly difficult work, and Crusaders began to seep away; few new reinforcements arrived. Meanwhile, says Ibn al-Athir, Damietta was “reinforced and supplied uninterruptedly” and stood “safe and unharmed, its gates open.”3

Then the Crusaders had an unexpected piece of luck. The old sultan suffered a stroke and died, leaving the Ayyubid throne to his son; but a Cairo nobleman mounted a bid to usurp it, rallying his supporters against al-Kamil. Al-Kamil deserted Damietta and headed towards Cairo. Without its governor, the city’s defenses weakened. The Crusaders made their way around the reef, back into the Nile, by February, and blocked Damietta from resupply. The blockade gave them hope that the city might eventually fall, but Damietta still held out, even while its people began to starve.

Sometime in the late summer, a visitor arrived at the Crusader camp on the Nile: Francis of Assisi, founder of the order of the Lesser Brothers. Francis, says his thirteenth-century biographer Bonaventure, was driven in his mission both by the burning desire to preach the Gospel and by an equally fiery desire to suffer martyrdom for the sake of Christ. He had tried twice before to travel to Muslim lands; his first effort had been derailed by storm and shipwreck, his second by illness. Finally, he had managed to make his way to Egypt, where he hoped to bring peace to the Crusade-wracked country by converting the Sultan.

Jacques de Vitry, the same priest who had discovered the rotting body of Innocent III in a deserted Italian chapel, was also at the Crusader camp; three years earlier he had been appointed Bishop of Acre, and had traveled to the siege with the Crusader army. In a letter to his colleagues back at Acre, he described Francis’s visit. “He was so inflamed with zeal for the faith that he did not fear to cross the lines to the army of our enemy,” he wrote. “For several days he preached the Word of God to the Saracens, and made a little progress.”

Francis then set out for Cairo and eventually gained an audience with al-Kamil himself. By this time, al-Kamil had managed to put down the rebellion in the capital with the help of his brother al-Mu’azzam, deputy governor in Syria. He received Francis politely and listened to his sermons. (“In fact,” Jacques de Vitry adds, “the Saracens willingly listen to all these Lesser Brothers when they preach about faith in Christ and the Gospel teaching, but only as long as in their preaching they do not speak against Mohammed as a liar and an evil man.”) The new sultan was ultimately unconvinced, but he dismissed Francis of Assisi with unfailing courtesy, and had him escorted safely back to the camp at Damietta. There, Francis tried to discourage the bored soldiers from visiting brothels and gambling to pass the time, with an equal lack of success.4

By late October no defenders were left to man Damietta’s walls. The Crusaders stormed the city on November 4, expecting riches and glory. They found a graveyard.

Five out of six citizens had died of starvation and plague. “Not only were the streets full of the dead,” writes Oliver of Paderborn, who was in the Crusader army, “but in the houses, in the bedrooms, and on the beds lay the corpses. . . . Little ones asked for bread and there was none to break it for them, infants hanging at the breasts of their mothers opened their mouths in the embrace of one dead.” Appalled by the scene, the Crusaders—Francis of Assisi and Jacques de Vitry still among them—did not indulge in any of the violence that had marked the conquest of Constantinople. Contemporary accounts agree that they allowed the survivors to leave the city, and even tried to feed (and baptize) the starving children.5

The conquest of Damietta turned out to be the high point of the Fifth Crusade. Al-Kamil, now in full control of the sultanate, had beefed up the Ayyubid army with his brother’s men. Meanwhile, no further Crusader reinforcements arrived. The army in Damietta was too weak to attack Cairo. For the next year, it remained in the city, unwilling to leave, unable to push forward. Francis of Assisi, “making no progress” either in converting the Egyptians or in attaining martyrdom, left to visit Bethlehem and then returned home. Jacques de Vitry occupied himself in writing a comprehensive history of the Crusades. Frederick II did not arrive, although he talked Pope Honorius III into crowning him Holy Roman Emperor, in 1220, by promising to embark on crusade immediately afterwards.6

By June of 1221, the Crusader army was fed up with Damietta. Against the advice of the more experienced soldiers, the senior papal legate accompanying the Crusade, Pelagius, talked the bulk of the army into leaving Damietta and marching towards Cairo.

The long uncomfortable advance was slowed by constant attacks from al-Kamil’s front lines. The Crusader army was relying on boats from Damietta, supplying them with food by way of the Nile, but as they drew closer to Cairo, al-Kamil’s own boats cut this supply line off. By the end of August, the Crusaders were hungry, thirsty, and discouraged. They decided to retreat back towards Damietta, but by this point the Nile was in full flood, and al-Kamil ordered the sluice gates that lined the Crusader path back to Damietta opened. Their way was flooded and impassable, except for one narrow road blocked by al-Kamil’s army. The Crusaders were trapped; and that was the end of the Fifth Crusade.7

Al-Kamil could have slaughtered the pinned army, but he accepted their offer to hand over Damietta in exchange for their lives. To guarantee that Damietta would be surrendered, the Crusaders handed over twenty hostages (including the senior papal legate Pelagius, who was not particularly popular at that moment). They went back to Damietta, collected their belongings, and went home.

Blame for the failed campaign was well distributed. Pelagius came in for his share: such catastrophe is to be expected, wrote the French scholar William the Clerk, “when the clergy take the function of leading knights.” The leaders who had allowed themselves to be convinced by Pelagius were roundly condemned; they in turn blamed the pope; Honorius III blamed Frederick, who had never shown up.8

The single bright spot in the entire bleak picture was the rumor, brought back by Jacques de Vitry on his return, that help against the apparently impregnable Muslim front was on the way. He had heard tales from India, de Vitry explained, that a Christian king from deep in the heart of that unknown land was approaching Baghdad, and would sweep the Muslims away in front of him. He was known, variously, as King David or Prester John, and (as de Vitry wrote in a letter to Honorius III) he was “like unto David, the holy king of Israel . . . crowned by the will of Providence.” King David, ruler of a huge Christian realm hitherto undiscovered, had hundreds of thousands of men. He had already defeated Khwarezm and was even now hurrying towards the Holy Land to rescue its sacred sites.9

But there was no King David, no Christian army from India, no help on the horizon. The reports that had reached Jacques de Vitry were garbled tales of the Mongol advance from the east; and when the Great Khan appeared, it would not be as a rescuer of Christendom.

*By “Jerusalem,” Roger of Wendover means the remnants of the Kingdom of Jerusalem centered at Acre; increasingly it was known as the kingdom of Acre.

Chapter Forty

From the Golden Bull to the Baltic Crusade

Between 1218 and 1233,

the king of Hungary is forced to acknowledge

the rights of his nobility,

and the Teutonic Knights

embark on the long conquest of Prussia

RETURNING HOME from his perfunctory visit to the Fifth Crusade, Andrew of Hungary found his country in a state of ferment.

It had been bubbling even before his departure for the Holy Land. Andrew, now in his thirteenth year as king, had started his rule under a shadow. Intended to serve as regent to the actual heir, the five-year-old son of his brother King Emeric, Andrew had instead seized the throne for himself. His sister-in-law had taken the child and fled to Austria, where the conflict was resolved when the boy died of illness the following year.

Three weeks later, Andrew had arranged for the Archbishop of Hungary to crown him as rightful king of Hungary. And, by way of shoring up his claim, he started to give away royal lands to his supporters with abandon. Villages, castle lands, fortresses: anything that fell under his authority as a royal domain was fair game.

Andrew himself called his gifts a “new institution”: the novae institutiones, the right of the monarch to be as free and generous as he pleased. But his generosity unsettled the country. The lands he gave away had no strings attached; if you were one of Andrew’s partisans and received the gift of a village in exchange for loyalty, you owed the king no further service in return, no tithe of crops or service, no taxes, no obligation to answer to anyone for the welfare of the villagers, who now were subject to your whims.

This was bad enough, but the gifts were also distributed in uneven clumps. Taxes and military service now fell unevenly onto the shoulders of the Hungarian dukes and counts who were not in the king’s inner circles. And Andrew hit a long-festering pocket of resentment by favoring, in vast numbers, German knights who had settled in Hungary.1

These had come at the time of his marriage to his first wife, Gertrude, daughter of the Count of Bavaria and direct descendant of Charlemagne himself. Andrew had made the match in 1205, as part of his effort to position himself for the Hungarian throne; and while connection to German nobility provided him with additional allies, it had also brought numerous aristocratic retainers and relatives from Germany into Hungary. In the early years of Andrew’s reign, these German knights became, in unpopular numbers, the lords of Hungarian castles and the lawmakers of Hungarian villages.

Another massive wave of German knights had arrived in Hungary in 1211. The Teutonic Knights, a military order made up of Germanic Crusaders, had been granted papal recognition around 1200. Their original purpose had been to protect the pilgrim hospital St. Mary’s of the Germans, in the city of Jerusalem; but the hospital had been destroyed by Saladin in 1187, and the Teutonic Knights had been set adrift from their purpose. Andrew invited them into Hungary to help protect his borders from the invasions of the Cumans, a wandering tribal alliance of Turkish, Mongol, and northern Chinese peoples who had migrated slowly farther and farther to the west. In exchange, he awarded them a home in the eastern reaches of Hungary, in a thickly wooded part of his kingdom known as Erdő-elve: “through the woods,” or, in Latin, Transylvania. There the Teutonic Knights were permitted to live, govern themselves, and crusade against the Cumans; they were expected to remain loyal to Andrew, but were exempt from both taxes and tribute.2

In 1219, the year after his return from the Fifth Crusade, Andrew announced that all lands gifted by the crown would remain permanently in the hands of their receivers, to be passed down as hereditary estates from father to son into eternity. This would have carved Hungary up into an unrecognizable set of principalities, many of them under German control, and it was one step too far for the Hungarian knights and counts. With the encouragement of Honorius III (who believed that Andrew was not zealous enough in promoting the interests of the Church within his realm), they drew up a charter protecting their own rights, as well as the rights of the Christian priests under Andrew II’s rule.

Threatened with a mass uprising, as well as by the possibility that his noblemen might decide to enthrone his teenaged son Béla in his place, Andrew was forced to yield. On Saint George’s Day, 1222, he agreed to sign the offered charter. Called the Golden Bull (after the golden seal that dangled from the scroll), the charter began with a pointed condemnation: “The liberties of the nobility, as well as others of these realms,” it announced, “. . . have suffered great detriment and curtailment by the violence of certain kings who are impelled by their own evil propensities [and] by the cravings of their insatiable cupidity.”3

The Golden Bull, like the Magna Carta, protected the rights of the wealthy and powerful; it was not a charter for the common man. The Hungarian nobility could not be taxed arbitrarily. The noblemen could not be forced to fight in foreign wars; nor could the king create new nobility by giving away his lands.

But the Golden Bull did carve out a space where even a peasant could safely stand. “No man shall be either accused or arrested, sentenced or punished for a crime,” the second statute read, “unless he receive a legal summons, and until a judicial inquiry into his case shall have taken place.” And, like the Magna Carta, the Golden Bull made very clear that the instrument itself was greater than the king. Should Andrew refuse to abide by it, “the bishops as well as the other barons and nobles of the realm, singularly and in common . . . [may] resist and speak against us and our successors without incurring the charge of high treason.”4

Two years after the signing of the Golden Bull, the Teutonic Knights—assuming, perhaps, that the Hungarian king had lost so much support that he was vulnerable—made a play to turn their Transylvanian territories into an independent state. They sent a petition to Honorius III, asking that they be put directly under the authority of Rome, answerable only to the pope—a request that would have exempted them from obedience to earthly kings.

Honorius happily granted the request, but the petition was a clear attempt to abscond with the granted Hungarian land and create an independent state. King Andrew was indignant. The Teutonic Knights, says one of his court chroniclers, had become “to the king like a fire in the breast, a mouse in the wallet and a viper in the bosom, which repay their hosts badly.” He assembled an army, marched into Transylvania, and drove the Teutonic Knights out.5

Deprived of their Hungarian roosting place, the Teutonic Knights were at loose ends. But their venture had confirmed a new purpose for the order: domestic crusade, fighting against pagans and infidels at home. Their renewed calling came at the right time. Honorius III, following in the footsteps of Innocent III, was proving to be more willing than any pope before him to recognize wars against non-Muslims as worthy of the designation (and rewards attached to) crusade.

North of the Hungarian border, west of the Rus’, lived a people who had as yet played almost no part in the larger power struggles of the surrounding nations. The Polans were a Western Slavic tribe who had, for two centuries, occupied the river-crossed lands between the Carpathian Mountains and the Baltic Sea. Their existence had first been chronicled in the anonymous Gesta Principum Polonorum, written around 1115; they were, says the Gesta, ruled by a dynasty called the Piast, who had converted to Christianity sometime in the tenth century. In 992, the Piast prince Boleslaw had crowned himself the first king of the Polans, but the title brought no unity. Cousins of the Piast fought with each other for the crown, and local tribal leaders resisted the victors. By the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Polans were divided into a series of dukedoms, discrete but fairly prosperous and orderly: Little Poland, Mazovia, Kujawy, Greater Poland, Silesia.6

The Polans duke Konrad of Mazovia, in the north, hoped to conquer the lands directly above him. These lands were occupied by another tribal people, known (from the language they spoke) as Lithuanians; and the Lithuanian-speakers themselves were divided into three groups, each of which spoke a different Lithuanian dialect. Farthest to the north were the Letts, bordered by the Rus’ on the east and just below the cold Baltic Sea. In the basin of the Vistula river lived a second group of Lithuanian-speakers, known, generally, as Prussians. Between them lay a larger group who simply claimed the name Lithuanian.7

To European eyes, all of the Lithunians dwelt at the very edge of civilization. According to Oliver of Paderborn, they “venerated the waters, trees, hills and caves . . . and worshipped all kinds of mythological creatures.” “They burned their dead, along with the horses and weapons and magnificent clothes,” offers the anonymous thirteenth-century chronicle Descriptiones Terrarum, “for they believed that they can use these and other burned items in the world to come.” These were markers of wild paganism, and Honorius III had already sent missionary bishops into Lithuanian lands to convert the tribes. The efforts had not yielded much success: the “evil, sinful wickedness” of the Prussians, writes the German historian Nicolaus von Jeroschin, “had made them so stubborn that no teaching or exhortation or blessing could move them from their error.”8

There was one good thing about the Prussians, Nicolaus von Jeroschin adds as an afterthought: they “lived at peace with the Christians who had settled alongside them.” This was soon to end.

The Polans, just a little ahead of the Lithuanian tribes in the evolution of their state, saw them as fair game. Konrad of Mazovia offered the Teutonic Knights another opportunity to crusade: they could come into his dukedom and fight against the enemies of Christ who lived around the Vistula. In exchange, he promised them a northern tract of land in his dukedom for their own “in perpetuity . . . and in addition the lands which they might conquer thereafter with the help of God.”9

For a relatively small payout, Konrad thus got a heavily armed, zealous, and experienced border guard. The Teutonic Knights gained a base of operations and the chance to conquer a kingdom, plus all the benefits of holy war: In 1226, Honorius III declared the fight against Lithuanian-speakers to be a new crusade, complete with full absolution of sin for those who took part.

40.1 The Baltic Crusade

The Teutonic Knights took some time to organize and assemble themselves, but in 1233 the first invasion of Prussia, across the Vistula river, began. It was the beginning of a war that would last for decades. What began as the “Baltic Crusade” turned into an ugly, bloody, protracted struggle in which (as the historian Kenneth Setton puts it), “primitive tribes with no common political organization were obliged hopelessly to protect their lives, farms, tribal independence, and religion against the superior might of the west.” Before long, the fighting forked into a double war, one against the pagan Lithuanians, the other against nearby Christians who hoped to seize some of the land east of the Baltic for themselves.10

“It was completely joyless and full of hard fighting,” writes Nicolaus von Jeroschin of the new Crusade, “. . . a land of horrors and wilderness . . . [where] the knightly sword of Christianity greedily devoured the sinners’ flesh.” For the next fifty years, the Teutonic Knights would lay waste to the lands of the Lithuanians—fighting, perhaps, for Christ, but hoping to gain themselves a kingdom.11

Chapter Forty-One

Lakeshores, Highlands, and Hilltops

In Africa, between 1221 and 1290,

a descendant of Solomon overthrows a descendant of Moses,

a Muslim king extends his reach,

and the kings of Mapungubwe move to the hilltops

IN 1221, the greatest church builder in Africa died.

Eight hundred years before, an eastern African king named Ezana had been converted to Christianity by the Roman emperor Constantine himself.* His kingdom, Axum, had remained a Christian realm until its disintegration, sometime in the middle of the tenth century. The fall of the capital city left the ghost of the empire behind: a network of monasteries and nunneries, a scattering of conquered and converted peoples who went on living, in peaceful obscurity, between the highland headwaters of the Nile river and the shores of the Red Sea.1

Sometime in the middle of the twelfth century, a local chief named Marara had managed to reclaim the title of king once held by those long-ago Christian rulers. He lived on the southern edge of the old Axumite land; his people, the Agau, had been forced to submit by the Axumites nearly nine hundred years before. But he claimed to be the rightful successor to the Axumite throne. He took the small southward town of Adafa as his capital, the descendants of the bygone Axumites as his subjects. His dynasty, the Zagwe (“of Agau”), left almost no records behind; no chronicles, no inscriptions, not even any minted coins.2

But they did leave churches, carved from single massive chunks of rock.

Marara’s great-nephew, Gebra Maskal Lalibela, was by far the most accomplished of all the Zagwe church builders. He was, by his own claim, a descendant of Moses and his Ethiopian wife.† Ancestry from a patriarch revered by Christian scripture was an efficient way to bolster his claims to be in the Axumite royal line, as was the elaborate coronation ceremony built around the Zagwe kings, observed by the Arab traveler Abu Salih. The king was crowned by a priest, beneath the portrait of the angel Michael in the church that bore the angel’s name; tonsured to represent his spiritual calling, he was clothed in priestly clothes rather than a crown.3

In the first quarter of the thirteenth century. Lalibela built nearly a dozen churches, carved out of the red volcanic rock. A narrow rocky river cut through his capital city; this river, channeled into deeper hand-cut narrows, was renamed Yordanos, the Jordan. The steep rock faces on both sides of the Yordanos were whittled away into huge standing outcrops, enormous lumps of stone on the banks; and then those blocks were chiseled, hollowed, and shaped, by skilled masons of the king, into churches with domes, pillars, and arches. The Mount of Olives church stood to the north, the Mount of Transfiguration to the south. A new holy landscape, the distant and inaccessible Israel of the Gospels, had been carved into African ground.4

There is not much more that we know about the Zagwe; only that, in 1270, a highland dweller named Yekuno Amiak married the daughter of the last Zagwe king and then usurped his father-in-law’s throne. He too had no real right to claim the Axumite mantle—he came from yet a third people, the Amhara—but he also claimed to be descended from a patriarch. In his case, the distinguished ancestor was King Solomon; a continually elaborated legend held that the queen of the western Arabic kingdom Sabea, who had visited Solomon to see his splendor, had returned from her journey pregnant; her son Menelik had then stolen the Ark of the Covenant from Solomon himself and carried it into Africa. This made Yekuno Amiak both the son of kings and the guardian of the (as yet unseen) Ark, a worthy successor to the Axumite throne.5

It also garnered him the support of the monasteries and nunneries. With their recognition of his right to rule, Amiak moved the capital to Shewa. From that city, his descendants, the Solomonid dynasty, would rule for two and a half centuries.

IN THE CENTER of the continent, the kingdom of Kanem was at its zenith.

Dunama, the first royal convert to Islam, had not managed to bring all of his people into the fold behind him. But his descendant and namesake Dunama Dibalemi, ruling from sometime in the early 1220s and staying in power until 1259, took more direct action. He first requested, and then ordered, his people to abandon their traditional practices and follow the ways of Islam; and then, to make his point, he destroyed Kanem’s most precious religious object.6

“In the possession of the Saifawa [dynasty],” an Arab account tells us, “there was a certain thing wrapped up and hidden away, whereon depended their victory in war. It was called Mune and no one dared to open it. Then the sultan Dunama . . . wished to break it open. His people warned him, but he refused to listen to them. He opened it, and whatever was inside flew away.”7

41.1 Zagwe, Kanem, and Mapungubwe

The exact nature of the mune is never made clear, but this was part of its power. The sacred object required obscurity for its power. Veiled, it was potent. Unveiled, trivial. Dibalemi ripped away its secrecy.

He had no need for talismans to give him victory in war. Dibalemi was good at war. He spent the early years of his reign building up his cavalry units, until he could put forty thousand mounted soldiers on the field at one time. He established a sizable arsenal on the northern shore of Lake Chad; from there, says the Arab geographer Ibn Sa’id, he often launched a fleet to make sea raids “on the lands of the pagans, on the shores of this lake . . . [he] attacks their ships and kills and takes prisoners.”8

During his thirty years on the throne, Dibalemi used his ships and cavalry to stretch his reach across the entire basin of Lake Chad. This gave him control of the southern part of the Eastern Trade Route, and a guaranteed path to trade in the north.

It also limited, somewhat, his enthusiasm for the spread of Islam. His refusal to abide by the secret of the mune speaks to his deep conviction of the truth of Islam. He lived by the pillars of Islam; he went on hajj not once but twice; he gave alms to the poor; he was known, says Ibn Sa’id, “for his religious warfare and charitable acts.”9

But like his predecessors, he used captive non-Muslim slaves as his primary currency, trading them north for horses and goods in short supply in central Africa. And so the lands south of Lake Chad remained non-Islamic, profitable hunting grounds for slaves that did not fall under Islamic prohibition.10

The quick and massive assimilation of nearby tribes and kinglets did not make Kanem a peaceful empire. By the end of his reign, Dibalemi was facing a serious undercurrent of rebellion. Some accounts chalk the unrest up to the clan of the Bulala, African traditionalists who resisted Islam and were aghast by Dibalemi’s desecration of the mune. Others suggest that, as the empire expanded, Dibalemi placed his sons as lieutenant governors in the outer reaches and then was forced to deal with their growing independence: “The sons of the ruler,” the Kanem king list remarks, tersely, “became separated in different regions.”11

Whatever the cause, Dibalemi died with his empire still intact, firmly Muslim, heavily armed, the strongest kingdom in central Africa; but with seeds of unrest just beginning to sprout.

SOUTH OF BOTH Kanem and Kagwe, on the Limpopo river, lay a kingdom that was neither Christian nor Muslim. Lacking the tradition of written chronicles that Islamic scholars and Christian monks carried with them, the kingdom of Mapungubwe left no king lists behind: just gold and ivory, glass beads and Chinese celadon, marks of an impressive trade network that stretched far to the east.

Mapungubwe had originally been no more than a band of traveling farmers, searching for fertile fields, who had come into the Limpopo river valley some two centuries earlier. Their settlement had grown to several thousand, their farms into multifield operations of millet, beans, pumpkins and melons, sheepfolds and cattle herds. They had begun to hunt elephants and to trade ivory down the Limpopo to Arab traders on the coast. Between the fertile fields and the ivory trade, they grew increasingly wealthy.12

Apparently the wealth was also unevenly distributed. Around 1220, a new complex suddenly appeared on the top of a nearby hill: a steep-sided, flat-topped hill with only four easily guarded paths to the top. A new palace and new spacious homes now stood on top of the hill; thirty years or so after, massive stone walls rose to enclose them. The smaller huts of nearly five thousand people now clustered around the the hill’s base.13

This was not for security. There is no sign of war or attack at Mapungubwe; and the government officials, the judges and tax collectors, apparently lived at the bottom of the hill. So did the cattle, goats, and sheep that fed the royal court. Prospering beyond his wildest expectations, the king seems to have removed himself from the hoi polloi, leaving them physically behind.

The strict segregation of rich from poor, royal from commoner, was a new thing in Africa. But Mapungubwe seems to have flourished for a time in its drastically two-level form. Traces of Mapungubwe settlement stretch over nearly twelve thousand square miles and are scattered with the remnants of trade with Egypt, with China, with India. At the top of the hill, royal graves were filled with gold beads, royal corpses dressed in rich robes and gold bangles and buried sitting straight up. A carved staircase replaced one of the paths, walled and corniced and intended for the king and his court alone.14

And then the Limpopo became unreliable. It dried to a thread, and then savagely flooded. The temperature dropped; rainfall dwindled. The people at the bottom of the hill began to trickle away. A good many of Mapungubwe’s residents seem to have moved northeast, to the city of Great Zimbabwe; in the next century, the trade routes too would shift to Zimbabwe.15

Without the commoners below, the king lost his tribute bringers, his taxpayers, his farmers, his place of pride. By 1290, he too had vanished, leaving his palace abandoned on the top of the hill.

*See Bauer, History of the Medieval World, pp. 193ff.

†Numbers 12:1.

Chapter Forty-Two

The Sixth Crusade

Between 1223 and 1229,

Frederick II recaptures Jerusalem with no bloodshed

and has pig intestines hurled at him in thanks

NEITHER ANDREW OF HUNGARY nor the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick had been present for the surrender of Damietta in 1221; Andrew, because he had gone home from the Fifth Crusade early; Frederick, because he had never arrived.

Promising again and again to descend on the Crusade in glory, complete with German reinforcements, Frederick II had always found a reason not to leave Germany. Now the Fifth Crusade was over; but Frederick had vowed that he would go on crusade, and the sacred promise still had to be fulfilled. In 1223, he assured Honorius III that he would be ready to go by 1225. In 1225, he postponed the planned trip east another two years.1

Frederick was newly married to his second wife Yolande, but the delay wasn’t due to wedded bliss. He was thirty-one, Yolande was fourteen, and the wedding had been celebrated by proxy. She was the daughter of King John of Jerusalem (whose kingdom, ruled from Acre, no longer actually included Jerusalem) and the rightful heir to the crown; John, although claiming the title of king, was merely her regent. And John hadn’t even been in Acre for the last two years. He had been traveling through France, England, Spain, and Germany, trying to whip up some crusading fervor that might help him get Jerusalem back.*

John had agreed to the marriage in hopes that his new son-in-law would provide him with an army. Instead, Frederick added the title “King of Jerusalem” to his own string of honorifics. Yolande’s husband, he argued, was more entitled to the regency than her father.

John was furious but impotent; he was in Italy, without an army, and Frederick had the support of Honorius III, who hoped that the title might finally propel Frederick across the Mediterranean. In this, he was disappointed. Honorius died in March of 1227; and Frederick did not make his first stab at crusading until August of that year. “He went to the Mediterranean Sea,” Roger of Wendover says, “and embarked with a small retinue; but after pretending to make for the Holy Land for three days, he said that he was seized with a sudden illness, . . . therefore he altered his course, and after three days’ sail landed at the port where he had embarked.”2

Frederick’s contemporaries merely rolled their eyes at the emperor’s sudden illness.* But Honorius’s successor, an Italian cardinal who had been elected Pope Gregory IX, promptly excommunicated the emperor for failure to keep his vow. Brand-new to the papacy, Gregory IX was afraid that he would “seem like a dog unable to bark.” He was no paper pope, and he wanted the world to know it; he published news of the excommunication to every ruler in Europe.3

So began two decades of a violent wrestling match between the emperor and the papacy. Hostilities were at their height, as crackling and wire tight as they had been all the way back in the day of Frederick’s great predecessor Henry V. Frederick had every intention of exercising every bit of royal prerogative he could clutch between his fingers. His defiance of the pope was so blatant that he was widely believed to be the Antichrist. The thirteenth-century Franciscan priest Salimbene tells of a “certain abbot of the Order of Fiore, an old and holy man,” who had hidden away all of his books lest Frederick lay waste the countryside: “For he believed that in the Emperor Frederick all the mysteries of iniquity should be fulfilled, because Frederick had such great discord with the Church.”4

Frederick seized every right that had been the subject of negotiation over the past centuries. He “appointed bishops and archbishops and other prelates,” the Italian chronicler Giovanni Villani explains, “driving away those sent by the Pope, and raising imposts and taxes from the clergy.” He claimed the right to rule Italy directly. And instead of negotiating with Gregory IX, he wrote to all the Christian kings and princes in Europe, accusing the Roman church of avarice. The letters, Roger of Wendover says, warned that the pope would continue to disinherit “emperors, kings, and princes” in order to seize their tribute: “And at the conclusion of his letter he advised all the princes of the world to guard against such iniquitous avarice in these words, ‘Give heed when neighbouring houses burn, / For next perhaps may be your turn.’”5

Meanwhile, Yolande had apparently taken up the full duties of a wife. At barely fifteen, she gave birth to her first child, a daughter; the little girl died at the age of nine months. Yolande was already pregnant again. Her son was born at the end of April 1228. The delivery killed her. She was buried, not long after her seventeenth birthday, in the southern Italian cathedral of Andria.

Her death threw Frederick’s claim to be king of Jerusalem into doubt. As the heiress’s widower, he had no more claim to the throne than the heiress’s father. But his newborn son Conrad was clearly the next claimant to the crown; and Frederick, not John, was his guardian.6

Now, at last, Frederick had good reason to go to Jerusalem.

In early September 1228, the emperor landed at Acre with only six hundred knights. This was the beginning of the Sixth Crusade. Unfortunately, as Frederick II was excommunicated, the church could hardly take credit for it, which annoyed Gregory IX so much that he excommunicated Frederick II for a second time. Frederick’s tiny army, he snapped, looked more like a pirate band than a king’s force.7

Unbothered, Frederick commenced his work. He had an unorthodox crusading strategy all planned, and he didn’t need an enormous military force to carry it out.

Al-Kamil, down in Egypt, had fallen out with his brother al-Mu’azzam, governor of his Syrian lands, and the Syrian realms had revolted. Frederick II had already negotiated a plan with al-Kamil. In exchange for Jerusalem, he would commit German and Italian forces to help al-Kamil get Syria back. But by the time he arrived, the situation had shifted. The Arab diplomat and historian Ibn Wasil, who served under al-Kamil, records the dilemma:

When the Emperor reached Acre, al-Malik al-Kamil found him an embarrassment, for his brother al-Malik al-Mu’azzam, who was the reason why he had asked Frederick for help, had died, and al-Kamil had no further need of the Emperor. Nor was it possible to turn him away and attack him because of the terms of the earlier agreement, and because this would have led him to lose the goals on which his heart was set at the time. He therefore made a treaty with Frederick and treated him with great friendship. What followed will be told later, God willing. . . . The Emperor settled at Acre and messengers came and went between him and al-Malik al-Kamil until the end of the year.8

Frederick refused to leave, and al-Kamil had no wish to start a war. Finally, the two men negotiated the surrender of Jerusalem. The city was a waste; its walls had been razed by al-Mu’azzam during the Syrian revolt, and most of the population had fled. It had no garrison, only a scattering of soldiers, a few officials who would rather have been elsewhere, and a handful of die-hard families. Al-Kamil handed it over to Frederick with a slew of conditions: he was not to rebuild the walls, the nearby villages would remain Muslim, the Temple Mount (including the Dome of the Rock) was to stay in Muslim hands, with the Christians only given visiting rights, and Muslim worship was to continue there uninterrupted.9

Without striking a blow, Frederick had attained the goal of all of the Crusades since 1100, and he had done so as an unrepentant excommunicate. It was hard for Rome to rejoice in this. In fact, no one was pleased with the treaty. “This year,” lamented the Arab historian Ibn al-Athir, “the Franks (God curse them) took over Jerusalem by treaty. May God restore it to Islam quickly!” “The news spread swiftly throughout the Muslim world,” writes Ibn Wasil, “which lamented the loss of Jerusalem, and disapproved strongly of . . . al-Kamil’s action as a most dishonorable deed.” The Christian reaction was almost as strong; Frederick II had entered into a binding and sacred agreement with an infidel, and this was no way for a Christian emperor to act. (Gregory IX, who had a talent for one-liners, snapped that a covenant had been arranged “between Christ and Belial.”)10

Ignoring the outcry, Frederick journeyed south to his new possession and entered Jerusalem on March 18 of 1229. Since he was still excommunicated, the patriarch of Jerusalem tried to forbid him to enter the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; but Frederick brushed him aside. “We reverently visited the Tomb of the Living God, like a Catholic Emperor,” he wrote in his own dispatches. “On the next day, Sunday, we wore the Crown there, to the honour of the Most Highest.” He merely meant that he had entered the church as Holy Roman Emperor, but the indignant patriarch accused him of usurping his infant son’s title and crowning himself king of Jerusalem with his own unholy hands, and the rumor spread.

Frederick had never intended to stay in Jerusalem permanently; he appointed two Syrians of Frankish descent, Balian of Sidon and Garnier l’Aleman, as regents in Jerusalem and went back to Acre. On May 1, he headed down towards the harbor, ready to board his ship and set off for home. He had regained the Holy City for Christendom, but he didn’t get a hero’s send-off. The rumors had reached Acre, and its people were so incensed by his supposed self-coronation that they hurled pig guts and offal at him as he made his way out of the city.11

*Yolande’s dead mother had been the granddaughter of Amalric, king of Jerusalem from 1163 to 1174, and the great-granddaughter of Fulk of Jerusalem, former count of Anjou and father of Henry Plantagenet; Yolande’s father, John of Brienne, was a Frenchman, second son of the Count of Brienne (in Champagne).

*The genuineness of Frederick’s complaint continues to be a matter of debate. David Abulafia, one of Frederick’s most accomplished biographers, points out that one of his companions, the Landgrave of Thuringia, also sickened and actually died at sea (Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor, pp. 165–166). However, Gregory IX certainly didn’t believe in Frederick’s illness, and his opinion seems to have been shared by many.

Chapter Forty-Three

The Tran Dynasty

Between 1224 and 1257,

a new royal family rules the Dai Viet,

a new nation breaks away from the Khmer,

and the Cham try to dominate the south

THE KING OF THE DAI VIET was not well.

Hue Tong of the Ly dynasty had been on the throne for fourteen years. His road to the throne had been a rutted and difficult one; before he was fifteen, his father, King Cao Tong, had been driven from the throne by a palace revolt. The royal family had fled to Nam Dinh Province, where they took refuge with the wealthiest family on the coast: the Tran, made prosperous by generations of skillful fishing. In exile, Crown Prince Hue Tong had married the young daughter of the house. This brought the entire Tran clan firmly over to his side, and with the help of his new wife’s father and brothers, the crown prince and the king were able to return to their capital city of Thang Long.

In 1210, at Cao Tong’s death, Hue Tong had assumed the throne of the Dai Viet. Still only seventeen years old, dependent on his in-laws for support and direction, Hue Tong had promoted his wife’s male relatives into higher and higher positions at court. Now thirty years old, the king had Tran generals, Tran ministers, Tran noblemen, Tran interests surrounding him on all sides.

What he did not have was a son.

Already inclined to melancholy, Hue Tong retreated further and further into a fog of despair. His mental state is recorded not in the official court histories of the Dai Viet kings, but instead in palace rumors that became often-told tales. “Sick and faint-hearted,” one story begins, “the King Ly Hue Tong abdicated, and retired into the country.” In his place, he left his seven-year-old daughter, Chieu Hoang.1

Little Chieu Hoang had no say in court; her Tran mother and in-laws acted as her regents, so Hue Tong’s abdication in 1224 effectively handed the country over to the Tran. The chief of the royal guard, the young queen’s uncle Tran Thu Do, arranged for the child to marry her first cousin Tran Canh, the eight-year-old son of another Tran uncle. And after the marriage was celebrated, Chieu Hoang obediently handed her right to rule over to her small husband. In December of 1225, Tran Canh was proclaimed emperor of the Dai Viet.2

Just months later, Hue Tong was dead in his Buddhist monastery. The stories say that Tran Thu Do visited him and suggested that his daughter’s reign would be peaceful only if Hue Tong removed the possibility of a revolt in favor of the Ly dynasty. “A few days after his conversation,” the tale concludes, “King Ly was found hanged on the boughs of a rose-wood tree.”3

The circumstances imply that Tran Thu Do did a little more than simply suggest suicide. But however it happened, Hue Tong’s death brought an end to over two hundred years of Ly rule. Tran Canh was child king of the Dai Viet; and his uncle Tran Thu Do immediately appointed himself to the office of Grand Chancellor.

Tran Thu Do was a vigorous man of thirty-one, and until his death in 1264, remained de facto ruler of the country, uncrowned king of the Dai Viet and the true founder of the Tran dynasty. He schemed to eliminate the remaining members of the Ly family; according to one contemporary chronicler, he built a temple over a huge pit, invited the Ly clan to come honor their ancestors in it, and then pushed the entire temple with all inside into the pit and buried them alive. Another history, the thirteenth-century Dai Viet su ky, explains that Tran Thu Do sent out geomancers to scour the entire Dai Viet kingdom for sites on which a future king of the Dai Viet might be born. When those places were located (apparently, they held a concentration of vital forces that could be detected only by those trained to detect the earth’s energy flows), Tran Thu Do ordered them razed, built over, or ruined.4

Under the direction of Tran Thu Do and the (usually) compliant Tran Canh,* the Dai Viet government got a complete overhaul. The countryside was divided into twelve administrative provinces; new taxes were introduced to help pay for a larger standing army and a series of dike projects; an accurate census was carried out; a Chinese-style academy, the National College, was founded to train scholars and future officials in the knowledge of the classic Chinese writings. But the Tran clan, while paying homage to the importance of Confucian education, remained thoroughly Dai Viet in their ways. “Our forefathers,” wrote a later Tran emperor, “since the very beginning of the Dynasty, established their own system of law and did not follow the Song laws and institutions.”5

The young king himself realized early on that he was more or less superfluous. In 1236, he attempted to leave his throne and enter a monastery, but Tran Thu Do intercepted his flight and forced him back to the palace. Trapped on his throne, Tran Canh devoted himself to composing treatises on Buddhist philosophical topics. The man who does not devote himself to the rigorous pursuit of self-knowledge, he wrote, is

always wandering in life, like a man full of vicissitude

he strays miles and miles further from his native village. . . .

No need to go a long way!

One can come home.6

The birth of a son in 1240 gave Tran Canh the hope that, one day, he too might be able to abdicate to the sanctuary of a Buddhist cloister. But that longed-for retreat was still almost two decades away.

Instead, he did his duty by his country, which included leading, in 1252, an attack on his southern neighbors.

KHMER, once the greatest enemy of the Dai Viet, had exhausted itself. The kings who had followed the conqueror Suryavarman had watched the outer edges of his empire flake slowly away. In 1238, the shrunken Khmer shed another chunk of land, this one in the fertile western valley of the Chao Phraya river, laced with smaller rivers and cut through by mountains. The people who lived there were known to the Khmer and Champa as the Syam; on the bas-relief scenes of battle carved at Angkor Wat, the Syam march with the armies of the Khmer king, but they march apart, wearing their own battle dress.7

For a time, the Khmer ruler Indravarman II—an obscure king almost unknown to the chroniclers—had managed to keep the Syam in the upper valley loyal by granting one of their chiefs a royal title and a princess for his wife. But in 1238 this chief, Pha Muong, made an alliance with another Syam clan leader who had never fallen under Khmer domination. Together, the two men led a short sharp attack on the Khmer officials in Sukhothai, the largest city in the valley, and drove them out.

Pha Muong, perhaps realizing that his willingness to violate his oath of loyalty to the Khmer king had weakened his authority, then led the way in proclaiming his ally, Bang Klang T’ao, king of the valley. This was the first independent kingdom of the Syam, the root of the Thai nation.8

To the east, the downtrodden Champa had also shaken off the Khmer yoke. The country was a faint shadow of its own self, but under Jaya Paramesvaravarman II was making a comeback.

He had inherited the rule of Champa in 1227 and had immediately begun an extensive rebuilding program: temples and palaces, dams and ships. Champa ships began to raid the Dai Viet coast, carrying off both goods and slaves. “He reinstalled all the lingas of the south . . . and the lingas of the north,” read the inscriptions from his reign; he was reasserting his own rule as Hindu monarch over his country, wiping out the claims of the Khmer god-king who had overwhelmed it.9

43.1 The Four Kingdoms of Southeast Asia

For a time, Champa seemed poised to tip the balance towards itself, becoming the most prosperous nation in the southeast. Cham ships took aloewood, elephant tusks, and rhinoceros horns north to Chinese ports and brought back silk and porcelain. Jaya Paramesvaravarman himself laid in stores of jewels and gold, flaunting them in his royal costume to show his power.10

Around 1252, Jaya Paramesvaravarman demanded that the Dai Viet return three provinces between the two countries, seized long ago by the Ly dynasty. The provinces were a sore point between the two thrones, and together Tran Canh and his uncle took the opportunity to strike back. A Dai Viet army stormed into the north of Champa; in the battle that followed, Jaya Paramesvaravarman fell and his daughter, the crown princess Bo Dala, was taken captive back to Thang Long.

The kingdoms of the southeast now lay in an uneasy four-way truce. Champa’s aggression had been checked, and Tran Canh’s son was growing towards adulthood. Retirement was almost within his grasp. But before the crown prince could reach his eighteenth year, all four kingdoms were shaken by the approach of a threat greater than any of them.

The Mongols were approaching.

*Tran Canh is more often known by his posthumous royal name, Thai Tong.

Chapter Forty-Four

Young Kings

Between 1227 and 1242,

Louis IX of France fights off Henry III of England,

and the kings of León-Castile and Aragon

almost finish the reconquest of Spain

THE WESTERN KINGDOMS were in the hands of the young.

In France, twelve-year-old Louis IX and his regent, his mother Blanche of Castile, faced a front of French barons who were tired of eclipse. Louis’s grandfather, Philip Augustus, had taken a loose collection of almost-independent noble estates in Western Francia and turned them into France, a country united under a strong-handed king. France was more prosperous, stronger, larger than Western Francia had ever been.

The price: the power of France’s nobility.

Philip Augustus’s son Louis VIII, an experienced soldier, had died of dysentery in 1226 after a brief three-year reign. His untimely death gave the French aristocrats a chance to push back. “Since the barons of France saw the King a child,” writes Louis’s friend and biographer, the Crusader knight Jean de Joinville, “and the Queen his mother a foreign woman, they made the Count of Boulogne, the uncle of the King, their chief, and held him likewise to be their lord. After the King was crowned, there were barons among them who demanded of the Queen that she should give them great fiefs; and since she would do none of this, all the barons assembled at Corbeil.”1

Corbeil was just south of Paris. At that moment, young Louis IX himself was on his way back to Paris; he had been on a coronation tour, so that his subjects could see him and pay their respects, and had halted at Montlhéry, a few miles west of Corbeil. The frustrated barons apparently planned to kidnap the young king, but word of the plot got to Blanche. She surrounded the royal party with armed men, and they made their way back to Paris as quickly as possible.2

This level of hostility towards a crowned king was a new and alarming phenomenon, and it was soon followed by even more disturbing news: the king of England was using the revolt of the barons to make a play for the French lands that King John had lost.

Henry III was now twenty years old, ready to terminate the regency that had dominated him for eleven years. Old William Marshal had died in 1219, three years after the boy king’s coronation; his successor, the Earl of Kent, was easily dismissed. Henry, energetically reorganizing his government to suit himself, had no possessions left in France except for the south of Aquitaine. But he still held the titles Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou, and he now had hopes of regaining the lands that went with them. Encouraging the rebellion against young Louis, he sent messengers to the French barons: “making large promises,” says Roger of Wendover “if they would receive him in good faith . . . and acknowledge him as their natural lord.”3

Henry’s first attempts to woo the French nobility came to nothing; Blanche of Castile had rethought her refusal to meet the baronial demands and was “lavishly distributing amongst them the lands and castles of the royal domain.” She managed to bribe and persuade most of the discontented nobility to swear allegiance to her son, and Henry’s messengers went home unsuccessful.

Henry III had a high opinion of his own royal rights. Inclined to act autocratically, to mount lavish demonstrations of his own magnificence, and to insist on his own prerogatives, he was not willing to give up his claim to the French lands. Eventually he persuaded the Count of Brittany to break his vows to Louis IX and swear allegiance to the English throne instead, in exchange for the title Earl of Richmond and the opportunity to become Duke of Brittany instead of a mere count. Now Henry had a friendly shore to land on; and in May of 1230 he sailed from Portsmouth with his army and landed at Saint-Malo, on the Brittany coast.4

He had visions of a great and glorious war against the French enemy, but after five months he still hadn’t gotten out of Brittany. Inexperience, empty pockets, and the prospect of fierce French opposition stalled the English army at the southern border: “The king of England all this time,” writes Roger of Wendover, “was lying with his army at the city of Nantes, doing nothing except spending his money.” In October, recognizing the impossibility of fighting any farther into the lost lands, Henry III gave up and went home. Not long after, the Count of Brittany reversed himself and became, once more, the vassal of Louis IX.5

Neither of the young kings had distinguished himself. Henry III spent the next few years trying to appease his own barons, who were annoyed both by his autocratic manner (his first move, as soon as he got back to London, was to demand that they all ante up scutage to pay for the unsuccessful campaign) and by his propensity to offer favors to the French. And Louis IX, relying on Blanche to keep his own unhappy barons in line, found himself forced to yield to most of their demands to keep peace.

ACROSS THE WATER south of England, across the mountains west of France, the kings of Spain were having much better fortune.

44.1 The Invasions of Henry III

James of Aragon, who had begun his rule as a five-year-old hostage to Simon de Montfort, was now twenty-two. For the first fourteen years of his reign, Aragon had been in a boil of intrigue, every noble clan attempting to maneuver its way past the child into power. “The nobles of Aragon formed themselves into gangs and factions,” James wrote, in his own account of his reign, “. . . And we were unable to take decisions nor did we have anybody with us whom we could consult.” His regent had resigned when James was ten, leaving him to run the country more or less on his own; and he grew up a master of manipulation, playing his noblemen against one another to preserve himself.6

James had a hair-raising childhood: fighting, armed in combat, for the first time at nine; leading a siege at eleven; married at twelve (“We were a full year with her without being able to do what men should do with their wives, because we were not old enough”). In 1227, at nineteen, he had finally managed to negotiate a truce between all the battling clans: the Peace of Alcalá, an agreement that finally gave the towns of Aragon the breathing space to mend their walls and restock their treasuries.7

James was both canny and ambitious; at once, he corralled all the warlike nobles into a single cause and pointed them towards the Muslim lands.

The Almohad caliphate had retreated into North Africa, leaving a series of independent governors ruling mini-kingdoms across the south. Among the most powerful of these was Ibn Hud, who had begun as an Almohad official in Murcia and took advantage of the Almohad decay for his own benefit: “Little by little,” says the sixteenth-century historian al-Maqqari, who used contemporary accounts now lost to write his account of Muslim Spain, “Ibn Hud’s partisans increased, until, seeing himself at the head of a respectable force, he caused himself to be proclaimed king by his men.” He swore allegiance to the Abbasid caliph in far-off Baghdad, and in return was awarded the title Commander of the Faithful; and before long he also controlled Seville, Córdoba, and Granada.8

Instead of moving south against Ibn Hud, James targeted the Muslim-ruled island of Majorca, off the eastern coast. He talked the cortes, the lawmaking assembly of Aragonese nobility, into passing a tax that would pay for the war; he talked the papal legate in Aragon into offering crusade indulgences* to anyone who would fight with him; he sailed through a ship-destroying storm to land on the shores of Majorca; and in December of 1230 he led his army in sacking the capital city of Palma and claimed the island for himself. It was his first great victory, and it gave Aragon a serious edge in carrying on trade across the Mediterranean Sea.9

To his west, the king of Castile, Ferdinand III, was also prospering.

Ferdinand was the son of the king of León by his second wife, and so not in direct line to inherit León’s throne. Instead, he had been crowned king of Castile at the age of eighteen, when his mother had inherited the rule of Castile from her brother and had immediately passed it on to him. In 1230, as James was returning from the conquest of Majorca, the king of León died. Immediately Ferdinand claimed the throne of León as well; his two older half siblings, both women, were unable to rouse enough support to drive him off, and the three eventually came to a semifriendly settlement. This made Ferdinand the king of a united León-Castile; the two kingdoms, which had joined and split several times already, would never divide again.

The following year, Ferdinand led the armies of his double kingdom south against Ibn Hud. Two years of campaigning drove Ibn Hud to sue for peace; he was, at the same time, threatened on his other side by another Muslim governor, Ibn al-Ahmar of Arjona. Al-Ahmar declared himself to be king of Arjona in 1232, and the cities of Córdoba and Jaén at once went over to him. “Whilst the [Muslim] chieftains divided among them the provinces of Andalus, or were at war against each other,” al-Maqqari laments, “the Christians . . . were furiously assailing the dominions of Islam.” The multiple battle lines weakened the Muslim kingdoms and gave Ferdinand an advantage: he pushed steadily through the Islamic-held territories, and by 1236 Córdoba was in his hands.10

Late in 1237, Ibn Hud, who had lost most of his supporters as he lost his land, was assassinated by one of his lieutenants, the governor of Almería. According to al-Maqqari, the two men had fallen passionately in love with the same woman, a Christian prisoner (“one of the most beautiful creatures that ever lived”), and Ibn Hud’s lieutenant hired four men to smother his rival with pillows as he slept. With Ibn Hud out of the scene, al-Ahmar immediately seized Almería. In 1238, he proclaimed himself king in Granada and started to construct a fortified palace for himself: the Alhambra, the “Red One,” named after the red clay bricks that the builders first used. It would become the official residence of his descendants, the Nasrid dynasty, and the capital of the Kingdom of Granada.11

44.2 The Spanish Peninsula, 1248

Over the next decade, Ferdinand of León-Castile and James of Aragon between them carried out the reconquest of almost all of the remaining Muslim lands. James began a campaign against Valencia: “Now that God has allowed you to conquer by sea,” one of his noblemen told him, “you should also conquer that which is at the gate of your kingdom. And it is the best and most beautiful land in the world.” It took him thirteen years, but by 1245 Valencia was his. Ferdinand took Murcia in 1243, Jaén in 1246, and Seville in 1248. Only the Kingdom of Granada survived the Christian onslaught, the last Muslim enclave in Spain.12

HENRY III was not so lucky.

He had not given up on his French project. Ever since his humiliating return to England, he had schemed to divert the allegiance of Louis IX’s nobles. His new ally was Hugh de Lusignan, count of the small province of Marche, just south of Poitiers. Forty years earlier, Hugh had been engaged to Henry’s mother, Isabella of Angoulême; King John had taken her away and married her. But in 1220, four years after John’s death, Isabella had returned home. Hugh, seeing her, was struck with her beauty, and the long-separated pair married. Isabella was thirty-two, Hugh close to forty; she had already given John five children, and between 1221 and 1234 she had nine more, half siblings to the king of England, with the Count of Marche.

Isabella had encouraged her husband to switch allegiances (according to some accounts, she refused to sleep with him until he agreed), and while Hugh de Lusignan pretended loyalty to Louis, he was secretly assembling men to fight against the king of France. In May of 1242, Henry III brought three hundred English knights across the Channel to join his stepfather; a much smaller army than he had hoped for, but the barons of England had refused to agree to a higher scutage, and it was all he could afford.13

Louis responded by gathering thirty thousand men and garrisoning them at the castle of Taillebourg, west of Marche, on the banks of the Charente river. Henry III, once again displaying the total lack of strategy that had characterized his earlier invasion, brought his men and Hugh’s—barely two thousand in number—to face the French across the river. It could be crossed only by a slender bridge; perhaps Henry thought that this would narrow the odds. But the French had already assembled a whole fleet of boats to storm across the Charente.

On July 22, the battle began, and ended quickly. “Our folk,” writes Jean de Joinville, “that had the castle on their side, strove with much ado and crossed perilously by boats and [pontoon] bridges and fell upon the English.” Henry III fled; the few noblemen who had accompanied him, among them Simon de Montfort the Younger (son of the notorious Crusader), fought a desperate rearguard action, but finally were forced to scatter and flee. Hugh de Lusignan and Isabella were taken prisoner. Louis IX allowed them to apologize, and then took most of Marche for himself, plus all the Count’s money.14

Henry III took up a new position at Bordeaux, but he had no strength left; Simon de Montfort, exasperated almost beyond words, told him that he ought to be locked up like Charles the Simple before he did any more damage. But the damage was already done. The defeats in France rankled; and in the next century, the seeds Henry had planted would blossom into a century-long war.15

*An “indulgence” was an official pronouncement, validated by the authority of the pope, that reduced the amount of punishment a sinner would have to undergo in the afterlife.

Chapter Forty-Five

The Mongol Horde

Between 1229 and 1248,

the Mongols terrify the world

THE UNIVERSAL KHAN was dead, and his conquests had been divided up between his sons: his youngest, Tolui, in the heartland, the flat grassy Mongolian steppes; his second, Chagatai, in Central Asia between the Amu Darya river and the northwestern edge of the steppes; the two sons of his dead oldest son Jochi in the western lands, beyond the Aral Sea. And as the overlord of all of them, his third son Ogodei: the Great Khan, presiding (at least in theory) over the entire realm from his homeland near the Kherlen river.

The Mongol armies had backed away from the west, at Genghis Khan’s death; a token force remained north of the Caspian Sea, where the Kiev warriors had fallen, but most of the Mongol strength was now turned towards the east. A decade and half before, the north of the Jin empire had fallen into their hands fairly easily. But the subjugation of the rest, to the last corner, was a different proposition. The Jin had moved their capital from the ransacked Zhongdu to Kaifeng, farther south, and there had reestablished their government. Their territory was shrunken, much of their farmland in the hands of the enemy; so for the last years, they had been mounting campaigns against the Song land below them.

Once Ogodei was firmly on the Great Khan’s seat, he dispatched additional troops to press the invasion of the Jin. The Mongols were fierce fighters, but not invincible; in both 1230 and 1231, Ogodei’s great general Subotai was beaten back by Jin counterattacks.

While he fought his way doggedly forward, another Mongol division, commanded by the general Sartaq, made its way towards Goryeo. In the summer of 1231, they reached the Yalu river and prepared to attack.

It was not the first time that the Mongols had been to the Yalu. Back in 1218, during Genghis Khan’s push westward, a Mongol detachment had chased fleeing steppe peoples known as the Khitan into the peninsula. When the Khitan holed up at the Goryeo city of Kangdong, the Mongols asked the military dictator Choe Chung-heon to send them aid.

Choe Chung-heon had agreed, cautiously; as one of his officials pointed out, the Mongols were known to be “the most inhuman of the northern barbarians.” But another advisor, the Commissioner of Men and Horse, warned, “If we disregard them, I believe we will regret it later.” To prevent reprisals, Chung-heon sent troops and provisions: a thousand men and a thousand bags of rice.1

Once they had defeated the Khitan, the Mongols demanded tribute as payment for delivering Goryeo from the Khitan menace, and then left; most of them, anyway. Forty-one men, according to the Goryeo-sa, were left at the border town Uiju. “Practice the language of Goryeo,” they were instructed, “and wait for our return.”2

Now, in 1231, the Mongols were back. On August 26, General Sartaq ordered his men to cross the Yalu, and the war to swallow Goryeo began.

By 1231, Choe Chung-heon was dead; his son Choe-U headed the military state that had enfolded Goryeo’s civil government. A figurehead monarch, King Gojong, still sat on the throne, but Choe-U was responsible for facing the Mongol threat.

As the Mongols advanced, the towns in front of them emptied, the people surrendering or fleeing. Choe-U called the standing army of Goryeo out to face the enemy. Unexpectedly reinforced by five thousand outlaws, sent by the notorious bandit chief Yu-ke-hsia from his hiding place near the Yalu, the Goryeo army put up a startlingly fierce resistance. The northwestern city Kuju held out so stubbornly that the Mongols themselves paid grudging respect: “I am accustomed to seeing the cities of the world fought over,” General Sartaq is reported to have said, afterwards, “but I have never seen anyone being attacked like this and, to the end, not surrendering.” The Mongols attacked Kuju with catapults, with siege towers, with tunnels, with flaming fagots soaked in human fat; only when Choe-U himself authorized the surrender of the city did the commander, Pak So, open the gates. Sartaq, in admiration, spared his life.3

The Mongol invasion pushed through the north of the country, getting closer and closer to the capital city Kaesong, until by the end of the year Choe-U had decided to appeal for a peace. He managed to swap an enormous tribute (twenty thousand horses, ten thousand bolts of silk, and numerous other riches) for a halt in the Mongol progress. Most of the Mongol troops withdrew, leaving military commanders in charge of the captured territory. They were supposed to cooperate with the Goryeo court in Kaesong. But, feeling unsafe, King Gojong, Choe-U, and all the top officials sneaked out of Kaesong, crossed the strip of water between the Goryeo coast and the nearest island, Kanghwa, and reestablished themselves on the island. The Mongols demanded their return; but they refused, able to supply themselves quite well by sending ships farther south to the unconquered coast. The Mongol commanders had no experience with water; they were reduced to shouting threats across at the king, fruitlessly ordering him to come back.4

For the next few years, Goryeo and the Mongols existed in this state, half peace, half war, half occupied; while on the mainland, the Mongol conquests continued.

45.1 Mongol Conquests in the East

SUBOTAI AND HIS MEN had almost reached Kaifeng, the Jin capital. They had been helped, in their advance through the Jin territory, by the Southern Song. Subotai, knowing that the Jin (still in possession of a strong army) would have their most formidable defenses erected to block an approach from the north, had negotiated, with the Song, passage through the lands below Kaifeng, so that he could send part of his attack force around to assault the city from its more vulnerable southern side.

The massive circular detour soon attracted the attention of the Jin. The Jin emperor Aizong sent an appeal south to the Song, reminding them of an old Chinese proverb: When the lips are gone, the teeth will soon become cold. The Mongols had destroyed “forty kingdoms,” he warned, and if the Jin fell, the Song would be next.5

But the Song declined to intervene. The bulk of the Jin army hastily shifted from the Yellow river, where it had gathered to ward off the expected northern attack, to the far side of the capital city. But Subotai had held more than half of his troops back. As the southern Mongol force appeared on the horizon, the reserve troops descended from the north. Trapped, the Jin army was slaughtered. The Jin emperor, Aizong, was pinned inside Kaifeng along with hundreds of thousands of his subjects.6

The siege went on for over a month, in summer heat; inside the city, the Jin ate their horses, then grass, then boiled their saddles and the skins covering the military drums to make soup. Soon, they ate the dead. Weakened by hunger and then by plague, the defenses finally collapsed. As Subotai’s men poured into the city, Aizong killed himself.7

Subotai did not immediately turn on the Southern Song. He had been summoned north by Ogodei to take charge of the next offensive: three thousand miles in the opposite direction, all the way over on the western side of the Mongol territory.

These were the lands awarded to Batu and Orda, the two sons of dead Jochi. Orda, the oldest, had been given already-conquered territory on the lower Syr Darya river, south of the Aral Sea. Batu’s portion had been the lands across the Volga river, beyond the Caspian Sea: an inheritance that had not yet been conquered by the Mongols, and was not yet theirs to give. Now the Great Khan intended to help his nephew lay hold of his promised lands.8

Subotai, now in his midfifties, had been serving the khans since the age of seventeen. He had fought in the west already, helping Jochi to shatter the Kievan forces at the Kalka in 1223. He had absorbed the lessons of western warfare and practiced them in the east. Now, heading back towards Europe, he was at the apogee of his profession. Batu, nominally the leader of the campaign, was a straw boss; the European campaign had Subotai’s fingerprints all over it. Unrelenting sieges, crafty maneuvering of light and highly mobile troops, calculated ferocity intended to terrify the next foe into surrendering: the patterns practiced in Goryeo and the Jin empire were repeated again and again, stamping Subotai’s mark into European land.

Late in 1237, Subotai and Batu crossed the Volga; the Mongols were accustomed to fighting in the bitter cold, and the frozen countryside posed no challenge to them. A breakaway strike force, commanded by the veteran general Chormaghan, veered to the south and crossed the Caucasus range into Georgia. Already battered by the Mongols in 1219, Georgia now lost its capital city, Tbilisi, and most of its eastern reaches; the Georgian nobles were pressed into the Mongol ranks.9

Meanwhile, Subotai and Batu had terrified the first Rus’ city in their path. They captured Riazan’ on December 21, just before the Christmas Mass. “They burned it all,” says the contemporary Voskresensk Chronicle, “and killed its prince and his princess, and seized the men, women, and children, and monks, nuns, and priests; some they struck down with swords, while others they shot with arrows and flung into the flames.” Moscow fell, as did Kiev after a ten-week siege; so many panicked Kievans crowded into the Church of the Tithe, hoping for safety, that the second floor gave way and the church collapsed inward. Six years later, a traveler passing through Kiev made note of the skulls and bones still piled on the deserted streets.10

45.2 Mongol Conquests in the West

By 1240, all of the Rus’ principalities except for Novgorod, the most distant, were under Batu’s rule; his nonexistent inheritance had finally been fleshed out with captives. Subotai, after resting his army, pressed on in the spring of 1241: across the Carpathian Mountains, into Hungary.

To most Europeans, the Rus’ were still a distant and mysterious people, but Hungary was their doorstep. Fifty thousand Mongol warriors now swarmed down on it from the mountains, while another twenty thousand marched sideways into the lands of the Polans to block reinforcements. The Duke of Greater Poland, Henry the Pious, did his best to drive them back; but his own personal retinue of trained soldiers was small, and although the Teutonic Knights joined him, the Christian army was badly outnumbered. When they met the Mongols on April 9, near the town of Liegnitz, Henry’s knights were slaughtered, along with the farmers and metalworkers Henry had drafted to fill the ranks. Henry fell with them. When the survivors finally began to clear the field, Henry’s stripped and headless body was recognized by his wife only because he had six toes on his left foot.11

Two days later, four hundred miles to the south, Subotai and the rest of the Mongols came face-to-face with the Hungarian army at the Sajo river. In the lead rode Béla IV, son of Andrew of Hungary, king since his father’s death six years earlier. The Hungarians were heavily armored, ready to fight, well supplied by the nearby towns of Buda and Pest, on either side of the Danube. Subotai backed his own men slowly away; and then, when the Hungarians advanced, encircled them.12

The Hungarians were probably doomed even before Subotai’s feint. In front of the Mongol advance, refugees had fled across the Carpathians into Hungary, and Béla IV had welcomed them. His noblemen had not been as pleased by the influx of foreigners. Summoned by their king, the Hungarian nobility showed up to fight, but the monk Rogerius of Apulia, who survived by hiding in a nearby swamp, noted afterwards that they “were discontented, and . . . lacked the needed will and enthusiasm. They even hoped that the king would lose the battle, making them even more important.”13

The Mongols had plenty of enthusiasm. They fought viciously, hurling boulders at the Hungarian crossbowmen with catapults, tossing Chinese firecrackers and minibombs of flaming tar into the midst of the knights. Sixty thousand Hungarian soldiers fell on the field; in an echo of Kiev, a passerby several years later describes “fields white with bleaching bones.” Béla IV escaped from the field, but Subotai sent an assassin after him: Kadan, a younger son of Ogodei himself. Kadan had helped lead the charge against Henry of Poland, and after the victory had ridden hard south to be present at the second battle.14

He pursued Béla IV through the dukedom of Austria and back around into Croatia, but gave up when Béla crossed into the Adriatic and took refuge on a small rocky island; the Mongols generally did not like to cross oceans, even when their prey was in sight. Instead, Kadan went back to his general.

Subotai had just dispatched a scouting party to go even farther westward: to the borders of Frederick’s Holy Roman Empire itself. They got within sight of Vienna, on the edge of the empire. Rumors of the quick-moving invaders spread, terrifying all who heard. A Hungarian priest announced that the Mongols were, in fact, the Antichrist. “Tribulation long foreknown and foretold has come upon us . . . with a ferocity already described by the testimony of the Holy Scriptures,” wrote a Polish Franciscan to his brethren. “They are the sword of the Lord’s anger for the sins of the Christian people,” mourned the Count Palatine of Saxony, in a letter to a fellow duke.15

It seemed that the end of days had come. And then, as quickly as the sky had clouded over, the storm blew away.

Even as Subotai’s scouts were gazing at Vienna’s distant spires, Ogodei Khan was dying. Before the great Mongol general could organize an attack on the Holy Roman Empire, he received the news that his old friend and master was dead. At once, he collected his troops and headed home.

Batu remained in the west, governing his conquered lands from Sarai, his new capital city on the lower Volga; his kingdom became known as the Golden Horde. But back in the Mongol heartland, a family feud had broken out over the succession to the title of Great Khan. Subotai intended to be there for the election of the next Mongol overlord.16

He never came west again. In Karakorum, he found the Mongol clans divided in support of Genghis Khan’s grandsons; and the four years of infighting that followed brought a temporary end to Mongol conquests.

Chapter Forty-Six

The Debt of Hatred

Between 1229 and 1250,

the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II

helps the pope establish the Inquisition

and is then excommunicated and deposed

THE HOLY ROMAN EMPEROR FREDERICK II, dodging the rain of pig scraps hurled his way, had left Jerusalem. He arrived back in Italy in 1229, knowing from reports sent by his officials what he would find: the empire ready to break apart.

The Holy Roman Empire, held together only by the fiction of the Roman resurrection, was perpetually splintering. Germany had possessed its own strong national identity since the tenth century. The northern Italian cities, separated from the German duchies by the Alps, had already reassembled the twelfth-century Lombard League that had defied Frederick’s grandfather. And Sicily, part of the empire only because Frederick II had inherited its crown from his mother Constance, was for all practical purposes a separate kingdom.

In Frederick’s absence, Pope Gregory IX had taken revenge on the unrepentant excommunicate emperor by prying at the empire’s cracks. He had given the deposed John of Brienne, the father of Frederick’s dead wife, permission to attack Sicily, promised his support to the Lombard League, and gone even further: “The pope has . . . spread false news of our death, and made the cardinals swear to it,” Frederick wrote back to al-Kamil’s court, upon his arrival in Italy. “So, on these men’s oaths . . . a rabble of louts and criminals was led by the nose. When we arrived . . . we found that King John and the Lombards had made hostile raids into our domains, and doubted even the news of our arrival because of what the cardinals had sworn.”1

When the Lombards and King John found out that the reports of Frederick’s death had been exaggerated, they lost heart; and when Frederick appeared on the horizon at the head of a German army, both parties beat a hasty retreat. Gregory IX, left without supporters, was forced to agree to a truce. He lifted the emperor’s excommunication; in return, Frederick promised not to take revenge on the agitators.2

Frederick’s next problem: Germany itself.

He had not been back to Germany, the core of his empire, for over ten years. He had left the country in the care of his young son Henry, crowned king of the Germans in 1222, which meant that Henry’s regents had been the de facto rulers for nearly a decade. But in his father’s absence, Henry had grown up. He was now nineteen, desperately anxious to be independent.

Realizing that Henry needed reining in, Frederick sent him a message ordering him to attend, in 1231, an imperial diet (a general assembly of all the dukes of Germany, presided over by the emperor) at Ravenna. Immediately, the Lombard League cities banded together and blocked Henry’s pathway through the Alps. Henry, without a great deal of regret, sent his apologies to his father.3

Frederick replied sharply. He was displeased with reports of Henry’s lavish lifestyle, and his tendency to favor court advisors who were hostile to the emperor. He ordered his son to meet him in the north of Italy in 1232. In the meantime he issued a series of imperial decrees reversing Henry’s latest decisions.4

Henry decided not to push the issue—yet. He met Frederick and took an oath of loyalty to him. But the two men were strangers, and the oath was an empty one.

Frederick chose to view the matter as closed. He sent Henry back to Germany and prepared to visit Sicily, the third of his three kingdoms; it was his birthplace, and the only part of the empire that felt like home. But before he left Italy, he finished putting into place another strategy for dealing with the Italian troubles—one that played to his own natural tendencies and also tied Gregory IX’s purposes more closely to his own.

Frederick II had always been inclined to treat heresy as an intensive offense against the empire itself. “To offend the divine majesty,” he had written, back in 1220, “is a far greater crime than to offend the majesty of the emperor.” A greater crime: more destructive and more pernicious, he meant, and deserving of at least the same penalty as treason.5

At the beginning of his reign, he had decreed that heretics within his realm should be banished forever and all of their possessions confiscated: the penalties that emperors before him had also enforced. The Albigensian Crusade, boiling along in southern France during the first decade of his reign, gave him another model for dealing with heretics.

Just two years earlier, the Council of Toulouse had established inquisitive committees of laypeople and priests in each southern French parish, tasked with investigating heresy and handing over the suspects to the secular authorities for punishment. Together, the emperor and the pope took this strategy a step or two further. The Dominicans, the Order of Preachers founded by Dominic Guzman to evangelize the Languedoc heretics, were appointed to spearhead the same hunt, throughout Sicily, and Germany, and Italy itself. By the papal decree Excommunicamus, published in 1231, anyone pointed out by the Dominicans was to be taken into custody by imperial officials (“relaxed to the secular arm”), held for examination, and then punished with animadversio debita: the “debt of hatred,” the due penalty for those who had rebelled not only against the emperor but against God himself.6

Gregory did not specify the exact nature of the ultimate animadversio debita, but repentant heretics were to be imprisoned for life. Unrepentant heretics clearly deserved much worse. Burning at the stake had been legal for centuries in Germany, although the penalty had not often been enforced, and Frederick had already decreed its legality for the Lombard cities within the empire. Now he wrote it into law once more. The first stipulation in the Sicilian Code of 1231—Sicily’s first written constitution—condemned heretics as traitors, subject to the same penalty of death.7

Now, in all three kingdoms of Frederick’s empire, heretics were to be hunted, imprisoned, questioned, and executed. The Council of Toulouse had established the Inquisition, but Frederick and Gregory IX had armed it with the sword.

Between 1231 and 1240, the two men cooperated in a series of decrees that increased the reach of the Inquisition and bound their two purposes closer and closer together. Both were driven by the specter of disorder and chaos in their domains, and Gregory at least was a firm believer that this disorder came from the supernatural world. Heretics, he explains in his 1233 letter Vox in Rama, gather their strength from secret rites where they do homage to a black cat, and summon into their midst a demonic creature who demands their obedience: a manifestation of Lucifer himself, “the most damned of men . . . whose lower part is shaggy like a cat.” “Who would not be inflamed against such perdition and the sons of perdition?” he concludes. “. . . No vengeance against them is too harsh.”8

And the vengeance was harsh indeed. Heretics were burned at the stake in Verona, in Milan, in Rome itself. “In the year of our Lord 1231 began a persecution of heretics throughout the whole of Germany,” records an official chronicle of the archbishops of Trier, “and . . . many were burned. . . . So great was the zeal of all that from no one, even though merely under suspicion, would any excuse or counterplea be accepted . . . no opportunity for defense be afforded. . . . Forthwith, he must confess himself guilty.”9

FREDERICK HAD MANAGED to align himself, however briefly, with Rome; but he continued to spar with his own son.

Near the end of December 1234, Henry declared open war against his father and his father’s forces. He headquartered himself on the banks of the Rhine river, just south of the German city of Koblenz. It was a short rebellion. Frederick, avoiding the hostile northern Italian lands altogether, landed on the northern shore of the Adriatic and then marched up through the loyal eastern German duchy of Carinthia. Joined by the Duke of Carinthia and by the equally loyal Duke of Lorraine, he progressed to Worms. His presence in his country, after so many years away, was greeted as a Second Coming by his people; and by the time he reached Worms, Henry’s supporters had faded away. “The Emperor . . . seized his said son, King Henry, and two sons of his, little lads,” wrote the Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani, no fan of Frederick, “and sent them into Apulia into prison . . . and there he put him to death by starvation in great torment.” In fact, Henry did not die from starvation, but after nearly eight years in confinement he could bear no more; in the early days of 1242, while riding under guard to a new prison cell near Martirano, he spurred his horse over a steep cliff face and was killed.10

But Henry was still alive when Frederick assembled a new imperial diet at Mainz, in 1235, and had his second son, seven-year-old Conrad, elected as the new king of Germany (and crowned two years later). He then began to plan a war against the rebellious Lombards; determined, now that his own family was in line, to restore “the unity of the Empire.”11

While the Inquisition began to spread its new-fledged wings, Frederick—ignoring Gregory IX’s repeated pleas for peace in Italy—campaigned in Lombardy. Verona welcomed him; Vicenza resisted, and was sacked; Ferrara surrendered; Mantua fell. The Milanese fought stubbornly, for months on end. Frederick, backing away, managed to draw them away from their home ground towards Cortenuova, farther to the east, and then surrounded them. On November 27, 1237, the emperor’s army killed or took prisoner over half of the Milanese soldiers and seized almost all of their horses, wagons, and supplies.

The remainder fled; and Frederick, bolstered by his victory, demanded the unconditional surrender of the city. Milan refused. “We fear your cruelty,” they wrote back, in response, “which we know by experience; we had rather die under our shields by sword, spear, or dart, than by treachery, starvation, and fire.” Instead, they dug themselves in for the winter; and their resistance encouraged the other Lombard cities to rejoin the battle.12

It had become increasingly clear to Gregory IX that Frederick’s designs on Italy would, eventually, reach down to Rome itself. The temporary truce between the two men was fragile; cooperation against heretics would last only so long, as a common bond. Gregory IX’s attempts to negotiate peace between emperor and Lombards were rejected. When, early in 1239, Frederick landed troops on the shores of the island of Sardinia, which the pope claimed as his own territory, Gregory IX rose up in wrath and condemned the emperor’s ambitions: “The hatred which sprung up between the pope and the emperor, like an old wound, produced foul matter,” records the English chronicler Matthew Paris. In the Lenten season, Gregory IX pronounced Frederick II not only excommunicated but deposed.13

46.1 Frederick’s War in Italy

The foul matter was now out in the open. Pope and emperor exchanged a series of increasingly testy letters, with Frederick copying his complaints to the crowned monarchs of Europe. (“The nations are now endeavouring to despise the ruler of Italy and the imperial sceptre!” he complained, neatly conflating his differences with Gregory and his desire to put down the Lombard revolt.) Finally Frederick II, leaving troops to go on with the war in Lombardy, began to march south towards Rome itself. In August of 1241, he was approaching the city’s walls when Gregory IX—well into his eighties, suffering from the heat of a Roman summer—died.14

Immediately, Frederick retreated and pointed out piously that his quarrel was not with the Church but with the ambitions of the man himself. Gregory’s successor served for only seventeen days before dying of illness and throwing Rome into chaos. Not until 1243 was a new pope finally elected: the Genoese cardinal Sinibaldo Fieschi, a canon lawyer who now became Pope Innocent IV.

Frederick had been friendly with Cardinal Fieschi, but he had his reservations. “This election,” he told his familiars, “will be of much hurt to us; for he was our friend when cardinal, and now he will be our enemy as Pope.” His prediction very shortly came true.15

Innocent IV had a lawyer’s mindset, and before long was combining Roman law with canon principles to come up with a clear articulation of his own power. Church law, he wrote, was above secular law; and since, in Roman jurisprudence, the prince stands above the law, so the pope also stands above church law, unbound by it, able to change it, depart from it, or even nullify it as needed. Absolute papal monarchy: it was a theory that Innocent IV spent much of his papacy elaborating and defending, and it was almost custom-designed to infuriate the emperor.16

Innocent IV began his papacy by ordering Frederick to give up all of the territory he had conquered since his excommunication by Gregory IX, five years earlier. When Frederick refused, Innocent IV traveled to the French city of Lyons—outside of Italy, and outside of the emperor’s grasp. There he renewed both the excommunication and the call for Frederick’s deposition as emperor.17

This began yet another war of letters, with both pope and emperor pleading their case to the rest of the world. “I hold my crown from God alone; neither the Pope, the Council, nor the devil shall rend it from me!” Frederick raged. “What might not all kings fear from the presumption of a such a pope?” “When a sick man who cannot be helped by mild remedies undergoes a surgical incision or cautery,” wrote Innocent IV, primly, in response, “he rages in bitterness of spirit against his doctor. . . . If then Frederick, formerly emperor, strives to accuse . . . the sacred judge of the universal church . . . he is behaving in the same fashion.”18

Inevitably, the war of words devolved into simple war. Innocent IV declared one of Frederick’s German subjects, Henry Raspe, to be the new king of Germany in place of young Conrad (now seventeen); Henry marched on Conrad’s own forces but died on campaign, so Innocent threw his weight behind another candidate, William of Holland. While Conrad fought in Germany, Frederick II started to lose his foothold in Italy. Bishops and cardinals loyal to the pope were preaching revolt to the emperor’s subjects in Sicily and Lombardy. In early February of 1248, Frederick’s army was unexpectedly defeated while laying siege to the city of Parma; the emperor was forced to flee to Cremona, and most of the gold and treasure he had been using to finance the war fell into Lombard hands. The Milanese, heading the Lombard League, led the recapture of Modena; Como fell; and in 1250, still battling, Frederick II grew ill with dysentery, the scourge of a soldier’s existence.19

“That Frederick who was once emperor died . . . in Apulia,” writes the Franciscan Salimbene. “And because of the very great stench of corruption which came from his body, he could not be carried to Palermo, where the sepulchers of the kings of Sicily are.” Salimbene was a northerner, and other northern Italians believed his horror story. In fact, Frederick’s body was embalmed, taken by ship to Sicily, paraded through the streets with an honor guard, and buried in Palermo, at the church of Monreale. The emperor’s death left Innocent IV still marooned in Lyons, Frederick’s son Conrad fighting off the anti-king of Germany, William, and the Inquisition blooming like a black weed across Europe.20

Chapter Forty-Seven

The Shadow of God

Between 1236 and 1266,

the crown of Delhi passes from

the family of Iltumish to a Turkish slave

who becomes absolute monarch

THE SULTAN OF DELHI, Iltumish, was dead. His sons were “engrossed in the pleasures of youth,” none of them worthy of the throne; and so Iltumish left his crown to his daughter Raziyya. “[She] was a great sovereign, and sagacious,” the Tabakat-i-Nasiri tells us, “just, beneficent . . . and of warlike talent, and was endowed with all the admirable attributes and qualifications necessary for kings; but, as she did not attain the destiny, in her creation, of being computed among men, of what advantage were all these excellent qualifications to her?”1

Her father’s officers divided. The vizier of Delhi and his supporters, hoping to put one of the sultan’s useless sons on the throne instead, mounted an attack on the palace, while several governors from the outlying provinces marched with their forces to Delhi to fight for Raziyya. The queen’s supporters won, driving the malcontents out of the city.

The opposition never fully faded, though. Raziyya appointed as Master of the Stables (a military position, directing the deployment of both horses and elephants) an African soldier named Malik Hakut, born in the highlands of the southern Nile. Immediately her Turkish detractors began to whisper that Malik Hakut must be her lover; why else would she have appointed a non-Turk to such a favored position? To quell the gossip, Raziyya abandoned traditional female appearances; whenever she rode out, she used a war elephant rather than a horse, and wore a man’s armor and headdress.2

But this did not end her troubles. She was forced to put down a serious rebellion in Lahore, and had just returned to Delhi when she heard that her trusted official Malik Altuniah, governor of the southward city of Bathinda, had also revolted. Unknown to Raziyya, this second rebellion had been carried out with the cooperation of Turkish officials in her own court. She left Delhi again and marched to Bathinda, but as she arrived, her own retinue joined with Malik Altuniah, killed the queen’s Master of the Stables, and took her prisoner.

With Raziyya held captive in the Bathinda fortress known as Qila Mubarak, her shiftless brother Bahram declared himself king in Delhi, with the support of forty Turkish officers and aristocrats. But Malik Altuniah had intended to seize the throne of Delhi himself. He drew up a contract of marriage with Raziyya (apparently without consulting her), converting himself from rebel to her champion, and then brought her by force back to Delhi, where he mounted an attack on Bahram.

According to the Tabakat-i-Nasiri, Bahram’s forty supporters and their retinues routed the attackers in short order. On October 13, 1240, Raziyya and her new husband were taken captive; both of them were executed the next morning. She had served as the first Muslim queen of India for three years, six months, and six days.3

Bahram only lasted two years before his own soldiers assassinated him. For some years, his supporters—the Forty, the most powerful mamluk warriors and courtiers in Delhi—struggled with one another for power while paying lip service to a puppet sultan: first Raziyya’s alcoholic nephew and then her youngest brother, Nasiruddin.4

Nasiruddin, aged twenty when he was elevated to the sultanate of Delhi in 1246, survived on the throne for two decades by not trying to rule. He was, says the Tabakat-i-Nasiri, devoted to fasting and prayer and the study of the Holy Word; he was a model of all gentle virtues: compassion, clemency, humility, and harmlessness. Causing no harm, he received none. He gave himself over to study and charity, and turned the running of the sultanate over to his Turkish officials. “The Sultan expressed no opinion without their permission,” explains the fourteenth-century poet and historian Isami; “he did not move his hands or feet except at their order. He would neither drink water nor go to sleep except with their knowledge.”5

Chief among his officials was the Turkish Grand Chamberlain Balban. Taken captive in a Mongol raid on his tribe as a young man, sold at the Baghdad slave market, and finally bought by Iltumish himself when he was in his early thirties, Balban had spent his entire adult life as a slave; but in Delhi, this was no bar to advancement. He had worked his way into Iltumish’s good graces, had served Raziyya herself in the court position of Chief Huntsman, and by 1246 was one of the most experienced soldiers and administrators of the Forty. Nasiruddin chose him to be vizier, making him the de facto sultan of Delhi: “The king lived in the palace,” says Isami, “and Balban governed the empire.”6

The years of disruption at Delhi had threatened the sultanate’s defenses. To the southeast, the Hindu king of Orissa—long resistant to Muslim encroachment—had gone on the offensive. His name was Naramasimha Deva; he had begun his push outward in 1238 and had taken away parts of Bengal that had once fallen under Islamic rule; the Delhi-controlled city of Laknaur had fallen to Naramasimha in 1243, and the year after, a massive battle on the shores of the Ganges had ended with the Orissa armies triumphing. “The Ganga herself was blackened,” reads an Orissa inscription celebrating the victory, “by the flood of tears from the eyes of the Muslim women of the north and west, whose husbands fell to Naramasimha’s army.”7

And to the north, the Mongols threatened. Lahore had been sacked, in 1241, by a Mongol raiding party that descended, looted the city, slaughtered anyone who resisted, and then withdrew. More sustained invasions seemed likely.

Balban met the threat by organizing annual military campaigns against both Hindu opponents and Mongol outposts. The first of these took place right after Nasiruddin’s enthronement, in 1246. With Nasiruddin in attendance and Balban in command, the armies of Delhi crossed into the region of the northern river known as the Sind and launched an attack on the scattering of Mongol forts there. “By the favour and aid of the Creator,” Balban’s chronicler tells us, “he ravaged the hills. . . . The army of the infidel Mongols who were in those parts took to flight, and . . . fear fell upon their hearts.” The following year, Balban led a similar campaign against Hindu rebels who had fortified themselves at Talsandah, east of Kannauj, and seized it for Delhi.8

47.1 Balban’s Wars

The Tabakat-i-Nasiri lists a score of these excursions: yearly military expeditions, buttressing the boundaries of Delhi and beating back the enemies at the sultanate’s edges. The success of these campaigns lay at the heart of Balban’s clout. By 1249, he had grown so indispensable that he was able to arrange a marriage between the Sultan Nasiruddin and his own daughter. “As Balban was the asylum of the Sultan’s dynasty, the prop of the army, and the strength of the kingdom,” Juzjani remarks, “it was his daughter’s good fortune to become the royal consort.”

He probably intended to be the grandfather of the next sultan, but the single son his daughter bore to her new husband died in infancy, and no more heirs appeared.9

In 1260, Balban led a massive and bloody reprisal against the hill country of Mewar, a Rajput kingdom south of Delhi that had caused the sultanate unending headaches by raiding, burning, and pillaging: in the eyes of the mamluks, a land of thieves, cattle rustlers, and bandits. Iltumish had attacked Mewar, but had been unable to overrun it. Now, in a series of vicious and bloody battles, Balban reduced the Mewar resistance to nothing. Thousands of Mewar soldiers were killed by the sword, or trampled under the feet of Balban’s elephants; civilians were slaughtered, captives were skinned alive, then hung over the gates of cities that resisted. When guerrilla warfare continued from the forests, Balban supplied his army with axes and ordered them to clear a hundred miles of trees away, laying the ground bare: “Hindus beyond computation fell beneath the unsparing swords of the holy warriors,” the Tabakat-i-Nasiri says.10

It was Balban’s most spectacular victory yet. The account of the triumph, dated to the fifteenth year of Sultan Nasiruddin’s reign, brings the Tabakat to an end; Nasiruddin remained on the throne of Delhi for another six years, but the histories are silent about his accomplishments. Apparently Balban—despairing of a grandson, and now at the height of his power—had eclipsed the sultan entirely.

By 1266, Nasiruddin was dead. None of the thirteenth-century chroniclers describe his death; half a century later, Isami would insist that Balban had poisoned his son-in-law. However it came about, Nasiruddin died with no heir, and Balban—father of his widow—claimed the sultanate of Delhi as his own.11

Twenty years of fighting to strengthen an empire ruled by a figurehead had left Balban with a strong need to assert his own authority. As vizier, he had kept the sultanate of Delhi safe with his own right hand; as sultan, he began to work out a theory that made the strength of that right hand identical to the will of God. He was Zil-i-llahi, “shadow of God”: God’s vice-regent on earth. He, no less than the distant Frederick II, held his crown from God alone; he, no less than the faraway Innocent IV, stood above all written laws. He was answerable to no man, bound by no legal code, and vulnerable to no challenge.12

No previous sultan had made such a bold claim, but Balban was prepared to give daily demonstrations of his status as divinely appointed representative of God to his people. He gave up drinking in public, remaining always distant, aloof, and solemn. He created an imposing armed guard that surrounded him everywhere he went. He dressed magnificently and sat on a diamond-studded throne, and in his audience chamber he instituted a new ceremony: his courtiers were to prostrate themselves before the throne on their bellies and kiss his feet. They were not to laugh in his presence.13

He made a few practical innovations as well. Those of the Forty who still survived were sent far away from Delhi, on missions to distant corners of the sultanate, preferably the most wild and dangerous ones; those who survived were selectively pruned through poisoning. Balban had a network of spies throughout the empire, sending constant reports back to Delhi about the behavior of far-flung officials. One of those spies, failing to provide an update on the doings of a provincial governor, was publicly executed and hung up on the city gate of his target.14

In the disorderly years since Iltumish, explains Balban’s biographer Ziauddin Barani, the people of Delhi had become “vacillating, disobedient, self-willed.” Balban’s unyielding hand on Delhi’s reins restored peace: “The dignity and authority of government were restored,” Barani writes. “Fear of the governing power, which is the basis of all good government . . . had departed from the hearts of all men, and the country had fallen into a wretched condition. But from the very commencement of the reign of Balban the people became tractable, obedient, and submissive.” The Turkish slave, risen to the sultanate, had reduced his people to the state he had once endured: obedient and submissive, slaves.15

Chapter Forty-Eight

The Seventh Crusade

Between 1244 and 1250,

Egypt changes hands,

and another crusade fails

DECEMBER IN PARIS, 1244: nearly Christmas. Louis IX of France lay ill, so close to death that he could neither speak nor move. Even the movement of his breath had ceased. “He was in such evil case,” his friend and biographer Jean de Joinville writes, “that, as they tell, one of the ladies who tended him wished to draw the sheet over his face, and said that he was dead.”1

Thirty years old, Louis IX—crowned king at twelve, governed by his mother until he turned twenty—had just finished beating back Henry III’s unsuccessful invasion of the western French lands. He was at the height of his strength, but he had no male heirs; his death would throw France into crisis. The entire palace wept. The doctors left; the doors to his room were flung open for mourners; priests arrived to “commend his soul.” And then, suddenly, the king took a deep breath and sighed.2

He had emerged from his coma; and when he had recovered enough to sit up and speak, he announced that in thanksgiving, he would go on crusade.

This announcement was greeted with joy by everyone except his mother Blanche, who tried to talk him out of it and even offered to pay for mercenaries who could go in his place. But Louis was unmoved. He had made a sacred vow, and he was not Frederick II; he would not renege.3

Even before his illness, Louis IX had probably been contemplating crusade. In the fall of 1244, disastrous news had come from the east: Jerusalem had fallen once more into Muslim hands.

The disaster had been brought about by a complicated five-year series of events. Frederick’s treaty with the sultan al-Kamil had expired in 1239; Islamic law dictated that a treaty made by Muslims with infidels could not last more than ten years. In most cases, treaties were simply renewed once per decade. But al-Kamil had died in 1238, and his two sons had battled over his empire.

The older brother, as-Salih Ayyub, triumphed (and imprisoned his rival for the rest of his life). However, the short sharp civil war had given Ayyub’s uncle as-Salih Ismail, brother of al-Kamil and governor of Damascus under al-Kamil’s sultancy, the opportunity to rebel. He declared himself ruler of the Syrian half of the Ayyubid empire, splitting Saladin’s kingdom in half. Ismail was now the overlord of Jerusalem.

So Ayyub hired mercenaries to attack his uncle’s Syrian domains, hoping to recover them for himself.

These mercenaries were wandering survivors of the Turkish kingdom of Khwarezm, destroyed by Genghis Khan in 1219. When the last Shah of Khwarezm, Jalal ad-Din, had fled into India pursued by Genghis’s men, his army and family had been wiped out, but Jalal ad-Din himself had survived. He had spent the next ten years of his life waging guerrilla warfare against the Mongol conquerors, finally meeting his end at Mongol hands in a desperate mountain battle in 1231. His followers, instead of dispersing, became known as the Khwarezmiyya, nomadic mercenaries, claiming to preserve the last remnants of Khwarezm culture, hiring themselves out to whoever could pay.4

In 1244, ten thousand Khwarezmiyya, fighting on behalf of the Sultan of Egypt, swept down on Syria. On August 11, they stormed Jerusalem. They slaughtered both Muslims and Christians in the streets, broke into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and ripped the bones of the Crusader kings of Jerusalem from their crypts. Ayyub of Egypt claimed the city, now not much more than ruins, for his own.5

News of the fall had been greeted in the west with grief, and with calls for another crusade to retrieve the city. Now, recovering from his illness, Louis IX was ready to answer.

It took him three years to make the proper arrangements. He collected a special crusade tax from his subjects to pay for the expedition, and recruited French barons and their knights to join him. From the city of Genoa, he bought scores of ships; over thirty two- and three-decked sailing ships, transport galleys, war galleys. He sent provisions to Cyprus, where he intended to rendezvous with other Crusader knights; “great stacks of barrels of wine,” says Joinville, who arrived at Cyprus to find the king’s provisions waiting there, “wheat and barley . . . laid in heaps on the fields . . . the rain which had long fallen upon the corn had made it sprout on the outside.” Under the green crust, though, the grain was still fresh.6

Well-prepared, well-victualed, and well-supplied with money, Louis IX began the Seventh Crusade by setting sail from Aigues-Mortes on August 25, 1248. His royal galley sailed at the head of thirty-eight ships and a score of flat-bottomed transports. His queen, Margaret of Provence, sailed with him; so did his younger brothers Charles and Robert. They arrived at Cyprus in early September, ready to embark on what seemed like an inevitable success.7

48.1 The Seventh Crusade

It was a fiasco.

The Crusader army was led by Louis, his brothers, the Grand Master of the Knights Templar, Jean de Joinville, the English Earl of Salisbury, and Henry III’s unfortunate stepfather, the disgraced Count of Marche. As was now traditional in any crusade, they all disagreed over strategy. Louis wanted to attack Egypt, which now controlled the city; the Grand Master of the Templars thought that the Crusaders should start off by making a play for some of the disputed Syrian lands; and several of the French barons suggested that fall was a bad time to set off by ship, since foul weather was almost a certainty. In the end, the Crusaders delayed on Cyprus until the following May, by which point a good deal of the fervor had faded, and most of the food had been eaten.8

This gave Ayyub plenty of time to prepare for an attack on Egypt. By the time the Crusader ships reached the coast near Damietta, in early June, Ayyub had fortified the city and established a second line of defense at the town of Mansurah, just east of the Nile and seventy-five miles northeast of Cairo.

The first Crusader attack began on the morning of June 5. A swarm of small boats brought the Crusaders to the shore, where they fought so fiercely that by midafternoon, the Turkish defenders had retreated back into Damietta. That night, under cover of dark, the Damietta garrison decided to evacuate the city. The following morning, the Crusaders found it nearly empty and marched triumphantly in.

Ayyub, furious over the easy victory, executed the generals who were responsible for the surrender. He was ill, suffering from what seems to have been progressive gangrene, and his temper was short.

He was expecting an immediate Crusader advance, but the Nile floods were due to begin, and Louis had learned his lesson from tales of the disastrous Fifth Crusade. “We felt sure that we would not leave Damietta until the feast of All Saints [November 1], because of the rise of the river . . . ,” his chamberlain John Sarrasin wrote back to France. “No one can go to Alexandria or Babylon or to Cairo when it has flooded across the land of Egypt.” Instead, they lingered in the city, transforming its mosque into a cathedral, digging additional fortifications, and waiting for the Nile to recede.9

On November 20, Louis led a Crusader army—reinforced by the arrival of a third royal brother with fresh men—out of Damietta, towards the Sultan’s encampment at Mansurah. By the time they arrived, Ayyub was dead.

His son and heir Turan-shah was fighting in Syria, but the elderly general Fakhr-ad-Din had taken charge of the Egyptian defense. The Crusaders camped across the river from Mansurah and prepared to attack. On February 7, Louis’s brother Robert forded the river to lead part of the Crusader army in a surprise attack on the Muslim encampment outside the town. It was brilliantly successful, but then Robert—instead of returning for reinforcements as planned—decided to lead his knights into Mansurah itself. There, the advance party came face-to-face with most of Egypt’s army, and was slaughtered.

The loss of Robert and his army had weakened the Crusader force too much for it to take Mansurah itself. They camped in front of its walls. Meanwhile, Turan-shah arrived unexpectedly and cut the Crusaders off from behind, blocking their line of supply from Damietta.

The Crusaders slowly began to starve. William of Tyre’s chronicle says that the men first ate horses, donkeys, and mules; and then “much worse things. Anyone who could find a dog or a cat would eat it as a great delicacy.” Disease followed: “The bodies of our men whom [the Egyptian defenders] had killed came to the surface of the water,” Joinville writes, “. . . all the stream was full of dead men from one bank to the other. . . . And for the unwholesomeness of the country . . . the sickness of the host came upon us . . . the flesh of our legs altogether dried up, and the skin of our legs became blotched with black and earth-colour, like to an old boot; and on us that had this sickness there grew rotten flesh upon our gums.”10

By Easter, it had become clear even to Louis that it was time to flee. He led the army north, but the men were hungry, weak, and constantly bombarded by Muslim attackers. Three weeks into the march, with men dying around him, Louis sent an envoy to Turan-shah, offering to surrender.11

Turan-shah accepted the surrender and put the king and his noblemen under guard. In an unexpected act of callousness, he ordered all of the sick and wounded slaughtered; Joinville, shocked by the executions, says that his guard told him that it was done for fear that the plague would spread.12

Damietta too was forced to open its gates. Louis’s wife Margaret had given birth to a son in his absence; with no midwife in the city, she had been forced to ask one of the old knights, a man of eighty, to help her deliver the baby. Before the surrender, she was bundled out of the city with her new baby and taken back to Acre, where she waited for news of her husband.

In exchange for 800,000 “Saracen bezants” (nearly 400,000 pounds of gold), half of it to be paid on the spot, and the freedom of all Muslim prisoners, Turan-shah agreed to free his captives. But the deal almost went sour when Turan-shah was suddenly killed in an uprising of the Turkish soldiers who made up a good part of his armed force.

Like the Muslim Ghurids in India, the Ayyubid rulers of Egypt had long relied on mamluks, Turkish slave warriors, to beef up their armies; perhaps half of Fakhr-ad-Din’s army was mamluk. And the most elite fighting force in the Egyptian army was a thousand-strong mamluk regiment known as the Bahri Regiment, originally formed as the personal bodyguard of the sultan Ayyub himself. (“He bought more Turkish mamluks than had any other member of his family,” notes Ibn Wasil, “until they became the major part of his army.”) When Turan-shah had arrived in Egypt, though, he had high-handedly promoted his own favorites into key positions instead of advancing the senior mamluks of the Bahri Regiment. He had also, incautiously, announced at a drunken dinner party that he intended to chop down his father’s mamluks, as easily as he might sweep his sword through a row of lighted candles. Angry over the slight, one of the Bahri Regiment’s commanders, a Turk named Baibars, plotted Turan-shah’s assassination.13

The murder left Egypt without a sultan. But Turan-shah had not been in Egypt long enough to be popular—in fact, his butchered body, swelling with decay, lay on the ground outside his camp for three days before anyone bothered to bury it—and no reprisals followed. Baibars and his confederates, setting themselves up as a military government in Cairo, decided to honor Ayyub’s widow as the titular ruler of Cairo, while they ran the government to suit themselves.

After threatening to void the deal, they also—eventually—agreed to honor Turan-shah’s arrangements. On May 5, Louis handed over his half ransom and was set free, along with his two surviving brothers and most of his barons. He set sail immediately for Acre, arriving on May 14. “All Acre came in procession down to the sea to receive him at his coming, with passing great joy,” Joinville writes.14

The king had survived, but there was little else to rejoice in. Hundreds of Crusader soldiers remained prisoners in Egypt. Louis had spent every penny and owed still more for the balance of his ransom. And the Crusade itself had failed: Jerusalem was still in Muslim hands.

Chapter Forty-Nine

The Splintering Khanate

Between 1246 and 1264,

the Mongols spread their conquests from east to west,

but then watch the empire divide into four

IN 1246, the Mongol clan leaders assembled at Sira-ordu, a few miles away from Karakorum, and finally hailed Guyuk as Great Khan.

It had taken Guyuk, the oldest son of Ogodei, four years to reach this peak. After Ogodei’s death in 1242, his widow Toregene had insisted on Guyuk’s election. But a healthy segment of the Mongol chiefs preferred another grandson of Genghis Khan: Mongke, the oldest son of Genghis’s youngest son Tolui.

By this point, all of Genghis Khan’s own sons were dead. Jochi had died before his father; Tolui had drunk himself to death in 1232; Chagatai had died just a few months before Ogodei himself. Three grandsons stood in line for the succession: Mongke, Guyuk, and Batu in the west, the oldest son of the oldest son.

Guyuk was widely unpopular, in part because his father had disliked him and had repeatedly suggested that the succession pass him by. But as regent until a new khan was elected, his mother Toregene had the force of Mongol law behind her; and the Mongols, ruthless in battle, were just as unbending when it came to their own legal codes. Toregene had delayed the election for four years in order to bribe, persuade, and bully clan chiefs into supporting her son.1

On August 24, beneath a white velvet tent, surrounded by gold-armed clan chiefs, Guyuk was seated on a gold and ivory throne, studded with pearls, and acclaimed as Great Khan. The ceremony was observed by ambassadors from Moscow, Cairo, Goryeo, the Song court, Baghdad, Georgia, Cilician Armenia, and Rome: “There were more than four thousand envoys there,” records the Roman diplomat, the Franciscan friar Giovanni de Plano Carpini. “So many gifts were bestowed by the envoys there that it was marvelous to behold—gifts of silk, samite, velvet, brocade, girdles of silk threaded with gold, choice furs . . . more than five hundred carts, which were all filled with gold and silver and silken garments.”2

The gifts were both tribute and appeasement, sent by nations that had fallen under Mongol control—or were desperately hoping not to. For his part, Pope Innocent IV sent not gifts but a papal letter, carried by Friar Carpini to the new Great Khan. “[We] do admonish, beg and earnestly beseech,” Innocent IV wrote, “that for the future you desist entirely from assaults . . . and that after so many and such grievous offences you conciliate by a fitting penance the wrath of Divine Majesty. . . . [A]cknowledge Jesus Christ the very Son of God, and worship His glorious name by practicing the Christian religion.”3

Guyuk’s response was curt. “You who are the great Pope,” he sent back, “together with all the Princes, come in person to serve us.”

The eternal God has slain and annihilated these [conquered] lands and peoples, because they have neither adhered to Genghis Khan, nor to the Great Khan, both of whom have been sent to make known God’s command. . . . How do you know that such words as you speak are with God’s sanction? From the rising of the sun to its setting, all the lands have been made subject to me. Who could do this contrary to the command of God? . . . [C]ome at once to serve and wait upon us! At that time I shall recognize your submission. If you do not observe God’s command, and if you ignore my command, I shall know you as my enemy.4

Guyuk could play the holy-war game as well as the next potentate; and, living outside of the Christian world, he was one of the few rulers in the world powerful enough to question the pope’s authority with absolute impunity.

Forty at the time of his election, Guyuk was prematurely aged by the traditional Mongol overindulgence in strong drink (“Then they started drinking,” Carpini wrote, of the hours just after Guyuk’s coronation, “and, as is their custom, they drank without stopping until the evening”). In April of 1248, Guyuk was traveling towards the lands of the Golden Horde, planning to meet with his cousin Batu in order to smooth out some differences between them, when he died on the road.5

In his two-year reign, though, he had set the Mongols back on the road to world domination. By 1248, Mongol forces had returned to the west and entirely subdued the Sultanate of Rum and the remaining holdout lands in Georgia; Cilician Armenia was now Guyuk’s vassal; and he had been preparing for war on the Southern Song, intending to send old Subotai at the head of the campaign, when he died.

With his death, war was once again put on hold, while the clans argued—for three years—over his successor. When Batu and the Golden Horde threw their favor behind Mongke, the son of Tolui finally gained his long-delayed title of Great Khan. He was acclaimed on July 1, 1251, in a ceremony that lacked the over-the-top magnificence of Guyuk’s; Batu had called the assembly himself, and when Mongke’s detractors refused to attend, Batu insisted on the appointment of Mongke by the clan chiefs who were present.6

It was the first time that a Great Khan had been elected by only a partial assembly. Mongke remained in full control of the entire empire for nine years (helped in part by his ruthless execution of both his opponents and their sons), but the partial victory cracked the foundation of the Mongol house, and the fissures were already spreading.7

Mongke was forty-three years old, the veteran of wars against the Jin, the Rus’, the Bulgars, and more, raised by his strict mother—a convert to Christianity—to avoid alcohol. Under his direction, Mongol conquest began again. He directed his armies towards two points of the compass simultaneously: according to the contemporary chronicler Rashid al-Din, he put his younger brother Kublai in charge of the eastern force, tasked with bringing down the Southern Song; his youngest brother Hulagu was given the task of renewing war in the west. “Each of them,” al-Din explains, “with the armies that they would have, would be his right and left wings.”8

From this moment on, the complicated and detailed story of country after country, from east to west, flattened itself into a single narrative arc: Mongol conquest.

Kublai planned to invade the Song from the west. He led his Mongol horde south, to the borders of the small southwest Asian kingdom of Nanzhao.* Nanzhao, circling Lake Erhai, had fought off the Tang in the eighth century and had remained independent through three changes of dynasty. But Kublai, approaching in 1253 from an unexpected direction, drove the Nanzhao defenders back to their capital city of Dali and besieged it. When Dali surrendered, the only captives executed were the king himself, and two of his officials who had murdered a Mongol ambassador.

Kublai, later accounts tell us, had been studying Chinese philosophy, and took as his motto an ancient tenet of the Confucian teacher Mencius: He who takes no pleasure in killing people can unite them behind him. It took another two years for Nanzhao to be entirely united under Mongol control, but once the kingdom had reached stability under a Mongol governor, Kublai used it as a base to begin attacks against the Song border.9

In Goryeo, the state of half war, half peace observed by the court on the island of Kanghwa and the Mongol occupiers in the north broke down. Repeated Mongol attacks on the independent south had killed an untold number: “As many as 206,800 men and women became prisoners of the Mongol troops this year (1254),” the Koryeo-san mourns, “and the number of people massacred cannot be accounted for. The provinces and districts we pass have all been reduced to ashes.” Finally, King Gojong arranged the assassination of Choe-U, the military dictator responsible for the ongoing resistance, and as soon as Choe-U was dead sent his own son, the Crown Prince, to Mongke’s court to offer Goryeo’s surrender. In 1259, the surrender was made official.10

Kublai sent another branch of his force into the kingdom of the Dai Viet. In 1257, the Mongols captured the capital city Thang Long, although they then retreated for a time, leaving the Dai Viet king Tran Canh on his throne. Immediately Tran Canh—still only a vigorous forty years old, with thirty-three of those years spent on the throne—abdicated and crowned his eighteen-year-old son Tran Hoang in his place. Officially, the change in power was intended to keep quarrels over succession from breaking out in the middle of a new invasion. But Tran Canh, despite dreading the Mongol return, had finally gained the chance he had been waiting for: to abandon the throne in favor of the monastery, battle in favor of reflection.11

Meanwhile Hulagu, with reinforcements sent by Batu from the Golden Horde lands to the north of his target, took a different direction from that of previous Mongol invasions to the west. He planned to push towards the Mediterranean and then turn south, towards Egypt.

In 1256, he crossed the Oxus river and laid siege to his first targets: the fortresses of the “Assassins,” the mountainous state of the Nizari. The Nizari were led by their chief, Rukn al-Din, who had been their ruler for a single year when Hulagu arrived at his walls. The thirteenth-century Muslim scholar Abu’l-Faraj records Rukn al-Din’s panic; he wanted to surrender, but the other Nizaris held him back. While his men were distracted by the sight of siege engines being erected outside their fortress, al-Din sneaked out and surrendered to Hulagu, on condition that he be allowed to travel east and appeal to the Great Khan himself. Hulagu duly sent his captive east, but when he arrived at Mongke’s camp, the Great Khan ordered him killed without an audience.12

Hulagu’s branch of the army rapidly reduced the Nizari to rubble, and he advanced steadily forward, against the Ayyubid holdings. In 1259, he reached Baghdad and swept through it, putting the last Abbasid caliph to death. In 1260, he drove the last Ayyubid governors out of Damascus and Aleppo.

Before he reached Cairo itself, news of the Great Khan’s death reached him. And, like all of the Mongol generals before him, he turned immediately back towards Karakorum to be present for the election of the next Mongol supreme leader.

Mongke Khan had left the youngest of his brothers, Arik-Boke, to guard the homeland and had joined Kublai’s attack on the Southern Song in person. The two had stormed through the south, but in the vicious heat of a south Chinese August, Mongke had sickened with dysentery. The two brothers were laying siege to the southeastern city of Erzhou when Mongke finally collapsed; and on August 11, 1259, the Khan died.

As the next-oldest, Kublai expected to be acclaimed the next Great Khan. But he lingered in hostile Song lands, reluctant to abandon the siege of Erzhou. Hulagu, leaving a skeleton crew of ten thousand to guard the new frontier, had started home immediately, but he had the longer way to go.

In their absence, Arik-Boke marshaled the support of the more insular Mongol chiefs—those who were suspicious of Kublai’s interest in Chinese culture, and wary of expanding the empire as far as Egypt. He managed to summon a rump assembly in Karakorum and got himself elected Great Khan before either of his elder brothers could make it back home.

When word of his youngest brother’s coup reached Kublai, he convened his own assembly, made up of the clan chiefs who were with him, and had himself confirmed as Great Khan in his brother’s place. Neither assembly was entirely regular, not according to Mongol law. Arik-Boke had not given the full quota of clan chiefs time to assemble, and Kublai had called his assembly on non-Mongolian soil, which made it unofficial. But both brothers had simply followed the pattern Mongke had established at his own election: they had taken partial support as enough justification to seize the single title of Great Khan.13

And with their actions, the Mongol empire split apart.

Answering his wife’s plea to return lest the empire slip away from him, Kublai finally abandoned the Song conquest and headed back to Karakorum with his battle-hardened troops. For over two years, Arik-Boke fought against his brother’s advancing men. But Kublai was by far the more experienced soldier, and the better generals were on his side. On August 1, 1264, Arik-Boke finally agreed to surrender. Kublai spared his life (although he put most of Arik-Boke’s supporters that he could find to death).

He was now Great Khan, but still not without opposition.

Batu, loyal to his cousin Mongke, had died in 1255; his brother Berke now controlled the lands of the Golden Horde and rejected Kublai’s clan to be his overlord. In the lands east of the Oxus, Chagatai’s grandson Alghu—who had supported Arik-Boke’s khanship—seized the opportunity to declare his own independent rule over the Chagatai Khanate. And Hulagu, afraid that whoever he swore allegiance to might end up on the bottom of the heap when the fighting stopped, had withdrawn entirely.

Kublai still ruled in the east, but the Golden Horde khanship and the Chagatai Khanate would continue to claim their independence. Hulagu’s own conquests, growing apart from the other Mongol lands, would become the Il-khanate, a separate Mongol kingdom in the Middle East. The empire that had stretched from the Chinese coast to the Black Sea had fractured into quarters, and then broken entirely apart.

49.1 The Four Khanates

*See Bauer, The History of the Medieval World, pp. 381–383.

Chapter Fifty

The Mamluks of Egypt

Between 1250 and 1268,

the Bahri Regiment takes control of Cairo,

and the Mongols suffer their first defeat

IN EGYPT, mamluk soldiers now governed the country, and a woman sat on the throne.

After Turan-shah’s murder, the Bahri Regiment had taken control of Egypt’s government. Realizing that they had no legitimate claim to rule, its leaders had followed Islamic custom and recognized Ayyub’s widow Shajar al-Durr as the new sultan; but the power of government remained firmly in their hands.

Shajar al-Durr had been one of Ayyub’s younger concubines (Turan-shah’s mother was long dead); she had apparently become one of his favorites, and later his wife. She had borne him a single son, Khalil, who died as a baby. As sultan of Egypt, Shajar al-Durr had coins struck in her name and Friday prayers said on her behalf, but not in her name alone. She represented herself, always, as “Queen of the Muslims and Mother of Khalil.” Only as mother of Ayyub’s son could she claim any right to hold the throne.1

And even this right was a shaky one. Hearing of the coup d’état and Shajar al-Durr’s enthronement, the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad had sent a withering message to the Bahri: “If there remain no men among you, let us know, and we will send you one.” Cairo’s crown would never sit securely on a woman’s head. Two months after her enthronement, Shajar al-Durr tried to protect herself by marrying the mamluk commander Aybek and handing over the title of sultan to him.2

Aybek did not belong to the Bahri Regiment itself, and Shajar al-Durr’s choice was not a popular one. Aybek, one of the Bahri remarked later, was not “ruler of Egypt”: “He was simply one of our comrades whom we appointed over us, while there were among us some who were older, more qualified, more skilled, and more deserving to be Sultan.” A number of these comrades gathered behind another candidate, a six-year-old of Ayyubid descent named al-Malik al-Ashraf (the grandson of the youngest son of al-Kamil himself), and proclaimed him the rightful Ayyubid sultan.3

For a time, Aybek—perfectly aware of his own lack of legitimacy—agreed to accept al-Ashraf as co-sultan. This did not bring peace; the seven years of Aybek’s rule were marked by riots and looting in Cairo, quarrels with the other mamluks, and political murders. In 1254, Aybek murdered his most distinguished colleague, the Bahri Regiment general Faris al-Din Aqtay, who had been largely responsible for the defeat of Louis and the French army. The assassination, carried out by Aybek and his loyal lieutenant Qutuz in the citadel of Cairo, broke the Bahri apart. Aqtay’s friends fled north into the chaotic Syrian lands; among them was Baibars himself, the assassin of Turan-shah. Aybek then managed to rid himself of his ten-year-old co-sultan by sending the boy into exile. His retainers took him north and found refuge for him in the Empire of Nicaea.4

This temporary victory over opposition lasted only until 1257. Shajar al-Durr had been growing disenchanted with her husband; she had hoped that the marriage would allow her to keep some power, but Aybek was determined to shut her out. In April, she sent her own retainers to ambush Aybek at the royal bathhouse; there they strangled the defenseless sultan to death.

The palace disintegrated. Aybek’s own guards chased Shajar al-Durr into the southern end of the palace and captured her; then they dragged her back into Aybek’s quarters, where (according to Ibn Wasil) Aybek’s first wife allowed the house servants to beat her to death with their wooden house clogs.5

Aybek’s mamluk companions then appointed his fifteen-year-old son, al-Mansur Ali, to be the next sultan of Egypt. Ali was never meant to rule; he was a makeshift caretaker, meant to reassure the people of Cairo that all was in order, while behind his throne the mamluks fought among themselves over the sultanate.

The winner was Aybek’s lieutenant and hitman Qutuz, who got himself proclaimed sultan by his companions on November 12, 1259, and sent Ali into early and peaceful retirement. Shortly afterwards, the Bahri who had fled from Aybek began to trickle back into Egypt. Qutuz welcomed them. He needed them to face the Mongols.6

Hulagu, temporarily abandoning his conquests to return to Karakorum, had left his ten thousand men under the command of his general Ked-Buqa. Ked-Buqa had carried on, leading the occupation of Aleppo, Homs, Hama, and Gaza. By early 1260, the Mongol front had pushed forward almost to the Jordan river; very little land lay between Ked-Buqa and Egypt.7

In late August, Ked-Buqa sent an envoy to Cairo, ordering Qutuz to surrender. Instead, the new sultan put the Mongol messengers to death and stuck their heads up on his city gate.

The defiance was intended to spark an explosion; Qutuz knew that the Mongols had been left behind as a skeleton force, and he was convinced that Allah was behind him in his desire to crush the Mongol enemies of Islam; like Hulagu’s mother, Ked-Buqa was a convert to Christianity. Qutuz even sent a message to Acre, asking the Crusaders there to join him in an alliance. Given that the slaughter at Damietta had happened a bare decade before, the Crusaders were a little taken aback by this offer; they finally decided to pass, but they did offer help with resupplying the Egyptian army as it marched against the Mongols.8

On September 3, 1260, both armies entered the valley of Ain Jalut: “Goliath’s Spring,” site of the storied slaying of the giant Goliath by a young David. And, for the first time, the Mongols fell into the trap they had so often laid for others. Qutuz’s army outnumbered Ked-Buqa’s, but Qutuz concealed most of his men in the hills around Ain Jalut and sent only a small division, led by Baibars, into the Mongol jaws. Ked-Buqa, scenting victory, called for a charge; Baibars turned tail and fled into the hills; and as the Mongols followed, the rest of the mamluks emerged from hiding and surrounded them.9

The Mongol ferocity showed itself, and the trapped army nearly fought its way free. But the mamluks were as effective on horseback as the Mongols had ever been. Several hours into the battle, Ked-Buqa fell. The death of their commander took the heart out of the Mongol army; they began to retreat, and the retreat turned into flight. At the town of Beisan, eight miles out, the survivors attempted to turn and regroup. The pursuing mamluks slaughtered them.

For the first time, a Mongol army had been beaten in pitched battle. News of the mamluk victory was carried triumphantly to Egypt, accompanied by Ked-Buqa’s head on the end of a spear; news of the Mongol defeat spread to the four quarters. The Mongols, it turned out, were not invincible after all. Their triumph was not inevitable. The rest of the world could fight back.10

Qutuz himself rode in triumph to Damascus, drove out the Mongol occupiers, and claimed it again for Egypt. Within a month, he had also retaken Aleppo, Homs, and Hama. Egypt and Syria were finally reunited under the Cairo sultanate. And a lasting line had been drawn between the Arabic empire of Cairo and the domain of the Mongols, deeply influenced by Christianity; first Hulagu’s mother and now his wife were Christian converts.11

Qutuz never returned to Cairo, where his people were preparing to welcome him as hero and conqueror. The Bahri Regiment had not forgotten his part in the murder of Faris al-Din Aqtay, six years earlier. Led by Baibars, they had been planning a cold revenge. In October of 1260, as they journeyed back towards Egypt, Baibars and Qutuz went out hawking with a small band of companions. As the two men stood together, Baibars bent to kiss the sultan’s hand. It was a signal to his confederates; they all surrounded Qutuz at once and killed him.

Leaving the body, they rode back to the camp and faced down Qutuz’s top official, who was waiting for him. Eyeball to eyeball with the murderers, the man folded. “Which of you killed him?” he asked. “I did,” Baibars answered. “Then sit on the throne in his place,” the man said, and retreated.12

A Bahri sultan had at last emerged.* Baibars, biding his time, now ruled a sultanate that was reunified and victorious over the most blood-chilling enemy the world had ever seen.

In the seventeen years of his rule, the border lines of the new Middle East shifted slightly and then were carved even more deeply into the rocky ground. Hulagu, separating himself from Kublai’s dominion, chose the city of Maragheh, west of the Caspian Sea, as the Il-khanate capital; to guard himself from the revenge of the Il-khanates, Baibars sent envoys north to the Golden Horde to negotiate alliances with Berke, the khan who now ruled the Rus’ lands. Berke had converted to Islam, and now that he too had renounced allegiance to the Great Khan, he was anxious to protect his own borders against Hulagu’s ambitions.13

The friendship between the Golden Horde and the Bahri Sultanate also protected the slave trade routes. Thousands of slaves, taken captive by Mongol detachments, were shipped from the shores of the Black Sea (now under Berke’s control) to Egypt every year; the slave regiments, continually replenished, remained the strongest instrument of Baibars’s power.14

In 1261, Baibars lassoed the role of Commander of the Faithful by welcoming an Abbasid refugee, fleeing the Mongol-occupied city of Baghdad, into Cairo, and declaring him the new Abbasid caliph, under Bahri protection. Hulagu had destroyed the ancient heart of Islam; now Baibars was posing as its restorer. The “heathen Tartars,” wrote the fourteenth-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, “abolished the seat of the Caliphate and . . . made unbelief prevail in place of belief,” but Baibars had snatched the fading torch:

[I]t was God’s benevolence that He rescued the faith by reviving its dying breath and restoring the unity of the Muslims in the Egyptian realms. . . . He did this by sending to the Muslims, from this Turkish nation and from among its great and numerous tribes, rulers to defend them and utterly loyal helpers, who were brought from the House of War to the House of Islam under the rule of slavery. . . . [S]ome of them are chosen to sit on the throne of the Sultans and direct the affairs of the Muslims, in accordance with divine providence and with the mercy of God.15

50.1 The Bahri Sultanate

A pleasant side effect of this decision was the immediate allegiance of the sharif of Mecca, the most powerful tribal chief in the Holy City, with the Cairo sultanate. In order to make the hajj, the sacred pilgrimage to Mecca, most of the Muslim world would have to pass through Baibars’s land; now that land would be friendly. At once, Baibars adopted a new title: khadim al-haramayn al-sharifayn, “Servant of the Two Holy Places,” protector of both Mecca and Medina. In the next years, he paid for the renovation of the mosque in Medina that bore Muhammad’s name, and supervised the renewed observation of Islamic laws in the sultanate (including the ban on drinking alcohol).16

He also renewed the war against the Crusader kingdoms, now reduced to two: the Kingdom of Jerusalem at Acre, still clinging desperately to the Mediterranean coastline; and the Principality of Antioch, which since 1201 had also encompassed Tripoli. Bypassing Acre, Baibars marched north towards Antioch and laid siege to the city itself. Antioch fell after a mere four days. Seventeen thousand of its people were taken captive, over a hundred thousand sold into the slave markets; Bohemund VI, the prince of Antioch, was left with only Tripoli.17

Bohemund had not been in Antioch during the siege, but Baibars thoughtfully sent him a letter describing the conquest. “Your houses [were] stormed by pillagers and ransacked by looters,” he wrote,

your women sold four at a time . . . the crosses in your churches smashed, the pages of the false Testaments scattered, the Patriarch’s tombs overturned . . . your Muslim enemy trampling on the place where you celebrate the mass, cutting the throats of monks, priests, and deacons upon the altars. . . . The God who gave you Antioch has taken it away again; the Lord who bestowed that fortress on you has snatched it away, uprooting it from the face of the earth.18

Now only Tripoli and Acre remained in Crusader hands: Tripoli as the last remnant of the Principality of Antioch, minus Antioch; Acre, as the capital of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which no longer controlled Jerusalem. Baibars had restored the Muslim supremacy east of the Mediterranean, a dominance that would endure for generations. “Thus, one intake comes after another and generation follows generation,” Ibn Khaldun explains, “and Islam rejoices in the benefit which it gains through them, and the branches of the kingdom flourish with the freshness of youth.”19

*The “Bahri sultanate” is generally dated 1250–1382, even though the first five sultans were not actually part of the Bahri Regiment.

Chapter Fifty-One

Louis the Saint

Between 1250 and 1267,

the Pastoureaux attack the Church,

but the king of France submits to it

FOUR YEARS AFTER the failed march on Egypt, Louis IX of France was still in the east.

He had arrived in Acre in late May, with barely a hundred surviving men trailing behind him. In early June, he had called them together for a council and posed his dilemma. “The queen my mother has sent to me,” he told them, “and beseeches me . . . to return to France, because my kingdom is in great peril, seeing that I have neither peace nor truce with the King of England. Those belonging to [Acre], with whom I have spoken, tell me that, if I depart, this land is lost. . . . Think well upon this matter, and you shall answer me according as you think right, eight days from today.”1

It was an uncomfortable eight days. Most of the surviving barons wanted the king to go back to France, assure the kingdom’s safety, and then relaunch the Crusade after proper preparations. The soldiers, Jean de Joinville among them, were reluctant to abandon the Crusade and the remaining hostages back in Cairo.

After hearing all the arguments, Louis decided to stay. His mother and regent, Queen Blanche, had “people enough to defend [France],” he concluded; but “if I depart hence, the kingdom of Jerusalem is lost, for none will dare to remain after I have left.” Instead, he sent his two surviving brothers home with a letter, explaining to his people that he intended to remain in Acre for some time to work for “the release of prisoners, the retaining of castles in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and other advantages for Christendom.” And he concluded the letter with a strong and unambiguous appeal: The Crusade was not yet over, and the knights of France could still fight for the Holy Land.

Come, then, knights of Christ, own soldiers of the Pope of the Living God, take up your arms and be strong to avenge these outrages and insults. . . . Those who come, or send effective help to us or rather to the Holy Land, while we are still here, will earn, besides the indulgences promised to those who take the Cross, the respect and gratitude of God and of men. . . . The nature of the task calls for speed, and every delay will be fatal.2

The appeal was answered from an unwelcome quarter.

While Louis was devoting himself to reinforcing the walls of Acre, a mad Hungarian monk began to preach, throughout northern France, that the Virgin Mary had appeared to him with a revelation: King Louis would be relieved not by barons and knights but by the humble and the poor. His message mined a deep vein of resentment of the privileged and powerful, the nobles and the knights. “The poor people . . . pay for all the wars of their lords,” the Norman churchman William the Clerk had written, not a score of years before, “and often weep thereat and sigh.”

The monk assured those same poor that shepherds and peasants had been “granted by heaven the power, in their humility and simplicity, to rescue the Holy Land . . . for, as he said, the pride of the French soldier was displeasing to God.” This was a popular message, and the monk, styling himself the “Master of Hungary,” soon stood at the head of thousands of followers. All of them—farmers, swineherds, cowmen, and a healthy salting of murderers, thieves, and outcasts—dressed themselves as shepherds, and the movement became known as the Pastoureaux: the shepherds.3

At first, their enthusiasm was widely praised, and the regent and queen mother Blanche herself welcomed them to the capital city and listened to the Master’s message. But soon the movement turned dark. Before long, the Master began to preach an anti-Church message even stronger than that of the Waldensians and Cathars a few decades before. “[He] condemned all orders excepting their own,” writes Matthew Paris; the Franciscans were vagrants, the Cistercians greedy, the priests and bishops “only money-hunters.” He was tapping into a deep vein of resentment, not just of well-to-do knights, but of all who prospered while the poor struggled. “I would like to strangle the nobles and the clergy, every one of them,” announces a character in a thirteenth-century French satire. “Everything that is tasty and good goes to them.”4

In January of 1251, the Pastoureaux entered Orleans, armed with “swords, axes, darts, daggers and long knives” (“They seemed to cherish the thoughts of war more than of Christ,” Paris remarks), and swept through the city, attacking and killing clergymen, burning and raiding as they went. Similar mobs stormed churches in Tours and Bourges. Blanche immediately withdrew her support. “I believed that they, in their simplicity and sanctity, were about to win the whole earth,” she declared. “But since they are deceivers, let them be excommunicated, seized, and destroyed.” Royal officials began a manhunt. Within the year, the Pastoureaux had been cut to pieces in hand-to-hand fighting, arrested and hanged, or driven into the rivers to drown; the Master himself was killed by a militant Parisian butcher wielding an ax, who “struck him on the head and sent him brainless to hell.”5

51.1 The Pastoureaux

France, vulnerable to English ambitions and wracked by internal chaos, soon lost its regent as well. In November of 1252, Blanche—well into her sixties—died after a short illness. Hearing of his mother’s death, Louis shut himself in his chambers for two days, speaking to no one, and then finally made preparations to return to France.

He arrived back in Paris on September 7, 1254. For six years, he had been away; he had managed to free some of his captured followers and had built new fortifications around the Christian cities in the east, but he had failed to recover Jerusalem. The collapse of the Seventh Crusade had changed him. “After the king returned from overseas, he lived in such devotion that never did he wear fur . . . nor scarlet, nor gilded stirrups and spurs,” writes Jean de Joinville. He gave up wine, declined elaborate feasts; he was ascetic in clothing, in food and drink, and in his habits, dedicating more and more of his income to the poor, praying constantly, studying the scriptures late into the night.6

His piety had a direct effect on France; Louis was as concerned with justice in his realm as with his own private devotions. Within two years of his return, he had passed multiple restrictions on the conduct of his royal officials. They were not to swear or to frequent taverns; they were to treat native Frenchmen and foreigners the same; bribes and gifts were forbidden, as were random seizures, jailing without cause, and violence. He banned duels as a way of settling legal arguments, outlawed prostitution and gambling and public blasphemy.7

Like the late Frederick II, he resisted the encroaching power of France’s bishops; unlike Frederick, he did so out of his conviction that the king should be a servant of the Church. When they petitioned him to arrest and “constrain” men they had excommunicated, as a way to bring them more quickly to repentance, he refused: it was possible, he told them, that the judgment of the pope might yet declare such men innocent, and the power of France could not be used to support the decisions of local bishops who might be mistaken. It could be wielded only on behalf of God (by way of the pope).8

King as servant of the church: Louis was, in this, following the views of the Dominican scholar Thomas Aquinas. Barely thirty, Aquinas had just finished his first teaching job at Cologne. He had arrived in Paris in 1252, and was now lecturing and writing in the French capital. Like Anselm at the beginning of the twelfth century, like Peter Abelard and Peter Lombard and Bernard of Chartres after that, Aquinas devoted himself to the study of the Greek masters and their synthesis with Christian thought. His greatest theological works were still unwritten, but he would manage to lay out in full, during Louis IX’s lifetime, a massive reconciliation of Aristotelian ideas with Christian revelation.9

In The Politics, now translated into Latin, Aristotle had argued that a just ruler works for the common good of all his subjects. Aristotle’s “common good” encompassed justice and prosperity for all, and by his definition Louis was indeed a virtuous monarch: “The king . . . made it his chief concern,” writes Joinville, “to find out how the people were governed, and their rights and interests protected. . . . [G]ood justice prevailed . . . and things were so much better, that goods and property and everything else sold for double their value.”10

Aquinas accepted Aristotle’s definition and then expanded it. Kings have the task of bringing justice and prosperity to their subjects, but leading them to ultimate salvation is beyond the monarch’s reach. “Man does not attain his [ultimate] end, which is the possession of God, by human power but by divine,” Aquinas concluded. “Therefore, the task of leading him to that last end . . . has been entrusted not to earthly kings but to . . . the chief priest, the successor of St. Peter, the Vicar of Christ, the Roman Pontiff.” There was, in Aquinas’s mind, no conflict between king and pope, any more than there was a clash between natural law and heavenly law, between reason and revelation. They walked hand in hand, the king attending to earthly matters, the pope to heavenly ones. But there was no question as to who had the final say: “To the Roman Pontiff, all the kings of the Christian people are to be subject,” Aquinas concluded, “as to our Lord Jesus Christ Himself.”11

The anticlericalism of the Pastoureaux had been the far swing of the pendulum; Louis brought it back to the other extreme. “Love and honour all persons in the service of Holy Church,” he told his son, at the end of his life, and added a further instruction: Even if wronged by the Church, the king should hold his tongue. For considering “the benefits God had bestowed,” it was better to give up royal privilege than to struggle against an authority bestowed by God.12

Chapter Fifty-Two

The Lion’s Den

Between 1252 and 1273,

three popes work to separate Sicily from the empire,

the king of England tries to face down his barons,

and the line of Frederick II comes to a violent end

AFTER THE DEATH of his enemy Frederick II, Pope Innocent IV had returned triumphantly to Rome. “To the Roman Pontiff, all the kings of the Christian people are to be subject,” wrote Thomas Aquinas; and Innocent IV agreed. “Whoever seeks to evade the authority of the vicar of Christ,” he declared, “thereby impairs the authority of Christ Himself. The King of kings . . . has conferred full power on us.”1

He used this power, at once, in two different directions. In 1252, he issued the papal bull Ad Extirpanda, an elaborate set of procedures governing the Inquisition in Italy. Every ruling civil official was ordered to appoint committees that would be responsible for hunting out and arresting heretics. And the officials themselves were commanded to “force” the heretics to confess, citra membri diminutionem, et mortis periculum: by any measure, short of death or permanent disfigurement. This left plenty of options (flogging, starvation, the rack) by which heretics could be questioned; it was the first papal legitimization of torture as a tool of inquisition.2

At the same time, Innocent IV busied himself reducing the power of the next Holy Roman Emperor. He had long hoped to divide Sicily off from the triple realm of Germany, Italy, and Sicily. While Frederick II’s son and heir Conrad was occupied beating off his German rival to the throne, William of Holland, Innocent IV sent messengers to Henry III of England, offering to crown his second son Edmund as the rightful king of Sicily.

The deal was a lousy one for England. Innocent had nothing to offer except the empty title; Henry would have to swear, on peril of excommunication, to hand over a substantial payment to Rome, and also to send an army to take Sicily away from Conrad. Nevertheless, Henry III (an idle, cowardly, and foolish king, says Matthew Paris) accepted on nine-year-old Edmund’s behalf.3

As it turned out, enthusiasm for the Sicilian struggle was nonexistent in England, and Henry had enormous trouble raising an army. He was still working on the project when Conrad, fighting in the lowland swamps south of the Apennines, died of malaria. His heir was his two-year-old son Conradin; at once, Conrad’s younger half brother Manfred claimed the right to serve as the child’s regent.

Manfred sent the toddler to grow up safely in Bavaria and opened negotiations with Innocent IV, apparently believing that the pope might retract the offer to crown Edmund in favor of himself. But the talks failed; Manfred exhorted the Sicilians to rise behind him and resist the papal order handing them over to foreign rule. In December, he crossed over to southern Italy with his troops and led an army against the papal soldiers stationed at Foggia, defeating them easily.4

Innocent himself was in Naples, suffering from a gradually worsening sickness. When he heard the news of the defeat, his condition took a sharp turn downward. He died on December 7, 1254.

In his place, the cardinals elected Alexander IV: “kind and religious,” says Matthew Paris, “assiduous in prayer and strict in abstinence, but easily led away by the whisperings of flatterers.” In his sixties, Alexander IV had ambitions but little clout. He excommunicated Manfred and confirmed Edmund’s kingship, but the papal troops were no match for Manfred’s armies, and Alexander IV was forced to retreat to the Papal States and leave Sicily in Manfred’s hands. By 1258, Manfred was sure enough in the loyalty of the Sicilians to crown himself king of Sicily, excommunication notwithstanding.5

At the same time, young Conradin lost his claim to Germany. Conrad’s rival William of Holland had drowned crossing a stream; after Conrad’s death, the electors of Germany gathered together to decide on the next king of Germany. No one voted for Conradin. It seemed clear that Germany, after nearly ten years of chaos, needed a grown-up as king—and preferably one from outside the country, since all the German candidates could claim only fragmented and partial support.

But there was no clear outside choice either. After nearly a year of bickering, half of the electors decided to vote for Alfonso X, king of León-Castile, an experienced statesman who also happened to be the grandson of the German baron Philip of Swabia (by way of his mother). The rest preferred Henry III’s younger brother Richard of Cornwall, second son of John Lackland. Richard managed to get Alexander IV on his side, and even went to Germany to be crowned. But, faced with the necessity of conquering over half the country to actually rule it, he soon gave up and went home again.6

Now the English royal family had tangled itself up in two foreign struggles—one in Sicily, the other in Germany—for personal gain. Henry III, never a popular king, had enmeshed himself in a web of stupid decisions. Married to Eleanor of Provence, he had promoted too many of his wife’s French relatives into plum court positions, annoying his local courtiers. He had raised taxes in an attempt to collect the pope’s fee for the Sicilian crown, annoying everyone else. And after an adolescence spent under the thumb of a regent, he had grown into a spiky and irascible man, resentful of any advisor who seemed too controlling. He feuded with his officials; he fell out with his brother-in-law, the younger Simon de Montfort; when he needed the approval of the Curia Regis, the gathering of churchmen and landholders named by the Magna Carta as the “common counsel of our realm,” he summoned only those men who were certain to agree with him; he led expensive and pointless campaigns into the French lands that had once belonged to England. “He despoiled his native subjects, and enriched his brothers, relations, and kinsmen,” Matthew Paris sums up, “. . . [and] the kingdom . . . was all full of suspicion and fox-like treachery.”7

Henry was also facing the possibility of excommunication. He had not managed to raise either an army or the necessary funds that his oath to Innocent demanded. In March of 1258, Alexander IV sent him a stern final warning: if he didn’t pay up by June 1, he would be excommunicated.

Henry had no choice. To raise the necessary funds, he needed the entire Curia Regis to agree to new scutage. So in early April 1258, he summoned the priests and barons of England together in London and demanded more money.

Henry’s dilemma gave the barons of England the chance to air thirty years’ worth of complaints and grievances. Certainly Henry could have his money, the barons told their king, as soon as he fulfilled their conditions: he was to expel most of his French-born officials from England; he was to reaffirm all of the provisions of the Magna Charta; and he was to hand final decisions of policy over to a chamber of twenty-four leading barons, twelve chosen by him, twelve by the Curia Regis. “They moreover insisted that the king should frequently consult them, and listen to their advice,” Paris concludes.8

Unlike his father John, Henry was unwilling to risk excommunication. On June 11, 1258, he agreed to sign the barons’ demands, set down in a written treaty known as the Provisions of Oxford. The original demands had morphed: he was now to accept a standing council of fifteen who would have to ratify all his decisions, as well as another committee of twelve and the original council of twenty-four.9

But the army to conquer Sicily, and the pope’s fee, did not materialize. A dry season in England led to a drastic shortage of food, which led to famine and disease: “A measure of wheat rose in price to fifteen shillings and more,” Paris writes, “at a time when the country itself was drained of money, and numberless dead bodies were lying about the streets.” Alexander IV extended the deadline for payment. Meanwhile, the English barons expanded the Provisions of Oxford into the more elaborate Provisions of Westminster, placing even more limitations on Henry’s ability to raise money.10

Henry III had given up a whole raft of royal privileges and gotten nothing in return. But he had King John’s example to lead him; he opened secret negotiations with Alexander IV, pointing out that he could raise the money he owed if he were freed, by papal decree, from the Provisions of Oxford.

Alexander seems to have agreed. On April 13, 1261, he issued a papal bull freeing the king from all obligation to both Provisions; and on June 14, Henry sent the bull to be read out loud to the newly formed councils, which had assembled at Winchester.11

The barons, led by Simon de Montfort, began to prepare for war.

Fighting did not begin immediately. Neither the barons nor Henry were ready to launch a full-scale civil war; and the famine of 1258 had been followed by several good years of crops and rising prosperity, which meant that the English as a whole were not inclined to revolt. Instead, nearly three years of increasingly ill-tempered negotiations commenced. Alexander IV died, shortly after issuing the bull, but his successor Urban IV confirmed it; Simon de Montfort remained Henry’s most inflexible foe, but other barons went back and forth between allegiance to their peers and loyalty to the king; Henry’s oldest son and heir, Edward, at first took a virtuously principled stance of disagreement with his father (refusing, says Paris, “to accept of or profit by this absolution”) and then reversed himself, made up with Henry III, and became the leader of the royal army.12

In the summer of 1263, Simon de Montfort began to agitate, openly, for armed resistance. By March 1264, the two armies—the barons behind Montfort, the royalists led by Prince Edward—had advanced towards each other and lay only nineteen miles apart. Raids, skirmishes, and plundering of nearby estates began.

On May 14, the armies met at Lewes, on the southern coast of England. Edward, in charge of one wing of the attack, crushed the barons facing him and chased them well into the countryside. But the rest of the royal army faltered. By the time Edward returned, Henry III had surrendered after his horse was killed underneath him, and the royal forces had scattered.

Edward too was forced to surrender. Montfort, leader of the baronial cause, was now the most powerful man in England. He put Edward and Henry under courteous guard, in the Tower of London. “From that time,” Paris records, “he showed himself less inclined to treat for peace . . . because he had the king and the whole kingdom in his power.” For fifteen months, the monarchy remained under his control.13

Early in 1265, Edward managed to talk his guards into allowing him to ride outside the city gates for exercise. When they agreed, he challenged them to a race, and then quickly outrode them and took refuge with royal partisans at the castle of Wigmore. He found plenty of support for the royal cause outside of London: “Thus released from his imprisonment,” Paris says, “Edward assembled a large army, as numbers flocked to join him.” The war began again. Clashes in July and early August both ended with Simon de Montfort’s army driven backwards. In the third encounter between the two forces, at the field of Evesham on August 4, Edward’s army massacred the opposition in a brief violent two-hour confrontation. Simon de Montfort himself died in the fighting.14

52.1 The Battle of Evesham

The Battle of Evesham brought an end both to the Second Barons’ War against the crown and to the power of Henry III. It would be two years before final terms of peace were signed, and eight before Henry III’s reign finally ended. But from the moment of victory at Evesham, Edward—twenty-six years old, six foot two and towering over his peers, hardened by constant service in his father’s army—was the real ruler of England.

MEANWHILE, the Sicilian match that had lit the English powderkeg was burning merrily away in new directions.

Since Henry was clearly not going to get Sicily out of Manfred’s hands, Pope Urban IV offered the crown to Louis IX instead. Louis declined, on principle; he did not wish to be the usurper of young Conradin’s rights. But Urban IV found a more willing candidate in Louis’s younger brother, Charles of Anjou: aged forty, constantly in motion, a veteran of the failed Damietta Crusade, impatient with Louis’s scruples and ambitious for himself. He agreed at once—over Louis’s objections—to both take the crown and conquer the country. And, like Henry III nearly a decade earlier, he accepted a truly awful set of conditions in exchange for the meaningless title. He agreed to give up all power over the clergymen in Sicily, to claim no other title in Italy, to pay off the English debt to Rome, and to hand over an enormous yearly tribute to the pope. In exchange, he got the name of king—and the pope’s promise to give anyone who fought against Manfred the rewards of crusade.15

By the time Charles arrived in Sicily, Urban IV too was dead (the continuing election of elderly priests to the seat of Peter lent itself to quick turnover), and the French cardinal Guy Foulques le Gros had become Pope Clement IV.

Charles and his wife were crowned king and queen of Sicily in Rome; and, with title in hand, Charles prepared to attack Manfred. Learning of the new arrangement, Manfred had crossed over into southern Italy with a good-sized army of his own. He intended to surround Charles in Rome and make short work of him: “The bird is in the cage,” he had remarked, hearing of Charles’s arrival in the city.16

Before Manfred could arrive, Charles marched his own army, recruited from the French provinces, out of Rome and down into Manfred’s southern Italian lands, bordered by the Garigliano river. The French forces found a gap in the border defense, at the town of Ceprano. Rumors later spread that traitors in Manfred’s kingdom had arranged the hole: “Bones are gather’d yet / At Ceprano,” the Florentine poet Dante wrote later, in the Inferno, “there where treachery / Branded the Apulian name.”17

The two kings met at Benevento, and Charles of Anjou’s battalions easily outmaneuvered the Sicilian soldiers. Three thousand of Manfred’s men fell; more were drowned in the river nearby as they fled. Manfred himself was killed at the center of the fighting. When Charles located his body, three days later, he buried it in unconsecrated ground near the battlefield: Manfred had died in his excommunicated state. (Dante would later meet Manfred in purgatory, working off his sins: “When by two mortal blows / My frame was shatter’d,” the shade laments, “I betook myself / Weeping to Him, who of free will forgives.”)18

The capture of the Sicilian kingdom by Charles of Anjou had a bloody and brutal postscript. When the Italian cities in the north declared independence, young Conradin—now fourteen and backed by the German troops of his uncle, the Duke of Bavaria—made a play for what remained of his inheritance. Impelled by his advisors, he crossed through the Alps and tried to rally the Lombard cities against Charles’s power.

He made it as far as Rome. Clement IV came out to watch him march by, driven by hopes of victory and a teenager’s sense of immortality: “Dragged by wicked men as a lamb to the slaughter,” he is said to have muttered from his balcony.19

52.2 The Kingdom of Sicily

Charles came north against him and repeated his victory, driving back Conradin’s supporters at the Battle of Tagliacozzo on August 23, 1268. “The better part of the enemy was destroyed with the edge of the sword,” he wrote back to Clement IV afterwards, “. . . the slaughter of the enemey there was so great that what happened . . . on the fields of Benevento can hardly be compared to it.” Conradin himself was captured as he fled from the battlefield. Charles imprisoned him for a year and then, in October 1269, had the teenager publicly beheaded for treason.20

The three-way dominion of the Holy Roman Emperors had disappeared, along with the line of Frederick II. Charles reigned in Sicily and southern Italy; the Lombard cities remained in revolt; and, four years after young Conradin’s death, the German electors finally decided on one of their own, Rudolf, Count of Hapsburg, to be the next king of Germany.

Rudolf prudently remained in Germany, content with the title king of Germany and making no efforts to regain the empire. To be crowned Holy Roman Emperor, he would have had to go to Rome and appeal to the pope; and he preferred to stay home. “Rome is like the lion’s den in the fable,” he explained. “One may see the footsteps of many who have gone there, but of none who have come back.”21

Chapter Fifty-Three

The Recapture of Constantinople

Between 1254 and 1261,

the Latin Empire comes to an end,

and the Byzantine Empire is restored

HALF A CENTURY BEFORE, Byzantium had splintered into four mini-kingdoms and faded from sight. For a little less than a millennium, Constantinople had been a pivot point of international politics; now, like Kiev, or Braga, or Krakow, it was of vast importance to its immediate neighbors, but little more.

Constantinople now stood as the capital of the “Latin Empire,” a tiny and penniless realm. Immediately after the conquest of the city by the Fourth Crusade, the Latin Empire, under the Count of Flanders turned Emperor, had stretched from Constantinople into the south of Greece, across the Black Sea to encompass the coast of Asia Minor. But under the count’s nephew Baldwin II, who inherited the throne in 1228 at the age of eleven, the Latin Empire had shrunk. The Bulgarian empire, under the ambitious Ivan Asen, mounted constant attacks on its western border; the Empire of Nicaea, under the ruthless John Vatatzes, assaulted it from the east. Baldwin had few troops, and no money to hire mercenaries. A delegation of Franciscan and Dominican friars who visited the city in 1234 reported that city was “deprived of all protection,” the emperor a pauper: “All the paid knights departed. The ships of the Venetians, Pisans . . . and other nations were ready to leave, and some indeed had already left. When we saw that the land was abandoned, we feared danger because it was surrounded by enemies.”1

Baldwin spent much of his reign out of Constantinople, traveling from court to court in Europe and begging each Christian king to help him protect the city that had once been Christianity’s crown jewel in the east. Both Louis IX of France and Henry III of England made small contributions to the Latin treasury, but in its king’s absence Constantinople itself grew shabbier and hungrier. By 1254, Baldwin could claim to rule only the land right around Constantinople’s walls. He had already sold most of the city’s treasures and sacred relics: a fragment of the True Cross, the napkin that Saint Veronica had used to wash the face of Christ as he walked towards Golgotha, the lance that pierced Christ’s side on the cross, the Crown of Thorns itself. (Louis IX bought most of them and built a special chapel in Paris to house the collection.) He had borrowed so much money from the Venetian merchants that he had been forced to send his son Philip to Venice as a hostage pending repayment; he had torn the copper roofs from Constantinople’s domes and melted them down into coins.2

While the Latin Empire withered, the Empire of Nicaea grew. John Vatatzes, claiming to be the Byzantine emperor in exile, spent most of his thirty-three-year reign fighting: swallowing most of Constantinople’s land, seizing Thrace from Bulgaria and Thessalonica from the third of the mini-kingdoms, the Despotate of Epirus. (The fourth mini-kingdom, the Empire of Trebizond, never expanded very far away from the shoreline of the Black Sea.) By 1254, the Empire of Nicaea stretched from Asia Minor across to Greece and up north of the Aegean.

53.1 The Empire of Nicaea

In February of that year, the sixty-year-old John Vatatzes suffered a massive epileptic seizure in his bedchamber. He slowly recovered, but seizures continued to plague him. “The attacks began to occur altogether more frequently,” writes the historian George Akropolites, who lived at the Nicaean court. “He had a wasting away of the flesh and . . . no respite from the affliction.” In November, the emperor died; his son Theodore, aged thirty-three, became emperor.3

But Theodore II soon sickened with the same illness that had killed his father: “His entire body was reduced to a skeleton,” Akropolites says. He died before the end of his fourth year on the throne, leaving as heir his eight-year-old son John.4

John’s rule was promptly co-opted by the ambitious Michael Palaeologus, a well-regarded soldier and aristocrat who was also the great-grandson of the Byzantine emperor Alexius III. With the support of most of the Nicaeans (“They did not think it proper,” says Akropolites, “for the . . . empire, being so great, to be governed by a fruit-picking and dice-playing infant”), Michael first declared himself to be regent and then, in 1259, promoted himself to co-emperor as Michael VIII.5

From the moment he took the throne, Michael VIII intended to recover his great-grandfather’s city: “His every effort and whole aim was to rescue it from the hands of the Latins,” writes Akropolites. In the first two years of his reign, he prepared for the attack on Constantinople by making peace on his other borders; he concluded treaties with both Bulgaria and the nearby Il-khanate Mongols.6

He also equipped himself with a new alliance. The merchants of Genoa had just suffered a commercial catastrophe. In 1256, they had quarreled sharply with the Venetians over the ownership of a waterfront parcel of land in Acre, the last surviving fragment of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Whoever controlled it could block rival ships from the harbor of Acre, and both of the maritime republics wanted this advantage. “The Christians began to make shameful and wretched war on each other,” says the contemporary chronicle known as the Rothelin Continuation, “both sides being equally aggressive.” The first major sea battle in the war, between a thirty-nine-ship Venetian fleet (reinforced by ships from friendly Pisa) and a fifty-galley Genoan navy, had ended with an embarrassing Genoan loss. Between 1257 and 1258, the conflict ballooned until all of Acre was at war:

And all that year there were at least sixty engines, every one of them throwing down onto the city of Acre, onto houses, towers and turrets, and they smashed and laid level with the ground every building they touched, for ten of these engines could deliver rocks weighing as much as 1500 pounds. . . . [N]early all the towers and strong houses in Acre were destroyed . . . [and] twenty thousand men died in this war on one side or the other. . . . The city of Acre was as utterly devastated by this war as if it had been destroyed in warfare between Christians and Saracens.7

The Genoans were the losers. By the end of 1258, they had been forced out of Acre completely; the old Genoese quarter in Acre was entirely pulled apart, and the Venetians and Pisans used the stones to rebuild their own trading posts.8

Now Genoa needed another trading base in the eastern Mediterranean. Carefully guarded negotiations between the Genoese statesman Guglielmo Boccanegra and the emperor Michael VIII went on during the winter of 1260, and ended in July of 1261 with the signing of a major treaty: the Treaty of Nymphaion, which promised the Genoese their own tax-free trading quarters in Constantinople, should they help the ambitious emperor to conquer it.9

The conquest itself was an anticlimax; Baldwin II was in no shape to resist, and the city was almost defenseless. As soon as the Treaty of Nymphaion was ratified, Michael sent a small detachment to Constantinople to issue a series of threats. The detachment discovered, to its surprise, that most of the remaining Latin army had been sent off to attack a Nicaean-held harbor island near the Bosphorus Strait. Under cover of thick dark, they climbed into the city, quickly overwhelmed the tiny remaining guard, and opened the gates. Baldwin himself, sleeping at the royal palace, woke up at the sounds of their shouts and managed to flee the city, leaving his crown behind him. The Latin Empire was no more.10

Michael VIII himself was camped to the north of Thyateira at the time. When news of the capture arrived at his camp, his sister woke him up by shaking him and saying, “Rise up, emperor, for Christ has conferred Constantinople upon you!” According to Akropolites, he answered, “How? I did not even send a worthy army against it.”11

Three weeks later, he arrived at the gates of Constantinople himself. He entered the city on August 14 as the first emperor of a restored Byzantium, and found a disastrous mess: “a plain of destruction, full of ruins and mounds.” The royal palace was so filthy and smoke-stained that it had to be scrubbed from top to bottom before he could take up residence in it.12

The Genoese, claiming their reward, now had a trade monopoly in Byzantium and held the premier position in the Mediterranean Sea. Baldwin II ended up in Italy, still claiming to be the emperor of the Latins.

Michael’s co-emperor, young John, remained behind in Nicaea. Michael VIII intended to rule the restored Byzantium on his own, founder of a new royal dynasty, without challenge. Four months later, he ordered the boy blinded and imprisoned in a castle on an island in the Sea of Marmara. The sentence was carried out on Christmas Day, 1261, the boy’s eleventh birthday.

Chapter Fifty-Four

The Last Crusades

Between 1270 and 1291,

Louis IX dies on crusade,

the Principality of Antioch and the Kingdom of Jerusalem fall,

and the crusading age comes to an end

LOUIS IX had not yet succeeded at crusade. On July 1, 1270, he once again set sail across the Mediterranean, departing from the southern coast of France and heading for Tunis.

The decay of Almohad power on the Spanish peninsula had been followed by the disintegration of the Almohad empire in North Africa. In Tunis, a former Almohad governor had declared his independence in 1229, establishing a dynasty known as the Hafsid. Other breakaway dynasties claimed chunks of Almohad land as well; the Zayyanids ruled from the city of Tlemcen, the Marinids from Fez. The last Almohad caliph, Idris II, had been able to claim little more than the lands surrounding Marrakesh itself, and even this claim had fallen when the Marinids stormed Marrakesh in 1269 and took it for themselves.

54.1 After the Almohads

Of the three post-Almohad kingdoms, the Hafsid was the most powerful. Tunis, separated from the Mediterranean Sea only by a lake, lay at the end of the central trade route down into Africa; it was already visited by merchants from across the Muslim world, and in Hafsid hands it grew into a mighty political capital as well. Ambassadors came to the Hafsid capital from Egypt, from West Africa, even from distant Norway. The kings of Kanem kept a permanent embassy there; so did James of Aragon, who managed to negotiate an ongoing peace with the Hafsid caliphs. Those caliphs boasted descent from a disciple of the twelfth-century prophet Ibn Tumart, founder of the Almohad movement; they set themselves as the rightful protectors of Islam in North Africa. Abu ‘Abdallah al-Mustansir, who had ruled in Tunis since 1249, styled himself “Commander of the Faithful.” His Tunis boasted both the great theological school of al-Zaytuna, where students of Islam came to work from all over Spain and North Africa, and the Studium Arabicum, a Dominican school intended to train Christian missionaries in their understanding of Muslim beliefs so that they could more effectively argue against them. Al-Mustansir raised no objections to this. Under his rule, both Dominicans and Franciscans preached freely to the Hafsid Muslims, although without great effect.1

Why Louis IX decided to tackle the Hafsids is not entirely clear. They were a mighty Muslim empire, but they held no holy sites. He had originally taken the cross intending to fight against the Bahri mamluk turned sultan Baibars, who had conquered Antioch and was now threatening Acre. Louis’s younger brother Charles of Anjou announced that he would join the Crusade, which might explain the targeting of Tunis; Charles, now king of Sicily and southern Italy, wanted to claim the North African coast for himself as well. But Louis had not been sympathetic to his brother’s ambitions. Perhaps he simply thought that the open-minded al-Mustansir was a likely convert to Christianity.2

Whatever the motivation, enthusiasm for the project among the French knights was nonexistent. “If we take not the cross, we shall lose the King’s favour,” one of them remarked, in the hearing of Jean de Joinville, “and if we take the cross, we shall lose the favour of God, since we take not the cross for Him, but for fear of the King.” James of Aragon refused to have anything to do with the war against his allies, and Joinville himself decided not to accompany his king: “They all did mortal sin that counselled his going,” he wrote, “because . . . all the realm was at good peace with itself and with all its neighbors . . . after he had gone, the state of the realm [did nothing but] worsen.”3

Louis finally managed to raise a certain amount of support. The king of Navarre, Theobald, had married Louis’s daughter Isabella in 1255; he now agreed to accompany his father-in-law. Prince Edward of England had also promised to join the army in North Africa, but had not yet embarked. Along with his three older sons, Louis landed in Carthage on July 18 and marched his army the fifteen miles towards Tunis. He began to besiege the city, but within weeks was suffering from what Joinville calls “a flux of the belly.” Dysentery ravaged the attackers; the Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani tells us that Louis’s second son John died, along with “an innumerable company of the common folk.”4

On August 25, after two weeks of suffering, the king of France died in camp. Charles of Anjou and Edward of England both arrived not long after to find Philip, the king’s oldest son and heir, also ill with dysentery. The conquest of Tunis had never been likely; now Charles negotiated a peace with al-Mustansir, who paid him off in order to get rid of the besieging army, and the demoralized Crusaders returned home. King Theobald of Navarre stopped in Sicily, where he too grew ill and died. This left the throne of Navarre in the hands of his younger brother Henry, who was by all accounts a competent ruler, although so corpulent that he was nicknamed “Henry the Fat” by his contemporaries. (Four years later, Henry the Fat suffocated on his own adipose tissue, leaving his infant daughter Joan as queen of Navarre.)

Philip recovered; he took the coffins of his father and brother back to France and began his rule as Philip III.

Edward of England was unwilling to abandon his crusade. He collected his own men and a few extras (among them, a Milanese priest named Tebaldo Visconti who had been invited to join the journey to Egypt by Louis IX himself) and sailed towards the Holy Land.

Bohemund VI, ruler of the Principality of Antioch, had lost everything but Tripoli to Baibars of Egypt; and Baibars, whose modus operandi included plenty of trash talk, was planning to finish the conquest. “We left you, but only to return,” he wrote to Bohemund. “We have deferred your total destruction, but only for a certain number of days.” Edward intended to prevent that destruction. He had three hundred knights, and recruited more from Cyprus, but his real strength lay in an alliance he negotiated as soon as he arrived in Tripoli: with the ruler of the Il-khanate dynasty, Hulagu’s son and successor Abaqa. Facing the joint Crusader and Il-khanate Mongol defensive front, Baibars agreed to a truce that would protect the plain of Acre and the road to Nazareth for ten years, ten months, ten days, and ten hours.5

Edward did not immediately start home. He was inclined to linger in the east, hoping for the chance to perform a greater deed in service of Christ’s cause; he helped rebuild a few defenses and tried to talk Abaqa into whittling away at the power of the Egyptian front.

In October 1271, the Milanese priest Tebaldo Visconti, who had joined Edward to continue the failed Egyptian Crusade, learned (greatly to his surprise) that he had just been elected to be the next pope. Clement IV had died in 1268, and for three years the cardinals had been in conclave in the Italian city of Viterbo, just north of Rome, quarreling over the succession: half of them wanted a French pope who would support Charles of Anjou, the rest an Italian pope who would resist him. For three years, the Church had been headless.

The citizens of Viterbo, finally fed up with the delay, had banded together and locked the cardinals into a single palace, removed the roof, and threatened them with nothing but bread and water until they chose a new pontiff. “And since they were not able to agree upon any one of those there present,” Villani writes, “they elected [as] Pope Gregory X . . . the cardinal legate of Syria in the Holy Land”: Visconti, a compromise candidate who was Italian but had spent most of his career outside Italy, who had never been involved with papal politics.6

Visconti, an idealist who (like Edward) was thoroughly committed to the recovery of the Holy Land, was not entirely pleased by this. Nevertheless, he started back towards Rome. But Edward still delayed. In June of 1272, an assassin attacked him in his chambers with a poisoned dagger; Edward managed to kick the dagger away and kill the attacker, but he was wounded in the struggle, and the wound festered and weakened him. Not until September was he strong enough to start home.

He was still traveling back towards England when Henry III died, after fifty-six years as king of England, and left the crown to his son.7

THE CRUSADES had ended.

The expedition to Tunis and Edward’s journey to Acre, neither of which had anything to do with Jerusalem—and neither of which involved very much in the way of actual fighting—were later known to some historians as the Eighth and Ninth Crusades. Other chronicles did not even grant them the name.

The crusading age, on its deathbed, had one last gasp before it expired.

Pulled away from his first crusade, the new pope Gregory X had made crusading the focus of his papacy. As part of readying the Christian world for a brand-new wave of crusades, he had opened discussions with Michael VIII, emperor of restored Byzantium, about reunifying the divided eastern and western churches. Michael VIII, a canny politician with no particular theological training, was enthusiastic. A church council had already been planned for the eastern French city of Lyons in 1274; Gregory X invited Michael to send a delegation to this Second Council of Lyons to discuss the possibilities. He also invited Thomas Aquinas, hoping that the great theologian would help out-argue any objections the Byzantines might raise; but Aquinas sickened and died on the journey to Lyons. He had not quite reached his fiftieth birthday.

In the end, his presence was unneeded. The delegation, headed by the chronicler George Akropolites, arrived at Lyons in midsummer, bearing a letter from Michael VIII that conceded almost every theological distinction of the eastern church in favor of the Roman positions.* A celebratory Mass was then carried out, with priests from both east and west taking part, and the council moved on to address other issues. This included the renewal of crusading in the east; also present at Lyons was a delegation of Il-khanate Mongols, sent by Abaqa to demonstrate his willingness to fight on the side of the Crusaders against the Egyptian Muslims.8

On their return, though, the Byzantine delegates found that the citizens of Constantinople were dead set against this politically desirable reunion. Monks and priests in the capital protested; even Michael VIII’s sister Eulogia snapped, “Better that my brother’s empire should perish, than the purity of the Orthodox faith.”9

Michael VIII was trying to still the dissent—imprisoning, flogging, and banishing those who dared speak out against union with Rome—when Gregory X, traveling back towards the papal palace, grew ill. He died on the road, January 10, 1276. The next three popes elected by the cardinals all died within a year, unable to implement any meaningful policies of their own. All of Gregory X’s efforts at unity unraveled.10

So did his plans for crusade.

No Crusader force ever returned to the east. After a triumphant reign of nearly seventeen years, Baibars died. His powerful mamluk colleague Qalawun seized the throne of Egypt, driving Baibars’s sons into exile. In the decade and half after his accession in 1277, Qalawun’s empire crept steadily outwards. Tripoli fell to the armies of the Bahri Sultanate in April of 1289, bringing an end to the Principality of Antioch.

At the fall of Tripoli, Qalawun was nearly seventy; the following year, he died in Cairo, but his son al-Ashraf Khalil picked up both his crown and his sword. In April 1291, al-Ashraf Khalil led the Bahris in a final push against the last remaining fragment of the final Crusader kingdom: Acre, the sole remaining outpost of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

Al-Ashraf Khalil’s army, says Villani, was so huge that it “stretched over more than twelve miles.” The Egyptian forces surrounded the city, filled in the moats, and battered at the walls, but for some weeks the inhabitants of Acre, led by the Knights Templar, resisted—stopping up the holes in the walls first with stones, then with wood planks, and finally with sacks stuffed with wool and cotton. In the end, they could hold out no longer. The gates were broken down, and the Egyptians flooded in. “There were of slain, and prisoners, men, women and children, more than 60,000,” Villani writes, “and the loss of goods and booty was infinite. And . . . they broke down the walls and strongholds, and set fire to them, and destroyed all the city, whereby Christendom sustained very great hurt; for . . . there remained in the Holy Land no city pertaining to the Christians.”11

54.2 The Triumph of the Bahri Sultanate

*The thorniest issue was the western church’s insistence that the Holy Spirit “proceeded,” or issued, from both the Father and the Son. The east refused to use this formulation, known as the “Filioque clause.” Eastern believers thought that to speak of the procession of the Holy Spirit “from the Father and the Son” suggested that God the Father and Jesus Christ were separate beings in a way that violated the unity of the Trinity. However, the real quarrel between east and west was one of authority: whether pope or patriarch ultimately had the last word on which Christian beliefs were or were not orthodox. For more on the specific theological problems involved, see Jaroslay Pelikan, The Growth of Medieval Theology (600–1300) (University of Chicago Press, 1978), particularly chapter 5, “The One True Faith.” For the eleventh-century division of the Christian church into east and west, see “Schism,” in Bauer, The History of the Medieval World, pp. 584–595.

Chapter Fifty-Five

Kublai Khan

Between 1273 and 1294,

Kublai Khan conquers China,

tries to subdue Champa,

fails to conquer the Dai Viet and Japan,

and becomes the first Yuan emperor

THE GREAT KHAN had lost three-quarters of his empire, but the quarter that remained to him was vast: the Mongol homeland, with Karakorum at its heart and the enormous sweep of plateaus north and west; the land seized from the Western Xia and the Jin and from Goryeo; the entire north of the Song.

The rich fields in the Yangtze river valley, and the lands below it, were still unconquered.

Those southern lands, the last remaining to the Song, were still ruled by the emperor Song Duzong. Few men could have gracefully maintained a court, in the face of the relentless and frightening Mongol aggression; Song Duzong was not one of the few. He turned to wine and feasting, his harem of concubines, gambling and games to distract himself from the coming end.1

For five years, the Mongol armies had been laying siege to the double city of Xiangyang and Fancheng, on the northern and southern banks of the western Yangtze: the gate to the south. In the early years of the assault, the Song managed to resupply the cities by the river. But as time went on, the Mongol blockade strengthened; Song resupply ships could make it through only with massive casualties. Then, in March of 1272, a team of siege engineers arrived from the west, sent to Kublai Khan by his nephew Abaqa of the Il-khanate Mongols as a gesture of goodwill. Led by Ala al-Din of Mosul, they brought with them a new weapon: trebuchets that used counterweights, instead of brute pulling strength, to hurl unusually massive stones at the walls of Fancheng. The walls began to crumble. By early February of 1273, they were breached; the Mongols stormed in and executed over ten thousand of the city’s inhabitants, stacking the bodies up where the defenders in Xiangyang could see them. When the trebuchets began to systematically break down the walls of Xiangyang, the city’s commander surrendered. The river basin now lay in Kublai Khan’s hands; the gate was opened.2

Shortly after the seizure of Xiangyang, Kublai Khan issued a declaration of war to Duzong.

Since the time of Genghis Khan, we have communicated diplomatically with the Song . . . [asking for] a cessation of hostilities and respite for the people. . . . This could have provided a plan for all humanity. Yet [you] . . . continued to dispatch troops year after year. The dead and injured now pile up while prisoners and hostages grow. This all suggests that the Song has brought peril to its own people.3

The Mongols had, of course, been at war with the Song for four decades, and Kublai himself had already spent fourteen years trying to conquer the south. But the formal declaration of war signaled a shift. He was no longer the Great Khan of a vast rough-hewn nomadic empire, built by invasion; he was one king pointing out the faults of another. He was defending the legitimacy of his attack.

He had changed.

Already, he had begun to designate the years of his reign with a Chinese dynastic title. He had moved away from the Mongol capital Karakorum, and built himself dual capital cities in China, north and south, in imitation of his predecessors. The northern capital was his summer home; to the Mongols it was known as Shangdu, “Supreme Capital,” and it was a luxurious and settled king’s city. “In Xaindu did Cublai Can build a stately pallace,” an anonymous traveler had written, after touring Shangdu, “encompassing sixteene miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile meddowes, pleasant springs, delightfull streames, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the middest thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure, which may be removed from place to place.” Five hundred years later, the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge would fall into a drug-induced sleep while reading the traveler’s memoirs and dream of Shangdu; when he awoke he would write,

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man,

Down to a sunless sea.4

Kublai Khan’s second capital, two hundred miles to the south, was built right next to the burned remains of Zhongdu. He called this city Dadu, “Great Capital”; today, its ruins still survive in the northern suburbs of Beijing. The Venetian traveler Marco Polo, who visited Dadu sometime after 1270 and wrote of his journey some thirty years later, describes a minutely planned city: “perfectly square,” surrounded by white battlements, with arrow-straight streets and carefully laid-out allotments of land for each family and clan chief:

55.1 Kublai Khan.

Credit: The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY

In this manner the whole interior of the city is disposed in squares, so as to resemble a chess-board, and planned out with a degree of precision and beauty impossible to describe. The wall of the city has twelve gates, three on each side of the square . . . every gate being guarded by a thousand men.5

The security of the city reflected Kublai Khan’s strengthening grasp on the lands around him. He had reduced Goryeo to complete submission; the Crown Prince who had surrendered to Mongke in 1259 had passed the rule of Goryeo to his son Chungnyeol, and Kublai had forced the young man to accept the lesser title of king, rather than the traditional Goryeo title of emperor. He had also given Chungnyeol a Mongol princess for his wife. This was not as great a privilege as it might seem. Kublai Khan, says Marco Polo, had twenty-two sons by his four wives, twenty-five by his concubines (who numbered at least a hundred), and an untold number of daughters; he used them to tie his vassals close to him.6

In 1274, he suffered an unexpected failure. Past Goryeo lay the island of Japan, governed by the Kamakura shogunate in the hands of the shikken (“Regent of the Shogun”) Hojo Tokimune. Several years earlier, Kublai Khan had sent a curt demand for tribute and submission to the Kamakura shogun; Hojo Tokimune ignored the message, plus several follow-ups. With Goryeo firmly under his control, Kublai Khan now organized a two-fleet invasion force, one setting sail from the coast of China, the other from the southern shores of Goryeo, converging on Japan.7

The Mongols were not good on the water, but Kublai was able to press thousands of watermen and hundreds of ships from China and Goryeo into service; the entire force probably numbered just over twelve thousand men and perhaps three hundred vessels, a reconnaissance force rather than a full-blown invasion. The ships swept by the smaller outlying islands, dispatching their garrisons without too much difficulty, and on November 19 the fleet arrived at Hakata Bay, on the northern end of the island of Kyushu itself.8

Samurai warriors hastily assembled to fight off the invasion, but when the Goryeo contingent scented bad weather, they talked the Mongol commanders into withdrawing after a single day of fighting. Even so, the ships were caught by a storm on their way out of the bay, and perhaps a third of them were lost.

The armies on the Chinese mainland had better fortune. The war against the Song began to draw to an end. Kublai’s general Bayan led his armies along the Yangtze river; city after city fell to them; and by the end of 1275, they had reached the southern Song capital of Hangzhou.

By then, the emperor Duzong was dead; his five-year-old son had been aclaimed as the Emperor Gong, with the child’s mother as regent. In the face of the Mongol horde, she agreed to surrender the city. In January of 1276, the city’s gates were thrown open and the Mongols marched in. The boy emperor and his mother surrendered; Bayan treated them well and sent them to Shangdu, where Kublai Khan’s empress settled them into new quarters; Gong would live the rest of his life as a Buddhist monk in the north of China.9

Even then, Southern Song resistance did not end. The little boy had two brothers, both of whom were offered, by various partisan groups, as emperor in exile. The middle son, Duanzong, died not long after his acclamation. The youngest, six-year-old Bing, had been concealed in a Buddhist temple far to the south. Guarded by his mother (a younger concubine of Duzong), her father, and the mother of the dead Duanzong, Bing survived until 1279. Pursued by a Mongol detachment, his guardians finally dragged him with them into the sea, drowning the child as they committed suicide to avoid capture. His death brought a final end to the Southern Song; Kublai Khan’s dynasty, the Yuan,* now controlled China.10

Kublai had not forgotten about Japan.

Two years after the initial invasion, he had sent another embassy demanding surrender. The shikken Hojo Tokimune beheaded them and began to prepare for war. He summoned samurai from across western Japan to defend the coast. They built eight-foot stone walls along the beaches of Hakata Bay and other likely ports, to trap landing Mongol troops between the water and the fortifications; they assembled a special navy of small, very fast boats.

At the same time, Kublai Khan had recruited an admiral from the Song prisoners and begun construction of nine hundred new warships. Once again, the navy launched from both Goryeo and the southeastern Chinese coast; this time, 140,000 men on over four thousand ships sailed towards Japan in early June.11

The defending samurai were hugely outnumbered, but the stone walls temporarily halted the Mongol advance. The first men on the beach were stalled by the samurai defense, with the main bulk of the navy still anchored off Kyoto. The small Japanese ships launched constant quick strikes against them, keeping them on perpetual alert. Packed together, the soldiers on board began to suffer from an epidemic that killed thousands and weakened more.

For seven weeks, the samurai defenses held. And then, on August 15, a typhoon blew down on the Mongol fleet. For two full days, it battered the anchored ships. According to some accounts, 90 percent of the vessels sank. Nearly a hundred thousand more men were drowned. Thirty thousand soldiers, left stranded on the beach, were massacred.12

The great Buddhist monk Eison, who spent the invasion praying earnestly in the Otokoyama Shrine near Kyoto, chalked the storm up to divine intervention: it was a kamikaze, a divine wind sent to protect the island. Others were less certain. The philosopher Nichiren Shonin, a fierce critic of Japan’s government, snapped, “An autumn gale destroyed the enemy’s ships, and . . . the priests pretend that it was due to the efficacy of their mysteries. Ask them whether they took the head of the Mongol king?”13

Kublai Khan’s head was still firmly on his shoulders. He contemplated a third invasion, but he had lost too many of his Goryeo seamen; he decided instead to turn his attention back the mainland.

55.1 The Yuan Dynasty

SOUTH OF THE SONG, Champa and Khmer and the Dai Viet now lay exposed to the Mongol front.

The Khmer king, Jayavarman VIII, decided to act with prudence rather than valor; he sent Kublai Khan tribute and submitted as a vassal to buy peace. The king of Champa, Indravarman V, tried to chart a middle road. He sent an embassy to Kublai’s court to negotiate a treaty, hoping to both avoid war and subjection. Kublai chose to regard the embassy as a surrender, and at once appointed two Yuan vice-regents to rule Champa on his behalf.

When the Champa king refused to recognize their authority, the Khan sent a five-thousand-man invasion force around by sea to storm Champa’s coast. It arrived without difficulty at the capital city of Vijaya, but meanwhile Indravarman and his court had retreated to the mountains. From there, they carried on a forest guerrilla war that the Mongols could not easily resist. The damp unfamiliar heat, so far south from their native lands, did not help; sickness thinned their ranks. In the summer of 1285, a Cham ambush managed to wipe out almost all of the remaining invaders.14

Kublai Khan had no better luck in the land of the Dai Viet. Back in 1258, the Mongols had retreated from Dai Viet without capitalizing on their capture of Thang Long. In 1284, with the Champa expedition still underway, Kublai sent an even larger army under the command of one of his sons, Prince Toghan, by land through the north of the country. He won an initial victory and managed to establish a front close to the capital city, Thang Long. But once again the Mongols were stumped by a guerrilla army, this one led by the fervent nationalist Prince Tran Quoc Toan, cousin of the ruling emperor. Under his guidance, the Dai Viet soldiers tattooed “Death to the Mongols” on their arms and continued the grueling, inch-by-inch repulsion of the invading forces.

When the emperor asked him whether it might not be better to surrender and end the difficult and bloody war, Tran Quoc Toan is said to have answered, “Your Majesty, if you want to surrender, then cut off my head first, for while it remains on my shoulders the kingdom shall stand.” His dogged resistance paid off. In 1287, Prince Toghan was forced to return to his father for reinforcements. When he came back with a massive army of both men and river craft, Tran Quoc Toan lured him into a battle at the Bach Dang river, the site of the great Dai Viet defeat of the Song in 1076.

This time, the Dai Viet army had prepared by staking the bottom of the river with bronze spikes. When the tide began to run out, the Mongol river barges were caught. So many Mongols were slaughtered on the river that the water ran red.15

Prince Toghan fled. Tran Quoc Toan, the hero of the resistance, was later worshipped as divine, under his posthumous name, Tran Hung Dao.

BOTH JAPAN and the southeast remained unconquered when Kublai Khan died in 1294: the last Great Khan, the first emperor of the Yuan dynasty of China.

He had been born the grandson of a nomad, but he ended his life as one of the greatest emperors in the world. He kept a personal guard of twelve thousand horsemen; he could seat forty thousand of his subjects at a festival banquet and serve them all from gold and silver vessels; he could mount a hunt for his friends with ten thousand falconers and five thousand hunting dogs. He printed his own money, accepted by traders from Shangdu to Venice; he could send messages through a network of post offices and riders that webbed his entire kingdom. He welcomed to his court, says Marco Polo, “kings, generals, counts, astrologers, physicans, and many other officers and rulers” from all over the world.16

His grandson inherited his rule, not as Great Khan but as Emperor Chengzong of the Yuan dynasty. Kublai, the last Great Khan, had become the first Yuan Emperor.

But after decades of war with the Mongols, the population of the empire now ruled by the Yuan had shrunk by fifty million. Graves, heaps of corpses, and river-washed skeletons marked the Yuan dynasty’s birthplace.

*The Yuan dynasty, which lasted until 1368, is variously considered to have begun in 1263 (Kublai’s foundation of a new capital city), 1271, 1279 (the death of the last Song heir), and 1280.

Chapter Fifty-Six

The Sicilian Vespers

Between 1274 and 1288,

the parts of the Holy Roman Empire

go in different directions

RUDOLF OF HAPSBURG, now king of Germany, had been crowned in Aachen in some disorder. The ceremony was already underway when someone realized that the royal regalia, the scepter and crown of Frederick II, had disappeared sometime during the anarchy of the previous decade. Forced to improvise, Rudolf grabbed a nearby crucifix: “The symbol of our redemption secures us heaven,” he told the electors, “it will certainly confirm to us a parcel of earth.”1

The chaos of the ceremony was only a foretaste. Germany was wrecked. The treasury was empty, the countryside afflicted by roving bandits, the dukes engaged in private warfare. One of the most powerful electors, Ottocar II of Bohemia, was in open revolt. Since early in the century, the Dukes of Bohemia had been granted the right by the emperor to claim the title of king of Bohemia, a lesser monarch subject to the German throne; this had only confirmed their desire to push back against imperial demands on their loyalty. Summoned to an imperial diet in 1274 to do homage to his new overlord, the King of Bohemia refused to show up, and instead fortified his boundaries for war.

For the next four years, Rudolf was forced to defend himself against Ottocar’s intermittent attacks, while destroying the headquarters of robber bands, reestablishing the rule of law in Germany, and reorganizing a kingdom that had been left in shambles by its boy king and the challenger for the imperial throne. By 1278, he had managed to do all three. Ottocar had finally been killed, fighting his lord on the banks of the Danube. Rudolf had destroyed sixty castles occupied by bandits and private warlords; he had whipped the troublesome kingdom of Moravia into line; he had made a marriage alliance between Ottocar’s son Wenceslaus and his own daughter, and made another treaty with the king of Hungary. He had restored Frederick’s laws, and spent countless months traveling through Germany, visiting each local court. He took as his motto the Latin Melius bene imperare, quam imperium ampliare: Better to govern the empire well than to enlarge it.2

Meanwhile, Charles of Anjou was ruling his double kingdom of southern Italy and Sicily (“The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies”) with equally close attention to detail. In Charles’s case, though, the attention was paid to his own power.

In 1280, after the sudden death of the current pope (Nicholas III, who had lasted all of three years as pontiff), Charles meddled directly in the papal elections. He favored the election of the Franciscan Simon de Brion, a native of Tours. When the Italian cardinals objected to the election of another Frenchman, Charles imprisoned two of them. The rest, properly intimidated, elevated Brion to the papal seat. The new French pope, who took the name Martin IV, was so unpopular in Italy that he did not dare enter Rome; he had to be consecrated at Orvieto, north of Saint Peter’s city.

As supreme head of Christ’s church, Martin IV was ruled by two overwhelming considerations: how to find his next gourmet meal, and how to please Charles of Anjou. His greed was relatively harmless (although in the Divine Comedy, Dante’s narrator encounters Martin IV, in purgatory, still doing penance for his overindulgence in eels and rich Muscadel wine). His willingness to further Charles’s ambitions was less benign. He gave Charles the position of Senator of Rome, promoted pro-Anjou French priests into positions of power, and threw his complete agreement behind Charles’s newest scheme: to conquer Constantinople for himself.3

For this scheme, Charles had recruited two allies. The Doge of Venice, still smarting over the Genoese monopoly in Constantinople, agreed to send ships; the defeated Latin emperor Baldwin, who had taken refuge in Italy after fleeing from Michael VIII’s troops, hoped to regain his throne under Charles’s protection. In 1282, Charles was given the perfect opportunity to launch his war against Byzantium. Michael VIII, still attempting to whip his anti-union protesters into line, died; and his son Andronicus II, a staunch Orthodox believer, took the throne as second emperor of the restoration. He refused to let his father, traitor to the Byzantine church, be buried in consecrated ground; and he at once he revoked the Union of Lyons, which had brought the eastern and western churches together. At the news, bells rang all through Constantinople, and cheering crowds thronged the street.4

But before he could head towards Constantinople, Charles’s plans were disrupted by catastrophe at home.

Neither half of his kingdom, awkwardly united across the Strait of Messina only by his personal rule, was firmly pro-French. But in Sicily the simmering resentment against French rule, combined with hatred for Charles’s drastic policies of taxation, had become a rapidly rising boil. While Charles was plotting the capture of Constantinople, the Sicilian nobleman John of Procida and an alliance of anti-Anjou soldiers and officials had been secretly plotting revolt against him.

They had a powerful ally: the king of Aragon. James of Aragon, whose reign had begun in such disorder, had finally died in 1276, aged nearly seventy. His son, Peter III, inherited his throne; and Peter III was married to none other than the daughter of Manfred, killed by Charles of Anjou’s men at Benevento during the French takeover. This gave Peter an indirect but perfectly valid claim to the Sicilian throne. He agreed to join in the overthrow of Charles, in return for the crown of Sicily.

56.1 The Sicilian Vespers

Their chance came suddenly, in Easter week of 1282. Most of the conspirators were in Palermo for the holy services, when a French soldier insulted a Sicilian woman in the presence of her husband-to-be. “A Frenchman in his insolence laid hold of a woman of Palermo to do her villainy,” writes Villani. “She began to cry out, and the people being already sore, and all moved with indignation against the French . . . began to defend the woman, whence arose a great battle between the French and Sicilians.” The riot spread, with the Sicilians shouting, “Death to the French.” The headquarters of the royal government in Palermo were rapidly overrun. The conspirators, seizing their opportunity, carried the war across Sicily. “Each in his own city and country did the like,” Villani says, “slaying all the Frenchmen which were in the island.”5

Villani claims that over four thousand French soldiers and civilians fell in the massacre, which became known as the Sicilian Vespers. Charles of Anjou, in Italy when the revolt broke out, was forced to besiege his own capital city by sea. Peter of Aragon, who had been waiting for the signal, brought his own fleet across the Mediterranean and wiped out Charles’s ships. In the fighting, Charles’s oldest son and most trusted officer, the thirty-year-old Charles II (“Charles the Lame,” apparently nicknamed for a slight limp), was taken prisoner.

Peter then landed at Trapani. On August 30, 1282, he was proclaimed king of Sicily and Aragon at Palermo. The younger Charles was thrown into a Sicilian prison.6

Charles retreated back to Naples in a fury. Pope Martin IV obediently excommunicated Peter of Aragon and, for good measure, preached a crusade against both Aragon and Sicily. Philip III of France, son of the dead Louis and thus Charles of Anjou’s nephew, joined the fight against Peter of Aragon and the Sicilian rebels, bringing France and Aragon to open war. Charles even challenged Peter of Aragon to single combat for the kingdom, a plan that came to nothing when no neutral referee could be found to supervise the match (although Edward of England contemplated taking the job).

Three years of fighting ended, abruptly, when all of the players died within months of each other in 1285.

In January, Charles of Anjou—nearly sixty, after a lifetime of ambitious struggle, distraught over the continuing imprisonment of his son—died unexpectedly in Italy. He controlled nothing more than southern Italy, his capital at Naples; the only title he still could claim, king of Naples, now belonged to the son in chains.

As soon as news of his death reached them, the Venetians began peace talks with Andronicus II of Constantinople, aiming to get their trading quarters in the east back through negotiation rather than war.

With Charles dead, Pope Martin IV had no support. Afraid for his life, he fled from Rome to Perugia. He died there in March, still indulging in eels and wine. The cardinals elected an eighty-five-year-old Roman priest, Giacomo Savelli, in his place.

Philip III of France had marched through Languedoc into the eastern Aragonese territory known as Roussillon with an enormous army—over a hundred thousand foot soldiers, cavalry, and bowmen, supported by a hundred French ships offshore. But the Aragonese, joined by the people of Roussillon, put up a fierce resistance. The Aragonese admiral Roger of Lauria led a sea attack that dispersed the French fleet. Battling forward, the land forces began to suffer, once again, from dysentery. Philip III himself grew sick, just as he had outside Tunis, from the disease that had killed his father. Winter approached; cold rain soaked the troops.

Finally Philip decided to retreat back across the Pyrenees. But before he could lead his army to safety, an Aragonese army came up behind them and blew through the ill, footsore, exhausted French army from the rear. The assault, known as the Battle of the Col de Panissars, lasted for two days. When it was over, little more than the royal vanguard itself remained.

Philip himself made it no farther than Perpignan. On October 5, four days after his army had been slaughtered, he died there of dysentery.

A month later, Peter III of Aragon died of fever, aged forty-six. He left the crown of Aragon to his oldest son Alfonso III, the throne of Sicily to his second son James.

CHARLES OF ANJOU’S OLDEST SON, Charles the Lame, remained in prison in Sicily.

This was hardly ideal. Young James hoped to be a Christian monarch; keeping the rightful king of Naples, who also happened to be the first cousin of the king of France, in prison was not the act of a God-fearing king. Nor was it a good way to keep peace with France. But the liberation of Charles the Lame was a complicated and drawn-out process. Edward of England, serving as mediator, helped to hammer out the details (making up, perhaps, for his decision not to preside over the proposed duel between Charles of Anjou and Peter of Aragon). Charles the Lame would agree to a peace with Sicily and Aragon; he would pay fifty thousand marks of silver for the expenses of the war his father had started; and he would acknowledge that Sicily and southern Italy were now two separate kingdoms, the one ruled from Palermo, the other from Naples.7

Charles himself agreed to all of the conditions. But as soon as he had signed the treaties and returned home, he breached the conditions.

Ancient Giacomo Savelli, who had become Pope Honorius IV by unanimous election, had lasted only two years before dying. His successor, Nicholas IV, was a peace-inclined Franciscan. But his actions suggest that he was uneasy on the papal throne. In 1288, he agreed to release Charles the Lame from the entire elaborate, carefully worked-out treaty, in exchange for Charles’s acknowledgement of the final and supreme authority of the pope in Sicily and any other lands he might rule.

His stated reason was that no ruler should be forced to abide by conditions that were made in captivity; a not unreasonable position. But his nullification of the treaty began another war between Naples, Sicily, and Aragon. And this one would drag on for a full twenty-four years, folding itself around the turn of the century and lasting into a time of much greater catastrophe.

Chapter Fifty-Seven

The Wars of Edward I

Between 1275 and 1299,

Edward I of England claims Wales,

the Scots fight for independence,

and Philip IV of France

spends too much money on war

IN 1275, Edward of England—aged thirty-six, in the third year of his reign—marched west to conquer the Prince of Wales.

Unlike Scotland, Wales had never possessed a High King who could boast the allegiance of the whole country. Instead, it had rivaling princes who claimed to rule one or more of a handful of small kingdoms: Gwynedd and Powys, Dyfed and Deheubarth, Morgannwg and Ceredigion. This made Wales vulnerable to the English kings, should they choose to push west past Offa’s Dyke, the border between Powys and the English county of Mercia. In 1247, Edward’s father Henry III had done just that. He had taken the northern territory known as the Perfeddwlad away from the Kingdom of Gwynedd and had then granted the Perfeddwlad to Edward, the crown prince, as his own particular possession.1

At the time, the Kingdom of Gwynedd was temporarily leaderless; its prince had died without an heir, and his brother’s four sons were fighting over the principality. By 1255, the second brother, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, had managed to come out on top. But the victory gave him a shrunken Kingdom of Gwynedd. He wanted the Perfeddwlad back.

Within the year, he had driven the English out of the Perfeddwlad. And his ambitions then expanded even farther, into the rest of Wales. He spent twenty years fighting: against the English outposts in Wales; against his fellow Welsh princes, forcing them to swear allegiance to him in place of the English king. Henry III, entangled in his bid for Sicily and his disputes with the barons, could not hold on to his Welsh claims or halt Llywelyn’s advance. In 1267, five years before his death, Henry had been forced to recognize Llywelyn ap Gruffudd with a new title: Prince of Wales, the first Welsh ruler to claim anything more than local authority.*

Edward I intended to empty this title of its power and to reclaim the Perfeddwlad for himself. Three years after his accession, he ordered Llywelyn to travel to England and pay him homage. Llywelyn refused, and Edward prepared to march into Gwynedd.

It took him a year to raise an army and the needed funds, but a slew of English barons agreed to fight with him in exchange for gifts of conquered Welsh land. When fighting actually began, Llywelyn found the Welsh princes he had cajoled into submission melting away, happy to let the English king deal with their overbearing countryman. His own younger brother Dafydd, who had long hoped to get the lordship of Wales for himself, joined Edward’s side. Edward, personally leading the campaign, cut Llywelyn off by land and hemmed him in by sea.2

By November 1277, Llywelyn was forced to agree to a peace treaty, the Treaty of Conway, that took away from him everything but his original small northwest corner of Gwynedd. Edward handed out Welsh lands to his barons in reward, took the Perfeddwlad for the crown, and gave Dafydd the rule over a chunk of the Gwynedd principality that had once belonged to his brother.

In five years, this arrangement fell apart. The English barons, as overlords to their Welsh tenants, were both dismissive and demanding; the English sheriff appointed to supervise Welsh affairs, Reginald de Gray, was harsh, dragging up decade-old offenses for trial and threatening petitioners with the death penalty; Dafydd himself was forced to obey English law in his own lands. “All Christians have laws and customs in their own lands,” complained one Welsh nobleman. “Even the Jews in England have laws among the English; we had our immutable laws and customs in our lands, until the English took them away.”3

Just before Easter 1282, Dafydd rallied the Welsh princes behind him. The first act of war was the sudden attack on an English-held castle, Hawarden, on the Saturday night before Palm Sunday. Within a week, Llywelyn had joined his brother (the English were now a greater threat than his sibling’s ambitions), and almost the entire country was in revolt.4

This time, Edward brought more men. Fighting in the north of Wales, fighting in the south of Wales: in December, the balance was still tipping rapidly back and forth between the sides. But on December 11, Llywelyn was ambushed by a band of English soldiers at a bridge crossing over the river Irfron. “Llywelyn ap Gruffydd is dead,” wrote the commander of the ambush, in his report on the incident, “his army defeated, and all the flower of his army dead.”5

57.1 Wars in Scotland and Wales

In fact, Llywelyn had only a small detachment with him; but with Llywelyn’s fall, the Welsh resistance lost its heart. Dafydd immediately declared himself Llywelyn’s successor as Prince of Wales and carried on the fight, but in June of 1283 he was turned over to the English by a handful of his own companions.

The war had been expensive and vexing, and Edward authorized a new punishment for Dafydd. He was drawn, hung, and quartered, a barbaric punishment carried out on a still-living rebel: dragged through the streets of London behind a horse, as a traitor; hung as a thief; and then cut down when still alive, disemboweled and his intestines burned in front of his eyes, an ancient penalty for homicide. Finally, says the contemporary Chronicle of Lanercost, “his limbs were cut into four parts as the penalty of a rebel, and exposed in four of the ceremonial places in England as a spectacle.” His right arm went to York, his left to Bristol, his right leg to Northampton, his left to Hereford. His head, bound in iron to keep it from falling apart as it decayed, was stuck on a spear shaft at the Tower of London.6

Edward then took the title Prince of Wales for himself. The 1284 Statute of Rhuddlan formally added Wales to the English empire. Llywelyn became known as Llywelyn the Last; Wales would never again have an independent ruler.

WAR IN SCOTLAND and war with France followed, hand in hand.

Alexander III, king of the Scots since 1249, had made an alliance with Henry III by marrying his daughter Margaret, Edward I’s younger sister. But after the wedding, he had refused Henry III’s demands that he pay homage to the English king as his overlord.

For nearly four decades, Alexander III protected his kingdom’s independence. His beloved wife and all three of his children died before him, his children in a rapid span between 1281 and 1284. Desperate for an heir, he married again, a young Frenchwoman named Yoleta de Dru. He was riding back home from a council late one March night, anxious for another visit to her bedchamber, when he outstripped his squires, took a wrong turn, and rode his horse off a steep cliff. He had reigned in Scotland for thirty-six years and nine months.7

His sole surviving heir was his granddaughter Margaret, child of his dead daughter Margaret and her husband, the king of Norway. Margaret was only three years old, but the nobles of Scotland consented to recognize her as their queen. In hopes of bringing a lasting peace, they also agreed, in the Treaty of Birgham, to betroth her to Edward’s own son; this would create a personal union between the two kingdoms of England and Scotland, on condition that Scotland would always keep its independence.8

Margaret was brought to Scotland in style, but the arrangement all fell apart in 1290, when she died in the Orkney Islands, aged seven. With no more royal family left, there were no fewer than thirteen candidates for the Scottish throne. The front-runners were Robert Bruce the Fifth, the dead king’s second cousin, and John Balliol, a great-great-great-grandson of David I.

Robert Bruce had perhaps the best claim to the throne, and his son Robert Bruce the Sixth was well known to Edward; he had been on the Ninth Crusade with Edward and had helped the English campaign in Wales. But Robert the Fifth was already eighty years old, and Edward threw his weight behind John Balliol’s candidacy. Balliol, a landowner in his forties, had no training as a soldier; he was married to an Englishwoman, owned an English estate, and already owed money to the English crown.9

A gathering of 104 Scottish aristocrats duly chose Balliol. “He was raised to the kingly seat at Scone,” the Chronicle of Lanercost records, “with the applause of a multitude of people assembled, the King of England’s attorneys also taking part.” It was traditional for Scottish kings to be crowned at Scone Abbey, in the southeast of Scotland, while seated on the Stone of Scone: a chunk of sandstone said to have been brought to Scotland by the legendary first king of the Scots, Fergus, sixteen hundred years before.10

Having English officials help conduct the ceremony was definitely not traditional. But their presence was a sign of things to come.

Balliol agreed, shortly after his coronation, to do homage to Edward as his feudal lord. It was not a popular act; Edward immediately showed himself far too willing to meddle in Scottish affairs, and Balliol was unwilling to defy him. But for two years, the two men maintained an uneasy peace—until Edward and Philip of France fell out, giving the Scots a chance to rid themselves of their overbearing master to the south.

THE DEATH of Philip the Bold in France, after his ill-considered campaign in Aragon, left his seventeen-year-old son Philip IV on the throne. A year before his accession, the boy had been married off to Queen Joan of Navarre, aged ten; this had brought Navarre and France together under one royal couple.

Philip hero-worshipped his dead grandfather Louis, and hoped to model himself after Philip Augustus, his great-grandfather: both of them, kings with a high view of their divine calling as ruler. In the young Philip, this took the form of a great need to exert his authority over the independent-minded dukes who still held much of his kingdom. And the most independent-minded of these was Edward I, who was Duke of Aquitaine as well as king of England; Aquitaine, the home of Eleanor, wife of Henry II and mother of both Richard Lionheart and John Lackland, still remained under English control.

Philip was thus, theoretically, the feudal lord of Edward—just as Edward was the feudal lord of John Balliol. In 1294, the French king ordered Edward to appear at the French royal court in order to answer for the behavior of Norman sailors who had taken part in a brawl with French ships just off the coast.

When Edward ignored the summons, Philip confiscated Aquitaine as punishment. Edward immediately began to round up allies on the continent. The Duke of Brittany and the Count of Flanders, both hoping to reduce Philip IV’s power, agreed to fight with him. He also sent an imperious message to John Balliol, ordering him to send Scottish troops as part of his feudal responsibility to his overlord.

Balliol sent back a meek reply, promising the soldiers; but at this, the aristocrats who had chosen him took the country out of his hands. Twelve of them formed a council to govern the country, and “it was decreed,” says the Chronicle of Lanercost, “that the king could do no act by himself.” Balliol was now no more than a figurehead, earning himself the contemptuous nickname of Toom Tabard, “Empty Suit.”

On behalf of the country, the Twelve Peers sent to Philip IV, offering to make a treaty with the French against the English. The Treaty of Paris, concluded in 1295, promised alliance with the French throne and hostility to the English. It also began decades of war between Scotland and England: to the English, the Scottish Wars; to the Scots, the Wars of Independence.11

Now Edward was faced with the necessity of fighting in both France and Scotland; in France, as a disobedient vassal; in Scotland, as the overlord of a disobedient vassal. Leaving the French war in the hands of his generals, he personally led an army towards the Scottish city of Berwick. At the same time, he sent a navy to assault Balliol by sea. He put Robert Bruce the Sixth, whom he trusted, in charge of the northern fortress Carlisle Castle, on the Scottish border: a key position not far from Hadrian’s Wall.

The English army made short work of Berwick. “The town [was] taken,” writes the Scottish chronicler John of Fordun, “and all were swept down; and, sparing neither sex nor age, the aforesaid king of England, in his tyrannous rage, bade them put to the sword 7500 souls of both sexes; so that, for two days, streams flowed from the bodies of the slain.”12

The Scottish defenders were driven steadily back into the north. One by one the castles of Scotland fell: Dunbar, Edinburgh, Stirling. At Montrose, Balliol gave up. He surrendered, coming out of the castle without his royal robes, waving a white wand.

Edward took him prisoner and declared victory over Scotland. On his way back to England, he detoured through Scone Abbey and seized the Stone of Scone. Balliol he imprisoned in the Tower of London; the Stone of Scone he set on the royal coronation seat of England, so that future English kings would be crowned kings of Scotland as well. He left vice-regents and English sheriffs to administer Scotland in his name. Scotland, he assumed, was his; just like Wales.

But unlike Wales, Scotland was accustomed to unifying itself behind a single strong leader.

The Twelve Peers had not given up. “They built castles,” says John of Fordun, “repaired those which were in ruins, set trusty garrisons in the strongest positions, and made ready to withstand bravely the lawless usupation of that most wicked king of England.” But none of the Twelve Peers emerged as the leader of Scottish rebellion. That role fell to the energetic second son of a minor landholder: William Wallace, aged twenty-five, six foot six and a hater of the English.

Wallace had already been declared an outlaw for taking private revenge on overbearing English soldiers. He had collected a band of freedom fighters (to the Scots) and brigands (in English eyes) who roved through Scotland with him, launching attacks on English garrisons and plundering English-held castles. According to an account written over 150 years later by an obscure poet known as Blind Harry, his fame was growing: “With a run of conquests he had slain / His foes, and all their cities storm’d and ta’en.”13

Since Edward did not send an army in response, Wallace’s attacks were probably on a much smaller scale. But in 1297 William Wallace precipitated open war.

Blind Harry says that he had fallen in love with Marion of Lanark, the beautiful young daughter of a local landowner. Since Lanark was the seat of a powerful English sheriff, the outlaw Wallace was forced to marry his beloved in secret. Caught visiting her, he fought his way out of Lanark, killing a good number of English soldiers on the way. The sheriff, Sir William Heselrig, put Marion to death in retaliation. Maddened by grief, Wallace came back to Lanark, broke into Heselrig’s castle at night, and dismembered the sheriff as he slept.14

Marion’s existence cannot be traced, but Wallace and his men certainly did attack and kill the English sheriff, as the first act in a coordinated uprising all across the country under Wallace’s leadership. “William Wallace lifted up his head from his den,” says the more sober account of John of Fordun, “and . . . there flocked to him all who were in bitterness of spirit and weighed down beneath the burden of bondage under the unbearable domination of English despotism. . . . So Wallace overthrew the English on all sides.”15

Now Edward took notice. He sent a “large force to repress this William’s boldness.” Wallace, advancing towards the enemy, met them at Stirling Bridge, over the Forth. On September 11, 1297, his army wiped out the English and killed their general. A thirty-two-year struggle, the First War of Scottish Independence, had formally begun.

MEANWHILE, THE ENGLISH were fighting the French in Aquitaine, and the war was more expensive than Philip IV had anticipated.

He had already declared special taxes on Jews and imposed a highly unpopular tax on the French church. In 1298, he devalued the French currency for the first time: seized it, melted it, and then reissued it with the same value but less silver in it, producing more coins with the same amount of precious metals. This backfired; the coins were immediately viewed as worth less, and inflation set in.16

Poorer than when the fight began, Philip IV agreed in 1299 to negotiate a peace with Edward I. To seal the deal, he approved the marriage of his sister Marguerite to the sixty-year-old Edward (Edward’s first and much-loved wife, Eleanor of Castile, had died in 1290). Philip IV was half Edward’s age, Marguerite only twenty. At the same time, Philip betrothed his five-year-old daughter Isabella to Edward’s fifteen-year-old son, the future Edward II of England.

In exchange for peace, he agreed to give no further aid to the Scots. Wallace and his rebels were isolated on their island, and Edward could now turn his full attention their way.

*The arrangement also involved Llywelyn’s promise to pay an annual tribute of three thousand marks to England, a deal that he kept only through 1270.

Chapter Fifty-Eight

The Second Sultanate of Delhi

Between 1287 and 1300,

the Khilji dynasty seizes the throne of Delhi,

and Sultan ‘Ala’-ud-Din drives back the Mongols

EARLY IN 1287, the Sultan of Delhi died. Balban was eighty years old; he had dominated Delhi for half his lifetime and spent twenty years as the crowned sultan, the right hand of God.

His favorite son had died before him, and he had a low opinion of his second son Bughra Khan, safely off governing the eastern Ganges delta territories known as Bengal. But he had raised his grandsons at court. On his deathbed, he ordered the crown passed to the younger child, son of the dead prince. Instead, his court officials placed the older grandchild, Bughra Khan’s seventeen-year-old son Mu’izzu-d din, on the throne.

Immediately, Delhi veered off course. “From the day that Balban, the father of his people, died,” writes Ziauddin Barani, “all security of life and property was lost, and no one had any confidence in the stability of the kingdom. . . . [T]he chiefs and nobles quarreled with each other; many were killed upon suspicion and doubt.”

The four years of Mu’izzu-d din’s reign were, effectively, an interregnum; no one was in charge. The boy was sweet-natured and kind, says Barani, but he had been raised with intense strictness, always under the careful eye of tutors, guards, and instructors, given no freedoms and no pleasures. When he suddenly became sultan, he reacted like any sheltered teenager suddenly given wings: “all that he had read, and heard, and learned, he immediately forgot . . . and he plunged at once into pleasure and dissipation of every kind.” While the chiefs and nobles fought over power, Mu’izzu-d din built an enormous palace and garden for himself, invited his friends to move in, and spent all of his time at parties.1

Balban’s younger son Bughra Khan, governing in Bengal, immediately abandoned allegiance to his son and named himself Sultan of Gaur, an independent ruler. Various other courtiers “sharpened their teeth in pursuit of ambition” as well. One of these, the Chief Justice Nizamu-d din, figured out how to get Mu’izzu-d din to eliminate his rivals; he would present himself before the young sultan when he was drunk, and get from him permission to kill anyone he pleased. Mu’izzu-d din’s toddler cousin was one of his first victims. Many more followed, until Nizamu-d din’s reign of terror became unbearable. A court official, playing the Chief Justice’s own game, convinced the intoxicated Sultan to authorize Nizamu-d din’s murder, and then put poison in his wine.2

Nizamu-d din had been ruthless, but he had also been effective, and without him the government descended again into chaos. Hastily, the sultan summoned one of his grandfather’s favored slaves, Jalalu-d din Firu Khilji, from his post as governor of the northern city of Samana and gave him the job of administering palace affairs.

Jalalu-d din proved to be just as efficient and ambitious as his predecessor. Before long, the young sultan was struck by a mysterious paralyzing illness. Jalalu-d din presided over the enthronement of the boy’s infant son as the next sultan, took the job of regent, and then with the help of his sons, kidnapped the baby. In 1289 he declared himself sultan in the child’s place. (Barani doesn’t tell us what happened to the baby, who conveniently disappeared.)

This brought an end to the mamluk dynasty of Balban and inaugurated a new dynasty, that of the Khilji. Jalalu-d din was Turkish by descent, but the Khilji had been Indianized over several generations, and the Turks of Delhi at first resisted his rule. He was forced to establish his headquarters at Kilu-ghari, a few miles from Delhi, and for the first two years did not even try to enter the capital city. Instead, he governed from Kilu-ghari, distributed alms, recruited a sizable army, and then finally sent his sons ahead of him to clear opposition out of Delhi before his arrival.

His sultanate turned out to be a short one. More than seventy when he became sultan, Jalalu-d din was still energetic and sharpwitted, careful of his power but not paranoid. When a treasonous plot was uncovered in his palace, he burned the traitors alive and had their leader crushed by an elephant. But when he received reports that a group of drunken nobles had spoken, “in their cups,” about killing him, he simply remarked, “Men often drink too much, and then say foolish things. Don’t report drunken stories to me.”3

But he was moving towards eighty; he was disinclined to fight; and the throne was not his with any kind of legitimacy. When the inevitable end came, it was from within his own house.

His chief general was his nephew ‘Ala’-ud-Din; Jalalu-d din had brought the boy up in his own house and had married a daughter to him. He trusted ‘Ala’-ud-Din without question. He had given the young man the governorship of Kara, a well-to-do town not far west of Allahabad, and had allowed him to keep a good part of the booty and treasure from various raids down into the Hindu kingdoms of the Deccan, the dry lands south of the Narmada river. Unknown to his uncle, ‘Ala’-ud-din had been stockpiling this wealth and delaying passing on the sultan’s part of it, in hopes of raising and equipping an army of his own: “Through Kara,” says Barani, “he hoped to obtain Delhi itself.”4

Warned by his advisors that ‘Ala’-ud-Din might be planning a coup, the sultan refused to listen. “What have I done to ‘Ala’-ud-Din that he should turn away from me?” he said. As his nephew arrived back from one of these raids, carried out against the rich southern city of Devagiri, the sultan went out to meet his uncle with just a few men in attendance. ‘Ala’-ud-Din knelt down in front of him to pay homage, and the sultan gave him a welcoming kiss and took him by the hand. But ‘Ala’-ud-Din had ordered his men to use this gesture of affection as a signal to attack. One of them drew his sword and wounded the sultan; as the old man tried to run back towards his attendants, a second one beheaded him. His men were cut down as well.

‘Ala’-ud-Din marched into Delhi with his private army and claimed the throne. He distributed offices and gold to all his supporters: the gifts, and the honors, earned him security. “People were so deluded by the gold which they received,” Barani writes, “that no one ever mentioned the horrible crime which the Sultan had committed, and the hope of gain left them no care for anything else.”5

His uncle’s head was placed on a spear and paraded in front of him, into Delhi. And like his pitiless counterpart in Constantinople, ‘Ala’-ud-Din ordered his cousin, Jalalu-d din’s oldest son, blinded to disqualify him from ever laying claim to the throne.6

‘ALA’-UD-DIN had barely finished his first year as sultan when the Mongols came over the mountains.

Mongol invasions into India had been carried on, for decades, by raiding parties from both the Il-khanate and Chagatai lands. Neither khanate had made any real effort to conquer Indian lands; they were too busy fighting each other.

The Il-khanate was now in the hands of Ghazan, the great-grandson of the Il-khanate founder Hulagu. Following the great Mongol tradition, Hulagu’s son and successor Abaqa had drunk himself to death in 1282; his two sons seized and lost the leadership of the Il-khanate, in quick sequence, and in 1295, Ghazan, a competent hardened soldier of twenty-four, had become khan. Like his grandfather, he was an enemy of the Egyptian sultanate and the Golden Horde khanate north of the Black Sea; he allied himself with Christian interests, made overtures of friendship to Andronicus II of Constantinople, and kept up a friendship with the distant Chinese khanate of Kublai.7

58.1 The Mongol Invasion of Delhi

The Chagatai khanate, now in the hands of Chagatai’s great-grandson Duwa, was friendly with the Golden Horde khan but hostile to Kublai’s rule, and firmly opposed to the Il-khanate—particularly when the Il-khanate soldiers made ventures eastward. Bloody fighting over the right to claim Khurasan had kept the two khanates focused on each other instead of on the lands to the south. But the internal struggle for the Il-khanate throne after Hulagu’s death had given the Chagatai armies an edge, and right before Ghazan’s khanship began, Chagatai soldiers had finally driven the Il-khanates out.8

Now Duwa had a base from which he could do more than raid north Indian lands; he could actually plan a conquest.

In the second year of ‘Ala’-ud-Din’s reign, the Mongols crossed through the mountains and came into the north. The sultan sent his brother Ulugh and his close friend Zafar at the head of a large Delhi army to meet them. At Jalandhar, the Delhi army won an easy victory over the Mongols: “Many were slain or taken prisoners,” says Barani, “and many heads were sent to Delhi. The victory . . . greatly strengthened the authority of ‘Alau-d din.”9

In the flush of victory, the sultan sent an invasion force of his own westward, against the Hindu state of Gujarat. It fell easily and was folded into the Delhi sultanate. Among the prisoners taken captive was a eunuch named Malik Kafur; when ‘Ala’-ud-Din saw him, he was “captivated” by the slave’s beauty. From that time on, Malik Kafur was his constant companion.10

He intended to keep up the war against the Hindu states, but the Mongols now returned. Having tested the enemy’s strength, the Chagatai khan Duwa was ready to embark on a full-scale conquest. In 1299, he sent a force magnitudes larger than that of the 1296 invasion—two hundred thousand horsemen, according to contemporary reports—under the command of his son. Instead of raiding and fighting against border fortresses, this army ignored every target between the mountains and Delhi, and made straight for the capital city.11

Panic swept across the north. Villagers in the Mongol path abandoned their houses and farms and fled to Delhi, only to find that the city was in poor shape to receive them.

The old fortifications had not been kept in repair, and terror prevailed, such as never before had been seen or heard of. All men, great and small, were in dismay. Such a concourse had crowded into the city that the streets and markets and mosques could not contain them. Everything became very dear. The roads were stopped against caravans and merchants, and distress fell upon the people.12

‘Ala’-ud-Din summoned governors and their armies from all over his sultanate to report to Delhi for its defense. But, given the state of the city and the panic inside its gates, he ignored the advice of his councillors to prepare for siege and marched out of Delhi, towards a pitched battle on open ground.

The battle lines between the two massive armies stretched on for miles. ‘Ala’-ud-Din himself commanded the central units, with his brother in charge of the left wing, and his friend and general Zafar on the right. His own troops, equipped with hundreds of elephants, broke the Mongol line in front of him; Zafar’s wing also drove back the enemy, but in chasing them down, Zafar lost two horses from beneath him and finally was killed. After nearly a full day of fighting, the Mongols began to retreat. They made their way back to the Khyber Pass, losing more men to illness and exhaustion along the way. Duwa’s son himself died on the forced journey.

‘Ala’-ud-Din made his way back to Delhi in a state of triumph so ecstatic that, once back, he announced his intention of founding a new religion. (“My sword . . . will bring all men to adopt it,” he told his courtiers. “Through this religion, my name and that of my friends will remain among men to the last day, like the names of the Prophet and his friends.”) He named himself “The Second Alexander” and had this title embossed on his coins, announcing his intentions to go out like Alexander the Great and conquer the known world.13

The threat of the Mongol return had convinced the sultan that Delhi needed a huge standing army. One of his chroniclers notes that he built his forces until he had a standing cavalry of 475,000 horsemen. Unlike many kings at the turn of the century, he paid regular salaries to his soldiers; so that they could live comfortably on the salaries, he introduced fixed prices into the markets of Delhi, setting state-controlled limits on the costs of grain, fruit, sugar, oil, even shoes and coats. Merchants who were caught price gouging were arrested; if convicted, they were punished with the removal of flesh equal to the weight of the falsely priced goods sold.

To funnel money towards defense, ‘Ala’-ud-Din also restricted the ability of his noblemen to live luxuriously; anyone who wanted to throw a huge party or indulge in a major purchase had to get permission from the Market Controller, a new office introduced into Delhi’s government by the sultan. He repaired all of the frontier forts, garrisoned them with well-trained regiments, and branded the military’s horses to prevent theft or unauthorized sale. He put into place an espionage system to warn him of Mongol movements and unprepared fortress commanders, of discontented soldiers and possible revolt. By the century’s turn, the Mongol threat had helped to turn the sultanate of Delhi into one of the most efficient, tightly controlled, and aggressive empires in the world.14

Chapter Fifty-Nine

The End of the Papal Monarchy

Between 1301 and 1317,

Boniface VIII destroys the Templars,

infuriates the king of France,

and takes the papacy into exile

AS THE CENTURY TURNED, Pope Boniface VIII made a massive effort to restore the old power of the papacy; the power it had held back in the days of Innocent IV, more than half a century before.

But fifty years down the road, it was now apparent that Innocent had unintentionally put an expiration date on the power of Saint Peter’s heir. He had excommunicated Frederick II, authorized civil war in the Holy Roman Empire, and helped to split Germany, Sicily, and Italy apart; and in doing so, he had deprived the papacy of its strongest potential ally, a Holy Roman Emperor with the power to protect the Church’s interest across all three lands.

Now there was no Holy Roman Emperor at all. Sicily was controlled by James of Aragon; southern Italy, the “Kingdom of Naples,” by Charles the Lame, son of Charles of Anjou; Germany, by Rudolf of Hapsburg’s son Albert. Louis IX’s throne was occupied by Philip IV, nicknamed “Philip the Fair” for his good looks; he was much less well-disposed towards the privileges of the Church than his pious grandfather.

And the northern Italian cities were caught in a massive and complicated power struggle between two rival political parties.

These factions, known as Guelph and Ghibelline, had started out in the twelfth century, as supporters to two rival candidates for the Holy Roman Emperorship: Conrad of Hohenstaufen (the Ghibellines) and Henry the Lion (the Guelphs). The Hohenstaufens had successfully snagged the title, meaning that the family’s Ghibelline loyalists in Italy were now ardent supporters of the empire’s power over those perpetually rebellious Lombard lands.

A hundred years later, the Ghibelline and Guelph parties had lost most of their pro- and anti-empire leanings. But they still existed as hostile factions, with members of each struggling for control of Italian cities north of the Papal States. By this point, those struggles had lost any identification with the fate of the empire: they were struggles for control over ports, trading privileges, tax breaks. Like any political party that survives for more than a century and a half, the Guelphs and the Ghibellines had taken on a culture and life of their own, divorced from their original purpose.1

Boniface VIII now had to negotiate with all of the complicated and opposing powers that surrounded him: a much more difficult and precarious task than his predecessors had faced in dealing with their Holy Roman Emperors.

In northern Italy, he decided to ally himself with the Guelphs. A vicious and ongoing fight between Guelph and Ghibelline families (the Cancellieri and the Panciatichi) had devolved into an even bloodier fight within the Guelphs themselves. Two branches of the Cancellieri, the Bianchi and the Neri (the “White Guelphs” and the “Black Guelphs”) were carrying on a vigorous private warfare. Unable to persuade the two clans to make peace, Boniface VIII invited Philip IV’s younger brother, Charles of Valois, to come into Italy and settle the fight.

Charles had crossed into northern Italy just before the turn of the century; motivated, says Giovanni Villani, “in the hope of being Emperor, because of the promises of the Pope.” His army was now headquartered at Florence, which was suffering greatly from the White and Black rivalry. He negotiated an alliance with the Neri, the Black Guelphs; and in November of 1301, with papal approval, Charles of Valois and his soldiers helped the Neri launch a feud-ending attack on their enemies in Florence, both White Guelph and Ghibelline. Six days of sacking and burning, looting of shops, and the murder of White partisans followed. The great Florentine poet Dante Alighieri, himself a White loyalist, lost his house and his possessions and was forced to flee from the city; the rest of his life was spent in exile, which accounts for his sour assessment of Charles in the Divine Comedy (“Not land, but sin and infamy, / Shall [he] gain”).2

Charles mismanaged the Florentine purge, which rapidly became much bloodier than Boniface had intended. In disgrace with his brother Philip, and running short on money, he was forced to return to France shortly after. But he had done Boniface’s bidding, and for a time the warfare in northern Italy lessened.

Meanwhile, Boniface dealt with Philip IV on a different front. Philip the Fair had already imposed taxes on the French church in order to help pay for his ongoing wars; he had made an uneasy peace with Edward of England, but he had continued to fight against the Count of Flanders. This was expensive, so Philip refused to hear Boniface’s complaints about the ecclesiastical taxes. He also insisted on his right to try clergymen in royal courts and to control the appointments of French priests to empty cathedral posts: all of the old issues between kings and pope, still alive and present.

In December of 1301, Boniface sent the king a papal letter reasserting the arguments of his powerful forerunners, all the way back to Gregory the Great. Ausculta fili, it began: “Listen, son . . .”

God has set us over kings and kingdoms. . . . [L]et no one persuade you that you have no superior or that you are not subject to the head of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. . . . Our predecessors deposed three kings of France . . . and although we are not worthy to tread in the footsteps of our predecessors, if the king committed the same crimes as they committed or greater ones, we would depose him like a servant with grief and great sorrow.

Philip IV read the letter, and then set it on fire.3

This set him on the high road to excommunication; to guard himself against the inevitable public backlash that would follow, Philip did his best to rally his people behind him. In April of 1302, he summoned to Paris the two most powerful bodies of men in the country: the dukes who ruled the great counties of France, and the leading French churchmen. To these he added, for the first time, a third group: the “deputies of the good towns,” the mayors, prominent citizens, and wealthy merchants of the largest cities. All three assemblies agreed with him; Boniface was in the wrong, and Philip’s defiance was entirely justified.4

At the same time, he was struggling in Flanders. On July 11, 1302, a large French army commanded by the distinguished Robert of Artois faced down a force of Flemish foot soldiers, and was horribly defeated near Courtrai. The battlefield, crisscrossed with ditches dug by the Flemish, tripped up the French cavalry; the horses became entangled, falling into the water-filled trenches and throwing their riders, and the Flemish infantry systematically advanced through them, finishing off both men and horses. “Kill all that has spurs on!” their commander, Guy de Namur, called out; and within three hours, the “flower of French chivalry,” an entire army of elite French knights, had been slaughtered. Robert of Artois died among them. Afterwards, the peasants of Flanders scoured the battlefield, taking the golden spurs from the bodies of all of the aristocrats. More than five hundred pairs were hung as trophies in the nearby Church of Our Lady, at Courtrai.5

In the fall of that same year, another letter arrived from Boniface, even more threatening than the previous one. “If therefore the temporal power errs, it must be judged by the spiritual,” Boniface wrote, “. . . but if the supreme spiritual power commit faults, it can be judged by God alone, and not by any man.” He could condemn Philip, but Philip was powerless to retaliate.6

Philip was in no mood to hear it. When Boniface finally excommunicated him, in the fall of 1303, he sent Guillaume de Nogaret, his own Keeper of the Seal, to head up a sneak attack on the pope at Anagni. They broke into the pontiff’s residence at night on September 7, twelve hours before Boniface was due to issue a bull of deposition that would remove Philip from the French throne, and took the pope away to a nearby castle.7

They probably intended to force him into lifting the deposition, but three days later Boniface VIII was rescued by a small band of friends from Rome and taken to the Vatican. He died there a month later at sixty-eight years old, worn out by stress and fury.8

With him the old ideal of the papal monarchy—of the pope as spiritual king, over and above Church law—died too. Boniface had tried to corral the power that had once belonged to the empire, and had failed. His successor, Benedict XI, ruled for a matter of months; a yearlong argument between the French and the Italian cardinals followed, while the papal seat sat empty.

Things were looking up for Philip, who now won several victories in a row in Flanders. In the spring of 1305 he was able to force the Flemish to submit, on punitive terms. Victorious over Flanders, victorious over the pope, he now explained to the cardinals that his first choice for Benedict’s successor was the French archbishop of Bordeaux, Bertrand.

Bertrand was duly elected on June 5, 1305. Crowned at Lyons as Pope Clement V, he took up residence not in Rome but at Avignon: technically under the control of Charles the Lame, but essentially under French control. For the next seventy years, the papacy would remain out of Rome, in French hands: the “Babylonian Captivity” of the papacy. In thanks for Philip’s support, the new pope revoked his excommunication and promised the French king a tithe of all the Church’s income.9

Philip the Fair collected his tithe and continued to raise money to pay off his war debts, with no further objections from the papacy. In 1306, he exiled all of the Jews from France so that he could confiscate their property. The following year, he made a move against the Knights Templar, the richest military order in Europe.

Until now, the Templars had been answerable only to the pope. But Clement V, Philip’s lapdog, quickly agreed to remove his protection. As soon as he did so, Philip issued a letter ordering the arrest of the Templars throughout France, on charges that the Templars indulged in all sorts of secret and occultish acts of demon worship. They were to be treated as heretics: “You will hold them captive to appear before an ecclesiastical court,” he wrote, to the chief inquisitor of Paris; “you will seize their movable and immovable goods and hold the seizures under strict supervision in our name.”10

This included a vast amount of treasure, held in the Templar fortress right outside the walls of Paris. The inquisitor duly sent out his agents, and all through France the Templars were suddenly arrested and imprisoned. Among them was Jacques de Molay, the sixty-year-old Grand Master of the order. Imprisoned, starved, and threatened with torture, de Molay confessed that, yes, when he had joined the Templars forty-two years earlier, he had been required to spit on a cross and deny the divinity of Christ; which he had done, but “not with his heart.”11

59.1 The Papal Palace at Avignon.

Credit: Photo by author

He then recanted this, but the damage was done. Wielding the Grand Master’s confession, interrogators convinced other Templars to confess to a whole range of blasphemous and idol-worshipping rituals, including black magic and ritual acts of sodomy. In 1310, Philip IV ordered fifty-four Templars burned at the stake outside the walls of Paris; on March 24, 1312, Clement V officially abolished the Templars, with “bitterness and sadness of heart . . . by an irrevocable and perpetually valid decree.” In 1314, the elderly Grand Master was removed from his prison cell and burned to death on a tiny island in the middle of the Seine.12

Meanwhile, Clement V continued his policy of royal appeasement.

In 1308, Albert of Germany had been assassinated; in his place, the German electors chose Henry of Luxembourg as King Henry VII of Germany. Henry wanted to become the next Holy Roman Emperor; Clement V did not dare enter Rome, but he agreed to send cardinals who would crown Henry there.

Henry made a long journey south, crossing into Italy in the fall of 1310. There he was welcomed by the Ghibellines. The Guelphs, who had the upper hand in Florence thanks to Charles of Valois’s support of the Neri, encouraged other Guelphs throughout northern Italy to hinder Henry’s approach. “The Florentines, the Bolognese, the Lucchese, the Sienese, the Pistoians, and they of Volterra, and all the other Guelf cities . . . held a parliament,” Villani writes, “and concluded a league together, and a union of knights, and swore together to defend one another and oppose the Emperor.”13

59.1 The Empire, Divided

Henry, hoping to get the entire territory of the old empire back under his thumb, spent most of the summer of 1311 laying siege to the rebellious city of Brescia. In September, the city finally surrendered. Genoa, ambivalent about emperors, agreed without much conviction to give Henry a twenty-year oath of loyalty; Pisa, historically pro-emperor, declared itself on his side, offered him six hundred bowmen, and provided him with transport down the coast to Rome on thirty Pisan ships.

Henry decided that this was victory enough for the moment, and headed for his coronation. But the Romans, not happy to see him, shut the gates against him. Stalled on the outside, Henry was finally forced to go to the church of St. John Lateran, beyond the city’s limits, for his coronation. As soon as the ceremony was finished—June 29, 1312—he started back up north. He intended to bring Florence, the center of the resistance, to its knees.14

He laid siege to Florence in September. But the city held out with ease, and by January Henry had decided to take a temporary break from the attack. He went instead to Pisa, where he allowed his army to rest, and sent to Germany for reinforcements.

The new regiments did not arrive until July, by which point Henry had grown more and more severely ill with a malarial fever that had tormented him since the previous fall. He died on August 24, 1313, having spent all but a few months of his reign outside of Germany.15

The German electors gathered, to the north, and immediately split into two camps. They named two kings simultaneously, Louis of Bavaria and Frederick of Austria. Immediately, civil war began; the two men were equal in supporters, in land, and in armies, and the civil war went on for a full decade.

Wary of Philip IV, deprived of German support, Clement now made overtures to the sole remaining strong power in Italy: the King of Naples. Charles the Lame had died in 1309, four years before, and his son Robert had succeeded him as king of southern Italy. Clement offered Robert the position Vicar of Italy, which meant vice-regent of the north, theoretically under papal authority. This was good for Robert, since it doubled the size of his kingdom; it was also good for Clement, since Robert directly owed him loyalty for the land.16

It was the last decision Clement made. He died on April 20, 1314, fifty years old, suffering from an illness that left ulcers all over his legs. His body was taken to Uzeste, where he had asked to be buried. While it was lying in state, says the Italian chronicler Agnolo di Tura, a fire burst out and burned the bottom half of the corpse, either a very bad stroke of luck or a folktale ending to the pope whose catastrophic rule had destroyed the Templars and taken the papacy into exile.17

Seven months later, the forty-six-year-old king of France was boar hunting on horseback in Fontainebleau forest when his horse fell, injuring him so badly that he died a few days later. His son Louis, who had already inherited the crown of Navarre from his mother Queen Joan at her death in 1305, now became king of France as well.

He ruled as king of France and Navarre for only eighteen months before dying unexpectedly at the age of twenty-seven. His second wife was about to give birth, and the nobles of France agreed to appoint Louis’s younger brother Philip as regent, pending the baby’s birth. On November 15, she gave birth to a son; but he lived for only six days.

Louis X already had a daughter, Princess Joan, from his first marriage. Her relatives attempted to argue that she, as the direct descendant of the oldest son, should become queen of France. Philip immediately had his lawyers dig out an ancient bit of law used by the barbarian Salian Franks, centuries before. The lawyers argued convincingly that this code, the Salic Law, had always been an acknowledged part of French law; and since it barred women from inheriting the rule, Princess Joan could inherit only the crown of Navarre from her dead father. The French throne had to go to the nearest male relative: Louis’s brother.

The French nobles, on the whole, preferred to be ruled by a grown man rather than by an infant girl. Philip V was crowned the new king of France on January 9, 1317. It was a personal victory; but the aftershocks of the decision would trouble France for the next century.18

Chapter Sixty

The Appearance of the Ottomans

Between 1302 and 1347,

the Ottoman Turks appear in Asia Minor,

the Catalan Company arrives at Constantinople,

and the emperors of Constantinople

find themselves at constant war

ANDRONICUS II, second emperor of the Byzantine restoration, was facing a new upheaval.

Five or six years before, the village of Sogut had suddenly awoken. Sogut lay in the lands of the Turkish Sultanate of Rum; since its conquest by the Mongols in 1243, the Sultanate had existed in name only, its sultan a figurehead, the real power in the hands of Il-khanate viziers.

But beneath the surface of Il-khanate control, the Turks of Rum were restless.

Rum was home to a kaleidoscope of Turkish tribal alliances: Eskenderum, Eskisehir, Konyali, all of them possible challengers of the Il-khanate overlords. Sogut lay at the center of those three tribal territories, home to a small tribe led by the Turkish chief Osman. And sometime shortly after 1290, Osman had embarked on a sudden conquest spree.

There is no written history of his tribe that dates from anywhere near Osman’s lifetime; it is not certain that, in the last decade of the thirteenth century, the people of Sogut were even Muslim. But later legends tell of a dream Osman had, of a great tree growing up to shadow the whole world; the Tigris, Euphrates, Nile, and Danube flowed from its roots; beneath its limbs were built scores of cities filled with minarets, where the faithful came to pray; the leaves of the tree were sword blades, and a wind blew against them and pointed them towards Constantinople, which lay in the distance “like a diamond . . . the precious stone of the ring of a vast dominion which embraced the entire world.”1

And from the beginning of his conquests, it seemed clear that Osman had his eye on Constantinople. He ransacked the nearby countryside, conquered the tribe of the Eskenderum to his north, occupied territory near Ephesus and Pergamum, intruded into Phrygia. The Il-khanate ruler Ghazan, currently occupied with fighting against the Bahri dynasty of Egypt and its tendency to expand, seems to have paid little attention to the agitation just south of the Black Sea. The truth was that Turkish agitation in Asia Minor was nothing new; under Il-khanate supervision, says the contemporary chronicler George Pachymer, the Turks of Asia Minor had been running rampant for decades, laying waste the lands between the coast of the Black Sea and the southern island of Rhodes. Mostly, the Mongol khans ignored the Turks, as long as they stayed where they were supposed to.2

But the Emperor Andronicus could not afford to look the other way. When Osman met a Byzantine army at Baphaeum, near Nicaea, and drove them back, Andronicus grew alarmed. He sent his son and co-emperor, the twenty-five-year-old Michael IX, into Asia Minor with a bigger army, but Michael found himself so outnumbered that he retreated without giving battle.

This was an unpleasant case of dejà vu for the empire. Advancing Turks, two hundred years earlier, had launched the First Crusade when a frightened Alexius Comnenus had appealed to the pope for help. Andronicus II did not make the same mistake. Instead of asking for help, he hired it.

The mercenary captain who agreed to come fight the Turks was Roger de Flor, a onetime Knight Templar who had (fortunately for him) been thrown out of the order by Grand Master Jacques de Molay for piracy. He had assembled around him a mercenary crew called the Catalan Company, mostly made up of soldiers from Aragon proper and from the Aragonese-controlled countship known as Catalonia, on the eastern Spanish coast.* He was at loose ends, having just finished up fighting for James of Aragon, and was looking for his next profitable adventure.

He arrived in September of 1302 with a fleet of Genoese-built ships (he had stiffed the shipbuilders, making an enemy of Genoa) and eight thousand paid soldiers (they had stopped to sack the Venetian island of Ceos on the way, making an enemy of Venice). Crossing over into Asia Minor, the Catalan Company began to engage Osman’s troops, doing the Turks significant harm. But Roger de Flor also showed himself completely willing to rob any Christian settlements in his way, and Andronicus was heartily regretting his invitation, particularly when Roger de Flor demanded more money and, not getting it, started to raid Byzantine territory.2

In the winter of 1304, the Catalan Company retreated to Gallipoli to wait out the cold. While they were there, Andronicus hired a second set of mercenary soldiers to waylay Roger de Flor, on a planned visit to Prince Michael IX at Adrianople, and murder him. The plot, carried out in April 1305, succeeded: the assassins, says the Catalan Company adventurer Ramon Muntaner in his own account of the incident, “massacred” Roger de Flor “and all who had come with [him] . . . not more than three escaped.” At the same time, Byzantine soldiers laid siege to the remaining Catalan Company at Gallipoli. “They found us thus off our guard,” says Muntaner, “and . . . killed over a thousand people. . . . [And] we agreed that . . . we would defy [the emperor] and impeach him for bad faith and for what he had done to us.”4

The Catalan Company fought back, which meant that Andronicus was now carrying on two separate wars with an already spread-thin army: one, led by his son Michael IX, against the Company; one in Asia Minor, against Osman. So he appealed to the Il-khanate, which had not yet paid much attention to Osman and his Turks. The khan Ghazan had died in 1304 without heirs, leaving the Il-khanate to his brother Oljeitu; Andronicus II offered Oljeitu a marriage alliance with one of his own daughters in exchange for troops to fight against Osman.

Oljeitu agreed to the deal. In 1308, an Il-khanate army of thirty thousand men marched against Osman’s troops, but although the Il-khanates claimed victory, Osman seemed unhindered. He took Ephesus, fought down the coast, and made a preliminary pass at Rhodes.

60.1 The Ottoman Invasion

In 1315, the Catalan Company finally abandoned Gallipoli. “We had been in that district [more than] seven years,” writes Muntaner, “and there was nothing left . . . we had depopulated all that district for ten journeys in every direction; we had destroyed all the people, so that nothing could be gathered there. Therefore we were obliged to abandon that country.” They went off in search of other wars, leaving behind a demoralized Michael IX, who had been unable to conquer them.5

He was suffering from some progressive and undefined illness, possibly aggravated by depression. In 1320 he died, leaving his father on the throne along with his twenty-three-year-old son Andronicus III, who had been crowned co-emperor a few years earlier to assure the succession.

Unfortuately, Andronicus III had embroiled himself in all sorts of scandals, mostly involving gambling, prostitutes, and strong drink, and his grandfather was fed up with him. Right before Michael IX’s death, young Andronicus (a married man) had completely horrified his family by hiring hit men to stalk one of his mistresses, whom he suspected of infidelity, and kill the other man she was sleeping with.

The other man turned out to be Andronicus’s half brother Manuel, one of Michael IX’s sons from his second marriage. He died in the dark, on the streets of Constantinople.6

The emperor promptly disinherited his grandson; young Andronicus in turn declared war on his grandfather. He gathered around him a core of discontented men his own age, and the rebels established themselves in Thrace.

The Catalan problem had now been replaced by a civil war. For seven years the Byzantine armies made no progress in reconquering Osman’s territories. Osman himself, perhaps feeling at the edge of his reach, did not advance farther; and the Turks remained in place until he died in 1327, leaving the principality to his son Orhan.

In May of the following year, Andronicus III finally won his war against the old emperor. He had been carrying on a constant propaganda campaign from Thrace, promising lower taxes and faster action against the Turks, and the people of Byzantium—overtaxed to pay for all of the ongoing fighting—were inclined to think that the time had come for a change in leadership. On the evening of May 23, 1328, supporters inside Constantinople opened the gates for Andronicus III and his troops; and they marched into the city.7

Andronicus III allowed his grandfather to abdicate and enter a monastery in safety; old Andronicus II lived there another five years, dying peacefully at the age of seventy-four.

The new emperor was now thirty-one years old, an experienced soldier with a strong following, most notably his longtime friend and now chief official (megas domestikos) John Cantacuzenus. He immediately began to push forward against the Turkish advance. But in Orhan, who had now named his principality the “Ottoman Empire” in memory of his father,* he faced an opponent as ambitious and capable as he. In the first battle where the two men came face-to-face, near the Marmara straits, Andronicus III was wounded, and the Byzantine ranks broke and fled.

In 1331, Orhan took Nicaea. He advanced to Nicomedia and laid siege to it; for the next six years, the Byzantine armies fought to drive him off. They forced the Turks to lift the siege twice, but both times Orhan retreated and then returned. By 1337, the fields and farms around Nicomedia had been laid waste for so long that the city could no longer be resupplied. The defenders were forced to open the gates, and Nicomedia surrendered.

The following year, Turkish raids into Thrace took thousands of Greek prisoners; three hundred thousand, according to contemporary chroniclers, a wildly inflated number that nevertheless reveals the panic the Byzantines felt, in the face of this ongoing, apparently unstoppable assault.8

Andronicus III had little time left to resist. In 1341 he was struck by a sudden high fever that lasted four days without breaking. On the fourth day the emperor died, a few months away from his forty-fifth birthday. He left the throne of Byzantium to his nine-year-old son, John V.9

He had made no arrangements for such a sudden end, and so his megas domestikos, John Cantacuzenus, assumed the role of regent for the child. Most of the Byzantine court seemed to think this perfectly natural; and as soon as affairs in the capital were in order, Cantacuzenus took the army out of Constantinople to head off border threats, a regent’s most important task.

In his absence, young John’s mother, the Empress Anne, and the Patriarch of Constantinople (who had never liked Cantacuzenus) paid off, promised, and flattered a critical mass of officials to declare Anne regent in place of Cantacuzenus. The megas domestikos, away in Thrace preparing for war, received the message that the city gates had been shut against him. After years of faithful service to young John’s father, he had been declared an enemy of the empire; his lands had been seized, his house destroyed, and even his mother exiled from the city.10

Cantacuzenus, who had been ready to serve the young emperor faithfully, could not swallow this insult. He decided to fight his way back into Constantinople and claim not just the regency but the crown of co-emperor.

Civil war began again.

AS THE WAR BETWEEN REGENTS dragged on, the king of Serbia launched his own bid for power.

Stefan Dushan was the great-great-great-grandson of Stefan Nemanja, the Serbian Grand Prince who had managed to free his country from Constantinople’s control. Dushan, the ninth king of a dynasty that had endured with enormous stability for nearly two centuries, had been crowned in 1331. His kingdom was bordered on the north by Hungary and Bosnia (technically a Hungarian vassal); on the east by Bulgaria; and on the south by Byzantium. For decades, Serbian nobles had been agitating for an attack on the bordering Byzantine lands; Stefan Dushan’s father had refused, but the son was willing.11

While John Cantacuzenus and his rivals fought, Stefan Dushan invaded. City after city fell in front of him, until he had reached almost as far as Thessalonica. “The great Serb,” complained Cantacuzenus, his hands occupied with Byzantine opponents, “like an overflowing river which has passed far beyond its banks, has already submerged one part of the Empire of the Romans with its waves, and is threatening to submerge another.”12

On Easter Sunday, 1346, Stefan Dushan made his intentions perfectly clear. He had already written to the Doge of Venice, whom he hoped to pacify with an alliance, claiming lordship of almost all of the imperii Romaniae; now he had himself coronated as Emperor of the Romans and Czar of the Serbs. He could see the throne of Constantinople, tossed into the air like a ball, hovering between claimants; there was no reason why he should not join their ranks.

60.2 Serbia under Stefan Dushan

IN THE END, Cantacuzenus beat him to it.

To bring the civil war to an end, he made overtures to the most powerful general around: Orhan of the Ottoman Turks. As incentive, Cantacuzenus offered a marriage alliance with one of his own daughters. Should Orhan help him retake Constantinople, the Ottoman chief would then be the son-in-law of the emperor: a position the Turkish leader could not even have dreamed of, two decades before. Orhan, who was an astute politician as well as a competent general, agreed to the plan.

In 1347, with a thousand of his own men with him and the threat of a much larger Turkish force hovering behind, John Cantacuzenus marched into the city through a gate opened to him by a supporter inside. The regent Anne was broke (she had, as a last resort, borrowed thirty thousand ducats from bankers in Venice, handing over the crown jewels of Constantinople as security) and unable to muster a defense. The people of Constantinople were ready for a competent emperor, and Cantacuzenus had no trouble negotiating a settlement: he would rule with young John V as equal co-emperor, taking the royal name John VI, and all the intrigues, hostilities, and injuries of the previous six years would be covered under a blanket amnesty.

He had his crown; but Stefan Dushan waited just past Thessalonica, and the Turkish alliance that had given it to him would barely survive the next decade.

*See map 56.1, p. 390.

*His subjects were actually known as “Osmanli,” the “descendants of Osman,” which came over into western languages as “Othmanli” or “Ottoman”.

Chapter Sixty-One

The Fall of the Khilji

Between 1303 and 1320,

the Muslim sultanate of Delhi spreads across the north,

but the Khilji dynasty loses its hold on the throne

UNDER ‘ALA’-UD-DIN’S heavy hand, the sultanate of Delhi was spreading, in a series of Muslim assaults aimed at obliterating the Hindu holdouts of India. The Rajput kingdoms—the Hindu warrior clans, the “sons of kings”—were falling, one by one.

61.1 The Rajput Kingdoms

Gujarat had already been taken. Malwa, the kingdom of the Rajput Parama clan, and Ranthambhore, the strongest fortress of the Chauhan clan, followed quickly. In January of 1303, the sultan turned his eye towards Mewar, kingdom of the Guhila. The Guhila were the most powerful of the remaining Rajputs; for five hundred years, they had fought back, successfully, against Muslim invasion.

According to later accounts, ‘Ala’-ud-Din chose to attack Mewar because he hoped to kidnap Mewar’s beautiful queen: Padmini, wife of the Mewar shah Rana Ratan Singh. He began the attack with deception: he visited the capital city of Chittor, ostensibly in peace, but with men hidden outside the gates. When Rana Ratan Singh courteously escorted him to the gates at the end of the visit, ‘Ala’-ud-Din’s men sprang out of hiding, seized the king of Mewar, and dragged him off to the sultan’s camp.

To save her husband, Padmini sent a message to the sultan, offering to exchange herself for her husband, as long as she could bring her beloved maids and attendants with her. ‘Ala’-ud-Din agreed; and the next day, a whole procession of curtained litters, each carried by six slaves, wended its way towards the camp. But the slaves were Rajput warriors, and the litters were so many Trojan horses, crammed with fully armed soldiers. Once inside the camp, the soldiers leapt out, slaughtered the guards around ‘Ala’-ud-Din’s camp, rescued their king, and fought their way back to Chittor.1

The details of this unlikely situation were probably invented by the sixteenth-century poet Jayasi, who was working out a detailed allegory in which ‘Ala’-ud-Din represents lust, Rana Ratan Singh love, and Padmini herself wisdom. According to Jayasi, when ‘Ala’-ud-Din finally did conquer Chittor (which he did, after an eight-month siege), Rana Ratan Singh died fighting, while Padmini sacrificed herself on his funeral pyre rather than submit to ‘Ala’-ud-Din. But there may be glimmers of fact beneath Jayasi’s embroidery. ‘Ala’-ud-Din seems to have taken the resistance of Chittor very personally; the chronicler Amir Khusru, who was there, notes that when Chittor finally fell, the sultan uncharacteristically ordered thirty thousand of the Hindu inhabitants massacred.2

In the remaining years of ‘Ala’-ud-Din’s reign, the other Hindu kingdoms surrounding the sultanate fell, one by one. Khusru lists conquest after conquest, cities and principalities falling in front of the Delhi commanders, campaign after campaign carried out “in order that the pure tree of Islam might be planted . . . and the evil tree, which had struck its roots deep, might be torn up by force.”3

The Pandyan realm, divided by civil war between two princes, fell in 1308; the northern part of the Sri Lankan island declared its independence, and Delhi armies occupied the Pandyan capital. Other Hindu kingdoms south of the Deccan survived: the Yadava, ruling from Devagiri, and the two successor states of the old Chalukya kingdom: the Kakatiya (centered at Warangal) and the Hoysala (with its capital at Dwarasamudra). But they too suffered from constant attacks: Dwarasamudra was sacked, Devagiri raided, Warangal besieged. And although the Delhi armies always withdrew from these southern lands, thousands died in the raids: “Their heads rolled on the plain like crocodile’s eggs,” writes Khusru.4

In celebration of his victories, the sultan constructed a black pavilion in the middle of Delhi, “like the Ka’aba in the navel of the earth.” The Ka’aba was Islam’s most sacred shrine; at Mecca, it housed the Black Stone, a sacred rock (possibly a meteorite) oriented towards the east.* To this simulacrum came “kings and princes of Arabia and Persia,” to prostrate themselves not just before the duplicate Ka’aba but before the sultan as well. Delhi, Amir Khusru concludes, had become “the city of Islam.”5

“IN THE LATTER PART of the reign of ‘Ala’-ud-Din,” writes Barani, “several important victories were gained, and the affairs of the State went on according to his heart’s desire, but his fortune now became clouded and his prosperity waned.” He fell out with his sons and with his ministers, reacted with vicious severity to small offenses, treated his officials to fits of temper. He suffered from painful swelling of his legs. And Barani notes, disapprovingly, that his infatuation with the handsome eunuch Malik Kafur grew even more pronounced: “He made him commander of his army, and vizier,” Barani writes, “and this eunuch and minion held the chief place in his regards.”6

In 1316, ‘Ala’-ud-Din died. He was succeeded by his designated heir, his six-year-old son; with a stunning tone deafness to possible sibling rivalry, ‘Ala’-ud-Din left the young king’s brother, his older son Qutb-ud-Din Mubarak Shah as his regent.

The decision created instant havoc. Both the six-year-old king and a third brother were blinded (“eyes cut . . . from their sockets with a razor, like slices of melon,” says Barani with relish), and Qutb-ud-Din was proclaimed sultan. The mastermind behind this plan is not entirely clear. Barani, who despises Malik Kafur, blames the eunuch; he says that Kafur intended to blind all three boys but ran into too much opposition. Other accounts chalk the plot up to Qutb-ud-Din. The evidence seems to favor Qutb-ud-Din, who not only kept his eyes but outlived his competition. Thirty-five days later, Malik Kafur was assassinated, beheaded in the halls of the palace by courtiers, or possibly by army officials.

The teenaged Qutb-ud-Din was now Sultan of Delhi, and immediately followed in his father’s footsteps. He took, says Barani, an “inordinate liking” for a young Hindu prisoner of war who had converted to Islam; he “raised him to distinction and gave him the title of Khusru Khan. He was so infatuated . . . that he placed the army . . . under that youth.” Meanwhile, he occupied himself with pleasure, wine, and overspending. He survived as sultan four years, but only by making every crowd-pleasing decision he could: removing all of ‘Ala’-ud-Din’s price controls, abandoning the tax code, giving the noblemen freedom to pursue their own power-building schemes, raising salaries, scattering gold lavishly around the court to buy loyalties.7

It was only by chance that no serious invasions or rebellions afflicted the sultanate during Qutb-ud-Din’s brief reign. But his incompetence didn’t win him many friends, bribes notwithstanding, and when Khusru Khan began to plot his overthrow, the ex-slave found plenty of willing allies.

Late one night, the conspirators entered the royal palace, heavily armed and led by Khusru Khan. Khusru himself went up to the sultan’s rooms, while the rest dispatched the guards in the courtyard. The sultan’s rooms were guarded, but his guards let the sultan’s lover through. As Khusru closed the door behind him, the sultan asked him what all the racket was about: “Your horses have broken loose,” the eunuch said, “and everyone is down in the courtyard trying to catch them.” By this point, Khusru’s men had made their way up to the royal suite behind him. As they began to kill the guards outside the door, the young sultan realized what was happening. “He put on his slippers,” says Barani, “and ran towards the harem. The traitor [Khusru Khan] saw that if the Sultan escaped to the women’s apartments, it would be difficult to consummate the plot.” He ran after Qutb-ud-Din, grabbed him by the hair, and pulled him down. The two men were still wrestling on the ground when the other conspirators arrived behind him. As Khusru bellowed at them to be careful, one of them speared the sultan and dragged him off.8

Qutb-ud-Din’s headless, dismembered body was thrown into the courtyard. Khusru Khan and his men carried out a palace purge, murdering all of the sultan’s supporters. Then, at midnight, all of the remaining officials assembled in the courtyard by torchlight and recognized Khusru as the new sultan. “Khusru Khan had prevailed,” writes Barani, “the face of the world assumed a new complexion, a new order of things sprung up, and the basis of the dynasty of ‘Ala’-ud-Din was utterly razed.”9

KHUSRU KHAN’S SULTANATE lasted a single year.

Barani’s distaste aside, he seems to have been a reasonably competent ruler and soldier, and the sultanate itself, tightly organized by ‘Ala’-ud-Din, continued to run more or less smoothly. But as soon as he was secure on his new throne, Khusru Khan renounced his profession of Islam and returned to Hindu practice. The conquered Hindus rejoiced, especially when Khusru began to promote Hindu officers and courtiers through the ranks. But the coherence of the Delhi sultanate was largely due to ‘Ala’-ud-Din’s vision of the empire as an Islamic realm, bringer of truth to the heathens, and Khusru Khan’s reconversion quickly wiped out his support. Barani complains that “preparations were made for idol worship in the palace” itself, and that “copies of the Holy Book were used as seats, and idols were set up in the pulpits”; it is unlikely that Khusru was foolish enough to defy Islamic practice so overtly, but Barani’s chronicle reflects the outrage that the Muslims of Delhi felt over this reversal.10

Two months after Khusru’s accession, the governor of one of the outlying areas in the Punjab, Ghazi Malik Tughluq, rallied an opposition party against him. In a pitched battle outside the walls of Delhi, a collection of Muslim governors and their troops faced down Khusru’s royal army. The sultan’s force broke and ran; Khusru himself hid in a nearby garden, where he was discovered and beheaded on the spot.

The governors then proclaimed Ghazi Malik the next sultan (“You have delivered us from the yoke of the Hindus!” they exclaimed). He took the royal title Sultan Ghiyas-ud-Din, and, Barani concludes, “everyone paid him due homage. . . . In the course of one week, the business of the State was brought into order, and the disorders and evils occasioned by Khusru and his unholy followers were remedied.” Two Delhi dynasties had fallen, and now a third ruled; the dynasties might disintegrate, but the sultanate itself remained unmoved.11

*See Bauer, History of the Medieval World, pp. 193–195, 294–296.

Chapter Sixty-Two

The Triumph of the Bruce

Between 1304 and 1314,

Edward I subdues the Scots,

Edward II flees from them,

and Robert Bruce becomes their king

EIGHT YEARS of desperate fighting against the English had resulted in little gain for the Scots.

William Wallace had followed up his victory at Stirling Bridge with an invasion of England itself and had returned to Scotland loaded with plunder and glory. But the following year an English army crushed Wallace’s men in the Forth valley near Falkirk, and Wallace was driven into hiding. Four more years of fighting yielded no real advantage for either side, and no single leader of the Scottish cause emerged. Edward, anticipating a victory yet to be won, awarded the title Prince of Wales to his oldest son, also named Edward; the first time an English heir apparent had claimed it.

In 1302 a brief peace had been declared. But nine months later, Edward invaded Scotland once more. Deprived of Wallace, deprived of French support, the Scots were defeated again and again. By Easter of 1304, Edward had fought his way up to Stirling Castle on the river Forth.

He planned the attack on the castle as a massive demonstration of English strength; he had commissioned a mammoth new trebuchet nicknamed the “War-wolf,” and as the siege began five master carpenters and fifty craftsmen were still assembling it outside Stirling’s walls. Prince Edward, just turned twenty and in command of one wing of the English army, was sent to collect lead from the roofs of nearby churches to add to the counterweight. When the outmatched garrison in the castle tried to surrender, the king refused to accept until the trebuchet could hurl its first boulders: “Stirling Castle was absolutely surrendered to the King without conditions this Monday, St. Margaret’s Day [July 20],” one of his knights wrote in a letter home, “but the King wills it that none of his people enter the castle till it is struck with his ‘War-wolf.’” Only when the walls were battered to bits did he allow the garrison to yield.1

This seemed to wrap the matter up. “Both great and small in the kingdom of Scotland (except William Wallace alone) had made their submission,” says John of Fordun, “. . . and after all and sundry of Scottish birth had tendered him homage, the king, with the Prince of Wales, and his whole army returned to England.” He left a Chief Warden as vice-regent in his place, and never entered Scotland again.2

Eleven months later, William Wallace was taken prisoner by John Menteith, the English-appointed governor of Dumbarton Castle; the fourteenth-century chronicler Peter of Langtoft notes, without elaboration, that Wallace was betrayed to Menteith by his own servant, Jack Short, and was “taken unexpected at night.” He was sent to London, where, after a trial that consisted of a recitation of his crimes without any chance for defense, he was hanged, cut down and disemboweled alive, and then beheaded as his intestines were burned in front of him. “His body was hewn into four quarters to hang in four towns,” says Langtoft, “his head at London, his quarters spread throughout Scotland.”3

As far as Edward was concerned, this brought an end to the Scottish matter; but the Scots were not yet finished resisting.

Robert Bruce the Sixth, onetime companion of Edward on the Sixth Crusade, had fought for the English since the beginning of the war for independence. Scottish accounts tell us that he had become disenchanted with the English administration of Scotland (“indignant at the cruel bondage of the kingdom and the ceaseless ill-treatment of the people,” says the contemporary Chronicle of Pluscarden), but there were more practical drawbacks to his English alliance: he had spent a good deal of his own money on the English campaign, he had not been reimbursed by the crown, and Edward I had neglected to reward his loyalty in any way. In March of 1306, he mounted a renewal of the Scottish rebellion, declaring himself King of the Scots and taking Edward completely by surprise.4

Once again, English armies marched into Scotland. And, as had become the pattern for the Scottish rebellions, Bruce was almost at once driven into hiding. He was defeated twice in succession, the first time in June near Perth, the second time on August 11 at Dalry, much deeper into Scottish territory. His men were forced into hiding, and Bruce himself became a fugitive, living “a most wretched life in the wilderness,” as the Chronicle of Pluscarden tells us:

He sometimes went a whole fortnight without taking any food but raw herbs, water and milk . . . now walking barefoot when his shoes were worn out with age; now left alone in the islands; now alone, unknown, fleeing from his enemies; now slighted and despised by his own servants, he remained utterly deserted, an outcast from all his acquaintances.5

But he remained out of English hands, and while Bruce was at large, the Scots still hoped for victory.

EDWARD I WAS ILL. He had been slow to arrive at the Scottish front, after Bruce’s coronation, because he was suffering from pains in his legs and his neck and could ride only two miles per day. He grew a little stronger over the winter, but the illness returned in the summer of 1307. He was on his way back to Scotland when he came down with dysentery; already weakened, he died suddenly on July 6, while his servants were getting him out of bed for breakfast. It was his thirty-fifth year as king of England.6

The Prince of Wales was crowned Edward II of England, and almost at once Bruce emerged from the shadows and began to regather his armies. Scotland’s fortunes took a sharp turn towards the good; Edward II was less concerned with Robert Bruce than with arranging the royal household to suit himself. He was, says the contemporary Vita Edwardi Secundi, “a strong young man in about his twenty-third year . . . [who] did not fulfil his father’s ambition, but turned his mind to other things.”7

One of his first acts as king was to call back, from exile, his close friend Piers Gaveston. Gaveston and Edward II had grown up together, and the two young men had become so inseparable that the older Edward grew annoyed: “He realized that his son, the prince of Wales, loved a certain Gascon knight well beyond measure,” remarks the fourteenth-century Annales Paulini. When the Prince of Wales demanded that Gaveston be given the title Count of Ponthieu (a Norman countship that had belonged to Edward I himself), the king flew into a fury and banished Gaveston to his ancestral lands in Gascony,* a southwestern French province controlled by the English crown.† Young Edward was forced to swear that he would “neither receive, nor keep with him nor about him” the banished knight, and on his deathbed Edward I asked the earls of Lincoln, Warwick and Pembroke “not to suffer Piers Gaveston to come again into England.”8

Defying his barons, Edward II invited Gaveston back into England (“with the dead king not yet even buried,” notes the chronicler Walter of Guisborough with disapproval) and made him the Earl of Cornwall. When in 1308, Edward II traveled to France to celebrate his promised and long-delayed marriage to Isabella, daughter of Philip IV (the Fair), he left Gaveston as regent of the kingdom in his absence.9

He returned to find the barons fed to the teeth with his favorite. Gaveston, says the Vita, was a tactless regent, “a man very proud and haughty in bearing.” Court gossip said that he and the king were lovers, but the resentment against Gaveston had less to do with a rumored and unproven sexual relationship and more to do with the young king’s willingness to treat his personal friends with such lavish and obvious favoritism: “The great men of the land hated him,” the Vita explains, “because he alone found favour in the king’s eyes and lorded it over them like a second king.”10

With almost one voice, the barons demanded that Edward get rid of Gaveston. The king saved some face by sending Gaveston to Ireland to act as his lieutenant there; but the united hostility of his barons unsettled him, and he began unobtrusively to prepare for civil war. “When the king saw that his barons stood against him like a wall,” the Vita says, “. . . he tried to break up their alliance and draw the more powerful to his side . . . with gifts, promises, and blandishments.” In this way, he rounded up enough support to allow for Gaveston’s return, but the royal favorite was unable to fit himself back neatly into the court hierarchy. With his old importance restored, he “began to behave worse than before,” calling his enemies by insulting nicknames and using his power to grant offices and privileges to his own favorites.11

Meanwhile, Edward II had finally gotten around to taking notice of Robert Bruce. In the fall of 1310, he marched into Scotland with an army; but Bruce and his freedom fighters evaded him, lurking in hiding, then emerging to plunder the English camps and pick off isolated reconnaissance parties before disappearing again. The unfruitful campaign dragged on for months, Bruce gaining in strength, the English losing horses, men, and confidence.12

Early in 1312, with the English army in winter quarters near the border and Edward himself back in England, the English barons began to plan Gaveston’s murder. Their chance came in May, when the two men were briefly apart: Gaveston in Scarborough, Edward II in York. Led by the Earl of Lancaster, Gaveston’s enemies surrounded the castle where the young knight had spent the night and forced him to emerge. They had already decided, says the Vita Edwardi Secundi, that he should die “as a nobleman and a Roman citizen” rather than as a thief or traitor; so they led him out onto the Earl of Lancaster’s land and beheaded him.13

They left him where he fell, but nearby Dominican friars gathered up the body and head, and buried them together.

Edward, grieved and infuriated in equal measure, could not muster enough support to attack the offenders. He was forced to accept a mediated peace with them, in which they protested that they had acted only to preserve the king’s power, and with his good in mind; but he did not forget.

He had now been on the throne for nearly seven years and had accomplished almost nothing. In the summer of 1314, he attempted to right this by marching into Scotland personally with additional reinforcements, hoping to bring the ongoing and exasperating war to an end. Like everything else he attempted, the invasion failed. The English army met the Scots at Bannockburn, where the Scots—fighting almost entirely on foot—managed to draw the heavier English cavalry forward, across pits that had been dug and covered over lightly. The horses floundered in the pits; the cavalry behind panicked and retreated; Edward himself, at the rear of the army, turned and rode to safety as fast as possible.

62.1 The Battle of Bannockburn

“From that day forward,” John of Fordun concludes, “the whole land of Scotland . . . rejoiced in victory over the English.” Robert Bruce was no longer a rebel: “After the victory,” says the Chronicle of Lanercost, “Robert Bruce was commonly called King of Scotland by all men.” Immediately he launched a war of conquest, sending ships to Ireland and marching over the border into northern England to raid, burn, and plunder.14

Meanwhile, Edward was forced to return to London in humiliation. “If he had followed the advice of the barons,” remarks the Vita, “he would have humbled the Scots with ease.” This fact had not escaped the barons; and a full revolt was delayed only because England was now facing a new crisis.

*See map 59.1, p. 415.

†Philip IV had given up claim to Gascony in the 1303 Treaty of Paris.

Part Three

CATASTROPHES

Chapter Sixty-Three

The Great Famine

Between 1310 and 1321,

the countries of Europe suffer

flood, tempest, drought, and starvation

FOR AS LONG AS MEMORY STRETCHED—over five hundred years, we know in retrospect—Europe had been a few degrees warmer than in the millennia before. In France, planting began in March; summer began early in June and lasted until the early days of September. In England, villages spread across the high hills of Dartmoor, farms across the northern Pennine moors, and vineyards flourished as far north as York. Copper mines in the Alps, closed by ice during the later centuries of the Roman empire, were reopened. The ice pack in the northern oceans melted back, giving Leif Ericsson passage to the west, deluding his followers into believing that the shores of Greenland were habitable. (“The temperature never dropped below freezing,” one of them marveled, “and the grass only withered very slightly!”) And, as happens when mild weather extends the growing season, the population had mushroomed. In two centuries, the English population tripled. In France, 6.2 million men and women around 1100 had grown to at least 17 million by the beginning of the fourteenth century.1

But in the vast span of millennia, the warmth was a blip. With the luxury of hindsight, climatologists have given the blip a name: the Medieval Warm Period, or the Medieval Climatic Anomaly.*

The five-hundred-year summer of the Warm Period was not quite over. But beginning around 1310, Europe began to see dips in temperature that had never been experienced within living memory. This was accompanied by soaring highs, violent storms, deluges, flooding. Rain poured down in the spring. Grain rotted in the field. The French, trying to invade Flanders, sank deep into the mud and were forced to turn back. “About the year 1310,” says The Chronicle of Pluscarden, “there was so severe a famine and dearth of victuals in the kingdom of Scotland . . . that men fed on the flesh of horses and other unclean beasts.” “Hunger and dearth, on earth, the poor have undergone,” complains the political broadside “Poem on the Evil Times of Edward II,” “while beasts starve, while corne has been so dear.”

There comes then another sorrow, that spreads over all the land,

A winter sent, before which there was never one so strong . . .

The cattle die, all together, and make suddenly the land so bare,

that never came such wretchedness into England before,

never men more aghast.2

In England and northwest Europe, the summer of 1314 was one of the wettest in memory. The summer of 1315 was worse, filled with downpours, low-lying areas flooded everywhere. “The hay lay so long under water that it could neither be mown nor gathered,” noted the English monk John of Trokelowe, from his monastery in Northumberland, “[and] the grain could not ripen . . . it did not have the nourishment from the heat of the summer sun.” The German town of Salzburg saw “such an inundation of waters, it seemed as though it were the Flood.”3

63.1 Miniature from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, showing March planting.

Credit: © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY

The year 1316 was just as wet. Sheep and goats died of liver fluke and murrains, a blanket fourteenth-century term for epidemics of foot-and-mouth, streptococcus, and other damp-aggravated illnesses. In the south of England, the harvest weighed in at half its normal bulk, the lowest yield in fifty years. In Germany, the Neustadt vineyard gave only “a trifling quantity of wine.” The French city of Ypres lost one person in ten to famine; in Tournai, an observer wrote that so many “perished every day . . . men and women, rich and poor, young and old . . . that the very air stank.” To make matters even worse, a comet was visible throughout most of Europe for a good portion of those two years. Geoffrey de Meaux, royal physician to the king of France and amateur astronomer, noted that its brilliance was so great that the comet was visible day and night. Fourteenth-century scholars were in agreement that such a brilliant comet signified a coming time of bad crops, a time when robbery and mayhem would increase, truth and justice decline, and the sea rise to swallow many: “The whole world was troubled,” wrote a German chronicler, surveying the multiple reports of disaster from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean coast.4

63.1 Flood and Famine

Famine began. Everyone suffered, but the aristocrats, with their larger reserves, suffered less. The mass of peasants, living week to week, found themselves on the constant edge of starvation. They survived only by using up everything stored away for the future: seed grain, future stores. Draft animals, essential for the future cultivation of the now-bare fields, were slaughtered. Old people starved themselves to keep grandchildren alive; young parents were forced to choose between their children or their lives, knowing that their deaths would ultimately mean the starvation of their young ones.

“There was great famine in the land,” begins the German folktale “Hansel and Gretel,” collected by the Grimm brothers in the nineteenth century from the days of desperation five centuries before. Unable to face voluntary starvation or infanticide, the parents lead their children into the woods to abandon them; at least, they will not then see the young ones die. (“Surely it would be better to share the last bite of food with one’s children!” thinks the father, the fatalist; it is the stepmother, perhaps clutching babies of her own, who still desperately hopes to live.)5

The summer of 1317 was a little dryer, giving the battered and waterlogged peasants a glimmer of hope. But in August the rains returned, and between October 1317 and Easter 1318, temperatures sank to unheard-of lows. The North Sea froze; Cologne suffered from a snowstorm on June 30.6

By fall 1318, the worst of the dip had ended; the long summer, now dying, had a few decades left in it. But the weather remained unpredictable. “This year,” says the 1319 entry in the Norman Chronicle of St. Evroult, “there was a prodigious disturbance of the elements, causing great damage. Many trees were thrown down by the violence of the winds.” And, five years later, “Great damage was done by thunder-storms . . . many houses and trees were levelled to the ground.” “In the year 1321, there was a very hard winter, which distressed men, and killed nearly all animals,” notes John of Fordun. The snow, records a Norman chronicle, was everywhere, deep and lasting: in mid-March, the middle of Lent, it was still “the thickest anywhere on earth.”7

The Great Famine left a tenth of Europe’s men and women dead; in some places, as much as a quarter of the population died. And the children who survived the famine were, for the rest of their lives, weakened by scurvy, stunted growth, their immune systems compromised, their teeth poor—defenseless against the next catastrophe that would sweep down over them.

*Thanks to global warming, the existence of the Medieval Climatic Anomaly has been turned into a political football; opponents of legislation to reduce CO2 emissions point to it as proof that climate change happens independent of human action, while supporters have tended to downplay the warming period or deny that it happened at all. Actual measurements can be found in a number of academic texts, such as Richard W. Battarbee et al., eds., Past Climate Variability through Europe and Africa, Vol. 6 (Springer, 2004). A more popular and accessible survey of the evidence is in the first chapter of Brian Fagan’s The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300–1850 (Basic Books, 2000), pp. 3–21.

Chapter Sixty-Four

The Sultan and the Khan

Between 1310 and 1335,

the empire of Egypt grows in strength and wealth,

but the Il-khanate collapses

KHALIL, THE SULTAN OF EGYPT, had presided over the final end of the last Crusader kingdom: the goal of Muslim commanders since the days of Saladin.

This did not make him a hero. Instead, he was assassinated in 1293, aged twenty-nine, by three of his own officers.

In the seventeen anarchic years that followed, the sultanate changed hands four times. Self-made men, rising from slavery to sultanate, the mamluks of Egypt had no tradition of father-to-son succession: the strongest man was the one who could lay hold of the sultan’s scepter. And although all of the would-be rulers were mamluk, none of them belonged to the Bahri Regiment, the onetime personal bodyguard of long-dead Ayyub. Even the Bahri who had been very young men at the time of the Regiment’s rise to power, were in their seventies; the next generation of mamluks was now agitating for its share of power.1

Complicating the struggle for power at the top was the existence of Qalawun’s younger son, Khalil’s little brother al-Nasir Muhammad ibn Qalawun. Al-Nasir, only eight at the time of Khalil’s murder, was elevated to the sultanate twice between 1293 and 1310, both times as a figurehead; power had always remained in the hands of an ambitious regent, and al-Nasir had survived only by accepting his complete lack of authority and living in retirement.

But in those years the submissive child had grown into a young man. He was nearly twenty-four; he had spent most of his life under house arrest, and for some time he had been quietly planning to emerge as sultan in fact as well as in name.

Meanwhile, the people of Egypt had grown tired of the constant chaos and purges at the sultan’s palace. In 1310, the sudden failure of the Nile to rise pitched their discontent to a new high, and al-Nasir seized his chance. He left the castle of Kerak, where he had been living for some time in exile, and set out for Damascus, collecting followers as he went. By the time he arrived at the city, the governors of the mamluk-held cities of Aleppo and Jerusalem had decided to join his cause.

As al-Nasir prepared to journey from Damascus to Cairo to claim his throne, most of the empire came over to his side. His current rival, an officer named Baybars who had proclaimed himself sultan two years earlier, found himself entirely deserted. He came out to meet his replacement on foot, carrying a grave cloth to show that he was ready to die; al-Nasir, who was already a clever politician, magnanimously forgave him in public, and then had him strangled in private a few hours later.2

Al-Nasir had had years to plan out what he would do, once he got the sultanate into his hands, and immediately he started to reorganize the country’s disorderly affairs. He commissioned a survey of the empire’s land, its owners, and the taxes paid by each, a formal audit called a rawk; he then redistributed estates to those who were most loyal to him. He would do this three more times during his thirty-year rule, each time with enormous attention to detail, personally supervising the work of the scribes and surveyors.3

He had become sultan at a fortunate time; the most dangerous enemy of the Egyptian kingdom, the Mongol Il-khanate kingdom in the Middle East, had mellowed. The Il-khanate khan, Oljeitu, had married a daughter of the Byzantine emperor and allied himself with the Byzantine empire against the mamluks; in 1305, he had even tried to persuade the French and English kings to join him in an allied attack on Egypt. But unlike his brother and predecessor Ghazan, Oljeitu had little luck in battle. In 1312, he organized an invasion of Syria, across the Euphrates, which failed completely to conquer any mamluk-held cities; al-Nasir answered by sending an army into Il-khanate territory and seizing the eastern cities of Kahta, Gerger, and Malatya for himself.

Oljeitu made no more efforts to conquer the mamluks; he seems to have lost his appetite for war, and he was unwell. In 1316, he died of a bleeding stomach ulcer that had troubled him for years. He was only thirty-six, and his heir was his ten-year-old son Abu Sa’id Bahadur Khan. Serving as the child’s regent was one of Oljeitu’s most distinguished generals, Chupan.4

Despite a lifetime spent in war, Chupan was by nature a treaty maker and a bridge builder. When George V, the vassal king of Georgia (entirely in Mongol hands since 1248), arrived at Baghdad to attend the coronation of the new young khan, Chupan rewarded him by giving him back full control of a southwestern piece of Georgia that previous khans had ruled directly. And he began to negotiate a peace with the mamluks; the eventual truce, ratified in 1323 by both young Abu Sa’id and al-Nasir, set the Euphrates river as the boundary between the Il-khanate state and the mamluk empire. It was a line that would outlast both empires.5

At the same time, al-Nasir took the precaution of firming up his alliance with the Golden Horde. The khan, Uzbek, remained hostile to his Mongol cousins in the Il-khanate, but agreed to send one of his daughters to marry al-Nasir and seal the alliance.6

Egypt was now the single strongest power between Morocco and the Persian Gulf; Cairo alone was populated by perhaps 600,000 people, making it fourteen times larger than contemporary London. It stood at the intersection of the spice route that ran from the Red Sea to the Nile and then to the west of Africa, and al-Nasir’s efficient administration meant that the Egyptian sultanate collected a percentage of the trade passing through. The Muslim traveler Ibn Battuta, journeying from his home in Tangiers to Mecca to perform the hajj, came to Cairo in 1325 at the midpoint of al-Nasir’s reign. “Boundless in the profusion of its people, peerless in beauty and splendor,” he marveled, “she is the crossroads of travellers, the sojourn of the weak and the powerful. . . .”

There are reported to be twelve thousand water carriers and thirty thousand mocaris [renters of beasts of burden]; thirty-six thousand watercraft on the Nile belonging to the sultan and his subjects that do nothing but come and go . . . laden with merchandise of every kind. . . . There is a continuous series of bazaars from the city of Alexandria to Cairo. . . . Cities and villages succeed one another along its banks without interruption and have no equal in the inhabited world, nor is any river known whose basin is so intensively cultivated as that of the Nile.7

Al-Nasir himself plowed a huge amount of tax money back into Cairo and the surrounding cities. He built at least thirty mosques and schools, dug new canals and wells, ordered bridges and waterwheels constructed on the Nile: the sort of activity that could take place only in the absence of a treasury-draining war.

TO THE EAST, Al-Nasir’s new ally, the khan of the Il-khanate, was fretting.

Still in his teens, Abu Sa’id was increasingly unhappy in his role as figurehead. Chupan had assured peace in the Il-khanate, but the young khan, like al-Nasir a decade and a half before, found himself pushed constantly into the shade by his efficient and hardworking regent: “Chupan took all the realms of . . . Abu Sa’id into the grasp of his authority and the hand of his control,” writes the court historian Hafiz-i Abru.8

The khan began to suspect that Chupan, far from working to bring him into full power, was planning to install his own son as his successor, in a shogun type of arrangement that would leave Abu Sa’id entirely out of the circles of power. In 1325, he prodded hard at Chupan’s authority. Chupan’s daughter, the famous beauty Khatun, had two years earlier been married off to an Il-khanate nobleman; now Abu Sa’id summoned her father and demanded the young woman for himself. “For it was the custom of the Mongol house,” says Hafiz-i Abru, “that should any lady please the king, usage required her husband to forgo her with a good grace.”9

Abu Sa’id was a handsome youth (“The most beautiful of God’s creatures in features,” says Ibn Battuta, who passed through Baghdad after leaving Cairo and saw the khan with his own eyes), and the court historian Abru rather romantically chalks this demand up to love. “When the heart falls for a languid narcissus-eye,” he sighs, “be it a king’s or a slave’s, it slips out of control.”10

But the order was clearly an attempt to discover just how loyal to his khan Chupan actually was. When the vizier refused to order his daughter to obey, Abu Sa’id had his answer. He bided his time until Chupan was out of Baghdad, and then ordered Chupan’s oldest son arrested and executed, on charges that the young man was sleeping with one of the khan’s own concubines. Chupan, hearing the news, realized that a purge was upon him. He fled to the Il-khanate city of Herat, believing that the governor—a personal friend—would protect him. But the governor refused to defy the khan; instead, he offered his old acquaintance a choice between beheading and the more honorable death of strangulation.

Chupan chose strangulation. Afterwards, the governor chopped off one of his fingers and sent it to Abu Sai’d as proof of his obedience.11

Chupan’s second son fled to Cairo, but al-Nasir was also unwilling to offend Abu Sa’id; he put the boy in jail and then executed him the following year. Abu Sa’id then forced the beautiful Khatun to divorce her husband, and married her himself. At twenty, he was now in full control of the Il-khanate.

Unlike al-Nasir in Egypt, he did not blossom into an efficient ruler. To replace Chupan, he appointed one of his favorites, the minister Ghiyath al-Din: a good man, of “angelic temperament,” a contemporary account says, but incompetent. “Instead of punishing those who had wrought . . . ill deeds,” the chronicler says, “he drew the pen of forgiveness through the record of their crimes, recompensed their evil actions with good, and . . . entrust[ed] to them the most important functions.” The Il-khanate was in a downward spiral, and Abu Sa’id did not live long enough to mature into its savior. Ibn Battuta, repeating court gossip, says that around 1335 Abu Sa’id developed a “violent passion” for a new wife, and neglected Chupan’s daughter Khatun: “She became jealous in consequence, and administered poison to him. . . . So he died, and his line became extinct.”12

The Christian kingdom of Georgia at once declared its independence under George V. And Muslim dynasties, ruling over mini-kingdoms, sprang up all over the old Il-khanate lands: “When the King died and left no issue,” Ibn Battuta writes, “each of the governors assumed the government of the district over which he had been placed.” Almost overnight, the entire Il-khanate vanished.13

64.1 The Collapse of the Il-khanate

Chapter Sixty-Five

Mansa Musa of Mali

Between 1312 and 1360,

the riches of Mali become known to the outside world

IN 1312, the king of Mali handed the throne over to his first cousin (once removed) for safekeeping, and set off on an adventure.

His name was Abubakari II; he was the nephew of Sundiata, his mother’s brother, the great Muslim conqueror who had founded Mali as an independent kingdom. Mali was now half a century old. It had swallowed the nearby cities of Gao and Mani on the east; the entire Senegal river valley was enfolded; Mali stretched all the way to the West Africa coast.

Beyond this lay the ocean.

“The king who was my predecessor,” his first cousin later explained, “did not believe that it was impossible to discover the furthest limit of the Atlantic Ocean and wished vehemently to do so. So he equipped 200 ships filled with men and the same number equipped with gold, water, and provisions enough to last them for years.” Abubakari gave strict orders to his newly appointed admiral: Sail west, and do not return until you have come to the end of your food and drink.

Long after, a single ship returned. Its captain reported to the king that the entire fleet had been caught in a strong current, with only his craft left behind: “They did not return,” he told Abubakari, “and no more was seen of them and we do not know what became of them.” The Mali expedition had been caught, apparently, in the North Equatorial Current: the Drifts of the Trade Winds, the current that flows westward into the Caribbean Sea.

No trace of the expedition was ever found, but Abubakari still believed that the far edge of the ocean could be found. He prepared another, much larger fleet—two thousand ships, half of them dedicated entirely to provisions—and himself set off at its head. “That was the last we saw of him,” his cousin said, afterwards, “and all those who were with him, and so I became king in my own right.”1

So Mansa Musa, cousin and deputy of the king, became king of Mali. And he cast his eyes in the opposite direction: not west, towards the unknown, but east, towards Mecca. He was, says an acquaintance, “pious and assiduous in prayer, Koran reading, and mentioning God”; it was his greatest desire to make the hajj.

It was twelve years before his plans were finally in place. In 1324, as Ibn Battuta was beginning his travels across the northern edge of Africa, Mansa Musa too set off for the Holy City. With a massive caravan of slaves, soldiers, officials, and his wife’s maids (five hundred of them), he journeyed along the Niger valley and then northeast towards Cairo, crossing over the trade routes and passing through Taghaza on his way.2

Mecca still lay under the protection of the Bahri sultan, and Cairo was an obligatory stop on the path from West Africa to Arabia. There, Mansa Musa became friendly with the court official Ibn Amir Hajib, governor of Old Cairo. “Musa told him,” says the fourteenth-century Arab historian al-‘Umari, “. . . that his country was very extensive and contiguous with the Ocean. By his sword and his armies he had conquered 24 cities, each with its surrounding district with villages and estates.” From all of these conquered cities, Mansa Musa demanded tribute in gold.3

Whatever Mansu Musa told him, the governor came away from the conversation convinced that the gold in Africa grew in the ground, on gold plants, with roots of gold, that simply needed to be pulled up and shaken. He could perhaps be forgiven for the mistake, since the Mali contingent’s behavior gave the impression that gold was as common as goat’s milk in the Niger valley. Mansa Musa had brought with him thousands and thousands of gold ingots: eighty loads weighing 120 kilograms (260 pounds) each, says Ibn Khaldun, a total of over ten tons. During his stay he distributed it so lavishly that the worth of gold in Cairo fell as much as 25 percent. “This man flooded Cairo with his benefactions,” the governor later said. “He left no court emir nor holder of a royal office without the gift of a load of gold.”4

65.1 The Height of Mali

Either the king or his accountants lacked foresight, though; the Mali monarch spent most of his money on his initial passage through Cairo, and by the time he returned through the city after his pilgrimage to the Ka’aba, he was broke. He had to borrow from Cairo’s moneylenders to fund his trip back across the desert, to Mali, and the moneylenders charged him compound interest; he ended up paying back 233 percent on each dinar borrowed.5

ABUBAKARI’S ADVENTURE to the west had brought Mansa Musa to the throne; and thanks to Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage east, Mali appeared more and more often on European maps of the world. The Catalan Atlas, an ambitious world map produced for Peter of Aragon by the Jewish cartographer Cresques Abraham, shows Mansa Musa himself seated on a golden throne, holding a golden scepter and a golden orb, wearing a crown of gold.

In the remaining years of Mansa Musa’s rule, European traders and embassies from European governments traversed the Sahara again and again, seeking gold, forging alliances; and after Musa’s death in 1337, Mali remained strong. But outside the country, the exaggerated legends of Mali’s wealth, of the riches that needed only to be plucked from the ground, continued to grow. And inside Mali, factions and political parties began to clot towards critical mass.

Mansa Musa’s son Maghan, who had served as regent during his father’s extended absence from the country, inherited his crown. But he died after a brief four-year reign, and the throne was claimed by his uncle Mansa Sulayman. “A most avaricious and worthless man,” Ibn Battuta calls him; arriving in Mali halfway through Mansa Sulayman’s reign, Ibn Battuta was told that the sultan had a gift for him, and was then presented with “three crusts of bread, with a piece of fried fish, and a dish of sour milk.” Highly offended—he had expected at least a horse and a golden robe or two—Ibn Battuta sent the sultan a piece of his mind and was rewarded with a house and provisions during the rest of his stay.6

Sulayman had reason to be suspicious of new arrivals to his kingdom. In Mansa Musa’s wake, more and more outsiders had made their way to Mali, looking for the gold plants that lay on the ground, and counting on the gullibility of the Malians. The governor of Old Cairo, a generation before, had noted that the merchants of Cairo exploited Mansa Musa’s caravan with happy abandon: “Merchants . . . have told me of the profits which they made from the Africans,” the governor explained to the historian al-‘Umari, “saying that one of them might buy a shirt or cloak or robe or other garment for five dinars when it was not worth one. Such was their simplicity and trustfulness that it was possible to practice any deception on them.” And then he added, “Later, they formed the very poorest opinion of the Egyptians because of the obvious falseness of everything they said . . . and their outrageous behavior in fixing the prices.”7

65.1 Mansa Musa of Mali on the Catalan Atlas.

Credit: John Webb / The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY

But Sulayman had apparently concluded that Ibn Battuta was harmless, and the honors soothed the traveler’s offended pride somewhat. During the two months he remained in Mali, Ibn Battuta paid grudging respect to the safety and justice of the kingdom: “A traveller may proceed alone among them, without the least fear of a thief or robber,” he noted. He also praised their piety, noting that it was common for the men of Mali to commit the entire Koran to memory. In al-‘Umari’s words,

Their king at present is named Sulayman, brother of the sultan Musa Mansa. He controls, of the land of Sudan, that which his brother brought together by conquest and added to the domains of Islam. There he built ordinary and cathedral mosques and minarets, and established the Friday observances and prayers in congregation, and the muezzin’s call. . . . This king is the greatest of the Muslim kings of the Sudan. He rules the most extensive territory, has the most numerous army, is the bravest, the richest, the most fortunate, the most victorious over his enemies.8

In Sulayman’s twenty-four years on the throne, Mali remained firmly under his authority. His subjects, Ibn Battuta says, “debase themselves . . . in the presence of their king” more than any other people, prostrating themselves and throwing dust upon their heads. Sulayman surrounded himself with the trappings of an emperor: gold arms and armor; ranks of courtiers and Turkish mamluks, warrior slaves bought from Egypt, surrounding him. They were required to keep solemn and attentive in his presence: “Whoever sneezes while the king is holding court,” al-‘Umari explains, “is severely beaten.”9

But at Sulayman’s death, in 1359, the political factions that had been slowly coalescing during his reign—each one centered on a different descendant of Mansa Musa—broke the country apart.

A civil war erupted between the supporters of Sulayman’s son Fomba and one of the sons of Maghan, Mari Diata II. After a year of fighting, Fomba was killed and Mari Diata II seized the throne: “A most wicked ruler over them,” says the fourteenth-century chronicler Ibn Khaldun, “because of the tortures, tyrannies, and improprieties to which he subjected them.”10

In the wake of the coup, a chunk of Mali between the Senegal and Gambia rivers revolted. Instead of submitting to the despotic Mari Diata, three distinct but neighboring clans—Waalo, Baol, and Kajoor, all of them Wolof-speakers—formed a confederation, each independent but all three united under a single king. This king was elected, much like the German rulers, by a group of high-ranking clan members who joined together to choose a ruler from one of the clans.

Tradition gives a name to the first-elected Emperor of the Wolofs: Ndiadiane N’Diaye. Little else is known about him, but legend preserves at least one telling detail. Ndiadiane was a magician; not an Islamic king, but a traditional African ruler. The kings of Mali had ruled an Islamic realm, but beneath the surface veneer of Muslim loyalty, the old practices had survived.

Chapter Sixty-Six

After the Famine

Between 1318 and 1330,

Philip V is troubled by shepherds and lepers,

and the Capetian dynasty gives way to the Valois,

while Edward II is defeated by his wife and her lover

and comes to an uncertain end

IN 1318, for the fifth year in a row, Philip V of France promised to go on crusade.

The oath had become part of the regular rhetoric of French kings, an orthodox sign of commitment to the Christian cause. Philip had “taken the cross” for the first time in 1313, along with his father and brother; and his promise to march east and fight against the Muslims—whether Arab, Ottoman, or Mamluk—had been renewed every year.

And perhaps Philip V did intend to go on crusade, some year when France was prosperous and at peace, his officials in line, his people content and unlikely to rebel. But 1318 was not that year. Nor, as it turned out, was 1319; although Philip did call a council in Paris to discuss the possibilities. Nor was 1320.

The problem was a logistical one. The days when a pope wielded enough power to actually gather a crusade and launch it were long gone. The French lawyer Jacques d’Euse had become Pope John XXII in 1316; but he lived in Avignon, dependent on the French king, an exile from Rome, powerless over the politics of Germany and Italy. No crusade would rally around Avignon. If a crusade were to happen, one of the monarchs of Europe would have to spearhead it.1

And Philip V, like all the other monarchs of Europe, was perpetually preoccupied by troubles at home. His coronation had coincided with the last severe year of famine and cold; the worst had now passed, but the world that greeted the survivors of famine was still jagged and unreliable, troubled with windstorms and torrential tides, dry months and sharp unbearable cold snaps. Prices of grain and salt were seesawing wildly. England was perpetually hostile. Flanders, forced into unwilling submission in 1305, was agitating again under its new count, the young and independent-minded Robert III (“the Lion of Flanders”). And predatory shepherds were roaming the countryside; the Pastoureaux, successfully put down seventy years earlier, had reemerged.

“Suddenly,” writes the chronicler Etienne Baluze, “there rose up a gathering of simple people of both sexes, calling themselves Pastoureaux, who were filled with zeal and courage to cross the sea and recover the Holy Land.” The first uprising had been born from a single charismatic preacher, the mad Master of Hungary, but the second was almost entirely leaderless; Baluze mentions a defrocked priest and “an apostate Benedictine monk” but gives neither man a name, and other chroniclers seem to have noticed no leadership at all.2

The spontaneous gathering of shepherds and swineherds had first banded together in June of 1320, begging for alms in order to accompany the proposed royal crusade. But, like the first bands of Pastoureaux, they were soon joined by bandits and outlaws. Begging turned to plundering, with wealthy priests and well-to-to monasteries at the top of the hit list. Philip V, preoccupied with Flanders, made no move to punish the looters, and their numbers grew. “Pestiferous . . . a new plague,” complained the Dominican inquisitor Bernard Gui. But as the movement spread south, it tilted away from annoying banditry, towards the open murder of France’s Jewish population.3

Philip’s father had decreed exile for the Jews in 1306, but some had remained, and in the fourteen years since, others had returned. In Bordeaux, in Albi, in Toulouse, in a dozen smaller villages, the Jewish population was herded together and given the choice between forcible baptism and death. At Montclus, 337 Jews died; at Castelsarrasin, 152 were murdered. Royal officials, belatedly taking notice, arrested twenty-four wagons of marauders and hauled them to Toulouse for trial. As the wagons entered the city, a contemporary account says, “the Pastoureaux who were in the last wagons asked for help, as they had been captured and imprisoned because they wanted to avenge Christ’s death. Some of the Toulouse crowd broke the ropes holding the wagons, and once the Pastoureaux were freed, they jumped out and called out along with the crowd, ‘Death, death, let’s kill all the Jews!’” Over 150 Jews died in Toulouse in a single day.4

From Avignon, Pope John XXII heard of the troubles, and at once sent letters to every major town in France, condemning the Pastoureaux and ordering all Christian people to join together in protecting the Jews. “We request all of you, and urge in the Lord Jesus Christ,” the papal message read, “to grant such ready aid to the Jews, individually and collectively . . . that none of them shall be harmed in goods, property, and person.” By the second week of July, the letters had spread across the country, and the civil authorities had begun to act. Thousands of Pastoureaux, marching across Aigues-Mortes, were surrounded by the men of Carcassonne and slaughtered.5

The leaderless movement collapsed almost immediately, but the hungry, impoverished French countryside was still unsettled. In the spring of 1321, an untraceable rumor sprang up: lepers were poisoning wells throughout France in order to spread their disease to everyone. Soon, the rumor morphed into a conspiracy theory. Lepers, Jews, and Muslims had joined together in a grand plan to throw “poisonous potions” into “waters, fountains, wells, and other places” in “all kingdoms subject to Christ’s faith.” Terrified villagers seized local lepers and burned them alive. Philip V, thoroughly convinced of the danger, ordered lepers quarantined and Jews evicted; again, a wave of Jewish exiles left France. The panic spread across into Aragon, where the Aragonese king James II ordered all lepers arrested and questioned under torture.6

Philip V never did go on crusade. In the middle of the leper scare, he fell ill with a fever that soon turned into chronic wasting dysentery. In January of 1322, he died, aged twenty-nine.

He left only a daughter, excluded from the throne by the same Salic Law that Philip had used to gain it; his brother Charles IV was crowned in his place.7

POST-FAMINE, ENGLAND was in no better shape; but the blame went elsewhere.

“Every bailiff and beadle seeks how he may most oppress poor men,” complained the protest poem “The Simonie”:

Once there were merchants who honorably bought and sold,

And now is that custom abrogated, and has not been observed

for a long time . . .

Husbandmen curse and widows weep and cry to God for vengeance,

very soon,

For all the problems must be attributed to lords who allow things to proceed in this way.8

The farmers and peasants of England blamed greedy merchants and corrupt judges for their troubles; the merchants and judges blamed the English barons; and the barons blamed the king.

Edward II had now been king of England for fifteen years. “Ever chicken-hearted and luckless in war,” remarks the Chronicle of Lanercost; “quite unlike his father in wisdom and courage,” says Jean Froissart. Edward had lost Scotland; he had presided over the greatest famine in living memory; he had made a fool of himself with Piers Gaveston, and now that Gaveston was dead, he had developed a new favorite.9

This was Hugh Despenser the Younger, son of the Earl of Winchester; he was a tall and well-favored man of thirty-six, only two years younger than the king. In 1318, Edward had made Hugh his chamberlain. Afterwards, the royal accounts record a startling amount of money paid out on behalf of Hugh the Younger: supplies bought for his chambers, armor and weapons for himself and his castles, out-and-out grants of money for personal use; new private chambers for Hugh within the royal castle at Winchester. A great new warship built for the king’s fleet was named La Despenser. “Confident of the royal favour,” the Vita Edwardi Secundi says, “Despenser did everything at his own discretion, snatched at everything, did not bow to the authority of anyone whomsoever.”10

Despenser was even more odious to the barons of England than Piers Gaveston had been, but their efforts to convince Edward to permanently banish him were fruitless. Finally, Despenser began to meddle in Edward’s marriage; Jean Froissart writes that he “stirred up such discord between the King and Queen that the King refused either to receive the Queen or to visit her,” and the Chronicle of Lanercost suggests that Hugh was actively trying to obtain a divorce between king and queen.11

Isabella, eleven years younger than her husband, had already been humiliated by his partiality for Gaveston. Fed up with playing a distant third, she left London and went to Paris, taking refuge with her brother, the newly crowned Charles IV of France.

Over the next three years, a complicated cat-and-mouse game unfolded, with Edward the mouse, Isabella the cat, and Charles the animal trainer, directing from behind the scenes. With Isabella in Paris, French armies sent by Charles IV invaded the English-held Duchy of Guienne. Isabella then returned to London, offering to help Edward make peace with her brother. In 1325, she visited Paris for a second time; as far as Edward knew, acting as his ambassador; in reality, to put into motion a plan to unseat her husband and give his throne to her son, the young Prince of Wales.

In Paris, she gathered around her a powerful ring of English exiles, some of them driven out of the country by Hugh Despenser, others who had fallen out with the king. Among them were the king’s own brother, Edmund of Kent, and the exiled English baron Roger Mortimer, who had been imprisoned by the king in 1321, after leading an armed attempt to drive Hugh Despenser out of London. Mortimer had managed to escape from the Tower of London and had fled to France; and, meeting in Paris, he and the queen became lovers.12

By the end of 1325, the king had twigged that all was not well in Paris. “[T]he Queen crossed to France to make peace,” he told Parliament, on December 5. “And on her departure, she did not seem to anyone to be offended. . . . But now someone has changed her attitude. Someone has primed her with inventions.”13

Isabella, barely thirty, married to a man who had stopped sharing her bed years before, did not need priming. With Mortimer beside her, and her brother’s treasury at her disposal, she gathered an army; English barons agreed to join her cause, should she arrive with reinforcements. In September of 1326, she set sail for England with a small hired army: men from Flanders, Germany, and Bohemia, with a handful of English expatriates rounding out the numbers.

Their conquest of England was almost instant. “They gained England without striking a blow,” says the contemporary account of Sir Thomas Gray, “for all the lords and commons rose for them against the King.” Edward II and Hugh Despenser tried to escape together down the river Wye, but their boat was driven ashore and both men were taken prisoner.14

Edward was imprisoned in Berkeley Castle. Parliament reassembled and deposed the king “by their common assent,” renouncing their homage and instead swearing loyalty to Edward III. He was crowned in 1327, aged fourteen, ruling under the regency of his mother Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer.

Hugh Despenser (“not loved in those parts,” says Froissart) was condemned by “the unanimous verdict of the barons and knights to suffer the following punishment”:

First, he was dragged . . . through all the streets of Hereford, to the sound of horns and trumpets, until he reached the main square of the town. . . . There he was tied to a long ladder, so that everyone could see him. A big fire had been lit in the square. When he had been tied up, his member and his testicles were first cut off, because he was a heretic and a sodomite, even, it was said, with the King, and . . . when his private parts had been cut off they were thrown into the fire to burn, and afterwards his heart was torn from his body and thrown into the fire. . . . [H]is head was struck off and sent to the city of London. His body was divided into four quarters, which were sent to the four principal cities of England after London.15

What happened to Edward II is, oddly, a mystery. Late in September, the king’s jailers announced that he had died suddenly, of “natural cause.” The body was immediately embalmed, and although various knights and priests were invited to view it from a distance, the “friends and kin” of the dead king were kept away.16

For centuries, most chroniclers assumed that Roger Mortimer had ordered the king suffocated in his cell (“He died, in what manner was not known, but God knoweth it,” writes Sir Thomas Gray). But in 1878, a letter written by the fourteenth-century bishop Manuele de Fieschi was uncovered in Church archives at Montpellier, France. Fieschi had met Edward II himself, the letter said; the king had escaped from Berkeley Castle by murdering a guard and had gone first to Ireland, and ultimately to Italy.17

THE FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD Edward III was now ruler of England, which meant that, for the next four years, Isabella and Roger Mortimer were the de facto king and queen. Under the direction of his mother and her lover, Edward III made peace with Charles IV of France by paying over fifty thousand sterling marks to buy back his own Duchy of Guienne, a treaty that nicely solved Charles’s immediate money problems. In the first year of his reign, he also made peace with Robert the Bruce: the Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton brought an end to the First War for Scottish Independence by recognizing Robert as king of Scotland.

In the second year, Isabella and Roger Mortimer tried to put young Edward on the throne of France as well. Philip IV’s sons turned out to be a short-lived lot; Louis had reigned for eighteen months, Philip V for eight, and Charles IV ruled only four years before dying, aged thirty. He had no son, and Isabella and Mortimer suggested that Edward III was the logical choice to fill the empty throne. The Salic Law, they argued, only prevented women from inheriting the throne; it did not prevent inheritance through the female line, as long as the heir himself was male. As Isabella’s son, Edward was the closest living male relative of the French royal house.

66.1 Edward III and the Valois

An English king would have needed a much stronger argument (and more swords) to convince the French barons to recognize him, and Edward’s bid for the throne failed. Instead, the French nobility chose to recognize Philip of Valois, the Count of Anjou and first cousin of the three dead kings. He was crowned in 1328, the first king of the Valois line; the direct line of Hugh Capet, rulers of France for 340 years, had ended.

66.1 Genealogy of Philip VI and Edward III.

The following year, the new Philip VI of France summoned Edward III to come and do homage for the county of Guienne. Isabella decided that it would be politic for her son to agree, and so the seventeen-year-old king of England meekly walked through the ritual of submission and loyalty: placing his hands underneath the hands of the French king, promising to remain his liege man. But the obeisance was Edward’s last act of obedience. He was nearly of age, and fed up with his regents. “The King began to grow in body and mind,” Gray notes, “which was not agreeable to the authority of the Queen his mother.”18

In the following year, 1330, the young king turned eighteen. Immediately he dissolved the regency, in the most direct way possible: he sent two of his younger friends with a party of soldiers to arrest Mortimer and his mother in the middle of the night.

Mortimer suffered the same fate as Hugh Despenser. After a quick trial, he was drawn and quartered, “upon a charge of having been party to the death of the King, Edward II.” Isabella was placed under polite house arrest; her son provided her with comfortable rooms, an income, and ladies in waiting, but ordered her never to go out or show herself in public again.19

Chapter Sixty-Seven

The Southern and Northern Courts

Between 1318 and 1339,

the Kamakura shogunate falls,

the Ashikaga shogunate rises,

and the Chrysanthemum Throne divides

THE MONGOL INVASION OF JAPAN had failed, twice. The island still lay safe off the coast, a protective wall of water between the samurai and the Mongol soldiers of the Yuan dynasty.

But Japan’s convoluted, two-court arrangement was fragile; and in the aftershocks of the Mongol attacks, it shivered apart.

At the peak of the Mongol threat, the imperial court in Kyoto had divided over the succession to the Chrysanthemum Throne. A complicated argument between two brothers—one the oldest son of the emperor, the other his favorite—eventually resolved itself into an arrangement where the sons and grandsons of the older brother (the senior line) and the descendants of the younger alternated on the throne.

Like most compromises, this one made everyone unhappy. The two royal families grew increasingly hostile to each other. The junior line followed Confucianism, the senior Buddhism; the junior line patronized Chinese-style scholarship, the senior preferred Japanese literature written in traditional Japanese script. Within the clans, individual families quarreled over the right to put the next emperor on the Chrysanthemum Throne.1

Meanwhile, the military government headquartered at Kamakura, run by a regent on behalf of the figurehead shogun, grew slowly more tyrannical. After the Mongols were driven back, the shikken Hojo Tokimune and his successors began to act more and more autocratically: granting government positions to friends and allies, distributing land to loyalists, electing more and more Hojo clan members to be the military governors (the shugo) who ran the provinces farther away from Kyoto and Kamakura.2

As the grip of the Hojo fist tightened, lawlessness ballooned. Highwaymen flourished. Gangs of outlaws called akuto (“evil bands”) roamed across the countryside. Pirate fleets haunted the ports and shores. To each problem, the Hojo answered with more force, more regulation, and more punishment. Additional warriors were sent to each shugo, tasked specifically with hunting down outlaws. All ships were forced to register and to show the name of the owner and the port of registration at all times. Muggings on land and robbery at sea, once punishable with exile, were now capital offenses. Stealing crops before harvest, once a civil matter, now became a crime.3

And yet the disorder grew worse and worse. Piracy moved west, with fleets of ships sacking, stealing, and kidnapping along the coasts of China and Goryeo. The hordes of the akuto increased year by year, until the bands were often a hundred strong, armed with swords and bamboo spears, robbing villages and blocking roadways. “They pay no attention to the laws of the bakafu [the Kamakura shogunate], and the attempts of the shugo to suppress them have borne no fruit,” writes a fourteenth-century priest from Harima. “In this way, their numbers have swelled with each passing day.” Reports from the outlying provinces complained of night raids and roadside murders, burned farms and stolen crops, temples closed because the monks were too afraid to stay.4

IN 1318, THE EMPEROR HANAZONO ABDICATED. He was a son of the senior line, and so his cousin Go-Daigo, who belonged to the junior branch, was crowned the next emperor.

But his enthronement came with conditions. The two years before Hanazono’s abdication had been taken up with an increasingly bitter argument between the families. Although Go-Daigo was clearly next in line, most of the junior branch preferred his nephew, Kuniyoshi; but the principle of alternating succession meant that, after Go-Daigo, the crown would have to pass to the other clan, cutting Kuniyoshi out completely.

To prevent a total breakdown at Kyoto, the shikken in Kamakura ordered a compromise. Go-Daigo would be coronated, but none of his sons would be eligible for the title of crown prince; Kuniyoshi would follow him, but after that, the crown would revert to the senior line. And, to give more candidates a shot at the throne, all emperors would have to abdicate after ten years of rule.5

Go-Daigo was only thirty-one. Forced to swear away not only his own future as emperor but that of his sons as well, he began to plot to bring the Kamakura shogunate down.

His first step was to get more power back into his own hands. The Cloistered Emperor, theoretically more powerful than the sitting emperor, was his own father Go-Uda (thanks to rapid abdications, there were three living retired emperors, and Go-Uda was the oldest). But Go-Uda was more inclined to piety than to administration. “I passed four years touching the dust of the capital,” he later wrote, of his brief stint as Cloistered Emperor. “I lost my bonds with the propagation of [Buddhist] esoteric teachings . . . my bonds and my duties pulled me this way and that. Very strongly, thoughts of retirement welled up inside me.” Go-Daigo took advantage of his father’s natural inclinations; during the fourth year of his rule, he talked Go-Uda into giving up the traditional lawmaking powers held by the Cloistered Emperor and returning them to the throne.6

Over the next years, Go-Daigo ruled directly: a strange state of affairs, made bearable to the rival family only by his apparent intention to abide by the shikken’s ruling and abdicate after ten years. But in 1326, the designated Crown Prince, Kuniyoshi, fell suddenly ill and died within two weeks. “The distraught members of his household felt as though a light had gone out,” says the poetic chronicle The Clear Mirror, and soon the darkness of civil war spread across Japan. Go-Daigo suggested that, since the original arrangement had clearly designated another member of the junior line as his successor, one of his own sons should now become Crown Prince. The senior branch argued for the immediate reversion of the title to the senior line. The quarrel dragged on; without a clear successor, Go-Daigo remained on the throne past his ten-year expiration date. At the same time, he was developing a strong alliance with the notorious warrior monks on Mount Hiei; he sent two of his sons to study there, one becoming a priest, the other an abbot.7

The military government at Kamakura was slow to intervene this time. The young shikken, Hojo Takatoki, had been appointed in 1311 at the age of eight; his chief minister and competent grandmother had handled the earlier succession crisis, but now Takatoki had taken power in his own right and had turned out to be easily distracted from matters of state. The fourteenth-century chronicle Taiheiki says that he had developed a passion for dog fighting and was even willing to accept dogs in lieu of taxes owed. Dogfights were staged twelve days out of every month, and the best dogs were

fed on fish and fowl, kept in kennels having gold and silver ornaments, and carried in palanquins to take the air. When these distinguished animals were borne along the public thoroughfares, people . . . had to dismount and kneel in obeisance. . . . Thus, the city of Kamakura presented the curious spectacle of a town filled with well-fed dogs, clothed in tinsel and brocades and totaling from four to five thousand.8

Preoccupied with his entertainments, Hojo Takatoki paid little attention to the rumblings in Kyoto.

By 1331, Go-Daigo’s intentions of staying on the throne indefinitely had become perfectly clear to the senior line. Clan members sent an urgent and unambiguous message to Kamakura: “Most dangerous of late are the sovereign’s rebellious plottings. Let the military make inquiry quickly, lest disorder afflict the realm.” On advice of his councillors, Takatoki sent an army towards the imperial capital; Go-Daigo answered him with a call for open rebellion against the corrupt and weakened shikken.9

Samurai flocked to the new war. Some fought in support of the emperor, others in support of the Hojo shikken, and still others for themselves, hoping to seize a piece of the political pie. The most notorious of these samurai was Ashikaga Takauji; and in the course of the war, he rotated between all three loyalties.

The Ashikaga clan, an offshoot of the once-powerful Minamoto, hailed from the northeastern province of Shimotsuke, distant enough from both shogun and emperor to feel no overwhelming loyalty towards either. In the first six months of fighting, Ashikaga Takauji joined the forces of the shogunate, which quickly turned out to be the winning side; the Kamakura army drove Go-Daigo and his samurai into the mountains near Kyoto and trapped them there, and Go-Daigo was forced to surrender with embarrassing speed. He was taken back to Kyoto and housed in a shack behind the palace, where he was forced to listen to the joyous coronation of a prince from the senior line as the new emperor. He was then escorted under guard to Yasuki Harbor, west of the capital, and was taken by ship to desolate Oki Island: “almost devoid of human habitation,” says The Clear Mirror, “only distant structures marked a spot where fisherfolk boiled water for salt.” Here he lived for two years in makeshift housing, while the new Emperor Kogon ruled in Kyoto and Hojo Takatoki went back to his dogfights in Kamakura.10

But the shikken’s incompetence won him no new friends, and the Emperor Kogon was widely regarded as his puppet; he had not even been properly coronated, since Go-Daigo had refused to hand over the imperial scepter and regalia to his rival. From Oki, Go-Daigo was able to quietly assemble a network of supporters—samurai, fishermen, and pirates—who wanted to be rid of Hojo Takatoki’s rule. In the winter of 1333, a small band of pirates and fishermen helped Go-Daigo escape from his island. He landed on the shores of Hoki Province and found an army there already assembled, waiting for his leadership.11

At the news, Hojo Takatoki dispatched his own army from Kamakura, led by Ashikaga Takauji and another commander. Nitta Yoshisada, also a descendant of the Minamoto clan. But Ashikaga Takauji felt that the shikken had been slow in rewarding his loyalty; contemplating a change in allegiance, he had been carrying on a secret correspondence with Go-Daigo for the last year. Once out of Kamakura, he swapped sides, followed closely by Nitta Yoshisada and most of the army. Together, the men led a two-pronged attack against Hojo power; Ashikaga Takauji took part of the force into Kyoto and drove out the Hojo officials there, while Nitta Yoshisada led the rest directly against Kamakura.12

Both attacks succeeded. Emperor Kogon and the military governor of Kyoto fled together to the east but were quickly overtaken; the governor was killed on the spot, Kogon brought back to Kyoto and imprisoned. Nitta Yoshisada and his men fought a five-day battle at Kamakura against the Hojo supporters. Driven steadily back, facing almost certain defeat, the Hojo generals and officials began to commit suicide, one after another. On July 5, 1333, Hojo Takatoki retreated with three hundred supporters to the Kamakura temple where his ancestors were buried. “Kill yourselves quickly!” he shouted to them. “I’ll go first to set the example!” He swigged down a bowl of wine, passed it to his closest companion, and then “plunged his dagger into his left side, cut a long gash extending all the way to his right flank, pulled out his guts, and fell prostrate.” Nitta Yoshisada’s men were already setting fire to the temple, and Takatoki’s men followed him; the Taiheiki says that nearly eight hundred men killed themselves on that single day.13

Go-Daigo returned to Kyoto, claiming that he had never actually abdicated and ignoring Kogon’s brief stint on the throne entirely. In the next three years, known as the Kemmu Restoration, he attempted to take back direct rule of the country, as though the intervening exile had never happened. But Ashikaga Takauji was simultaneously angling for the vacant position of shikken. He had already set himself up in the emptied shogunate offices of Kyoto, and from there he appointed military governors just as the Hojo shikken had done. In 1335, he moved himself to Kamakura and began to give out grants of land.

He still had not claimed for himself the title of either shikken or shogun. But Go-Daigo had intended to free himself from the dictates of the shogunate, not simply replace one voice of authority with another. While Takauji was in Kyoto, he had avoided an outright confrontation. Now that his onetime ally was in Kamakura, the emperor declared him an “enemy of the throne.” Again, war was in the open.14

Ashikaga Takauji’s men marched towards Kyoto. The emperor’s forces, led by the loyal Nitta Yoshisada, met them in the summer of 1336 on the banks of the Minato river. Once more, the climactic battle took place in the July heat. After six hours of violent fighting, Nitta Yoshisada ordered a strategic retreat of one wing; this turned out to be a ghastly mistake that divided the emperor’s army and left it vulnerable. Thousands of imperial soldiers died.15

Go-Daigo fled south into the mountains with his remaining loyalists and established a new imperial capital there, at Yoshino. Takauji claimed Kyoto for himself, building military headquarters in the section of the city called Muromachi. He did not attempt to declare himself emperor; the connection of the imperial right to rule with the bloodline of the royal family was impossible to break. Instead, he declared Kogon’s younger brother Yutahito to be the new emperor.16

In 1338, finally in complete control of Kyoto, Ashikaga Takauji named himself shogun of Japan. Now, instead of a shogunate and a shikken at Kamakura and an imperial capital at Kyoto, Japan had two imperial capitals, two emperors, two courts, one shogun, and no shikken. The Kamakura Shogunate had ended; the Ashikaga Shogunate, which would survive for more than two hundred years, had begun.*

67.1 The Southern and Northern Courts

But the southern court held out. Go-Daigo died in Yoshino in 1339, aged fifty, but his sons continued to resist from the mountains. The beginning of the Ashikaga Shogunate was also the start of the Nambokucho era: the age of the “Southern and Northern Courts,” a royal schism that would last for sixty years. The ongoing spat between the junior and senior imperial lines had turned into an open breach; the junior line ruled in the south, the senior in the north.17

The divided sovereignty turned Japan into a series of military zones. Unlike the Kamakura shogunate, the Ashikaga shogunate never claimed the loyalty of most of the warrior class; it had a much smaller base of samurai support. And while the Kamakura shogunate had attempted to keep peace between the junior and senior royal branches, the Ashikaga had thrown its fortunes in with the senior line and turned against the junior. Before long, the Ashikaga could claim to be in power only over Kyoto and the lands nearby. Governors of the more distant provinces took control for themselves. Nowhere was there peace; nowhere, order.18

“From the time of the heavenly founder,” wrote the political theorist Kitabatake Chikafusa, from his place at the Southern Court, “there has been no disruption in dynastic succession in Japan.”

Our country has been ruled without interruption by the sovereigns of a single dynastic line. . . . In our country alone, the imperial succession has followed in an unbroken line from the time when heaven and earth were divided until the present age. . . . This is entirely the result of the immutable mandate of Amaterasu, and is the reason why Japan differs from all other countries. The way of the gods is not readily revealed. Yet if the divine basis of things is not understood, such ignorance will surely give rise to disorder.19

The rule of the divine imperial line was entwined with the origin, the ancient history, the very identity of Japan. A strongman could seize Kyoto, but military rule would always bring chaos.

*The Ashikaga Shogunate is also known as the Muromachi bakafu, after the district where its headquarters were located.

Chapter Sixty-Eight

Rebellions

Between 1320 and 1351,

the sultanate of Delhi shrinks

as both Muslim and Hindu subjects rebel

IN DELHI, yet another dynasty had taken the sultanate. Ghiyas-ud-Din, onetime governor in the Punjab, had rescued it from the hands of the Hindu Khusru Khan, and reestablished Islamic practice; his dynasty, the Tughluq, was the third Turkish dynasty to rule in Delhi.

The king of the south Indian kingdom of the Kakatiya, Pratapa Rudra, took the change in dynasty as an opportunity to fight back.

He had been struggling against Delhi for a decade. In 1310, the Delhi general Malik Kafur, serving ‘Ala’-ud-Din, had laid siege to Warangal for a month, forcing Pratapa Rudra to agree to a hefty annual tribute. “Reinstate him under [our] sovereignty,” Malik Kafur had instructed, “and restore his dominion; you should give him a robe studded with jewels and promise him a parasol on my behalf with due regards.” Both the robe and the parasol were symbols that Pratapa Rudra now ruled “under the shadow” of the Delhi sultan. Pratapa Rudra accepted both, but he continued to act with independence, and was often slow to send the proper tribute to Delhi. He also reinforced the walls of Warangal, building bastions all along the stone walls that surrounded the city’s outer edge.1

During the general disorder of Khusru Khan’s reign, Pratapa Rudra had decided not to send the tribute at all. But once Ghiyas-ud-Din had put the sultanate’s affairs back into order, he noticed the omission. In 1321, the year after his coronation, he sent his oldest son and chief general, Ulugh Khan, south to extract the required elephants and treasure from the king at Warangal.

The first siege failed; Warangal was successfully blockaded, but before the city could surrender, false news of Ghiyas-ud-Din’s death arrived from Delhi, and his son retreated. As he prepared to leave, a second report arrived: the sultan was well and healthy.2

Ulugh Khan laid siege to the city for a second time. It was already starving and weakened, and this time surrendered within a few days. Ulugh Khan, under instructions from Delhi, laid the city waste. He allowed his men (63,000 strong, according to one inscription) to sack Warangal, destroyed the great temple that housed the Hindu deities to whom Pratapa Rudra paid homage, ordered the city renamed Sultanpur, and began to build a huge mosque next to the wrecked Hindu temple. Pratapa Rudra, taken prisoner, was sent to Delhi in chains. He died on the way. Two inscriptions from slightly later tell us that he perished by his own wish, on the banks of the Narmada; with his kingdom wiped from the map and his city gone, the last Kakatiya king had thrown himself into the river.3

While Ulugh Khan was putting down the southern rebellion, Ghiyas-ud-Din himself was marching east against the Sultanate of Bengal, ruled by Bughra Khan’s grandson. The ruler “made some resistance,” remarks Barani, but the reconquest of Bengal happened with remarkable ease; Bughra Khan’s grandson was sent to Delhi with a rope around his neck, and the sultan of Delhi turned to start home.

On his way back to Delhi, he halted six miles southeast at Afghanapur to show himself to the residents. He was watching an elephant parade from a knocked-together royal pavilion, when it collapsed on top of him. He had been sultan for only five years.4

Ulugh Khan, still on his way back from Warangal, immediately had himself crowned on the road. He arrived at Delhi forty days later and took control of the city, under the royal name Muhammad bin Tughluq.

He had inherited the sultanate at the height of its expansion, and he proved to be an energetic and ambitious ruler. But he was also short-tempered, inclined to cruelty, and apt to act without enough forethought: “The Sultan planned in his own heart three or four projects by which the whole of the habitable world was to be brought under [his] rule,” writes Barani, “but he never talked over these projects with any of his counsellors and friends. Whatever he conceived he considered to be good, but in promulgating and enforcing his schemes, he lost his hold upon the territories he possessed, disgusted his people and emptied his treasury. . . . Every one of them that was enforced brought about wrong and mischief.”5

The first of these disastrous projects was a tax increase that infuriated the rich and ruined the poor. The second was a decision to move the capital city seven hundred miles south, to the city of Devagiri, in an effort to be closer to the new southern expanses of the empire; below the Krishna river, only the Hoysala had continued to resist the sultanate. His courtiers and officers were less than thrilled, and a good number of them refused to move there. Muhammad was not a man to be crossed. He chose a cross section of the Indian elite and forced them to transplant their families to his new capital, which he renamed Daulatabad.6

The move was calamitous. He had not prepared Daulatabad to receive the number of new residents who were now settled there, and water ran short. Famine and thirst began to kill the new citizens: “All around Daulatabad . . . there sprung up graveyards,” Barani says.7

In 1330, Muhammad gave up and moved back to Delhi. But the long and grueling journey across the Deccan and the Vindhya mountain range killed thousands more. Three years later, when the traveler Ibn Battuta entered Delhi (his pilgrimage to Mecca had turned into a round-the-world journey), he saw empty streets and an abandoned marketplace: “It was almost a desert,” he writes. “Its buildings were very few; in other respects it was quite empty, its houses having been forsaken. . . . The greatest city in the world had the fewest inhabitants.”8

More horrendous decisions followed. An attempt to change the currency of the entire empire over to copper coins failed horribly when private mints sprang up throughout India, churning out money that soon sank into complete worthlessness. A seven-year drought and accompanying famine—over three times as long as the Great Famine of Europe—settled over the subcontinent. Thousands died, but Muhammad bin Tughluq put no aid programs into effect; there was no lowering of taxes, no handouts of stored food. Expensive and unproductive campaigns into Khorasan made him not only poorer, but more and more unpopular. “The ill feeling among his subjects gave rise to outbreaks and revolts,” Barani tells us, “. . . and the minds of all men, high and low, were alienated from their ruler.”9

The map of India began to rearrange itself.

In 1335, the governor Ahsan Shah, struggling alone with his hungry subjects, broke away and announced himself the ruler of the Sultanate of Madura, an independent Muslim realm. The following year, the Kakatiya survivors Harahara and Bukka, brothers who had fled from the sack of Warangal, declared their own freedom from Delhi dominance at Vijayanagara and established themselves around the Tungabhadra river. Filled with fury and disgust at the violent destruction, joined by other Hindu warriors driven south by Delhi’s expansion, they now set themselves to reestablish the Hindu kingdom in the south.

Shortly after, the native Hindus who had remained in Warangal rebelled against the Delhi occupiers as well. The Hindu warrior Kapaya Nayaka drove them out and took Warangal for himself, calling himself Sultan of the Andhra Country.10

More Muslim sultanates followed: rebels against Muhammad, not against Islam. A Delhi officer named Malik Haji Ilyas seized the Bengali city of Lakhnawati, captured Gaur, and made himself Sultan Shams-ud-Din, founder of the Ilyas Shahi dynasty of Bengal. “The second Alexander,” he called himself on his own coins, “the right hand of the caliphate, the defender of the Commander of the Faithful.” In Daulatabad, the Muslim officer Hasan Gangu declared himself sultan of the Deccan in 1347. He had worked his way up from foot soldier in the Delhi army to the position of commander, and now used his authority to break away from his ruler. He took the sultanate title Ala-ud-Din Bahman; his sultanate, the Bahmani, would rule there for over a century.11

68.1 New Sultanates in India

The sheer scope of the calamity overwhelmed Muhammad. His troops were spread thin; when he did win a victory, he attempted to frighten the remaining rebels into submission with increasingly severe punishments of the captured. The more violent his reprisals, the worse the revolts became. Reproved by his advisors, the sultan snapped, “My remedy for rebels, insurgents, opponents and disaffected people is the sword. . . . The more the people resist, the more I inflict chastisement.”12

In 1351, Muhammad bin Tughluq was fighting in the north, near the Indus, when he began to suffer from fever and stomach pains. Barani chalks this up to a piece of bad fish, but it was dysentery, once again bringing a great war leader low. On March 20, 1351, the second Tughluq sultan died on the banks of the Indus.

The regiments that were with him fled, making their way back towards Delhi without order or plan. On the way, they were robbed by bandits; without food and supplies, the women and children who had accompanied the expedition began to die. Desperate, the remaining officers gathered together and begged Tughluq’s nephew Firoz Shah, who had accompanied the expedition, to become the next sultan: “For God’s sake,” they said, “save these wretched people, ascend the throne, and deliver us and many thousand other miserable men.”13

Firoz Shah refused. He did not want to be sultan; in fact, he was planning to make the hajj, and did not intend to remain long in Delhi. Over his objections, they declared him their ruler.

His first task was to get them home; and so he organized the stragglers into new regiments and turned them to attack the bandits. Under his guidance, they were victorious, and the robbers fled: “This was the first victory of the reign of Sultan Firoz,” writes his biographer Shams-i Siraj, “and he proceeded to Delhi among general rejoicings and acclamations.”14

One of his earliest acts was to pay damages to the heirs of anyone put to death unjustly by Muhammad bin Tughluq: “Those who themselves had been deprived of a limb, nose, eye, hand, or foot . . . [were] appeased with gifts,” the new sultan himself records. He repealed a whole raft of taxes, ordered new hospitals and shelters built for the poor, restored confiscated land, pensioned off or discharged government officials who had taken part in Tughluq’s repressive regime.15

The disintegration of the sultanate slowed. The borders, wildly fluctuating, began to stabilize. The flaking away of the conquered territories ground to a halt. But the sultan was now merely one ruler, and in the cluttered landscape, the kingdoms of Vijayanagara and Bahmani were already spreading into empires.

Chapter Sixty-Nine

Naming the Renaissance

Between 1322 and 1341,

Louis of Bavaria tries to get back the old title of Holy Roman Emperor,

the old certainties of the Church are questioned,

and a new story of the past emerges in Rome

FOR EIGHT YEARS, Louis of Bavaria and Frederick of Hapsburg had been quarreling over the German crown. Both had been named king, in 1314, by two separate groups of electors; both had the support of a handful of powerful German dukes.

And both were more or less broke. Neither man could afford to launch an actual campaign, and the only real battle of the mostly cold war came in 1322, when Louis’s men met Frederick and his supporters in person at Mühldorf, in Bavaria. Several hours of fighting ended when Frederick was taken prisoner. Afterwards, Louis ordered eggs served to the poverty-stricken Bavarian army for dinner; it was the most lavish celebration he could afford. (He decreed that two eggs should go to the knight who had fought hardest in the battle, one Siegfried Schweppermann, who later put an egg on his family crest to mark the honor.)1

Louis and Frederick were cousins, and in fact had spent part of their adolescence living in the same house; Louis treated his rival well, confining him in relative comfort at the Castle of Trausnitz.

He now began to maneuver towards his ultimate goal: the title of Holy Roman Emperor.

This required him to get control of the prickly and independent-minded north Italians, which he hoped to do by presenting himself as a friend and ally. So, in 1323, Louis appointed an “imperial vicar,” the Count of Märstetten, and sent him into Italy to woo the Lombard cities of Milan and Ferrara. From his papal palace at Avignon, John XXII objected. In the absence of a crowned emperor, he insisted, the pope was the protector of the empire and alone had the right to appoint a “vicar” over Italy. Louis refused to retreat from Italy; and on July 17, 1324, John XXII excommunicated the German king.2

Perhaps Louis had not expected the pope-in-exile to defend his rights in Italy with such vigor; in any case, the excommunication alarmed him. He still did not have unanimous support within Germany. Some of the electors were actively hoping to replace him, and even those who were on his side were now threatened with excommunication themselves, should they remain allies of a king who was outside the boundaries of the Christian church.

In an effort to shore up his support within Germany without yielding to the demands of John XXII, Louis went to see Frederick the Handsome, still jailed at Trausnitz, and offered to recognize him as joint king (Mitkönig). His proposal was carefully detailed: on odd days, his name would appear on state documents, on even days, Frederick’s; they would both receive homage of vassals to the German crown; if one set out for Italy, the other would remain in Germany; Frederick’s name would appear on Louis’s seal, Louis’s become part of Frederick’s.3

Frederick agreed to this elaborate and impractical division of powers (after all, his alternative was an indefinite stay in the Trausnitz dungeon). But now the German electors dug in their heels. They had the right to choose the king of Germany, and none of them had voted for both men. The compromise would savagely undercut their authority.4

John XXII also refused to recognize any claim of Frederick’s to the throne, condemning him for his willingness to cooperate with the excommunicated Louis. But John XXII was in serious danger of losing his moral high ground. It was increasingly obvious, even to Louis’s enemies, that the pope’s decrees were aimed at the eventual declaration of his patron, the king of France, as Holy Roman Emperor. The Avignon papacy had become no more than the tool of the French crown; and John’s decrees drove the last nail into the coffin of the papal monarchy, that theory placing all popes above any law.

“To comply with these teachings [of John XXII] . . . is none other than to allow the root of all governments to be cut up,” wrote the Italian scholar Marsilius of Padua, in his 1324 treatise Defensor Pacis. “He . . . harbors no other design than to acquire for himself the ability to overthrow, at his own pleasure, the power of all governments, and hence to cast them into slavery to himself.” But Defensor Pacis went far, far beyond a simple condemnation of John XXII. Just a few years earlier, the exiled poet Dante Alighieri had published a sharp rejection of the pope’s right to confer the title of Holy Roman Emperor; arguing from scripture, from history, and from reason, Dante insisted that the Church had never been given authority over any earthly kingdom, and so could not bestow on any man a power that it did not own.

Before Pilate, Christ disclaimed any ruling power of a temporal kind, saying, “My kingdom is not of this world.” . . . This must not be understood to imply that Christ, who is God, is not Lord of the temporal kingdom . . . but rather to mean that, as exemplar of the Church, He had not charge of this kingdom.5

Marsilius, who had been serving as Louis of Bavaria’s personal physician, agreed with Dante; Christ “did not come into the world to reign with temporal government or dominion,” and the bishops of Rome had claimed this power through a “perverted inclination” for power. But then he went even further. The pope was not the head of the empire; neither was he the head of the Church itself. “He is no more the vicar of God than is any other bishop, as we have often said and shown before,” Marsilius concluded.6

His argument was detailed and complex, but hinged on one all-important assertion: The “true church” is not centered at Rome, made up of those whom the pope recognizes as Christians; the true church is made up of all who worship Christ, all over the world, in any place or community. This community—the ecclesia, the “invisible church”—is spiritual, not earthly. It is not bound by time or place, and so it cannot have an earthly, time-bound ruler. Christ, not Peter, is the Rock upon whom the church is built; it has no human master.7

Within a decade of each other, Dante and Marsilius had given written shape and an intellectual foundation to the impulse that had pushed the Waldensians and Cathars and Pastoureaux to reject both priests and pope. It was a paradigm-shattering, society-altering argument.

John XXII, occupied with his political aspirations, did not immediately take notice. But Louis of Bavaria did. Armed with Marsilius’s arguments, depending on the goodwill of the Italians who had benefited from the visit of his imperial vicar, he marched into Italy to be crowned emperor. On Whitsunday of 1327, he had himself crowned king of Italy at Milan, with the Iron Crown of the Lombards; and on January 17, 1328, he was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by two bishops, aided by the Italian nobleman Sciarra Colonna (a fast enemy of John XXII).

Before he became aware of the usurpation of his role, John XXII had been preaching a crusade against Louis. When he heard of the coronation, he declared it void on March 31; a month later, Louis in his turn declared the pope deposed. In his place, Louis installed the Franciscan priest Pietro Rainalducci in St. Peter’s Basilica, under the papal name of Nicholas V.8

But before long, Louis found himself growing unpopular. His underpaid German army was looting and stealing in order to support itself; he forced Milan and the surrounding cities to hand over a total of 200,000 florins (nearly three-quarters of a ton of gold, all told) to help pay for his proposed reunification of the empire; and he unwisely threatened priests who remained loyal to John XXII with execution. Before long, he decided that it would be wiser to leave Rome.9

69.1 Lands Claimed by Louis of Bavaria

Nicholas V fled the city, aware that in his patron’s absence, the goodwill of the people of Rome would not give him claim over the Christian church in Italy, let alone the world. Instead, he made his way to Avignon and asked John XXII for absolution. John XXII granted it, and Nicholas V faded gratefully into obscurity.

So far, honors in the struggle between pope and emperor were about even. But John XXII now made a theological misstep. In Avignon, on November 1, 1331, he preached a sermon giving a new interpretation of the Beatific Vision, the direct vision of God given to the righteous dead, who were traditionally thought of as being in the presence of God. Instead, the pope taught, they were in an intermediate state; protected by Christ, free from human woes, but still not in the direct presence of God. Not until the Last Judgment, the setting of all things right, would the faithful actually see God.10

The sermon was preached on All Saints’ Day, when the church celebrated those who had finished the race of life and now lived on the other shore. To suggest that those faithful dead were still waiting, blocked from the presence of God, was more than a theological nicety. For fourteenth-century Christians, whose dead were numerous and close, who lived in the constant knowledge that they too faced the possibility of death from every accidental splinter, every sore throat, every minor burn, it was a fraught and painful message.

It took some time for the controversy over this sermon to spread, but by 1333 John XXII was defending himself against accusations of heresy from his cardinals. Louis IV seized on this theological problem and announced that he intended to call a council of his own, to make a formal accusation of heresy against the pope.

John XXII, by now nearly eighty-five, crumbled. He was ill and tired of fighting. On December 3, 1334, he retracted his teaching about the Beatific Vision, acknowledging that he had made a mistake. And on the next day, December 4, he died in Avignon.

His successor, Benedict XII, was elected with remarkable speed, thanks to the intervention of Philip VI of France. Louis offered to meet with the new pope in order to try to work out a compromise; but Philip VI demanded that a peace treaty with France be part of any German agreement with the Church, and this Louis refused to do. He remained an excommunicate Holy Roman Emperor; and the pope remained in Avignon, a servant of the French king.11

ROME, POPE-LESS AND EMPEROR-LESS, was in its usual chaotic and simmering state when the Italian poet Petrarch was crowned in Rome as Poet Laureate: the first time this honor had been carried out since ancient times.

Petrarch had been lobbying for the title, in a genteel and polished way, for some time. His father had been driven from Florence at about the same time as Dante; Petrarch, born afterwards, had been working in Avignon for years, writing a massive epic about the Roman general Scipio Africanus, traveling as the impulse struck him, and occasionally carrying out discreet diplomatic missions for the Avignon popes.

The Roman Senate, correctly interpreting Petrarch’s various oblique remarks as a request for the crown, invited the poet to Rome for his coronation. He chose Easter Sunday, April 18, 1341, as the day for the ceremony, and treated the assembled Romans and senators to an oration promising that the revival of the Poet Laureate position would help to bring about a new age in Rome. “I am moved also by the hope that, if God wills,” he told them, “I may renew in the now aged Republic a beauteous custom of its flourishing youth. . . . Boldly, therefore, perhaps but—to the best of my belief—with no unworthy intention, since others are holding back, I am venturing to offer myself as guide for this toilsome and dangerous path; and I trust that there may be many followers.” The path was the path of learning; the rediscovery of the truths of the past, the history and literature of Rome’s glory days. Poets and scholars, Petrarch explained, would save Italy; poets and scholars would lead the Italian cities back into peace and prosperity.12

The choice of Easter Sunday was not random. Petrarch had in mind a resurrection for his beloved Rome, a return to the days when the Roman Empire had been whole and powerful, not split between squabbling rulers and priests. Italy could recover her greatness by returning to the world of Rome before Christianity, Rome in the golden age of Cicero and Virgil, Rome between the coronation of Romulus and the rule of the emperor Titus. This, he later wrote, was “a more fortunate age,” and it was time to return to its ideals. Between that golden time and the present lay “the middle,” an era of “wretches and ignominy,” centuries of tenebrae: of darkness.13

A classical age of light and learning, followed by a Dark Age, culminating in a rebirth: a renaissance. Three epochs in history: antiquity, a Middle Age, and the present. Petrarch had laid out, for the first time, a scheme that would shape the next six hundred years of historical inquiry. And in doing so, he had inadvertently revealed that his hoped-for renaissance was already well underway. The twelfth-century rediscovery of Aristotle had begun it; the Christian church had fought it; by Easter Sunday of 1341, it had spread so far into the minds of the fourteenth-century multitude that Petrarch could talk of the Latin past with the assurance that the Roman crowd would understand exactly what he meant.

Chapter Seventy

The Cities in the Lake

Between 1325 and 1375,

the Mexica build two cities in Lake Texcoco,

choose two kings, and become the Aztecs

ON THE CENTRAL AMERICAN land bridge, drought had rearranged the map.

Refugees from the dusty northwest were wandering farther and farther south into the more fertile valleys, searching for water and tillable ground. A certain sameness appears in the traditional tales of their journeys: Each group of refugees had left its homeland because the gods told them to go. Journeying south, they came first to the ruins of the half-mythical city of Tollan, burned in the middle of the eleventh century and deserted by its people. Tollan had been a blessed city, loved by the gods; but it too had fallen. So the exiles passed through it and traveled on to the lands where they now settled.1

One of these wandering tribes, the Mexica, trudged through wrecked Tollan and arrived in the valley that now bears their name: the Valley of Mexico. They told a story of being led from their faraway home, in a place called Aztlan, by their god Huitzilopochtli. After nearly a century of wandering, they had come at last to the valley. There they built their first homes on the crest of a hill called Chapultepec.

The locals were not pleased at the intrusion, and several years of destructive fighting followed. Finally the Mexica were beaten into submission, turned into slaves and servants. The surrounding tribes divided the defeated newcomers up; the largest group of Mexica was claimed by the king of Colhuacan, the city nearest to their hill, as his vassals. The Mexica had fought fiercely against their attackers, and their new master intended to use them as front-line troops in future wars.

As he didn’t really care whether or not they survived, he settled them in a barren plain south of his city; it was called Tizapan, and it was filled with rocks and poisonous snakes. But the Mexica were tough, and they survived in their inhospitable new land. For decades, they bided their time, serving the king of Colhuacan, building their strength.2

Around 1325, they made an unmistakable gesture of defiance and independence. They told their royal master, the king Achitometl, that they wished to elevate his daughter, the princess of Colhuacan, to goddesshood, and asked that she be sent to them so that they could carry out the rituals.

The king agreed, and the princess was taken with great ceremony out to the highest point of Tizapan. An oral tradition, set down in the sixteenth century by the Spanish courtier Fernando Alvarado Tezozómoc, tells the rest of the story:

Then they slew the princess and they flayed her,

and after they flayed her, they dressed a priest in her skin.

Then they summoned her father, King Achitometl, to come and greet the goddess. Achitometl gathered up flowers and food to offer his daughter, and the Mexica led him into the darkened interior of their sacred building. He set the offerings down in front of the indistinct figure, but

he still did not see the person . . .

Then he made an offering of incense and the incense-burner blazed up,

and Achitometl saw a man in his daughter’s skin.

He was horror-struck.

He cried out, he shouted to his lords and to his vassals . . .

“They have flayed my daughter!

They shall not remain here, the fiends!

We shall slay them, we shall massacre them! The evil ones

shall be annihilated here!”3

He set his warriors against the Mexica, and they were driven away from their inhospitable home in the barrens, into the waters of Lake Texcoco. Once they were splashing in the shallows, the Colhuacan soldiers drew back. “The Colhuacans thought they had perished in the water,” says Fernando Alvarado Tezozómoc; more likely, the lake sat in a demilitarized zone, neutral ground that separated Colhuacan from the equally powerful city-states of Azcapotzalco and Texcoco. King Achitometl did not mind wiping out the helpless Mexica, but he did not wish to start a fight with his neighbors.4

Lake Texcoco was a runoff lake, filled with melted snow that had trickled down from the mountains ringing the Basin of Mexico. All that runoff brought salt and minerals with it; and because it was also a closed lake, with no channel to the sea, the salt remained in the lake when the water evaporated. It was shallow and briny, filled with saltwater reeds and dotted with islands of liquid mud, completely hostile to settlement.5

70.1 The Aztecs

Nevertheless, the Mexica were stuck in it, trapped by three major powers in the middle of a swamp. So, as they had done for the last decades, they made the best of their situation. They began to tell a story that would transform their mucky new home into a divinely chosen land.

Their god Huitzilopochtli, they declared, had told them long before that they would know they had reached the end of the wanderings when they saw a sign, an eagle sitting on a cactus (tenochtli) with a snake held in its beak: “It is there that we shall fix ourselves, it is there that we shall rule, that we shall wait, that we shall meet the various nations and that with our arrow and our shield we shall overthrow them.” When they arrived at Lake Texcoco, the story went on, they sloshed their way into the middle of it and suddenly saw the eagle of prophecy, “poised on a cactus, eating with delight. . . . And they wept, crying, ‘At last we have been worthy of our god; we have deserved the reward; with astonishment we have seen the sign: our city shall be here.’” It was a wonderful story, and useful; it allowed them to celebrate the inevitable.6

The Mexica began to build houses for themselves on one of the larger islands, where underlying rock would keep them from sinking down into the bog that surrounded them. This island they named Tenochtitlán, after the cactus in the prophecy. They lived on fish and waterfowl; they trapped and hunted and traded the meat with the surrounding cities for bricks and timber and the other necessities of life. Slowly, Tenochtitlán was transformed from a muddy survivor’s camp into a town. Slowly, the tribe of the Mexica was becoming a nation: the Aztecs. But they did not forget the horror of those first years on the island. “This is the place of the serpent’s anger,” the Aztec priests chanted, over a century later, as they descended into Lake Texcoco for their ritual yearly bath, “the humming of the water-mosquito, the flight of the wild-duck, the murmur of the white rushes.”7

Sometime between 1337 and 1357, a splinter group of Aztecs moved out of Tenochtitlán, to a dry patch of land less than a mile away, at the north end of the lake. The Dominican friar Diego Durán, who gathered and preserved the oral histories of the Aztecs in the sixteenth century, tells us that Tenochtitlán had grown large enough to be divided into four sections, or barrios, with each section parceled out to the men of the city. “Some of the elders who felt they deserved more property than they had received . . . rebelled,” Durán writes. “They decided to seek a different place, and by going through the reeds and rushes they found a small dry piece of land.” Here, four chieftains (“restless and seditious men, of evil intentions”) built a second city and called it Tlatelolco. The twin cities on Lake Texcoco existed in a state of constant simmering hostility: “They were never at peace,” Durán says, “nor did they get on well with their brothers.”8

The division forced both Aztec settlements to shore up their defenses. “[The men of Tlatelolco] have abandoned us, they have gone away,” one of the elders of Tenochtitlán explained. “I am afraid that with their cunning they will one day wish to surpass us and subdue us. . . . Before we find ourselves in a situation like that, I believe we should make a rapid decision and choose a king who will rule over us and over Tlatelolco as well.”9

The king they chose was Acamapichtli, “Handful of Arrows,” the son of an Aztec father and a Colhuacan mother. Crowned in 1375 as the first ruler of Tenochtitlán, he was immediately forced to carry on complicated and delicate negotiations with the surrounding powers; Tezozomoc, the powerful king of the city-state of Azcapotzalco on the western ridge of the valley, had become alarmed by the rapid rise of Tenochtitlán. He sent a demand for immediate tribute: fish, frogs, willow and cypress trees, maize, chiles, beans, squash, and large loaves of bread made out of the ground redworms called ezcahuitli (an important source of protein for the lake dwellers).

Paying the tribute would acknowledge that the Aztecs were vassals and servants to Azcapotzalco. The new king was a “valiant youth,” but he decided to be cautious; he ordered the people of the city to pay the tribute and keep the peace. (Conveniently, his chief priest agreed; the god Huitzilopochtli, he said, had appeared and promised to make the city prosperous if the tribute were paid.)

And so it happened. “The Aztecs continued to pay the same tribute for fifty years,” Durán says,

pretending to be content and feigning obedience, while their numbers multiplied, while they became stronger. King Acamapichtli reigned forty years in the city of Tenochtitlán, ruling in peace, in quiet, in harmony. He built the city, organizing its houses, canals, and streets . . . [and] achieved other benefits for the good of the state.10

Meanwhile, the chieftains of Tlatelolco ignored the election and chose their own king. Acamapichtli was half Colhuacan and the vassal of Azcapotzalco; so the city on the north end asked Tezozomoc of Azcapotzalco to send them one of his own royal sons as their ruler. Tezozomoc agreed and sent his younger son, Cuacuauhpitzahuac. This too made Tlatelolco a vassal of the greater city, but a vassal in higher standing than its neighbor.

From the beginning, they were set against each other: Tenochtitlán and Tlatelolco, brother against brother, Cain and Abel in the same lake, twin cities competing for the favor of the stern and distant Tezozomoc. “No kingdom divided against itself can endure,” Durán concludes. “And dreading destruction, yet warring against each other, both groups pretended ignorance of the reality.”11

Chapter Seventy-One

A Hundred Years of War

Between 1329 and 1347,

Edward III of England fights against Scotland,

tries to claim the throne of France,

and begins a hundred years of war

ROBERT BRUCE, the king of Scotland, was ill. “He had grown old,” says Jean Froissart, “and was afflicted with leprosy, of which he was expected to die.” In fact, he was only fifty-five, but he had been suffering from “heavy sickness” for years; “leprosy” was a catchall term for a whole range of unpleasant wasting diseases. He died on June 7, 1329, leaving his five-year-old son David on the Scottish throne.1

Bruce had done his best to guard his son’s claim to the throne. At the signing of the Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton in 1328, young David had been betrothed to the seven-year-old sister of Edward III (the marriage was celebrated the same year, and the little girl had come to live in the Scottish royal palace). As regent and guardian, Bruce had appointed one of his own relations: Thomas Randolph, the Earl of Moray, an experienced soldier who had commanded a regiment at Bannockburn and fought by Bruce’s side during the War for Scottish Independence. “It was publicly proclaimed at [David’s] coronation,” says the Chronicle of Lanercost, “that he claimed right to the kingdom of Scotland by no hereditary succession, but in like manner as his father, by conquest alone.2

This was a silly assertion to make of a child, but the Earl of Moray knew that the Scots had a tradition of following the strongest man, not the next in line by blood. Sure enough, David’s rule was soon challenged by Edward Balliol, son of the deposed John (who had died in France some fifteen years earlier, having been released from the Tower of London on condition that he never return to Scotland). With a small mercenary army and the support of a handful of English barons who had lost their Scottish territories and wanted them back, Edward Balliol took ship and landed his men near Kinghorn, on the eastern coast, in August 1332.

On his way to repel the invasion, the Earl of Moray was taken suddenly and violently ill and died. The Scottish nobles elected another of their number, the Earl of Mar, to replace him. With the help of David’s illegitimate half brother Robert and the son of the dead Earl of Moray, the new regent led thirty thousand Scots against the little English army, and was thoroughly and embarrassingly beaten. “The Scots were defeated chiefly by the English archers,” says the Chronicle of Lanercost, “who so blinded and wounded the faces of the first division of the Scots by an incessant discharge of arrows, that they could not support each other.” More than half of the Scottish army was killed or taken prisoner in this defeat, known as the Battle of Dupplin Moor. The Earl of Mar died fighting, after only nine days as regent. Robert fell too; so did the young Earl of Moray.3

Edward Balliol marched triumphantly to Scone and had himself crowned king of Scotland on October 4. But he had no supporters in Scotland; three months after his coronation, he was forced to flee Scotland by a reassembled Scottish army loyal to David.

At this point, both kings of Scotland appealed to Edward III for help. David’s ambassadors arrived at York, where the king was holding court, and begged him to assist the young king “as an ally ought to do, seeing that he had his sister to wife.” Balliol’s officers appeared at the same time, pointing out that Balliol and his allies were merely taking back land that had once been theirs.

Nationality, and the chance to get Scotland back, won out over family ties; Edward decided to support Balliol. “The King’s council was of the opinion,” writes Thomas Gray, “that he was not bound so to act against his own subjects.” An English army joined Balliol and his men, and in early July of 1333, the combined armies of Balliol and Edward III attacked the border town of Berwick. This time, the Scottish defenses were outmanned, and “a great number of barons, knights, and common people were slain.” Berwick surrendered, and Balliol marched to Scone for the second time.4

Seeing that the odds had turned against Scotland, David’s new regent arranged to get him and his child wife, Joan, out of Scotland and into France, where Philip VI agreed to help him regain Scotland in return for David’s homage to the French throne. Meanwhile, back in Scotland, Balliol repaid Edward III for his aid by handing over half of Scotland to the direct control of the English crown.5

But the war between England and Scotland had only been the prequel to a much longer and more complicated war between England and France.

War between England and France was nothing new. The two countries had never been friends, and their relationship had grown knottier when Henry II, heir to French lands by way of his father, had become the first king of England to owe homage to the French throne as Count of Anjou. The complicated interactions of the two monarchs, one of which was also the liege man of the other, had grown even thornier when Eleanor of Aquitaine had taken her family lands with her into the bed of the king of England, away from the king of France.

But the new war was slightly different. On October 19, 1337, Edward III dispatched a letter to his French counterpart. “Edward, by the grace of God King of England Ireland,” it began, “to Philip of Valois . . .”

We are heir to the realm and crown of France by a much closer degree of kingship than yourself, who have entered into possession of our heritage and are holding and desiring to hold it by force. . . . Wherefore we give you notice that we shall claim and conquer our heritage of France . . . since we consider you as our enemy and adversary.6

“This letter,” Philip VI retorted, “does not require an answer.” And with that dismissal of Edward’s claim, the Hundred Years’ War began.

The name, describing a whole series of campaigns that took place between 1337 and 1453, is a much later invention. Edward’s first campaign—into the northern territory of Gascony—did not even begin until late in 1338, and the first major battle between the French and the English did not take place until June 24, 1340, when the English fleet destroyed the French navy at the Battle of Sluys. Long periods of peace intervened between years of intense fighting. And contemporary chroniclers such as Froissart see nothing particularly unusual in yet more war between France and England.7

But the hundred-plus years during which France and England fought are characterized by a deeper conflict than mere territorial battles: “The King of England,” says Jean Froissart, “had long wished for an opportunity to assert his right to the crown of France.” When Philip V had resurrected the old Salic Law to take the throne of France away from his niece, he had inadvertently provided a way for the English king to take the French thone. Philip V’s end run around his niece’s right to rule France had led to the barring of his own daughter, his sole child, from the throne, and the appointment of the new House of Valois in the place of Hugh Capet’s descendants—leaving Edward III, son of Philip’s sister Isabelle, as the sole remaining monarch of direct Capetian descent.

Edward III prepared for war by recruiting an ally: Louis IV of Germany. Louis agreed to declare Edward III the Vicar-General of the Holy Roman Empire, “so that all those of the Empire should be at his service.” This would give the English king the right to recruit soldiers from anywhere in the empire; but before the declaration could be made, Louis IV needed to make very clear that he had the right to make it.8

71.1 The Start of the Hundred Years’ War

In a series of three meetings held over the spring and summer of 1338, the electors of Germany agreed, almost unanimously (John of Bohemia, Louis’s longtime enemy, dissented), to put down in writing, as an imperial policy, the conclusions of Dante Alighieri and Marsilius of Padua. The Holy Roman Emperor derived his authority not from the pope (more clearly than ever an ally of the French throne) but from the the electors, the representatives of the empire and its people: now, formally, the Electoral League. No properly elected German king needed the papal seal of approval. In fact, thirty-six identical letters were sent to the pope, each from a different German city, each accusing him of ungodly hostility against the “German fatherland.” For the first time, the Holy Roman Empire was entirely independent of the papacy: a purely political realm, established by the temporal powers, not the spiritual ones.9

And Louis IV was now Holy Roman Emperor by right of his electors alone.

OVER THE NEXT DECADE, the war between France and England unfolded in jerks and leaps and false starts.* Edward III’s destruction of the French fleet at Sluys halted Philip VI’s intended invasion of England, but Edward III followed this up with a siege of Tournai that failed and cost far too much money. David of Scotland, accompanied by French troops, returned home in 1341, just barely turned eighteen, and began to attack English positions along the Scottish border. Louis IV’s promised soldiers never arrived, despite repeated appeals from Edward.

By late 1342, neither side had gained a clear advantage, and both kings were deep in debt. They agreed to a three-year peace; the carefully negotiated truce, the Treaty of Malestroit, was signed on January 19, 1343.

The truce did not quite make it to the three-year mark. In April of 1345, Edward III declared it void, insisting that Philip had violated its provisions. In response, a French army laid siege to Aiguillon, in the English-held territory of Gascony. “When the King of England heard how hard-pressed his men were in the Castle of Aiguillon,” Froissart writes, “he decided to assemble a large army and lead it to Gascony. He gave orders for full preparations to be made, mobilized men from his own kingdom, and engaged mercenaries in other countries.”10

In July of 1346, the English army set sail from Southampton. But Edward’s announcement that he intended to relieve Aiguillon was a feint. He reversed directions and instead landed on the shores of Normandy at the head of fifteen thousand men. He had also brought with him his oldest son, sixteen-year-old Edward of Woodstock; as soon as he landed, on July 18, he knighted young Edward on Norman soil.11

Philip VI, taken by surprise, hastily redirected his own army towards the invasion. Meanwhile, the English romped through Normandy, sacking and pillaging: “So was the good, fat land of Normandy ravaged and burnt, plundered and pillaged by the English,” complains Froissart. A diary kept by one of the English knights tells us that Edward III had given his men orders not to burn the houses of the poor, sack churches, or injure women, children, or the elderly, but this well-intentioned decree was not well enforced. At the town of Caen, sacked on July 26, Edward’s army slaughtered civilians and knights without distinction, and Froissart claims at least some of the English soldiers raped women in the street and indulged in arson and robbery. (“In an army such as the King of England was leading,” he remarks, “it was impossible that there should not be plenty of bad characters and criminals without conscience.”)12

From Caen, the fleet and troops progressed up the coast. Edward III sent a personal challenge to Philip VI, who pursued the English through the north until Edward III reached Crécy-en-Ponthieu, just south of the harbor town of Calais. There he turned to face the approaching French.

The French army outnumbered the English three to one, and Philip VI had every reason to think that he would crush the invaders. But when fighting began, at four o’clock on the afternoon of Saturday, August 25, the English had their backs to the sun. It shone straight into the eyes of the French, and when the English pursued the same strategy they had used with such success against the Scots at Dupplin Moor—placing their bowmen at the front and overwhelming the front lines with a blizzard of arrows—the French line broke. “There is no man . . . that can imagine or describe truly the confusion of that day,” Froissart writes, “especially the bad management and disorder of the French, whose troops were out of number. . . . The English continued to shoot into the thickest part of the crowd, wasting none of their arrows. They impaled and wounded horses and riders, who fell to the ground, unable to get up again.”13

By nightfall, Philip VI was forced to begin a retreat. Edward himself had climbed up a nearby windmill to get an overview of the field. His son was still in the thick of the fighting, but when an officer arrived to ask the king to send reinforcements, Edward answered, “Do not send for me again today, as long as my son is alive. Let the boy win his spurs.” By then, the victory was probably already secure. Thousands of French foot soldiers and most of Philip VI’s knights—by one reliable count, 1,291—lay dead on the field. Philip himself took refuge at Amiens; young Edward was rewarded, according to at least one story, with a black cuirass from which his nickname, the Black Prince, may have been derived.14

After Edward’s victory at Crécy, a blight seemed to fall over his opponents.

Edward marched to the strategic port of Calais and laid siege to it. The defenders held out for eleven months; Philip, hoping to lift the attack by distracting his enemy, sent word to David II of Scotland asking him to invade England from the north. The plan was a disaster. David led the Scottish army towards Durham only to encounter, unexpectedly, an English force hastily assembled by the Archbishop of York. Once again, the English archers broke the Scottish line: “Few Englishmen were killed,” says the Chronicle of Lanercost, “but nearly the whole of the army of Scotland was either captured or slain.” David himself was taken prisoner back to London, where he would remain for the next eleven years.15

Louis IV’s reluctance to send the promised soldiers to Edward had been followed up by overtures to the French king, and then by a complicated series of conflicts with his nobles over deaths and marriage alliances. By 1346, he had few friends left; and the German electors exercised the power that Louis had helped them gain by electing a new king, Charles of Bohemia, to replace him.

Louis IV, now sixty-two, refused to recognize the election. Just as civil war seemed inevitable, he had a stroke during a bear hunt and fell dead from his horse.16

Philip VI lost Calais. The defenders finally surrendered in August of 1347; Edward III immediately established an English colony there, ordering thirty-six well-established English families to settle in the city, along with three hundred “men of lesser standing” and encouraging the French exodus: “I wish to repopulate Calais with pure-blooded English,” he announced.17

And then, just as he was poised to take advantage of his victories, the world ended.

*Each battle in the Hundred Years’ War has been studied in depth; there is no way that a general history such as this one can cover even the major campaigns. Desmond Seward’s The Hundred Years War: The English in France, 1337–1453 (Penguin, 1999) provides a readable overview; a much more detailed account can be found in the three-volume narrative history The Hundred Years War, by Jonathan Sumption (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991–2009).

Chapter Seventy-Two

The End of the World

Between 1338 and 1353,

the plague arrives

IT BEGAN JUST WEST OF CHINA.

The tenth Yuan emperor, Kublai Khan’s great-great-great-grandson Toghon Temur, sat on the Chinese throne. He had been crowned in 1333, aged thirteen. For eleven years he had been the passive ruler of a top-heavy, bureaucrat-stuffed, unevenly taxed empire, run for him by his chancellors.1

Five years after his coronation, an obscure little village below Lake Issyk-Kul began to die.* We know this only from the headstones found in the village graveyard; hundreds of them date from the years 1338 and 1339. “This is the grave of Kutluk,” one reads. “He died of the plague with his wife.”2

No contemporary accounts trace the spread of the illness in the next six years, but plenty of chroniclers record other disasters: drought and famine in the Huai river valley, torrential flooding rains in the provinces at Canton and Houkouang, locusts in Honan, an earthquake that carved a new lake into the Ki-Ming-Chan mountain range. Meanwhile, sickness seems to have moved silently west, along the trade routes between the Yuan cities and the markets of India. In 1344, an army from Delhi, marching south to put down a rebellion in Ma’bar, was wiped out by a “pestilence”; the Arab traveler Ibn Battuta, visiting the southeastern city of Madurai, discovered a lethal infection sweeping through it. “Whoever caught it,” he wrote “died on the morrow, or the day after.”3

By 1346, the Western world knew that something horrible had spread across the East; and, for the first time, symptoms of the illness were being set down by observers. “It began in the land of darkness,” wrote the Arab scholar Abu Hafs ‘Umar Ibn al-Wardi, “[and] it has been current for fifteen years. . . . Plague sat like a king on a throne and swayed with power, killing daily one thousand or more and decimating the population. It destroyed mankind with its pustules. . . . How amazingly does it pursue the people of each house! One of them spits blood, and everyone in the household is certain of death.”4

Death moved steadily westward: through Transoxania, into the lands of the Rus’ and the Golden Horde, down through Syria, towards Egypt. In 1347, a Golden Horde army that was laying siege to the city of Caffa (a Genoese-controlled trading port) sickened and began to die: “thousands upon thousands every day,” writes the contemporary Italian chronicler Gabriele de’ Mussis. “[They] died as soon as the signs of disease appeared on their bodies: swellings in the armpit or groin caused by coagulating humours, followed by a putrid fever.”5

In Renaissance chronicles, many epidemics are labeled “plague”; but this particular plague was marked by those swellings in armpit and groin. “These were at first the size of hazelnuts,” writes the Franciscan friar Michele da Piazza, who first saw plague at the port city Messina. “These glandular swellings grew . . . then to the size of a hen or a goose egg and became quite painful.” The swellings, or buboes, were caused by infected lymph nodes, which filled with pus: a symptom of the presence of Yersinia pestis, a bacterial infection carried by fleas. Bubonic plague.6

The bacteria had caused epidemics before; in sixth-century Byzantium, Yersinia pestis had killed millions. But never before had it spread so widely, and so quickly. And never before had it crossed the Mediterranean into the densely populated European countries. With no exposure came a complete lack of any immunity to the disease.

At Caffa, in 1347, the plague made that final leap. Piazza explains that the dying Golden Horde warriors hurled the corpses of their dead companions over the city walls with catapults, hoping to kill the defenders either with the illness itself, or with the stench of the decaying bodies. A handful of the inhabitants escaped by ship and made their way to Messina; and there, they died. And so did “everyone . . . who spoke with the victims . . . anyone who bought from them, touched them, or had any kind of intercourse with them.”7

To Piazza, the plague was demonic, an invasion of blackness; his story of the Mongol corpses neatly pins the sickness to a heathen and godless nation. In all likelihood, the plague simply spread into and out of Caffa as it spread everywhere else: on the backs of black rats that lived in the holds of ships, ran in and out of cities, and shed fleas wherever they went. And in a perfect storm of disrupted weather cycles, overcrowded cities, weakened population, far-flung merchant navies, and far-roving armies, the plague burned across Europe as it had burned across Asia and India and Syria.

Millions died writhing in pain from the swollen buboes, their skin blackened with internal bleeding, lips and noses turning gangrenous, vomiting blood. Millions more died when the infection settled in the lungs and caused pneumonia, killing so quickly—often within forty-eight hours—that the buboes never had a chance to form: “All who die so suddenly have an infection of the lungs and spit up blood,” wrote the French physician Louis Sanctus. “And . . . whenever one infected person dies, all who see him during his illness, or visit him, or have dealings with him in any way, or carry him to his grave, straightaway die without remedy.”8

In Constantinople, at least half the city’s population perished; John Cantacuzenus watched his thirteen-year-old son die. “So incurable was the evil,” he wrote, “that [no] bodily strength could resist it. . . . Great abscesses were formed on the legs or the arms, from which, when cut, a large quantity of foul-smelling pus flowed. . . . There was no help from anywhere . . . there was no hope left.”9

In Florence, the poet Giovanni Boccaccio watched in amazement as two pigs on the street nosed the cast-off rags of a plague victim, and then collapsed, struggling and dying as if poisoned. Houses stood empty everywhere, entire families wiped out within hours of each other; bodies stacked in the street, trenches dug in churchyards with hundreds of corpses stowed “tier upon tier,” covered only with a thin layer of dirt. In some villages, everyone died. Crops were left untended, doors open, churches deserted; cows and sheep wandered free.

In Marseille, fifty-six thousand people died in a single month. Eight hundred souls died every day in Paris; among them, King Philip VI’s beloved wife Joan. In Avignon, Pope Clement VI bought a field just outside the city and consecrated the entire thing so that sixty-two thousand bodies could be buried there.10

The plague crossed over to England and Ireland in 1348, spreading from the southwest up and across the islands. Nearly half of England died. “Many villages and hamlets were deserted,” the Leicester priest Henry Knighton noted, “because everyone who had lived there was dead, and indeed many of these villages were never inhabited again.” “[It has] stripped villages, cities, castles, and towns of their inhabitants so thoroughly that there is scarcely anyone left alive in them,” wrote the Irish monk John Clynn, from his empty monastery. “The whole world is encompassed by evil.” Then he added, “I, waiting among the dead for death to come, have committed to writing what I have truly heard . . . I leave parchment for continuing the work, in case anyone should still be alive in the future.” Beneath these last words is added, in the handwriting of another, “Here, it seems, the author died.”11

72.1 The Spread of the Plague

Between October of 1348 and February of 1349, a hundred thousand Egyptians died in Cairo alone. “Cairo became an empty desert,” wrote the Arab chronicler Maqrizi, “and there was no one to be seen in the streets. A man could go from the Zuwayla Gate to the Bab al-Nasr without encountering another soul. . . . Corpses lay piled along the public way, burial trains jostled one another, and the dead were carried to their graves amidst commotion.”12

“No one controls anything and they do not even ring the church bells anymore,” wrote Agnolo di Tura, from the Tuscan town of Siena. “Giant pits are being excavated for the multitudes of the dead and the hundreds that die every night. And I . . . have buried five of my sons with my own hands. . . . Everyone believes it is the end of the world.”13

AND THEN THE DYING, finally, began to slow.

By the middle of 1350, plague deaths in England and Europe had thinned to a tiny trickle. The epidemic circled back around through the land of the Rus’, where it persisted until 1353, killing the Grand Duke of Moscow and all seven of his children. And it was never again entirely absent; all over the known world, plague outbreaks would erupt again and again.14

The survivors found themselves facing newly emptied countrysides, deserted villages, waste fields. “In the following winter there was such a lack of workers,” Henry Knighton complained, “. . . that there had hardly ever been such a shortage before.” In England, prices of essentials had tripled or quadrupled. Farmhands, now a rare commodity, began to charge exorbitant fees for their labor.15

“Many have certainly / Heard it common said,” wrote the French poet Guillaume de Machaut,

How in one thousand three hundred and forty nine,

Out of one hundred, there remained but nine.

Thus it happened that for lack of people

Many a splendid farm was left untilled,

No one plowed the fields

Bound the cereals and took in the grapes,

Some gave triple salary . . .

Since so many were dead.16

So many were dead; and no one agreed on what it all meant. The faculty of the medical school in Paris published a report blaming the plague on the conjunction of “three planets in Aquarius,” which had caused the “deadly corruption of the air.” King Edward III of England, mourning the loss of his fifteen-year-old daughter, blamed the spiritual wickedness of his people. “It was thought,” wrote the Florentine Matteo Villani, “that the people, whom God by grace had preserved in life, having seen the extermination of their neighbors . . . would become better, humble, virtuous . . . overflowing with love and charity for one another. But . . . the opposite happened.” In France and Germany, Jews were accused of poisoning the wells; hundreds were seized and murdered by angry mobs. From Avignon, Pope Clement VI condemned this violence and composed a Mass for the turning away of plague: O God, who does not desire the death but the penitence of sinners, we beseech you graciously to turn your people to you . . . mercifully withdraw the flail of your anger from them.17

“We have lost almost everything,” wrote the Poet Laureate Petrarch, in a letter to a friend, “and found no rest. . . . Last losses are beyond recovery, and death’s wound beyond cure. There is just one comfort: that we shall follow those who went before. . . . The life we lead is a sleep; whatever we do, we dream. Only death breaks the sleep and wakes us from dreaming. I wish I could have woken before this.”18

*The identification of the 1338/1339 deaths in Central Asia as the first sign of plague is widely but not universally accepted. The exact origin of the “Black Death” continues to be debated, as does the identity of the plague; this chapter takes the majority view that the fourteenth-century pandemic was bubonic plague caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, but a solid minority of scientists and historians continue to argue for other causes, such as anthrax, hemorrhagic fever, typhus, or some combination of infectious diseases. The literature on the Black Death is huge and the research voluminous; a good starting place is Philip Ziegler’s standard study The Black Death (John Day 1969; paperback reissue, Sutton Publishing, 1997). A useful collection of primary sources is found in Rosemary Horrox, trans. and ed., The Black Death (Manchester University Press, 1994). On the identity of the plague, see Graham Twigg, The Black Death: A Biological Reappraisal (Schocken Books, 1985), and Susan Scott and Christopher Duncan, Biology of Plagues: Evidence from Historical Populations (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Useful analyses of the plague’s aftermath include Samuel K. Cohn, The Black Death Transformed (Arnold Publishing, 2002) and David Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West (Harvard University Press, 1997).

Part Four

REGROUPINGS

Chapter Seventy-Three

The Will to War

Between 1349 and 1369,

Charles of Navarre tries to seize the throne of France,

the king of Castile makes himself unpopular,

the peasants of France revolt,

and France and England find new excuses to fight

BETWEEN OCTOBER 1349 AND AUGUST 1350, three monarchs died of plague.

The first royal victim was Joan, queen of Navarre. Thirty-two years before, she had been denied the French throne by her uncle’s invocation of the Salic Law. That same law had led to the ending of the Capetian dynasty and to the installation of her distant relative, Philip VI of Valois, on the French throne.

Ten months after Joan’s death, on August 22, 1350, Philip VI of France—fifty-two years old, newly married to Joan’s nineteen-year-old daughter—also died of plague.*

The plague had already killed King Alfonso XI of León-Castile; he had succumbed on March 27, in a campaign tent near Gibraltar. By now, the Christian kingdoms of Portugal, León-Castile, and Aragon had pushed all the way down to the Mediterranean. But the sole Muslim kingdom of Granada, ruled by Yusuf I, still clung to the southern coast; Alfonso was fighting against it when he died.

The throne of León-Castile (more often now simply referred to as “Castile”) went to Alfonso’s sixteen-year-old son Pedro. But rather than continuing to fight against Granada, Pedro of Castile began a war for territory with the king of neighboring Aragon, Pedro IV.

Meanwhile, Philip VI’s oldest son was crowned King John II of France, inheriting a country that was “in a very unsatisfactory state,” as Froissart writes. “The English were in possession of many places, especially of Calais, which caused the French considerable annoyance; moreover, their treasury was well-nigh exhausted.” The famine and drought a few decades before had already weakened France; unending war and bubonic plague had carved still more strength away.1

The king of Navarre chose this moment to launch a bid for the French throne.

Charles of Navarre, Joan’s son and heir, had long thought of himself as a Frenchman. From his father, the Count of Évreux, he had inherited substantial family lands in the north of France. He had married King John II’s daughter, and had lived in France for much of his life. Even after his coronation, he used Navarre mostly as a source for income and soldiers.

In some ways, Charles’s claim to the French crown was even stronger than Edward III’s. Both hinged on the untimely death of Louis X, in 1316, at the age of twenty-seven, without a male heir. For both Edward and Charles, the passing of the crown to the Valois house was an injustice, one that disregarded the living Capetian heirs. But Edward was only Louis X’s nephew; Charles was his grandson.

For the first five years of his reign, Charles of Navarre contented himself with raising supporters for his bid. The triple assembly of French nobility, clergy, and leading townsmen, first called by Philip the Fair in 1302, had been called several more times by Philip’s successors, mostly to approve new taxes. Each time the three groups, or “estates,” had acted as a single body: the “Estates-General,” the first representative gathering of the French people. But the Estates-General had no power to pass laws, or to force the king to do anything; it merely offered counsel and advice. Across all three of the Estates, a healthy scattering of thoughtful men believed that the Estates should have a say in the king’s decisions, particularly when it came to taxes or the reissuing of French currency (reissues inevitably sent prices either soaring or into freefall).

The disorder that followed the plague made reform even more attractive, and Charles of Navarre, making complicated and careful alliances, presented himself as a possible “reform king,” willing (should he gain the throne) to give more authority to the Estates. “A small man with a lively wit, a penetrating eye, and an easy, unaffected eloquence,” one of his contemporaries wrote; “his astonishing shrewdness and extraordinary charm enabled him to find supporters as no other prince of the blood could do, not just among the common people but among men of substance and power.”2

At the same time, Edward of England and John of France finished negotiating a complicated peace deal. Plague had hit the armies of both men hard; neither was in good position to launch new attacks, and in April 1354, John agreed to hand over to Edward all of the western French lands south of Normandy (except for Brittany), and to yield Calais. In exchange, Edward III would give up his claim to the French crown.3

A year later, Edward—feeling a little stronger—repudiated the treaty. But by then, John II had already gained a reputation for weakness (“By the blood of Christ, this King is a worthless man and a bad ruler,” one of his counts snapped), and Charles of Navarre’s campaign gained strength. His crowning achievement was to convince John’s son and heir, the Dauphin Charles,* to plot with him the overthow of John himself.4

Seventeen-year-old Charles, intelligent but sickly, was easily swayed by his silver-tongued brother-in-law. In April of 1356, the two men were throwing a banquet for some thirty potential allies at Rouen Castle in Normandy (the Dauphin also bore the title Duke of Normandy) when John II unexpectedly arrived, fully armed, at the head of a band of soldiers. He had heard a rumor that Charles of Navarre was planning to kidnap and kill him, and he had decided to rid himself of Charles’s ongoing schemes.

Over the Dauphin’s loud protests, John arrested four of the Norman leaders and ordered them executed. They were immediately taken outside the city and beheaded by the only executioner available, a prisoner in the Rouen jail who offered to do it in exchange for a pardon. He had never tried to behead anyone before, and made a bloody and extensive business of it.5

John II spared his son-in-law, but the king of Navarre was taken off in chains and moved from secure prison to secure prison until he ended up in the Fort of Arles, surrounded by a swamp. This brought the English back into the fight. Charles of Navarre’s twenty-two-year-old brother Philip recruited the English prince John of Gaunt, third son of Edward III, to help him attack John II’s Norman holdings in revenge; Edward III himself furnished twenty-seven ships for the attack.6

Edward the Black Prince—aged twenty-six, a ten-year veteran of the war with the French—was in his father’s territory of Gascony; from there, he had been leading raids into Languedoc, raiding and killing, burning French towns and villages, Toulouse among them. In August 1356, while John was in Normandy fighting the Navarrese and English, Edward marched out of Gascony, towards the Loire river, with eight thousand men.7

The march was another large-scale raid, not necessarily meant to force John II into a showdown: “It was our purpose to ride forth against the enemies in the parts of France,” the Black Prince himself wrote, “. . . harrying and wasting the country.” But John II turned to meet Edward, and the two armies came face-to-face at Poitiers. The French, better rested and better organized, had every reason to expect victory.

On September 19, the English army drove back the French, a pattern that was rapidly becoming embarrassing for the French cause. Thomas Gray accuses the French generals of failing to act together because they “were at variance because of bitter words”; other accounts suggest that John II’s decision to have his knights dismount and fight on foot after the initial charge—an attempt to avoid the English archers who had been so deadly in the past—caused the disaster.8

73.1 French Defeats

Whatever the reason, the defeat was particularly embarrassing because King John of France was taken prisoner, along with his fourteen-year-old son Philip. The Black Prince treated the royals with respect, but took them both prisoner to England.9

King John was not kept in a dungeon. Prisoner taking, in the fourteenth century, was largely a matter of ransom collection, and the possibility of succeeding was one of the major motivations for knights with more honor than cash to go to war. Taking a wealthy opponent captive and holding him until a sizable payment was made offered a quick way to refill an empty treasury.

In fact, a few months after John II was taken to Windsor, David of Scotland—now thirty-three years old, in the eleventh year of his imprisonment in England—finally managed to negotiate his own release, in exchange for 100,000 marks (to be paid out in installments over the next ten years; Edward was not unreasonable). One hundred thousand Scottish marks was a lot of money: a knight of middling rank might spend 100 marks in a year maintaining his lifestyle; a servant or farmer might earn 10.

Edward III of England had spent a great deal of money on war in the past decade, tax revenues had dropped off along with the population, and John II’s capture afforded the English king the chance to make some of it back. He suggested a ransom of 3 million crowns, which in the United States of 2012 would mean that the king of France was worth 500 million dollars; David of Scotland, 65 million.*

As a valuable prisoner, John was kept in comfort while Edward III tried to convince the Estates-General to cough up the proposed ransom; he had his own staff, private chambers, and an occasional chance to go hawking and hunting. Meanwhile, back in Paris, there were “many conferences held, and much discontent appeared.” The king’s sons were generally thought too young and incompetent to run the country, and the English and Navarrese were romping through the west and south, creating havoc. Finally, each of the Estates agreed to nominate twelve “of the wisest from among themselves, to consider and determine what would be most advisable.” This council of thirty-six took control of the country, with the young Dauphin Charles “styled Regent” but not granted much in the way of actual power.10

But France, war-weary, plague-thinned, overtaxed, did not settle comfortably into parliamentary rule. Charles of Navarre escaped from his swampland fortress in November of 1357 and made his way to Paris, where a complicated power struggle began between his supporters (a considerable number of Parisians were convinced that he did indeed have a right to the throne), the Estates-General (led by the powerful Parisian merchant Etienne Marcel), and the Dauphin.

While the wealthy and well-born jousted with each other in Paris, a sudden explosion of violence at the little northern town of Saint-Leu-d’Esserent, on the banks of the Oise river, startled them all.

It came from the bottom of French society; from the peasants, scornfully nicknamed Jacques Bonhomme, “Silly Jack,” by the elite. Struggling to raise their crops and tend their livestock in a countryside constantly trampled by the armed forces of English, French, and Navarrese, buffeted by sudden arbitrary taxes imposed by the Crown and collected by force, thinned by plague and mourning their dead, the French countrymen had reached boiling point. The last straw was probably the Dauphin’s decision to give his army captains permission to pillage the countryside in order to supplement their skimpy wages. “We were afflicted not only by the sword of our English enemies,” complained the contemporary writer Philippe de Mézières, “but by our own lords too.”11

In May 1358, the misery organized itself into an armed revolt. “Some of the inhabitants of the towns assembled together . . . without any leader,” says Froissart, “. . . [and] said that the nobles of the kingdom of France, knights and squires, were a disgrace to it, and that it would be a very meritorious act to destroy them all.” For two weeks, bands of armed peasants and craftsmen—blacksmiths, quarrymen, coopers, masons, and even rural priests and minor officials—rampaged through the north of France, armed with pikes and plow pieces, burning castles, murdering knights, and massacring noble households and families. (Froissart describes even more creative cruelties, including the roasting of a knight on a spit, but he also gets the year of the revolt and the numbers involved wrong.)12

The uprising, nicknamed the Jacquerie, barely lasted three weeks before the Dauphin and Charles of Navarre, fighting separately, brought it to an end by wiping out the major roving bands of Jacques Bonhomme insurgents. Just a few weeks later, Etienne Marcel was assassinated in Paris.

While his country was disintegrating, John II had been negotiating with his captor. The two kings had finally agreed on a treaty; John II could buy his freedom by handing over, by treaty, Aquitaine, Normandy, Poitou, Touraine—almost half of his country. He would also have to raise the three million crowns of his ransom, although Edward III graciously allowed him six years to pay the debt off. (As surety for the debt, John’s second son, Charles’s younger brother Louis of Anjou, was sent to Calais to be a hostage of the English until the full amount was paid.) In return, Edward III gave up his claim to Normandy and also agreed (for the second time) to surrender any claim to the French throne, a concession that also extended to his son the Black Prince.13

The compromise, signed at Bretigny on May 8, 1360, allowed John to return home. He entered Paris, after four years of imprisonment, to the sentimental relief of his people. This brought Charles of Navarre’s hopes to a sharp end; seeing his supporters melt away, he retreated to Navarre.14

But the return of John II was not joyful. His second wife had died just before his arrival home. Paris was shabby and divided against itself. The countryside was infested with bandits. The treasury was empty, with three million crowns left to be found. The Dauphin Charles had lost his two daughters to illness within weeks of each other, and himself was suffering from a mysterious sickness that was causing his hair to fall out and his fingernails to shed.

John II was completely unable to talk the Estates-General into raising taxes for the payment of the ransom, and young Louis of Anjou, seeing no end to his captivity, escaped from Calais and made his way home. So in January of 1364, John himself announced that he would journey back to England to renegotiate the terms. He left the Dauphin Charles as regent in Paris; to his favorite son, the youngest, Philip the Bold, he gave Burgundy along with the title Duke of Burgundy. Louis of Anjou got nothing.

Edward welcomed the king of France in style and put him up at the Savoy Palace in London, the home of Prince John of Gaunt. But deliberations, says the contemporary Chronicle of Canterbury, “were delayed from day to day; and meanwhile the king of France remained at the Savoy without any final decision.” Early in March, John came down with a severe and obscure ailment. On April 8, three months after his returned to London, he died at the Savoy Palace. He was forty-five years old.15

At this, Charles of Navarre “had hope,” says Froissart. He sent a Navarrese army, under joint Navarrese and English command, into Normandy; Charles’s biographer, the extraordinary Christine de Pisan, says that “three thousand men-at-arms” also began a march towards the Seine, intending to intercept Charles on the way to his coronation and prevent it. But the French royal army, pressing rapidly forward, met the invaders near the village of Cocherel, north of Paris. “There was much hacking and cutting with lances and battle-axes,” remarks Froissart, “. . . [and] of the Navarrois but few escaped being slain or taken.” Three days later, the Dauphin was crowned King Charles V of France.16

The Battle of Cocherel ended Charles of Navarre’s last serious attempt to claim the French throne; he would agitate for the next twenty years, doing an ill turn to the French throne whenever he could, but he would never again rule any country other than Navarre. In 1387, he would come to a particularly nasty end; accidentally set on fire while wrapped in a brandy-soaked sheet to treat a skin condition, he would linger for fifteen excruciatingly painful days before finally dying in agony.17

The Treaty of Bretigny, which had allowed John of France a last visit home, had guaranteed that neither Edward III of England nor the Black Prince would launch another challenge. England and France were, theoretically, at peace.* But the peace, fatally fragile, soon crumbled. The fighting restarted on the Spanish peninsula.

Pedro of Castile, inheriting the throne after his father’s untimely death of plague, had spent the first fifteen years of his reign in a territorial war with Pedro of Aragon. He was, says Froissart, “a cruel man . . . of such a horrid disposition, that all persons feared and suspected him.” He was, in fact, no worse than his brother kings in England and France; but fifteen years of war had not increased his popularity with his own people, any more than it had made John II more beloved by the French.18

Right after Charles V’s coronation, Pedro of Castile’s illegitimate half brother, Enrique of Trastámara, challenged his rule, and “the kings of France and Aragon undertook to place him on the throne.” This was a reasonable enough decision on the part of Charles V of France; an alliance with Aragon, plus a Castilian king who owed his throne to France, would certainly provide a useful wall against further armies marching in from Navarre. A joint French-Aragonese army assembled and invaded Castile. Pedro summoned his barons and knights, but they too were war-weary and thinned by plague, and “scarcely any came.”

Pedro was forced to flee from his country into Gascony, where he asked for an audience with Edward the Black Prince and (says the Canterbury Chronicle) “begged him most urgently to give him military assistance.” As justification, he pointed out that he and the Black Prince were blood kin. The Black Prince’s great-grandmother, wife of Edward I, was Eleanor of Castile, Pedro’s great-great-great-aunt, which made the two men cousins, three times removed.19

Most European royal families were at least cousins three times removed, but the Black Prince immediately agreed. The alliance would, after all, bring him face-to-face with the French again, and without breaching the Treaty of Bretigny.

In 1367, Pedro the Cruel marched back into Castile, accompanied by the Black Prince and an English army. The English-Castilian army defeated the French-Castilian army thoroughly at the border town of Navarette, and Enrique (in turn) fled from Castile, back to France. Charles V sent more reinforcements, and at the second encounter between the brothers, at the Battle of Campo de Montiel, the French-Castilian contingent won out. Pedro the Cruel was taken captive; Froissart says that when Enrique of Trastámara visited him in the tent where he was being held prisoner, “an angry altercation ensued, and the two brothers fought till King Enrique drew his poniard and plunged it into Don Pedro’s body.”20

Enrique was then crowned king of Castile. He owed his throne to the French; his coronation was a French victory over the English; and, emboldened by the triumph, Charles V declared that, since some of the terms of the Treaty of Bretigny had not yet been fulfilled by the English, the peace between the two countries was at an end. In the summer of 1369, he began to prepare an invasion force of ships and soldiers: “And the whole kingdom of England were much rejoiced at it,” Froissart concludes, “for they were quite prepared to give the French a good reception whenever they should land.” The will to war had outlived four kings, two treaties, and the bubonic plague; no matter how weary and impoverished both countries were, they would continue to fight.21

*Contemporary accounts merely note that he “departed this life,” but this is most likely a polite circumlocation for the Black Death—an undignified end for a monarch.

*The Dauphin took his title from the province of Dauphiné, which was his particular possession. Charles was the first heir to the French throne to hold this designation; after his accession, he decreed that all future heirs to the crown would receive it.

*Currency comparisons are always difficult. In the United States, in 2012, David of Scotland was worth the combined yearly income of the Kardashian family; John of France’s 500 million, in 2012 U.S. dollars, would pay the full four-year tuition for nearly three thousand Harvard undergrads, or (alternatively) buy one-fourth of the Dodgers baseball team, including the stadium.

*The treaty also set up an installment plan for the payment of the still-pending ransom debt; it is not clear how much of the money was actually paid out over the next decades.

Chapter Seventy-Four

White Lotus, Red Turban

Between 1351 and 1382,

the Yuan dynasty collapses,

and the Ming take charge

WHILE THE PLAGUE across the Oxus had plenty of chroniclers, the plague in China went almost unrecorded. The only pointers we have to its severity are numerical: between the beginning and the end of the fourteenth century, the population of China dropped by forty million people.

Not all of this can be chalked up to bubonic plague. The century had begun with Mongol invasions; the establishment of the Yuan had happened at the cost of millions of lives. Like the rest of the world, China had seen severe weather patterns. Heat and drought, rain and mold, floods and windstorms, all had played a part in famine, failed crops, deaths from starvation. Plague had merely added itself to the catastrophes.

Misery had lent itself to the renewed spread of an old form of Buddhism: Amitabha, or Pure Land Buddhism, which promised rebirth into an undefiled and perfect world, the Western Paradise, for all who believed in the Buddha.* In the twelfth century, a charismatic Pure Land monk named Mao Ziyuan had preached that the Western Paradise could be experienced on earth, mystically: in the mind of the believer who was willing to meditate unceasingly on the name of the Buddha, concentrating all thought and will on the Pure Land. His followers took the name White Lotus Society. By the fourteenth century, the mystical White Lotus Society had flowered and divided into energetic subsects all over Yuan China. And it had developed a more immediate and less mystical hope: that a Prince of Light, a manifestation of the Buddha, would appear in the present and bring the Pure Land on earth. These White Lotus worshippers, looking forward to immediate deliverance, often adopted red turbans as a sign of their unity.1

The unhappy, unwieldy empire was still ruled by Kublai Khan’s great-great-great-grandson Toghon Temur, the “Emperor Huizong.” Toghon Temur was now thirty-one, a veteran of eighteen years of passive governing; his chancellor, the soldier-historian Toghto, was in charge of the country.

In 1351, Toghto was directing a massive repair project in the center of the empire. The Yellow river’s outlet to the sea frequently shifted—the land near the coast was flat, and silt buildup constantly pushed the river’s course back and forth—but the gargantuan flooding of the last years had now moved it far to the north, above the Shangdong Peninsula. The flooding had also blocked the Grand Canal. It had become impossible to transport grain from the rich farmland around the Yangtze to the southern capital, Kublai Khan’s perfectly square city of Dadu, except by sea.

Taking advantage of the city’s helplessness, a pirate named Fang Guozhen had assembled a fleet of outlaws and pranced along the coast, robbing coastal cities and intercepting grain ships to Dadu at will. The Yuan navy was unable to either capture or drive him off. But moving the Yellow river back to its old bed would make it possible to clean out and unblock the Grand Canal. Then the grain shipments from south to north could resume, protected by the shore from Fang Guozhen and his bandits.2

Such a project needed many hands, and so Toghto recruited corvée labor—workers drawn from the peasant and farmer classes, required to work unpaid at the Yellow river site for a certain number of months per year. Corvée labor was horrendously unpopular; while the workers were digging up silt, their fields at home were going untended, and they would return to a reduced harvest and the same tax burdens as before. Yet Toghto imposed it on almost two hundred thousand Chinese residents of the central Yuan empire.3

The backbreaking, heartbreaking work was the match that lit the stacked dry bonfire of Yuan China’s discontent.

One of the workmen press-ganged into the Yellow river project was a White Lotus follower named Han Shantong. Midway through the labor, he announced that he had uncovered, in the silt of the Yellow river, a one-eyed statue prophesying the arrival of the Prince of Light. Other White Lotus believers flocked to him, donning the red turbans as their mark. With their support Han Shantong proclaimed himself the rightful ruler of China, descendant of the last Northern Song emperor, sent to oust the oppressive and foreign Yuan powers.4

His little rebellion was immediately squashed into the mud by Toghto, who dispatched Yuan soldiers to arrest him. Han Shantong was promptly executed; his followers scattered, and his son Han Lin’er, whom he had declared his crown prince and heir apparent, disappeared into hiding. But Han Shantong had been merely the bellwether. Red Turban rebellions began to pop up all over the Yuan realm, fueled by wretched living conditions, fury at Yuan demands, and messianic hopes. After Han Shantong, at least five men proclaimed themselves the new emperor of China, and six or seven war leaders without imperial titles added themselves to the mix.5

Toghto, directing a tight and successful defense against the rebels, fell victim to the emperor’s incompetence. In 1354, Toghon Temur suddenly fired his chancellor. He was apparently annoyed that Toghto had not found the time, between desperate battles, to organize the elaborate ceremonial recognition of his son, Ayushiridara, as Crown Prince and heir; the decision shows just how out of touch with the realities of governing the Mongol emperor was. But Toghto, loyal to the end, stepped down at once. He was in the middle of conducting a siege of the rebel-held city of Gaoyou; it was on the verge of surrender, but when Toghto left, the Red Turbans who held it took heart.6

The failed siege of Gaoyou was a sign of things to come. Toghto took himself into exile and died a year later (possibly poisoned by one of the Crown Prince’s allies). The Yuan army was divided by squabbling generals, each hoping for ultimate command. Spread too thin, fighting too many rebels, the imperial force was unable to wipe any of them out. By the end of the decade, the emperor Toghon Temur controlled only the land directly around Dadu. The Red Turban rebels had shaken themselves out into two major movements; in the northeast, a strong force led by the Buddhist monk Zhu Yuanzhang, who had originally been a follower of Han Shantong’s son; and in the southwest, an uprising under a former Yuan provincial official named Chen Youliang. Chen Youliang proclaimed himself emperor of China in Jiangzhou, adopting the name Dahan, “Great Han,” for his era; Zhu Yuanzhang captured Nanjing and declared himself founder of the new Wu dynasty. Meanwhile, the pirate Fang Guozhen had seized the southern coast south of Hangzhou for his own.7

In 1363, the now ex-Buddhist monk Zhu Yuanzhang destroyed his competitor on Lake Poyang, near the southern coast. Chen Youliang was the first to enter the lake; a contemporary account describes his bold entrance, at the head of a fleet of three-decker warships, painted with red lacquer, filled with soldiers and horses, surmounted by iron-clad archers’ towers. He intended to lay siege to the shore town of Nanchang, held by Yuanzhang’s men.

To beat him off, Zhu Yuanzhang dispatched a fleet of his own from Nanjing; it took nine days for them to arrive. On August 30, the two fleets faced each other on the surface of the lake and fought for two days without victory. On the third day, Zhu Yuanzhang ordered dummy ships, manned by straw-stuffed uniforms and loaded with gunpowder, to be launched towards the enemy. Set fire with long fuses, the fireships blew into Chen Youliang’s line and exploded.8

This battle, followed a month later by a second short naval encounter during which Chen Youliang was struck in the eye by an arrow and died instantly, gave China to Zhu Yuanzhang. The southern Red Turban movement crumbled. The Yuan court held out at Dadu for four more years, but the country was in the hands of the northern Red Turban leader.

74.1 The Rise of the Ming

In November of 1367, Zhu Yuanzhang mounted a final attack on Dadu and overran it with ease. Toghon Temur fled with his court into the old Mongolian homeland to the north. He still controlled Shangdu, the northern capital of the great Kublai Khan; and he was still boldly proclaiming himself emperor of China. But he had become merely another northern warlord, clinging to a tiny local kingdom. A year later, he would lose Shangdu and be forced even farther into the steppe.

In the south, Zhu Yuanzhang had himself crowned emperor at his capital city of Nanjing. He announced the start of a new dynasty, the Ming, beginning with the New Year of 1368; for himself, he took the imperial name Taizu and named the era of his reign Hongwu, “Most Warlike.” He is generally known by his era name: the Hongwu Emperor.9

He was forty years old, and a lot of water had gone under the bridge since his days as a Buddhist monk. He was, says one source, the father of twenty-three sons, whom he installed across his new empire as prince-regents at strategic locations; this seems to be a condensation of a somewhat lengthy process that took place over a number of years, but shows just how determined he was to keep a tight hand on the running of the country.10

Which he did, for thirty years. He managed to stay on the throne long enough to revamp almost every part of his kingdom. He appointed a committee of scholars to revise, expand, and reissue the old Tang law code, replacing the knotty tangle of old customs and nomadic practices that the Yuan had followed. He poured money into the Confucian schools and reinstituted the old Confucian civil service tests, as a way of bringing competent officials to his notice: “The empire is of vast extent,” one of his very first decrees read; “because it most certainly cannot be governed by my solitary self, it is essential that all the worthy men of the realm now join in bringing order into it.”11

His intention was, above all, to bring tranquillity to China. In a letter to the Byzantine emperor, announcing the commencement of a new dynasty, the Hongwu Emperor pointed out that under the Yuan, his homeland had suffered nearly two decades of misery. “We, as a simple peasant of Huai-yu, conceived the patriotic idea to save the people,” the letter explained, “. . . [and we have now] established peace in the Empire, and restored the old boundaries. . . . Although We are not equal in wisdom to our ancient rulers whose virtue was recognized all over the universe, We cannot but let the world know Our intention to maintain peace within the four seas.”12

But he never forgot that he had come to the throne through rebellion, and he never placed too much trust in those worthy men. In 1380, afraid that his longtime friend and chief minister Hu Wei-yung was growing too powerful, the Hongwu Emperor tried him for treason, ordered him executed, and then began a purge of everyone else who might threaten his power. Thousands were put to death. Two years later, the emperor created a secret police, the “Embroidered Uniform Guards,” to be his spies and hit men; they had the authority to arrest and confine, in secret prisons, anyone who might threaten the security and tranquillity of the realm. To break up the power of aristocratic clans that might unite against him, he ruthlessly moved them off their land, resettled them far apart, and took their fields. In payment, he gave them monthly allowances of rice and cloth, making them completely dependent on his goodwill alone.13

His vendettas may have been paranoid, but they were never private or petty, and he was no hypocrite. “An emperor should suppress his desire for self interest, and refrain from indulgence in material enjoyment,” he announced. “Only when the emperor is virtuous, free from material desire, can he rule.” And so he refused to eat meat, wore patched shirts, and ordered the crown prince to plant his own vegetable garden to save money. He was a man of iron self-control and determination, and he was thoroughly determined: the new Ming empire would be peaceful, and no price was too high to pay for peace.14

*See Bauer, The History of the Medieval World, pp. 19–20.

Chapter Seventy-Five

After the Mongols

Between 1351 and 1399,

a new nation takes root in southeast Asia,

and a Chinese general uses Chinese weapons

to change the fate of his country

THE MONGOLS had retreated from the south of China, but their invasion had changed the landscape.

The Khmer, weary even before the arrival of the Mongols, had finally become a Mongol vassal to buy peace. Ever since, the power of Angkor Wat had been in decline. The last inscription recording the rule of a Khmer king at Angkor Wat, the obscure Jayavarmaparamesvara, comes from 1327; the kings after him are faceless. Building had almost ceased. Rice fields had grown over with weeds. And now the Khmer faced a new enemy—an enemy that had once been subject to them.1

A century before, the western valley, occupied by a vassal people known to the Khmer as the Syam, had slipped out of Khmer control and founded a kingdom centered at the city of Sukhothai. This “Syam” kingdom was the first independent state governed by the people of the valley, known to us as the Thai. Soon it was joined by a handful of other little Thai enclaves, scattered from the Mekong river over to the Irawaddy.

The first Thai kingdom had taken the city of Sukhothai, the largest in the valley, as its capital. But by 1351, a strongman from the Thai city of Lopburi had been “anointed as king” over his own clan; and from Lopburi, he began to build an even stronger rival kingdom.

Some accounts suggest that this ambitious leader, named U Thong, was the son of a Chinese merchant who had settled at Lopburi, one of a number of Chinese expatriates to carry on a lucrative trade with the Thai valley as their home. Other chroniclers call him a native of Lopburi. An early version of U Thong’s own Royal Chronicles notes that U Thong had married into a rich merchant clan at another Thai city-state, Suphanburi, and had claimed leadership of it as well. Whatever his origin, U Thong changed his name to the royal Ramathibodi, and the two cities together became the twin nuclei of his new domain.2

According to the Royal Chronicles, an epidemic of smallpox then drove King Ramathibodi out of his home city of Lopburi. Leaving it under military rule, he moved the remaining population into the countryside until they found a “circular island, smooth, level, and apparently clean,” at the triple juncture of the Chao Phraya and Pasak rivers. There, U Thong founded his new capital city of Ayutthaya. The Chronicles give an exact date and time: the year 712, on the sixth day of the fifth month, three nalika and nine bat after sunrise; Friday, March 4, 1351, nine o’clock in the morning.3

Ramathibodi proved to be an aggressive ruler, worried about possible Khmer retaliation, and in 1352 he led the new kingdom of Ayutthaya into its first out-and-out conflict with the diminishing Khmer. Over ten years of slow, excruciating war followed. Victories were balanced by defeats; Ramathibodi’s own son, the Prince Ramesuan, was taken prisoner by the Khmer and had to be rescued by his uncle. When Ramathibodi died, in 1369, Ayutthaya was thoroughly rooted into the countryside, but Khmer still threatened.4

The Thai kingdoms, like most brand-new states, had no tradition of father-to-son succession. Ramesuan managed to get himself crowned as his father’s successor, but his mother’s brother, Borommaracha of Suphanburi, soon arrived at Ayutthaya and demanded the throne.

Borommaracha, a short-tempered but experienced soldier in his sixties, had almost the entire city behind him. He was the uncle who had rescued the humiliated Ramesuan from Khmer captivity, and had followed this up with an impressive (although temporary) victory outside the walls of Angkor Wat itself. Ramesuan had no victories of his own to boast of; seeing his uncle’s popularity, he left the throne and retreated to Lopburi.

Borommaracha then turned his attentions not towards the Khmer but towards the next-largest Thai kingdom, Sukhothai. Ramathibodi had followed a policy of peace with his Thai neighbors, but Borommaracha spent almost the entire eighteen years of his rule mounting attacks against the Sukhothai borders: “A war-minded ruler,” one contemporary chronicle remarks, “a lover of weapons.” By the time of his death, in 1388, he had managed to force the king of Sukhothai into swearing allegiance to him.5

Ramesuan then returned to claim his father’s throne himself, after the eighteen-year parenthesis in his rule. His uncle had doubled the size of his kingdom; Ramesuan repaid the favor by executing his teenaged cousin, Borommaracha’s son and heir Thong Lan, in the traditional manner: placing him in a velvet sack and then beating him to death.6

Ramesuan then began a second war with the Khmer. His strategy was not simply to conquer the Khmer but to enfold the people themselves into the Thai. Captive Khmer—particularly if they were artists, writers, musicians, or high-ranking civil officials—were deported to Ayutthaya, where they were encouraged to continue their work. The Thai and Khmer cultures had already entwined around each other, during the years when the Khmer had dominated the valley; the Thai already used the Khmer writing system, had already borrowed Khmer ways of irrigating their crops. Now that the Khmer had diminished, the exchange continued: not just entwining but mingling, evolving into something new.7

The two families—the clan of his father, and the merchant tribe of his mother—were less inclined to mix. Until the end of the century, Ramesuan held the throne of his father; but his mother’s family waited, ready to seize their opportunity at the crown.

75.1 Conflict in Southeast Asia

ALONG THE COAST OF THE CHINA SEA, the Dai Viet and the Cham celebrated the departure of the Mongols by attacking each other.

Decades of territorial conflict over their common border ramped up, around 1360, into a full-scale war. Leading the fight was the warlike Che Bong Nga of Champa, known to the Dai Viet as the Red King. Like Ramathibodi of the Thai, his origins are obscure; all that we know is that, by 1361, he had roused the Cham into their first major assault on the Dai Viet. More attacks followed; and in 1369, Che Bong Nga managed to gain the imprimatur of the Chinese emperor on his kingship, a recognition that gave yet more energy to his attempts to conquer the Dai Viet.

In 1371, Che Bong Nga organized a massive sea invasion, landing his soldiers along the Dai Viet coast. They rampaged inland all the way to the capital city of Thang Long, which the Cham soldiers sacked and burned. Girls and young men alike were kidnapped and hauled back to Champa as slaves.8

Unable to halt the raids, the Dai Viet king abdicated and handed his throne over to his brother, Tran Due-tong. Far from rallying the country against the invaders, Tran Due-tong soon gained a reputation as a cowardly and greedy king; during one invasion, he fled from the capital city on a raft and waited at a distance until the Cham had retreated; to prepare for the next, he took all of his treasure up into the mountains and buried it so that neither the Cham nor his subjects would be able to get their hands on it.9

The Red King sacked Thang Long for a second time; and then for a third time. In all, he launched at least ten major campaigns against the Dai Viet. But despite his harassment of the Dai Viet and the apparent ease of penetrating to the capital, he was unable to take hold of it. He was resisted, fiercely, not by the kings of Dai Viet but by the chief general, Le Quy Ly, a soldier of Chinese blood who had risen through the ranks of the Dai Viet army to become its supreme commander.

Le Quy Ly led the long tiring years of resistance to the Cham, again and again driving back the invading army at enormous cost. In 1389, he suffered the greatest defeat of his career. Fighting on the Luong river, his soldiers were massacred, his officers scattered; he was forced to scramble away through the rough countryside with one of his surviving captains, who moaned, “The enemy is stronger than we are, and resistance is impossible!”10

But Le Quy Ly had been arming his soldiers with weapons imported from his Chinese homeland. The Dai Viet army had no vocabulary for these new weapons: they simply borrowed the Ming Chinese terms for them. In the next desperate engagement against Cham, a river battle in 1390, they carried huochong: a brand-new military technology, handguns sold by the Ming.

A defector from Cham’s ranks had, for a price, told them which of the river vessels carried the Red King, and the Dai Viet trained a hail of gunfire on it. Che Bong Nga died, pierced with a bullet. His army panicked and retreated. In a more traditional gesture, Le Quy Ly ordered his head cut off and taken to the capital city. With the Red King’s death, Champa’s brief flowering into a major power came to an end.11

Nine years later, Le Quy Ly usurped the throne of the Dai Viet.

The usurpation seems to have been born of frustration. For over ten years, he had watched the royal family fumble, retreat, and panic in the face of the Cham. The nation was bankrupt and demoralized; Champa’s armies had “crisscrossed [the country] as they might an empty land,” one of the chroniclers notes; the capital had been sacked again and again.12

The great general had married one of his daughters into the royal family, and in 1395 he convinced the sitting emperor Tran Thuan Tong, his son-in-law, to relinquish the throne to Prince An, aged three: the emperor’s son, grandson of the general. Le Quy Ly then executed the abdicated emperor and declared himself regent for his grandson.

The child obediently abdicated in 1399, aged seven, and relinquished the crown to his grandfather. Le Quy Ly changed his name to the Chinese Ho and began to claim descent from the legendary Second Sage Emperor Yu of antiquity. He even renamed the country itself: from Dai Viet, to Ta Yu, after Yu himself.13

The science of China had saved his country; now he intended to remake it.

Chapter Seventy-Six

The Turks and the Desperate Emperor

Between 1352 and 1373,

the Ottoman Turks are invited across the Hellespont,

and the emperor of Byzantium loses almost everything

TWO EMPERORS now occupied the palace of Constantinople: twenty-year-old John V, son of Andronicus Palaeologus; and John VI, the former regent John Cantacuzenus, a man of nearly sixty.* Together, they ruled over a plague-battered city, a half-empty countryside, and a sadly shrunken empire: all that was left of glorious Byzantium was the old Roman province of Thrace, a handful of northern Aegean islands, and the city of Thessalonica, marooned on the coast with Stefan Dushan’s Serbian conquests all around it.1

It was a bleak picture, but young John V could see nothing but his own lack of power. His dominant co-ruler, John VI, had already handed parts of the empire over for his two surviving sons to govern: the remote southernmost tip of the Greek peninsula to the younger, the strategically valuable city of Adrianople to Matthew, his oldest.2

In the summer of 1352, young John V marched recklessly into Matthew’s territory and laid siege to Adrianople. Matthew sent his father a plea for help; to supplement the thinned ranks of the Byzantine army, John VI asked his old ally Orhan of the Ottomans for help.

Orhan agreed, and sent over into Byzantium a whole detachment of Turkish soldiers, under the command of his own oldest son, Suleyman Pasha. In return, young John begged another dangerous enemy for help; he sent a message to Stefan Dushan, asking for reinforcements.

Dushan sent four thousand soldiers, and the Byzantine-Ottoman troops defending Adrianople lined up against the Byzantine-Serbian soldiers trying to conquer it. On the banks of the Marica river, right outside Adrianople’s walls, the Ottomans crushed the Serbs, and young John’s allies retreated. John himself was taken prisoner; the older John ordered him deported to Tenedos, a fifteen-mile-long island just off the coast of Asia Minor.

Claiming that he acted more in sorrow than in anger, John VI now declared his young co-ruler deposed and appointed his own son Matthew to be emperor in his place. But he had overstepped. His invitation to the Turks had not been a popular one, especially since (as Nicephorus Gregoras tells us) he had raided the churches and monasteries of Constantinople for enough gold and silver to pay them. When, after the battle, the Turks rampaged their way through the villages near Adrianople, taking what they pleased, he was widely thought to have given them permission. Even worse, Orhan’s son Suleyman Pasha had seized a fortress in Thrace—Tzympe, on the coast—and now refused to leave.3

Two hundred and fifty years earlier, Alexius Comnenus had invited Crusaders east to deal with the Turks and, in doing so, had made his empire vulnerable to their attack. John VI had invited the Turks west to deal with his fellow Byzantines, and had given them a foothold in his empire; Constantinople would pay the price for this decision as well.

John VI grew steadily more unpopular, the presence of the Turks increasingly irksome. In 1354, catastrophe threw its weight onto the Turkish side. On the morning of March 2, a massive earthquake shook the entire coastline of the Aegean Sea. The walls of Constantinople itself shifted and cracked. Throughout Thrace, houses and fortresses crumbled; some villages entirely disappeared. The city of Gallipoli, the key point for controlling passage over the Hellespont, was flattened. Thousands died; the survivors were lashed by fierce storms of alternating rain and snow.4

John VI launched relief efforts from Constantinople, but the Turks were already on their way. Suleyman Pasha, hearing of Gallipoli’s destruction, rounded up a massive crowd of Turkish soldiers and civilians and descended on the deserted ruins. They occupied the wrecked empty houses, repaired the walls, and claimed the city as their own. More Turks dispersed through the countryside, doing the same whenever they found a shattered village. It was a quiet and effective occupation, and they refused to leave.5

The Byzantine survivors expected their emperor to drive the squatters out, but John VI hoped to shift them through diplomacy instead. “Intelligent men do not go to war without first weighing the strength of their own forces against those of their enemy,” he wrote in his memoirs, justifying his refusal to fight. “These barbarians have great experience, great numbers, and great enthusiasm. . . . Our resources are by comparison minimal. Our army, once so brilliant and celebrated, is now poor and small; our public revenues are reduced to poverty and insignificance.”6

But when he appealed to Orhan, the Ottoman leader stalled. Young John took advantage of the situation; in November he escaped from his island and returned to Constantinople. The citizens welcomed him, shouting his name in the streets and demanding his return to power.

John VI buckled. On December 10, he abdicated as co-emperor of the Byzantine realm and handed all power over to the younger man. His abdication seems to have been a relief; he had been running the empire for over thirty years, and bad luck had dogged him the entire time. He entered the Monastery of St. George in Constantinople, and there he remained for the rest of his long life, finally dying at the age of ninety-one.7

Constantinople, now in worse shape than ever, was in the hands of John V. Aged twenty-three, inexperienced at war, he was facing the Turks on the east and Stefan Dushan of Serbia on the west. One or the other seemed likely to seize the city and the throne; but Stefan Dushan, gearing up the effort, suffered a massive stroke in December 1355 and died. He was only forty-seven, and had named no heir. His empire immediately split apart under battling successors.8

This left Orhan and the Ottomans as John V’s greatest problem: a problem that would occupy him for the next seventeen years of his reign.

Unlike the older John, he was very willing to attack the Turks. But he soon realized that his deposed co-emperor had had a point. The Byzantine army alone was completely incapable of driving out the Turks.

So, having learned precisely nothing from history, he sent an appeal to the pope for help. His letter to Avignon made an offer that would never have crossed Alexius Comnenus’s mind. In exchange for Christian soldiers and ships, John V offered to convert to Catholicism and to return the entire empire to the Catholic fold.

Clement VI had survived the plague, dying in 1352 after a long illness; his successor in Avignon was the Frenchman Innocent VI. Innocent, a lawyer by training, politely sent a papal legate to instruct the emperor in the faith, but he ignored the request for soldiers. John V had not bothered to consult his advisors about the offer, and Innocent VI was a realist; he knew the chances that the Orthodox church would willingly dissolve itself were less than slim.9

After the pope, John V tried the Serbs (too embroiled in their own civil wars), Genoa and Venice (unable to supply the necessary numbers), and the king of Hungary (too busy with his own war against Bulgaria). Meanwhile, the Ottoman occupation of Thrace crept forward. The opportunistic Suleyman Pasha was killed in a riding accident in 1357 (his horse was executed and buried next to his body on the Thracian shore), and Orhan sent his second son Murad across the Hellespont to take his place as governor of Gallipoli and leader of the Turkish invasion. “The Turkish historians say that the prince Murad . . . was the most powerful of the line of the Ottomans,” says the sixteenth-century Greek chronicler Theodore Spandounes, “for there was no one to be found who could defeat him in battle. He was always the first to strike.”10

Under Murad, the occupation turned into an out-and-out invasion. He besieged and captured the city of Didymoteichon, the second-largest in Byzantium, and then took Adrianople as well. Renamed Edirne, the latter city became the Ottoman capital in Thrace.

His father Orhan died sometime late in 1361 or early in 1362 (the Turkish chronologies are unclear), and Murad became the Ottoman chief. Orhan had taken the title of sultan to himself for the first time in the year of his death; now Murad adopted it as well.11

And the conquest of Thrace continued.

76.1 The Ottoman Empire

ABRUPTLY, the Avignon papacy tottered.

The lawyer Innocent VI died in September of 1362, and the conclave of cardinals decided to elevate the Benedictine monk William Grimoard in his place. At the time, Grimoard was in Italy on a papal mission; when he heard of Innocent VI’s death, he is said to have burst out, “If a Pope were elected who would restore the seat of St. Peter to Italy, I would die content!” News of his own election came shortly after.12

On his return to France, he took the name Urban V. He was ascetic by nature, severe and pious by training, and he had little patience with the luxury that Innocent VI had lived in. He also believed that the papacy could not serve both God and the king of France, and from the moment of his election he began to plan a return to Rome.

The cardinals, most of whom preferred France, objected; but the Roman Senate sent messages of encouragement, and the poet Petrarch (now in his sixties) sent a long and flowery appeal. “While you are sleeping on the shores of the Rhone, under a gilded roof,” his letter began, “the Lateran is a ruin, the Mother of Churches open to the wind and rain; the churches of the Apostles are shapeless heaps of stones.”13

In April of 1367, Urban V set sail from Marseille* and took the papacy (and the unwilling cardinals, who complained the whole way about Italian customs, Italian manners, and Italian food) back to its birthplace. The papal palace was indeed a ruin, but he took up temporary residence near Viterbo.

It was there that John V of Constantinople arrived, two years later: at his wits’ end for help, he had decided to appeal once again to the Church. He had realized that the Greek church would not tamely surrender to the pope, but as a last-ditch attempt to raise support, he had decided to convert himself, in the hopes that the Orthodox back in Constantinople would follow.

Urban V agreed to receive the emperor back into the fold of the faithful. In an elaborate ceremony on October 21, 1369, John V kissed the pope’s feet, hands, and mouth, and was welcomed into the Catholic faith.14

In return, Urban V supplied him with three hundred soldiers, hardly enough to mount an attack on the Ottomans. But the pope also issued an official bull ordering all Christian monarchs in the west to do everything possible to assist the emperor, as he was now a full brother in the faith. Armed with this assurance, John V tried to raise support from both Genoa and Venice; he was too broke to get home without help, in any case. But when he arrived in Venice, he discovered that the Doge was still calculating interest on the unpaid 30,000-ducat loan taken out by his mother Anne, back in the days of the civil war with John Cantacuzenus. The Doge politely refused to forgive the debt; John V had no money left for travel; and so the emperor of Byzantium was stranded in Venice, saddled with debt, and unable to get back to Constantinople.

Eventually his oldest son Manuel managed to raise the cash by confiscating treasure from the churches and monasteries in Thessalonica, where he was governor, and made his way to Venice to bail out his father. John V arrived at his capital city, humiliated, converted, and penniless, in October 1371. There, he learned that Murad had just led the Ottoman army in a shattering defeat of the Serbians, killing two of the princes who had claimed parts of the Serbian empire after Stefan Dushan’s death, and driving deep into Serbian territory. The Turkish threat now flanked Byzantium, cutting the remnants of the empire off from the rest of Europe; only by water could John return home.15

The emperor gave up.

Contemporary accounts do not record the terms of the treaty, but by 1373, John V had sworn a vassal’s oath to Murad and was carrying out his duties by fighting with Murad against rival Turkish tribes in Anatolia. He had renounced his faith and humiliated himself at Venice for nothing; he had transformed himself from an Orthodox Byzantine emperor into a Catholic Turkish vassal, and in return had lost everything but Constantinople itself.16

*See chapter 60, p. 425.

*See map 73.1, p. 518

Chapter Seventy-Seven

The Disintegration of Delhi

Between 1352 and 1388,

the sultan of Delhi exercises kindness,

the Shah of Bengal cultivates mysticism,

and the rulers of the south spend all their time fighting

IN DELHI, the reluctant Firoz Shah Tughluq had been on the sultan’s throne for a little less than a year. Under his uncle’s cruel and careless rule, the sultanate had drastically shrunk; the early part of his rule was more concerned with matters at home than with enemies beyond Delhi’s current borders. His biographer, Shams-i Siraj, tells us that he began his reign by making massive government loans to the people of Delhi “for the purpose of restoring the land, villages, and the quarters which had fallen into ruin during the days of famine,” and then forgiving the loans.1

This was good domestic policy, and Firoz Shah was rewarded with the loyalty of his subjects; during his entire reign, Siraj says, “not one leaf of dominion was shaken in the palace of sovereignty. . . . Everyone had plenty of gold and silver. . . . Wealth abounded and comforts were general. The whole realm of Delhi was blessed with the bounties of the Almighty. . . . These facts are among the glories of his reign.”2

While Firoz Shah prospered at home, the kingdoms that had broken away from his predecessor continued to expand.

EAST OF DELHI, the Bengali kingdom ruled by Shams-ud-Din was evolving steadily away from its previous masters. Shams-ud-Din had expanded his reach, defeating the Hindu warlords around him; and as he did so, his kingdom was taking on a new character.

Since at least the eleventh century, a mystical strain of Islam known as Sufism had threaded through Muslim practice worldwide. Practitioners of Sufi focused their efforts on the present, not on the hereafter; they sought inner purification, working hard to rise to higher and higher levels of piety. They fasted, meditated, prayed, gave alms; internally, they practiced gratitude to God, tried to exist in a constant awareness of the divine bond between God and the believer, strove for a heart-felt affirmation of the oneness of the divine.3

In this, they were like mystics worldwide: like the contemplative monks of Europe, like the original White Lotus seekers in China. But Sufi believers also held, strongly, that those who had reached inward purity—the awliyâ’, Sufi saints—were the true rulers of men. “God has saints whom he has specially distinguished by His friendship,” wrote the eleventh-century Sufi scholar ‘Ali Hujwiri, “and whom He has chosen to be the governors of His Kingdom.”

[He] has purged [them] of natural corruptions and has delivered [them] from subjection to their lower soul and passion, so that all their thoughts are of Him and their intimacy is with Him alone. . . . He has made the Saints the governors of the universe; they have become entirely devoted to His business. . . . Through the blessing of their advent the rain falls from heaven, and through the purity of their lives the plants spring up from the earth, and through their spiritual influence the Muslims gain victories over the unbelievers.4

‘Ali Hujwiri, born in Ghazni, had traveled throughout the old Persian lands where Sufism flourished; but then he had settled in the north Indian city of Lahore, and had found ready ears among both the Muslim poor and the Hindu underclass. To hear that the authority of a saint trumped the power of a king, to be given a chance to rise through spiritual discipline from the mud of their daily lives to such a dazzling high place in the world—that was a rare and wonderful promise.

Sultan Shams-ud-Din was hardly powerless, but he had embraced Sufism as part of his break away from Delhi. He became a patron and follower of the Sufi teacher Shaikh ‘Ala al-Haq, a native Bengali who had achieved sainthood within the Sufi hierarchy. “He is the guide to the religion of the Glorious,” announced Shams-ud-Din, on a mosque inscription that still survives, “may his piety last long.” Sufism gave Shams-ud-Din a useful way to distinguish his rule from that of his former master; and with royal patronage behind it, Sufi mysticism spread throughout the Bengal kingdom.5

Firoz Shah was unable to retrieve Bengal, either for orthodoxy or for the sultanate of Delhi. When Shams-ud-Din died in 1357, Firoz Shah marched into Bengal to confront his son and successor Sikandar. But he did not have the strength to compel the Bengali sultan, and he was forced to retreat after Sikandar offered him nothing more than a token tribute payment.6

SOUTH OF DELHI, the breakaway kingdoms of Vijayanagara and Bahmani were more worried about each other than about the sultanate that had once ruled them.

By the time of his death in 1356, the first Vijayanagara ruler, Harihara Raya I, had conquered himself a territory that reached from Kaveri to Krishna. His brother Bukka Raya succeeded him as sultan.

Meanwhile, Bahman Shah (the former Delhi officer Zafar Khan) was also at war. He had moved his capital city to the safer town of Gulbarga (Karnataka), a well-watered area surrounded by hills, and built himself a massive citadel there; it still survives today. By the time of his death, in 1358, he had expanded the Bahmani kingdom until it stretched from from Bhongir in the east to Daulatabad in the west; and from the Wainganga river in the north to Krishna in the south.

77.1 Citadel of Gulbarga.

Credit: © R Sudhir Kumar

Krishna marked the northern border of Vijayanagara, and Bahman Shah’s son and successor, Muhammad Shah I, began a war with his neighbor over possession of the fertile land between Krishna and Tungabhadra. It was the first of ten vicious and indecisive wars that would occupy the two kingdoms for more than a century.7

Muhammad Shah himself was a no-holds-barred warrior, the first to use gunpowder in his wars in the Deccan. His gunpowder projectiles were inaccurate and unpredictable, valuable for noise and confusion more than for actual defense; they came from China, and the Indians called them hawai, “rockets.” Yet their use began to change the landscape. For the first time, the new forts being built across the contested land were given slit holes through which projectiles could be fired.8

Muhammad Shah’s wars against the Hindu kingdom to the south were, in his eyes, religious contests. Contemporary chronicles say that in the fifteen years Muhammad Shah fought against Vijayanagara, half a million people died. (Finally, the two shahs came to an agreement: civilians would be spared, as would prisoners of war.) Temporary treaties were made, and then broken; land was given over, and then reclaimed; as in France and England to the west, the will to war kept both kingdoms on the edge.9

77.1. Bahmani Expansion

Faced with solid opposition on his northern border, Bukka Raya’s son and successor Harihara made a tentative prod to the south, crossing a few soldiers over the Palk Strait and landing them on the shores of Sri Lanka.

Since the decay of Pandyan power in the previous century, the north of Sri Lanka had been independent under a king who ruled from Jaffna; the first Jaffna king may well have been a Pandyan general who remained in the island when his native country fell to Delhi. The kingdom of Jaffna had flourished, for a time; Ibn Battuta had visited the court of Jaffna sometime in the 1340s and had been given a tour of the kingdom’s pearl fisheries and ruby mines.

The south of the island had never fallen under Pandyan control, but over several obscure decades, the center of power had migrated from Dambadeniya to the capital city of Gampola, a little farther to the south, and from there to the fortress city of Kotte. From the southern shores, Sri Lankan traders had struck out to ports all over the south, reaching as far as Cairo.10

The island was rich, but not vulnerable. The Vijayanagara troops made a few incursions, but the troops committed to the north made it impossible for Harihara to follow up; the kings at Jaffna and Kotte were able to buy him off with an insignificant tribute. The conquest of the island would have to wait.

IN 1388, Firoz Shah died.

Once Delhi was firmly behind him, he had begun to make the traditional expeditions outwards, against neighboring kingdoms. These had, almost universally, failed; but his success at home continued: “Through the attention which the Sultan devoted to administration,” says Shams-i Siraj, “the country grew year by year more prosperous.”

Firoz Shah himself believed that justice and compassion were the greatest qualities of his reign. “In the reigns of former kings,” he wrote,

. . . many varieties of torture [were] employed. Amputation of hands and feet, ears and noses; tearing out the eyes, pouring molten lead into the throat, crushing the bones of the hands and feet with mallets, burning the body with fire, driving iron nails into the hands, feet, and bosom, cutting the sinews, sawing men asunder; these and many similar tortures were practised. . . . All these things were practised that fear and dread might fall upon the hearts of men, and that the regulations of government might be duly maintained. . . . [But] through the mercy which God has shown to me, these severities and terrors have been exchanged for tenderness, kindness, and mercy. Fear and respect have thus taken firmer hold of the hearts of men.11

He was right. Despite his unwarlike rule, Delhi had mostly held together; he had lost only one part of the empire, Khandesh, which rebelled under its governor six years before his death. But apart from Khandesh, general contentment prevailed. Firoz Shah was no general, but he had proved to be an excellent administrator, an enthusiastic mosque builder and garden planner, a competent manager of the empire’s finances. Grain remained cheap in the capital; soldiers and officials were well paid; taxes were reasonable.12

He died in 1388, aged eighty-one, and at once the remaining cohesion of the sultanate spun apart. The governors of Jaunpur, Malwa, and Gujarat joined Bengal and Khandesh in independence, while in Delhi, a handful of claimants battled over the weakened throne. Tenderness and kindness had not restored the empire’s greatness, but they had slowed the decay; now rot accelerated once more. “During the forty years that Firoz Shah reigned, all his people were happy and contented,” Shams-i Siraj concludes, “but when he departed, and the territory of Delhi came into the hands of others, by the will of fate, the people were dispersed.”13

Chapter Seventy-Eight

The Union of Krewo

Between 1364 and 1399,

Hungary and Poland join briefly under one crown,

and then Poland and Lithuania join under another

IN 1364, Casimir the Great of Poland called a council, and the world came.

Charles V of France, newly crowned, was there. So was the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, elected as king of Germany to replace the unpopular Louis in 1346 and then crowned emperor in 1355; he had just married the king of Poland’s own granddaughter Elizabeth. The king of Hungary was present; dukes and barons from German principalities, Polish duchies, and Mediterranean islands filled out the guest list.

The council itself, the Congress of Krakow, was a bust. Casimir the Great had hoped to whip the assembled kings and aristocrats up into an enthusiasm for a new crusade, this one against the eastern threat of the Ottoman Turks. But calling for crusade had become a little bit like throwing a charity dinner and passing the hat; people paid lip service to the need, but looked the other direction when the actual demand was made. The assembled rulers were much more interested in jousting: “The king of Poland / Who holds Cracow in his domain . . . promised that he would help. . . . To put the holy crusade into execution,” wrote the French poet Guillaume de Machaut, who was among the attendees.

And of all the princes who were there,

Some avowed, and others swore on oath

That they would willingly assist,

And do everything in their power.

But the heralds proclaimed the lists

For they all wished to tarry

To joust and to hold a great tournament.

In short, they jousted together.1

The tournament was as close to fighting as any of them would get; they went home, and that was the last of it.

But the Congress of Krakow had fulfilled its more foundational purpose, which was to demonstrate to the world that Poland had joined the first rank of nations.

Unity had not come easy to the land of the Polans. The first “King of Poland,” the eleventh-century Duke of Piast Boleslaw I, had controlled only a handful of Polish dukedoms, and none of his successors had done much better. Casimir’s father, the short but ambitious Wladyslaw the Elbow-High (also a Duke of Piast) had made a good try at rounding up all of the dukes, but the Polans in the north and east had remained outside of his control.

Since his coronation in 1333, Casimir had worked at finishing the job. The Teutonic Order, between his domain and the Baltic Sea, had taken all of Prussia; he made a treaty with the order that settled an ongoing quarrel over his northern border. He paid off the king of Hungary and in return was given control over the duchy of Mazovia. He fought other duchies into submission, and built at least fifty new castles across Poland to help hold the newly expanded country together. He founded schools and convinced the pope to approve the charter of a new university in Krakow. He sponsored the massive revision and republication of a law code for all Polans. He threw himself into the renovation of his capital city: “He found Poland dressed in timber,” says an old Polish proverb, “and left her dressed in brick.”2

The Congress of Krakow revealed to the world a new Poland: a third larger, prosperous and well educated, at peace. But Casimir had left one task undone: he hadn’t managed to produce a male heir. He had married three times, had two mistresses, and indulged in an illegal bigamous marriage with one girl from Prague, but his only legitimate children were girls.

78.1. Poland under Casimir the Great

Late in October 1370, the sixty-year-old king was out hunting on horseback when he took a hard fall. His physicians suggested that he recuperate in peace and quiet, but he refused to take to his bed. Soon he was suffering from fever and shortness of breath, probably pneumonia; at sunrise on November 5, Casimir the Great died.3

His funeral was massive and elaborate, with a mile-long ceremonial procession of knights and courtiers and the distribution of silver coins to the people. At the end of the funeral mass, his royal standard was broken into pieces. “At this, there arose such a shriek from the congregation in the cathedral, such an outburst of weeping from young and old, from high and low alike, that they could hardly be calmed,” wrote the king of Hungary, who was present. “And no wonder! The death of the peace-loving king had caused them to fear that the peace to which they had all grown accustomed during his lifetime would now end.”4

The king of Hungary, Louis of Anjou, had attended in order to register his claim to the Polish throne. He was the closest male relative of the dead king (his mother had been Casimir’s sister), and Casimir himself had promised him the crown. Louis soon managed to negotiate a compromise with the Polish dukes: they would recognize him as king of Poland, and in return he would leave them alone. He further sweetened the deal with a proclamation issued in 1374, the Privilege of Košice, that reduced their obligations to the crown to three duties (payment of a small land tax, military service within Poland only, and the upkeep of castles and fortifications). He also redistributed hundreds of acres of royal land among them. He then rarely came into Poland, and for twelve years, the united kingdoms of Hungary and Poland were a single realm only on paper.5

Unfortunately, Louis shared his uncle’s inability to father a son. Before he died, in 1382, he had arranged for his oldest surviving daughter, ten-year-old Mary, to succeed him as queen of Hungary and Poland; he had also arranged her marriage to the Roman Emperor Charles IV’s teenaged second son, Sigismund.

But after his funeral, the aristocrats of both countries objected to Mary’s rule. In Poland, a strong party of dukes argued for election of Mary’s younger sister Hedwig instead; this would break the union of the two crowns and preserve Poland’s separate existence. In Hungary, a dissenting party of Hungarian nobles who disliked the idea of female rule invited the king of Naples (the southern part of Italy, separate from Sicily for the last century) to come in and take the crown.6

The Hungarian disagreement turned out much bloodier than the Polish. The king of Naples, Charles II, arrived in Hungary in 1386. He was assassinated a month later, by agents of Mary’s mother Elizabeth, who had hoped to rule as regent for her young daughter. In retaliation, the supporters of the dead king kidnapped Mary and her mother and dragged them off to Croatia, where, in a mountain fortress, Elizabeth was strangled in front of her daughter’s eyes.7

Sigismund (with his father’s assistance) put together a force of German soldiers and Venetian sailors and arrived in Hungary a few months later. By a combination of force and concessions, he managed to negotiate Mary’s release and also claim the throne of Hungary for himself. The antiqueen contigent, pacified by his promise that Mary would have no more power than a queen consort, finally accepted his claim.

Mary, suspecting that her new husband had been complicit in her mother’s death, refused to live with him. He was no more enthusiastic than she was; the two occupied separate households until her accidental death in a riding accident in 1395. She was twenty-four, pregnant with their first child; her death prevented the crown from passing out of Sigismund’s hands, and after that he reigned alone as king of Hungary.

Meanwhile, little Hedwig, not yet eleven, had been crowned king on October 16, 1384. The Polans had no other way to designate a ruling queen, a queen regnant, since Polish queens had always simply been wives of the king. But the name king did not solve the primary problem: their country, newly enlarged, newly powerful, was now governed by a female child.

For help, the Polish dukes turned to their most likely ally: the Grand Duke of Lithuania.

The Teutonic Knights had originally been invited into the Polish duchies to help conquer the Lithuanians. But the Teutonic conquest of the Lithuanian-speaking region of Prussia had had the side effect of uniting the Lithuanians to the east into a stronger and stronger block of resistance, governed and directed by a Grand Duke who ruled from the capital city of Vilnius.

Teutonic aggression had also convinced Casimir’s father that an alliance with the Lithuanians would provide good protection against both the German-Prussian state and the possible expansion of the Golden Horde. In 1325, he had arranged for Casimir to marry the daughter of the Grand Duke, creating a union between the two countries.

Casimir’s wife, Aldona, converted to Christianity at the time of her marriage. But the Lithuanians remained unapologetically “pagan,” continuing in their traditional nature worship; the armed conversion of Prussia had not done much to convince them that Christianity would improve their condition. Now, however, the Polish dukes had a proposal for the Grand Duke of Lithuania. If he converted to orthodox Christianity and married Hedwig, he could become king of Poland and Lithuania, a strong country that would be vulnerable to neither Teutonics nor Mongols.

The Grand Duke, Jogaila, was in his midtwenties and already showing signs of the political intelligence that would mark the rest of his reign. He was a man of moderate habits: he dressed plainly, ate sparingly, never drank, and entertained himself with hard-riding hunts. “A person of simple manners, better suitable for hunting rather than government,” the fifteenth-century chronicler Jan Dlugosz called him, scornfully; but Dlugosz was not a fan of the Lithuanian-Polish union, and even he had to pay grudging credit to Jogaila’s character, “sincere and honest, and without double dealing.”8

Jogaila’s mother, a Rus’ aristocrat, had been an orthodox Christian, and Christianity was not unfamiliar to him. He agreed to the conditions, and on August 14, 1385, Hedwig’s regents met Jogaila at the city of Krewo and signed a formal agreement: the Union of Krewo, a personal union of the two countries under the Grand Duke.

Hedwig remained queen, but all power passed into Jogaila’s hands. By all accounts he treated her well. Pregnant for the first time in 1399, she gave birth to a daughter. The little girl died shortly afterwards, and within a week Hedwig too died, of puerperal fever. Casimir’s two great-nieces were now both dead, the Piast dynasty at a final end, and Poland and Lithuania tied together: one monarch, one crown, two armies, two administrations, and one religion, since most Lithuanians followed their Grand Duke into the Catholic fold.9

Chapter Seventy-Nine

The Rebirth of the Mongol Horde

Between 1367 and 1399,

the Iron Cripple destroys the Golden Horde,

invades the west,

and sacks Delhi

IN 1367, a Mongol soldier in Balkh set out to recover the glory decades of the Mongol conquests: the long-gone days of Genghis Khan, when Mongol ferocity had spread Mongol power across the known world.

He was in his midthirties, known to his compatriots as Timur-Leng, the Iron Cripple (later Latinized to Timurlane); he had earned the nickname by continuing to fight through to the end of a battle despite wounds in both arms and legs, injuries that left him with a permanent limp. He had grown up in the Chagatai Khanate, east of the Oxus river, and for ten years had served his brother-in-law Amir Husayn, the Mongol governor of the city of Balkh.1

Amir Husayn was, theoretically, loyal to the Mongol khan of the Chagatai, a descendant of Genghis Khan. But the Chagatai Khanate had never gained the stability that the other three parts of the Mongol empire (the Golden Horde, the Il-khanate, and the Yuan) had at least briefly enjoyed. The Chagatai khans ruled from the eastern side of the Khanate, an area that had gained the nickname Mughulistan, “Land of the Mongols”; they had never been able to wield very much power in the western reaches of the kingdom, Transoxania (the lands just east of the Oxus river). There, amirs (local Mongol chiefs) wielded the real power. Without them, the Chagatai khans had no hope of retaining their thrones, and Amir Husayn was one of the most prominent kingmakers among all the amirs; he had personally engineered the coronation of the current Chagatai khan, Kabil Shah.2

Since at least the age of twenty-one, one of his biographers writes, Timur had been “very anxious to rebel against the Khan, and to assume [his] power.” But Timur was not a descendant of the royal clan of Genghis Khan (despite the claims that later biographers made on his behalf), and he was not in pursuit of the khanate itself. He wanted power, not a title; dominance, not the mere appearance of it. He wanted the power of Amir Husayn, not the empty title of the puppet khan.3

Like the great Genghis Khan himself, he was a fierce and charismatic fighter. The fifteenth-century warrior-historian Mirza Muhammad Haidar quotes a verse made in Timur’s honor, by those who had seen him in battle: when he seized his sword, he “made such sparks fly from it that / The sun in comparison seemed dark / He charged down like a roaring lion.”4

His battle frenzies had won him a loyal following among Amir Husayn’s soldiers, and their loyalty was only increased by his habit of giving away much of the battle spoil to his troops. He gave them clothing, jewels, horses, weapons, and belts, and (says a contemporary, the court historian Sharaf ad-din Ali Yazdi) thanked them for their bravery by sending them, “in cups of gold, the most delicious wines by the hands of the most beautiful women in the world.” It was a generosity that Amir Husayn, stingy by nature, never displayed.5

“As the power of Amir Timur rose, so did the star of felicity of Amir Husain begin to decline,” writes Haidar. When he felt himself strong enough, Timur turned on Amir Husayn. He laid siege to his former master, trapping him in his capital city of Balkh; on April 10, the defenses broke and Timur’s army flooded in. Timur took his brother-in-law captive and allowed one of his officers, a man with a blood feud against Husayn, to murder him.6

From that time on, Timur ruled in Husayn’s place as amir of Transoxania, with Samarkand as his capital. He ruled in the name of the Chagatai Khanate, but his conquests were all his own. Seventeen long years of campaigning moved his border steadily westward: Khwarezm, Isfahan, Tabriz, the lands south of the Caspian Sea.7

Timur was a throwback, an atavistic combination of Mongol nomad and Assyrian king. He had no interest in diplomacy, scolding his officers for displaying too much restraint: “He was dissatisfied with the gentle way in which his generals . . . treated the enemy,” his court historian noted, “in watering the plains of enmity and warfare with peace.” Timur was more inclined to water them with blood; it had the useful effect of killing any weeds of revolt that might spring up. After a battle against the city of Isfizar, seventy miles south of Herat, he ordered the defenders of the city piled up and cemented into towers while still alive. When Isfahan fell, he had seventy thousand opponents executed. He left pillars of skulls across the former Il-khanate lands to mark his progress. In Sistan, he ordered his troops to wreck all of the irrigation works they could find, destroying the countryside’s ability to grow crops and simultaneously its will to resist.8

He was not merely a sadist. Nor, despite the efforts of his later biographers to put words of piety into his mouth, was he a warrior of the faith. He claimed Islam as his own, but there was no thread of holy warfare in his massacres. He put his enemies to death and spared his allies. He was a practical man, not a philosopher; his only ethic was victory.

79.1. The Advance of Timur-Leng

Until he reached the Caspian Sea, his campaigns were against other amirs, against local Turkish dynasties that had established themselves on the outskirts of the Ottoman power, against the onetime officials of the old Il-khanate who had claimed rulership of their own cities. Now he turned his eyes on the Golden Horde, the Mongol khanate that had dominated the cities of the Rus’ for a century.

Just a few decades earlier, the Golden Horde would have presented Timur with a formidable challenge. But now, the Golden Horde seemed poised for plucking. Plague had weakened both the Rus’ cities and the Mongol government that oversaw them; and then, in 1359, a fight between two brothers of the khanship had spread into a khanate-wide struggle. In the years before Timur’s arrival, pretenders all over the Horde—at one time, seven simultaneously—claimed to be the rightful khan. The man who eventually came out on top could claim descent from Genghis Khan’s son Juchi. His name was Toktamish and he came, originally, from the Chagatai lands; and some years before, he had sworn a vassal’s loyalty to Timur himself.9

He had claimed the khanship of the Golden Horde despite a massive rebellion by the Rus’ princes, who had hoped to throw off the Mongol overlordship altogether. Faced with the defiance of Moscow, Riazan’, and a handful of other Rus’ cities, Toktamish descended on them with full Mongol ferocity, plundered their treasuries, burned their houses, and slaughtered their women and children. By the time Timur arrived at his borders, Toktamish had terrorized the Rus’ back into submission.10

Now he turned to face his former master, refusing to surrender to Timur’s demands for the proper obedience owed to him by his vassal.

The Rus’ princes, called upon to fight with their oppressor against this newest arrival, chose to obey. Timur seemed the worse of the two choices: an “iniquitious, ferocious and terrible torturer and destroyer,” the Russian chronicles call him. Backed by the Rus’ princes, Toktamish met Timur’s army in 1391, just east of the Volga river; and there he was badly defeated.

He retreated to the west, leaving the eastern part of the Horde territory in Timur’s hands. During the next year, Timur fought his way through the Rus’ cities as far as Elets. There, says the Russian chronicle of the invasion, he “captured the prince of Elets and tortured to death many people.” Two hundred miles away from Moscow, he stopped, unwilling to push farther in the face of a devastatingly frigid Russian winter.11

He had rebellions to put down south of the Caspian Sea, and he had his eye on Baghdad, which he entered with little difficulty in August of 1393. He did not launch another major invasion of Toktamish’s territory until 1394.

Once again the Rus’ princes joined their Mongol overlord to fight off the Mongol threat. And once again, they were defeated. On the Terek river, in 1395, Toktamish fought against Timur for three entire days before he was forced to flee. He spent the rest of his life as a fugitive, mostly wandering through Siberia, trying to stay alive.

This time, the entire land of the Rus’ lay open to Timur. He sacked the Golden Horde capital city of Sarai, on the Volga, and then spent eight months in the land of the Rus’, destroying fortresses and reducing towns to rubble. “He subdued and subjected all without exception to his will,” wrote the Arab traveler Ibn ‘Arabshah, who visited the wrecked lands less than a decade later and saw the destruction with his own eyes. “[He] took booty and divided it, and let his men despoil and make prisoners and gave leave to use force and violence and wiped out their tribes and overturned their forts and changed the whole condition.”12

Then Timur went back to Samarkand to recover. He had another target in mind.

He had already sent an advance force into India, under the leadership of his grandson Pir Muhammad; this preliminary reconnaissance had advanced as far as the Sutlej river before retreating to the mountains. In April 1398, after careful preparation, Timur marched from Samarkand, headed south, to join Pir Muhammad.

Together, they raided through the Punjab. By September 20, Timur was camped on the banks of the Indus river, ready to plunder Delhi itself. Delhi, still ruled by the Tughluq dynasty, had passed through the hands of a score of fleeting sultans. It was no longer the center of a major empire but, now ruled by the obscure Tughluq scion Nasiruddin Mahmud, it was still a rich prize.

Just before laying siege to the city, Timur ordered all the Indian prisoners still held in his camp massacred, for fear that they might break out during the battle and join in Delhi’s defense: “On the great day of battle,” he told his officers, “prisoners cannot be left with the baggage. No other course remains than to make them all food for the sword.” Every soldier was ordered to kill his fair share of the prisoners; contemporary accounts suggest that as many as 100,000 were slaughtered, their bodies piled into a bloody mountain outside the camp.13

The sultan’s army came out to meet him the next day, December 17, 1398. It included 120 war elephants whose tusks had been poisoned; this was a little off-putting to the Mongol army, but Timur had made inquiries and learned that elephants were easily panicked. He ordered his men to pile hay on the backs of camels, set it on fire, and drive the camels towards the elephants.

Faced with screaming, flaming, charging camels, the elephants stampeded back through the sultan’s army. The lines broke, and the Mongols drove the Indian army back. Nasiruddin Mahmud escaped, fleeing to Gujarat and taking refuge there.14

79.2 Battle of the Terek River

The population of Delhi was not as fortunate. Timur entered the city the next day and allowed his forces to plunder and kill. “High towers were built with the heads of Hindus,” one chronicler wrote, “and their bodies became the food for ravenous beasts and birds.” The official court account recorded ten thousand beheaded in a single hour, wives and children taken as slaves, grain stores burned, jewels torn from the ears and fingers of Delhi’s women. “Excepting the quarter of the scholars,” the account concludes, “the whole city was sacked.”15

The conquest of the rest of India did not immediately follow. Instead Timur withdrew to Samarkand; the heat of the 1399 summer, in the north of India, had discouraged him from staying. He took with him thousands of captives: artists, writers, competent officials, stonemasons, bricklayers, and weavers. He intended to put them to work as slaves in his own realm; the builders were given the task of constructing a mosque that Timur planned as a monument to his own greatness. When Nasiruddin Mahmud finally crept back to his wrecked city, he found it stripped and burned, corpses stacked in the street, and its entire culture transported over the mountains, to captivity in distant Samarkand.

Chapter Eighty

Compromises and Settlements

Between 1368 and 1392,

the Goryeo dynasty gives way to the Joseon,

and the southern court of Japan gives way to the northern

EAST OF TIMUR, insulated by the sheer expanse of earth and water from Timur and from plague, Goryeo was struggling with the presence of the Ming instead.

The fall of the Yuan dynasty gave the rulers of Goryeo a chance to recover their old status. Kublai Khan had forced them to replace their traditional title of emperor with the lower rank of vassal king, and had further tied the royal family to his own through marriage; one of his (many) daughters had been sent to Goryeo as a royal bride, and since then, Goryeo kings had continued to marry Mongol wives.

When Yuan might began to deflate during the Red Turban rebellions, King Gongmin of Goryeo had begun, tentatively, to reclaim his power. The Hongwu Emperor’s coronation, in 1368, was a green light; King Gongmin immediately sent messages of friendship and respect to the new Ming emperor, and at the same time appointed the Buddhist monk Shin Ton to help carry out a purge of the Mongols in his own government.1

The cleansing of Goryeo from Mongol influence was not a simple thing. For nearly a century, Goryeo’s kings had not only married Mongol wives but had gone to Yuan China for their education; Gongmin himself had spent years studying politics and Confucian thought at the Mongol capital Dadu. But a contemporary chronicle gives us an unexpected glimpse into the resentment that must have simmered around him, after his return. When the young man and his brother went in to see their father the king, he flew into a temper and shouted at them, “Both your parents are Korean. Why do you come to see me in Mongolian clothing? . . . How do you have the face to see people? Change your clothes immediately!”2

The Mongol thread woven through Goryeo’s everyday life seems to have been a constant humiliation to Gongmin. The removal of Mongol officials soon expanded into a general reprisal against prominent Goryeo citizens who had been Mongol-friendly. With the king’s approval, Shin Ton even created a new agency, the “Directorate for Reclassification of Farmland and Farming Population,” whose sole task was to investigate pro-Yuan landholders with the intent of taking their land and slaves away, redistributing the land and freeing the slaves.3

But Gongmin’s determination to clean out the Mongol vein from the bedrock of Goryeo culture was not shared by everyone at his court. For many of his people, the ways of the Yuan had simply become their ways; the foreigners to be feared were the Ming, the aggressive new empire that no one yet knew or understood.

Adding an additional layer of disturbance, Japanese pirates, called wokou, were taking advantage of the divided court and ongoing civil war at home to range lawlessly through the sea. Raids on Goryeo’s coast grew so severe that Gongmin ordered warehouses on the coast, used for storing official taxes paid in rice, moved inland. Peasants who had always farmed the fertile lands along the water gave up and fled from the sea. Gongmin gave the defense against pirates over to his general Yi Seong-gye. Famous for his skills as an archer, Yi Seong-gye was personally responsible for picking off the most notorious of the pirates, the much-feared Akibatsu, with his own arrow.4

The wokou sometimes staged raids with as many as three thousand pirates and scores of ships; they were a constant plague not only to Goryeo but to the Ming coast as well. Yet the Ashikaga shogunate had been, so far, powerless to restrain them, as it was powerless to restrain most bandit activity that took place far away from Kyoto. The Japanese monarchy itself was divided, with an emperor from the senior imperial line ruling in Kyoto, a rival emperor from the junior line holding court in the southern mountains. The Ashikaga shogun had tied his fortunes to the emperor in Kyoto; and that emperor’s reach was short and weak.

And in 1368, the newly appointed shogun was a ten-year-old boy: Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, grandson of the first Ashikaga shogun. He had been left in the hands of the highly capable and conscientious regent Hosokawa Yoriyuki, but Yoriyuki was soon forced to leave Kyoto by his political rivals. Japan remained divided into battling military zones, with local warlords doing as they pleased; no ruler, imperial or military, had the power to bring peace to the countryside, let alone the distant pirate-haunted coasts.

IN 1371, the reformist monk-official Shin Ton was assassinated; his energetic land claiming and slave freeing had made him many enemies in Goryeo. Doggedly, King Gongmin continued his anti-Yuan, pro-Ming policies, hardening the fears of those who saw Ming power looming too close. Three years later, he too was assassinated.

The architect of the assassination was his chief general Yi In-im, who held the reverse of the dead king’s positions: he was pro-Yuan, and anti-Ming, and believed that Goryeo would find independence only in resisting all Ming demands. Yi In-im presided over the coronation of Gongmin’s son, eleven-year-old Wu, and himself took control of the government. He found this easy to do; Wu was both young and in an ambivalent position. Later accounts (all of which have a stake in proving that Wu was never a legitimate king) explain that he was widely rumored to be not Gongmin’s son at all, but the illegimate son of the dead monk Shin Don, smuggled into the palace because Gongmin’s wife was barren.5

For nearly fourteen years, pro-Ming and Ming-phobic factions struggled in the Goryeo government. Yi In-im himself fell in the conflict. The general Yi Seong-gye, hero of the fight against Japanese piracy, gained a following as a pro-Ming leader. Like the dead Gongmin, he believed it was more politic to pacify the Ming than to annoy them.

In the summer of 1388, the conflict came to a point when the Ming Hongwu Emperor made a demand for the return of the northern lands once held by the Yuan. Under the influence of his anti-Ming advisors, King Wu ordered General Yi Seong-gye to lead an attack on the nearest Ming territory. Yi Seong-gye protested. This, he said, was a very bad idea, and he sent the young king a letter explaining exactly why.

First, it is not profitable for a small kingdom to attack a bigger kingdom.

Second, it is not appropriate to mobilize large troops in summer.

Third, there is the possibility of Japanese pirates invading the southern parts if large troops are concentrated in the northern parts.

Fourth, bows cannot be used due to the melting of the bowstrings in summer when it is rainy and sweltering much, and soldiers suffer from many diseases.6

King Wu refused to listen. Exasperated, Yi Seong-gye marched his army straight into the capital city and arrested both the young king and his anti-Ming advisors. The coup was a relatively peaceful one; Wu was treated kindly, but he was firmly deposed.7

At first, Yi Seong-gye and his allies chose a new king to serve as their puppet; but in April of 1392, Yi Seong-gye crowned himself ruler of Goryeo. He renamed himself Taejo and declared the following year, 1393, to be the first year of a new era. He also renamed the country: from now on it would be Joseon, the name he also gave to his new dynasty.

It was a relatively peaceful transition. In an effort to keep bloodshed to a minimum, the new emperor Taejo ordered that all government officials be removed from their posts, deprived of their titles, and put under house arrest; then he appointed a new administration. He announced the construction of a new capital city: the city of Hanyang, which was renamed Hanseong, and known widely simply as the seoul, a common noun meaning “capital.” A massive building project, recruiting almost twenty thousand laborers, began, and a massive new royal wall was built around the city during the cold season, when the laborers were not needed on their own farms. The city had four gates: Great East, Great South, Great West, and Sukjeongmun the north gate, barred so that it could not be used except for ritual purposes.

And Taejo continued to pacify the Ming. Joseon, he believed, was “a small nation serving a greater nation,” and there was both honor and virtue in acting with proper submission. Despite his years of army service, King Taejo was a diplomat through and through. When the Ming emperor sent a demand for tribute to be paid every three years, Taejo sent a counterproposal: he would send it three times per year instead. Somewhat startled, the Hongwu Emperor agreed.8

He was not excessively concerned with his own dignity, merely with the survival of his country and the stability of his own throne. And in this, he triumphed. “He achieved a prosperous era,” the poet and courtier Jeong Do-jeon wrote, in praise of his reign, “. . . as the King enjoys longevity / all the people are rejoiced.”

In 1395, Taejo commissioned the carving of a star map: a representation of the sky with 1,467 stars, the Milky Way, and almost three hundred constellations.* Based on a rubbing of a first-century star map, long lost, the new star map included a new element: representations of the relative brightness of each star, with dim stars carved smaller, brighter ones larger. The map itself reflects a first-century sky, but the carving of the stars was based entirely on observation of the sky: it was a complicated and detailed undertaking, the kind of thing that is sponsored by a monarch who has chosen not to fight, in favor of looking outward instead.9

MEANWHILE, the young Ashikaga shogun Yoshimitsu had been slowly earning greater and greater respect at the Kyoto court; this respect was demonstrated by the raft of ceremonial titles he was awarded, one by one. By the age of twenty-one, he held every title that his father and grandfather had claimed; by 1380, aged twenty-three, he had become the Minister of the Left, the second-highest position at court.10

Increasingly, he took to himself the rituals and symbols of sovereignty. He even called himself “King of Japan” in his dealings with the Ming emperor; the Ming disliked dealing with subordinates, and without the royal title Yoshimitsu would have been unable to exchange embassies and treaties with the Hongwu Emperor and his successors.

80.1 Joseon and Japan

Meanwhile, the southern court at Yoshino was fading. The southern emperor, Go-Daigo’s grandson Go-Kameyama, was in possession of the sacred regalia of the Japanese emperors, but he could boast little else. In 1392, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu managed to negotiate a compromise: if Go-Kameyama would travel to Kyoto with the sacred regalia and hand it over to the northern emperor (an act that would ritually legitimize the Kyoto emperor’s rule), the shogun would see that Go-Kameyama was awarded the title of Cloistered Emperor. He also promised that the next ruling emperor would come from the junior line, and that rule would alternate between the senior and the junior branches of the family.11

This was exactly the same compromise that had failed sixty years before. But Go-Kameyama chose to be an optimist. He journeyed to Kyoto and surrendered the regalia.

In recognition, Yoshimitsu sponsored a three-day sacred festival in Kyoto. Nightly dances dedicated to the gods (kagura) celebrated the spiritual triumph of reunification, the joy of the end of the Nambokucho era, the conclusion of the age of the “Southern and Northern Court.”12

But the compromise, which theoretically brought the struggle between north and south to an end, had done nothing to bring the fractured military zones back under central rule. It had done nothing to corral the independent-minded warlords out in the provinces. The victory dances were empty: ritual with no reality behind them.

*The Korean name of the map is “Cheonsang yeolcha bunya jido.”

Chapter Eighty-One

The House of Visconti and the Papal States

Between 1368 and 1390,

the pope tries to return to Rome,

the Viscontis fight to claim the north of Italy,

and the papacy divides

POPE URBAN V had returned to Rome, but a single year in the Eternal City had given him a deep appreciation for Avignon.

Italy was seething. South of the Papal States, the Kingdom of Naples was friendly to the pope, but torn by palace intrigues and an ongoing feud with Sicily. The Papal States themselves had been without a head for sixty-five years, ever since the papacy had removed itself to Avignon; the cities within the Papal States were ruling themselves. Control of Rome itself had seesawed violently between Senate and various competing aristocratic families. In the north, the Lombard cities had reverted to their old independent ways, with little interference from the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV. Charles was far more interested in Germany than in the old regnum Italicum of the empire; when he had gone to Rome for his own coronation, he had arrived in the morning, been crowned, and then left without even spending the night in the city.1

In this vacuum, the House of Visconti had expanded.

The Visconti family had begun its rise to power in Milan seven decades before, when the Archbishop of Milan, Ottone Visconti, had maneuvered his nephew Matteo into Milan’s secular government as Captain of the People, leader and spokesman for the merchants and craftsmen. Thirty years later, the Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV had appointed Matteo’s grandson Perpetual Lord of Milan, and since then, the House of Visconti had dominated Milan’s politics.2

Milan had also spread its reach outward, claiming to rule the nearby cities of Pavia and Genoa (among others). In 1356, the two brothers Giovanni and Bernabò Visconti had divided the Milanese territory between them; Giovanni was ruling from Milan, Bernabò from the city of Bologna, which he had seized from the Papal States.

Bernabò was a fearsome opponent: a notorious libertine, father of seventeen legitimate and some twenty illegitimate children; an enthusiastic hunter who kept five thousand hunting dogs; a cruel and capricious ruler who had once ordered a deer poacher thrown into his dog kennel to be eaten, and who had executed a young man for confessing that he had “dreamed” of killing one of his master’s game boars. Urban V had excommunicated the Visconti tyrant for his trespass into the Papal States, sending two papal legates with a bull of excommunication to Bologna to confront Bernabò in person. Bernabò had listened, and then had forced the legates to eat the bull—parchment, silk ribbons, lead seals and all. Urban protested; Bernabò retorted, “I would have you know that I am pope, emperor and king in my own domains. God Himself cannot do here what is contrary to my will.”3

That level of defiance was a little over Urban V’s head, and so he appealed to emperor Charles IV, hoping that Charles would provide him with the actual force necessary to drive the man out.

Charles IV agreed, entering Italy in May of 1368 and marching on Milan. Although he was not popular in Italy, he could easily have mustered the other northern Italian cities against the Viscontis; Florence, Padua, and Mantua were all worried about the growing Visconti power. Instead, the emperor allowed the Visconti brothers to buy him off with a good-sized tribute. He then tried to base himself in Lucca, but the people of Lucca, indignant over his pacification of the Visconti tyrants, refused to welcome him.4

Charles IV gave up and went home. Without his support, Urban V lost heart; he was overwhelmed and powerless in Italy, and he began to think longingly of Avignon.

The cardinals knew of his wish to go home; so did most of Rome. The Franciscan nun Birgitta of Vadstena, well known for her mystical revelations, visited the papal court and told the pope that she had received a direct word from the Mother of God. “I led Pope Urban by my prayer and the work of the Holy Spirit from Avignon to Rome . . . ,” she declared, speaking in Mary’s voice. “What did he do to me? He turns his back on me. . . . An evil spirit has brought him to this by deceiving him. He is weary of his divine work and wants his own physical comfort.” If Urban V returned to Avignon, Birgitta prophesied, he would die within the year.5

But Urban was sixty years old, tired and fed up, and perhaps death within the year already seemed likely. He returned to Avignon in September, and died in November after a brief and sudden illness.

His successor was Gregory XI, nephew of Urban’s predecessor Clement VI. Gregory XI was forty-two years old, energetic and politically savvy. He knew that the papacy was in danger of losing the Papal States unless it returned to Rome, but he was aware that he was no more capable of dealing with the Visconti than Urban had been. So, from Avignon, he worked to unify a league of Lombard cities against the Visconti.

This went horribly, disastrously wrong. Gregory XI had hoped that Florence would join the anti-Visconti league, but the papal legate he sent to finalize the alliance swapped sides and took up with the Viscontis. The Florentines, already suspicious of the pope’s motivations, rallied Siena, Lucca, and Pisa against the Papal States. Almost immediately, the conflict mutated into Italians against French, the defense of the homeland against a foreign pope; in ten days, eighty cities and towns joined this antipapal alliance.6

81.1 War in Italy

The nasty, complicated, bloody war that followed saw multiple switchings of sides, including that of the English mercenary John Hawkwood, who fought in turn for Florence, Milan, and Gregory XI; he was in the pope’s pay, though, when he led his men in a sack of the Italian city of Faenza that ended in massacre of the civilians, rape of every woman under the age of sixty, and wholesale looting. A Sienese chronicle says that Hawkwood himself killed at least one young woman, and that a priest with the expedition stood at the gates of Faenza, calling out to the rape victims to submit because “this is good for the army.” A year later, a similar scene unfolded at Cesena, where the pope’s legate Robert of Geneva led an attack in which at least four thousand unarmed citizens were killed: “women, old and young, and sick, and children, and pregnant women, were cut to pieces at the point of a dagger.” Robert himself was heard to shout out, during the attack, “I will have more blood! kill all!—blood, blood!”7

By 1377, both Gregory XI and the antipapal league were sickened by the war, ready to negotiate a peace. On August 21, they agreed to a cease-fire; Gregory XI was still in the middle of messy negotiations with Florence on the one hand and Bernabò Visconti on the other when he died, in March of 1378.

He had come to Rome for the negotiations and drew his last breath there, which finally gave the Roman cardinals the chance to elect an Italian pope. Shouting down their French colleagues, they elevated the Italian-born Bartolomeo Prignano as Pope Urban VI. But the French cardinals, indignant over the new pope’s first months in office (he refused to even visit Avignon, and he was appalled by the luxury in which the cardinals lived; one of his first acts was to decree that they could have only one course at dinner), soon revolted. They left Rome en masse, reassembled at Fonti, declared Urban VI deposed, and elected an antipope: Robert of Geneva, leader of the massacre at Cesena.8

He took the papal name Clement VII and went back to Avignon. The exile of the papacy to France had now developed into something even more disruptive: a dual papacy, one at Rome and one at Avignon, a schism that would last for decades. “King Charles of France acknowledged Clement to be the true Pope,” says Jean Froissart, “as did also the King of Spain, the Earl of Savoy, the Duke of Milan, the Queen of Naples, and the whole of Scotland; but Germany declared itself in favor of Urban, and also Lord Lewis of Flanders. . . . Thus was the Christian world divided, and churches set at variance.”9

Back in Rome, Urban VI (“of a choleric and obstinate disposition,” Froissart says, “and very haughty in the execution of his office”) was not covering himself with glory. He deposed all of the cardinals who had taken part in the election of Clement VII (the “antipope,” according to the Romans) and then quarreled with their replacements. Accusing them of conspiracy, he ordered them tortured and executed; some he had sewn into sacks and drowned.10

He was too occupied with his cardinals to pay much attention to the Italian cities, and warfare blazed out across the north again.

With both pope and German king occupied by their own troubles, the Italian cities ramped up their quarrels with one another. Genoa and Venice, always rivals, restarted their own series of battles; and in 1380, the Venetians destroyed most of the Genoese fleet in a sea battle at Chioggia, a blow from which Genoa never fully recovered. In Milan, Bernabò Visconti’s nephew, Gian Galeazzo Visconti, plotted the overthrow of his uncle; in 1385, he launched an armed raid that took both Bernabò and his two sons prisoner, and declared himself Lord of Milan. When he offered the Milanese drastic tax cuts in return for their support, they acclaimed him at once and forgot about Bernabò. The notorious tyrant died seven months later, still under guard, after eating a big meal sent to him by his nephew.11

Gian Galeazzo then went on a kingdom-building spree, capturing Verona in 1387 and Padua in 1388. Venice and Florence remained free of his reach, but a reappearance of the plague in 1390 weakened both cities. They could not mount any sustained attack on the new Lord of the Realm of Milan. And one after another, Bologna, Assisi, Perugia, Siena, Pisa, and Lucca came under his control.12

Chapter Eighty-Two

Bad Beginnings

Between 1369 and 1381,

the kings of France and England come of age,

and the common people revolt

THE ENGLISH AND THE FRENCH were still fighting.

In the summer of 1369, Charles V of France was assembling ships and men for an invasion of England. Edward III responded with immediate force. His chief general, his oldest son Edward the Black Prince, was suffering from chronic dysentery and was unable to ride (or even walk for long), so Edward III sent his third son John of Gaunt with four thousand men over to raid and plunder the land around Calais.

Charles delayed his invasion. Instead, he turned his army, commanded by his younger brother the Duke of Burgundy, to meet the English raiders. A series of battles along the northeastern coast began.

At first, the fighting was inconclusive. The Black Prince arrived, carried on a litter, to help his brother; not long after his arrival, he discovered that the English-held town of Limoges had surrendered, at the request of the French, without a fight. He was, says Froissart, “much vexed” and insisted on laying siege to retake it.

English sappers, tunneling under the walls, brought a large chunk of the defenses down without too much trouble. But the Black Prince had worked himself up into a towering fury at the town’s inhabitants, who had been so quick to open the gates to the French. “It was a melancholy business,” writes Froissart. “All ranks, ages, and sexes cast themselves on their knees before the prince for mercy; but he was so inflamed with passion and revenge, that he listened to none of them: all were put to the sword wherever they could be found.”1

The Black Prince had been afflicted with spells of irrational rage and frightening hallucinations along with his dysentery symptoms, suggesting that he may have been suffering from porphyria.* Whatever the cause of his viciousness, three thousand defenseless civilians died at Limoges. Charles V, hearing the news, was “sadly grieved” and equally angry. Taking measure of the popular indignation against the English, he appointed the professional soldier Bertrand du Guesclin to be the new chief commander of the French offensive, with the title Constable of France: a position generally awarded to a nobleman rather than to a common-born soldier.2

And now the tide of the war turned in favor of the French.

The Black Prince, growing progressively sicker, finally went back to England. Edward III announced that the would personally arrive in France to lead the English army, but he was now into his sixties and showing some signs of early senility; he never left England. In 1372, the English fleet was defeated at La Rochelle, by a joint Genoese-Castilian fleet fighting under the French flag; by the following year, the constable Guesclin had recovered almost of all of the land between the Loire and the region of Gironde for France. Only Bordeaux, Bayonne, and Calais remained in English hands. The English now possessed the same French lands they had claimed in 1337, before the war had begun. Badly weakened, disheartened, Edward III negotiated a two-year truce with Charles V.3

“During the period of the truce,” writes Froissart, “on Trinity Sunday, 1376 . . . the Lord Edward of England, Prince of Wales . . . departed this life in the palace of Westminster.” The Black Prince was forty-six years old; his chronic illness, whether it was dysentery complicated by kidney failure or porphyria, had finally killed him.

Edward himself was in poor health, and he immediately made clear that the Black Prince’s nine-year-old son Richard would become his heir. The following year, King Edward III suffered a series of strokes and died. “He had been a glorious king,” notes the contemporary Chronica Maiora, “benevolent, merciful and magnificent. . . . [But] I must briefly note that, just as at the beginning of his reign all the popular successes one after another made him renowned and famous, so, as he moved towards old age and went down the sky to his sunset . . . many unfortunate and unlucky disasters mushroomed in their place.”4

Young Richard was crowned in London, lavishly; a castle had been built in Cheapside, with wine flowing from its turrets and through the aqueducts of the city for the commoners to drink. There was some expectation in the capital that the king’s oldest surviving son, John of Gaunt, might challenge the child’s right to the throne; Richard II was now the first English king to inherit the crown without his father’s first holding the throne. But John of Gaunt refrained from objecting.5

With a child on the throne of England and the truce expiring, Charles V finally launched his fleet across the Channel. Between 1377 and 1380, French ships raided all along the southern coast: Rye, Sussex, the Isle of Wight, Dartmouth, Plymouth, Southampton, and Dover all suffered from French invasion. But he was unable to seize victory. He too was suffering from some chronic illness, most likely a form of heart trouble, and Froissart says that he saw his death coming. He was only forty-two, his son and heir only twelve; so he summoned his brothers and solemnly charged them to look after young Charles VI. On September 16, 1380, the king of France died.

The new king of France was twelve; Richard II of England was now thirteen. Both boys had inherited countries at war; neither one had a wise counselor who could help to orchestrate a peace.

IN PARIS, Charles VI’s four uncles (the Dukes of Anjou, Berry, and Burgundy, all younger brothers of Charles V, and the Duke of Bourbon, brother to Charles VI’s mother Joanna) spent the days after the royal funeral quarreling over the right to control their young nephew. Eventually, they agreed to recognize the oldest, Louis, the Duke of Anjou, as regent.

The Duke of Anjou had ambitions to be the king of Naples, and he promptly used the royal treasury to raise an army for his own purposes. He convinced the antipope Clement VII to crown him in Avignon, and then marched into Italy with forty thousand cavalry behind him. A harsh winter and the reluctance of the Italians to provide him with fodder killed off most of the horses; food ran short; dysentery mowed down his officers. The pope in Rome, Urban VI, declared him a heretic and announced a crusade against him. In September of 1384, with plague spreading throughout the remnants of his army, Louis died on campaign.6

The young king of France was no better served by his other uncles. As a group, they recommended a tax increase in Paris; the incensed citizens rioted, and Paris grew so dangerous that the boy and his uncles fled to Meaux. The Duke of Berry was busily diverting royal funds to buy himself rare manuscripts and beautiful works of art, which he added to his extraordinary collection. The Duke of Burgundy, who shared Louis’s political aspirations, suggested that Charles VI go off and fight in Flanders to put down a growing rebellion against the Count of Flanders—who happened to be the Duke of Burgundy’s own father-in-law.7

Victory would pay out far more benefits to the Count of Flanders and the Duke of Burgundy than to Charles VI. But the boy agreed, and marched off to Flanders with the royal army. On the way, they “gained a very considerable plunder” by looting for “cloth, linen, knives, money in gold and silver, silver dishes, and plates,” all of which were sent back to the royal treasury.

82.1. Richard II and Charles VI

The rebellious Flemish army met them near the village of Rosebecque, and in the carnage that followed, the long-speared French infantrymen spitted the close-packed Flemish foot soldiers until the ranks broke and fled. The Flemish captain was found dead in a ditch without a wound on him; he had been trampled and suffocated by the masses of men climbing across him.8

High on triumph, Charles returned to Paris. The residents came out to greet him in arms, determined to show their new young king just how much power they had; in response, Charles ordered his captains to remove the gates from the city and clear the streets, so that he could stampede the entire army into the city to put down any further rebellion. This proved adequately terrifying: the Parisians slunk back into their homes, “so fearful of being punished,” Froissart says, “that, as the King entered the city, none dared to venture out of doors, or even to open a window.” In retaliation, Charles VI and his advisors levied heavy fines on those who had protested publicly: “as a punishment for their past behavior, and as an example to other towns in the kingdom of France.”9

RICHARD II was given no better guidance.

The logical regent for the underage king was his uncle John of Gaunt, the oldest surviving son of Edward III. But John was widely disliked, and more than one courtier suspected that he had designs on the English throne. Instead, a governing council was formed; its membership varied from year to year, but all, says the Chronica Maiora, were “good, sensible men of repute.”10

They may have been good, but their decisions were bad ones. To raise money for the ongoing war with France, the king’s council orchestrated a series of new taxes: “poll taxes,” flat payments imposed on everyone in the country. The first of these, collected in 1377, required each person in England to pay one groat—a coin roughly equivalent to the price of a goat (the tax was slightly higher for clergymen). The second, passed in 1379, required a groat from the poor, but much more from knights and landowners. It was a “subsidy so wonderful that no one had ever seen or heard of the like,” groused the fourteenth-century Anonimalle Chronicle—unprecedented and wildly unpopular.11

In December of 1380, a third “wonderful subsidy” was proposed: three groats from every man and woman in England over the age of fifteen. Triple the first tax, the 1380 poll tax was levied equally all across the country; peasants were called on to pay exactly the same amount as John of Gaunt and the Mayor of London.*

As tax collection began, in the spring of 1381, tax collectors noticed something odd. Five hundred thousand or so laborers, shepherds, and farmers seemed to have simply disappeared from England since 1377. Devon was particularly afflicted by this strange vanishing-peasant phenomenon. Apparently its population had dropped by half in three years.12

The size of the quiet tax revolt suggests massive underground organization, and an almost universal agreement that enough was enough. The laborers of England were fed up.

Two additional springs, one religious and the other secular, had been feeding into a broad river of English resentment. “There came to prominence in the university of Oxford a man of the north, called Master John Wycliffe, a doctor of theology,” writes Thomas Walsingham in the Chronica Maiora. “He publicly asserted mistaken, heretical doctrines, which were quite absurd . . . that the church of Rome is not the head of all the churches . . . that the pope at Rome does not have greater power than any other ordained priest . . . [and] that the Gospel is sufficient guide in this life for any Christian.” This was hardly new and startling; the Cathars of Languedoc, the Waldensians, and the Pastoureaux had all called for the dissolution of the Roman church, and both Dante and Marsilius had already argued against the special authority claimed by the pope. But Wycliffe’s ideas were expressed both in scholarly writings and in the pulpit. He had a knack for plain and forceful expression, uncommon in an Oxford don, and his preaching throughout London had gained him a considerable following. He condemned the wealth and privilege of the English clergy and argued that salvation came directly from God to the sinner, with no “prelate” needed to convey grace: both were messages that took power from the hands of the privileged and handed it over to the men and women in the pews.13

At the same time, the “mad priest” John Ball had been traveling through the countryside, calling for a radical reorganization of English society. “It was his habit on Sundays after mass,” Jean Froissart tells us, “when everyone was coming out of church, to collect a crowd round him in the marketplace and address them more or less as follows:”

My friends, the state of England cannot be right until everything is held communally, and until there is no distinction between nobleman and serf, and we are all as one. Why are those whom we call lords masters over us? How have they deserved it? By what right to they keep us enslaved? We are all descended from our first parents, Adam and Eve; how then can they say that they are better lords than us, except in making us toil and earn for them to spend? They are dressed in velvet and furs, while we wear only cloth. They have wine, and spices and good bread, while we have rye, and straw that has been thrown away, and water to drink. They have fine houses and manors, and we have to brave the wind and rain as we toil in the fields. It is by the sweat of our brows that they maintain their high state. . . . Let us go to the King. He is young, and we will show him our miserable slavery, we will tell him it must be changed, or else we will provide the remedy ourselves.14

Meanwhile, the royal council had decided to deal with the tax revolt by appointing special inquiry agents with powers of arrest and punishment to go out and find the missing peasants.

In June of 1381, the inhabitants of the village of Brentwood greeted the arrival of one of these inquiry agents fully armed. When the agent, one Thomas Bampton, ordered them arrested, they drove him out of Brentwood by force.

Immediately, revolt spread across the south of England.

This was not, like the rebellion of the Jacquerie, a matter of roving disorganized peasant bands. It was a civil war. Thousands of English commoners had fought in France; they knew how to conduct a campaign. In towns throughout Essex and Kent, they elected leaders, lined up in regiments, and prepared to march on London.15

By the time they arrived at the capital city and made their way through its gates, they boasted an army ten thousand strong, and one of the elected leaders had emerged as chief spokesman: Wat Tyler, a man about whom almost nothing at all is known. He may have fought in France; he was, says Walsingham, an “able fellow”; “a crafty man, endowed with great sense,” another chronicler adds.16

Until now, the revolt had been relatively bloodless; the peasant army had ransacked parish offices on their way to London, burning land records and birth documents, but not laying siege to castles or attacking their inhabitants. But in London the restraint broke. The elaborate London mansion owned by the unpopular John of Gaunt, the Savoy Palace, was set on fire (John himself was in Scotland, which probably saved his life). The Temple Bar, where London’s lawyers practiced, was destroyed. The peasant army opened the gates of Fleet Prison and set the prisoners free. Fires burned all over London; the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Treasurer of England, a chief poll-tax collector, and two other men were dragged out of the Tower of London, where they had taken refuge, and executed.17

Richard himself had retreated to a royal storehouse called the Wardrobe, where he was now trapped with his advisors. He was forced to agree to a parley. On June 14 and again on June 15, he rode out to meet with Wat Tyler.

Tyler’s list of demands was blunt. Laws passed during Edward III’s reign in order to give landowners more power over the peasants who worked the land were to be repealed. The legal category “outlaw” would be abolished. All of the wealth of the English church was to be redistributed among the people; all bishops would be stripped of their rank and only John Ball would hold that title. All of the ranks and titles of English aristocracy would be done away with. “And finally,” Tyler concluded, “let there be no more villeins in England, but all to be free and of one condition.” By royal decree, Richard II was to do away with the entire structure of lord and servant that had shaped England since the Norman Conquest.

Richard agreed to all of it, “saving the regality of the crown.” He, alone in England, would bear a title.18

He had neither the power nor the inclination to enforce any of these promises. But Tyler, satisfied, asked for a mug of beer with which to toast the new agreement. The chronicles disagree about what happened next; one says that Tyler drew his dagger and attacked the Mayor of London; another says that a knight in Richard’s party taunted the peasant leader; a third that the Mayor tried to arrest Tyler without provocation. Within ten minutes, though, Wat Tyler lay on the ground, mortally wounded.

The London militia, which had been quietly assembling behind the scenes, immediately surrounded the peasant army. Massive bloodshed seemed inevitable, but young Richard rose to the occasion; drawing himself up with sheer Plantagenet nerve, he shouted out to the rebels, “I will be your king, your captain and your leader, and grant your requests.”

After a few tense moments, the peasant soldiers began to lay down their arms. The militia allowed them to disperse; and over the next few days, more and more of them trickled back to their homes.

They had put their hopes in the young king, and he had promised to change their condition. Days passed before it became clear that he had absolutely no intention of keeping his word. Rioting began again; but by then the English army had assembled in full force, and the punishment of the rebels began. “The king and lords, pursuing them, had some of them dragged behind horses, some put to the sword, some hanged on gallows, and some dismembered,” wrote the fourteenth-century Welsh lawyer Adam Usk, “and thus did they slaughter them in their thousands.” Richard gave the Mayor of London absolute military authority to keep order in the city. John Ball tried to flee into the countryside, but he was arrested and brought back to London, where he was drawn and quartered.19

On June 22, Richard was personally leading a reprisal attack in Essex when a delegation of laborers requested an audience with the king. They asked, says Walsingham, for the fulfillment of his promises: for the abolishment of serfdom, for equality with their lords. Richard, “completely amazed at such boldness,” retorted,

Peasants you were, and peasants you are. You will remain in bondage, not as before, but in an incomparably worse state. For as long as we are alive to achieve this and by the grace of God rule this kingdom, we shall work our minds, powers and possessions to keep you in such subjection . . . that now and in the future men like you shall always have before their eyes, as if in a mirror, your miseries, as a reason for cursing you and fearing to commit similar crimes themselves.20

*Porphyria, a genetic disorder that produces an imbalance of certain chemicals in the body, often produces vomiting, diarrhea, and stomach cramps, along with seizures and mental symptoms such as paranoia and hallucinations. Other members of the English royal family, most notably Edward’s distant relative King George III (1738–1820), may have suffered from the disease as well.

*There was a provision requiring the rich to make up shortfalls if the poor were simply unable to pay—but the overall intention was to impose a flat tax.

Chapter Eighty-Three

Dislocation

Between 1370 and 1399,

Kanem becomes Bornu,

and seven states on the Niger see a new frontier

FOR MORE THAN A CENTURY, the hawkish empire of Kanem had perched at the center of Africa, its core just east of massive Lake Chad, its edges diffusing outward. “The empire [of Kanem] commences on the Egyptian side at a town called Zella and ends on the other side at a town called Kaka,” writes the fourteenth-century historian al-‘Umari. “A three-month journey separates these two towns.” Zella, all the way up in the northern Sahara, and Kaka, far southeast of Lake Chad in central Africa, were some twelve hundred miles apart; but Kanem was not a European empire, collecting tax and vassalage oaths from its subjects, and the king of Kanem did not control all of the land in between.1

Instead, he took charge of keeping the trade routes clear. Kanem’s prosperity depended on trade through the Sahara, along the eastern trade route that led to Tripoli, and along a less-traveled and rougher road that led, more directly, to Egypt. Salt, ivory, ostrich feathers, and grain went north from Kanem’s mines, fields, and forests; war horses, wool, copper, and iron weapons came south. The monarchs of Kanem did not feel the need to force the northern Saharan tribes to pay homage, but they desperately wanted safe roads to the Mediterranean markets. Kanem’s borders were a commercial reality, not a political one; this made them a little more difficult to define, and even more difficult to defend.

Sometime around the beginning of the fourteenth century, Kanem’s eastern border began to suffer raids from a neighboring people. Known to later chroniclers as the Bulala, they were farmers and shepherds who had drifted westward, possibly from the highlands of the Nile, ahead of Arab settlement. They still held to their traditional religious practices, and their hatred may have been motivated by Kanem’s trading practices; salt and alum, says the Arab chronicler al-Idrisi, were two of Kanem’s biggest exports, but slaves captured from nearby tribes were traded north as well. Although a relatively small part of Kanem’s trade, slavery was still lucrative. And since Islamic law forbade one Muslim to sell or own another, the unconverted tribes nearby were Kanem’s only source of slaves.2

The attacks went on for decades, but by 1370, Bulala raids had multiplied into all-out war. Tradition says that the last six rulers on Kanem’s throne all died in battle, fighting against the Bulala. Sometime around 1380, the Kanem king ‘Umar ibn Idris made the drastic decision to abandon the lands east of Lake Chad and to move away from the capital city Njimi. He chose to settle himself west of the lake, placing it between his people and the Bulala threat. The land to the west of the lake was known as Bornu. It had probably been an independent kingdom at some time long past; the memory of that separate existence was almost gone, but survived in the ongoing tendency of the Kanem kings to claim the title “King of Kanem and Lord of Bornu.”3

Most of ‘Umar ibn Idris’s people followed him, glad to move away from fear, and for some decades the dislocated kingdom struggled to right itself. Apart from Lake Chad, Bornu had no natural borders. It bled imperceptibly down into the southern countryside, where seven kingdoms had built mud walls around their own royal centers.

These little states were known, later, as the Hausa kingdoms. Each was centered around a mud-walled city where soldiers were based and where trade was carried out. They traded up towards Tripoli: gold, ivory, leather, and ostrich feathers traveling north to the Mediterranean, paper and parchment, weapons and armor making their way back down south. There were seven Hausa kingdoms: Kano and Rano, known for trading indigo; warlike Gobir; Zaria, whose wealth was built on slaves; Biram, Daura, and Katsina. They had existed in the wide fork of the Niger as small settlements, some of them for centuries. The oral tradition belonging to Kano puts the first Kano ruler around ad 1000, the completion of the city’s walls sometime around 1150. By the end of the century, Kano was attempting to conquer nearby peoples and had launched a war against its neighbor Zaria; at that time, Katsina had just appeared on the scene as a tiny unprotected village.4

A later legend about the origin of the Hausa preserves a journey from the east. Bayajidda, son of the “king of Baghdad,” quarreled with his father and left home. He came to Bornu, where he married a Bornu princess; and then he quarreled in turn with his father-in-law and left this kingdom too. Continuing west, he came to Daura and there found the people afflicted with a problem: an enormous snake in the village well, which allowed the people to draw water only on Fridays. He killed the snake, married Daura’s queen, and had seven sons, who scattered out to found the seven kingdoms.5

The variations on this story are many and complicated, and it was not written down until much later. In the fourteenth century, the Hausa kingdoms were not yet Muslim, and Bayajidda’s origin is clearly a later gloss, intended to give the Hausa kingdoms an origin that is both Muslim and royal. What does emerge, from all versions of the legend, is a clear link between the Hausa kingdoms, forged by some ancient tribal relationship.6

83.1 The Hausa Kingdoms

The snake in the well suggests another connection. The villagers in Daura had tried to pacify the monster by sacrificing black chickens, black he-goats, and black dogs. But only Fridays (the Muslim holy day) and the sword of the Muslim prince could block it from its prey.7

When the Kanem king shifted to the west, he brought with him the entire array of Islamic government: soldiers and settlers, scholars and imams. For the first time, the full panoply of a Muslim court hovered just north of the walled Hausa cities; they now shared a common frontier between traditional ways and the people of the Prophet.

Chapter Eighty-Four

Madness and Usurpation

Between 1383 and 1401,

Charles VI loses his wits,

and Richard II loses his throne

JOHN OF GAUNT had lost his palace to the Peasants’ Revolt, but not his hopes of a throne.

His first wife, the heiress Blanche of Lancaster, had brought him the title Duke of Lancaster. After her death at the age of twenty-three (she had already borne John seven children, three of whom survived), he had remarried the seventeen-year-old Constance of Castile, daughter of the deposed and murdered king of Castile, Pedro the Cruel. The pretender to the throne, Pedro’s half brother Enrique of Trastámara, had seized the throne of Castile with the help of the French; he knew that John of Gaunt hoped to claim it in the name of his wife.

“John, duke of Lancaster, made an urgent request [that] money should be entrusted to his charge . . . ,” the Chronica Maiora says, “claiming that with this same money he would keep back the enemy from the coasts of England for a whole year. . . . The nobles, although unwillingly, agreed to this importunate request with . . . some bitterness of heart. . . . [T]he duke held such power in the kingdom that it was extremely inadvisable for them to go against his wishes.” The fleet was not merely for defense of the coast from the French, which Enrique of Trastámara knew; when he heard of John of Lancaster’s new fleet, it gave him a “great fright. . . . He judged that the duke would be sailing not only in defence of the sea but also in an attempt on his kingdom, seeking to claim it by force on behalf of his wife.”1

He was perfectly correct. John of Gaunt intended to seize the throne of Castile, and to do so, he negotiated an alliance between England and the king of Portugal. “We cannot gain a more convenient entrance to Castile than through Portugal,” one of his advisors remarked; the Portuguese were consistently suspicious that Castile would try to absorb them again, and a war against Castile would help assure them of independence.2

Actual war between the two countries did not begin until 1383; by then Enrique of Trastámara had died, and his son John sat on the throne of Castile. A combined English-Portuguese army, led by John of Gaunt and the Portuguese John of Aviz, who claimed the right to rule in Portugal, marched on Castile. And, as before, French soldiers came to reinforce Castile’s defenses; the Duke of Bourbon, young Charles VI’s uncle, was their commander in chief.

But the war turned into an assertion of Portuguese independence against Castilian might, of John of Aviz’s right to rule as sole sovereign against Castilian ambitions to control Portugal. In August of 1385, John of Aviz defeated the French-Castilian forces at the Battle of Aljubarrota, bringing a crashing end to Castilian attempts to reclaim Portuguese land. The victory made John of Aviz a hero in the eyes of his people and strengthened his claim on the throne.

84.1 The Battle of Aljubarrota

But it did nothing for John of Gaunt. Castile remained in the hands of Enrique Trastámara’s son, and John of Gaunt was still without a crown. The king of Portugal offered to keep on fighting against Castile, and Parliament reluctantly agreed to fund another invasion force for John of Gaunt: twelve hundred knights, two thousand archers, a thousand foot soldiers, and enough money to pay them all for at least six months.

In answer, the king of Castile appealed once again to the court of France for help. Eighteen-year-old Charles VI decided that an invasion of England would serve to draw the English away from Castile. “Do not be uneasy,” he wrote back to the king of Castile, “for we will occupy the English at home, until they do not know which way to turn; and when England is completely destroyed, we will come to your aid.”

“With this answer the King of Castile contented himself as well as he could,” Froissart tells us. “Indeed, he could not help himself, for no knights and squires came to him from France, all were so anxious to invade England.” The invasion was planned for the August of 1386. A new tax was declared in France, to fund the building of more warships; Charles VI ordered vessels commandeered from every port in France. (“Never since God created the world were there seen such number of large ships together,” Froissart adds.) Months were spent baking ship’s biscuit, salting meat, and drying egg yolks so that they could be powdered and stored on board. In England a new rumor arose every day: the French were just about to land in Dover or at Sandwich; the fleet would depart any day now; the fleet would first surround and besiege Calais; Charles himself would lead the attack.3

The whole glorious enterprise fizzled out abruptly. The French fleet did not catch a fair wind until the end of October. On All Saints’ Eve, the entire fleet sailed out of the harbor of Sluys, where it had been assembled for an entire year. Twenty miles out of port, says Walsingham, “a contrary wind began blowing in their faces, and drove them all back home . . . and also drove them into collisions with each other so that some of them were wrecked in the very entrance to the port of Sluys.”4

No second attempt followed. No French force ever arrived at Castile either, although by 1387 John of Gaunt had realized the fruitlessness of his attempts to get Castile’s throne, and instead had arranged for the marriage of one of his daughters to the king of Portugal’s son. He would not gain a throne, but perhaps one day he would be the grandfather of a king.

The invasion-that-wasn’t was symptomatic of the complete lack of leadership in Paris. Charles VI was a flighty and uninterested ruler, his uncles constantly jostled each other for more power at court, and intrigues, private agreements, and feuds prevented any unified war strategy from taking place. In London, Richard II was no more effective. He made unwise favorites, quarreled with the two uncles still in England, and plotted to get rid of unwanted council members. Clashes and spats took place along the French and the English coasts, but neither king was capable of planning, let alone carrying out, a grand strategy.

In 1391, the French chamberlain opened tentative discussion of a possible peace treaty. “The French . . . knew very well that they were not enough to conquer the kingdom of England,” Walsingham says, “and that the English were no way strong enough to subjugate France, and that both countries were being impoverished time after time by useless expeditions.”5

Officials from both countries had endless lists of bullet points to be ticked off before any peace treaty could be sworn out, and discussions dragged out. They were still limping along the following summer, when Charles VI began to suffer from a chronic fever. “His physicians and uncles noticed that at times his intellects were deranged,” Froissart says, “but they could not do any thing, for he would not listen to what they proposed.”

Despite his poor health, in the first week of August 1392 the twenty-four-year-old king insisted on leading a troop of soldiers on a punitive expedition against the Duke of Brittany, who had insulted the Chief Constable of France. It was a hot day, but he was fully dressed in black velvet jacket and crimson hood, and the young pages who rode behind him were elaborately dressed in silks and armor, with polished steel caps; one of them carried the king’s lance.

“As they were thus riding,” Froissart writes, “the pages, who were but children, grew negligent of themselves and their horses; and the one who bore the lance fell asleep . . . and let it fall on the helmet of the page before him.” Steel clattered against steel. Charles, startled by the sound, suddenly hallucinated an attacking horde of traitors. “Advance, advance!” he bellowed, and then turned on his own pages. They scattered in terror, at which point Charles spurred his horse directly towards his own brother, twenty-year-old Louis, Duke of Orleans, bare sword in hand.

Panicked, the Duke of Orleans spurred his horse away and then rode back around in a circle so that the squires and knights could surround the king. He seemed to recognize no one; they backed away and circled, letting him chase them, until he was sweat soaked and exhausted. Finally his chamberlain came up behind him and caught him by the arms so that others could take his sword away.

“His three uncles and brothers approached,” says Froissart, “but he had lost all knowledge of them, showed no symptoms of acquaintance or affection, but rolled his eyes round in his head without speaking.” He was carried on a litter to nearby Le Mans, where he lay in a coma for three days. When he recovered consciousness he had no memory of the event; he was weak, but completely rational.6

But he was never again the same. He suffered from sudden severe attacks of pain, as though he were being stabbed with “a thousand spikes.” He had fits in which he recognized no one, turned on his friends and family, ran through the palace for hours until he collapsed. The madness was unpredictable and never lasting, making it impossible for a regent to legally claim power for long. Instead, his uncles again returned to court, and the country fell into their hands.7

The spells of insanity slowed peace negotiations even further. Finally, in March 1396, the final stamp was put on a twenty-eight-year truce between the two countries. It froze hostilities between the two countries and prohibited the building of any new castles along the existing frontiers. Richard II, now twenty-nine, agreed to marry Charles VI’s six-year-old daughter Isabella; this would create a marriage alliance between the royal families, but Isabella’s children were to have no claim to France.

The wedding was celebrated in November, the child given her own household in the southern English castle of Portchester. “The kingdom of England seemed about to enjoy a period of unbroken peace,” Walsingham notes, “on account of the recent royal wedding and the riches that it had brought with it, [and] the thirty years of peace that had been arranged. . . . But suddenly everything was upset by the deviousness of the king.”8

Without warning, Richard II arrested and imprisoned three men he distrusted; the earls of Warwick and Arundel, and his own uncle, the Black Prince’s youngest brother Thomas. He accused the three of plotting against him; no one was completely convinced of the charges, but Richard was determined to get rid of possible rivals. The Earl of Warwick was imprisoned for life, and Arundel was beheaded. The royal Thomas died unexpectedly in prison; Richard had dispatched a hired assassin to smother him without leaving marks.

“What the king was afraid of is not known,” Walsingham remarks; and it is possible that Richard was suffering from paranoia. His behavior afterwards was not exactly rational. He became preoccupied with the possibility that Arundel’s head might have been miraculously rejoined to his body, and ordered a couple of earls to go dig up the coffin at four o’clock in the morning to check. (It was still detached.) He also grew increasingly autocratic; he borrowed money in vast amounts from his subjects and made no effort to repay it; he expected any man who caught his eye to fall on his knees; he forced some of his courtiers to sign and seal blank sheets of paper so that he could write accusations later, should he need an excuse to rid himself of them. He was, says Adam Usk, “ever hastening to his fall.”9

In 1398, he ordered his cousin Henry Bolingbroke to leave England. Henry, the oldest son of John of Gaunt, was a hothead. He had challenged another nobleman, the Duke of Norfolk, to a duel over a chance remark. To prevent the duel from taking place, Richard II sent both men out of the country.

The following year, John of Gaunt died. He was sixty; he had returned to England a tired and weary man, making no protest either over the murder of his younger brother or the exile of his son. At his death, Richard II confiscated his vast Lancaster estate, which now belonged to the exiled Henry, for the crown.

Henry, who had gone to Paris, heard the news and set out for home. “He could now see that the king was being unjust to all his subjects,” Walsingham says, “[and] he showed himself to his countrymen now in one part of the kingdom, now in another, to see if men were preparing to resist him.” When Henry finally landed near Ravenspur, ready to make his grand entrance, earls and dukes flocked to his side; within a matter of days he had six thousand soldiers and was collecting more.

Richard II did not even try to fight back. He was rational enough to know just how unpopular he was; he took to the roads, staying ahead of Henry and his supporters by going farther and farther north. Finally he gave up. He sent an envoy to Henry, offering to resign the crown in return for his life and “a livelihood suitable to his position.”10

Henry had arrived in England on July 4; on September 29, Richard formally abdicated the throne in a ceremony at the Tower of London. He released all of his subjects from their loyalty to him, and announced that he wished the new Duke of Lancaster to follow him on the throne. He did this, says Walsingham, with “seeming gladness and a cheerful countenance.”

The next day, Henry accepted the crown. “I lay claim to this kingdom,” he told the gathered knights, clergy, and earls, “through the royal blood which comes down to me . . . and through the just cause which God of his grace has sent me for recovering the kingdom . . . [which] was on the point of destruction, owing to the failure of its government.” He said this in English—the first time, since the Norman Conquest, that an English king had used his native language for the coronation address.11

Afterwards, Richard made a single remark on the proceedings. “After all this,” he said, “I hope that my kinsman is willing to be a good lord and friend for me.”

By February 1401, the deposed king was dead. Henry IV had confined him to Pontefract Castle, far to the north in Yorkshire; there, say contemporary accounts, he sank into a deep despair, his mind unbalanced, and starved himself to death. Not everyone believed this. “It was well known that he would never come out . . . alive,” Froissart says, and rumors floated that Henry IV had sent assassins to dispatch his predecessor. The sixteenth-century chronicler Ralph Holinshed suggests that the knight Piers of Exton had heard Henry sigh, “Have I no faithful friend who will deliver me from him?” and had instantly set off to do the deed; the deliberate echo of Henry II and Becket makes this story suspect.12

Regardless, Henry at once put Richard’s body on display. It was drawn from Pontefract all the way down to London on a litter hitched to four black horses, so that all the towns between could confirm the death. He intended for there to be no doubt, no tales of Richard’s miraculous escape, no reappearance of a pretender. Richard had died childless, the Plantagenet line had come to an end, and the House of Lancaster possessed the throne of England.*

*Richard II and Henry IV were cousins, but because Henry’s father John of Gaunt had been a younger son of the king, Henry IV was considered a member of a different family. The House of Lancaster was a “cadet branch” of the Plantagenets (a branch made up of the descendants of the younger sons of a monarch or patriarch).

Chapter Eighty-Five

The Battle of Nicopolis

Between 1385 and 1396,

the Ottomans triumph

JOHN V OF CONSTANTINOPLE had kept his throne, but at the expense of his freedom; he was now a vassal of the Ottoman sultan Murad, and his son Manuel lived as a hostage at the Ottoman court to guarantee the emperor’s obedience. Murad was simply following long-established Ottoman policy: conquest by assimilation, forcing the kings around him into submissive vassalage, and then bending them to his will.1

Campaign after campaign followed. Now the Ottomans had moved past Byzantium, into Serbia and Bulgaria. Serbia, completely disorganized, lost its entire east; the city of Sofia fell in 1385, Nis in the following year. Thessalonica surrendered in 1387. Bulgaria, mounting a last-ditch rebellion against the sultan’s dominance, was overrun with Turkish troops, the Bulgarian king trapped and compelled to swear loyalty.2

In the early summer of 1389, the Turkish flood finally overwhelmed Serbia. The last Serbian defender, a nobleman named Lazar who had established himself as a local ruler on the Morava river, had rallied the competing Serbian leaders behind him for a last defense, but they were badly outnumbered, divided on strategy; when the Turkish troops met them at Kosovo on June 15, thousands of Serbian soldiers were slaughtered. Lazar himself was taken captive and immediately beheaded. Serbia now belonged to the Turks; Lazar’s son was spared when he agreed to swear loyalty, pay tribute, and fight for the Turks.

The one bright spot in a dark and submerged landscape seemed to be the death of Murad, who had fallen at the Battle of Kosovo in unclear circumstances: perhaps killed in the fighting, possibly murdered by treachery. But this too turned out to be to the Ottomans’ advantage. The Turkish sultanate now fell to Murad’s son Bayezid: Yildirim, “the Thunderbolt.” At once, Bayezid ordered his favorite brother and loyal commander Yakub strangled with a bowstring. Yakub had fought bravely at Kosovo, but he might one day challenge the new sultan’s might, and Bayezid would not even allow this possibility to exist.3

Bayezid had evolved a new policy. Rather than allowing the vassal rulers under his control to continue on, he planned to aggressively drive them out. New campaigns began in Bulgaria and in the other vassal territories of the Ottoman empire, with Bayezid determined to replace vassal kings with slave governors who were entirely devoted to him, personally loyal. For himself, he adopted a new title: the Sultan of Rum. By this he did not simply mean to claim the old Turkish sultanate in Asia Minor as his own; he meant that he intended to be the sultan of the second Rome, Constantinople itself.4

In 1390, he forced Manuel to take part in the siege of Philadelphia, the last Greek holdout in the Turkish lands of Asia Minor. The heir to the Byzantine throne was the first over the walls when the last Byzantine outpost surrendered to the Turks. As the fifteenth-century Greek chronicler Chalkokondyles tartly noted, it was a rare distinction.5

Alarmed by Bayezid’s aggression, John V of Constantinople ordered the gates of the city reinforced, stripping marble from the dilapidated churches around the city to do so. This did not please Bayezid, who now flexed his muscle and demanded that the reinforcements be pulled down, the Golden Gate of the city demolished and thrown open. He threatened to blind Manuel, still at the sultan’s court, if the emperor did not comply.

John V agreed. But this was the final blow to his hopes and his pride. He retreated to his own apartments and took to his bed, lying motionless and without food until he died in February of 1391. He was fifty-eight.6

Hearing of his father’s death, Manuel escaped from the sultan’s territory and made his way back to Constantinople. Bayezid was later heard to say that he wished he had murdered his hostage while he had the chance.* But now that the new emperor was in possession of the city, he had to content himself with a message: “Close the gates of the city and reign within it, but all that lies outside belongs to me.”7

For a time, Manuel—forty years old, the veteran of countless military campaigns, a scholar by nature and a soldier by necessity—pretended that the old glory of Constantinople still survived. Early in 1392, he married the Serbian princess Helena in an anachronistic ceremony that trumpeted the empire’s greatness. The city was dressed in silks; parades and feasts led up to an all-night celebration of the Eucharist, after which the newlyweds greeted the gathered court from their golden thrones, crowned and jeweled.

The real crown jewels were actually still in Venice, held as surety for the unpaid debt. Before they took their leave, the Venetian guests reminded the emperor that he still owed them money.

All that was left of the great eastern empire now lay within the walls of Constantinople. Outside belonged to the Turks, and Bayezid’s eyes were fixed on entire victory, the fall of every western throne within his grasp. “After the land has been cleared of thorns,” he told his court, “my sons may dance in the Christian land without fearing to scratch their feet.”8

IN 1394, BAYEZID I, from whose court Manuel II had escaped, laid siege to Constantinople. His army burned everything outside the city walls and surrounded Constantinople by land. The city survived only because the Turks were not yet able to blockade it by sea; their fleet was rudimentary, their skills on the water poor, and Constantinople was for a time able to resupply itself by ship. But the fields and woods outside the city were inaccessible. Inside, the people were forced to grow vegetables in their tiny city plots, to pull down outbuildings and cottages so that there was enough firewood to bake bread.9

Manuel needed help from the outside. Aid finally came from Sigismund of Hungary, ruling in the place of his young wife. With Bulgaria succumbing to Turkish attack and Serbia already gone, he could see his own doom on the horizon. Sigismund begged for still one more crusade, hoping that the kings of the Christian West would respond.

85.1 Ottoman Victories

None of them did, although the Avignon pope (the “antipope,” to the Romans) promised indulgences. Only a few English soldiers arrived, none of them under the command of royalty. Charles VI of France was in no shape to go on crusade; his uncle the Duke of Burgundy promised to attend in his place, but backed out at the last minute and sent his son instead. Venice, hoping to preserve its right to trade with the east through the Black Sea, sent troops. The military order of the Knights Hospitaller provided a few more.10

By the end of September 1396, the crusading force that had gathered in Hungary was at its strongest—an attenuated, unenthusiastic crew, arguing about whether the coming struggle with the Turks should be a defensive one (waiting until Bayezid came to them) or an attack. In the end, they all advanced to Nicopolis: they had become a formidable force only because Sigismund himself had reinforced their ranks with sixty thousand Hungarians.

There, on September 25, Bayezid crushed them.

He drew the French knights, who were anxious to claim credit for the first attack, out with a small advance force, hiding the bulk of his army behind a nearby hill. The French contingent galloped impressively out against the small visible band of Turks; they were at once surrounded and wiped out. The Turkish army then charged down against the remaining Crusaders. Taken by surprise, they were slaughtered in droves. The Crusader camp outside Nicopolis was surrounded, all of the goods and tents falling into Turkish hands.11

Sigismund of Hungary and the Master of the Knights Hospitaller escaped, leaving behind thousands of captured soldiers; the son of the Duke of Burgundy was among them. The day after the battle, Bayezid ordered his men to bring out all of their prisoners. According to Islamic custom, the prisoners belonged to their captors, although Bayezid could claim one-fifth of the battle spoils for himself. But the sultan had a different ending in mind. He told one of the French captives, a Burgundian who had once fought for the Ottomans as a mercenary and spoke some Turkish, to identify twenty of the richest prisoners to be held for ransom. The man did so; the young heir to Burgundy was among them.

Then Bayezid ordered the rest decapitated.

This was against both Christian and Islamic practice, but his men obediently began to carry out the command. One of the survivors, the sixteen-year-old German foot soldier Johann Schiltberger, was spared because of his youth: “None under twenty years of age were killed,” he notes. And then he adds,

Then I saw lord Hannsen Greif, who was a noble of Bavaria, and four others bound with the same cord. When they saw the great revenge which was taking place, he cried with a loud voice and consoled the cavalry and infantry who were standing there to die. Stand firm, he said, when our blood this day is spilled for the Christian Faith we by God’s help shall become the children of heaven. When he said this he knelt and was beheaded together with his companions.12

Eventually, the slaughter stopped. Bayezid’s soldiers, anxious to please their master, were nevertheless sickened by the task. Eyewitnesses disagreed on the total number of men killed, with reports ranging from a few hundred into the thousands. No matter the total, the result was the same. Constantinople still lay under siege, the Christians had retreated, and Bayezid’s path to the west remained open.

Death on crusade: it was a martyr’s death, and Hannsen Greif’s last moments were sweetened by the pure belief that he would go directly into the presence of God. But Bayezid was not fighting a holy war. He was conquering an empire, and sacred rules of just war were the last things on his mind.

*Apparently the sultan reconsidered this threat; three months after Manuel’s enthronement, he summoned Manuel to his court, and the new emperor arrived in safety. Manuel had decided to stave off Bayezid’s inevitable attack on Constantinople itself by demonstrating his loyalty, and he spent seven months assisting Bayezid’s next military campaign before returning to the city in January 1392. After this, he remained in Constantinople, and Bayezid’s strategy shifted to out-and-out conquest.

Chapter Eighty-Six

The Union and Disunion of Kalmar

Between 1387 and 1449,

Margaret of Denmark unites all three Scandinavian kingdoms,

but the confederation barely outlives her

NORTH OF THE BALTIC SEA, the three kingdoms of Denmark and Norway and Sweden had not yet played a leading role in the world’s affairs.

The Scandinavians had lived in the cold northern lands since far before the eighth century. The ancient chronicler Paul the Deacon made a note of their dilemma: they had “grown so great a multitude that they could not now dwell together.” Some of them had gone to Lombardy, northern Italy, where they had added their own blond and blue-eyed presence to the Italian mixing bowl. Others had crossed the Baltic Sea and built trading posts, founding Rus’ villages along the rivers and streams. Still others had set sail as marauding pirates into the Frankish and British lands, where they become known as Vikings.

But many had remained in their native lands, where they coalesced into kingdoms of the Suetidi, the Dani, and the Hordar: the Swedes, the Danes, and the Norse. The Norse had been united under Harald Tangle-Hair around ad 900 and afterwards had sent ships westward to colonize Iceland and Greenland. The Danes had claimed England for a time; the Swedes, cowed by the Danes, had been allies of the Danish and English kingdoms.*

Denmark and Sweden had held on to the old warrior-clan tradition of electing their kings, although the kings were usually elected from the royal families; Norway alone had developed a line of succession from father to son. Alike in their ways, slowly diverging in their languages, the three Scandinavian kingdoms had separated and reunited like partners dancing a reel.

In 1319, Sweden and Norway had been tied together in a brief and uneasy personal union when Magnus Ericsson, elected king of Sweden, also inherited the rule of Norway from his grandfather. Neither the Swedes nor the Norse were content under the combined crowns, and after multiple uprisings and revolts, Magnus was forced to pass the throne of Norway to his son Haakon in 1355; then, in 1364, he lost the throne of Sweden as well, when the Swedish nobles invited his cousin Albert to become king instead.

Dispossessed, Magnus Ericsson took refuge with Haakon in Norway, drowning in a shipwreck some ten years later. The personal union had been shattered, but Haakon had already laid the groundwork for a second confederation; he had married the Danish princess Margaret, daughter of Valdemar IV of Denmark (whose only son had died young). Margaret bore Haakon a single son, Olaf. When Valdemar IV died, in 1375, five-year-old Olaf was elected king of Denmark by the Danish electors, the Danehof, with his Danish mother as his regent; and when Haakon then died prematurely, in the summer of 1380, ten-year-Olaf became king of Norway by right of inheritance.

Once again the trilogy of kingdoms had been shuffled into a new arrangement. Sweden was now separate under Albert, Denmark and Norway linked in personal union. But like his father, Olaf died early. The teenaged king passed away in 1387, leaving his mother Margaret (who had not yet stepped down as his regent) as de facto ruler of both Norway and Denmark.

Neither country had any way to recognize a female sovereign, but Margaret now set out to do what no previous king had managed to achieve: the union of all three countries under a single crown.

She already held power in Norway and Denmark; she just needed to convince both countries to keep her on the throne. The Danehof, meeting after young Olaf’s death, agreed to continue to recognize her as regent; she was, after all, the only surviving child of Valdemar IV, and they were inclined to keep the crown within the royal family. They had no title for a woman holding such a position, so Margaret was known by the stopgap appellation “All-Powerful Lady and Mistress.”1

Norway, with its tradition of blood succession, took a little longer to decide. To boost her claims there, Margaret adopted a son and heir: her dead older sister’s grandson Eric, a child of five. The year after her recognition by the Danehof, Margaret was acclaimed as ruler of Norway as well.2

That left Sweden.

Albert of Sweden, brought to the throne by a majority of electors, had never gained the full allegiance of the noblemen in the west of his country. These men had preferred Magnus Ericsson; they had felt an affection for his son Haakon and grandson Olaf, and now were ready to offer their loyalty to Margaret. When Albert incautiously tried to commandeer noble-held lands and castles for his own use, their opposition to his rule crystallized.

86.1 Genealogy of Margaret and Eric.

A secret treaty, sworn out in January of 1388, promised Margaret the use of a series of castles and fortresses across Sweden, as well as recognition of the queen of Norway and regent of Denmark as “All-Powerful Lady and Rightful Mistress of Sweden.” In exchange, Margaret pledged to protect “the rights, freedoms, and privileges” that the Swedish aristocrats had enjoyed “before King Albert came to Sweden”; even more important, she promised to restore to Sweden all lands that had been filched by Denmark and Norway over the past decades, returning the country to its old boundaries.3

Albert had nothing but scorn for his opponent, whom he nicknamed “Queen Breechless.” But when Danish and Norse troops marched into Sweden, the country dissolved into civil war. “Ill stood the realm,” a contemporary rhyming chronicle laments,

One brother slew another

And sons moved against father

No one asked after law or right

For some they held to the king

And some the queen would follow.4

The war was violent but brief. In February of 1389, on a plain east of Falköping, Margaret’s army defeated Albert’s men in straight battle. Albert himself was taken prisoner. Unfamiliar with his surroundings, he had ridden out onto a frozen marsh and fallen through. Margaret, who had not appreciated her new nickname, ordered him crowned with a fool’s cap and taken back to the Danish castle of Lindholm; there he would remain imprisoned for the next six years.

86.1 The Scandinavian Kingdoms

Most of the country was now Margaret’s, but the city of Stockholm, loyal to Albert, held out until 1395. When it finally surrendered, Margaret could claim to be ruler of all three Scandinavian countries. She intended to keep them together and pass them to Eric as a single block, so she ordered a constitution drafted that would formalize their union. All three kingdoms would be “eternally united” under a single king; each would keep its own laws and customs; each was obligated to fight to defend the other two; and foreign alliances made by one would bind all three.5

On June 17, 1397, this constitution was signed by aristocrats from all three countries in a ceremony at Kalmar. Young Eric was crowned king of a unified Scandinavia, but his great-aunt Margaret—forty-five years old, the wife of a king since the age of ten, ruler of two countries for the last decade—was the real sovereign.

FIFTEEN YEARS after the death of the queen’s son Olaf, a penniless stranger arrived in the Teutonic state of Prussia, where he took up residence in a small village near Graudenz. The contemporary Prussian historian Johann von Posilge records the event: “Here he was discovered by some merchants who asked him whether he was well-known in Denmark,” he writes, “since he looked very much like King Olaf. He said that he was not the king. Then they left him but returned with some other men and addressed him as their lord, the King of Denmark and Norway.”6

How the merchants knew, fifteen years after the fact, what Olaf looked like is a fair question. Posilge doesn’t say, but the rest of the story suggests that the “merchants” may in fact have been native schemers, attempting to mount an upset to Margaret’s power. They took the man to the coastal city of Danzig and “showed him great honor,” setting up a court for him, giving him everything he wanted, and even making a seal for him. The mysterious stranger, possibly weak-minded, embraced his new identity and agreed to send Margaret a message, reclaiming his crown.7

The inevitable discovery took place as soon as he was brought into the queen’s presence. “He was shown to be false in every respect,” Posilge explains, “since he was neither born in the kingdom nor was able to speak the language” (something the conspirators should possibly have considered ahead of time). Unmasked, he confessed that he was actually a native of northern Hungary and that he had accepted his new identity only because the people of Danzig had heaped him with honors.8

Queen Margaret condemned him to death. In the international marketplace in the southern province of Scania, he was burned at the stake, forced to hold all the letters he had sent to the queen in his arms as he died.

THE UNION OF KALMAR had brought the countries together, but the document could not paper over the rifts between them.

On December 8, 1405, Margaret’s ward Eric married the daughter of Henry IV of England in Westminster Abbey. Philippa was eleven years old; Eric, aged twenty-four, was not even present. The royal wedding was carried out with a proxy in his place.

The ceremony made the match legal, but Philippa did not leave England until the following summer. She met her husband for the first time when she arrived in her new country; the marriage was celebrated for a second time in Sweden’s Lund Cathedral on October 26, 1406. Two hundred and four of Philippa’s attendants were present, brought by her from England as part of her household; an inventory of her trousseau that survives notes that their robes were trimmed with a total of 23,762 squirrel pelts.9

The alliance with England should have completed the transformation of Eric into the position of one of the premier monarchs of Europe. But he possessed neither Margaret’s energy nor her political savvy. After her death, in 1412, he overtaxed and undergoverned the Union, and his popularity began a slow and steady decline.

In 1434, open revolt started in Sweden; another armed rebellion broke out in Norway in 1436. Eric turned out to have little stomach for war. In 1438, he took the royal treasury and fled to the island fortress of Gottland.10

In Denmark, a new king was elected: the son of Eric’s sister, Christopher of Bavaria. He was a young and inexperienced ruler, and his acclamation meant that control of the country actually fell into the hands of the Danish nobles. Eventually Sweden agreed to recognize his kingship as well. Norway followed, last of the three; Christopher never even visited the country after his coronation.11

He then died after eight years of rule, leaving neither sons nor any memorable deeds behind him. Now the Union ruptured. Sweden elected the aristocrat Karl Knutsson, who had led the fighting against Eric during the original revolt; the Danes elected one of their own, Christian of Oldenburg, instead. The Norwegians were split in three; some wanted to elect a native ruler from the extended family of Haakon, others favored the Swedish king, and still others the Danish ruler.

Ultimately, the Danish party won out, and Norway and Denmark submitted to a single crown. But the Swedes remained apart and hostile; Margaret’s grand accomplishment had lasted only a single generation after her death.

*Bauer, The History of the Medieval World, pp. 237, 396–397, 427, 522ff.

Chapter Eighty-Seven

The Hussite Uprising

Between 1388 and 1419,

the German cities rebel against their king,

and the Bohemian Hussites rebel against their church

THE KING OF THE GERMANS had been on his throne for ten years. For nearly the entire time, he had been at war with his own people.

Wenceslaus IV, twenty-seven years old, had followed his father, the Emperor Charles IV, onto the imperial throne. Just before his death in 1378, Charles IV had guaranteed his son’s election by distributing cash presents to the electors. To raise the money, Charles had mortgaged a cluster of imperial cities in Swabia; Wenceslaus inherited both the German crown and their displeasure.

“Imperial cities,” or Reichsstädte, had been founded on royal-owned land, or had grown up around imperial castles. They were directly under the authority of the Holy Roman Emperor; imperial cities paid their taxes straight into the royal treasury, answered only to the emperor’s appointed governor (and not to any duke or elector, even if they stood within his duchy), and swore allegiance to the emperor alone.1

To “mortgage” an imperial city was to hand it over to the control of another, in return for payment; Charles IV had sold the right to appoint magistrates and other civil officials to a local Swabian aristocrat, the Count of Württemberg, which effectively put the cities under the Count’s power.2

The Swabian city of Ulm led thirteen others in revolt. Together, they declared themselves a League, a political alliance of German cities pledged to a common goal: to resist any outside princes who might try to dictate their affairs, and to reject the election of young Wenceslaus as their new emperor. Charles IV had barely begun to fight back against the rebellious Swabian League before his death in 1378; Wenceslaus spent the next decade struggling to force the cities into submission to his rule. It was not a good beginning.

His war with the Swabian League finally dragged to an unsatisfactory end in 1389, when Wenceslaus agreed to give the Swabian cities a carefully enumerated set of self-governing privileges (including the settlement of quarrels between “the lords and the cities who are in this peace” by an independent commission) in exchange for their recognition of him as their king—and the dissolution of the league. In fact, the general peace (or Landfriede) that he offered rejected any leagues of cities against the emperor: they were “against God himself, the Empire, and the law.”3

The Swabian cities, worn out by war, agreed to the compromise. But Wenceslaus IV’s attempts to squelch the will of his people were ultimately fruitless. The first ten years of his reign had been occupied with the struggle against the imperial cities; the second decade was taken up with a series of rebellions carried out by German dukes. They resented his methods of raising money (which had included recognizing Gian Galeazzo Visconti, the Lord of Milan, as a full duke in exchange for an enormous payment); they objected to his dealings with the clergy (he had reacted to an ongoing conflict with the Archbishop of Prague by tossing the archbishop’s subordinates into jail); they criticized his heavy drinking; and they complained about the amount of paperwork Wenceslaus generated in the governing of the empire.4

They were, in short, determined to rid themselves of the king. “The cities of Germany enjoy a very extensive liberty,” the sixteenth-century political philosopher Machiavelli wrote, not long after; “they . . . obey the emperor when they please, under no apprehension of being attacked either by him or by others, for the towns are defended by strong walls and deep ditches, and are provided with artillery and provisions for a year, so that the siege of these cities would be both long and painful.” And, which Machiavelli does not note, they were accustomed to running their own affairs, constitutionally disinclined to obey for the sake of obedience.5

Wenceslaus gave them the chance to abandon him when he made a move towards ending the double papacy. The Papal Schism was now in its second generation; the Naples-born Pope Boniface IX had succeeded Urban VI in Rome, and the Aragonese Benedict XIII had followed Clement VII onto the papal throne at Avignon. The religious fracture was widened by the political one; the mad king of France supported the Avignon pope, the German throne recognized the Roman pope.

In 1398, Wenceslaus IV agreed to meet with Charles VI at Reims, the traditional place of coronation for French kings, to discuss a compromise. He drank too much the night before and had to be shaken awake the next morning, late for the conclave; Charles VI, meanwhile, was suffering the first symptoms of a returning fit. Somehow, the hung-over German king and the withdrawn French monarch came to an agreement: they would ask both popes to resign, and a third would be elected to bring the papacy back together.

Boniface IX fought back. He offered to give the German electors the authority to depose their king, in exchange for their support of his papacy.

They accepted the offer. It took them some time to agree on a successor, but on August 20, 1400, they met at Lahneck Castle, where the Archbishop of Mainz declared Wenceslaus to be “useless, idle, and incapable,” no longer worthy of the crown. Immediately afterwards, the gathered electors chose one of their own, the Elector Palatine Rupert, as the next king of Germany.6

Wenceslaus refused to recognize his deposition, but he had little support left in most of Germany; he was forced to retreat into Bohemia. There he continued to rule as king, but his power failed at the Bohemian border.

Rupert of Germany soon found that the problems he had inherited resisted any quick solution. After his coronation in 1401, he marched into Italy to reduce the power of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, now the Duke of Milan; but Visconti’s troops halted the imperial army at Brescia, and the following year Rupert gave up and went home. There he soon found himself embroiled in the same rebellions, complaints and intrigues as his predecessor.

Wenceslaus, barricaded in Bohemia, had already been battered by the imperial cities and overthrown by his dukes. Now he faced the third uprising of his rule: yet another revolt of the people, this one in support of a Bohemian priest named Jan Hus. And although the followers of Hus had far less power than the dukes of Germany or the imperial cities of Swabia, the Hussites turned out to be more formidable than either.

JAN HUS: in his thirties, priest and scholar, rector of the University of Prague, follower of John Wycliffe, now the polestar of a massive popular uprising.

Wycliffe himself had not long outlived the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. He had been engaged, at the time, in the massive task of translating the Bible from Latin into English: a shockingly anticlerical project that grew out of his conviction that “no simple man of wit should be afraid to study in the text of holy Writ.” The pride and greed of England’s priests, Wycliffe argued, caused them to be blind to the true understanding of the word of God; but the New Testament was “open to the understanding of simple men.”7

The English translation was not Wycliffe’s alone. Other English scholars, agreeing with Wycliffe’s radical ideas, lent a hand. Opposition had also spread: “By him, Scripture is become common,” snapped the English abbot Henry Knighton after the publication of Wycliffe’s Bible, “and more open to the lay folk and to women than it used to be to clerics of a fair amount of learning. . . . Thus, the Gospel pearl is cast forth and trodden under foot of swine . . . and the jewel of the clergy is turned into the sport of the laity.”8

Wycliffe had continued to preach and write, proposing among other things that the Church doctrine of transubstantiation (the transformation of the bread and wine of the Eucharist into the actual body and blood of Christ) was unscriptural and idolatrous. “We worship a false god in the chalice,” he protested, “. . . [for] a sacrament is no more but a sign . . . of a thing passed, or a thing to come.” This too was a slap at the clergy, who claimed that they alone had the divine right to handle the sacred body and blood; anyone could share bread and wine as a sign of things passed. He condemned indulgences as a “manifold blasphemy,” since promising sinners that their punishment would be revoked gave Christ’s saving power to the pope.9

87.1 Hussite Wars

By the time of his premature death from a stroke in 1384, Wycliffe had gained a substantial English following, not only among the poor but among the knightly class. They went by the name of Lollards: “ravening wolves,” snaps Thomas Walsingham, no fan of Wycliffe’s work, “infecting others with their wicked doctrines.” In 1401, Henry IV approved a parliamentary statute that forbade English subjects to own Wycliffe’s Bible, since it was “contrary to the Catholic faith.” Anyone preaching without a license granted by the Church could be arrested and tried. The statute never mentioned the Lollards, but it instantly prohibited them from ever speaking their beliefs out loud, on pain of death.10

Wycliffe’s beliefs were equally divisive on the other side of the Channel. In 1403, the University of Prague banned his teachings; when Hus continued to defend them, even translating Wycliffe’s work for the benefit of the university’s students, he was finally dismissed from his position.

In 1409, “Wycliffism” was formally condemned by a papal bull, a move that authorized the burning of all his books and the condemnation of all his teachings. But this papal bull was itself a contested document. It came not from either Rome or from Avignon but from Pisa, where the College of Cardinals had finally gathered and agreed to depose both competing popes in favor of a third, compromise candidate: the Franciscan Alexander V.

The condemnation of Wycliffe was one of Alexander V’s first acts. Unfortunately, neither of the other two popes would agree to step down. Now, in an excruciatingly embarrassing development, there were three popes in the west.

Wenceslaus, still king of Bohemia, decided to recognize Alexander V as the genuine article. This meant that the bull against Wycliffism went into full and drastic effect in Bohemia, where it was published in March of 1410.

Jan Hus, along with several other Bohemian supporters of Wycliffe’s ideas, took their copies of Wycliffe’s writings to the Archbishop of Prague with a personal appeal. The books had been obtained “at great trouble and cost” and contained many things of value. It was ridiculous to burn them: “By the same reasoning, we must burn the books of Aristotle, the commentaries of Averrhoes, or the works of Origen.” The archbishop ignored them and ordered the bonfire built. At least two hundred books were burned, over the protests of their owners; two days later the archbishop excommunicated Hus and his colleagues as well.11

The archbishop’s autocratic decision did not sit well with most of Prague, particularly since it was rumored that he had saved the gold bindings and knobs from the most valuable books for himself. Songs were sung in the street: “The Bishop burnt the books,” one went, “but ne’er knew he / What was in them written.” Groups of rioters burst into churches and chased the priests away from the altars. Hus did not help, preaching a sermon that strongly suggested that the archbishop might be the Antichrist. And Wenceslaus IV did nothing to calm the tensions when he ordered the archbishop to pay back the cost of the burned books; Alexander V had suddenly and unexpectedly died, after only ten months on the third papal throne, which meant that the king of Bohemia could straddle the fence for a little while to see which way the wind was blowing.12

As it happened, it had shifted. Alexander V’s successor in Pisa, John XXIII, confirmed Hus’s excommunication and tactlessly criticized Bohemia for being “full of heresy.” Wenceslaus didn’t appreciate this wholesale condemnation of his kingdom. He told Hus to leave Prague, but refused to act against him any further; and for a number of months, Hus went on preaching and writing outside of the capital city: rejecting the claim of the pope to be Peter’s heir, condemning indulgences, and drawing more and more followers into his circle.13

Meanwhile, a rearrangement had taken place on the other side of the Bohemian border. Rupert, king of Germany, had died in 1410, after a frustrating and fruitless decade on the throne. The electors had quarreled over the next candidate until 1411, finally settling on Sigismund, king of Hungary (after the death of his wife the queen) and survivor of the 1396 Battle of Nicopolis, younger son of Emperor Charles IV and brother of Wenceslaus IV.

Sigismund had moved, steadily, into the center of international intrigues. He was now forty-three years old: “tall, with bright eyes, broad forehead, pleasantly rosy cheeks, and a long thick beard,” says the fifteenth-century chronicler Aeneas Sylvius, who later became Pope Pius II. “He had a large mind and formed many plans, but was changeable . . . witty in conversation, given to wine and women, and thousands of love intrigues are laid to his charge. . . . He made more promises than he kept, and often deceived.”14

Hoping to simultaneously recover Bohemia, corral Italy, and solve the embarrassment of the triple papacy, Sigismund used his new authority as king of Germany to propose an international church council. He needed only one pope to sign off on the idea, and John XXIII agreed; most likely, he expected that the council would depose his two papal rivals.

It took several years to organize the council, but it finally convened in the German town of Constance two days before All Saints’ Day, 1414. Nearly four hundred high-ranking clergy were present: archbishops, abbots, priors, and priests. But they were outnumbered by university leaders, scholars, and ambassadors from the courts of Europe. The council had two major problems to address—the spread of Wycliffe’s heresies and the scandal of the three popes—and both were as much academic and political puzzles as theological dilemmas.

Constance was crowded out—not just with council attendees but with hundreds of merchants, clowns, jugglers, conjurers, musicians, barbers, and prostitutes. There was more carousing than contemplation in the streets: “The Swabians say,” Jan Hus remarked, “that it will take thirty years to purify Constance of all its sins.” One local resident estimated that seventy thousand outsiders descended on the city during the Council’s deliberations.15

The opening act of the Council was to summon Jan Hus to defend his beliefs. Hus himself seems to have gotten the impression that the Council disapproved of him only because its members did not understand exactly what he was saying. He was further reassured when Sigismund himself pledged a royal safe-conduct: if Hus came to Constance, he would be allowed to depart again in peace. “Under the safe conduct of your protection, [I will] appear at the Council, the Lord Most High being my defender,” Hus wrote back to the king, accepting the promise. “I have taught nothing in secret, but only in public . . . so I desire to be heard, not privately, but before a public audience. . . . And I shall not be afraid.”16

Hus arrived at Constance in early November of 1414; he wrote back to his friends in Bohemia, telling them that he had been welcomed politely (and noting, with some worry, that lodging and food in Constance was much more expensive than he had expected). But while he was preparing his defense, his lodging house was surrounded by soldiers. The College of Cardinals had decided to treat him as a heretic, not a guest.17

He was imprisoned in a dank cell at a local monastery, right next to the latrines, and soon he was suffering from severe dysentery. Sigismund, finding out about the arrest after the fact, protested the violation of the royal safe-conduct. But he soon saw that freeing Hus would alienate much of the Council; and so he sacrificed Hus to the greater cause, the end of the Great Schism of the papacy.

Hus remained imprisoned for months. “Please get me a Bible,” he wrote to his friends, “and some pens and small inkhorn. . . . And send another shirt by the bearer.” Meanwhile, the Council turned back to deal with the three popes. The Pisan pope John XXIII, who had been present since the council opened, soon saw that the assembled clergy were bent on removing him. In March of 1415 he took his leave; in his absence, the council deposed him.18

This left two popes to be dealt with. The pugnacious Roman pope Boniface IX had died nine years before, and his successor Gregory XII had always hoped to bring the schism to an end. He now offered to abdicate, on condition that the council also depose the Avignon pope, Benedict XIII, and agree on a single papal candidate who would take the place of all three.19

Benedict flatly refused to cooperate. Sigismund began negotiations with his secular allies—most notably, the king of Aragon—in an attempt to force him out of Avignon. But this was a slow and delicate operation, and as it dragged on, the Council of Constance turned its attention back to Hus. Debates and arguments followed; but not until June was Hus allowed to speak for himself. None of his defenses were accepted. He was given several chances to recant and refused. Finally, on July 6, he was brought to the cathedral of Constance and condemned as a heretic. Directly afterwards, he was taken outside the city to an execution site known as the Devil’s Place. He was chained to a stake, firewood piled up to his chin: “In the truth of the gospel I have written, taught and preached,” he called out, “today I will gladly die.” And then the fire was lit.

No one from the Council was present; they had all gone back to their deliberations, and were already arguing again about the papacy.20

ULTIMATELY, THE KING OF ARAGON agreed to support the deposition of the obstinate Avignon pope, and the Council was able to end the schism. In 1417, a single pope was appointed by the cardinals and approved by the Council: the Roman priest Martin V. With its work done, the Council began to wind up its business, the assembled ambassadors, priests, professors, and prostitutes finally heading home.

But John Hus was not forgotten. At the news of his death, his followers in Bohemia had begun to gather weapons and organize themselves into groups: no longer simply followers of Wycliffe, they were now Hussites, an increasingly bold movement that was rapidly transforming into a popular army.

The new pope Martin V excommunicated all of Hus’s followers early in 1418, forcing King Wenceslaus to act against them or be accused of defying the one true Church. Pragmatically, Wenceslaus ordered the arrest of priests in Prague who had allowed laypeople to serve the Eucharist, a clear Hussite acceptance of the radical ideas first proposed by Wycliffe. But Wenceslaus had no more luck with the Hussites than with the imperial cities. His punishment led to a riot; in July of 1419, Hussites stormed through the streets of Prague, breaking into the town hall and demanding that the officials there release the imprisoned priests. In the scuffle that followed, Hussites threw thirteen Prague administrators out of the windows. Seven were killed in the street below.

King Wenceslaus died shortly afterwards, reputedly of shock, more likely of acute alcohol poisoning. His brother Sigismund reclaimed Bohemia for Germany, adding the duchy back to his combined German-Hungarian empire. He then set out to destroy the Hussites; but the incident at the town hall (later nicknamed the “First Defenestration of Prague”) had been only the first act in a long and bloody struggle between the imperial German armies and the militant Hussite resistance. The Hussite Wars would drag on for another twenty years: a bloody, extended, and explicit rejection of the authority of emperor, king, pope, and Church.21

Chapter Eighty-Eight

The Taking of France

Between 1401 and 1420,

the king of England finally seizes France

IN ENGLAND, Henry IV sat on the throne. He had claimed the crown of England in every possible way: “first, by conquest,” says Froissart, “second, from being heir to it; and third, from the pure and free resignation which King Richard had made of it. . . . [And] Parliament [too] declared that it was their will he should be king.”1

There was, in all this, a faint air of protesting too much. Henry derived his right to rule from his father, John of Gaunt; John, the oldest surviving son of Edward III at the time of the king’s death, could have claimed to be rightful king in the place of his dead brother’s son Richard. But he had never made this claim. And since five sons of Edward III had grown to adulthood, there were plenty of other royal cousins in England who could make a similar claim to the throne. The strongest claim belonged to Edmund Mortimer, the Earl of March; his mother Philippa was the only daughter of Edward’s second son, Lionel of Antwerp. Like the Black Prince, Lionel had died before his father, but Philippa was still senior to Henry IV. She had been Richard II’s heiress, and after her death in 1382, her claim had passed to her son.

The upshot was that Henry IV, although popular with his people, was vulnerable to challenge. And the first years of his rule were particularly tumultuous. Wales had been part of the English empire for over a century, but now a wealthy Welsh farmer named Owain Glyndwr took advantage of Henry’s insecure crown and called his countrymen to follow him to independence. Early in 1401, he began to lead attacks on the English living in the north of Wales. Henry sent his oldest son, Prince Hal, at the head of a reprisal force, but Owain continued to inflict “considerable losses on the English.”2

And then Henry IV began to make missteps.

Rumors of Richard II’s survival had already begun to circulate, despite all of his efforts. He was not making much headway against the Welsh, and the Scots had taken the opportunity to mount invasions in the north as well. Meanwhile, Edmund Mortimer, who (despite being deprived of his putative crown) had been loyally fighting for the English cause against the Welsh, was taken prisoner in a battle with Owain Glyndwr. Mortimer’s brother-in-law Henry Percy, who had been leading the resistance to the Scots, offered to ransom him out of Owain Glyndwr’s hands. But Henry IV refused to allow it.

This removed Edmund Mortimer, his potential rival, from the English scene. But both Mortimer and Henry Percy, who until this point had been supporters of Henry IV, were indignant. Owain Glyndwr seized on the indignation. He set Mortimer free, gave him his own daughter Catherine as wife, and made an alliance with both Mortimer and Percy: they would help him gain independence from England, and he would in turn help put Mortimer on the English throne.

Henry IV had accidentally turned the Welsh revolt into a civil war, and the revolt he had created boiled along for another decade. Henry Percy, nicknamed “Hotspur” because of his tendency to act first and think later, was killed almost immediately; in the middle of a savage battle fought against the royal forces at Shrewsbury, in July of 1403, he lifted the faceplate of his helmet to get a breath of air and was at once struck through the palate by a random arrow. Mortimer survived until 1409, when he was trapped at Harlech Castle by an English siege; starving and possibly ill with plague, he died in January before the siege could be lifted. His wife, Owain’s daughter, and their four children were at Harlech as well. After the castle surrendered, they were taken to the Tower of London, where Catherine, her only son, and two of her daughters all died of illness.3

Owain Glyndwr’s revolt outlived them all. It was still dragging on when Henry IV died, in March of 1413, after five years of a horrible illness that featured “festering of the flesh, dehydration of the eyes, and rupture of the internal organs”: possibly, some form of leprosy.4

CHARLES VI did not have a good decade either.

He was more often out of his wits than in them, and in the absence of any royal control, his favorite brother, Louis of Orleans, and his uncle, the seventy-year-old Duke of Burgundy, were feuding. Both hoped to control the mad king, and through him, France.

In 1404, the Duke of Burgundy died and his part of the feud devolved to his son and heir John, newly returned from the Battle of Nicopolis and ransomed from Turkish captivity. The new Duke rapidly gained both power and popularity. He managed to arrange a match between his eleven-year-old daughter and the young Dauphin Louis, Charles VI’s son and heir (despite his fits, Charles had been married since the age of seventeen, and by 1404 his wife Isabeau had borne him eight children). “A very heavy tax was about this time imposed on all the inhabitants throughout France, by the king and his council at Paris,” writes the chronicler Enguerrand de Monstrelet, “but the Duke of Burgundy would not consent that it should be levied—which conduct gained him universal popularity throughout the kingdom.”5

This only intensified the Duke of Orleans’s “deep hatred” for his cousin, and over the next three years the two men jockeyed unceasingly for power: ingratiating themselves with the people of Paris by way of public grants and tax breaks, demanding special favors from the king, insisting on the command of various expeditions against France’s foes.

In 1407, on the Feast of Saint Clement—November 23—the Duke of Orleans was ambushed in the streets of Paris, late at night, by a gang of armed men. He was knocked off his horse and beaten to death in the street so savagely that, the next morning, his servants went back to scrape up the brain matter that had been scattered across the stones so that it could be buried with him; they also found his right hand, which had been severed in the attack.6

The ambushers had been hired by the Duke of Burgundy, which soon became clear when several of them bragged about the murder. “This was the cause of most disastrous quarrels,” says Monstrelet, “which lasted a very long time, insomuch that the kingdom was nearly ruined and overturned.” Fearing arrest, the Duke of Burgundy fled from Paris and made his way back to his own domains. But even with the truth of the assassination out, he remained popular. “The Parisians [had not been] well pleased with the Duke of Orleans,” Monstrelet adds, “for they had learnt that he was the author of all the heavy taxes that oppressed them, and began to say among themselves in secret, ‘The knotty stick is smoothed.’”7

Early in the spring, the Duke of Burgundy boldly returned to Paris and, with the help of the noted theologian Jehan Petit, mounted a public defense. The killing, he and Petit argued, was not murder, but tyrannicide, and so was both ethical and justified. Jehan Petit offered a syllogism to defend it (along with four hours of detailed supporting argumentation):

The major: It is permissible and meritorious to kill a tyrant.

The minor: The duke of Orleans was a tyrant.

The conclusion: Therefore the duke of Burgundy did well to kill him.8

Aristotle’s rules of thought had found yet another use.

Charles VI, anxious to keep the peace in Paris, granted his cousin a free pardon the very next day. The indignant supporters of the Duke of Orleans, led by his wife, at once formed an anti-Burgundy faction, uniting behind his son and heir: fourteen-year-old Charles, the new Duke of Orleans. The houses of Orleans and Burgundy appeared poised to throw the country into civil war.9

In 1410, young Charles married the daughter of the Count of Armagnac, and the Count became the leader of the anti-Burgundy party. From this point on, the partisans of the House of Orleans were known as the Armagnacs; they were from the west and the south and numbered among themselves the Dukes of Berry and Bourbon, and the Constable of France. The Burgundy party was from the north and the east.

Equally balanced in power, both parties hoped for the support of the new English king to break the stalemate.

HENRY V was crowned at Westminster on April 9, 1413, in the middle of a freak snowstorm that buried animals and houses and killed scores of men caught out unawares. Some Londoners muttered that the blizzard was a sign: the new king would be “a man of cold deeds, and severe.”10

He was twenty-seven years old, wound-scarred and experienced from his years fighting against the Mortimers and the Welsh. Almost at once, two sets of envoys arrived at the English court, one from the Armagnac party (which now counted Charles VI himself among its adherents) and one from the Duke of Burgundy, both asking to be “strengthened” in their struggle against the other party.11

Henry V was willing to help with the struggle. He offered to drive a bargain with the Armagnac party; he would defeat the Duke of Burgundy, in exchange for the crown of France, marriage with the king’s daughter Catherine, and a dowry of two million crowns.*

This was not so much an offer as an incitement to war. “And so,” says the Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham, “hopes of peace were completely put to sleep.” The family struggle of the Valois had opened the door to English invasion.12

By the summer of 1415, Henry V had organized the ships, men, war machines, armaments and provisions needed to renew the war with France. He landed in Normandy on August 15 with nearly fifteen hundred ships behind him; they blockaded the coast while he laid siege to the coastal fortress town of Harfleur by land. His army, says Monstrelet, contained six thousand foot soldiers and twenty-three thousand archers; the force of archers probably numbered closer to ten thousand but the English longbows continued to be the most deadly weapon that the English kings had at their command. Harfleur held out for a month, with the English bombarding the walls with cannon by day and mining beneath them by night. Finally, the town surrendered; but in the meantime, dysentery had swept through the English tents. Thousands died; many more were forced to return to England. By the time he had accepted Harfleur’s surrender, Henry V had lost a good part of his army. He decided to march on towards Calais with the remnant: eight thousand archers and foot soldiers, “a great many of whom were [still] hampered by the dysentery.”13

The French response had been slowed by disagreement between the king’s counselors, and the unwillingness of the Burgundian and Armagnac parties to fight side by side. The army that finally came out to meet the advancing English troops was almost entirely Armagnac; the Duke of Burgundy had promised to come, but had not yet kept his word.14

On October 24, the two armies came in sight of each other, near the wood of Agincourt. That night they camped within earshot: the French “refreshed and with full stomachs,” the English badly outnumbered (at least three to one), “exhausted, weak, worn out with hunger and lack[ing] even supplies of water.”15

88.1 The Battle of Agincourt

The next morning, the French offered to carry out further negotiations, but Henry V ordered his men to begin the charge. The first volley from the English archers, coordinated into a single devastating hail, brought down the entire French front line; the horses behind, many of them wounded, wheeled and charged back into the massed ranks. Others slipped in the mud—the field where they fought was newly planted with grain—and trapped their knights. The English foot soldiers drove forward with “swords, hatchets, mallets, and bill-hooks,” slaughtering thousands. “Thus perished almost all the flower of French chivalry,” Walsingham writes. Among the captives taken alive was the Duke of Orleans himself.16

Perhaps eight thousand French soldiers died; the total may have been higher. English chronicles insisted that Henry V lost only twenty-seven men, but Enguerrand de Monstrelet offers the more realistic sixteen hundred. Either way, it was a shattering defeat for the French, a soul-fulfilling victory for the English.17

Spectacular though it was, the triumph at Agincourt did not give Henry the French crown. His weakened and weary men were in no shape to continue campaigning, so rather than attempting to push on to Paris, Henry V took his prisoners and his men to Calais and set sail for home, where he was hailed in London as the “King of England and of France.”

In the wake of Agincourt, the Count of Armagnac became Constable of France, but his high-handedness made him increasingly hated in Paris; not long after, he was murdered in a riot along with scores of other Armagnac cronies. Meanwhile, the Duke of Burgundy had opened secret negotiations with the English king, willing to entertain the idea of accepting the Lancaster king in place of the flawed and irrational Charles VI. He had begun to make strides towards a compromise agreement when he was assassinated by Armagnac thugs.18

In 1417, Henry V returned, a fresh army with him, and started to fight his way through Normandy. Rouen fell on January 19, 1419; it had been in French hands for two centuries, ever since the disastrous reign of King John, and its loss cut the heart out of the French resistance.19

By the end of 1419, the new Duke of Burgundy—Philip the Good, aged twenty-three—had managed to talk Charles VI into a compromise. He would remain on the throne of France, but Henry would become France’s regent. Henry, not the teenaged Dauphin, would become the king’s heir; and he would marry Catherine, guaranteeing that Charles VI’s grandchildren would still rule France.20

Charles VI, weary, ill, incoherent, agreed. The Treaty of Troyes, finalized in May of 1420, brought an end to “all manner of dissensions and wars” between the two countries. Two weeks later, Henry and Catherine were married in Troyes. After a single day’s honeymoon, Henry V went back to war. The Treaty of Troyes had promised him France, but after decades of incompetent and self-serving government, Charles VI controlled very little of the country. He had given it to his rival; but now Henry had to conquer it.

*At this time, the income of a fairly well-to-do knight was around 150 crowns per year, so the dowry was the equivalent of over thirteen thousand years of middle-class income.

Chapter Eighty-Nine

After Timurlane

Between 1401 and 1415,

Timur reconquers the Mongol empire,

and his heirs split it apart,

while the Ottomans fail to conquer Constantinople

AFTER THE SACK OF DELHI, Timur had retreated to the cooler refuge of Samarkand, leaving the shattered Indian countryside to bake in the summer sun.

He was, before long, visited by an embassy from the Deccan. The sultan of the Bahmani kingdom, Firoz, had been awestruck by Timur’s might; his ambassadors were even more floored by Samarkand itself. The city had been razed by Genghis Khan, its population slaughtered. But now it had risen from rubble back to splendid life. Timur’s practice was to spare architects, artists, and craftsmen from execution and bring them back to his capital city to work there; in his hands, Samarkand had earned itself the nickname “Threshold of Paradise.”

The Castilian diplomat Ruy González de Clavijo, visiting the city near the end of Timur’s lifetime, wrote a detailed account of its wonders: salted through with mosques and minarets, paved courtyards and cobbled streets, green parks and marble houses. Timur had built a wide commercial street traversing the heart of the city with rows of shops on both sides, each shop uniformly built and fronted with a stone bench for shoppers, the street itself domed over and lined with water fountains: the first indoor shopping mall. Along it, González de Clavijo saw leather and linen from the Rus’, silks and embroidery from China, rubies and diamonds and pearls from India; nutmegs, cloves, and ginger; game, fowl, bread, and fruit; hemp and flax, silver and copper, glass and porcelain, rhubarb and musk. The merchants visiting the city were so numerous that they camped outside the walls, in a tent city of fifty thousand. The royal palace of Samarkand stood inside the city walls, doubly protected by a river that curved through the city and around its walls. Its splendid public garden was so huge that one ambassador’s horse, escaping into the leafy retreat, stayed missing for six whole weeks before it could be located.1

The Bahmani diplomats, loaded with gifts, begged the Mongol warrior for a favor: could Firoz please become his vassal? Timur was pleased. He graciously accepted, and in exchange sent the message that Firoz could, by his grace, rule over Malwa and Gujarat.

He had not conquered those two small kingdoms, both of which had declared independence after the wreckage of Delhi. Neither had Firoz; in fact, his rival, the sultan of Vijayanagara, was even at that moment busy establishing diplomatic relationships with both. But Firoz accepted anyway. The ceremonial dance between the two was almost meaningless, but not quite; the submission meant that Timur was in no hurry to plow back down and wreck the Bahmani. He remained out of India. For the next decades, the Indian kingdoms would carry on their unending local wars for territory, leaving the Delhi sultans to carry on a ghost existence in the city that had once been the center of empire.2

TIMUR TURNED BACK towards the west, where two Turkish empires waited to meet him: the mamluks of Egypt and the Ottoman Turks.

After the collapse of the Il-khanate, the Egyptian sultan had been left as the foremost power in the lands east of the Mediterranean. The Bahri sultanate, drawn from the old regiment that had once protected the Ayyubid ruler of Egypt, had decayed; in 1390 a new mamluk dynasty had claimed the rule of Egypt. The Burji dynasty drew its sultans from a different military regiment, originally made up of slave warriors bought from the Caucasus mountain ranges. Known as the Circassian mamluks, they had long since mingled with the Turks, but kept their own designation. The Circassian mamluk who first ruled after the Bahri, al-Zahir Barquq, took as his palace the great Citadel of Cairo, built by Saladin himself. His dynasty took its nickname from the Arabic word for the citadel’s spires, burj: they were the mamluks of the Tower.3

Barquq’s eleven-year-old son Faraj, powerless in the hands of his emirs, was on the sultan’s throne. Timur dispatched a letter to Cairo, demanding that the young sultan surrender his Syrian lands: “Consider your own survival and that of your subjects,” the letter commanded, “. . . lest our furious soldiers fall upon the people of Egypt and Syria in a cruel slaughter, burning and pillaging their properties. If you are so stubborn as to reject this advice, you will be responsible both for spilling Muslim blood and for the total loss of your kingdom.”4

Faraj’s emirs declined to surrender, and (to make matters worse) cut Timur’s messenger in half at the waist. In answer, Timur marched on Aleppo. Soldiers from a dozen Egyptian-held Syrian cities hurried to reinforce Aleppo’s defense, but Timur crushed the Burji army, broke through the city’s gates, and allowed his men to slaughter the population. He then laid siege to Damascus, trapping the well-known traveler and historian Ibn Khaldun inside. Ibn Khaldun was now nearly seventy; when Timur heard that he was inside, he asked to speak to the famous man. The city’s defenders didn’t trust Timur’s promise that he would not invade the city, should they open the gates to let Khaldun out. Instead, they lowered him over the walls in a basket.

Ibn Khaldun’s curiosity had driven him to the meeting, but he was not easy in his mind: “Because of fear,” he wrote later, “I composed in my mind some words to say to him which, by exalting him and his government, would flatter him.” He ate and drank with the great man, complimented him for being “sultan of the universe and the ruler of the world,” and watched him as he was carried to his horse by servants; Timur’s lameness forced him to drag his right leg behind him, and he was able to walk only for short distances.5

Khaldun was allowed to leave Timur in peace, later going back to Cairo. Damascus finally surrendered; Timur robbed the city of all of its wealth and goods and then set it on fire.

Instead of pushing down into Egypt, though, he turned left and seized Baghdad; and then he headed back north, towards the Ottoman front.

BAYEZID, VICTORIOUS AT NICOPOLIS, was still laying siege to the stubbornly resistant city of Constantinople. The emperor Manuel had escaped from the beleaguered city by water, leaving his nephew John VII as regent in his absence; as Timur approached, he was making a desperate tour of European courts, begging for men, money, and aid against the Turks. He was having absolutely no luck. The great kings were preoccupied, broke, invested elsewhere, or insane.

Timur did what no one else had been able to do: he delivered Constantinople, by forcing Bayezid to give up the siege.

He does not seem to have had designs on Byzantium itself. Instead, he was bent on re-creating the old Mongol empire. Genghis Khan and his successors had terrified the kings of Europe, but they had also established a Mongol border past which Timur was not inclined to pass. In fact, he had approached John VII in friendship once already; he had sent two ambassadors to Constantinople (one of them a Turkish Muslim, the other a Dominican priest), requesting that the emperor not make any sort of truce with Bayezid, since Timur himself was about to engage the Ottomans on the eastern flank.6

The Timurid army arrived in Ottoman territory in the summer of 1402 and laid siege to the castle of Ankara. By the end of July, Bayezid had arrived with his own army to drive back the invaders.

Timur’s army numbered around 140,000; Bayezid’s, close to 85,000. Fighting on the Timurid side were numerous Turkish chiefs who had been displaced by the spread of the Ottoman empire and wanted revenge; the Ottomans were reinforced by Serbian troops and the the Serbian vassal “king” Stefan Lazarević. Timur soon showed himself to be the better strategist, as well as the commander of the bigger army. His encampment was set up to block the Ottomans from nearby water sources, so that they went into battle thirsty. He also planned to repeat the fire attack that had worked so well in Delhi; this time, soldiers launched “Greek fire” (unquenchable streams of burning liquid, probably sulfur-based) into the enemy ranks from the backs of thirty-two specially trained elephants.7

Fighting began early on the morning of July 28 and continued for the entire day, but by the end of it the Ottoman troops had been driven back; Bayezid himself and two of his sons were taken captive. At once, Timur sent John of Constantinople another message: Guard the Strait of Bosphorus with Byzantine galleys, so that the defeated Ottoman troops cannot flee across it and escape.8

Relieved of the Turkish threat, Manuel and John were finally given the space to draw a deep breath. The Timurids raided deep into the Ottoman lands; within a matter of weeks, the Ottoman empire had shrunk back to its core domains, with Timur claiming dominion over the rest. Bayezid himself died in captivity, sometime in 1403. Of his six sons, two were in captivity, one fled to Constantinople, changed his name to Demetrius, and had himself baptized as a Christian, and the remaining three struggled to claim their father’s title for themselves.

The division of the Ottoman empire lasted for twenty years. Bayezid’s third son, Suleyman, managed to seize the western territories, and held on to them by freeing Manuel from his vassal status and allowing him to reclaim Thessalonica for Byzantium. His next two sons fought furiously over the old Ottoman heartland, a battle that got fiercer when their older brother Musa escaped from Timur’s hands and came back home.9

Meanwhile, Timur himself finished reducing the kingdom of Georgia to absolute submission. He had for a time agreed to allow George VI, son of George the Brilliant, a small amount of authority in exchange for tribute money. But now he returned, swept across the countryside, and flattened seven hundred villages. All the churches in Tbilisi were leveled into rubble.10

The entire Western world held its breath, waiting for Timur to keep on to the west. His goal of re-creating the Mongol empire was not yet clear to onlookers; Manuel himself was convinced that Timur’s goal was to first sack Constantinople and then push on into Europe, submerge all Christian countries and kill all Christian monarchs. Instead, the conqueror turned back east, towards China. He had sacked the lands of the Golden Horde and claimed the lands of the Il-khanate. He already controlled the Chagatai Khanate. The old land of the Yuan was the last quarter of the former Mongol empire that still lay out of his reach. He was the reincarnation of the Great Khan; recapturing the Khan’s lands was a higher priority than pushing farther into the west than the Khan had ever gone.11

89.1. Timur against the Ottomans

He was also nearly seventy. By January of 1405, he had made it as far as Utrar, 250 miles east of Samarkand. Forced to halt by extreme cold and deep snows, he warmed himself with a three-day feast during which he ate little, but drank a very great deal indeed. He slipped into a coma, emerging only long enough to declare that his grandson Pir Muhammad should inherit the throne of Samarkand.12

On February 18, 1405, the Iron Cripple died.

The empire he had conquered had no infrastructure, no real network of administration, no coherence, and no stability. Another grandson seized Samarkand; Pir Muhammad, attempting to get it back, was murdered by one of his own men in 1407. Timur’s youngest son, Shah Rukh, had been serving him as a governor in the eastern part of the empire; he took it for himself. And the western reaches of the empire were quickly claimed by the Turks between the Caspian and the Black Seas.

The tribes there were linked together into two separate confederations, the Black Sheep (“Qara Qoyunlu”) and White Sheep (“Aq Qoyunlu”) Turkomans. They occupied adjacent and overlapping territories, the White Sheep just south of the Black Sea, the Black Sheep on the southwestern Caspian shore. The White Sheep took Mardin and the surrounding lands; the Black Sheep captured Tabriz in 1406 and Baghdad in 1410. Soon the Black Sheep halted the White Sheep expansion and overran the remnants of the kingdom of Georgia, killing the nominal king Constantine. Their chief, Qara Yusu, then worked out a truce with the mamluks of Egypt that would guarantee the existence of the Black Sheep as an independent kingdom—temporarily, the most powerful Turkish kingdom in the east.13

But only temporarily. The Timurid empire had shivered apart, but the Ottoman empire was busy righting itself. In June 1413, the civil war between Bayezid’s heirs finally ended when his sixth son, Mehmed, defeated and then strangled his last surviving brother, Musa. Mehmed then declared himself both the undisputed sultan of the ravaged Ottoman realm and the loyal friend of Constantinople; the emperor Manuel had taken the strategically brilliant precaution of providing Mehmed with Byzantine warships and troops to help him fight against his brother. “Go say to my father the Emperor of the Romans that, with the help of God and the support of my father the Emperor, I have recovered my hereditary dominions,” Mehmed wrote to the court of Constantinople, after his victory. “He will find me neither unheeding nor ungrateful.”14

He kept his word. The Ottoman sultanate needed to rebuild in any case; defeat at the hands of Timur, followed by ten years of fraternal fighting, had wrecked it. He was in no shape to restart the war with Byzantium, even if he wanted to. Mehmed signed a treaty of peace with Manuel and went to work rebuilding his army, firming up his control over his Serbian lands, and battling to keep the Black Sheep back.

He did have one new victory; he annexed the Hungarian principality of Wallachia, ruled over by the independent prince Mircea the Elder, and added it to his own empire. Not long after, Mircea died and his son Vlad took his place as Wallachia’s prince and Mehmed’s vassal. He would become known as Vlad Dracul, Vlad the Dragon; builder of Castle Dracul, father of the violent and bloodthirsty Wallachian prince Vlad the Impaler.15

IN THE SPRING OF 1415, the Emperor Manuel traveled with a small band of soldiers to the south of the Greek peninsula, where the last remaining bit of the Byzantine empire still survived. There, within the space of two weeks, the soldiers rebuilt the Hexamilion Wall. In Roman times it had stretched across the Isthmus of Corinth, protecting the south from invasion by land. It had long been in ruins, but rebuilding it guaranteed that the Turks would be able to conquer this final outpost of Byzantium only by sea.16

Mehmed might keep his treaty, but Manuel did not intend to put all of his faith in the sultan’s goodwill. He had more trust in the Byzantine navy.

Part Five

ENDINGS

Chapter Ninety

The Withdrawal of the Ming

Between 1405 and 1455,

the Mongol north and the Da Viet south fall to the Ming,

and great ships sail to the west,

but then victory and exploration come to a sudden end

THE MING EMPIRE OF CHINA had come into existence under the Hongwu Emperor, severe and ascetic; in his hands, the inner workings of the country had been entirely revamped, opposition mowed down, the remnants of the Yuan dynasty thoroughly beaten.

The ruined Yuan court, retreating to the north, hunkered down at the old Mongol city of Karakorum, but the safety of the sacred site proved an illusion. The Ming army pushed into it, sacked and burned it, and took seventy thousand men prisoner. The title of Yuan emperor survived, claimed by more and more distant relations of the long-dead Kublai Khan. But with the center of the Mongol homeland violated, the Yuan name lost the last of its cohesive power. The Mongols of the north spun apart, as the Yuan dug into its last remaining territory in the northeast, and the western Mongols reclaimed their old tribal identities. Together, four of those tribes joined into a coalition known as the Oirat.

Neither the Oirat nor the Ming were exactly sure where China began and the lands of the nomadic steppe dwellers ended, which made the border war complicated. And the Hongwu Emperor, cautious by nature, was wary of launching unnecessary campaigns. But he was also aware (with an almost pathological intensity) that a line between China and barbarian existed, even if he didn’t know exactly where it was. “The Yuan was created by northern barbarians entering and residing in China,” he wrote, early in his reign. “How could the barbarians rule the Chinese? I fear that the heartland has long been stained with the stink of mutton. . . . Therefore I have led forth armies to make a clean sweep. My aim is to chase out the Mongol slaves . . . to cleanse China of shame.” By the end of his reign, in 1398, he had built a string of fortresses out into the steppe country, bases from which to raid deep into Northern Yuan and Oirat lands. 1

He had many sons, but the oldest, his crown prince, had died before him; and so he had chosen the crown prince’s oldest son, Jianwen, to succeed him. When the grandson was crowned in Nanjing, the Hongwu Emperor’s fourth son Zhu Di, military governor of the old Mongol city of Dadu, challenged him. More than three years of civil war followed. In 1402, Zhu Di and his army marched into Nanjing and burned down young Jianwen’s imperial palace. The boy himself was said to have died in the fire, but rumors of his reappearance would spread constantly through the rest of his uncle’s reign. 2

Zhu Di named himself the Yongle Emperor and ordered that the brief rule of his nephew be wiped from the official Ming record books. Like his autocratic father, he crushed all possible opposition with an immediate purge: tens of thousands of Jianwen’s supporters (or suspected supporters) were murdered. When the boy’s chief counselor, Fang Xia, refused to recognize the new Yongle Emperor as legitimate, he was sentenced to death by public dismemberment: zhe, a version of drawing and quartering that could take as long as three days.3

The Hongwu Emperor had fought on land; the Yongle Emperor set his sights on the sea.

Between 1405 and 1422, he ordered six massive naval expeditions launched from the coast of China, headed out to the western ports: first to India and then to the shores of south Asia, to Sri Lanka, to the islands of the Maldives, to Mecca, and finally to the eastern edge of the African continent. The commander in chief of these expeditions was the Grand Eunuch Cheng Ho, the superintendent of all royal eunuchs; the voyages were recorded by the geographer Ma-Huan, who accompanied Cheng Ho from the second journey on.

Like his Muslim counterparts, Ma-Huan made note of the customs, the landscapes, the food and drink of a dozen different countries. But these were not voyages of discovery. Cheng Ho’s “star-guided rafts” were loaded with armed Ming soldiers; his mission was to collect tribute and submission from every king he encountered. He was tasked with conquest, not diplomacy: “Upon arriving at foreign cities, capture those barbarian kings who resist civilization and are disrespectful,” he summed up his instructions, in his own words. “Exterminate those bandit soldiers that indulge in violence and plunder. The ocean routes will be safe thanks to this.” He had the hardware to back up his intentions: hundreds and hundreds of nine-masted ships, thousands of deck-mounted bronze cannon, tens of thousands of Ming marines packed aboard. 4

While Cheng Ho led his fleets farther and farther abroad, the Emperor Yongle personally conducted five different campaigns against the Oirats and the Northern Yuan. He fought in the north; Cheng Ho sailed to the west; and yet another Ming army was dispatched to the south.

90.1. The Sea Voyages of the Yongle Emperor

This south-pointing army, five hundred thousand strong, was ostensibly sent to restore the Tran dynasty to the throne of the Dai Viet, and to remove the usurping Ho ruler. This was a good and moral motivation, a “righteous war” according to Confucian doctrines, carried out to restore the proper order. “When the criminal [Ho] is captured, we will select a virtuous offspring of the Tran family as king,” Yongle decreed. “We will help him rule the place, and then withdraw our forces.” 5

It was a good front, but once the Ming soldiers had destroyed the Ho power—the capital city was overrun in 1406, the usurping king Ho and his son taken prisoner in 1407—the Emperor Yongle found himself unwilling to let it out of his hands. Instead, he sent an administrator to run the country, and formally annexed it as a province of Ming China. He renamed it Jiaozhi, its name in ancient times, when it had been claimed by the Tang dynasty.*

For twenty years, the Ming ruled the Dai Viet directly, in the Fourth Chinese Domination. It was a plum conquest for Yongle, who captured over a quarter of a million elephants, horses, and cattle, nine thousand ships, and nearly fourteen million “shoulderloads” of grain—an amount somewhere around nine hundred thousand tons.6

Meanwhile, fighting continued in the north. By the time the last expedition against the Oirat had ended, the emperor had pushed the Ming border all the way out to the Amur river, far beyond the old Yuan frontiers. He had increased the size of the Ming army, from around forty thousand cavalry at the beginning of his reign to a million and half near the end. He had begun a massive repair effort on the crumbling Great Wall to the north. He had claimed old Dadu, the southern capital of the Yuan, as his personal capital. Now renamed Beijing, it was the home to his gargantuan new royal residence, a city within the city, decades in construction: the Forbidden City, for use by the emperor and the royal family alone.7

ALL OF THIS cost a lot of money.

The expenditures were already starting to pinch in 1418, when the northern Dai Viet aristocrat Le Loi, youngest of three sons, began to organize a resistance to the Chinese occupation. At first, he chose to throw his weight behind the restoration of the old and vanished Tran dynasty; he picked an inoffensive Tran figurehead and proclaimed that he would help return the Tran to the throne.

But before long, he simply led the rebellion himself, under the royal name Binh Dinh Vuong: Pacifying King of the Dai Viet. His right-hand man and chief general, Nguyen Trai, helped him to rally the Dai Viet countryside behind his cause; Nguyen Trai, a well-educated and crafty man, is said to have gone into the forest and written “Le Loi is the king and Nguyen Trai his servant” with animal fat on hundreds of leaves. When the ants ate away the fat, the message showed up as perforated letters, appearing to the uneducated villagers in the countryside as a supernatural prophecy.8

90.2 The Ming and the Oirat

With the peasants rallying behind him, Le Loi and Nguyen Trai carried on a guerrilla war, the strategy of the weaker side in a fight. More and more Ming troops were sent into the Dai Viet jungles; regiment by regiment, they disappeared at the hands of the guerrilla forces that waited. For ten years, the Dai Viet battlefield sucked away at the Ming army.

While this was going on, Yongle was continuing to spend lavishly on keeping up appearances in the capital city. An ambassador from Baghdad, visiting the capital city Beijing in 1421, was present at a royal feast where a thousand different dishes were served: “geese, fowls, roasted meat, fresh and dry fruits . . . filberts, jujubes, walnuts, peeled chestnuts, lemons, garlics and onions pickled in vinegar . . . and various kinds of intoxicants.” The diplomats present were required to perform eight prostrations in front of the emperor; in return they were loaded with lavish presents of silver, weapons, hawks, and horses.9

Yongle did not live to see the consequences of his expansiveness. He died in 1424, while on campaign in the north. He was followed by his son, the Emperor Hongxi; Hongxi lived only two more years, leaving the Ming rule to his son, the Emperor Xuande, in turn.

The Emperor Xuande was no coward. He had fought with his grandfather in the north as a young man, and he planned to continue the campaigns against the Mongols. But, faced with a shrinking treasury and an unending war in the south, he chose to triage the Ming resources: to halt the sea expeditions and withdraw from the troublesome Dai Viet war: “We have used military forces every year in Jiaozhi,” he told his court. “Many innocent people have been killed, and the people of China are exhausted.” His advisors were divided, half of them protesting that withdrawal would be a dangerous sign of weakness, the other half pointing out that the Dai Viet kingdom was always a problem, and that no Chinese dynasty had ever managed to hold on to it without headaches.10

While they dithered, Le Loi led his men in a series of concerted attacks on the Chinese front. By 1427, at least ninety thousand Ming soldiers had fallen in the Dai Viet jungles.

The Emperor Xuande called a halt. The Ming soldiers withdrew; Le Loi claimed victory, along with the throne of a now-independent Dai Viet. He was the first king of a new dynasty, the Le, which would rule until the eighteenth century. And the final sea expedition of the Ming returned in 1433. The ships never again left the Ming ports.11

Despite Xuande’s efforts to refocus on the northern battlefield, the Oirat were increasingly victorious.

A new Oirat khan named Esen Tayisi had inherited the leadership of the coalition, and was proving alarmingly good at welding more and more of the surrounding Mongol tribes and petty states into his following. At the same time, the Ming were suffering from a lack of leadership. The cautious Xuande died after just ten years, leaving the throne to his seven-year-old son, the Emperor Zhengtong. The empire was in the hands of the child’s advisors; they were divided over strategy, and the Oirat advance pushed the Ming front steadily, frighteningly, backwards. Frantic fortification of the Great Wall and a series of new barriers inside it—the “inner Great Wall,” nei-ch’ang-ch’eng—did little to hold the Oirat off. By the time the young emperor turned twenty-one, Esen Tayisi had advanced to within two hundred miles of Beijing itself.12

In 1449, Zhengtong, on the advice of his chief eunuch, Wang Zhen, agreed to personally lead an army against the Oirat. The royal counselors were once again divided over strategy: “The Son of Heaven, although the most exalted of men, should not get personally into these dangers,” one opponent of the expedition offered, tactfully. “We officials, although the most stupid of men, insist that this must not occur.” The phrasing suggests that Zhengtong was not receptive to criticism; his actions suggest that he had delusions of a glorious victory. In the searing heat of August, he marched from Beijing with half a million men. It was the seventh month of the Chinese calendar, the Ghost Month, when the gates of hell were said to be open so that the dead could roam among the living.13

As they neared the Oirat front, they passed heaps of unburied Ming corpses, victims of a recent Oirat attack on the nearby fortress of Datong, two weeks earlier. But there was no sign of the Oirat army. The landscape was eerily empty; the piles of bodies grew higher; and the spooked emperor decided to turn around and go back to Beijing.

It was already too late. Esen Tayisi had silently surrounded them, cutting off their escape route, and on the first day of September he pulled the noose tight. With the Ming army camped at Tumu, the Oirat suddenly emerged, cutting down thousands with a hail of arrows and then charging over the bodies to scatter the rest. The eunuch Wang Zhen died in the fighting, probably murdered by his own angry and terrified men. The Emperor Zhengtong himself, recognizing defeat, sat down on the ground and waited silently to be taken prisoner.

Esen Tayisi now sent a demand for a massive ransom payment to Beijing. He had expected the Ming to hand over cash to retrieve their emperor without quarrel; instead, the royal court at Beijing simply declared the captive Zhengtong to be Grand Senior Emperor and crowned his younger brother Junior Emperor in his place.14

Disgusted, Esen Tayisi set his young prisoner free; he probably hoped that the merciful act would eventually give him a foothold in Beijing. But when Zhengtong made his way back to the capital, he found his brother less than pleased to see him, and his people uninclined to restore him to full reign. He spent the rest of his life in the Forbidden City, walled away from his people, remote and withdrawn.

As the emperor went, so went the Ming.

The days of ambitious military campaigns, wide-ranging sea voyages, and international diplomacy were trickling to an end. The Oirat threat dwindled; Esen Tayisi was murdered by his own men in 1455, during a sharp struggle between the tribes over control of the coalition, and the massive attacks on the northern border ceased. But the Ming emperor did not try to retake the land. No new offenses were planned, no campaigns to foreign lands, no diplomatic missions demanding tribute. The manpower and tax revenue remaining to the Ming all went to the support of a passive internal policy: the fortification of boundary walls, a retreat to the safe land within them.15

*The three early periods known to the Dai Viet as “Chinese Domination” were 207 bc–ad 39, ad 43–544, and ad 602–905.

Chapter Ninety-One

Failure

Between 1412 and 1440,

the Catholic church and the Christian empires

fail to find the old unities

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH had been badly cracked by the long years of dual papacy; the cracks were now papered over, but still visible through the thin tissue of agreement. The paradigm of a single Christian empire still survived in stereo, in the hands of the German king to the west and the Byzantine emperor. Both of them claimed the ancient baptized crown of Rome, the call to enforce the pax Romana as a pax Christiana.

But all of these ideals were aging, and at least one of them was already emitting a deathbed rattle.

SIGISMUND, king of Germany and Hungary, was not yet emperor of a holy Roman kingdom. Both Italy and Bohemia, territories of the old empire, lay beyond his grasp.

Before his death from plague in 1402, Gian Galeazzo Visconti—granted the title Duke of Milan by the emperor Wenceslaus IV—had claimed almost all of northern Italy. Only Florence and Venice had remained independent, and Genoa had saved herself from his grasp only by submitting to the rule of the French.

But with Visconti dead, his two sons (aged twelve and thirteen) were helpless in the hands of various ambitious Milanese soldiers and city officials. The older son, Gian Maria, fell under the control of the soldier of fortune Facino Cane and his capable wife Beatrice Lascaris; for a decade, this formidable couple ruled Milan through the puppet duke, while the cities and lands that had once been under Milanese control were claimed, one by one, by other Milanese captains and merchants.

In 1412, while Facino Cane lay dying of fever in Pavia, a band of his enemies murdered the twenty-one-year-old Duke in Milan. His younger brother Filippo Maria Visconti became Duke of Milan in his place. The new Duke, aged twenty at the time of his accession, took the advice of his friends and married Facino’s widow Beatrice, now aged forty. She agreed to the match; she got to be Duchess of Milan, while Filippo Maria was able to claim control of her alliances and also of her rather extensive family lands.1

It was never a happy match. Filippo Maria Visconti had an odd and unattractive personality; he was intelligent, and a shrewd user of men, but pathologically frightened of thunder, obese, and so self-conscious about his hooked nose and vast girth that he lived in secret rooms, changing them frequently, scuttling away from his subjects in the street and refusing to allow his portrait painted. Beatrice, in turn, was a powerful and wealthy woman twenty years his senior. The two coexisted in mutual hostility until 1418, when Filippo Maria accused his wife of adultery and ordered her beheaded.

No one believed the charges; but it was more expedient to stay on the good side of the Visconti Duke.2

Filippo Maria found more satisfaction in his conquests. He had hired the mercenary Francesco Carmagnola to head the Milanese army, and by 1421 Carmagnola had reconquered for Milan almost all of the territories that had fractured away from the Duke’s control. As a bonus, he added Genoa, which changed its alliance from the mad king of France to Filippo Maria instead.

The conquests were vicious and unsparing; one account says that, at the city of Piacenza, so many citizens were slaughtered by the Milanese that only three people remained alive within its walls. But it set Filippo Maria at the top of the Italian pyramid: “Having become master of all Lombardy,” notes Niccolò Machiavelli, the sixteenth-century Florentine politician, in his History of Florence, “[he was] thinking he might undertake almost anything.” In name, he was a subject duke of the Holy Roman Empire; but in practice, he ruled the north of Italy with something close to an emperor’s power.3

BOHEMIA POSED an even thornier problem.

On paper, Bohemia belonged to Germany. But the kingdom was on fire with Hussite rebellion. Sigismund had promised Jan Hus safe-conduct to the Council of Constance, and then had stepped back and allowed him to burn. Hussite fury over the betrayal was widespread, but one Bohemian knight in particular emerged as Sigismund’s opponent: the soldier John Zizka, veteran of wars against the Teutonic Order of Prussia, an ex-captain of the dead Wenceslaus IV. He began to drill the Bohemian peasants, armed with grain flails and riding in wagons, into an actual army. Sigismund, not daring to enter the country, sent a German army ahead of him into Prague; Zizka and his peasants drove the German soldiers back.4

They now demanded the rights that Jan Hus had begun to preach, as spelled out by the Hussite leaders and submitted to Sigismund: the Four Articles of Prague. The Articles asked the king of Germany, first, to allow open preaching of the Gospel without restriction; second, to permit the Eucharist served sub utraque specie, “in both kinds” (in the Bohemian churches, a practice had evolved since the twelfth century of serving the bread to the Christians in the pews, but reserving the wine for ordained priests alone);* third, to require all clergy to take a vow of poverty, giving up the Church’s right to accumulate wealth; and finally, to punish actions “against divine law” (legi divinae contrariae) openly and promptly. Specific sins were mentioned: drunkenness and theft; adultery and wantonness; unjustified tax and interest rate hikes; the sudden raising of feudal rents. Like the Cathars, like the Waldensians, the Hussites fought against all entitlement and privilege.5

Sigismund refused to grant the Articles. But in the ongoing battles between German and Hussite forces—led by Zizka and then, after his death from plague, by the scholar-soldier Prokop the Shaven—he lost more and more ground. The sound of the Hussite battle hymn “Ye Warriors of God,” sung by the armed and trained peasants as they marched into battle, was more often than not the sound of German defeat.

Blessed is everyone who dies for the truth.

Therefore archers and lancers,

Of knightly rank,

Pikemen and flailsmen,

Of the common people,

Keep ye all in mind the generous Lord! . . .

Feel the pride of the weapon in your hands,

And cry: “God is our Lord!”6

In 1421, with Sigismund stalled outside Prague, the Bohemian Diet (the gathered princes of the kingdom) declared him deposed. By 1427, the Hussites were venturing out of Bohemia into Germany, raiding and burning in revenge for German attacks on their homes.

Sigismund’s response to the Hussite revolt was neither as energetic nor as effective as it could have been; his attentions were divided, he was often in Hungary, and he was saving enough force for a proposed march down into Italy, where he hoped to convince the new unification pope, Martin V, to crown him emperor.

The first tentative move towards the imperial crown happened in the spring of 1431, when a church council assembled in the German town of Basel to discuss (among many other issues) the problem of the Hussites. But Martin V died shortly after the council was assembled, delaying its deliberations; the cardinals had to pull away from Hussite business to choose a new pope, the Venetian Eugene IV, in his place. In the meantime, Sigismund opened negotiations with Filippo Maria of Milan. Even if he convinced the new pope to give him the imperial crown, he could not march through the Lombard lands towards Rome unless he treatied with or defeated Milan.

As an incentive, he offered imperial soldiers to aid Milan in its battles with Florence and Venice, and imperial friendship with Milan against those two rival cities. Cannily, Filippo Maria walked a middle path; he agreed to allow Sigismund to enter Milan and be crowned with the Iron Crown of the Lombards (the intermediate step towards emperorship), but when the German king arrived, the Visconti Duke refused to see him. He withdrew to one of his castles outside of Milan and sent a message explaining that he did not dare see Sigismund face-to-face because his emotions were too extreme; he did not want to risk “dying of joy.”7

This neatly avoided the problem of paying personal homage to the new king of the Lombards, which he did not wish to do. It also didn’t fool Sigismund, but since there was no graceful way for him to insist on Filippo Maria’s presence, he accepted the excuse, claimed the crown on November 25, 1431, and went home again.

91.1 The Empire of Sigismund

It took another eighteen months to arrange the imperial coronation in Rome; Pope Eugene IV kept falling out with the attendees at the Council, which made his departure complicated. Finally, in May of 1433, Sigismund had all of his ducks in a row. He journeyed from Germany south, through Lombardy, entering Rome itself on May 21, surrounded by six hundred knights and eight hundred foot soldiers and riding beneath a canopy of gold cloth. Ten days later, Eugene IV crowned him Holy Roman Emperor underneath the dome of St. Peter’s.8

In celebration, Sigismund began to use a new seal: a double-headed eagle, representing his dual identity as king of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor. Later in that same year, he returned to the Council to weigh in on its (interminable) discussions and negotiations. Speaking to the assembled priests in Latin, he used the feminine gender for a neuter noun; when a nearby canon tactfully corrected him, Sigismund retorted, “I am the Emperor of the Romans, and above grammar” (Ego Imperator Romanus sum, et super grammaticam).9

His new status brought some small forward movement to the Council, which finally agreed, on November 26, to withdraw condemnation of the Hussites as heretics, to allow Bohemian laypeople to receive the cup of wine at the Eucharist, and to permit preaching by anyone who was “commissioned” by a “superior.” On the other two points, the Council waffled. But the Hussite leaders in Prague, receiving this news from Basel, were inclined to accept the partial concession. Bohemia was a small country; for over a decade, the regular business of trading, farming, and living had been completely disrupted by war; over a hundred thousand men had died in the fighting, and waves of plague had swept across the country again and again.10

Unfortunately, the Hussite movement had now matured enough to subdivide into sects, and the most radical of the Hussites refused to agree to any compromise.

Led by Prokop the Shaven, an army of hard-line Hussites laid siege to the Catholic city of Plzeň; in response, the more moderate Hussites joined with orthodox Catholics to fight against them. At Lipany, on May 30, 1434, a pitched battle between the extremists and the moderate-Catholic alliance ended with the defeat of the fanatics and an eventual compromise, sworn out in 1436. The Compactata, the Compacts of Basel, recognized the Hussites as part of the Catholic Church although different in practice and belief: the first time that western Christianity had recognized the existence of a distinct sect as inside Christianity, yet outside pure Catholic doctrine. It was a kind of oneness—paper unity, existing as long as no one crumpled the surface.11

THE COMPACTS OF BASEL had managed to bring Bohemia back within the empire, but the kingdom’s submission was brief.

After four years as emperor, Sigismund died on December 9, 1437. He was a few months away from his seventieth birthday, probably suffering from diabetes; the toes on his left foot had been amputated not long before. Feeling the end approach, he ordered himself dressed in the imperial robes and managed to get himself onto the imperial throne, where he sat and waited for death to come.12

He left no sons, and his son-in-law Albert, the forty-year-old Duke of Austria, claimed the right to all of his titles. Albert had no difficulty ascending the Hungarian throne, and in March of 1438 the German electors agreed to recognize his claim to Germany. But Bohemia rejected him, and the bickering Hussite factions argued over whom to recognize in his place.

Meanwhile, the Council of Basel was still carrying on. It had semisettled the Hussite question, but a plethora of other matters, including various church reforms and the possibility of (once more) attempting to draw the Greek Orthodox church of Constantinople back into the Roman fold, were unsettled.

And factions had developed within the Council. Just as Bohemia splintered away from the Holy Roman Empire, the Council also splintered. Pope Eugene IV and his supporters insisted on moving the deliberations to Florence, where the wealthy merchant-politician Cosimo de’Medici had assured them of a welcome. A stubborn rump Council remained behind, insisting that the pope had acted without proper consideration of the Council’s authority, and elected a replacement: a northern Italian aristocrat who became the “antipope” Felix V.

Unlike the fourteenth-century schism, this division of the papacy turned out to be a mere footnote; Eugene IV proceeded on to Florence, and most of Christendom recognized that the Council of Basel had become the Council of Florence. But for the next ten years, the obstinate Felix V continued to claim the title of pope.*

IN 1439, the emperor of Constantinople arrived at Florence, ready to discuss the possibilities (yet again) of union with Rome; never mind that Rome itself was still suffering a fair amount of disunion.

He was driven by the changing situation in the Ottoman empire. The kindly disposed Ottoman sultan Mehmed had died in January of 1421 (a natural death, according to court chronicles; poison, according to rumor), and his son, the fierce eighteen-year-old Murad II, had at once laid siege to Constantinople.

The elderly Manuel II had paid the new sultan off in 1424, temporarily lifting the siege. But the old emperor died not long after, leaving his son John VIII to face the new Ottoman threat. Emperor John VIII had journeyed to Italy, to what was now the Council of Florence, to ask the Christian west to unify against the Ottoman east, for the sake of Constantinople’s survival: a repeat of the same theme that had been heard, like an out-of-tune first violin, since the call for the First Crusade.

The effort failed.

John’s strategy was to try, once again, to smooth out the differences between east and west; to sponge out nearly five hundred years of diverging thought and theology, custom and culture, for the sake of a single-front war. But even before the arrival of the emperor’s party (which included seven hundred priests, court officials, theologians and scholars), the patriarch of Constantinople was infuriated by a message reminding him that he was supposed to kiss the foot of the pope when he was presented. His intentions, he retorted, were “to treat the Pope as a father, if he were older than me; if of the same age, as a brother; if younger, as a son.”13

This jousting over rank continued. Once at the Council, the Byzantines and Europeans argued over the best seats, priority during meals, whether or not the Patriarch got to decorate his dais with curtains like the Pope, where Easter services should be held, and (eventually) church doctrines. From June 4, 1438, through July 5, 1439, the Council argued, in marathon daily sessions, over the theological points that divided them: the exact way in which the Holy Spirit related to the other two persons of the Trinity, the use of leavened versus unleavened bread for the Eucharist, the precise degree of authority that the Pope held over the Greek church, and a host of related minutia. The priests and theologians hammered out compromise statements, word by word and preposition by preposition. During the deliberations, the Patriarch died of old age.14

Finally, the compromises were finished, set down on paper as the Decrees of Union, read out loud to much rejoicing, and greeted with hymns of praise from both Greeks and Latins (although, since neither set of clergy approved of the hymn style of the other, they were forced to alternate singing at each other across the central aisle in the cathedral of Florence).

Guaranteed the support of the Western church, and bearing with him the promise that Pope Eugene would send three hundred warships and twelve thousand florins to help defend Constantinople against the Turks, John VIII set off for home. He arrived early in February 1440; and within a matter of weeks, both the promised soldiers and the much-needed cash had followed him to his capital city.

Yet the unification never happened.

Greeted by Constantinople’s people at the docks with the question “How did your efforts fare? . . . Did we win our cause?” the priests who had accompanied the emperor retorted, “We have sold our faith overseas, we have exchanged piety for impiety!” Only the very top levels of the Greek church and court were behind the compromise; the priests who labored in Constantinople’s churches and the laity in the pew saw it as a sellout, the crass exchange of precious sacred treasures for raw political advantage. Reading his people correctly, John VIII delayed in publishing the Decrees of Union in Constantinople.15

The delay became permanent. The attempt to draw the churches back into one body was no more successful than the reunification of the old Holy Roman Empire. The costly trip west, the countless hours in argumentation, the unending negotiations: all of this had brought a few more soldiers to Constantinople, but had achieved nothing else. And those soldiers would prove useless against the coming attack.

*This practice, which was defended by both Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas, seems to have grown out the doctrine of transubstantiation; if the bread and wine are literally transformed into Christ’s body and blood, taking part of either means that the worshipper has shared in the consumption of Christ, so both are not necessary. Because the wine was more easily spilled and abused (and, possibly, more expensive), many priests throughout France, Italy, and Germany refused to serve wine to the laity. This was a widespread but never universal practice; it was resented, by the Hussites, for drawing a sharp line of privilege between ordained and nonordained believers.

*The Council of Basel met for a transitional time at Ferrara before ending up at Florence. The entire council itself is most often now referred to as the Council of Florence, but the terms “Council of Basel” and “Council of Ferrara” are also sometimes used.

Chapter Ninety-Two

Perpetual Slavery

Between 1415 and 1455,

the Portuguese send slave ships to West Africa,

and the pope gives them permission for conquest

DECADES BEFORE, the war between France and England had thrust tendrils into the Spanish peninsula; those tendrils had rooted, and now were growing thorny fruit of their own.

The former John of Aviz was now John I of Portugal, and John of Gaunt’s English daughter Philippa was his queen. In Castile, the nine-year-old great-grandson of Enrique of Trastámara ruled as John II. After the Portuguese victory at Aljubarrota, the two countries had remained at war for another twenty-six years; not until October 1411 was a truce finally reached.

Now Castile and Portugal were carrying on a new struggle: for trade, for wealth, and for the islands that lay in the Atlantic to the west.

So far, Castile was winning. In 1402, the French adventurer Jean de Béthencourt had landed in the Canary Islands “with the view of conquering the islands, and bringing the people to the Christian faith.” He hoped for glory, chivalric deeds of daring, and plenty of loot; his expedition, chronicled by two Franciscan priests who accompanied it, immediately captured some of the inhabitants, an African tribal people known as the Guanches, and brought them back to the port of Cadiz to sell as slaves.

Béthencourt, seeing the opportunity for even more glory than he had originally intended, had then gone to the court of Castile and asked young John II’s father to recognize him as king of the Canary Islands, vassal to the throne of Castile. The Castilian king agreed: “It shows a very good intention on his part,” he told his court, “to come to do me homage for a country which, as I understand, is at two hundred leagues distance, and of which I never heard before.”1

Before long the Guanches were almost extinguished, taken to Europe as slaves; the Canary Islands, repopulated by Castilian peasants brought over to farm and fish. Castile now boasted brand-new territories in the Atlantic, and the Portuguese—always vigilant against Castilian ambitions—looked to expand their own reach.2

John I of Portugal decided on the target: the port city of Ceuta, on the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar. Ceuta was then in the hands of the North African sultan of the Marinids, one of the dynasties that had taken up the space left by the disintegration of the Almohad empire at the end of the thirteenth century. Fighting against the Marinids had at least two advantages. The battle could be pitched to his people as an extension of the Reconquista, the Christian reconquest of Muslim-taken territories, which had stalled on the Spanish peninsula thanks to the stubborn resistance of the Muslim kingdom of Granada; this was less fraught than mounting an attack on another Christian nation. And it would occupy his sons. He had five legitimate sons, and in 1415 they ranged in age from thirteen to twenty-four; that was a lot of young ambitious male energy that needed to be pointed in the right direction.

Queen Philippa herself died just before the assault force was launched. The royal chronicler of the Portuguese court says that she roused herself from her bed, just before her death, when she heard the north wind blowing, and exclaimed, “It is the wind for your voyage!” A month later, the Portuguese ships, her three older sons on board, had arrived at Ceuta to assault the city.3

After a single day, the Marinids abandoned the fight. John of Portugal led the attack himself, with his heir and oldest son, Edward, at his side; twenty-year-old Henry and his twenty-two-year-old brother Peter fought together on the other wing. After the defenders fled, the mosque of Ceuta was thoroughly scrubbed out, refitted with Christian altars and crucifixes, and cleansed with consecrated water, and all three princes were knighted by their father there. “It was a splendid thing to see, for they were all large and well formed, and were dressed in clean clothes, and wearing their swords,” writes the court historian Gomes Eanes de Zurara.4

The Marinids had not tried very hard to hold Ceuta, but they were also unwilling to give the Portuguese an undisturbed beachhead into their empire. They launched constant attacks; John I spent a tremendous amount of money defending it, and in 1418 he was forced to send an army under his third son, young Henry, to help lift a Marinid siege of the city. The year after, he appointed Henry to be Ceuta’s permanent governor.5

Ceuta was turning out to be an expensive disappointment; Marinid resistance made it impossible to use the city as a base for expansion into the north of Africa. So Henry made it his business, while holding Ceuta secure, to also find another path for trade. He had always wished, says Zurara, “to know the land that lay beyond the isles of Canary and that Cape called Bojador, for that up to his time, neither by writings, nor by the memory of man, was known with any certainty the nature of the land beyond that Cape.”6

He used Ceuta as a base to send out ships into the Mediterranean, through the Strait of Gibraltar, and then south towards Cape Bojador. It was not an easy mission to sell.

He sent out many times, not only ordinary men, but such as by their experience in great deeds of war were of foremost name in the profession of arms, yet there was not one who dared to pass that Cape of Bojador and learn about the land beyond it, as [Prince Henry] wished. And to say the truth this was not from cowardice or want of good will, but from the novelty of the thing and the wide-spread and ancient rumour about this Cape, that had been cherished by the mariners of Spain from generation to generation . . . that beyond this Cape there is no race of men nor place of inhabitants . . . no water, no tree, no green herb—and the sea so shallow that a whole league from land it is only a fathom deep, while the currents are so terrible that no ship having once passed the Cape, will ever be able to return.7

For twelve years, Henry sent out ships, year by year. Portuguese colonists settled on the Madeira Islands, and Portuguese ships raided Marinid ports. But despite Henry’s promise of enormous reward, none of the captains were willing to venture past the Cape.

IN 1433, JOHN I DIED. Henry’s older brother Edward was crowned king of Portugal, at the same time that yet another Portuguese ship sailed from Ceuta, bound west-southwest. Its captain, Gil Eannes, got as far as the Canary Islands and then, “touched by the self-same terror,” turned north. Henry resupplied his ship and then sent him back out. “You cannot find,” he told Eannes, “a peril so great that the hope of reward will not be greater.”8

Fortified with this promise, Eannes finally pushed past the cape. He returned with the news that the dreaded territory below was entirely unlike anything that had been rumored; he had seen calm seas, a long fertile coastline, and no people. Further reconnaissance ships reported the same, although one found footprints of men and camels. Henry sent yet another expedition, with instruction to land horses on the shore and ride inland until they sighted humans. The riders found no sign of villages or settlement before they grew afraid and turned back.

Political turmoil brought a temporary end to Henry’s expeditions. His brother the king declared war on the North African Marinids, despite the lukewarm support of Portugal’s lawmaking assembly, the Cortes; Henry, more enthusiastic than the Cortes, offered to lead an attack on the important port city of Tangier. With him, he took his brother Ferdinand, the youngest of John I’s sons, now aged thirty-five.

As it happened, the governor of Tangier was the same Marinid official who had been governing Ceuta at the time of its conquest by the Portuguese. He had learned from his defeat; he opened the gates of Tangier to draw the Portuguese army in, and then sent a detachment around behind to trap them in front of the city.9

92.1 Portuguese Explorations

When yet more Marinid reinforcements arrived, sent from the Marinid sultan in Fez, Henry was forced to give up. He managed to negotiate the freedom of most of his men by promising to give up Ceuta, but he was obliged to leave Ferdinand and twelve other Portuguese knights as hostages to assure the city’s surrender.

But the Cortes refused to honor Henry’s promise. Ferdinand remained in miserable captivity in Fez, chained in a cell at night and forced to do backbreaking work with other prisoners during the day.

Edward died eleven months later—of plague, according to some accounts; of a deep despair and guilt over his brother’s fate, according to others. His six-year-old son Afonso became king of Portugal, with Edward’s widow Eleanor and his brother Peter of Coimbra as uneasily cooperating co-regents.

Henry, back in Ceuta, was powerless to negotiate Ferdinand’s release; and in 1443, the youngest Portuguese prince died in captivity. By then, Henry’s expeditions had resumed. He had settled Portuguese families on the Azores, the cluster of islands west of Portugal. And his men had finally come face-to-face with the inhabitants of the African coast: “black Moors,” whom they had immediately taken prisoner. The captives, brought back to Portugal, were sold as slaves in Lisbon and went for a startling good price. “When people saw the wealth which the ships had brought back, acquired in so short a time and seemingly with such ease,” says Zurara, “some asked themselves in what manner they too could acquire a share of these profits.”10

Now Henry had no shortage of captains willing to sail south past Cape Bojador: “some to serve, others to gain honor, and others with the hope of profit.” His brother Peter of Coimbra, regent for the young King, granted Henry the exclusive right to control all trade that went out south of the cape, and Henry offered yearly rewards to expeditions that pushed into unknown territory. Captain after captain sailed down the western coastline, searching for new inlets, new rivers, and more slaves. Kidnapping and exploration went hand in hand; Portuguese ships would anchor off a new stretch of coast, the men would go ashore, and if they found villagers, they would capture them and bring their prisoners back on board. If not, they would sail farther south, making a note of what they saw. The chronicler Zurara describes one such voyage; a party of Portuguese sailors, landing on a new stretch of coast,

saw some Guinean [West African] women who seemed to be collecting shellfish on the shore of a little inlet. They seized one of the women who must have been about thirty years old, with her son who was two, and also a young girl of fourteen. . . . The strength of the woman was astonishing because the three men who seized her had great trouble getting her into the boat. So one of our men, seeing the slow progress they were making . . . had the idea of taking her child and carrying him to the boat, so that her maternal love made her follow him. . . . From this place they continued for a certain time until they found a river up which they could venture in their boat. In the houses they found there, they captured a woman and, after they brought her to the caravel, they returned once more to the river.11

The human traffic had trickled back into Portugal a little at a time, but in 1444 Henry sponsored a spectacular mass arrival of slaves into the Portuguese city of Lagos, a public-relations event headed by the sea captain Lançarote de Freitas. Six ships, one of them piloted by Gil Eannes, sailed past Cape Blanc and went ashore hunting for slaves. Charging into the West African forests with the battle cry “Santiago, São Jorge, and Portugal!” (“Saint James, Saint George, and Portugal!”), they captured at least 250 slaves and killed many more.12

They sailed into Lagos on August 8 and unloaded the crowd of slaves in the city’s marketplace; Henry himself was waiting there on horseback, ready to receive one-fifth of the slaves as his personal tribute, and perhaps also measuring the success of his dramatic staging. The chronicler Zurara was there as well, watching with his own eyes. “Very early in the morning, by reason of the heat,” he writes, “the mariners began to bring-to their vessels, and, as they had been commanded, to draw forth the captives.”

Placed together on that plain, it was a marvellous sight to behold, for amongst them there were some of a reasonable degree of whiteness, handsome and well-made; others less white, resembling leopards in their colour; other as black as Ethiopians. . . . [S]ome had sunken cheeks, and their faces bathed in tears, looking at each other; others were groaning very dolorously, looking at the heights of the heavens, fixing their eyes upon them, crying out loudly . . . others struck their faces with their hands, throwing themselves on the earth. . . . [Now] came those who had the charge of the distribution, and they began to put them apart one from the other . . . to part children and parents, husbands and wives, and brethren from each other. . . . [T]he mothers enclosed their children in their arms and threw themselves with them on the ground, receiving wounds with little pity for their own flesh so that their children might not be torn from them! And so, with labour and difficulty, they concluded the partition.13

Zurara, moved by the suffering of the captives, comforted himself by reflecting that they were still better off than before, when they had lived in “damnation of souls . . . like animals.” Now, he concludes, they are “dressed . . . fed . . . loved and turned with good will to the path of the Faith.” Their captivity had brought them into a Christian land where they would hear the Gospel; this was all to the good.14

BY 1452, the trade in slaves and other African goods had grown so fast (“yearly 3,500 slaves and more,” the geographer Duarte Pacheco Pereira wrote, some decades later, “many tusks of elephant ivory, gold, fine cotton cloth and much other merchandise”) that the king of Portugal decided to protect his country’s interests in Africa by appealing to the pope.15

Young Afonso V had finally come of age four years before, forcing his uncle and regent Peter of Coimbra to give up control of the government; when Peter tried to fight back, Afonso’s troops defeated him in a pitched battle at the river Alfarrobeira, during which Peter was struck through the heart with an arrow.16

Now in control of his own throne, Afonso V confirmed his uncle Henry’s right to administer the slave trade. He then appealed to Rome to recognize the throne of Portugal as conducting, in Africa, a crusade: a holy war against the enemies of the Church, an assault on the powers of darkness.

Eugene IV had died in 1447; the Italian Nicholas V now sat on the papal throne. After brief consideration, he agreed to Afonso’s request. On June 18, 1452, he issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, giving Afonso “full and free power, through the Apostolic authority . . . to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and . . . to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”17

In perpetuam servitutem: the bull had placed the papal seal of approval on the enslavement of the African captives. In all likelihood, Nicholas V was thinking more about the Turks than about the West Africans, since the bull simply gave Afonso the right to search out and enslave all pagans and seize their land. But three years later, when he confirmed the bull once more in the charter Romanus Pontifex, he took the further step of outlining the geographical areas in which Afonso could seize and enslave. Because the kings of Portugal had spent so much “labor, danger and expense” in sending “swift ships” to Africa, and because this had “caused to be preached to them the unknown but most sacred name of Christ,” and because this had “gained for Christ” the souls of so many, the entire Portuguese enterprise was now protected by the Church. Only the Portuguese could sail to West Africa, preach the gospel, and bring Africans back to Europe.

Fearing lest strangers induced by covetousness should sail to those parts, and desiring to usurp to themselves the perfection, fruit, and praise of this work . . . or should teach those infidels the art of navigation, whereby they would become more powerful and obstinate enemies to the king . . . and the prosecution of this enterprise would . . . perhaps entirely fail [with] great reproach to all Christianity; to prevent this and to conserve their right and possession . . . none, unless with [Portuguese] sailors and ships . . . and with an express license previously obtained from the said king . . . should presume to sail to the said provinces or to trade in their ports or to fish in the sea. . . . [T]hese islands, lands, harbors, and seas . . . do of right belong and pertain to the said King Alfonso and his successors . . . in order that [they] may be able the more zealously to pursue . . . this most pious and noble work . . . the salvation of souls.18

The conquest of the West Africans had been transferred into the realm of the holy; their enslavement had become their salvation; and their sale baptized as a righteous duty. It was the most devastating expansion yet of the ideal of crusade.

Chapter Ninety-Three

The Loss of France

Between 1422 and 1453,

Jeanne d’Arc helps the king of France

regain his throne and dies for it,

the French are victorious in the Hundred Years’ War,

and both rival kings lose their wits

HENRY V HAD TAKEN FRANCE; but except for the city of Paris and the lands immediately around it, his claim was a paper one. He had the support of the Duke of Burgundy; but the anti-Burgundian party, the Armagnacs, had allied themselves behind the young disinherited Dauphin. Charles VII had handed over the Dauphin’s right to inherit; but the old king was still alive, and Henry V spent the years after the Battle of Agincourt fighting against the Dauphin’s supporters. By 1422, says Walsingham’s Chronica, “a great part” of his army, “weakened through fighting and lack of food . . . went back to England, with very little intention of returning to France again.”1

Henry remained, but all of his adult life had been spent at war, and the dysentery that stalked every army had become chronic in him. He died suddenly on August 30, 1422, just short of ten years on the throne, just four miles away from Paris.

Back in England, his nine-month-old son was proclaimed Henry VI, “king of England and France,” ruler of England and heir to the throne in Paris. Two months later, the mad Charles VI also died. He was fifty-four; he had spent the last thirty years wrestling with his illness, submitting himself to regular bloodlettings, praying for days on end and making pilgrimages to sacred sites, trying every magical cure that was brought to him. He had been “confined to his bed by illness” for some time, says the chronicler Enguerrand de Monstrelet; and at the time of his death, almost no one was with him. His funeral was magnificent, but “none of the princes of the royal blood of France attended the funeral . . . a melancholy consideration, when it was remembered what great power and prosperity the king had enjoyed during the early part of his reign.”2

But he had long been irrelevant to the country’s fortunes, and even now was important only in his absence. It was unclear who would succeed him: the infant Henry VI, whose claim was supported by the Burgundians and the English, or the Dauphin Charles, whose claim was supported by the Armagnac party. The Dauphin was the youngest child of the dead king; his four older brothers had all been Dauphin before him, all of them dying before their father. He was the last surviving son. In 1422, he was nineteen years old. He had been acting for Charles VI since the age of fourteen, presiding over councils, signing royal orders, and generally exercising the power of a much older man. But his natural competency had been too often frustrated at too young an age. His father had given his title away; he found himself constantly blocked by the English-loyal Parisians; and he was now prone to sink rapidly into a despairing apathy when thwarted. And at all times he kept his own counsel: “Willingly,” wrote his chronicler Chastellain, “would he surround himself with wise and bold men, and let himself be led by them. But, unbeknown to them, he would all the while be planning something new.”3

Both of the candidates were hailed king simultaneously: the baby Henry in Paris, Charles VII in the chapel of Mehun, near Bourges. The English Duke of Bedford was also installed in Paris as Henry VI’s regent. Now civil war began in earnest, with the English Duke of Bedford and the French Duke of Burgundy fighting together to expand their power from Paris and the Loire valley south, and Charles VII and the Armagnacs based at Bourges and fortified by soldiers from rebellious Scotland and French-loyal Castile. “The war began with light skirmishes,” writes the English chronicler Raphael Holinshed, “but after it grew into main battles.”4

The first six years of the civil war saw victory after victory for young Henry’s claim. Baby Henry’s regent, the Duke of Bedford, married the Duke of Burgundy’s sister, making the French-English alliance that much stronger; Charles VII’s army was badly damaged by a horrible loss in July 1423, with three thousand Scottish troops lost and an equal number of French killed or captured. The towns of Coucy, Meulan, Rambouillet, Meung, and Compiègne fell as the English alliance pushed north and south; fortress after fortress surrendered. “The Dauphin was sore appalled,” says Holinshed, “for he was driven out of all the counties that appertained to the crown of France.” He set up his court at Poitiers, and from there did his best to play king. But already he was withdrawing, walling himself away from his supporters, shutting himself into inner rooms alone.5

In October of 1428, the Duke of Bedford laid siege to Orleans. The city held out until the late winter of 1429, but as the citizens began to starve, they sent an embassy offering to surrender to the Duke of Burgundy. The French cause was desperate; should Orleans fall, the rest of the south would follow and Charles VII would have to leave his country, perhaps for Castile. “The English continued their siege,” says Monstrelet, “and king Charles was in very great distress; for the major part of his princes and nobles, perceiving that his affairs were miserably bad, and everything going wrong, had quite abandoned him.”6

He was hovering at Chinon, without a plan and daring to approach no closer, when help arrived in the odd form of Jeanne d’Arc: the seventeen-year-old daughter of a well-to-do farmer, a girl who “dressed like a man,” had worked as a chambermaid, and “had shown much courage in riding horses to water, and in other feats unusual for young girls.”7

Since her early teenaged years in the northeastern village of Domrémy, Jeanne d’Arc had seen visions and heard voices. Her parents had tried to marry her off to a suitable young man; she had refused. It was her mission, she told them, to rescue France from the English, to see the Dauphin crowned as the one rightful king of the French people. In March of 1429, she arrived at Chinon to explain her mission to the would-be king.*

Charles agreed to see her; he had, after all, spent his youth watching his father receive magicians and soothsayers who promised miraculous cures. Eyewitnesses later said that Jeanne d’Arc immediately went to the Dauphin, who was wearing no identifying royal robes and standing with a group of his counselors, indistinguishable from them. This alone would not have swayed Charles into listening to her, but (as she later testified at her trial, her words recorded by her confessor Friar Jean Pasquerel), the message she gave him was impossible to ignore.

When [the king] saw her, he asked Joan her name and she answered: “Gentle dauphin, I am Joan the Maid, and the King of Heaven commands that through me you be anointed and crowned in the city of Reims as a lieutenant of the King of Heaven, who is king of France.” And after further questions asked by the king, Joan said to him anew: “I say to you, on behalf of the Lord, that you are the true heir of France, and a king’s son, and He has sent me to you to lead you to Reims, so that you can receive your coronation and consecration if you wish it.” This being understood, the king said to his courtiers that Joan had told him a certain secret that no one knew or could know except God: and that is why he had great confidence in her.8

He was still young himself, only twenty-six; he must often have felt that his right to rule was indeed a secret, unknown even to the father who had given his crown away.

Jeanne d’Arc’s appeal to the rest of his army is harder to understand. But she was not the first charismatic young leader to whip an army into enthusiasm; she was just the first seventeen-year-old girl to manage that feat, and the phenomenon cannot be completely explained in the absence of what must have been a magnetic and hypnotizing personal presence. “Great numbers of those who heard her had great faith in what she said,” Monstrelet writes, “and believed her inspired, as she declared herself to be.”9

Jeanne remained at Chinon with the king until April, planning the assault on the besiegers of Orleans. On April 27, she sent the Duke of Bedford a message (which he ignored) ordering him to surrender all of his properties and leave France. Then she began to travel towards Orleans at the head of the Dauphin’s army. Two days later, she crossed the Loire.

Her energy and conviction had managed to transmit itself to the knights and captains who had been stalled behind the Dauphin’s withdrawn generalship; and in three quick assaults on the Burgundian-English camps, the royalist army forced the besiegers to break camp and retreat by the end of the first week of May. It was the initial victory in a string of triumphs. Like a football team that has suddenly regained its confidence, the Dauphin’s army followed the “Maid of Orleans” into battle after battle—and fought brilliantly. The English and Burgundian forces fell back and back. The English-held Tournelles surrendered on May 8; Jargeau in June; Troyes and Reims in July; St. Denis in August. With Reims finally back in his hands, the Dauphin mounted an elaborate coronation ceremony in the ancient cathedral, following the tradition established by the Frankish king Clovis centuries before.

Crowned and anointed, Charles now seemed to lose his will to tap into Jeanne d’Arc’s electrical presence. The final step in establishing his lordship over France would be the routing of the English from Paris; but Charles was not enthusiastic about the attack, and Jeanne herself had underestimated the English strength in Paris. She had thought that the people would come over to the side of the rightfully crowned king of France, but there were too many Burgundians and English in the city. After a few initial assaults in late August, she led a major attack against Paris’s walls on September 8, 1429. But, sensing division in their leadership, the French army faltered. Jeanne herself was badly injured, taking a serious arrow wound to the thigh. The royalist army finally retreated. Something had shifted; Jeanne’s injury had turned the angel of the Lord into a vulnerable woman.10

The mysterious momentum of the French army had faded. By early September, Charles VII had decided to retreat across the Loire for the winter. By spring of 1430, he was still sitting, apathetically, at the northern city of Sully.

93.1 The Dauphin against the English

Hoping to recapture the old momentum, Jeanne d’Arc left him and went, with two thousand loyal soldiers, to the city of Compiègne. Compiègne had remained loyal to Charles VII, defying the English; she hoped to use the city as a base for a surprise attack on English troops nearby. Instead, she marched out from its gates and was almost at once driven backwards by the Duke of Burgundy’s men. “During that time,” one of the soldiers who was present later wrote, “the captain [of Compiègne], seeing the great multitude of Burgundians and Englishmen ready to get on the bridge . . . raised the drawbridge of the city and closed the gate. So the Maid was shut outside, and only a few of her men were with her.”11

Later accounts, including Holinshed’s, suggest that the governor of Compiègne was in the pay of the English and that Jeanne had been set up. However it happened, she was forced to surrender, and was taken captive to the Duke of Burgundy’s camp at Marigny. To the English and Burgundians, she was the power that had resurrected Charles VII’s army from the dead; she had to be not just removed from the war but also discredited. So she was treated not as a prisoner of war but as a heretic, accused of “many crimes, sorceries, idolatry, intercourse with demons, and other matters relative to faith and against faith.”12

Charles VII made no effort to ransom her. No contemporary writer makes any mention of his thoughts on the subject; there is nothing but silence. Perhaps he was playing out one of those deep long-term strategies that occasionally surfaced during his reign; or perhaps his coronation had been the only goal all along; or, possibly, he was suffering from a spell of the pathological apathy that occasionally seized him. There is no way to know for sure. But after long and miserable imprisonment, Jeanne was finally put on trial for heresy at Rouen, in Normandy (safely English territory), on February 21, 1431.

By then, Charles was clearly determined to keep far, far away from the taint of witchcraft. But despite the theoretically theological tone of the trial, it was perfectly clear that Jeanne’s condemnation was demanded by military expediency. She was kept in a military prison, given no lawyer for her defense, and denied the company of other women; all of these were blatant violations of Church laws protecting women accused of heresy.13

It was a confusion of procedure caused in large part by Jeanne’s own insistence that God was speaking to her directly, independent of any Church voice or setting (the same heresy that had plagued the institutional church for centuries now), and that He did not approve of the Treaty of Troyes (which had given Henry V the right to claim the crown of France). “Asked whether God hates the English,” the Latin transcript of her trial tells us, “she said she knows nothing about the love or hate that God has for the English, nor what he will do with their souls; but she knows for certain they will be driven from France, except those who stay and die, and that God will grant the French victory over the English.”14

Her prosecutor was Pierre Cauchon, a Paris-trained canon lawyer who was also the Bishop of Beauvais. For three months, she was bombarded with seventy different accusations. The assembled court—131 lawyers, priests, and scholars—decided that twelve of them could be proven. Meanwhile, Jeanne (exhausted, abandoned, poorly fed) sank into an illness that reduced her almost to coma. On Thursday, May 24, she allowed her hand to be guided into marking a cross at the bottom of the accusations: an acknowledgment of guilt, which sentenced her to lifelong imprisonment.

But over the weekend, a spark of resistance flared back up in the battered recesses of her soul. Visited by her judges, early next week, she renounced her confession.

At once, she was condemned as an unrepentant heretic and sentenced to death by burning. The French court had been prepared (and perhaps hoping) for this eventuality all along: the punishment was carried out with immediate efficiency. On May 30, 1431, she was led out to the square of Rouen, where eight hundred armed men had assembled to supervise the execution. It was a hasty execution; the priest assigned to hear her last confession at the stake later wrote that the captain of the troops tried to hurry him through the confession so that he could dismiss his men for dinner.

And impatiently, without any form, or indication or judgment, they sent her to the fire, saying to the master of the work: “Do your job.” And so she was brought and attached to the stake, continuing to praise God and the saints while lamenting devoutly; the last word she cried in a high voice as she died was: “Jesus!”15

JEANNE’S EXECUTION WAS, on the surface, a victory for the English.

It backfired. The sight of Jeanne dying with the name of Christ on her lips had not gone over well with the population of Rouen, and she was more and more widely spoken of as a martyr. The executioner himself later went to a priest, begging for absolution; he was damned, he said, because he had burned a holy woman. Rumors began to circulate that her heart had survived the flames, a miracle in the ashes.16

After the burning at Rouen, the regent Duke of Bedford arranged to bring young Henry VI, now ten years old, to Paris to be crowned at Notre Dame. But the ceremony was greeted with sullen silence, and the people of Paris were so hostile to the young English king that he left after just weeks and went to Normandy instead.

The English position in France was further complicated by a falling-out between the English regent and his longtime ally, the Duke of Burgundy. With the resurgence of Charles VII’s power, the Duke of Burgundy had been contemplating how he could be reconciled to his king. When his sister, the Duke of Bedford’s wife, died in 1432 and Bedford quickly remarried, the two men were pushed even further apart. “The English became very suspicious of the Burgundians,” Monstrelet says, “and guarded as much against them as they had done before against the French . . . and they no longer had confidence in each other.”17

The English had been pushed hard back on their heels, and in the late summer of 1435, Henry VI’s London council agreed to send ambassadors to Arras to meet with two cardinals sent from Rome to help establish a peace between the warring kings. The Duke of Burgundy was also in attendance, as were representatives from a number of French countries; Charles VII sent diplomats of his own. The Duke of Bedford remained away; and it soon became clear that the only useful negotiations were going on between the Duke of Burgundy and Charles VII’s men. The English were “not well pleased . . . for they suspected some treaties were in agitation that would not be for the advantage of their country.” In addition to secret meetings between the French parties, the English ambassadors were continually faced with the French demand that King Henry give up the claim to be king of France, in exchange for sovereignty over certain French territories. By early September, they were fed up. They abandoned the talks and returned to England.18

Just a few days later, the Duke of Bedford, who had been lying ill at Rouen, died. The Duke of Burgundy now concluded that any obligation to the English was at an end. On September 21, he agreed to sign the Treaty of Arras; this did nothing to bring the war with the English to an end, but it reunified the Burgundian party to the crown, bringing an end to the split that had allowed the English to make a play for France in the first place.

Paris itself resisted a little longer; there were die-hard Burgundians in the city who were still unwilling to follow their duke into the French king’s fold; and there was still an English force holding the Bastille. Finally, early in 1436, a French royal army under the command of the Constable of France broke through the gates, surrounded the Bastille, and forced the remaining holdouts to surrender.

Charles VII himself entered the city on November 12, 1437. He had not been in his own capital city for nineteen years, and the date was carefully chosen; it was the first Sunday in Advent, the beginning of the season of the Messiah’s arrival, a day when kings marched into their own cities in triumph.

France was hardly in a state of victory, though. The devastation of the civil war lingered. Charles VII’s previous royalist soldiers formed robber bands called écorcheurs (the “skinners,” or “flayers”) and stormed the countryside; it took the Constable a long time to bring them under control.

Charles VII created an additional disturbance by reorganizing the army. With the cooperation of the Estates-General at Orleans, he decreed that from now on, a permanent, government-controlled army would defend France. All officers were under the direction of the king, and no French duke could have soldiers of his own without the permission of the king. It was the end of private armies, a strike against one of the most treasured privileges of the French aristocracy.

Some of the dukes resisted. They joined forces with the écorcheurs and tried to mount an armed rebellion. But the government army, under the direction of the Constable of France, squelched the resistance before it could flower: the first demonstration of the new French military might.20

By this point, the English had lost almost all their French territories. In 1444, young Henry VI—now twenty–three and in control of his own government—agreed to a temporary cease-fire; he also consented to marry Charles VII’s niece Margaret, a wedding that took place in 1445.

But the union did not save the last English territories. In June of 1449, Charles VII abruptly accused the English of failing to abide by the terms of the cease-fire, and of attempting to incite the French Duke of Brittany, Charles’s nephew, to rebellion against the crown of France. In a series of campaigns between July 31, 1449, and August 22, 1451, the French army reconquered almost every fortress, town, and strategic position in both Normandy and Gascony, the latter English-held for the last three hundred years. Henry VI promised to send reinforcements, but he was preoccupied with domestic matters (a series of court intrigues and plots against him) and never managed to get the ships launched. Finally, the only English territory remaining in France was now a tiny strip encompassing Calais and Guînes. “Thus were the Englishmen clearly displaced,” Holinshed mourns, “and lost the possession of all the countries, towns, castles, and places within the realm of France . . . continually losing and nothing gaining.”21

Not all of Normandy was pleased with Charles VII’s rule, especially since he now imposed new taxes to pay for all the fighting. In October of 1452, citizens of Bordeaux (“already wearied of the French servitude”) allowed an English army of five thousand to land there under the command of John Talbot, son of the Earl of Shrewsbury. The French army arrived with cannon—the first time it had made use of cannon in a siege—and cut the English invaders to ribbons. Talbot died in the fighting, along with over a thousand of his men; the rest of the English fled. It was the dying gasp of the Hundred Years’ War.22

CHARLES VII HIMSELF was showing odd signs of debility: an illness that eventually made his hands too shaky to sign official papers. This illness, referred to only obliquely by his courtiers, began sometime late in 1453. He was forced to wear dressings on one leg to absorb a constant discharge of pus; he ordered special stockings for his bad foot, and his meals were carefully ground up because of a badly ulcerated mouth. He may have been suffering from syphilis; he may have inherited some chronic genetic disorder from his mad father.

His sister’s son was suffering as well. In August of the same year, Henry VI had suddenly lost his wits. “He fell by a sudden and accidental fright into such a weak state of health that, for a whole year and a half, he had neither natural sense nor reason capable of carrying on the government,” says the contemporary Giles Chronicle; and another account adds that the king of England “suddenly was taken and smitten with a frenzy.” It was the same symptom that had first struck his grandfather Charles VI in the summer of 1392; and it soon became clear that Henry had inherited the madness of the French royal family. He did not regain awareness for over a year. Even when he again recognized his wife and children, he remained unbalanced: hearing voices, falling into catatonia, seeing visions, retreating into an imaginary world. The illness would haunt the royal family for generations. This, it turned out, was the longest-lasting prize that Henry V had won for the English at Agincourt.23

*Only a few details of Jeanne d’Arc’s brief and extraordinary life can be covered here. The classic works by Régine Pernoud, Joan of Arc: Her Story, trans. Jeremy deQuesnay Adams (St. Martin’s Press, 1998); Joan of Arc: By Herself and Her Witnesses trans. Edward Hyams (Macdonald, 1964); and The Retrial of Joan of Arc, trans. J. M. Cohen (Harcourt, Brace, 1955), provide many more details, along with contemporary accounts and a full examination of the charges against her. A detailed and somewhat sympathetic look at Charles VII’s actions can be found in Malcolm G. A. Vale, Charles VII (University of California Press, 1974).

Chapter Ninety-Four

The Fall

Between 1430 and 1453,

the Turks triumph,

the Crusades die,

and Constantinople surrenders

THE FIERCE YOUNG OTTOMAN SULTAN MURAD II had grown into a fierce mature ruler. He had laid siege to Constantinople twice, both times withdrawing only after the payment of tribute and the surrender of yet more Byzantine lands. He had ruthlessly wiped out budding revolts in Wallachia and Serbia, both now under his control; after capturing the massive Hungarian fortress of Golubac, on the Danube river, he had forced the Hungarians to make it over to him permanently; in 1430 he seized Thessalonica; he had begun to invade the Venetian-held lands on the Adriatic Sea; and in 1431, his troops had knocked down the Hexamillion Wall, built by Manuel to block just such an extension of Turkish power.1

In Rome, the cardinals and pope talked hopefully of another crusade, this one perhaps involving the Hungarians, the Polish armies, the Venetians; the Duke of Burgundy had expressed interest; the Serbs might be persuaded to join in.

But such a crusade resisted full organization. Talk went on, while the only resistance to Murad was mounted by Hungary.

THE KING OF HUNGARY, Albert II, had succeeded his father-in-law Sigismund in 1438 on the thrones of both Hungary and Germany.

He took the Hungarian capital city of Alba Regia for his home, and at first directed his energies against the Bohemians, who were refusing to recognize his kingship. The Castilian traveler Pero Tafur, visiting his headquarters during the first Christmas of his reign, found him at the Bohemian border city of Breslau with “a great army”; he was impressed by Albert II’s courtesy (“honest in his bearing . . . an open and vigorous knight”), and even more astounded by the cold winter. “So cold is the city that [the king] and his courtiers go about in the streets seated in wooden vehicles like threshing machines,” he marveled. “No one with any money rides on horseback for fear of falling, for the streets are like glass owing to the continual frosts. . . . It was so cold that my teeth almost fell out of my mouth.”2

94.1 The Wars of Murad II

The Bohemians were not easily reduced, however, and in 1439 Albert II decided to turn southward against the Turkish front in Serbia. After an undistinguished campaign in which nothing particular happened, he was journeying back towards Vienna when he grew ill; he died at the Hungarian city of Neszmély on October 27, not quite finishing out two years as king of Hungary. He had never actually managed to be crowned king of Germany, and died as king-elect.

His venture against the Turks had produced one unexpected effect. In order to prevent Hungary and Poland from unifying against him, Murad II had sent an ambassador to the king of Poland, Wladyslaw III, with an offer. The Turks would help the king’s younger brother, Casimir, take complete control of Bohemia, removing it completely from the control of either Germany or Hungary and instead making it a subject kingdom of Poland—as long as Poland promised not to help the Hungarians attack the Turkish front.3

Wladyslaw III, only fifteen years old, was still under the guidance of his advisors. He accepted the treaty, but the Turkish ambassadors had not yet even left Krakow when news of Albert’s death arrived, along with an offer from the Hungarian nobles to recognize Wladyslaw as king of Hungary in his place. The German electors had settled on Frederick of Hapsburg, Albert’s first cousin: “Not so noble a man” as Albert, says Pero Tafur, but “exceedingly wealthy . . . [and] he knows well how to keep what he has.” But the Hungarians had concluded that separating their own realm from Germany, and from its Bohemian troubles, was a better route.4

Wladyslaw III accepted the Hungarian crown, which annoyed Murad II. When his messengers returned to his capital city of Edirne and told him that Poland and Hungary were now under a single ruler, he declared the treaty with Hungary void and began to gather his forces for an attack. Meanwhile, Albert II’s widow gave birth to a posthumous son, four months after Albert’s death. A minority of the Hungarian nobles lobbied for retracting the offer to Wladyslaw in favor of the infant. Fighting broke out, and Murad II must have believed that the divisions in Hungary would make the country vulnerable. In 1440, he advanced forward to Belgrade, the gateway into Hungary, and laid siege to it.5

To his shock, the siege failed. Belgrade, built between two rivers, was further protected by a double wall and five forts, and its harbor was shut off with a chain that ran between two strong towers. The Turkish army was equipped with stone throwers and cannon, but after several months of bashing at the walls without effect, Murad II ordered a secret tunnel built under the walls, beginning the construction a good distance away and behind a high hill to conceal it. Belgrade’s defenders discovered the tunnel, booby-trapped it with gunpowder, and waited until it was filled with advancing Turkish foot soldiers; then they set off the explosion, killing every last man in the tunnel. Murad retreated. In all, he had lost nearly fifteen thousand men at the siege.6

Fighting continued in Hungary over the right of Albert’s infant son to claim the throne, but the Turks were further stalled by the resistance of the Hungarian count John Huniades, a native of the eastern wooded area of Transylvania. Appointed by Albert II as military governor for Szörény, the lands near Wallachia, Huniades now offered his allegiance to Wladyslaw.

His skill stood in Murad’s way. Huniades, a well-educated man in his late thirties, had served under the Emperor Sigismund and was widely rumored to be Sigismund’s illegitimate son. He had studied military strategy in Milan and fought in the Hussite Wars. He now turned this experience, and a natural bent for craftiness, to the service of the Hungarian army. In 1442, he defeated Murad’s troops badly when the Ottoman sultan tried to invade Transylvania through the narrow pass called the Iron Gates. Then he went on the offensive. Beginning in 1443, he marched directly across the Balkan mountains, into the teeth of the Turks: an audacious and aggressive move known as the Long Campaign.

The Hungarian advance led to a string of Turkish losses; and in February 1444, Murad II chose to accept a ten-year truce with Wladyslaw and John Huniades. This sudden capitulation was only partly related to the Hungarian victories. His oldest and best-loved son Aleddin had just died of a swift and unexpected illness; Murad II was grieving and weary. He was only forty, but he had been sultan for twenty-three years, all of those spent at war. Right after signing the truce, he summoned his next son, twelve-year-old Mehmet, to join him at Edirne. There he announced that he intended to abdicate the sultanate and hand it over to the child and his hand-selected vizier, Halil Pasha.7

This appeared to be a sign of weakness.

Suddenly, it seemed that the long-discussed Crusade might actually happen. A papal legate was dispatched to assure both Wladyslaw and John Huniades that they were not bound by the terms of the truce they had just signed, since Murad was an infidel. He sweetened his persuasions by promising Huniades that the pope would recognize him as king of Bulgaria if he could manage to drive the Turks out of the old Bulgarian lands. It worked; both men agreed to ignore the treaty and join a multinational attack against the new young sultan.8

They remained committed—even when other potential Crusaders started to back out. John VIII refused to take the risk of annoying the Turks into another attack on Constantinople. The Serbian leader, whose daughter was married to Murad, decided that he would be better off working his family connections than trying to kill his daughter’s new family. The Venetians never came up with the expected ships. By the time the Crusaders had planned to march along the Danube, into the Turkish front, the force had shrunk to the Hungarians under King Wladyslaw and John Huniades and a small Wallachian force commanded by Vlad Dracul, now prince of his home country. He was willing to fight, but he was not hopeful about the chance for success: “The Sultan has hunting parties larger than this army,” he told his colleagues.9

But the Hungarians had triumphed too often; Huniades was stubborn, and Wladyslaw young and ambitious. They marched towards the Turkish-held city of Varna. At their approach, the Turkish vizier begged Murad II to come out of retirement and lead the return attack. Murad did (somewhat to the dismay of young Mehmet); he approached Varna himself at the head of a hundred thousand men, outnumbering the Hungarians three to one. Eyewitnesses say that when he joined the battle on November 10, 1444, he carried a standard with the ripped pieces of the peace treaty nailed to its top.10

The Hungarian army was savaged. Wladyslaw III, aged twenty, was killed in the fighting; his body was never found, although rumors circulated for years that he had survived and was wandering through the east as a pilgrim, always searching for Jerusalem. The survivors fled; John Huniades and Vlad Dracul both escaped into Wallachia, where they had a private falling-out that ended with Huniades in a Wallachian prison.

The Battle of Varna was the last Christian attempt to organize a crusade against the Turks. It had barely been a crusade, but the slaughter at Varna quelled even the urge to use the name.

In the aftermath, all of the thrones changed occupants.

Murad came back to the head of the Ottoman empire, demoting his resentful son to heir apparent once again. In Hungary, Albert II’s young son Ladislaus, now five years old, was unanimously elected to replace the dead Wladyslaw. Poland went through three years of interregnum before settling on Wladyslaw’s younger brother Casimir as their own king.

Germany was still under Frederick of Hapsburg; Sigismund’s union of Germany with its neighbors had now completely dissolved. Eight years after the Battle of Varna, Frederick would be crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Nicholas V—although he controlled little else apart from Germany. And although neither he nor Nicholas V knew it, he would be the last Holy Roman Emperor to ever be crowned in Rome.

IN 1448, JOHN VIII—who had been forced to congratulate Murad II, his overlord, on the victory at Varna—died in Constantinople. He had been married three times but had no sons. In his place, his younger brother Constantine took the throne.

Constantine XI Palaeologus was forty-five years old, twice widowed, and emperor of a shabby, demoralized, poor empire. He had fewer than nine thousand soldiers in Constantinople, and half of those were mercenaries. The walls of the city were crumbling, in places gapped through. He did not defy Murad II, but when Murad died in 1451 of a stroke, he faced a new sultan who did not intend to let Constantinople remain unconquered.

Mehmet II had retreated silently into the shadows, waiting for his father to die. The two had never been on close terms; Murad had preferred his two older sons, Mehmet’s half brothers, but both had died young. Now Mehmet returned to Edirne. He was nineteen years old, withdrawn and cautious, and the only person who did not underestimate him was the vizier Halil Pasha. “The late Sultan was a lenient and conscientious friend to you,” he wrote to Constantine XI, when the Byzantine emperor had annoyed him by suggesting that Constantinople might decide to support a rival for Mehmet II’s throne. “The present Sultan is not of the same mind. If . . . [you] elude his bold and impetuous grasp, it will be only because God continues to overlook your cunning and wicked schemes. . . . If you want to recover the places which you lost long since, try it. But know this . . . all you will achieve is to lose what little you still have.”11

Halil Pasha himself had set his affairs in order; he thoroughly expected to be done away with. But Mehmet II kept him on. The vizier was experienced, well liked, and well connected; Mehmet II did not necessarily want his father’s right-hand man in the sultan’s palace, but he was able to push away his dislike, when necessary, for the good of his reign. On the other hand, Mehmet’s infant half brother, son of his father’s new young wife, was a potential rival. As soon as he arrived at Edirne, Mehmet invited his stepmother to his throne room and gave her a sincere welcome. When she returned to her rooms, she found the body of her baby son, strangled while she had been away.12

Mehmet did not fritter his strength away in multiple campaigns. He at once arranged truces with Hungary, Venice, Wallachia, and the Greek cities on the southern peninsula, which allowed him to put all of his energies into building a new fortress. Called Boğazkesen, “Cutter of the Strait,” it stood on Byzantine land, on the western shore of the Bosphorus Strait. He assigned his entire workforce to build it, completely finishing it in less than twenty weeks. The Cutter of the Strait stood directly across from a fortress built by his grandfather Bayezid on the Turkish shore. It had only one purpose—to serve as a base for the conquest of Constantinople—and for twenty weeks, the citizens of Constantinople had been perfectly aware of this as they watched the fortress rise, stone by stone. Mehmet had ignored Constantine’s diplomatic protests. The emperor had no power outside the city’s walls, and the sultan’s one wish was to breach those walls and bring Constantinople to an end.13

In November 1452, the Cutter of the Strait claimed its first victim. As soon as the fortress was completed, Mehmet had announced that all ships passing through the strait would pay toll. A Venetian merchant ship refused to stop and shell out the tax; Turkish cannon blasted the ship to bits, killing most of the crew. The captain was hauled out of the water and impaled on the shore where other ships could see him.14

The storm was coming. Constantine set his people, that winter, to collecting weapons, repairing the walls, gathering provisions. A Hungarian cannon maker named Urban came to the city and offered his services; he was too expensive for Constantine, so with regret the emperor turned him away. He went to Cutter of the Strait instead, where Mehmet promptly hired him.15

At the beginning of April, Mehmet began to move his forces into place. He established his own headquarters right across from the gate known as St. Romanus and established other camps all along the walls. Monstrelet says that he had 200,000 men; the Venetian eyewitness Nicolò Barbaro guessed 160,000, the Greek chronicler Chalkokondyles 400,000. Among them were at least 60,000 archers and 40,000 horsemen; some of the foot soldiers armed only with scimitars, but others with iron helmets and French chain mail. “There were very many bombards and culverins,” Monstrelet says; bombards were wide-mouthed cannon that hurled granite balls, culverins smaller cannon that could be fired by hand. One of the bombards, according to Monstrelet, shot out stones “weighing eighteen hundred pounds.” This was the work of the renegade Hungarian cannon maker; it had taken sixty oxen pulling thirty wagons to haul it from its forging place in Edirne (once called Adrianople) to the city’s walls, and road workers had spent two months fortifying bridges and roadways ahead of it; the stones it hurled were more than seven feet around. The sultan hoped to use these to break through the triple land walls west of the city. No attacking force had ever before succeeded in this, but no attacking force had ever used cannon that hurled seven-foot stones either.16

The bombardment began on April 4, 1453.* It continued for fifty-five days; on each one of those days, the cannon launched 100 to 120 massive stones against the city’s walls. Barbaro, who was inside the city during the attack, records that the first Turkish attempt to storm through the gaps knocked in the walls came on April 18. It was driven back by the defenders, stones piled back into the walls.17

The most vulnerable wall of the city was the one lining the edge of the Golden Horn, the finger of water that ran from the Bosphorus inland. The Horn itself was blocked with a massive chain, the chain guarded by towers. But Mehmet had planned for this. His engineers had outfitted about seventy of his ships with wheels. In the night of April 22, his men hauled the ships by land over the hills north of the Golden Horn and then slipped them into the water, behind the protective chain. When dawn came on the twenty-third, the Golden Horn was filled with enemy ships.

It was at this point that the defense of the city began to seem more like a deathwatch.

Two more attempted invasions through breaches in the walls took place on May 7 and May 18, both pushed back by the pitifully small garrison within. Constantine, losing heart, sent a message to Mehmet asking for terms on which the sultan would withdraw: “Either I shall take this city,” Mehmet sent back, “or the city will take me, dead or alive. . . . The city is all I want, even if it is empty.”18

On May 28, the bombardment suddenly ceased. Silence settled over the city. And then, just after midnight, a final attack—every man, every cannon, every horse, every archer Mehmet commanded—was flung against and over the city walls. Constantine himself came out, sword in hand, to join the fighting. His body was never found, probably buried in a mass pit along with thousands of others; there were so many bodies, both Turkish and Byzantine, says Barbaro, that they floated in the Sea of Marmara “as melons float through the canals of Venice.”

94.2 The Golden Horn

By the morning of the twenty-ninth, Constantinople belonged to the Turks. Mehmet himself came in through the St. Romanus gate and went directly to the Hagia Sophia, the great cathedral of the Greek church, to say the first Muslim prayers inside it.19

The day after the conquest, Mehmet arrested his vizier Halil Pasha and had him executed. He was strong now, and he no longer needed the old man.20

THE TURKS called it “The Conquest,” but in the West it was known as “The Fall.”

There was no more emperor in the east, no more Christian jewel on the Black Sea. The chain connecting the fifteenth century to Constantine’s dream was broken. For the ideal of holy crusade, the conquest of 1453 was a postscript to the Battle of Varna; for the ideal of a holy empire, it was simply and purely the end. The old trade routes were no more. The old hopes were dead. The old promises were empty and hollow.21

The conquest was the beginning of many other things: the Muslim advance into the west; a new wave of Greek thought, moving westward as Byzantine scholars fled from Constantinople into the courts of Europe; the seeds of new nations; the roots of new wars.

But endings were easier to see than beginnings. Even for the Ottomans, who saw victory rather than the end of the world, the sack of the city was a period and not the start of a new sentence. The single detailed Ottoman account of the siege speaks less of triumph than of severed limbs and severed heads, of fire and charred remains, of dust and death and destruction.

And, from the furthest reaches below to the top-most parts, and from the upper heights down to ground level, hand-to-hand combat and charging was being joined with a clashing and plunging of arms and hooked pikes and halberds in the breaches amidst the ruin wrought by the cannon . . . a veritable precipitation and downpouring of calamities from the heavens as decreed by God.22

*The 1453 siege of Constantinople is one of the most-studied (and familiar) in Western history. Much more detailed accounts can be found in the illustrated and readable The Fall of Constantinople: The Ottoman Conquest of Byzantium, by David Nicolle, John Haldon, and Stephen R. Turnbull (Osprey Publishing, 2007), and in the narrative history Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, by Roger Crowley (Faber and Faber, 2005). The comprehensive 800-page study The Siege and the Fall of Constantinople in 1453: Historiography, Topography and Military Studies, by Marois Philippides and Walter K. Hanak (Ashgate Publishing, 2011), offers a survey of the research and sources available.

Notes

Preface

1. Richard A. Fletcher, Moorish Spain (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1992), p. 151.

Chapter One Logic and Compromise

1. William of Malmesbury, The Deeds of the Bishops of England (Gesta Pontificum Anglorum), trans. David Preest (2002), p. 575.

2. Guy Carleton Lee, Source-book of English History (1900), pp. 125–127; David Charles Douglas, William the Conqueror: The Norman Impact upon England (1964), pp. 265–266.

3. Douglas, pp. 273–274.

4. William of Malmesbury, The Deeds of the Bishops of England, p. 98.

5. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Growth of Medieval Theology (600–1300) (1978), p. 98.

6. William of Malmesbury, The Deeds of the Bishops of England, p. 26.

7. Saint Anselm, Proslogion, in A Scholastic Miscellany: Anselm to Ockham, ed. and trans. Eugene R. Fairweather (1956), p. 69.

8. Ibid., p. 100.

9. Uta-Renate Blumenthal, The Investiture Controversy (1988), p. 156.

10. William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum (The History of the English Kings), trans. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson, and Michael Winterbottom, vol. 1 (1998), p. 749.

11. Henry White, History of Great Britain and Ireland (1849), p. 114.

12. Gerd Tellenbach, The Church in Western Europe from the Tenth to the Early Twelfth Century (1993), p. 273.

13. Horst Fuhrmann, Germany in the High Middle Ages, c. 1050–1200, trans. Timothy Reuter (1986), p. 88.

14. Ibid., pp. 88–89; Karl F. Morrison, ed., The Investiture Controversy (1971), pp. 69–70.

15. Morrison, pp. 69–70.

Chapter Two The Crusader Enemy

1. Anna Comnena, The Alexiad of Anna Comnena, trans. E. R. A. Sewter (1969), X.9–10.

2. Ibid., X.11.

3. Ibid., XI.11–12.

4. The “Historia belli sacri (Tudebodus imitatus et continuatus),” cited by Aleksandr A. Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire, 324–1453, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (1952), p. 410.

5. George A. C. Sandeman, Metternich (1911), p. 168.

6. Christopher Duggan, A Concise History of Italy (1994), p. 40

7. Thomas F. Madden, Enrico Dandolo and the Rise of Venice (2003), p. 8.

8. Vasiliev, p. 413; Frederic Chapin Lane, Venice, a Maritime Republic (1973), pp. 33–34.

9. Donald M. Nicol, Byzantium and Venice (1988), p. 79.

10. Simon Payaslian, The History of Armenia (2007), p. 82.

11. In Fontes rerum byzantinarum, quoted by Vasiliev, p. 416.

Chapter Three Anarchy

1. Henry of Huntingdon, The Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon, trans. Thomas Forester (1853), p. 244; William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, pp. 761–763.

2. William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, p. 745; Judith A. Green, The Government of England under Henry I (1986), p. 5.

3. T. A. Archer and Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, The Crusades (1914), p. 15; John Richard Green, A Short History of the English People, rev. ed. (1894) p. 99.

4. William of Tyre, A History of Deeds Done beyond the Sea, trans. and ed. Emily Atwater Babcock and A. C. Krey, vol. 2 (1976), bk. 14.2, p. 51.

5. Simeon of Durham, The Historical Works of Simeon of Durham, trans. Joseph Stevenson (1855), p. 617.

6. Henry of Huntingdon, The Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon, trans. and ed. Thomas Forester (1853), bk. 7, pp. 259–260.

7. Ibid., pp. 269–271.

8. M. J. Swanton, trans. and ed., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (1998), pp. 264–265.

Chapter Four The Lost Homeland

1. Li Qingzhao ji jiazhu, quoted in Simon Leys, The Hall of Uselessness (2011), pp. 255–256.

2. Patricia Buckley Ebrey, ed., Chinese Civilization, 2nd ed. (1993), p. 169.

3. Ebrey, p. 171; Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization, 2nd ed. (1996), p. 357.

4. Yuan-Kang Wang, Harmony and War (2001), p. 80.

5. Peter Allan Lorge, War, Politics and Society in Early Modern China, 900–1795 (2005), p. 55.

6. Jung-Pang Lo, “The Emergence of China as a Sea Power during the Late Sung and Early Yuan Periods,” Far Eastern Quarterly 14, no. 4 (1955): 502, 491.

7. Wang, p. 89.

8. Alexander Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model (1971), pp. 7,299.

9. James Anderson, The Rebel Den of Nùng Trí Cao (2007), p. 143.

10. Michael E. Brown and Sumit Ganguly, Fighting Words (2003), p. 222; Nicholas Tarling, ed., The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, vol. 1 (1999), pp. 147–148.

11. George Coedès, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, ed. Walter F. Vella, trans. Sue Brown Cowing (1968), pp. 99–100, 159.

12. Georges Maspero, Royaume de Champa, quoted in Coedès, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, pp. 159–160.

13. Victor B. Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol. 1 (2003), pp. 348–350.

14. Oscar Chapuis, A History of Vietnam (1995), p. 52.

15. John K. Whitmore, Essays into Vietnamese Pasts (1995), p. 65.

16. Chapuis, p. 42.

17. Milton Osborne, The Mekong (2000), p. 31.

18. Charles Higham, The Civilization of Angkor (2001), pp. 115–117.

19. Ian Shaw and Robert Jameson, A Dictionary of Archaeology (1999), p. 63.

Chapter Five Crusade Resurrected

1. Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades (2000), p. 113; William of Tyre, p. 105.

2. Martin Sicker, The Islamic World in Decline (2001), p. 72

3. Nicholas N. Ambraseys, “The 12th Century Seismic Paroxysm in the Middle East,” Annals of Geophysics 47, nos. 2–3 (April–June 2004): 743–744; Ibn al-Athir, The Chronicle of Ibn al-Athir for the Crusading Period, trans. D. S. Richards (2006), pt. 1, p. 351.

4. Josef W. Meri, Medieval Islamic Civilization (2006), vol. 1, p. 219; The Qur’an, trans. Thomas Clancy (2004), p. 299.

5. Ibn al-Athir, pt. 1, p. 283; Jonathan C. Phillips and Martin Hoch, eds., The Second Crusade (2001), p. 126.

6. Christopher Tyerman, God’s War (2006), p. 188.

7. William of Tyre, p. 143.

8. Hillenbrand, p. 115.

9. Jacques P. Migne, Patrologia Cursus Completus (1855), cols. 1064–1066.

10. Thomas F. Madden, The New Concise History of the Crusades, updated ed. (2005), p. 50.

11. Otto of Freising, The Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa, trans. Charles Christopher Mierow (2004), p. 70; Jonathan Phillips and Martin Hoch, eds., The Second Crusade (2001), p. 3.

12. Thomas F. Tout, The Empire and the Papacy, 918–1273 (1899), p. 284.

13. Madden, The New Concise History, p. 52; Ralph V. Turner, Eleanor of Aquitaine (2009),

pp. 66–67.

14. Michael Frassetto, ed., Medieval Purity and Piety (1998), pp. 118–119; Ralph V. Turner, Eleanor of Aquitaine (2009), p. 47.

15. William of Tyre, pp. 171–172; Madden, The New Concise History, p. 58.

16. William of Tyre, pp. 176–177.

17. Ibid., p. 80.

18. Turner, p. 93.

19. Thomas S. Asbridge, The Crusades (2010), p. 242.

20. Bernard of Clairvaux, Five Books on Consideration, trans. John Douglas Anderson and Elizabeth T. Kennan (1976), p. 49; William of Tyre, p. 193.

Chapter Six Reconquista and Rediscovery

1. Roger Le Tourneau, The Almohad Movement in North Africa in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (1969), p. 25; Olivia Remie Constable, Medieval Iberia (1997), p. 186.

2. Donald J. Kagay and L. J. Andrew Villalon, eds., The Circle of War in the Middle Ages (1999, pp. 26–27; Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris, II.50, in The World of El Cid, trans. Simon Barton and Richard Fletcher (2000), p. 225.

3. Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris, II.58, in Barton and Fletcher, p. 228.

4. Ibid., II.92, in Barton and Fletcher, p. 241.

5. Keith J. Devlin, The Man of Numbers (2011), p. 21; Chris Lowney, A Vanished World (2005), p. 149.

6. Edward Grant, A Source Book in Medieval Science (1974), p. 35; B. F. Reilly, The Contest of Christian and Muslim Spain (1992), pp. 127–128.

Chapter Seven Questions of Authority

1. Peter Abelard, Historia Calamitatum, in The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, trans. Betty Radice (1974), p. 3.

2. Ibid., 11.

3. James Burge, Heloise and Abelard (2003), pp. 127–131; Abelard, Historia Calamitatum, p. 17.

4. Gillian Rosemary Evans, ed., The Medieval Theologians (2001), pp. 109–110; Peter Godman, The Silent Masters (2000), pp. 67–68.

5. Abelard, Historia Calamitatum, 21.

6. Godman, 79–80.

7. Otto of Freising, p. 82.

8. Ibid., p. 84.

9. Heinrich Fichtenau, Heretics and Scholars in the High Middle Ages, 1000–1200, trans. Denise A. Kaiser (1998), pp. 297–298.

10. Radice, p. 228.

11. John of Salisbury,The Metalogicon of John of Salisbury, trans. Daniel D. McGarry (1955), pp. 68, 167.

12. R. N. Swanson, The Twelfth-Century Renaissance (1999), p. 74; Alan Charles Kors and Edward Peters, Witchcraft in Europe, 400–1700 (2001), pp. 72–73.

13. Marcia L. Colish, Peter Lombard, vol. 1 (1994), pp. 16–17, 25,

14. Ibid., pp. 30–31, 77ff.; Evans, pp. 181–182.

Chapter Eight The New Song

1. Frederick W. Mote, Imperial China, 900–1800 (1999), p. 298.

2. Helaine Selin, ed., Encyclopedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures (2008), p. 959; Chen Kelun, Chinese Porcelain (2004), p. 13; Wenhua Li, Agro-ecological Farming Systems in China (2001), pp. 28–29.

3. Alfreda Murck, Poetry and Painting in Song China (2000), p. 219.

4. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, trans., Poetry and Prose of the Tang and Song (1984), pp. 273–274.

5. Steven Warshaw, China Emerges: A Concise History of China from Its Origins to the Present (1987), p. 60; P. J. Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self-Cultivation (2000), pp. 47–49.

6. Ebrey, p. 173; Godman, p. 80.

7. Mote, pp. 232–233; Herbert Franke and Denis Twitchett, eds., The Cambridge History of China, vol. 6 (2007), pp. 239–240.

8. Franke and Twitchett, pp. 240–241.

9. Harold Miles Tanner, China (2009), pp. 219–220.

10. Lorge, p. 63.

11. Yuan-Kang Wang, Harmony and War (2011), p. 92.

12. Lu Yu, “To Show to My Sons,” trans. Burton Watson, in The Shorter Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature, ed. Victor H. Mair (2000), p. 124.

Chapter Nine The Heiji Disturbance

1. George Sansom, A History of Japan to 1334 (1958), p. 197; Delmer M. Brown and Ichirō Ishida, trans. and eds., The Future and the Past (1979), p. 72.

2. Reinhard Bendix, Kings or People (1978), pp. 76–77; Stephen R. Turnbull, The Samurai (1977), pp. 25–27.

3. Brown and Ishida, p. 78; John W. Hall, Jeffrey P. Mass, and David L. Davis, Medieval Japan (1974), pp. 69–70.

4. William Wayne Farris, Japan to 1600 (2009), p. 86.

5. Brown and Ishida, p. 317.

6. Donald H. Shively and William H. McCullough, eds., The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 2 (1999), p. 609.

7. Brown and Ishida, p. 99.

8. Wm. Theodore de Bary et al., eds., Sources of Japanese Tradition, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (2001), p. 269; Turnbull, The Samurai, pp. 34–35

9. De Bary, p. 275; Brown and Ishida, p. 104; Turnbull, The Samurai, p. 37.

10. Brown and Ishida, p. 107.

11. Ibid., pp. 115–116.

Chapter Ten Death of an Army

1. Ki-baik Lee, A New History of Korea, trans. Edward W. Wagner with Edward J. Shultz (1984), p. 138

2. Martina Deuchler, The Confucian Transformation of Korea (1992), p. 32.

3. Edward J. Shultz, Generals and Scholars (2000), pp. 11–12.

4. Ki-baik Lee, p. 136.

5. Peter H. Lee, ed., Sourcebook of Korean Civilization, vol. 1 (1993), p. 332; Shultz, p. 16.

6. Shultz, pp. 13–14.

7. Ki-baik Lee, p. 139; Shultz, pp. 15, 17.

8. Michael J. Seth, A History of Korea (2011), p. 104.

9. Peter H. Lee, p. 332.

10. Ki-Baik Lee, p. 140.

11. Peter H. Lee, p. 334.

12. Shultz, pp. 20–21, 28–29.

13. Ki-baik Lee, p. 140; Shultz, p. 34.

14. Ki-baik Lee, p. 142.

15. Peter H. Lee, pp. 334–336.

16. Ki-baik Lee, p. 145; Peter H. Lee, p. 340.

17. Shultz, pp. 55–56; Seth, pp. 104–105.

Chapter Eleven The First Plantagenet

1. Swanton, p. 264.

2. John D. Hosler, Henry II (2007), pp. 5–6; William of Newburgh, Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I, ed. Richard Howlett, vol. 3 (1886), p. xvii.

3. Malcolm Barber, The Two Cities (1992), p. 267.

4. Quoted in Turner, p. 109.

5. Hosler, pp. 44–45.

6. William of Newburgh, The History of English Affairs, Book I, ed. P. G. Walsh and M. J. Kennedy (1988), p. 127

7. Ibid., p. 15.

8. Peter of Blois, Epistolae, ed. J. A. Giles (1847), pp. 50, 193–194.

9. Christopher Harper-Bill and Nicholas Vincent, eds., Henry II (2007), pp. 311–312; Rebecca Fraser, The Story of Britain (2006), pp. 128–129.

10. Hosler, p. 49.

Chapter Twelve Frederick Barbarossa

1. Eric Christiansen, The Northern Crusades, rev. ed. (1997), p. 53; Madden, The New Concise History, pp. 55–56.

2. France, pp. 132–133.

3. Otto of Freising, pp. 332–333.

4. Quoted in Colin Morris, The Papal Monarchy (1989), pp. 188–189.

5. Ibid., p. 190.

6. Otto of Freising, pp. 150–152.

7. Ibid., p. 127.

8. Morris, p. 267.

9. Patrick J. Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (1994), pp. 244–245.

10. Quoted in Robert Sallares, Malaria and Rome (2002), p. 225.

11. Morris, p. 195.

Chapter Thirteen The Almohads in Spain

1. Kagay and Villalon, p. 27.

2. Joseph F. O’Callaghan, A History of Medieval Spain (1975), p. 232.

3. Michael Gerli, Medieval Iberia (2003), p. 82; David Luscombe and Jonathan Riley-Smith, eds., New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 4 (2004), p. 615.

4. O’Callaghan, p. 236

5. Luscombe and Riley-Smith, p. 615.

6. Norman Roth, Jews, Visigoths, and Muslims in Medieval Spain (1994), p. 119

7. Jamil M. Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (1987), pp. 93–94.

8. Luis Vaz de Camões, The Lusiads, trans. Landeg White (2002), p. 161 (canto 8, stanza 29).

9. H. P. Livermore, A New History of Portugal (1966), p. 64.

10. Luscombe and Riley-Smith, p. 617

11. Ibid., pp. 617–618; Uri Rubin and David J. Wasserstein, eds., Dhimmis and Others (1997),

p. 166.

Chapter Fourteen “Many Nations”

1. Nehemia Levtzion and Jay Spaulding, eds., Medieval West Africa (2003), p. 7; Muhammad Fasi and Ivan Hrbek, Africa from the Seventh to the Eleventh Century (1988), p. 449.

2. “The Bornu Girgam,” translated in Journal of the African Society 12, no. 45 (Oct. 1912): 75.

3. E. W. Bovill and Robin Hallett, The Golden Trade of the Moors, 2nd ed. (1995), pp. 160–161.

4. Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery (1983), pp. 15–16.

5. Levtzion and Spaulding, p. 7; Humphrey J. Fisher, Slavery in the History of Muslim Black Africa (2001), p. 238.

6. J. D. Fage and R. A. Oliver, eds., Papers in African Prehistory (1970), pp. 259–260.

7. Richard Gray, ed., The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 4 (1975), pp. 202–203.

8. G. S. P. Freeman-Grenville, “Some Recent Archaeological Work on the Tanganyika Coast,” Man 58 (July 1958): 106.

9. Ibid., pp. 107–108.

10. Elizabeth Allo Isichei, A History of African Societies to 1870 (1997), p. 251.

11. Jeffrey Brodd, Primary Source Readings in World Religions (2009), pp. 34–35; Jacob Kehinde Olupona and Terry S. Reynolds, eds., Òrisà Devotion as World Religion (2008), pp. 151–152.

12. Kevin Shillington, ed., Encyclopedia of African History (2005), pp. 226–227; Dmitri M. Bondarenko and Peter M. Roese, “Between the Ogiso and Oba Dynasties: An Interpretation of Interregnum in the Benin Kingdom,” History in Africa 31 (2004): 103–115.

13. Roger Blench and Matthew Spriggs, eds., Archaeology and Language, vol. 3 (1999), p. 313.

14. Nehemia Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins, eds., Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History, trans. J. F. P. Hopkins (1981), pp. 79–80.

15. Djibril Tamsir Niane and Joseph Ki-Zerbo, Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Centuries (1997), pp. 124–125; Abiola Irele and Biodun Jeyifo, eds., The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought, vol. 1 (2010), pp. 406–407.

Chapter Fifteen The Last Fatimid Caliph

1. Asbridge, p. 242.

2. Maya Shatzmiller, Crusaders and Muslims in Twelfth-Century Syria (1993), p. 169.

3. H. A. R. Gibb, ed. and trans., The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades (2002), p. 341.

4. William of Tyre, p. 293.

5. Ibid., p. 294.

6. William Heywood, A History of Pisa, Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (2010), pp. 112–113.

7. William of Tyre, p. 305.

8. Ibn al-Athir, pt. 2, p. 163.

9. Ibid., p. 172.

10. Asbridge, p. 273; Ibn al-Athir, pt. 2, p. 174.

11. Ibn al-Athir, pt. 2, p. 175.

12. Ibid., p. 183; William of Tyre, pp. 367–368.

13. Ibn al-Athir, pt. 2, pp. 196–197.

Chapter Sixteen Monks and Brahmans

1. The Mahavansa, Part II, trans. L. C. Wijesinha (1889), p. 126; H. W. Codrington, Short History of Ceylon (1926), pp. 58–59.

2. Wijesinha, p. 59.

3. Ibid., p. 148; Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 4 (1954), p. 371.

4. Wijesinha, p. 149.

5. S. K. Verma, Political History of Ancient India (2010), p. 146.

6. Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski, Group Identity in the Renaissance World (2011), p. 179.

7. Ilana Friedrich-Silber, Virtuosity, Charisma, and Social Order (1995), p. 113.

8. Ibid., p. 105; Heinz Bechert, “Theravada Buddhist Sangha,” Journal of Asian Studies 29, no. 4 (Aug. 1970): 765.

9. Friedrich-Silber, pp. 84–85; Bechert, p. 766; Richard Francis Gombrich, Theravada Buddhism (2006), p. 159.

10. J. F. Fleet, “Inscriptions at Ablur,” in E. Hultzsch, ed., Epigraphia Indica and Record of the Archaological Survey of India, vol. 5 (1898–99), p. 240.

11. Bharati Ray, Different Types of History (2009), pp. 251–252; Dale Hoiberg and Indu Ramchandani, Students’ Britannica: India, vol. 3 (2000), p. 286.

12. R. S. Sharma, Early Medieval Indian Society (2001), p. 195; Stanley Wolpert, A New History of India (2004), pp. 112–113; Ray, p. 251.

13. Ray, pp. 253–254.

14. Colin Metcalfe Enriquez, Ceylon, Past and Present (1927), pp. 40–41.

15. Hoiberg and Ramchandani, p. 163.

Chapter Seventeen Conquest of the Willing

1. Hermann Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund, A History of India, 3rd ed. (1998), p. 111.

2. Tso-kha-pa Blo-bza-grags-pa and Gareth Sparham, The Fulfillment of All Hopes (1999), pp. 2–4.

3. Tansen Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade (2003), pp. 107–108.

4. Salahuddin Ahmed, Bangladesh (2004), p. 59.

5. Bauer, The History of the Medieval World, pp. 231–232.

6. Richard Maxwell Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760 (1993), pp. 16–17.

7. Sharma, pp. 102, 278, 283.

8. Minhaj Siraj Juzjani, Tabakat-i-Nasiri, trans. H. G. Raverty (1881), p. 352.

9. J. A. Boyle, ed., The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 5 (1968), p. 160.

10. Tabakat-i-Nasiri, p. 115.

11. Sir William Wilson Hunter, Imperial Gazetteer of India, 1833–1962, vol. 2 (1909), p. 309; Bauer, The History of the Medieval World, pp. 554–555.

12. Raj Kumar, ed., Essays on Medieval India (2003), pp. 275, 277.

13. Ahmed, p. 59.

Chapter Eighteen Death of a Priest

1. “Writ of William I,” quoted in Derek Baker, England in the Early Middle Ages, rev. ed. (1993),

p. 173.

2. Fraser, p. 130.

3. Henry William Carless Davis, England under the Normans and Angevins, 1066–1272 (1949),

pp. 210–211.

4. Michael Staunton, The Lives of Thomas Becket (2001), p. 45.

5. Frank Barlow, Thomas Becket (1986), pp. 44–45; Staunton, pp. 52–53.

6. Fraser, p. 131; Staunton, pp. 67–68.

7. Ernest F. Henderson, ed. and trans., Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages (1896),

pp. 11–16; Fraser, p. 132.

8. Thomas Becket, “Letter 82,” in The Correspondence of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury 1162–1170, ed. and trans. Anne J. Duggan, vol. 1 (2000), pp. 329, 333.

9. Henderson, pp. 16–20.

10. Ibid.

11. James J. Spigelman, Becket & Henry (2004), pp. 229–230.

12. Ibid., p. 251.

13. Ibid., p. 255; Fraser, p. 134.

14. Edward Potts Cheyney, Readings in English History Drawn from the Original Sources (1922),

pp. 155–158

15. Fraser, p. 135.

Chapter Nineteen Foreign Relations

1. Svat Soucek, A History of Inner Asia (2000), pp. 98–99.

2. Sicker, p. 58.

3. Madden, The New Concise History, pp. 64–65; John Julius Norwich, Byzantium (1996), p. 120.

4. Norwich, Byzantium, p. 121; William of Tyre, p. 235.

5. Stephen Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. 2 (1951), p. 348.

6. Norwich, Byzantium, p. 122; Vasiliev, p. 426; Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. 2, p. 352.

7. Vasiliev, p. 427.

8. Alicia Simpson and Stephanos Efthymiadis, Niketas Choniates (2009), p. 113.

9. Pál Engel, The Realm of St. Stephen, trans. Tamás Pálosfalvi, ed. Andrew Ayton (2005), p. 36.

10. Paul Magdalino, The Empire of Manuel I Komnenos, 1143–1180 (1993), p. 7.

11. John Van Antwerp Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans (1987), pp. 2–4.

Chapter Twenty The Venetian Problem

1. Nicol, Byzantium and Venice, p. 96.

2. Madden, The New Concise History, p. 54.

3. Ibid.

4. John Cinnamus, quoted in Nicol, Byzantium and Venice, p. 99.

5. Norwich, Byzantium, pp. 140–141.

6. Fine (1987), p. 6; Nicol, Byzantium and Venice, p. 107.

7. Norwich, Byzantium, p. 144.

8. Nicetas Choniates, O City of Byzantium, trans. Harry J. Magoulias (1984), pp. 192–193.

Chapter Twenty-One Resentments

1. Gerald of Wales, “The History of the Conquest of Ireland,” in The Historical Works of Giraldus Cambrensis, trans. Thomas Wright (1894), p. 184.

2. Ibid., p. 186; Ruth Dudley Edwards and Bridget Hourican, An Atlas of Irish History (1973),

pp. 184–185.

3. Gerald of Wales, p. 227.

4. Sean Duffy, Ailbhe MacShamhrain, and James Moynes, Medieval Ireland (2005), pp. 30–31; Hosler, p. 72.

5. Hosler, p. 65; Gerald of Wales, pp. 252–253.

6. Turner, pp. 224–225.

7. William of Newburgh, The History of English Affairs, Book II, ed. and trans. P. G. Walsh and M. J. Kennedy (2007), p. 117.

8. Wilfred Lewis Warren, Henry II (1973), p. 124.

9. Turner, pp. 226–227.

10. William of Newburgh, Book II, p. 153; Warren, pp. 135–136; Hosler, pp. 217–218; John Gillingham, Richard I (1999), p. 50.

11. Robert Fawtier, The Capetian Kings of France (1966), p. 110.

12. W. H. Jervis, A History of France (1869), p. 143.

13. Jerome A. Chanes, Antisemitism (2004), p. 153.

14. Robert Chazan, Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism (1997), p. 14; Jervis, p. 144.

Chapter Twenty-Two Saladin

1. Baha’ al-Din ibn Shaddad, The Rare and Excellent History of Saladin, trans. D. S. Richards (2002), pp. 18–19, 28.

2. Ibn al–Athir, pt. 2, p. 199.

3. Ibid., p. 225.

4. Ibn Shaddad, p. 51.

5. Ibn al-Athir, pt. 2, p. 234; Yaacov Lev, Saladin in Egypt (1999), p. 105; Stanley Lane-Poole, Saladin and the Fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (1898), pp. 141–142.

6. Lane-Poole, Saladin, p. 372; Lev, p. 168; ibn Shaddad, p. 55.

7. Madden, The New Concise History, pp. 73–74.

8. Ibn al-Athir, pt. 2, pp. 316–317; Madden, The New Concise History, pp. 73–74.

9. Ibn al-Athir, pt. 2, p. 321

10. Peter W. Edbury, trans., The Conquest of Jerusalem and the Third Crusade (1998), pp. 158–159.

11. Ibn al-Athir, pt. 2, pp. 323–324.

12. Ibid., pp. 324–325, 334; ibn Shaddad, p. 78.

13. Edbury, p. 73; Jervis, p. 144; Madden, The New Concise History, p. 79.

14. Edbury, p. 76.

Chapter Twenty-Three The Gempei War

1. Jeffrey P. Mass, Yoritomo and the Founding of the First Bakufu (1999), pp. 19–21.

2. Shively and McCullough, p. 697.

3. Burton Watson, trans., Tales of the Heike, ed. Haruo Shirane (2006), p. 16.

4. Brown and Ishida, p. 129.

5. Turnbull, The Samurai, pp. 56–57.

6. Ibid., pp. 57, 59.

7. James Sequin De Benneville, Saito Mussashi-bo Benkei (Tales of the Wars of the Gempei) (1910),

pp. 96, 166, 171.

8. Marius B. Jansen, ed., Warrior Rule in Japan (1995), p. 19.

Chapter Twenty-Four King’s Crusade

1. Roger of Hoveden, The Annals of Roger de Hoveden, trans. Henry T. Riley, vol. 2 (1853), p. 86.

2. Ibid., pp. 63–64; Gillingham, Richard I, p. 84.

3. Gillingham, Richard I, pp. 95, 98.

4. Ibid., pp. 98–99; Roger of Wendover, Flowers of History, trans. J. A. Giles, vol. 2 (1849), p. 75; Roger of Hoveden, p. 109.

5. Roger of Hoveden, pp. 110–111.

6. Itinerarium Regis Ricardi, in Thomas Andrew Archer, The Crusade of Richard I, 1189–1192 (1888), p. 6

7. Roger of Wendover, p. 87; Archer, p. 14.

8. Frederick I and Graham A. Loud, The Crusade of Frederick Barbarossa (2009), pp. 46–47; Vasiliev, pp. 446–447.

9. Edbury, p. 88

10. Ibn al-Athir, pt. 2, pp. 375–376.

11. Edbury, p. 98; Madden, The New Concise History, pp. 83ff.; Ibn al-Athir, pt. 2, p. 386.

12. Archer, pp. 81–82.

13. Ibn al-Athir, pt. 2, p. 387; Jervis, p. 145; Edbury, p. 105.

14. Roger of Hoveden, p. 256.

15. Madden, The New Concise History, pp. 89–90; ibn Shaddad, p. 175; Roger of Wendover, p. 108.

16. Madden, The New Concise History, p. 94; Ibn al-Athir, pt. 2, pp. 401–402; ibn Shaddad, p. 195.

17. Madden, The New Concise History, pp. 94–95; ibn Shaddad, p. 231.

18. “The letter of Richard, King of England, to Queen Eleanor, his mother, and his justiciaries in England,” in Roger of Hoveden, pp. 291–292.

19. Roger of Hoveden, p. 297.

20. Roger of Wendover, p. 178.

Chapter Twenty-Five The Sack of Constantinople

1. Nicetas Choniates, p. 294.

2. Innocent III, “Register 1:336, 15 August 1198,” in Alfred J. Andrea and Brett E. Whale, Contemporary Sources for the Fourth Crusade, rev. ed. (2008), pp. 11–12; Vasiliev, pp. 451–452.

3. Geoffroy de Villehardouin, “The Conquest of Constantinople,” in Joinville and Villehardouin: Chronicles of the Crusades, trans. M. R. B. Shaw (1963), pp. 31–33.

4. Villehardouin, pp. 43ff.; Vasiliev, pp. 452–454.

5. Nicetas Choniates, p. 295.

6. Villehardouin, p. 50.

7. Ibid., p. 52.

8. Ibid., pp. 70–71.

9. Madden, The New Concise History, pp. 110–114; Vasiliev, pp. 459–461.

10. Villehardouin, pp. 92–93.

11. Ibn al-Athir, pt. 3, p. 76; Jonathan Phillips, The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople (2004), p. 267.

12. Phillips, The Fourth Crusade, pp. 265–267.

13. Madden, The New Concise History, p. 119.

Chapter Twenty-Six Westward

1. Juan José Hoil, The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, trans. Ralph Loveland Roys (1967),

p. 129; Robert J. Sharer and Sylvanus G. Morley, The Ancient Maya (1994), p. 168.

2. Hanns J. Prem, The Ancient Americas, trans. Kornelia Kurbjuhn (1997), p. 25; Sharer and Morley, p. 169.

3. Hoil, p. 170; Richard E. W. Adams, Prehistoric Mesoamerica, rev. ed. (1991), p. 75.

4. Charles H. Southwick, Global Ecology in Human Perspective (1996), pp. 109–110.

5. Adams, pp. 108–109; Nicholas J. Saunders, Ancient Americas: The Great Civilisations (2004), p.157; George Kubler, The Art and Architecture of Ancient America (1962), p. 421.

6. Kubler, p. 421; Saunders (2004), p. 157.

7. Saunders (2004), p. 138.

8. Adams (1997), p. 105; David Keys, Catastrophe (2000), p. 219.

9. Adams (1997), p. 111; Keys, p. 221.

10. Saunders (2004), pp. 145–146, 148.

11. Jacques Malengreau, Sociétés des Andes (1995), p. 85.

12. Adams (1997), p. 114; Saunders (2004), pp. 193–196.

13. Adams (1997), p. 118.

14. Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, Brian S. Bauer, and Vania Smith, The History of the Incas (2007), pp. 60–61.

15. Ibid., pp. 70–74.

Chapter Twenty-Seven The Mongol School of Warfare

1. John Joseph Saunders, The History of the Mongol Conquests (1971), pp. 44–45; The Secret History of the Mongols, trans. Igor de Rachewiltz, vol. 1 (2004), p. 1.

2. Saunders, pp. 45–46; The Secret History, p. 13.

3. Saunders, p. 48; John Man, Genghis Khan (2005), pp. 73–74.

4. The Secret History, p. 43.

5. Ibid., pp. 122, 132–133.

6. Franke and Twitchett, pp. 199, 203; Man, pp. 119–120, 204.

7. Christopher I. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road (2009), p. 415, n. 45 (where the meaning of Genghis is discussed); Franke and Twitchett, p. 345; The Secret History, p. 155; David Christian, A History of Russia, Central Asia, and Mongolia (1998), pp. 398–399.

8. Alison Behnke, The Conquests of Genghis Khan (2008), p. 104.

9. Christian, p. 410.

10. Quoted in Dinah Shelton, Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity, vol. 2 (2005), p. 703.

Chapter Twenty-Eight John Softsword

1. Roger of Wendover, p. 179.

2. Roger of Hoveden, p. 112.

3. Roger of Wendover, pp. 205–206.

4. Kate Norgate, John Lackland (1902), pp. 90–91; John Gillingham, The Angevin Empire, 2nd ed. (2001), pp. 92–93; Gervase of Canterbury, The Historical Works of Gervase of Canterbury, vol. 2 (1880), p. 93.

5. Jervis, pp. 150–151.

6. Norgate, pp. 123–124.

7. James Fosdick Baldwin, The Scutage and Knight Service in England (1897), pp. 4–5.

8. The Waverley Annals, quoted in Norgate, p. 126.

9. Norgate, p. 127; Roger of Wendover, p. 241.

10. Norgate, pp. 129–131.

11. Gillingham, The Angevin Empire, p. 103.

12. Michael Van Cleave Alexander, Three Crises in Early English History (1998), pp. 84–85; Roger of Wendover, p. 247; Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England (1973), p. 343.

Chapter Twenty-Nine Sundiata of the Mali

1. Gordon Innes, Sunjata (1974), p. 275.

2. Levtzion and Hopkins, pp. 110, 117.

3. J. D. Fage with William Tordoff, A History of Africa, 4th ed. (2002), pp. 73–74; Niane and Ki-Zerbo, pp. 125–127.

4. Niane and Ki-Zerbo, p. 125;

5. Innes, pp. 218–219.

6. Niane and Ki-Zerbo, pp. 125–126; Fage and Oliver, pp. 351–352.

7. D. T. Niane, Sundiata, trans. G. D. Pickett (1965), pp. 54–55, 68–70; Junius P. Rodriguez, ed., The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery, vol. 2 (1997), p. 424.

8. Niane, p. 54.

Chapter Thirty The Jokyu War

1. Jansen, p. 1.

2. Mass, Yoritomo, pp. 72–73.

3. Jansen, pp. 6–7.

4. Brown and Ishida, p. 155.

5. Karl F. Friday, Samurai, Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan (2004), pp. 11, 25.

6. Brown and Ishida, p 178.

7. Ibid., p. 179.

8. Ibid., p. 182.

9. Ibid., p. 156.

10. Ibid., p. 160; Peter Martin, The Chrysanthemum Throne (1997), p. 5.

11. Brown and Ishida, p. 194; George W. Perkins, trans. and ed., The Clear Mirror (1998), pp. 37–38, 50–51.

12. Perkins, p. 51.

13. Ibid., pp. 51, 53.

14. Jeffrey P. Mass, The Development of Kamakura Rule, 1180–1250 (1979), p. xiv; Patricia B. Ebrey, Anne Walthall, and James B. Palais, Pre-Modern East Asia: to 1800 (2006), p. 185.

15. Quoted in John S. Brownlee, Political Thought in Japanese Historical Writing (1991), p. 98.

Chapter Thirty-One The Unwanted Throne

1. Jean de Joinville and Geoffrey de Villehardouin, Chronicles of the Crusades, trans. Frank T. Marzials (2007), p. 70.

2. Gunther of Pairis, The Capture of Constantinople, ed. and trans. Alfred J. Andrea (1997), pp. 111–112; R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (1953), pp. 60–61; Phillips, The Fourth Crusade, p. 270.

3. Joinville and Villehardouin, p. 57.

4. J. M. Hussey and Andrew Louth, The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire (2010), pp. 191–192.

5. Joinville and Villehardouin, pp. 62–63.

6. István Vásáry, Cumans and Tatars (2005), p. 34.

7. Joinville and Villehardouin, p. 65.

8. George Akropolites, The History, trans. and ed. Ruth Macrides (2007), pp. 139–140.

9. Donald MacGillivray Nicol, The Last Centuries of Byzantium, 1261–1453, 2nd ed. (1993), pp. 12–13; Akropolites, p. 17.

10. Vasiliev, p. 517.

11. Warren T. Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society (1997), p. 723.

Chapter Thirty-Two The First Delhi Sultanate

1. Tabakat-i-Nasiri, pp. 402–405.

2. Carl F. Petry, ed., The Cambridge History of Egypt, vol. 1 (1998), pp. 245–249.

3. Farhad Daftary, The Assassin Legends (1995), pp. 67–70; Joinville and Villehardouin, pp. 129–130.

4. Daftary, pp. 31–37, 54–55.

5. Wolpert, p. 110; Hasan Nizami, Taju-l Ma-asir, in The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians, ed. H. M. Elliot and John Dowson, vol. 2 (1869), p. 217.

6. Peter Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate (1999), p. 26.

7. Wolpert, p. 10; Jaswant Lal Mehta, Advanced Study in the History of Medieval India, vol. 1 (1979), p. 148; Nizami, p. 241.

8. Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 55, pt. 1 (1887): 39–40.

9. Alain Daniélou, A Brief History of India, trans. Kenneth Hurry (2003), pp. 202–203; Peter Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate, p. 45; Wolpert, p. 110

10. Daniélou, p. 203.

11. Peter Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate, p. 47.

12. Radhey Shyman Chaurasia, History of Medieval India (2002), pp. 11–12.

Chapter Thirty-Three Heresy

1. John W. Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus (1986), pp. 201–202.

2. Augustine of Hippo, The Correction of the Donatists, 5.19–20, 6.21, 23–24, in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, vol. 4, ed. Philip Schaff (1887), pp. 633–651.

3. Clyde Pharr, The Theodosian Code and Novels, and the Sirmondian Constitutions (1952), p. 450.

4. Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, A History of Medieval Heresy and Inquisition (2011), pp. 28, 34–36; Edward Peters, ed., Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe (1980), pp. 66ff.; Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy, 3rd ed. (2002), pp. 23–24; Walter L. Wakefield and Austin P. Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages (1991), p. 130; Reinerius Saccho, “Of the Sects of Modern Heretics,” in S. R. Maitland, History of the Albigenses and Waldenses (1832), pp. 407–413.

5. William of Puylaurens, Chronica, quoted in Peters, p. 107.

6. Peters, p. 123; Deane, p. 39.

7. Peters, p. 124; Lambert, pp. 116–118.

8. Philip Smith, The History of the Christian Church during the Middle Ages (1885), pp. 372–373; Jervis, p. 152.

9. William of Tudela, The Song of the Cathar Wars, trans. Janet Shirley (1996), p. 13.

10. Jervis, pp. 151–152.

11. William of Tudela, pp. 18–19; Pierre des Vaux de Cernay, The History of the Albigensian Crusade, trans. W. A. Sibly and M. D. Sibly (1998), p. 50.

12. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus Miraculorum (1851), p. 302.

13. Pierre des Vaux de Cernay, p. 50; William of Tudela, pp. 21–22.

14. Pierre des Vaux de Cernay, pp. 78–79.

Chapter Thirty-Four Reconquest and Failure

1. Damian J. Smith, Innocent III and the Crown of Aragon (2004), p. 44.

2. Ibid., pp. 84–85.

3. William of Tudela, pp. 38–39; William of Puylaurens, The Chronicle of William of Puylaurens, trans. W. A. Sibly and M. D. Sibly (2003), pp. 37–38.

4. Damian J. Smith, p. 98; O’Callaghan, p. 246.

5. Continuatio Lambacensis, quoted in Damian J. Smith, p. 99, translation mine.

6. Ibid., pp. 99–103; O’Callaghan, p. 246.

7. Harry W. Hazard, ed., A History of the Crusades, 2nd ed., vol. 3 (1975), pp. 423–424; O’Callaghan, pp. 248–249; Niane and Ki-Zerbo, pp. 53–54; William of Puylaurens, p. 43.

8. William of Puylaurens, p. 46.

9. Jervis, p. 153; William of Tudela, pp. 70–71.

10. O’Callaghan, p. 251.

Chapter Thirty-Five From Bouvines to Magna Carta

1. Roger of Wendover, pp. 259–260.

2. John W. Baldwin, pp. 209–210; Jervis, p. 154; Roger of Wendover, pp. 259–260.

3. Christopher Harper-Bill and Ruth Harvey, The Ideals and Practice of Medieval Knighthood (1986), p. 119; Helena M. Chew and Lucy C. Latham, Europe in the Middle Ages, 843–1494 (1936), p. 202.

4. John W. Baldwin, pp. 214–215; Matthew Bennett, Fighting Techniques of the Medieval World (2006), pp. 112–114; Roger of Wendover, pp. 299–300.

5. Roger of Wendover, p. 300; John W. Baldwin, pp. 216–271; Bennett, pp. 112–113; Robert W. Jones, Bloodied Banners (2010), pp. 51, 78.

6. Jones, p. 44; John W. Baldwin, pp. 218–220.

7. Roger of Wendover, p. 303; Alexander, pp. 97–98.

8. “The ‘Unknown’ Charter of Liberties,” in Harry Rothwell, ed., English Historical Documents, vol. 3 (1975), pp. 301–302.

9. The Chronicle of Melrose, trans. Joseph Stevenson, in The Church Historians of England, vol. 4, pt. 1 (1856), p. 158.

10. Alexander, pp. 100–101; Roger of Wendover, p. 307–308.

11. Roger of Wendover, p. 309.

12. Alexander, pp. 108–109.

13. L. Elliott-Binns, Innocent III (1931), pp. 84–85; “Letter of Innocent III, 24 August 1215,” in Rothwell, p. 317.

14. Roger of Wendover, pp. 335–336.

15. Ibid., pp. 357–358.

16. Stevenson, p. 162.

17. Roger of Wendover, p. 378.

18. John W. Baldwin, p. 334.

Chapter Thirty-Six The Birth of the Inquisition

1. Saint Bonaventure, The Life of St. Francis (2005), pp. 25, 29–31.

2. William of Tudela, p. 79; Elaine Graham-Leigh, The Southern French Nobility and the Albigensian Crusade (2005), pp. 44–45.

3. Roger of Wendover, pp. 344–345; William of Tudela, pp. 83–85.

4. Pierre des Vaux de Cernay, pp. 259, 270–271.

5. Jacques de Vitry, The Exempla (1890), p. xxviii.

6. William of Tudela, pp. 167, 172.

7. Jervis, p. 157.

8. Joseph R. Strayer, The Albigensian Crusades (1992), p. 118.

9. Puylaurens, p. 65; Strayer, p. 119.

10. Peters, p. 194.

Chapter Thirty-Seven Moving Westward

1. Soucek, p. 100.

2. Scott C. Levi and Ron Sela, eds., Islamic Central Asia (2010), pp. 125–126.

3. Ibid., p. 126.

4. Ibid., p. 127.

5. Saunders, pp. 56–57.

6. Ibid., p. 57; ‘Alā’-ad-Dīn Guwainī, John A. Boyle, and Muhammad Qazwīnī, Genghis Khan (1997), pp. 92–93; Boyle, pp. 307–308.

7. Ronald Grigor Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation (1994), pp. 35–37;

8. René Grousset, The Empire of the Steppes (1970), pp. 245–246.

9. Boyle, pp. 313–315; Guwainī, Boyle, and Qazwīnī, pp. 96ff., 131.

10. Boyle, p. 320; Guwainī, Boyle, and Qazwīnī, pp. 131–135.

11. Peter Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 1221–1410 (2005), p. 39.

12. Grousset, p. 246; The Chronicle of Novgorod, 1016–1471, trans. Robert Michell and Nevill Forbes (1914), p. 66.

13. George Vernadsky, Kievan Russia (1948), pp. 236–238; Franke and Twitchett, p. 365.

14. Levi and Sela, p. 136.

Chapter Thirty-Eight South of India

1. Chelvadurai Manogaran, Ethnic Conflict and Reconciliation in Sri Lanka (1987), p. 25; John Clifford Holt, Buddha in the Crown (1991), p. 96; Culavamsa, trans. Wilhelm Geiger (1929),

p. 132.

2. Culavamsa, p. 135; John Clifford Holt, ed., The Sri Lanka Reader (2011), pp. 42–43.

3. Culavamsa, pp. 138–139, 154.

4. Richard Gombrich and Gananath Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed (1988), pp. 137–138.

5. John Clifford Holt, Buddha in the Crown, p. 96.

6. Culavamsa, p. 151.

7. Hultzsch, p. 307.

8. C. Rasanayagam, Ancient Jaffna (1984), pp. 352–353.

Chapter Thirty-Nine The Fifth Crusade

1. Roger of Wendover, p. 383; Madden, The New Concise History, p. 145.

2. Francesco Gabrieli, ed. and trans., Arab Historians of the Crusades (1969), p. 256.

3. Ibid., p. 257.

4. Bonaventure, pp. 98–101; Regis J. Armstrong, ed., Francis of Assisi, vol. 1 (1999), pp. 580, 584.

5. Gabrieli, pp. 258–259; Madden, The New Concise History, p. 151.

6. Bonaventure, p. 102; Armstrong, p. 581.

7. Jonathan P. Phillips, Holy Warriors (2010), p. 226.

8. Ibid., p. 227.

9. L. N. Gumilev, Searches for an Imaginary Kingdom, trans. R. E. F. Smith (1967), p. 167.

Chapter Forty From the Golden Bull to the Baltic Crusade

1. Engel, pp. 91–92; Miklós Molnár, A Concise History of Hungary (1991), p. 33.

2. Charles W. Ingrao and Franz A. J. Szabo, eds., The Germans and the East (2008), p. 37; Vásáry,

p. 28; Nicolaus von Jeroschin, Chronicle of Prussia, trans. Mary Fischer (2010), p. 29.

3. Quoted in Rossiter Johnson, Charles Horne, and John Rudd, eds., The Great Events by Famous Historians, vol. 6 (1905), p. 194.

4. Engel, pp. 94–95; Johnson, Horne, and Rudd, p. 194.

5. David Abulafia, ed., The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 5 (2008), p. 744; Engel, p. 90.

6. Malcolm Barber, The Two Cities, p. 341.

7. T. Norus and Jona Zilius, Lithuania’s Case for Independence (1918), p. 9.

8. Alan V. Murray, Anne Huijbers, and Elizabeth Wawrzyniak, The Clash of Cultures on the Medieval Baltic Frontier (2009), pp. 29, 31; Nicolaus von Jeroschin, pp. 44, 47.

9. Jean W. Sedlar, East Central Europe in the Middle Ages, 1000–1500 (1994), p. 409.

10. Hazard, p. 570; Christiansen, pp. 102–103.

11. Nicolaus von Jeroschin, pp. 63, 76.

Chapter Forty-One Lakeshores, Highlands, and Hilltops

1. Roland A. Oliver and Anthony Atmore, Medieval Africa, 1250–1800 (2002), p. 116.

2. Richard Pankhurst, The Ethiopians (2001), pp. 45–46.

3. Verena Boll, ed., Studia Aethiopica (2004), p. 179.

4. Stuart C. Munro-Hay, Ethiopia (2002), pp. 190–191.

5. Oliver and Atmore, p. 118.

6. Robert O. Collins and James McDonald Burns, A History of Sub-Saharan Africa (2007), p. 90.

7. Nehemiah Levtzion and Randall L. Pouwels, eds., The History of Islam in Africa (2000), p. 81.

8. Collins and Burns, p. 90; Levtzion and Hopkins, pp. 187–188.

9. Levtzion and Pouwels, p. 80; Levtzion and Hopkins, p. 188.

10. Levtzion and Pouwels, p. 5.

11. Niane and Ki-Zerbo, p. 101; Roland A. Oliver and Brian M. Fagan, Africa in the Iron Age (1975), p. 153.

12. Philip Harrison, South Africa’s Top Science Sites (2004), p. 56; David Fleminger, Mapungubwe Cultural Landscape (2006), p. 24–25.

13. Fleminger, pp. 35–36.

14. Ibid., p. 40; Deborah Fahy Bryceson, Judith Okely, and Jonathan Webber, eds., Identity and Networks (2007), p. 165; Martin Hall, Farmers, Kings, and Traders (1990), p. 84.

15. Fleminger, p. 41.

Chapter Forty-Two The Sixth Crusade

1. Rebecca Rist, The Papacy and Crusading in Europe, 1198–1245 (2009), p. 98; David Abulafia, Frederick II (1992), p. 151.

2. Roger of Wendover, pp. 492–493.

3. Ibid., p. 499.

4. G. G. Coulton, From St. Francis to Dante, 2nd ed. (1907), p. 79.

5. Giovanni Villani, Villani’s Chronicle, trans. Rose E. Selfe (1907), p. 130; Roger of Wendover, p. 505.

6. Abulafia, Frederick II, p. 172.

7. Archer and Kingsford, p. 381.

8. Gabrieli, pp. 268–269.

9. Ibn al-Athir, pt. 3, pp. 293–294; Karen Armstrong, Jerusalem (1996), p. 302; Gabrieli,

pp. 269–270.

10. Ibn al-Athir, pt. 3, p. 293; Gabrieli, pp. 270–271; Abulafia, Frederick II, pp. 182–184; T. K. Kington-Oliphant, History of Frederick the Second, vol.1 (1862), p. 330.

11. Kington-Oliphant, p. 330.

Chapter Forty-Three The Tran Dynasty

1. Keat Gin Ooi, ed., Southeast Asia (2004), p. 801, condensed from Clotilde Chivas-Baron, Stories and Legends of Annam, trans. E. M. Smith-Dampier (1920), pp. 175–176.

2. George Coedès, The Making of South East Asia, trans. H. M. Wright (1966), p. 86.

3. Chivas-Baron, p. 179.

4. Oscar Chapuis, A History of Vietnam (2000), p. 80; Walter H. Slote and George A. De Vos, eds., Confucianism and the Family (1998), pp. 151–152.

5. Chapuis, p. 80; Coedès, The Making of South East Asia, pp. 123–124; David C. Kang, East Asia before the West (2010), p. 39; Slote and De Vos, p. 95.

6. Tài T. Nguyn and Chi Minh, History of Buddhism in Vietnam (1992), pp. 132–134.

7. Coedès, The Making of South East Asia, p. 101.

8. Ibid., p. 125.

9. Kenneth R. Hall, A History of Early Southeast Asia (2011), p. 240.

10. Ibid., p. 241.

Chapter Forty-Four Young Kings

1. Jean Sire de Joinville, The History of St. Louis, ed. Natalis de Wailly and trans. Joan Evans (1938), p. 22.

2. M. Guizot and Madame Guizot de Witt, The History of France, trans. Robert Black, vol. 1 (1884), pp. 426–427; Fawtier, p. 28.

3. Wilfred Lewis Warren, The Governance of Norman and Angevin England, 1086–1272 (1987),

pp. 174–176; Roger of Wendover, pp. 483–484, 487.

4. Michael Prestwich, Plantagenet England, 1225–1360 (2005), pp. 294–295.

5. Roger of Wendover, p. 538.

6. Damian J. Smith, pp. 27, 33.

7. Ibid., p. 34; Francis Darwin Swift, The Life and Times of James the First (1894), p. 33.

8. Ahmad Ibn-Muhammad al-Maqqari, The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain, trans. Pascual de Gayangos, vol. 2 (1843), pp. 327–328.

9. O’Callaghan, p. 343.

10. Ibid.; al-Maqqari, p. 328.

11. O’Callaghan, p. 345; al-Maqqari, p. 337.

12. Hazard, pp. 428–430; Damian J. Smith, p. 137.

13. Prestwich, Plantagenet England, p. 295.

14. Joinville, pp. 31–32; Jervis, p. 166.

15. J. R. Maddicott, Simon de Montfort (1994), p. 32.

Chapter Forty-Five The Mongol Horde

1. William E. Henthorn, Korea (1963), p. 14.

2. Ibid., p. 22.

3. Ibid., pp. 62–63; Peter H. Lee, and Wm. Theodore de Bary, eds., Sources of Korean Tradition (1997), pp. 202–203.

4. Carter J. Eckert and Ki-baek Yi, Korea, Old and New (1990), p. 91; Andrew C. Nahm, Korea (1988), pp. 90–91.

5. Henry H. Howorth, History of the Mongols (1876), p. 124.

6. Richard A. Gabriel, Subotai the Valiant (2004), pp. 61–62. 65.

7. Ibid., p. 66; Howorth, p. 124.

8. Janet Martin, Medieval Russia, 980–1584 (1995), p. 135.

9. Grousset, p. 263; David Christian, A History of Russia, Central Asia, and Mongolia (1998), p. 408.

10. Christian, p. 410; Janet Martin, pp. 138–139.

11. Man, p. 270.

12. Ibid., pp. 271–272.

13. Peter F. Sugar, ed., A History of Hungary (1994), p. 26.

14. Armin Vambery and Louis Heilprin, The Story of Hungary (1886), p. 142.

15. Matthew Paris, Matthew Paris’s English History, trans. J. A. Giles, vol. 3 (1854), p. 450

16. Janet Martin, p. 140.

Chapter Forty-Six The Debt of Hatred

1. Gabrieli, pp. 281–282.

2. David G. Einstein, Emperor Frederick II (1949), p. 278; Abulafia, Frederick II, pp. 199–200; Hazard, p. 365.

3. Einstein, p. 279.

4. Ibid., pp. 280–281.

5. Elphège Vacandard, The Inquisition, trans. Bertrand L. Conway (1908), pp. 76–78.

6. Einstein, p. 284; Peters, pp. 178–179.

7. Vacandard, p. 80.

8. Alan Charles Kors and Edward Peters, eds., Witchcraft in Europe, 400–1700, 2nd ed. (2001),

p. 116; Donald W. Engles, Classical Cats (1999), p. 186.

9. Scott L. Waugh and Peter Diehl, eds., Christendom and Its Discontents (1996), p. 47; Wakefield and Evans, p. 267.

10. Einstein, pp. 301–303; Villani, p. 133; Abulafia, Frederick II, p. 241.

11. Skinner, The Renaissance (1978), p. 5; Villani, p. 133.

12. Kington-Oliphant, pp. 55, 68; Einstein, p. 336.

13. Paris, vol. 3, p. 163.

14. Einstein, p. 365; Paris, vol. 3, p. 191.

15. Henry Hart Milman, History of Latin Christianity, vol. 6 (1883), p. 460.

16. Klaus Schatz, Papal Primacy (1996), pp. 93–94.

17. Einstein, pp. 377–378, 381–382.

18. Milman, vol. 6, p. 480; Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church & State, 1050–1300 (1964), p. 147.

19. Einstein, pp. 409–410; Skinner, p. 5; Kington-Oliphant, p. 461; Villani, p. 147.

20. James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin, eds., The Portable Medieval Reader (1977),

p. 365; Villani, p. 152.

Chapter Forty-Seven The Shadow of God

1. Tabakat-i-Nasiri, pp. 637–638.

2. Ibid., pp. 642–643; Satish Chandra, Medieval India (1997), p. 49.

3. Chandra, p. 50; Tabakat-i-Nasiri, pp. 647–648; Mehta, p. 105. Mehta points out that Nasiruddin may have actually been the posthumous child of Il-tumish’s oldest son (who died in 1229), adopted by Il-tumish in order to place him in the direct line of succession.

4. Wolpert, p. 110

5. Tabakat-i-Nasiri, p. 674; Mehta, p. 107.

6. Radhey Shyman Chaurasia, History of Medieval India (2002), p. 15; Mehta, p. 107.

7. Slightly paraphrased from the translation in Kulke and Rothermund, p. 173.

8. Quoted in Agha Hussain Hamadani, The Frontier Policy of the Delhi Sultans (1986), p. 87; Tabakat-i-Nasiri, p. 679.

9. Tabakat-i-Nasiri, p. 685.

10. Shail Mayaram, Against History, against State (2003), pp. 80–82; Tabakat-i-Nasiri, p. 713.

11. Clifford E. Bosworth et al., eds., The Encyclopædia of Islam, vol. 6 (1986), p. 48.

12. Mehta, p. 116.

13. Ibid., p. 117; Chandra, pp. 53–54.

14. Mehta, pp. 119–120.

15. Chandra, pp. 55–56; Ziauddin Barani, Tarikh-i Firoz Shahi, in The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians, ed. H. M. Elliot and John Dowson, vol. 2 (1871), pp. 99–100.

Chapter Forty-Eight The Seventh Crusade

1. Joinville, p. 33.

2. Peter Jackson, The Seventh Crusade, 1244–1254(2007), pp. 18–19.

3. Ibid., p. 19.

4. Janet Martin, p. 39.

5. Stephen Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. 3 (1951), p. 225.

6. Abulafia, The New Cambridge Medieval History, p. 434; Joinville, p. 39.

7. Jervis, pp. 168–169.

8. Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. 3, pp. 259–261.

9. William of Tudela, p. 87.

10. Ibid., p. 99; Joinville, pp. 86–87.

11. Madden, pp. 174–175.

12. Ibid., p. 175; Joinville, p. 98.

13. Jervis, p. 169; Sherman A. Jackson, Islamic Law and the State (1996), pp. 42–43; Peter Jackson, The Seventh Crusade, p. 134.

14. Joinville, p. 121.

Chapter Forty-Nine The Splintering Khanate

1. Saunders, p. 93; Robert Marshall, Storm from the East (1993), pp. 140–141.

2. Marshall, p. 149; quoted in George Lane, Genghis Khan and Mongol Rule (2004), pp. 139–140.

3. Quoted in Sangkeun Kim, Strange Names of God (2004), p. 133.

4. “Guyuk Khan’s Letter to Pope Innocent IV (1246),” in Christopher Dawson, Mission to Asia (1980), pp. 85–86.

5. George Lane, p. 141; Marshall, p. 160.

6. Saunders, p. 99.

7. Ibid., p. 100.

8. Quoted in Thomas T. Allsen, Mongol Imperialism (1987), p. 47; George Lane, pp. 49–50.

9. Mote, pp. 452–453.

10. Kang, p. 132.

11. Stephen R. Turnbull, Genghis Khan and the Mongol Conquests (2003), p. 83; Nhung Tuyet Tran and Anthony Reid, Viet Nam (2006), p. 48.

12. Daftary, p. 175.

13. Saunders, pp. 113–114.

Chapter Fifty The Mamluks of Egypt

1. Nasser O. Rabbat, The Citadel of Cairo (1989), p. 90.

2. Sherman A. Jackson, p. 43.

3. Ibid., p. 45.

4. Ibid.; John Bagot Glubb, Soldiers of Fortune (1988), p. 50.

5. Rabbat, p. 95.

6. Peter M. Holt, Ann K. S. Lambton, and Bernard Lewis, eds., The Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 1A (1977), pp. 210–211.

7. Ibid., p. 212; Sherman A. Jackson, pp. 46–47.

8. Marshall, p. 192.

9. Ibid., pp. 192–193; Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. 3, pp. 312–313.

10. Marshall, pp. 193.

11. Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. 3, p. 314.

12. Holt et al., p. 213.

13. Petry, p. 278.

14. Bertold Spuler, A History of the Muslim World (1994), p. 23.

15. Quoted in Petry, pp. 242–243.

16. Holt et al., pp. 216–217; Sherman A. Jackson, p. 51.

17. Jervis, p. 172.

18. Gabrieli, pp. 311–312.

19. Quoted in Petry, p. 243.

Chapter Fifty-One Louis the Saint

1. Joinville and Villehardouin, p. 155.

2. Ibid., pp. 157–158; Jaroslav Folda, Crusader Art in the Holy Land (2005), p. 245.

3. Rodney Howard Hilton, Bond Men Made Free (1973), pp. 99–100; Mary Morton Wood, The Spirit of Protest in Old French Literature (1917), p. 20; Matthew Paris, Matthew Paris’s English History, trans. J. A. Giles, vol. 2 (1853), p. 451.

4. Le Roman de Renart, quoted in Norman R. C. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, rev. ed. (1970), p. 82; Paris, vol. 2, p. 453.

5. Norman R. C. Cohn, pp. 96–98; Paris, vol. 2, p. 455.

6. Joinville and Villehardouin, pp. 195–197; Jervis, p. 170.

7. Fawtier, pp. 32–33; Joinville and Villehardouin, pp. 221–223; Georges Duby, France in the Middle Ages, 987–1460, trans. Juliet Vale (1991), p. 251.

8. Joinville and Villehardouin, p. 216.

9. Mandell Creighton, A History of the Papacy during the Period of the Reformation (1882), vol. 1,

pp. 29–30; Brian Davies, ed., Thomas Aquinas (2002), pp. 325–326.

10. Joinville and Villehardouin, pp. 341–342.

11. Saint Thomas Aquinas, De Regimine Principum, in Main Currents of Western Thought, ed. Franklin Le Van Baumer (1978), pp. 76–77.

12. Joinville and Villehardouin, p. 358.

Chapter Fifty-Two The Lion’s Den

1. Innocent IV, Eger cui levia, in Bernard Guillemain, The Later Middle Ages, trans S. Taylor (1960), p. 38.

2. Vacandard, pp. 108–109.

3. David Carpenter, The Reign of Henry III (1996), p. 184.

4. Tout, The Empire and the Papacy, p. 480.

5. Paris, vol. 3, p. 102.

6. Tout, The Empire and the Papacy, p. 490.

7. R. F. Treharne, The Baronial Plan of Reform, 1258–63 (1971), pp. 30–32; Paris, vol. 3, p. 136, 151.

8. Treharne, pp. 66–67; Paris, vol. 3, p. 286.

9. J. R. M. Butler, A History of England (1928), pp. 99–100.

10. Paris, vol. 3, p. 291.

11. Ibid., p. 333; Treharne, pp. 252–253

12. J. R. M. Butler, pp. 109–110; Paris, vol. 3, p. 336; Carpenter, pp. 270–271.

13. Paris, vol. 3, p. 350.

14. Ibid., p. 352.

15. Jervis, p. 171; Stephen Runciman, The Sicilian Vespers (1960), p. 70.

16. Runciman, Sicilian Vespers, p. 85.

17. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, trans. Henry F. Cary (1909), “Hell,” canto 28, p. 115.

18. Dante, “Purgatory,” canto 3, p. 156.

19. Tout, The Empire and the Papacy, pp. 486–487; Richard H. Lansing and Teodolinda Barolini, The Dante Encyclopedia (2000), p. 439; Ugo Balzani, The Popes and the Hohenstaufen (1889), p. 252.

20. Katherine L. Jansen et al., eds., Medieval Italy (2009), pp. 136–137.

21. James Sime and Edward A. Freeman, History of Germany (1874), p. 99.

Chapter Fifty-Three The Recapture of Constantinople

1. Robert Lee Wolff and Harry W. Hazard, eds., A History of the Crusades, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (1969),

p. 218.

2. Edwin Pears, The Destruction of the Greek Empire (1903), p. 12.

3. Akropolites, p. 270.

4. Ibid., p. 336.

5. Ibid., p. 343.

6. Ibid., p. 367.

7. Janet Shirley, trans., Crusader Syria in the Thirteenth Century (1999), p. 117.

8. Ibid., p. 141.

9. Nicol, The Last Centuries of Byzantium, p. 34; Abulafia, The New Cambridge Medieval History,

p. 435.

10. Norwich, Byzantium, pp. 210–211.

11. Akropolites, p. 380.

12. Ibid., p. 386; George Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine State (1968), p. 581.

Chapter Fifty-Four The Last Crusades

1. Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period, p. 121; Peter M. Holt, Ann K. S. Lambton, and Bernard Lewis, eds., The Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 2A (1977), pp. 230–231.

2. Norman Housley, Contesting the Crusades (2006), p. 73.

3. Joinville, pp. 221, 223.

4. Ibid., p. 223; Villani, p. 238.

5. Gabrieli, p. 310; George Hill, A History of Cyprus, vol. 2 (1948), p. 170.

6. Villani, pp. 251–252.

7. Michael Prestwich, Edward I (1988), p. 78.

8. Joseph F. Kelly, p. 96; Milman, pp. 406–407.

9. Jonathan Harris, Byzantium and the Crusades (2006), p. 180.

10. Milman, vol. 6, pp. 408–409.

11. Villani, pp. 295–296.

Chapter Fifty-Five Kublai Khan

1. Richard L. Davis, Wind against the Mountain (1996), p. 29.

2. Lorge, pp. 84–85; Michael E. Haskew et al., Fighting Techniques of the Oriental World, ad 1200–1860 (2008), pp. 188–189.

3. Richard L. Davis, p. 30.

4. Mote, p. 457; Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Related Writings, ed. Joel Faflak (2009), pp. 287–288.

5. Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo the Venetian, trans. W. Marsden, rev. T. Wright and Peter Harrison (2008), pp. 123–124.

6. Ibid., p. 103.

7. De Bary, p. 280.

8. Sansom, p. 442.

9. Mote, p. 464.

10. Richard L. Davis, p. 2; Mote, p. 465.

11. Kozo Yamamura, ed., The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 3 (1990), pp. 145–146.

12. Ebrey, Walthall, and Palais, pp. 192–193; de Bary, p. 281; Yamamura, p. 147; Sansom, pp. 149–150.

13. Junjirō Takakusu, Wing-tsit Chan, and Charles A. Moore, The Essentials of Buddhist Philosophy (1973), p. 191; Masaharu Anesaki, Nichiren, the Buddhist Prophet (1966), p. 127.

14. Sailendra N. Sen, Ancient Indian History and Civilization (1988), p. 531; Coedès, The Making of South East Asia, pp. 127–128.

15. Chapuis, pp. 83–84.

16. Polo, pp. 110–114.

Chapter Fifty-Six The Sicilian Vespers

1. Robert H. Vickers, History of Bohemia (1894), pp. 262–263.

2. Sime and Freeman, pp. 96–97; Elizabeth Peake, History of the German Emperors and Their Contemporaries (1874), pp. 131–133.

3. Dante, “Purgatory,” canto 24, p. 242.

4. Harris, p. 181.

5. Villani, pp. 267–268.

6. Jervis, p. 176.

7. Milman, p. 448.

Chapter Fifty-Seven The Wars of Edward I

1. Prestwich, Plantagenet England, pp. 146–147.

2. John Edward Lloyd, A History of Wales (1911), pp. 268–269.

3. Prestwich, Edward I, p. 188.

4. Ibid., p. 182.

5. Ibid., p. 194.

6. The Chronicle of Lanercost, 1272–1346, trans. Herbert Maxwell (1913), p. 35.

7. Ibid., pp. 40–41.

8. William Ferguson, Scotland’s Relations with England (1977), p. 23.

9. Prestwich, Edward I, p. 371.

10. The Chronicle of Lanercost, p. 86.

11. Ibid., p. 115; Magnus Magnusson, Scotland (2000), p. 119.

12. John of Fordun, John of Fordun’s Chronicle of the Scottish Nation, trans. Felix J. H. Skene (1872), p. 318.

13. Magnusson, pp. 132–133; Henry the Minstrel and William Hamilton, The History of the Life and Adventures and Heroic Actions of the Renowned Sir William Wallace (1812), p. 63.

14. Magnusson, pp. 134–135; Henry and Hamilton, pp. 83–84.

15. John of Fordun, p. 321.

16. J. M. I. Weatherford, The History of Money (1997), p. 68.

Chapter Fifty-Eight The Second Sultanate of Delhi

1. Barani, pp. 125–126.

2. Ibid., pp. 132–133.

3. Ibid., pp. 146–147.

4. Ibid., p. 140; Chaurasia, p. 30.

5. Barani, p. 161.

6. Wolpert, p. 112; Ahmed, p. 60.

7. Spuler, p. 35.

8. Agha Hussain Hamadani, The Frontier Policy of the Delhi Sultans (1986), p. 120.

9. Barani, p. 162.

10. Ibid., p. 163.

11. Mehta, p. 161.

12. Barani, p. 166.

13. Ibid., pp. 168–169.

14. Kumar, p. 283; Chaurasia, p. 41.

Chapter Fifty-Nine The End of the Papal Monarchy

1. Morris, p. 185; Chew and Latham, p. 187; William Francis Thomas Butler, The Lombard Communes (1906), p. 341; Lansing and Barolini, p. 439.

2. Jean-Charles-Léonard Sismondi, Italian Republics (1841), pp. 85–87; Villani, p. 332; Dante, “Purgatory,” canto 20, lines 71ff., p. 225.

3. Tierney, pp. 186–188; Charles William Previte-Orton, The Shorter Cambridge Medieval History (1952), p. 55.

4. Jean Brissaud, A History of French Public Law, trans. James W. Garner (1915), pp. 367–368; Justo L. Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity, vol. 1 (1984), p. 331.

5. J. F. Verbruggen, The Battle of the Golden Spurs (2002), pp. 243–244.

6. Jean Edme Auguste Gosselin, The Power of the Pope during the Middle Ages, trans. Matthew Kelly, vol. 2 (1853), pp. 233–234.

7. Jervis, p. 185; David Jayne Hill, A History of Diplomacy in the International Development of Europe, vol. 1 (1967), pp. 401–402.

8. Creighton, vol. 1, pp. 27–29.

9. Jervis, p. 186; Creighton, vol. 1, pp. 31–32.

10. Malcolm Barber and A. K. Bate, trans. and eds., The Templars (2002), pp. 246–247.

11. Weatherford, p. 69; Barber and Bate, p. 254

12. Weatherford, pp. 70–71; Barber and Bate, p. 309.

13. Villani, p. 403.

14. Sismondi, pp. 115–116.

15. Skinner, p. 6.

16. Creighton, vol. 1, p. 33.

17. Sophia Menache, Clement V (1998), pp. 33–34.

18. Jervis, pp. 190–191.

Chapter Sixty The Appearance of the Ottomans

1. H. A. Gibbons, The Foundation of the Ottoman Empire (1916), p. 24.

2. J. R. Tanner et al., eds., The Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 4 (1923), p. 655.

3. Ibid., p. 657.

4. Ramon Muntaner, Chronicle, trans. Lady Goodenough (2000), pp. 427–428.

5. Ibid., p. 460.

6. Nicol, The Last Centuries of Byzantium, p. 153; Norwich, Byzantium, p. 276.

7. Nicol, The Last Centuries of Byzantium, pp. 160–161.

8. J. L. Tanner et al., p. 662.

9. Norwich, Byzantium, p. 292.

10. Ibid., pp. 342–343.

11. Fine, p. 275.

12. Vasiliev, p. 617.

Chapter Sixty-One The Fall of the Khilji

1. Eva Ulian, Rajput (2010), pp. 19–20; Mehta, pp. 148–149.

2. Ronald S. McGregor, ed., A History of Indian Literature (1984), pp. 69–70; Amir Khusru, Tarikh’i Alai, in The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians, ed. H. M. Elliot and John Dowson, vol. 3 (1871), pp. 76–77.

3. Khusru, p. 80.

4. Stewart Gordon, When Asia Was the World (2008), pp. 13–14; P. N. Chopra, T. K. Ravindran, and N. Subrahmanian, History of South India (1979), p. 89; Stanley Lane-Poole, Medieval India under Mohammedan Rule, 712–1764 (1903), pp. 113–114; Wolpert, p. 115; Khusru, p. 81.

5. Khusru, pp. 84–85.

6. Barani, pp. 204–205.

7. Ibid., p. 213; Wolpert, p. 115.

8. Barani, pp. 222–223.

9. Ibid., p. 223.

10. Ibid., p. 224.

11. Ibid., pp. 228–229; Kumar, p. 285.

Chapter Sixty-Two The Triumph of the Bruce

1. Prestwich, Edward I, pp. 501–502; Ralph Payne-Gallway, The Book of the Crossbow (1995),

p. 261.

2. John of Fordun, p. 329.

3. Peter Langtoft, Peter of Langtoft’s Chronicle, vol. 2, in The Works of Thomas Hearne, vol. 4 (1810), pp. 329–330.

4. Felix J. H. Skene, ed., The Historians of Scotland, vol. 10 (1880), p. 172; Prestwich, Edward I, pp. 505–507.

5. Skene, pp. 178–179.

6. Preswitch, Edward I, pp. 556–557.

7. Wendy R. Childs, ed. and trans., Vita Edwardi Secundi (2005), p. 7.

8. Nigel Saul, ed., Fourteenth Century England, vol. 5 (2008), p. 40; Walter Phelps Dodge, Piers Gaveston (1971), pp. 38–40.

9. W. M. Ormrod, ed., Fourteenth Century England, vol. 3 (2004), p. 31.

10. Childs, pp. 5–7.

11. Ormrod, p. 32; Childs, p. 15.

12. Childs, pp. 23–25; Andy King and Michael A. Penman, England and Scotland in the Fourteenth Century (2007), p. 25.

13. Childs, pp. 44–49.

14. John of Fordun, p. 340; The Chronicle of Lanercost, pp. 212–213.

Chapter Sixty-Three The Great Famine

1. Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age (2000), pp. 16–17; Bauer, The History of the Medieval World,

pp. 431, 575; William Chester Jordan, The Great Famine (1996), p. 12.

2. Skene, p. 182; Thomas Wright, ed., The Political Songs of England, from the Reign of John to That of Edward II (1839), pp. 323, 342, translation from Middle English mine; Neville Brown, History and Climate Change (2001), p. 252.

3. John Aberth, From the Brink of the Apocalypse (2001), p. 34; John Kelly, The Great Mortality (2006), p. 58.

4. Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (1934), pp. 285–286; Neville Brown, p. 253; Jordan, p. 18; Fagan, The Little Ice Age, pp. 39–40; F. Donald Logan, A History of the Church in the Middle Ages (2002), p. 276.

5. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Hansel and Gretel, trans. Monique Felix (2001), n.p.

6. Wolfgang Behringer, A Cultural History of Climate, trans. Patrick Camiller (2010), p. 105.

7. Ordericus Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History of England and Normandy, trans. Thomas Forester, vol. 4 (1856), pp. 264–265; John of Fordun, p. 341; Jordan, p. 19.

Chapter Sixty-Four The Sultan and the Khan

1. Petry, p. 252; Glubb, p. 154.

2. Glubb, pp. 203–204.

3. Tsugitaka Sato, State and Rural Society in Medieval Islam (1997), pp. 140ff.

4. Meri, vol. 2, p. 573

5. D. M. Lang, “Georgia in the Reign of Giorgi the Brilliant (1314–1346),” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 17, no. 1 (1955): 75–76; Shai Har-El, Struggle for Domination in the Middle East (1995), pp. 33–34.

6. Petry, p. 277.

7. Ross E. Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta, a Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (2005), pp. 44–45; André Raymond, Cairo, trans. Willard Wood (2000) p. 120.

8. Arthur John Arberry, Classical Persian Literature (1958), p. 372.

9. Ibid.

10. Dunn, p. 98.

11. Boyle, p. 411

12. Ibid., p. 412; D. O. Morgan “Ibn Battuta and the Mongols,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 3rd ser., vol. 11, no. 1 (April 2001): 9–10.

13. Ibn Battuta, The Travels of Ibn Battuta in the Near East, Asia & Africa, 1325–1354, trans. Samuel Lee (2004), p. 40.

Chapter Sixty-Five Mansa Musa of Mali

1. Levtzion and Hopkins, pp. 268–269; Ivan Van Sertima, ed., African Presence in Early America (1992), p. 171.

2. Levtzion and Hopkins, p. 211.

3. Ibid., p. 267.

4. Ibid., pp. 270, 335; Ghadah Hijjawi Qaddumi, Book of Gifts and Rarities (1996), pp. 197–198.

5. Levtzion and Hopkins, pp. 212–213.

6. Niane and Ki-Zerbo, pp. 147–148; Ibn Battuta, p. 239.

7. Levtzion and Hopkins, p. 271.

8. Ibid., p. 261.

9. Battuta, p. 240; Levtzion and Hopkins, pp. 265–266.

10. Niane and Ki-Zerbo, pp. 147–148; Levtzion and Hopkins, p. 335.

Chapter Sixty-Six After the Famine

1. Madden, The New Concise History, p. 192

2. Quoted in John E. Weakland, “Pastorelli, Pope, and Persecution,” Jewish Social Studies 38, no. 1 (Winter 1976): 73, translation mine.

3. Gary Dixon, “Encounters in Medieval Revivalism,” Church History 68, no. 2 (June 1999): 273.

4. Michael Goodich, ed., Other Middle Ages (1998), pp. 40, 47; Norman R. C. Cohn, p. 103.

5. Weakland, p. 75; Jervis, pp. 191–192.

6. Michael R. McVaugh, Medicine before the Plague (2002), p. 220; Elizabeth A. R. Brown, “Philip V, Charles IV, and the Jews of France,” Speculum 66, no. 2 (April 1991): 301–302.

7. Jim Bradbury, The Capetians (2007), p. 283.

8. “The Simonie,” lines 59, 73–74, in Medieval English Political Writings, ed. James M. Dean (1996), pp. 205–206, 211.

9. The Chronicle of Lanercost, p. 240; Jean Froissart, Chronicles (1978), p. 39.

10. T. F. Tout, Chapters in the Administrative History of Mediaeval England, vol. 2 (1928), p. 358; Childs, p. 108.

11. The Chronicle of Lanercost, p. 249; Froissart (1978), p. 40.

12. Alison Weir, Queen Isabella (2005), pp. 204ff.

13. Ibid., p. 211.

14. Sir Thomas Gray, Scalacronica, trans. Herbert Maxwell (1907), pp. 93, 96.

15. Froissart (1978), p. 44.

16. Weir, pp. 320–321.

17. Gray, p. 74

18. Ibid., p. 108; Oliver J. Thatcher and Edgar H. McNeal, A Source Book for Mediæval History (1905), p. 366.

19. Gray, p. 110; The Chronicle of Lanercost, p. 267; Weir, pp. 383–384.

Chapter Sixty-Seven The Southern and Northern Courts

1. Marius B. Jansen, p. 83.

2. Ebrey, Walthall, and Palais, p. 193; Marius B. Jansen, p. 74.

3. Marius B. Jansen, p. 75.

4. Morten Oxenboell, “Images of ‘Akuto,’” Monumenta Nipponica 60, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 235, 247–248; Marius B. Jansen, p. xiii.

5. Marius B. Jansen, p. 85.

6. Perkins, p. 162; Andrew Edmund Goble, Kenmu (1996), p. 33.

7. Ebrey, Walthall, and Palais, p. 206; Marius B. Jansen, p. 85; Peter Martin, p. 87.

8. Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi, A History of the Japanese People from the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era (1915), p. 377.

9. Ibid., p. 379; Helen Craig McCullough, trans. and ed., The Taiheiki (1959), p. 42.

10. Perkins, pp. 194–195; Friday, p. 54.

11. Pierre François Souyri, The World Turned Upside Down, trans. Kathe Roth (2001), p. 111.

12. Friday, p. 13; Marius B. Jansen, pp. 99–100.

13. Souyri, p. 111; Helen Craig McCullough, ed., Classical Japanese Prose (1990), p. 491.

14. Yamamura, p. 186.

15. Sansom, p. 52.

16. Milton W. Meyer, Japan, 3rd ed. (1993), p. 81.

17. Friday, p. 14.

18. Meyer, p. 81; Brownlee, p. 105.

19. Kitabatake Chikafusa, “Jinno Shotoki,” in Traditional Japanese Literature, ed. Haruo Shirane (2007), p. 855.

Chapter Sixty-Eight Rebellions

1. Richard Maxwell Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan, 1300–1761 (2005), p. 18; Marika Sardar, “Golconda through Time” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2007), p. 26.

2. Barani, pp. 223–233.

3. Eaton, A Social History, pp. 20–21.

4. Kumar, pp. 285–286.

5. Henry Miers Elliot, The History of India, vol. 5 (1907), pp. 154–155.

6. Kumar, p. 286.

7. Elliot, p. 158.

8. Wolpert, p. 116; Ibn Battuta, p. 145.

9. Wolpert, p. 117; Elliot, p. 155.

10. Robert Sewell, Ferñao Nunes, and Domingos Paes, A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar) (1972), p. 23.

11. Ahmed, p. 61.

12. Barani, p. 263.

13. Ibid., pp. 266–267.

14. Shams-i Siraj, Tarikh-i Firoz Shahi, in The History of India As Told by Its Own Historians, ed. H. M. Elliot and John Dowson, vol. 3 (1871), pp. 277–278.

15. Elliot, pp. 164ff.

Chapter Sixty-Nine Naming the Renaissance

1. N. Robinson, ed., A History of the World with All Its Great Sensations (1887), p. 166; Michael Jones, ed., The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 6 (2000), pp. 537–538.

2. Michael Jones, pp. 539–540; Philippe Levillain, ed., The Papacy (2002), p. 850.

3. Henry Hart Milman, History of Latin Christianity, vol. 7 (1880), p. 86.

4. Michael Jones, p. 540; Milman, vol. 7, p. 87.

5. Marsilius of Padua, Defensor Pacis, trans. and ed. Alan Gewirth (2001), p. 354; Dante Alighieri, De Monarchia, trans. and ed. Aurelia Henry (1904), pp. 194–195.

6. Marsilius of Padua, pp. 135, 161, 502.

7. Irena Dorota Backus, Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation (1378–1615) (2003), pp. 26–27, 35.

8. Michael Jones, p. 541.

9. Milman, vol. 7, pp. 103–107.

10. Levillain, p. 850.

11. Michael Jones, p. 544.

12. Douglas Biow, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries (2002), pp. 29–30; Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi, eds., Petrarch (2009), pp. 137–138.

13. Theodor E. Mommsen, “Petrarch’s Conception of the ‘Dark Ages,’” Speculum 17, no. 2 (April 1942): 234, 240–241.

Chapter Seventy The Cities in the Lake

1. Prem, p. 28.

2. Ibid., p. 32; Donald E. Chipman, Moctezuma’s Children (2005), p. 9; Adams, p. 82.

3. Miguel León Portilla and Earl Shorris, eds., In the Language of Kings (2001), pp. 201–202.

4. Ibid., p. 202; Chipman, p. 10.

5. Exequiel Ezcurra, The Basin of Mexico (1999), pp. 10–12.

6. Prem, p. 32; Jacques Soustelle, Daily Life of the Aztecs on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest (1970), pp. 2–3.

7. Soustelle, p. 4.

8. Diego Durán, The History of the Indies of New Spain, trans. and ed. Doris Heyden (1994),

pp. 46–47.

9. Ibid., p. 48.

10. Ibid., pp. 56–58.

11. Ibid., p. 50.

Chapter Seventy-One A Hundred Years of War

1. Froissart (1978), p. 46; Jean Froissart, Chronicles of England, France, Spain and the Adjoining Countries, trans. Thomas Johnes, rev. ed., vol. 1 (1901), p. 8.

2. The Chronicle of Lanercost, p. 268.

3. Ibid., pp. 269–270.

4. Gray, p. 121.

5. The Chronicle of Lanercost, pp. 286–287.

6. Froissart (1978), p. 60.

7. L. J. Andrew Villalon and Donald J. Kagay, eds., The Hundred Years War (Part II) (2008), pp. 4–5.

8. Michael Jones, p. 544; Gray, p. 133.

9. Sime and Freeman, p. 101; Michael Jones, p. 545; Ernst Cassirer, “Some Remarks on the Question of the Originality of the Renaissance,” Journal of the History of Ideas 4, no. 1 (Jan. 1943): 52.

10. Froissart (1978), p. 68.

11. Nicholas Hooper and Matthew Bennet, The Cambridge Illustrated Atlas of Warfare (1996),

pp. 117–118

12. Richard Barber, The Life and Campaigns of the Black Prince (1997), pp. 28–29; Froissart (1978), pp. 76–77.

13. Froissart (1901), vol. 1, p. 39; Froissart (1978), pp. 90–91.

14. Froissart (1978), pp. 94–95.

15. The Chronicle of Lanercost, p. 342.

16. Michael Jones, pp. 548, 551–552.

17. Froissart (1978), p. 111.

Chapter Seventy-Two The End of the World

1. Franke and Twitchett, pp. 561; Lorge, p. 94.

2. Susan Scott and Christopher Duncan, Biology of Plagues (2001), p. 82; Kelly, p. 8.

3. Kelly, pp. 4–5; Philip Ziegler, The Black Death (1997), pp. 3–4; H. A. R. Gibb, trans. and ed., The Travels of Ibn Battuta, A.D. 1325–1354, vol. 3 (1971), p. 717; Dunn, p. 245.

4. John Aberth, The Black Death (2005), pp. 17–18.

5. Ole Jorgen Benedictow, The Black Death, 1346–1353 (2004), p. 60; Rosemary Horrox, trans. and ed., The Black Death (1994), p. 17.

6. Scott and Duncan, pp. 62–63; Aberth, The Black Death, p. 30.

7. Aberth, The Black Death, p. 29.

8. Horrox, pp. 24–25; Aberth, The Black Death, p. 33.

9. Quoted in Merry E. Wiesner et al., Discovering the Global Past, vol. 1 (2012), p. 389.

10. Ziegler, p. 46; Horrox, pp. 33, 43.

11. Kelly, p. 186; Horrox, pp. 80, 82–84.

12. Raymond, pp. 139–140.

13. Aberth, The Black Death, p. 81.

14. Benedictow, p. 214

15. Horrox, p. 80.

16. Quoted in David Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West (1997), p. 41.

17. Horrox, pp. 118, 122, 159; Herlihy, p. 65.

18. Horrox, pp. 248–249.

Chapter Seventy-Three The Will to War

1. Froissart (1901), vol. 1, pp. 50–51.

2. Lawrence Earp, Guillaume de Machaut (1995), pp. 34–35; Jonathan Sumption, The Hundred Years War, vol. 2 (1999), p. 107.

3. Sumption, vol. 2, p. 133.

4. Ibid., p. 198.

5. Ibid., pp. 205–206.

6. Ibid., pp. 208–209.

7. Herbert James Hewitt, The Black Prince’s Expedition of 1355–1357 (1958), pp. 3–4, 64ff.

8. Jervis, pp. 210–211; Gray, pp. 121–124; Hewitt, pp. 101, 126ff.

9. Gray, p. 125.

10. Froissart (1901), vol. 1, pp. 231–323.

11. Nicholas Wright, Knights and Peasants (1998), p. 56.

12. Froissart (1839), p. 240; de Vericour, “The Jacquerie,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 1 (1872): 187–290, 304; Wright, p. 13.

13. Jervis, pp. 214–215.

14. Ibid.

15. Chronicon Anonymi Cantuariensis, ed. and trans. Charity Scott-Stokes and Chris Given-Wilson (2008), p. 133.

16. Froissart (1901), vol. 1, pp. 79, 83; Christine de Pisan, Fais et Bonnes Meurs du Sage Roy Charles (1819), pt. 2, chap. 4.

17. Jean Froissart, Chronicles of England, France, Spain, and the Adjoining Countries, trans. Thomas Johnes, vol. 1 (1839), p. 314.

18. Froissart (1901), vol. 1, p. 91.

19. Chronicon Anonymi Cantuariensis, p. 149; Froissart (1901), vol. 1, p. 93.

20. Froissart (1901), vol. 1, p. 113.

21. David Nicolle, The Great Chevauchée (2001), pp. 10–11; Froissart (1901), vol. 1, p. 123.

Chapter Seventy-Four White Lotus, Red Turban

1. Hubert Seiwert, Popular Religious Movements and Heterodox Sects in Chinese History (2003), pp. 179–180; B. J. Ter Haar, The White Lotus Teachings in Chinese Religious History (1999),

pp. 115–116.

2. Harold Miles Tanner, p. 272.

3. Ibid., p. 273.

4. Frederick W. Mote and Denis Twitchett, eds., The Cambridge History of China, vol. 7, pt. 1 (1988), pp. 37–38; Haar, pp. 115–116.

5. Mote and Twichett, pp. 19–20.

6. Franke and Twitchett, p. 580; Edward L. Dreyer, Early Ming China (1982), pp. 24–25.

7. Mote and Twitchett, pp. 37–38.

8. Stephen Turnbull, Fighting Ships of the Far East, vol. 1 (2002), pp. 37–38.

9. Mote and Twitchett, pp. 96–98.

10. Henry Miles Tanner, pp. 287–288.

11. Mote, pp. 570–572.

12. Edward Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire (2009), pp. 169–170.

13. Henry Miles Tanner, p. 286; Gernet, pp. 397–398; Kangying Li, The Ming Maritime Trade Policy in Transition, 1368–1567 (2010), pp. 29–30.

14. Li, p. 40.

Chapter Seventy-Five After the Mongols

1. Higham, p. 139.

2. David K. Wyatt, Thailand, 2nd ed. (2003), p. 54.

3. Ooi, p. 192; Wyatt, p. 54.

4. Timothy D. Hoare, Thailand (2004), pp. 31–32.

5. Tarling, p. 163; Wyatt, pp. 56–57.

6. Hoare, p. 33.

7. Charles F. Keyes, The Golden Peninsula (1995), pp. 75–76.

8. Coedès, The Making of South East Asia, p. 205.

9. Chapuis, p. 91.

10. Sun Laichen, “Chinese Military Technology and Dai Viet,” ARI Working Paper, no. 11 (2003), p. 4, available at http://www.ari.nus.edu.sg/docs/wps/wps03_011.pdf.

11. Ibid., pp. 5–6.

12. Andrew Hardy et al., eds., Champa and the Archaeology of My Son (2009), p. 67

13. Coedès, The Making of South East Asia, p. 206.

Chapter Seventy-Six The Turks and the Desperate Emperor

1. Norwich, Byzantium, p. 309.

2. Ibid., p. 318; Nicol, The Last Centuries of Byzantium, p. 238.

3. Caroline Finkel, Osman’s Dream (2005), p. 16; Nicol, The Last Centuries of Byzantium, p. 241; George Finlay, History of the Byzantine and Greek Empires, vol. 2 (1854), p. 562.

4. Nicol, The Last Centuries of Byzantium, pp. 241–242.

5. Norwich, Byzantium, pp. 320–321.

6. Donald M. Nicol, The Reluctant Emperor (1996), p. 130.

7. Nicol, The Last Centuries of Byzantium, pp. 245–246; Norwich, Byzantium, pp. 322–323.

8. Fine, pp. 334–335.

9. Diana Wood, Clement VI (1989), p. 120; Norwich, Byzantium, pp. 326–327; Nicol, The Last Days of Byzantium, pp. 260–261.

10. Theodore Spandounes, On the Origin of the Ottoman Emperors, trans. and ed. Donald M. Nicol (1997), p. 21.

11. Finkel, pp. 17–18; Michael Jones, pp. 849–850.

12. Milman, vol. 7, p. 209.

13. Ibid., p. 215.

14. Nicol, The Last Centuries of Byzantium, pp. 272–273.

15. Norwich, Byzantium, pp. 334–335; Nicol, The Last Centuries of Byzantium; Michael Jones, p. 823; Finlay, p. 579.

16. Finkel, p. 18.

Chapter Seventy-Seven The Disintegration of Delhi

1. Shams-i Siraj, p. 287.

2. Ibid., pp. 289–290.

3. Jamil M. Abun-Nasr, Muslim Communities of Grace (2007), pp. 48–51.

4. Quoted in Gustave E. von Grunebaum, Medieval Islam, 2nd ed. (1953), pp. 138–139.

5. Eaton, The Rise of Islam, pp. 85–86.

6. Kumar, p. 288.

7. Wolpert, p. 117.

8. Brenda J. Buchanan, ed., Gunpowder, Explosives and the State (2006), pp. 54–55.

9. George Michell and Mark Zebrowski, eds., The New Cambridge History of India: I.7 (2008), p. 7; Kulke and Rothermund, p. 170.

10. Chelvadurai Manogaran, Ethnic Conflict and Reconciliation in Sri Lanka (1987), pp. 26–27; Ibn Battuta, pp. 185–188; Codrington, pp. 83–84.

11. Firoz Shah, “Futuhat-i Firoz Shahi,” in The History of India As Told by Its Own Historians, ed. H. M. Elliot and John Dowson, vol. 3 (1871), pp. 375–376.

12. Shams-i Siraj, pp. 344ff.

13. Ibid., p. 317; Wolpert, p. 119; Kumar, p. 7.

Chapter Seventy-Eight The Union of Krewo

1. Norman Davies, God’s Playground, rev. ed., vol. 1 (2005), p. 82.

2. Ibid., pp. 77–78; F. W. Carter, Trade and Urban Development in Poland (1994), p. 154.

3. Frank N. Magill, Great Lives from History: Ancient and Medieval Series, vol. 1 (1988), p. 410.

4. Norman Davies, p. 84.

5. Natalia Nowakowska, Church, State and Dynasty in Renaissance Poland (2007), pp. 14–15; Norman Davies, pp. 89–90.

6. Sugar, p. 54.

7. Molnár, pp. 54–55.

8. Giedrė Mickünaitė, Making a Great Ruler (2006), pp. 125–126; Daniel Stone, The Polish-Lithuanian State, 1386–1795, vol. 4 (2001), p. 8; Andrzej Piotrowski, Architecture of Thought (2011), p. 288.

9. Stone, p. 8.

Chapter Seventy-Nine The Rebirth of the Mongol Horde

1. Clifford E. Bosworth and Muhamed S. Asimov, History of Civilizations of Central Asia, vol. 4, pt. 2 (2000), p. 321

2. Peter Jackson, The Mongols and the West, p. 235; Mirza Muhammad Haidar Dughlat, The Tarikh-i-Rashidi (1895), pp. 30–31.

3. Abu Talib Hussyny, The Mulfuzat Timury, trans. Charles Stewart (1830), p. 36. Although the biography is written in the style of an autobiography, it dates from after Timur’s death.

4. Haidar, p. 34.

5. Justin Marozzi, Tamerlane (2006), p. 98.

6. Haidar, p. 34.

7. Bosworth and Asimov, p. 327.

8. Zafar Nama, quoted in Haidar, p. 39; Peter Jackson and Laurence Lockhart, eds., The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 6 (1986), pp. 50–51; Marozzi, pp. 96–97.

9. Janet Martin, p. 202.

10. Saunders, pp. 166–167.

11. Beiträge zur “7. Internationalen Konferenz zur Geschichte des Kiever und des Moskauer Reiches” (1995), pp. 268–269.

12. Levi and Sela, p. 171.

13. Sunil K. Saxena, History of Medieval India (2001), n.p.

14. Ibid.

15. N. Jayapalan, History of India (2001), pp. 50–51.

Chapter Eighty Compromises and Settlements

1. Nahm, p. 92.

2. David M. Robinson, Empire’s Twilight (2009), pp. 107–108.

3. Kang, p. 167.

4. Ibid., pp. 167–168.

5. Ibid., p. 169.

6. Ibid., pp. 168–169.

7. Ki-baik Lee, pp. 163–164.

8. Kang, pp. 178–180.

9. Kim Dae-haeng, Classical Poetic Songs of Korea (2009), pp. 68–69; Changbom Park, Astronomy, trans. Yoon-jung Cho and Hyun-ju Park (2008), pp. 116–118.

10. Thomas Donald Conlan, From Sovereign to Symbol (2011), pp. 173–174.

11. Ebrey, Walthall, and Palais, p. 207.

12. Conlan, pp. 170–171.

Chapter Eighty-One The House of Visconti and the Papal States

1. Michael Jones, p. 553; Richard Lodge, The Close of the Middle Ages, 1272–1494 (1906),

pp. 185–186.

2. D. M. Bueno de Mesquita, Giangaleazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan (1351–1402) (1941), pp. 1–2.

3. Sismondi, pp. 156–159; The History of St. Catherine of Siena and Her Companions, 3rd ed., vol. 1(1899), pp. 279–280.

4. George L. Williams, Papal Genealogy (1998), p. 34; Oscar Browning, Guelphs & Ghibellines (1893), pp. 149–150.

5. Denis Michael Searby, trans., The Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden, vol. 2 (2008), p. 249.

6. Sismondi, pp. 159–160.

7. William Caferro, John Hawkwood (2006), n.p.; Sismondi, pp. 160–161.

8. Creighton, vol. 1, p. 67.

9. Froissart (1901), vol. 1, pp. 165–166.

10. Sismondi, pp. 162–163; Froissart (1901), vol. 1, p. 165.

11. Sismondi, p. 177.

12. Ibid., pp. 188–193.

Chapter Eighty-Two Bad Beginnings

1. Froissart (1901), vol. 1, pp. 134–135.

2. Ibid., p. 135; Alan R. Rushton, Royal Maladies (2008), pp. 188–189.

3. Hooper and Bennett, p. 122.

4. Rushton, p. 87; Froissart (1901), vol. 1, pp. 148–149; Thomas Walsingham, The Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham, 1376–1422, trans. David Preest(2005), pp. 32–33.

5. Walsingham, p. 39.

6. Creighton, vol. 1, pp. 85–89.

7. Duby, p. 286; Froissart (1901), vol. 1, pp. 232–233.

8. George M. Bussey, Thomas Gaspey, and Théodose Burette, A History of France and of the French People (1850), pp. 564–565; Froissart (1901), vol. 1, pp. 258–261.

9. Jervis, p. 226; Froissart (1901), vol. 1, pp. 264–266.

10. J. S. Hamilton, The Plantagenets (2010), p. 184; Walsingham, p. 44.

11. Hamilton, pp. 185–186; Mark O’Brien, When Adam Delved and Eve Span (2004), pp. 30–31.

12. O’Brien, p. 30.

13. Walsingham, p. 29; Ian Christopher Levy, ed., A Companion to John Wyclif, Late Medieval Theologian (2006), pp. 330ff.

14. Leonard W. Cowie, The Black Death and Peasants’ Revolt (1972), pp. 79–80.

15. O’Brien, pp. 36–37; Anthony Goodman, A History of England from Edward II to James I (1977); Charles Oman, The Great Revolt of 1381 (1906), pp. 180–181.

16. Walsingham, p. 124; O’Brien, pp. 36–37.

17. Walsingham, pp. 126–127.

18. O’Brien, pp. 60–61; Goodman, pp. 181–182; Hamilton, p. 189.

19. Adam Usk, The Chronicle of Adam Usk, trans. C. Given-Wilson (1997), p. 5.

20. Walsingham, p. 153.

Chapter Eighty-Three Dislocation

1. Niane and Ki-Zerbo, p. 100.

2. Ibid., pp. 99–100.

3. Mark R. Lipschutz and R. Kent Rasmussen, Dictionary of African Historical Biography, 2nd ed. (1989), p. 240; Roland A. Oliver, ed., The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 3 (1975), p. 312.

4. Lewis H. Gann and Peter Duignan, African and the World (2000), pp. 216–217.

5. Toyin Falola and Adebayo Oyebade, The Foundations of Nigeria (2003), p. 594.

6. Dierk Lange, Ancient Kingdoms of West Africa (2004), pp. 157–158.

7. Bovill and Hallett (1995), pp. 225–226.

Chapter Eighty-Four Madness and Usurpation

1. Walsingham, p. 63.

2. Froissart (1901), vol. 1, p. 353.

3. Ibid., pp. 364–365; Livermore, pp. 102–103.

4. Froissart (1901), vol. 1, pp. 374–375; Walsingham, pp. 242–244.

5. Walsingham, pp. 278–279.

6. Froissart (1901), vol. 1, pp. 534–535.

7. John Ronald Moreton-Macdonald, A History of France, vol. 1 (1915), p. 268.

8. Walsingham, pp. 298–299.

9. Ibid., pp. 301, 306; John Julius Norwich, Shakespeare’s Kings (1999), pp. 115–116; Usk, p. 49.

10. Norwich, Shakespeare’s Kings, pp. 121–122; Walsingham, pp. 308–309.

11. Walsingham, p. 311.

12. Ibid., p. 317; Usk, pp. 89–91; Froissart (1901), vol. 2, pp. 214–215; Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, vol. 3 (1808), p. 14.

Chapter Eighty-Five The Battle of Nicopolis

1. Halil Inalcik, “Ottoman Methods of Conquest,” Studia Islamica, no. 2 (1954): 103.

2. Nicol, The Last Century of Byzantium, pp. 285–289.

3. Ibid., pp. 289–291; Norwich, Byzantium, p. 345.

4. Inalcik, p. 120; Norwich, Byzantium, p. 345.

5. Nicol, The Last Century of Byzantium, pp. 292–293.

6. Norwich, Byzantium, p. 347.

7. Vasiliev, p. 629.

8. Ibid.

9. Norwich, Byzantium, p. 353.

10. France, pp. 276–277.

11. Norwich, Byzantium, p. 355.

12. David Nicolle, Nicopolis (1999), pp. 68–69.

Chapter Eighty-Six The Union and Disunion of Kalmar

1. Franklin Daniel Scott, Sweden, the Nation’s History (1977), p. 81.

2. Vivian Etting, Queen Margrete I, 1353–1412, and the Founding of the Nordic Union (2004) p. 135.

3. Scott, pp. 81–82.

4. Ibid., p. 82; Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, A History of Norway from the Earliest Times (1900), p. 468.

5. Boyesen, pp. 468–470.

6. Etting, pp. 135–136.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid., p. 136.

9. Ibid., pp. 142–144.

10. Boyesen, p. 473.

11. Lester B. Orfield, The Growth of Scandinavian Law (2002), p. 143.

Chapter Eighty-Seven The Hussite Uprising

1. Mogens Herman Hansen, ed., A Comparative Study of Thirty City-State Cultures (2000), pp. 22, 296.

2. Henry Smith Williams, ed., The Historians’ History of the World, vol. 14 (1907), pp. 188–189.

3. Ibid., p. 192; Richard K. Emmerson and Sandra Clayton-Emmerson, eds., Key Figures in Medieval Europe (2006), p. 663; Thatcher and McNeal, p. 400.

4. Emmerson and Clayton-Emmerson, p. 663; Francis Dvornik, The Slavs in European History and Civilization (1962), p. 186; Hans Prutz, The Age of the Renaissance, trans. John Henry Wright (1905), pp. 148–149; Michael Jones, pp. 559–560.

5. Niccolò Machiavelli, The History of Florence and of the Affairs of Italy (1891), pp. 438–439.

6. Williams, p. 194.

7. Philip Schaff and David Schley Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 5, pt. 2 (1910), pp. 341–342.

8. Ibid., p. 343.

9. John Wycliffe, Writings of the Reverend and Learned John Wickliff (1831), pp. 156, 162–163; Walsingham, pp. 259, 272; Peters, pp. 257–259.

10. Henry Bettenson and Chris Maunder, eds., Documents of the Christian Church, 4th ed. (2011), pp. 192–193, Walsingham, p. 249.

11. Jan Hus, The Letters of John Hus (1904), p. 26.

12. Ibid., p. 27.

13. Dvornik, p. 193; Schaff and Schaff, p. 366.

14. Creighton, vol. 2, p. 162.

15. Williams, pp. 200–201; Prutz, p. 159.

16. Hus, pp. 144–145.

17. Ibid., pp. 160–161, 167–168.

18. Ibid., p. 179; Schaff and Schaff, pp. 373–374.

19. Prutz, p. 160.

20. Schaff and Schaff, pp. 380–382; Hus, p. 279.

21. Emmerson and Clayton-Emmerson, p. 664.

Chapter Eighty-Eight The Taking of France

1. Froissart (1901), vol. 2, p. 211.

2. Ramsay, p. 43; Usk, p. 145.

3. Jams Grant, British Battles on Land and Sea, vol. 1 (1897), pp. 76ff.

4. Usk, p. 243.

5. Enguerrand de Monstrelet, The Chronicles of Enguerrand de Monstrelet, trans. Thomas Johnes, vol. 1 (1877), p. 34.

6. Ibid., pp. 53–54.

7. Ibid., pp. 53, 56.

8. Richard Vaughan, John the Fearless (2002), p. 70.

9. Moreton-Macdonald, p. 271; Vaughan, pp. 80–82.

10. Usk, p. 243; Walsingham, p. 389.

11. Moreton-Macdonald, pp. 272–273; Walsingham, p. 397.

12. Jervis, p. 238; Walsingham, p. 397.

13. Walsingham, pp. 407–409.

14. Jervis, p. 239.

15. Walsingham, p. 410.

16. Ibid., p. 412; Monstrelet, vol. 1, p. 342; Usk, p. 257.

17. Monstrelet, vol. 1, p. 343.

18. Moreton-Macdonald, p. 276; Ramsay, pp. 243–244.

19. Ramsay, pp. 267–270.

20. Moreton-Macdonald, pp. 280–281.

Chapter Eighty-Nine After Timurlane

1. Brian M. Fagan, From Stonehenge to Samarkand (2006), p. 244; Ruy González de Clavijo, Embassy to Tamerlane, 1403–1406, trans. Guy Le Strange (1928), pp. 146–152.

2. Kulke and Rothermund, p. 170.

3. Rabbat, pp. 16–17, 136–137; Nezar AlSayyad, Cairo (2011), pp. 122–123, 127.

4. Marozzi, pp. 291–292.

5. Levi and Sela, pp. 171–175.

6. Nicol, The Last Centuries of Byzantium, p. 314.

7. Finkel, pp. 28–29.

8. Jackson, The Mongols and the West, p. 314; Finkel, p. 29.

9. Finkel, p. 31.

10. Grousset, p. 434.

11. Jackson, The Mongols and the West, p. 314.

12. Jackson and Lockhart, pp. 81–82.

13. Spuler, pp. 74–75; Ana Serrano et al., Ibn Khaldun (2006), pp. 110–111.

14. Norwich, Byzantium, p. 375.

15. Ibid., pp. 376–377; Finkel, pp. 35–36.

16. Norwich, Byzantium, pp. 376–377.

Chapter Ninety The Withdrawal of the Ming

1. Kenneth Chase, Firearms (2003), p. 41.

2. Timothy Brook, The Troubled Empire (2010), pp. 90–91.

3. Ibid., pp. 91–92; Timothy Brook, Jérôme Bourgon, and Gregory Blue, Death by a Thousand Cuts (2008), pp. 117–118.

4. Ma-Huan, Ying-yai Sheng-lan, trans. and ed. J. V. G. Mills (1970), pp. 6ff.; Brook, pp. 92–93; Chase, pp. 50–51.

5. Wang, pp. 153–154.

6. Ibid., pp. 155–156.

7. Gernet, p. 398; Denis Sinor, Inner Asia (1969), p. 205; Chase, pp. 46–47.

8. Chapuis, p. 101.

9. Julia Lovell, The Great Wall (2006), pp. 190–191.

10. Wang, p. 154.

11. Chase, p. 51.

12. Gernet, pp. 403–405; Chase, pp. 52–53.

13. Lovell, pp. 192–193.

14. Ibid., pp. 198–199.

15. Gernet, p. 405.

Chapter Ninety-One Failure

1. Sismondi, p. 203.

2. John Addington Symonds, Renaissance in Italy (1883), pp. 152–153; Machiavelli, pp. 44–45.

3. Sismondi, pp. 210–211; Symonds, p. 152; Machiavelli, p. 159.

4. Creighton, vol. 2, pp. 40ff.

5. Robert Bideleux and Ian Jeffries, A History of Eastern Europe, 2nd ed. (2007), pp. 147–148; Emil Reich, Select Documents Illustrating Medieval and Modern History (1905), p. 630.

6. Bideleux and Jeffries, p. 150; Craig D. Atwood, The Theology of the Czech Brethren from Hus to Comenius (2009), p. 115.

7. Creighton, vol. 2, p. 69; Hans Ferdinand Helmolt, The World’s History (1901), p. 199.

8. Creighton, vol. 2, pp. 81–82.

9. George Frederick Young, The Medici, vol. 1 (1911), p. 36.

10. Helmolt, p. 198; Creighton, vol. 2, pp. 105ff.

11. Hugh L. Agnew, The Czechs and the Lands of the Bohemian Crown (2004), pp. 49–59.

12. Creighton, vol. 2, p. 162.

13. Ibid., p. 176.

14. Ibid., pp. 179ff.

15. Kenneth Meyer Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, 1204–1571, vol. 2 (1978), pp. 65–66.

Chapter Ninety-Two Perpetual Slavery

1. Pierre Bontier, Jean Le Verrier, and Richard Henry Major, The Canarian, or Book of the Conquest and Conversion of the Canarians in the Year 1402 (1872), pp. 4, 41–44.

2. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Before Columbus (1994), pp. 181–182.

3. C. Raymond Beazley, Prince Henry the Navigator (1911), pp. 149–150.

4. Malyn Newitt, The Portuguese in West Africa (2010), pp. 26–27.

5. Bailey W. Diffie and George D. Vinius, Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, 1415–1580 (1977), p. 55.

6. Gomes Eanes de Zurara, The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, trans. Charles Raymond Beazley and Edgar Prestage, vol. 1 (1896), p. 27; Malyn Newitt, A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, 1400–1668 (2005), p. 19.

7. Zurara, pp. 30–31.

8. Ibid., pp. 33.

9. W. A. Salisbury Portugal and Its People (1893), pp. 98–99.

10. Zurara, pp. 40ff.; Newitt, A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, p. 24.

11. Diffie and Vinius, p. 79; Newitt, The Portuguese in West Africa, pp. 49–50.

12. Diffie and Vinius, pp. 80–81.

13. Arthur Helps, The Conquerors of the New World and Their Bondsmen, vol. 1 (1848), pp. 33–36.

14. Diffie and Vinius, p. 82; Newitt, The Portuguese in West Africa, p. 151.

15. Newitt, The Portuguese in West Africa, p. 44.

16. Salisbury, p. 105.

17. Stefan Goodwin, Africa in Europe (2009), p. 128; A. J. R. Russell-Wood, “Iberian Expansion and the Issue of Black Slavery,” American Historical Review 83, no. 1 (Feb. 1978): 27–28.

18. Francis Gardiner Davenport, ed., European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States and Its Dependencies to 1648 (1917): 22–23.

Chapter Ninety-Three The Loss of France

1. Walsingham, pp. 442–443.

2. Holinshed, p. 136; Rushton, p. 80; Enguerrand de Monstrelet, The Chronicles of Enguerrand de Monstrelet, vol. 6, trans. Thomas Johnes (1810), pp. 3–4.

3. Malcolm G. A. Vale, Charles VII (1974), pp. 27, 35.

4. Holinshed, p. 137.

5. Ibid., p. 143; Vale, p. 33; Monstrelet, vol. 6, pp. 49–51;

6. Prutz, pp. 215–216; Monstrelet, vol. 6, p. 248.

7. Monstrelet, vol. 6, p. 254.

8. Régine Pernoud and Marie-Véronique Clin, Joan of Arc, trans. Jeremy duQuesnay Adams (1998), p. 23.

9. Monstrelet, vol. 6, p. 255.

10. Clayton J. Drees, The Late Medieval Age of Crisis and Renewal, 1300–1500 (2001), p. 252.

11. Donald Spoto, Joan (2007), p. 111.

12. Ibid., p. 118; Holinshed, p. 170.

13. Spoto, pp. 121ff.

14. Daniel Hobbins, trans., The Trial of Joan of Arc (2007), p. 20.

15. Pernoud and Clin, p. 135.

16. Ibid., pp. 136–137.

17. Jervis, pp. 251–252; Enguerrand de Monstrelet, The Chronicles of Enguerrand de Monstrelet, vol. 2, trans. Thomas Johnes (1853), p. 24.

18. Monstrelet, vol. 2, pp. 3–4, 6.

19. Ibid., pp. 28–29.

20. Jervis, pp. 253–254.

21. Vale, pp. 116–117; Holinshed, p. 229.

22. Holinshed, pp. 235–236; Hooper and Bennett, pp. 134–135.

23. Vale, pp. 173–175; Rushton, pp. 78–80.

Chapter Ninety-Four The Fall

1. Finkel, pp. 41–42.

2. Pero Tafur, Travels and Adventures, 1435–1439, trans. Malcom H. I. Letts (1926), pp. 217–219.

3. Thomas Henry Dyer, The History of Modern Europe, vol. 1 (1861), pp. 14–15.

4. Tafur, p. 222.

5. Dyer, pp. 15–16.

6. Bertrandon de la Brocquière, The Travels of Bertandon de la Brocquière, trans. Thomas Johnes (1807), pp. 281–282; Peter Purton, A History of the Late Medieval Siege, 1200–1500 (2010),

p. 245.

7. Stephen R. Turnbull, The Ottoman Empire, 1326–1699 (2003), pp. 32–33; Finkel, pp. 44–45; Theoharis Stavrides, The Sultan of Vezirs (2001), pp. 53–54.

8. Hazard, pp. 655–656.

9. Turnbull, The Ottoman Empire, pp. 31–32.

10. Nicol, The Last Century of Byzantium, p. 363; Stavrides, p. 53; Dyer, pp. 17–18.

11. Norwich, Byzantium, pp. 414–415; Donald M. Nicol, The Immortal Emperor (1992), p. 52; Hazard, p. 657.

12. Norwich, Byzantium, p. 414.

13. Finkel, p. 49; Norwich, Byzantium, p. 415.

14. Nicol, The Immortal Emperor, p. 56; Norwich, Byzantium, p. 415.

15. Setton, p. 114.

16. Monstrelet, vol. 2, p. 229; Setton, p. 114; Nicol, The Immortal Emperor, pp. 64–65.

17. Monstrelet, vol. 2, p. 229; Setton, p. 116.

18. Nicol, The Immortal Emperor, p. 65.

19. Hazard, p. 659; Setton, p. 130.

20. Stavrides, p. 54.

21. Finkel, p. 49.

22. Ibid., p. 51.

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Permissions

The Lusiads, by Luis Vaz de Camoes, translated by Landeg White (Oxford University Press, 2002). Reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press.

“The Simonie,” edited by James Dean. From Medieval English Political Writings, edited by James M. Dean. Copyright © 1996 Medieval Institute Publications. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

“To Show to My Sons,” by Lu Yu, translated by Burton Watson. From The Shorter Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature, edited by Victor H. Mair. Copyright © 2000 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

Foreign Languages Press: Nine lines from Poetry and Prose of the Tang and Song, translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang. Copyright 1984 FLP.

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations and maps.

Aachen, 250, 388

Abaqa Khan, 374, 376, 379, 405

Abbasid caliphate, 134, 156, 230, 306, 342, 346, 349

‘Abd al-Mu’min, caliph, 90

Abelard, Peter, 49–52, 53, 57, 81, 235, 354

Abraham, 95

Abraham, Cresques, 457

Abru, Hafiz-i, 451–52

Abu Abdulluh al-Bakri, 99–100

Abu al-Abbas, 134n

Abubakari II, king of Mali, 455, 457

Abu Bakr, 226n

Abu’l-Faraj, 342

Abu Sa’id Bahadur Khan, 450–52

Abu Salih, 288

Abu Ya’qub Yusuf, 90–91, 243

Acamapichtli, king of Tenochtitlán, 494–95

Acominatus, Michael, 222

Aconcagua, 189n

Acre, 158, 170, 171, 173, 174, 257, 275, 277, 293, 296, 336, 348, 351, 353–54, 369–70, 373–77

Kingdom of, see Jerusalem, Kingdom of

Acts, Book of, 233

Adafa, 287

Adamuz, 243

Adele of Champagne, queen of France, 152

Ad Extirpanda, 359

Adrian IV, pope, 83

Adrianople, 220, 221, 421, 537, 538, 540

Adriatic Sea, 15, 16, 316, 673

Aegean islands

Aegean Sea, 368, 538

Afghanapur, 479

Afonso V, king of Portugal, 657, 659–60

Africa, 88, 94–100, 96, 244, 287–91, 372, 456, 587–89, 638, 654, 658

Christianity in, 287–88

Islam in, 288, 290

oral tradition in, 95, 98

slavery and, xxv, 654, 656–60

West, 98, 451, 456, 658–60

Agau people, 287

Aghata, 230

Agincourt, Battle of, 624–25, 624, 662, 671

Agnolo di Tura, 416

Agricultural Treatise (Chen Fu), 56

Ahmed Sanjar, Great Seljuk of the Turks, 121–22, 134, 262

Ahsan Shah, 480

Aigues-Mortes, 333, 463

Aiguillon, 501

Aimery of Limoges, 135–36

Ain Jalut, 348

Aizong, Jin emperor, 312–13

Akibatsu, 566

Akropolites, George, 221, 369–70, 375–76

Akuta, Jin emperor, 25, 57

akuto, 471

Ala ad-Din Muhammad ibn Tekish, shah, 262–63

Al-Adid, Fatimid caliph, 106

al-Adil, Ayyubid caliph, 273–74, 275–76

Alamut, 226–27, 227

Alaric, 240

al-Arish, 104

al-Ashraf, al-Malik, sultan of Egypt, 347

‘Ala’-ud-Din, sultan of Delhi, 404–8, 427–31, 478

Ala-ud-Din Bahman, sultan of the Deccan (Hasan Gangu), 481

Al-Bakri, 97

Alba Regia, 673

Alberic of Trois Fontaines, 53

Albert, king of Germany, 410, 414

Albert, king of Sweden, 605–7

Albert II, king of Hungary and Germany, 650, 673–75, 677

Albi, 462

Albigensian Crusade, 238–40, 239, 242, 244, 258, 259–60, 273, 275, 319

Al Biruni, 121

alcohol:

Islam and, 351

Mongols and, 339, 340, 341, 405

al-Din, Ala, 379

al-Din, Rashid, 341

al-Din, Rukn, 342

Aldona, queen of Poland, 554

al-Durr, Shajar, sultan of Egypt, 337, 346–47

Aleddin, 676

Aleppo, 17, 34, 35, 39–40, 137, 156, 342, 347, 348, 450, 628

Alessandria, 85

Alexander III, king of Scotland, 397

Alexander III, pope, 83, 85–86

Alexander IV, pope, 360–62

Alexander V, pope, 615

Alexander the Great, 408

Alexandria, 105, 335

Alexius (Mary of Antioch’s advisor), 144–45

Alexius (son of Isaac Angelus), 176

Alexius II Comnenus, emperor of Byzantium, 144–45

Alexius III Angelus, emperor of Byzantium, 176, 179, 217–20, 369

Alexius IV Angelus, emperor of Byzantium, 176, 177, 179, 217, 219

Alexius V Ducas (Mourtzouphlus), 179, 219

Alexius Comnenus, emperor of Constantinople, 13–14, 16, 135, 420, 538

Alexius Comnenus, emperor of Trebizond, 219

Alfarrobeira river, Battle of, 659

Alfonso I (Afonso Henriques), king of Portugal, 45–46, 88, 91, 242

Alfonso III, king of Aragon, 392

Alfonso VII, king of León-Castile, 44–46, 88

Alfonso VIII, king of Castile, 88–89, 91, 242–44

Alfonso IX, king of Léon, 242–44

Alfonso X, king of Léon-Castile, 360

Alfonso XI, king of Léon-Castile, 515

Alfonso the Battler, king of Aragon, Navarre, León, and Castile, 43–44, 92

Alghu, 343

Alhambra palace, 307

al-Haq, shaikh ‘Ala, 545

Ali, 226n

Ali, al-Mansur, sultan of Egypt, 347

al-Idrisi, 207

Ali ibn al-Hassan, 97

Ali ibn Yusuf, king of the Almoravids, 43

Ali Mardan, 228

Aljubarrota, Battle of, 592, 592, 654

al-Kamil, Ayyubid sultan, 276–78, 295–96, 318, 332–33

Allahabad, 404

Almagest, xxiii, 46

al-Maqqari, 306–7

al-Marrakushi, 9, 44, 88

Almería, 88, 307

Almohads, 44, 88–92, 90, 94, 177, 242–44, 306, 372–73, 372, 655

timelines, 48, 54, 93, 101, 247, 256, 261, 309

Almoravids, 43–45, 88, 100, 207

timelines, 48, 54

al-Mu’azzam, 277, 295–96

al-Muhallabi, 94

al-Mu’min, 88

al-Mustansir, Abu ‘Abdallah, 373–74

al-Nasawi, Muhammad, 262–63

al-Nasir, Muhammad, Almohad caliph, 243–44

al-Nasir Muhammad ibn Qalawun, sultan of Egypt, 449–52

Alps, 319, 364, 443

al-Qazwini, 207

al-Salih Ismail, 156

Altai mountains, 197, 263

Altuniah, Malik, 326–27

al-‘Umari, 456, 458–59, 587

al-Wardi, Abu Hafs ‘Umar Ibn, 506

Alys (daughter of Louis VII), 167n

al-Zaytuna, 373

Amalric I, king of Jerusalem, 103–5, 293n

Amaterasu, 476

Amaury de Montfort, 259

Amiak, Yekuno, 288

Amicia (daughter of Simon de Montfort), 243

Amiens, 502

Amu Darya river, 310

Amur river, 640

An, prince of Dai Viet, 535

Anagni, 413

Anarchy, the, 22, 23, 76–79, 126

Anastasius IV, pope, 83

Anatolia, 542

Andean cultures, 189

Andes, 192

Andes mountains, 189

Andrew II, king of Hungary, 275, 281–83, 293, 315

Andria, cathedral of, 295

Andronicus, general, 139

Andronicus Comnenus, emperor of Byzantium, 144–46, 219, 220

Andronicus II, emperor of Byzantium, 389, 391, 405, 419–22

Andronicus III, emperor of Byzantium, 422–23

Angkor, 30

Angkor Wat, 30–31, 31, 32, 34, 300, 521, 532

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 22

Anglo-Saxons, 4

Angoulême, count of, 202

Anjou, 20, 76, 77, 150–51, 202, 498, 304, 579

Ankara, 629

Anna Comnena, 13–14

Annales Paulini, 435

Annam, 27

Anne, empress of Byzantium, 423, 425, 541

Anonimalle Chronicle, 581

Anselm of Canterbury, 5–8, 50, 354

anti-Burgundians, 623

Antioch, 13–14, 15, 17, 36, 40–41, 102–3, 135–37, 156, 166, 170, 182, 351, 373, 376

Antoku, emperor of Japan, 161

Aoife, 149

Apulia, 321, 324, 364

Apulia and Calabria, Dukedom of, 13, 15, 135, 141

Aqtay, Faris al-Din, 347–48

Aquinas, Thomas, 356–57, 359, 375, 647n

Aquitaine, 77–78, 174, 203, 304, 398–99, 401, 520

Arabia, 429, 456

Arabic language, xxiii–xxiv, 46–47

Arabs, 16, 94, 95, 98, 276, 288, 289, 291, 295, 456, 463, 587

empire of Cairo of, 348

numbering system of, 46

Aragon, 43, 89, 242–46, 305–6, 307, 372, 391, 392, 398, 420, 463, 515, 522, 612, 617

Aral Sea, 263, 310, 313

Aram Shah, as sultan of north India, 228–29

Argenteuil, convent of, 50

Arik-Boke Khan, 342–43

Aristotelian logic, xxiv, 53

Aristotle, xxiii, 5–6, 46, 47, 52, 53, 489, 615

Christianity and, 6–7, 53, 356

dialectic of, 5–7, 49, 53, 57

Arjona, 307

Ark of the Covenant, 288

Arles, 517

Armagnac, count of, 622–23, 625

Armagnacs, 623, 624, 662–63

Armenia, 170

Arnold, Abbot of Cisteaux, 238–40

Arsuf, 172

Arthur (grandson of Henry II), 202–3

Arundel, earl of, 595

Ascalon, 158

Asen, 220

Ashikaga clan, 473

Ashikaga Shogunate, 475, 566, 568

Ashikaga Takauji, 473–75

Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, 566, 568–69

Asia, 506, 638

Asia Minor, 17, 135, 170, 217, 367, 368, 420, 421, 538, 599

Christians in, 13

Assassins (fidaiyan), 226–28, 342

Assisi, 575

Assize of Clarendon, 129, 132

Assyria, Assyrians, 102, 558

astronomy, xxiii, 46

atabegs, 34

Atacama Desert, 189, 191

Athareb, 35

Atlantic Ocean, 187, 455, 456, 654

atman, 119n

Augustine, Saint, 234

Austria, 16, 275, 316

Averrhoes, 615

Avignon, 258

papacy in, 413, 414, 461–62, 484–85, 487–88, 507, 510, 539–41, 571–74, 579, 601, 612, 615, 617

Axum, 287

Aybek, sultan of Egypt, 346–47

Ayushiridara, 527

Ayutthaya, 532–33

Ayyub, as-Salih, 332–37, 346, 449

Ayyubid caliphate, 275–76, 332–37, 342, 346–48, 628

Azcapotzalco, 494–95

Azores, 658

Aztecs (Mexica people), 491–95, 493

Aztlan, 491

Babylon, 335

Babylonian Captivity, papal, 413

Bach Dang river, 27, 385

Badajoz, 91

Baeza, 88

Baghdad, 34, 40, 44, 56, 134n, 156, 273, 279, 339, 450, 452, 560, 588, 629, 632, 641

caliph in, 230, 262, 306, 342, 346

slave market in, 327

Baha ad-Din, 200

Bahmani sultanate, 481–82, 545–46, 627–28

Bahman Shah (Zafar Khan), 546

Bahram, king of Delhi, 327

Bahram Shah, king of the Ghaznavids, 121–22

Bahri Regiment, 336–37, 346–49, 449

Bahri sultanate, in Egypt, 349, 350, 373, 376, 377, 420, 456, 628

Baibars, sultan of Egypt, 337, 348–51, 373–74, 376

Baladeva, 112

Balban, sultan of Delhi, 327–30, 328, 403–4

Baldwin I, emperor of Constantinople, 180, 217–21, 367

Baldwin II, emperor of Constantinople, 367–68, 370, 389

Baldwin II, king of Jerusalem, 21

Baldwin III, king of Jerusalem, 103–4

Baldwin V, king of Jerusalem, 156

Balian of Sidon, 296

Balkans, 675

Balkh, 264, 557

Ball, John, 582, 584

Ballal Sen, king of Sena, 119, 121, 123

Balliol, Edward, 497–98

Balliol, John, 398–400, 497

Baltic Crusade, 284–85, 285

Baltic Sea, 266, 283, 284, 445, 552, 604

Baluze, Etienne, 462

Bampton, Thomas, 583

Bang Klang T’ao, king of Syam, 300

Ban Kulin, king of Bosnia, 168n

Bannockburn, Battle of, 437, 437, 497

Banu Umayya, 134n

Baol, 459

Baphaeum, 420

Barani, Ziauddin, 330, 403, 405–6, 429–31, 479–80, 482

Barbaro, Nicolò, 678–80

Barnwell Chronicle, 205

Barons’ War, 254

Barquq, al-Zahir, 628

Basava, 113–14

Basel, 648–49

Bastille, 669

Bathinda, 326–27

Batu, 313, 315–16, 339, 340–43

Bavaria, 82, 360, 484, 601

Bavaria, duke of, 364

Bayajidda, 588–89

Bayan, 382

Baybars, sultan of Egypt, 450

Bayezid I, emperor of the Ottomans, 598–602, 629–30, 632, 678

Bayonne, 578

Beatific Vision, 487–88

Bec Abbey, 5, 6

Becket, Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury, 127–32, 148, 151

Bedford, duke of, 663, 665, 668–69

Beijing, 381, 640–42

Beisan, 348

Béla, 139, 282

Béla III, king of Hungary, 168n

Béla IV, king of Hungary, 315–16

Belgrade, 675

Benedictines, 540

Benedict XI, pope, 413

Benedict XII, pope, 488

Benedict XIII, pope, 612, 617

Benevento, 364, 390

Bengal, 117, 121, 124, 229, 328, 403, 479, 480, 544, 545, 549

Benin, 98–99

timelines, 101, 107, 116

Benin City, 99

Berengar of Poitiers, 52

Berengar of Tours, 6

Berke, 343, 349

Berkeley Castle, 465

Bernard of Chartres, 52–53, 354

Bernard of Clairvaux, 36, 40–41, 52–53, 77, 81

Berry, duke of, 579, 623

Bertrand, archbishop of Bordeaux, see Clement V, pope

Bertrand of Toulouse, 14n

Berwick, 399, 498

Béthencourt, Jean de, 654

Bethlehem, 278

Béziers, 238–39

Bhongir, 546

Bianchi (White Guelphs), 411

Bible, translation of, 613–14

Bihar, 120, 123

Bijjala II, king of Kalachuri, 112, 114, 115

Bilma, 95, 97

Biram, 588

Birgham, Treaty of, 397–98

Birgitta of Vadstena, 572

bishops, 10

Black Death, 505n

Black Sea, 135, 219, 221, 264, 266, 343, 349, 367, 368, 405, 420, 632, 680

Black Sheep “Qara Qoyunlu” Turkomans, 632–33

Blanche of Castile, regent of France, 254, 259, 303–4, 332, 353–55

Blanche of Lancaster, 591

Blind Harry, 400

Boccaccio, Giovanni, 507

Boccanegra, Guglielmo, 370

Bo Dala, crown princess of Champa, 301

bodhisattva, 111

Boethius, 5–6

Bogğazkesen (“Cutter of the Strait”), 678

Bohemia, xxiv, 275, 465, 613, 615–18, 645, 646–50, 673–74

Bohemian Diet, 647

Bohemund, prince of Antioch, 13–14, 17, 135, 182

Bohemund II, prince of Antioch, 17, 35

Bohemund III, king of Antioch, 170

Bohemund VI, prince of Antioch, 351, 374

Bojador, Cape, 655–56, 658

Boleslaw, king of the Polans, 284

Boleslaw I, duke of Piast, king of Poland, 552

Bolingbroke, Henry, see Henry IV, king of England

Bologna, 85, 415, 572, 575

Bonaventure, 277

Boniface, marquis of Monferrat, 217–19

Boniface IX, pope, 612, 617

Boniface VIII, pope, 410–13

Bonsmoulins, 167

Book of Highways and Kingdoms, 99

Bordeaux, 308, 462, 578

Boril, ruler of Bulgaria, 221

Borjigid clan, Mongol, 185

Bornu, 588

Borommaracha of Suphanburi, king of Syam, 532

Borte, 195–96

Bosnia, 137–39, 141, 168, 170, 424

Bosphorus Strait, 3, 13, 221, 370, 630, 678–79

Boulogne, count of, 303

Bourbon, duke of, 579, 592, 623

Bourges, 354, 663

Bouvines, 249n, 250, 252

Braga, 367

Brahmans, 113, 120–21

Bram, Crusader attack on, 240

Brentwood, 583

Brescia, 415, 613

Breslau, 673

Bretigny, 520

Bretigny,Treaty of, 521–23

Brindisi, 135

Brion, Simon de, 389

Bristol, 205, 397

Brittany, 49, 151

Brittany, count of, 304

Brittany, duke of, 399, 594

Bruce, Robert, the Fifth, 398

Bruce, Robert, the Sixth, king of Scotland, 398–99, 434–38, 466, 497

Buda, 315

Buddha’s Tooth temple, 111, 271

Buddhism, 27, 70, 198, 383, 470, 565

Amitabha (Pure Land), 525

in Dai Viet, 299–300

in Goryeo, 74

in India, 117–19, 121

kings in, 111

Mahayana, 118n

sanghas in, 271

in Sri Lanka, 108, 110–12, 113, 270–72

Theravada, 118n

of Uijong, 72

Buddhist monasteries, 62, 111–12

sohei in, 62, 63, 119

Buddhist temples, 69, 71, 118, 197, 383

Bughra Khan, sultan of Gaur, 403, 479

Bukhara, 263

Bukka, 480

Bukka Raya, sultan of Vijayanagara, 546–47

Bulala, 587

Bulgaria, 220–21, 367–69, 424, 539, 598, 600, 676

timelines, 224, 232

Bulgars, 341

Burgundians, 624, 662–63, 665, 667

Burgundy, 521, 673

Burgundy, dukes of, 152, 521, 577, 579, 601, 621, 623, 625, 662–63, 667, 669, 673

Burji Dynasty, 628

Burkhan Khaldun, 195, 197

Byzantium, 13–16, 35, 103–6, 134–39, 141–46, 142, 168–70, 178, 179–80, 217–22, 219, 222, 375, 389, 424, 450, 506, 529, 537–42, 540, 598–602, 645, 650–52

civil war in, 422–24

Latin Empire in, 180, 217–23, 367–70, 389

ongoing decline of, 221

restoration of, 367–70, 419–25

timelines, 18, 24, 42, 48, 140, 147, 154, 165, 175, 183, 194, 201, 224, 232, 280, 286, 292, 371, 378, 393, 402, 418, 426, 432, 543, 550, 556, 603, 610, 619, 634, 644, 653, 682

Turkish overthrow of, xxiv–xxv, 14, 673, 677–81

Cadiz, 654

Cadmus, Mount, 39

Caen, 501–2

Caesarius of Heisterbach, 239

Caffa, 506

Cairo, 97, 106, 155, 273, 276–78, 335, 337, 339, 342, 347–49, 351, 376, 450–52, 456–57, 458, 548, 628, 629

Old, 456–58

cakravartin, 111

Calais, 515, 517, 521, 577–78, 593, 624, 625

Calixtus II, pope, 11

Callixtus III, antipope, 86

Camões, Luis Vaz de, 90

Campo de Montiel, Battle of, 522

Canary Islands, 654–56

Cancellieri family, 411

Cane, Facino, 645

Cantacuzenus, John, see John VI, emperor of Constantinople

Canterbury, archbishop of, 5–8, 22, 127–32, 204–5, 583

Canton, 505

Cao Tong, king of Dai Viet, 298

Cape Blanc, 658

Cape Bojador, xxiv

Capet, Hugh, 499

Capetian dynasty, in France, 20, 76, 235n, 499, 515

Carcassonne, 239, 240, 463

Caribbean Sea, 455

Carinthia, 321

Carinthia, duke of, 321

Carlisle Castle, 399

Carmagnola, Francesco, 646

Carpathian mountains, 283, 315

Carpini, Giovanni de Plano, 339–40

Carthage, 373

Casimir III “the Great,” king of Poland, 551–55

Casimir IV, king of Poland, 674, 677

Caspian Sea, 226, 263, 264, 267, 310, 313, 349, 558–60, 632

Castelnau, Pierre de, 237

Castelsarrasin, 462

caste system, 120–21

Castielfabib, 243

Castile, 43, 44, 88–89, 89, 237, 242–46, 306–7, 522–23, 570, 591–93, 627, 654, 673

timelines, 524, 530, 536, 597, 603, 661, 672, 682

Catalan Atlas, 457, 458

Catalan Company, 420–22

Catalonia, 420

Categories (Aristotle), 6n

Cathars, 236–40, 257, 259, 354, 486, 582, 647

Catherine (daughter of Charles VI), 623, 625

Caucasus range, 313

Cauchon, Pierre, bishop of Beauvais, 668

Celestine III, pope, 172

Celts, 22

Central America, 187–88, 188, 192, 491

timelines, 194, 201, 206, 496, 504

Central Asia, 310, 505n

Ceos, 420

Ceprano, 364

Ceredigion, 394

Cesena, 574

Ceuta, 655, 657–58

Chad, Lake, 94, 97, 289–90, 587–88

Chagatai (son of Genghis Khan), 267–68, 310, 339, 343

Chagatai khanate, 343, 405–6, 557–60, 630

timelines, 564, 570, 576

Chalkokondyles, 599, 678

Chalukya, 429

Eastern, 112

Western, 112, 115

Champa, 28, 29–31, 300–301, 301, 385, 533–35, 533

timelines, 33, 42, 60, 302, 309, 536, 543, 550

Champagne, count of, 36

Chan Chan, 192

Chandrabhanu, king of the Javakas, 274

Chao Phraya river, 300, 532

Chapultepec, 491

Charente river, 308

Charlemagne, 20, 85, 282

Charles I of Anjou, king of the Two Sicilies, 333, 335, 337, 364–65, 373–75, 390–91, 410

Charles II of Hungary, king of Naples, 553

Charles II “the Lame,” king of Naples, 391–92, 410, 413, 416

Charles IV (Charles of Bohemia), Holy Roman emperor, 503, 551, 553, 571–72, 611

Charles IV, king of France, 463, 464, 466, 616

Charles V, king of France, 517, 520–23, 551, 577–79

Charles VI, king of France, 579–81, 580, 592–94, 601, 612, 621–23, 625, 646, 662, 671

Charles VII, king of France, 662–67, 666, 669–71

Charles of Navarre, 516–17, 521

Charles of Valois, 411, 415

Charles the Simple, 308

Chartres, 52–53

Chastellain, 663

Chatillon, 152

Chauhan clan, 428

Chauhans, 123

Cheapside, 578

Che Bong Ng, Red King of Champa, 533–34

Chen Fu, 56

Cheng Ho, 638

Chengzong, emperor of the Yuan dynasty, 386

Chen Liang, 26

Chen Youliang (Emperor Dahan), 527

Chernigov, 266

Chichen Itza, 187

Chieu Hoang, queen of the Dai Viet, 298–99

Chimu people, 192

China, 28, 59, 69, 97, 119, 134, 195, 282, 291, 301, 343, 382, 505, 529, 531, 546, 565–68, 627, 630, 637–43

climate conditions in, 525

Dai Viet and, 27

Imperial Commissioner’s Office for the Control and Organization of the Coastal Areas, 26

Jin dynasty in, see Jin dynasty (Jurchen)

Ly dynasty in, 29

Mandate of Heaven in, 25, 29

Ming dynasty in, see Ming dynasty

Mongol dynasty in, 380–86, 405

Mongols conquest of, 262

plague in, 525

Song dynasty in, see Song dynasty

timelines, 530, 536, 543

Yuan dynasty in, 383–86, 384, 470, 503, 525–26, 528–29, 565–67, 630–32, 637

Chinon, 251, 664–65

Chioggia, 575

Chios, 143

Chittor, 428

Choe Chung-heon, 73–74, 310–11

Choe Chung-su, 73–74

Choe-U, 311, 342

Chola, 270, 272–73

Chola empire, 108, 112–15, 113

Chormaghan, 313

Christianity, 340, 489, 601, 630

in Africa, 287–88

Dante’s and Marsilius’s contentions about, 485–86

early, 233

Greek thinkers and, 6, 50–53, 76, 356

heresy and, 233–40

Mongols and, 340, 341, 348–49

power and, 3

as pretext for slave trade, 659–60

in Spain, xxiii

see also Greek Orthodox Church; Roman Catholic Church

Christian of Oldenburg, king of Denmark and Norway, 609

Christians:

in Jerusalem, 296

Jews and, 153

Christopher of Bavaria, king of Scandinavia, 609

Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris, 45–46

Chronica Maiora, 578, 581–82, 591, 623, 662

Chronicle of Canterbury, 521–22

Chronicle of Ibn al-Athir, 105

Chronicle of Lanercost, 398–99, 437, 463, 497–98, 501

Chronicle of Melrose, 252, 254

Chronicle of Novgorod, 266

Chronicle of Pluscarden, 434, 445

Chronicle of St. Evroult, 447

Chronicle of the Crusade (Joinville), 226

Chronicles of Lanercost, 397

Chrysanthemum Throne, 214–215, 470

Chung-hsing, 199

Chungnyeol, king of Goryeo, 382

Chupan, 450–52

Church, conflict between Aristotelian logic and, xxiv

churches, east African, 287–88

Church law, 53, 323

Church of the Holy Sepulchre, 296, 333

Church of the Tithe, 315

Cicero, 489

Cilician Armenia, 15, 17, 136, 339, 340

timelines, 18, 24, 140, 147

Circassians, 628

Cistercians, 354

Citadel of Cairo, 628

civilians, 70–74, 153, 538

war and, 263, 321, 391, 501, 547, 574, 578

Clarendon, 129

Clear Mirror, 472, 473

Clement IV, pope, 364–65, 374

Clement V, pope, 413–14, 416

Clement VI, pope, 507, 510, 539, 572

Clement VII, pope, 574, 579, 612

Clifford, Rosamund, 151

Cloistered Emperors, 63–67, 63, 471–72, 569

cloth, satin, 56

Clovis, king of the Franks, 665

Cluny, 52

Cocherel, Battle of, 521

Col de Panissars, Battle of the, 392

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 380

Colhuacans, 491, 494–95

Collationes (Abelard), 51, 57

College of Cardinals, 615, 617

Cologne, 85, 235, 235n, 356, 447

Colomon, king of Hungary, 137

Colonna, Sciarra, 486

Como, 324

Compacts of Basel (Compactata), 649

Compiègne, 663, 667

Concordance of Discordant Canons, 53

Concordat of London, 8, 11

Concordat of Worms, 11

Confucianism, 56–57, 197, 299, 341, 470, 529, 565, 640

Confucius, 29, 56

Congress of Krakow, 551–53

Conrad III, king of Germany, 39–40, 82

Conrad IV, king of Germany, 295, 321, 323–24, 359–60

Conradin, 360, 364–65

Conrad of Hohenstaufen, 410

Constance (German town), 616–17

Constance (mother of Frederick II), 318

Constance (wife of Geoffrey, son of Henry II), 202

Constance of Antioch, 135, 137

Constance of Castile, 591

Constantine, emperor of Rome, 3, 254, 287, 680

Constantine, king of Georgia, 632

Constantine XI Palaeologus, emperor of Byzantium, 677–80

Constantinople, 13, 15, 16, 103, 134, 136, 141–45, 170, 178–79, 220, 221, 223, 257, 367–70, 389, 405, 507, 537–39, 542, 598–602, 650–52

Crusaders in sack of, 179–80, 181, 278

fall of, 235, 242

Latin patriarch of, 257

as Ottoman goal, 419–20, 425

Ottoman overthrow of, xxiv–xxv, 14, 600–602, 629–30, 673, 677–81

Patriarch of, 423, 651

sacred relics of, 368

Constitutions of Clarendon, 128, 130

Conway, Treaty of, 395

copper, 95

copper mines, 443

Corbeil, 303

Córdoba, 45, 244, 306, 307

Corfu, 178

Corinth, Isthmus of, 633

Cortenuova, 321

corvée labor, 526

Coucy, 663

Council of Basel, 649–50

Council of Constance, 617, 646

Council of Florence, 650

Council of Toulouse, 260, 319, 320

Courtrai, 412

Crécy-en-Ponthieu, 502

Cremona, 323

Croatia, 137–39, 141, 168n, 316

Crusaders, 40, 102, 104–6, 155, 156, 157–59, 171, 172, 217–19, 226, 237, 238, 240, 248, 275–78, 348, 374, 376, 538

Crusades, xxiv, 236, 258, 283, 296, 372, 461–63, 551, 673, 676, 677

First, 3–5, 13–17, 29, 36, 104, 134, 153, 182, 420, 650

Second, 39–41, 76, 81, 135

Third, 159, 166–74, 169

Fourth, 176–82, 240, 367

Fifth, 275–79, 276, 281–82, 293, 335

Sixth, 295–96

Seventh, 333–37, 334, 353–55, 364

Eighth, 375

Ninth, 375, 398

Albigensian, 238–40, 239, 242, 244, 258, 259–60, 273, 275, 319

Baltic, 284–85, 285

Christ vs. gain in, 82

end of, 375

against the Hafsids, 372–74

Holy Land Kingdoms of, 13–17, 15, 35, 36, 134n, 173, 180, 217–23, 257, 333, 351, 367–70, 376–77, 389, 449

Reconquista as, 43

in Spain, 244–46

Wendish, 81–82, 238

Cuacuauhpitzahuac, king of Tlatelolco, 495

Culavamsa, 270072

Cumans, 282

Curia Regis, 253, 361

Cuzco, 192–93

Cyprus, 135, 136, 171, 173, 275, 333, 335, 374

Dadu, 380–81, 526–28, 565, 640

Daftary, Farhad, 226n

Dafydd ap Gruffudd, prince of Wales, 395–97

Dai Viet, 27–30, 28, 298–301, 301, 342, 385, 533–34, 533, 535, 640–42

timelines, 33, 42, 60, 68, 75, 302, 309, 536, 543, 550, 644, 653, 661

Dai Viet su ky, 299

Dali, 341

Dalmatia, 137, 139

Dalry, 434

Damascus, 34, 40, 103, 156, 173, 333, 342, 348, 450, 628–29

Dambadeniya, 271, 273, 548

Damietta, 106, 276–78, 293, 335–36, 348, 364

Danishmends, 34

Dan-no-Ura, Strait of, 163

Dante Alighieri, 364, 389, 411, 485–86, 488, 500, 582

Danube river, 139, 168, 220, 315, 388, 419, 673, 676

Danzig, 608

Dardanelles, 217

Dartmoor, 443

Dartmouth, 579

Datong, 643

Daulatabad, 479–80, 481, 546

Dauphiné, 517n

Daura, 588, 589

David, king of Israel, 348

David, rumored Indian Christian king, 279

David I, high king of Scotland, 22, 398

David II, king of Scotland, 497–98, 501, 519

David the Builder, 264

Deccan, 405, 429, 480, 546, 627

de Cernay, Pierres des Vaux, 236, 239–40, 258

de Clare, Richard “Strongbow,” 149

Defensor Pacis, 485

Degrees of Union, 651

Deheubarth, 394

Delhi, 228–31, 229, 270, 326–30, 328, 478–82, 505, 544–49, 561–63, 627

Mongol Invasion of, 406

second sultanate of, 403–8, 427–31

timelines, 550, 556, 560

Timur and, 563, 627–28

Demetrius, 632

de Molay, Jacques, 414, 420

de Montfort, Simon, 205, 207

Denis, Saint, 250

Denmark, 81, 604–9, 607

timelines, 610, 619, 626

Descriptiones Terrarum, 284

Despenser, Hugh, earl of Winchester, 463

Despenser, Hugh the Younger, earl of Winchester, 463–65, 468

Despenser, La, 464

Devagiri, 405, 429, 479

Devon, 582

dharma, 111, 119n, 120

dialectic, of Aristotle, 5–7, 49, 53, 57

Dialogue of Miracles (Caesarius of Heisterbach), 239

Diara Kante, 100

Dibalemi, Dunama, king of Kanem, 288–90

Didymoteichon, 540

Dirgham, 104n

Divine Comedy (Dante), 389, 411

Dlugosz, Jan, 554

Dnieper river, 266

Do Anh Vu, 30

Dome of the Rock, 158–59, 296

Domesday Book, 4

Dominicans, 258, 319–20, 356, 367, 373, 436, 462, 494, 629

Domrémy, 664

Donatists, 234

Dorylaeum, 39

Dover, 254, 579, 593

Dublin, 149

Duklja, 137

Dumbarton Castle, 434

Dum Diversas, xxv, 660

Dunama I, king of Kanem, 95–97

Dunama II, king of Kanem, 95

Dunbar, 399

Dupplin Moor, 502

Dupplin Moor, Battle of, 498

Durán, Diego, 494–95

Duwa Khan, 406–7

Dwarasamudra, 429

Dyfed, 394

Dyrrhachium, 14

dysentery, 78, 103, 153, 254, 259, 303, 435, 463, 578, 617

military campaigns and, 324, 343, 374, 392, 482, 577, 579, 623–24, 662

Eannes, Gil, xxiv, 656, 658

Eastern Trade Route, 290

écorcheurs, 669

Edessa, 137, 155

County of, 13, 15, 35–36, 36, 39

Edinburgh, 399

Edinburgh-Northampton, Treaty of, 466, 497

Edirne, 540, 675–79

Edmund (son of Henry III of England), 359–60

Edmund of Kent, 464

Edo, 98–99

Edward, king of Portugal, 655–57

Edward I, king of England, 362–63, 373–74, 391–92, 394–98, 401, 411, 433–35, 522

Edward II, king of England, 401, 435–36, 438, 445, 463–65

as first English prince of Wales, 433–34

Edward III, king of England, 465–68, 466, 467, 497–99, 501–3, 510, 516–17, 519–21, 577–78, 581, 583, 620

Edward of Woodstock, 501

Edward the Black Prince, 517–18, 520–22, 577–78, 595, 620

Egharevba, Jacob, 98n–99n

Egypt, 16, 89, 104–6, 134n, 135, 155–57, 178–80, 273, 275–78, 291, 295, 335, 336, 342, 343, 346–49, 353, 372–77, 377, 420, 449–51, 458–59, 506, 587, 628–29, 632

timelines, 107, 116, 125, 352, 358, 366, 378, 387, 454, 460, 469, 634, 644

Egyptian Crusade, 374

Eighth Crusade, 375

Eison, 383

El Cid, 44

Eleanor, countess of Toulouse, 242

Eleanor, queen of Portugal, 657

Eleanor of Aquitaine, queen of England, 37–40, 77–79, 150–51, 166, 168, 173, 399, 499

Eleanor of Castile, queen of England, 401, 522

Eleanor of Provence, 361

Elements (Euclid), 46

Elets, 560

Elizabeth, Holy Roman empress, 551

Emeric, king of Hungary, 177, 281

England, 9, 77, 150, 151, 202–5, 233, 257, 293, 359, 360–65, 394–401, 445, 463–68, 466, 507, 509, 591–92, 595–96, 604, 608–9, 620–21

the Anarchy in, 22, 23, 76–79, 126

archers of, 623, 624

barons of, 4–5

Charter of Liberties in, 4–5, 251–52

church and state in, 126–32, 203–4

in Crusades, 159, 166, 168, 177, 275

France’s hostilities with, 153, 159, 166–67, 173–74, 177, 202–3, 204, 238, 248–52, 275, 303–4, 305, 308, 332, 353, 355, 361, 397, 401, 461, 498–503, 515–23, 547, 577–85, 580, 592–95, 623–25, 654, 662–71, 666

Ireland invaded by, 148–49

Magna Carta in, 251–54, 251

papal interdict on, 204–5, 248

rise of feudalism in, 4

Scotland’s rebellion against, 397–401, 433–38, 497–99

taxation in, 203–4, 251–52

thanes (thegns) in, 4

timelines, 12, 18, 24, 33, 80, 87, 93, 133, 140, 147, 154, 160, 165, 175, 183, 194, 206, 210, 216, 241, 247, 256, 261, 269, 309, 317, 358, 366, 371, 378, 387, 402, 409, 439, 448, 454, 469, 477, 483, 504, 511, 530, 536, 586, 590, 597, 603, 626, 634, 644, 672, 682

warming in, 443

Wycliffe in, xxiv

English Channel, 19, 203, 233, 251, 308, 615

Enrico Dandolo, doge of Venice, 177, 217, 220

Enrique of Trastámara, king of Castile, 522–23, 591–92, 654

Ephesus, 420, 422

Epic of Sundiata, 207–9

Epirus, Despotate of, 220, 221, 223, 368

timelines, 224, 232, 371

Erediauwa I, king of Benin, 99

Erhai, Lake, 341

Eric, king of Scandinavia, 605–9, 606

Ericsson, Leif, 443

Erzhou, 343

Esen Tayisi, Oirat khan, 642

Eskenderum, 419, 420

Eskisehir, 419

Essex, 583, 584

Estates-General, 519, 521

Eucharist, 647, 649, 651

doctrine of transubstantiation, 6

Euclid, xxiii, 46

Eugene IV, pope, 646, 649–51, 660

Eugenius III, pope, 36, 40, 81, 82–83

Eulogia, 376

Euphrates river, 273, 419, 420, 450

Europe, 630

climate conditions in, 443–47, 444, 446

plague in, 506–10

timelines, 448, 454, 460

Euse, Jacques d’, 461

Eustace, 78

Evans, G. R., 6

Everest, Mount, 189n

Evesham, Battle of, 353, 363

Evora, 90–91

Évreux, count of, 516

Eweka, king of Benin, 99

Excommunicamus, 320

excommunication, 7–8, 130–31, 237, 238, 254, 359, 360, 361, 391, 618

of Frederick II, 294–96, 322–23, 410

of Louis of Bavaria, 484–85, 488

Extremadura, 90

Ezana, king of Axum, 287

Faenza, 574

Fakhr-ad-Din, general, 335–36

Falkirk, 433

Falköping, 606

famine:

in Europe, 443–47

in India, 480

Fancheng, 379

Fang Guozhen, 526, 527

Fang Xia, 638

Faraj, sultan of Egypt, 628

farmers, 582

Fatimid caliphate, 15, 16, 104–6, 134n

Feast of Saint Clement, 622

Ferdinand (son of John I of Portugal), 656–58

Ferdinand II, king of León, 91

Ferdinand III, king of León-Castile, 306–7

Fernando, king of León, 88

Ferrara, 321, 484

feudalism, 4

Fez, 372, 657

fidaiyan (Assassins), 226–28

Fieschi, Manuele de, 465

Fieschi, Sinibaldo, see Innocent IV, pope

Fifth Crusade, 275–79, 276, 281–82, 293, 335

Finkel, Caroline, xxiv–xxv

Firdausi, 121

Firoz, 230

Firoz, Bahmani sultan, 627–28

Firoz Shah Tughluq, sultan of Delhi, 482, 544–45, 548–49

First Crusade, 3–5, 13–17, 29, 36, 104, 134, 153, 182, 420, 650

First War for Scottish Independence, 401, 466, 497

Fitz Urse, Reginald, 131

Flanders, 152, 249, 412–13, 445, 462, 465, 574, 579, 581

see also Baldwin I, emperor of Constantinople

Flanders, counts of, 152–53, 249–50, 399, 411, 579

Fleet Prison, 583

Flor, Roger de, 420–21

Florence, 321, 364, 415, 416, 507, 510, 572–75, 645, 648, 651

Foggia, 360

Fomba, 459

Fontainebleau, 416

Fonti, 574

Forbidden City, 640, 643

Forth river, 433

Forth valley, 433

Forty, the, 327

Foulques, 177

Four Articles of Prague, 646–47

Fourth Chinese Domination, 640

Fourth Crusade, 176–82, 240, 367

Fourth Lateran Council, 257–58, 275

France, 6, 20, 39, 51, 173, 233, 257, 259, 275, 293, 303–4, 364, 372, 390–91, 411–14, 445, 461–63, 464, 465, 466, 488, 497, 515, 518, 541, 621–23

the Anarchy in, 23

church and state in, 401, 411

constable of, 623, 625, 669

Crusaders from, 39, 159, 166, 177, 244, 275, 332–37, 347, 353–54, 601

England’s hostilities with, 153, 159, 166, 173–74, 177, 202–3, 204, 238, 248–52, 275, 303–4, 305, 308, 332, 353, 355, 361, 397, 401, 461, 498–503, 515–23, 547, 577–83, 580, 592–95, 623–25, 654, 662–71, 666

liberal arts in, 6

north of, 516

Pastoureaux rebellion in, 354–57, 355

Scotland and, 433, 501, 663

timelines, 269, 309, 317, 338, 345, 358, 366, 371, 378, 387, 393, 402, 418, 426, 477, 483, 504, 511, 524, 530, 536, 586, 590, 597, 603, 626, 634, 644, 672, 682

warming in, 443, 444

Francia:

in Crusades, 13

feudalism in, 4

popes in, 83

south of, 235, 240, 258

Francia, Western, 20, 36, 49, 76–78, 149–51, 150, 152, 159, 167, 174, 202–3, 221, 233, 236, 249, 252, 259, 303

timelines, 24, 33, 42, 48, 54, 60, 68, 80, 87, 93, 133, 140, 147, 154, 160, 165, 175, 183, 194, 206, 210, 216, 241, 247, 256, 261

Franciscans, 257, 277, 316, 324, 339, 354, 367, 373, 389, 392, 486, 506, 572, 615, 654

Francis of Assisi, Saint, 257, 277–78

Frankfurt, 81

Franks, Salian, 417

Frederick II, Holy Roman emperor, 250, 275–76, 278–79, 293–96, 316, 318–21, 330, 332, 356, 359, 388

excommunication of, 294–96, 322–23, 410

Italy invaded by, 321–24, 322

Frederick Barbarossa, Holy Roman emperor, 82–86, 84, 141, 159, 168–70

Frederick of Austria, rival king of Germany, 416, 484–85

Frederick of Hapsburg, Holy Roman emperor, 675, 677

Freitas, Lançarote de, 658

Freteval, 129–30

Froissart, Jean, 463–65, 497, 499, 501, 515, 521–23, 574, 577–79, 581–83, 593–94, 596, 620

Fujiwara clan, 61–67, 161

Fujiwara Nobuyori, 66–67

Fulbert, 49–50

Fulk V, count of Anjou, 20–21, 35, 103, 293n

Fulk the Black, 20

Galen, xxiii, 46

Galich, 266

Galileo Galilei, xxiv

Gallipoli, 420–22, 538–39

Gambia, 459

Gampola, 548

Ganges delta, 117, 225

Ganges river, 328

delta of, 403

Gao, 455

Gaoyou, 527

Garcia Ramirez (the Restorer), king of Navarre, 44, 89

Garigliano river, 364

Garnier l’Aleman, 296

Garonne river, 246

Gascony, 435, 499, 501, 517

Gaur, 119, 120, 124, 480

Gaveston, Piers, 435–36, 463–64

Gaza, 347

Gelasius I, pope, 82

Gempei War, 161–65

Genghis Khan, 195–200, 207, 262–68, 279, 310, 316, 333, 339, 380, 557–58, 560, 627, 629, 632

Genoa, 16, 83, 141, 144, 333, 369–70, 415, 420, 506, 539, 541, 571, 575, 578, 646

Geoffrey (son of Henry II), 150–51, 166, 202

Geoffrey the Handsome (Geoffrey Plantagenet), 20–21, 76, 77

George III, king of England, 578n

George IV, king of Georgia, 264

George V, king of Georgia, 450, 453, 650

George VI, king of Georgia, 650

Georgia, 264, 313, 339–40, 453, 632, 640

timelines, 269, 274, 317, 325

Gerald de Barri, 168

Gerald of Wales, 148–49, 151

Gerald the Fearless, 90–91

Gerard of Cremona, xxiii–xxiv, 46–47

Gerger, 450

Germany, 20, 81–86, 249, 250, 257, 318–21, 323–24, 359, 364, 388, 410, 416, 445, 465, 484–86, 488, 489–501, 551, 571, 574, 611–13, 618, 645–50, 674

civil war in, 416

in Crusades, 13, 39, 81–82, 159, 166, 168–70, 177, 275, 282–85, 293, 601–2

electors of, 360, 416, 484–85, 500, 503, 612–13, 675

Holy Roman empire in, 8, 11, 20, 86, 176

national identity of, 318

Slavic tribes in, 238

timelines, 87, 93, 101, 353, 418, 426, 432, 490, 496, 504, 511, 524, 576, 586, 590, 619, 626, 634, 661, 672

Gertrude of Bavaria, queen of Hungary, 282

Gervase of Canterbury, 203

Gesta Principum Polonorum, 283–84

Géza II, king of Hungary, 139

Ghana, 99–100

fall of, 207–9

Ghazan Khan, ruler of Il-khanate, 405–6, 420–21, 450

Ghazi Malik Tughluq, see Ghiyas-ud-Din, sultan of Delhi

Ghaznavid Turks, 121–23

Ghazni, 228, 229, 545

Ghibellines, 410–11, 415

Ghiyas ad-Din Ghuri, sultan of the Ghurids, 122–24, 225

Ghiyas-ud-Din, sultan of Delhi, 431, 478–79

Ghost Month, 643

ghulams, 229

Ghurids, 118n, 121–24, 225–31, 336

Giant’s Tank, 109–10, 110

Gibraltar, 515

Gibraltar, Strait of, 43, 91, 243, 655

Giles Chronicle, 671

Gillingham, John, 166

Girgam, 95–97

Gironde, 578

global warming, 443n

Gloucester, 149

Glyndwr, Owain, 620–21

goats, 445

Gobi Desert, 263, 267

Gobir, 588

Go-Daigo, emperor of Japan, 471–75, 569

Godfrey of Viterbo, 85

Gojong, king of Goryeo, 311, 342

Go-Kameyama, emperor of Japan, 569

gold, 95, 98, 174, 290, 456–57

Golden Bull, 282–83

Golden Horde, 316, 340, 343, 349, 405, 406, 450, 506, 554, 560, 561, 630

timelines, 564, 570, 576

Golden Horn, 679, 680

Goliath, 348

Golubac, 673

Gongmin, king of Goryeo, 565–67

González de Clavijo, Ruy, 627

Gopala, king of Pala empire, 117–19

Goryeo (Korea), 69–74, 69, 198, 310–13, 339, 341–42, 379, 381–85, 565–68

Council of Generals (Chungbang) in, 72–74

Goryeo (Korea) (continued)

timelines, 75, 80, 87, 317, 325, 570, 576, 586

see also Joseon

Goryeosa, 70–74, 311

Go-Sanjo, emperor of Japan, 61–63

Goseibai shikimoku, 212, 215

Go-Shirakawa, emperor of Japan, 65–67, 161, 163–64, 212–13

Gospel, 647

Go-Toba, emperor of Japan, 163–64, 213–15

Gottland, 609

Go-Uda, emperor of Japan, 471–72

Granada, 88, 89, 306, 307, 307, 515, 655

Grand Canal, 526

Gratian, 53

Gray, Reginald de, 395

Gray, Sir Thomas, 465, 467, 498, 518

Greater Poland, 284

Great Gift ceremony, Hindu, 120

Great Wall, 640

Great Zimbabwe, 291

Greece, 135, 171, 367–68, 599, 633, 678

Greece, ancient

ideas and thinkers of, xxiii–xxiv, 46–47, 354, 681

natural philosophy of, 76

Greek fire, 630

Greek Orthodox Church, 219–20, 222, 376, 389, 539, 541–42, 554–55, 650

Catholic beliefs vs., 376n, 651–52

Greenland, 443, 604

Gregoras, Nicephorus, 538

Gregory VIII, pope, 159

Gregory IX, pope, 294–96, 318–23

Gregory X (Teobaldo Visconti), 374–75

Gregory XI, pope, 572–74

Gregory XII, pope, 617

Gregory the Great, 412

Gregory the Priest, 136

Greif, Hannsen, 601–2

Grim, Edward, 131–32

Grimm, Wilhelm and Jakob, 447

Grimoard, William, see Urban V, pope

griots, 207

Guanches, 654

Guelphs, 410–11, 415

Guesclin, Bertrand de, 578

Guhila, 428

Gui, Bernard, 462

Guibert of Nogent, 153

Guienne, Duchy of, 464, 465, 467

Gujarat, 407, 428, 549, 563, 627

Gukansho, 61–63, 65–66, 162, 213

Gulbarga (Karnataka), 546, 546

Gulf of Tonkin, 27

Gunther of Pairis, 217

Guy, king of Jerusalem, 157–58, 170–71, 173

Guyuk Khan, Great Khan, 339–41

Guzman, Dominic de, 236–37, 257–58, 320

Gwalior, 228

Gwynedd, 394–95

Haakon, king of Norway, 605, 609

Hadrian’s Wall, 399

Hafsid dynasty, 372–73

Hagia Sophia, 680

Haidar, Mirza Muhammad, 558

Hailing, prince, 57–58

hajj, 95, 97, 103, 155, 290, 351, 451, 456, 480, 482

Hakata Bay, 382, 383

Hakut, Malik, 326

Halil Pasha, 676–78

Hama, 347, 348

Hanazono, emperor of Japan, 471

Han dynasty, in China, 27

Hangzhou, 55–56, 55n, 382

Han Lin’er, 526

Han Roe, 72

“Hansel and Gretel” (Grimm), 447

Hanseong, 568

Han Shantong, 526, 527

Hanyang, 568

Harahara, 480

Harald Tangle-Hair, 604

Harfleur, 623–24

Harihara Raya I, king of Vijayanagara, 545–48

Harim, 34

Harima, 471

Harlech Castle, 621

hashish, 228

Hattin, Battle of, 157

Hausa Kingdoms, 588–89, 589

hawai (rockets), 546

Hawarden, 395

Hawkwood, John, 573–74

Hedwig, king of Poland, 553–55

Heiji Disturbance, 66–67, 161–62

Heiji Era, 65n

Helena, empress of Byzantium, 599

Hellespont, 176, 538–39

Heloise, 49–50, 52

Henry, prince of Portugal, xxiv

Henry (son of John I of Portugal), 655–59

Henry I, king of Constantinople, 221–22

Henry I, king of England and duke of Normandy, 3–5, 7–8, 10, 19–22, 76, 251

Henry II (Henry Plantagenet), king of England, 76–79, 126–32, 148–53, 166–68, 174, 203, 293n, 399, 498

Henry III, king of England, 304, 307, 332, 335, 359–65, 367, 375, 394–95

Henry IV, Holy Roman emperor, 8, 176

Henry IV, king of England, 595–96, 608, 614, 620–21

Henry V, Holy Roman emperor, 8–11, 16, 19–20

Henry V, king of England, 620, 623–25, 662, 671

Henry VI, Holy Roman emperor, 170, 172–73, 176

Henry VI, king of England, 662–63, 668–71

Henry VII, king of Germany, 414–16

Henry VII (son of Frederick II), 320–21

Henry of Huntingdon, 19, 21, 22

Henry the Fat, king of Navarre, 374

Henry the Fowler, 20

Henry the Lion, 82–83, 86, 177, 410

Henry the Pious, duke of Greater Poland, 315–16

Henry the Younger, 130, 150–53, 166

Herat, 225, 558

Hérault river, 238

Herbert of Bosham, 128, 131

Hereford, 397, 465

heresy, 233–40, 242–43, 249, 413, 488, 582, 615

church councils and, 257, 260, 649

punishment of, 319–320, 359

trials for, 617, 667–68

see also Albigensian Crusade; Inquisition; Languedoc

Hermann of Carinthia, 46

Heselrig, Sir William, 400

heterodoxy, 51–52

Hexamilion Wall, 633, 673

Hiei, Mount, 63

Himalayas, 225

Hinduism:

Angkor Wat and, 30–31

beliefs of, 119n

castes in, 120–21

in Champa, 300–301

in Chola empire, 108, 110–15

devaraja in, 29

in India, 118–20, 123–24, 225, 230–31, 270, 327, 329, 405, 407, 427–31, 478, 479, 480, 544–46

in Sri Lanka, 271

Hindu Kush mountains, 267

History of Florence (Machiavelli), 646

Ho dynasty, 640

Hogen Era, 65n

Hogen Incident, 65

Hohenstaufens, 410

Hojo clan, 473–74

Hojo Masako, 213–14

Hojo Takatoki, 472–74

Hojo Tokimasa, 212–13

Hojo Tokimune, 382–83, 470

Hojo Yoshitoki, 213–14

Holinshed, Raphael, 596, 663, 667

Holland, 249

Holy Land, 21, 37, 77, 166, 171, 176, 258, 279, 281, 294, 354, 375, 377, 462

Crusader Kingdoms in, 13–17, 156–59

Holy Roman Empire, 8–11, 9, 82–86, 83, 159, 168–70, 316, 318–24, 415, 485, 500, 645–50, 648, 652

Electoral League of, 500

Guelphs and Ghibellines in, 410–11

imperial cities in, 611–12

Innocent IV and, 359–60, 410

shrinkage of, 365

timelines, 12, 18, 24, 33, 42, 48, 54, 60, 68, 87, 93, 183, 194, 206, 210, 216, 241, 247, 256, 261, 280, 286, 292, 297, 302, 325, 338, 345, 358, 366, 371, 387, 393, 402, 418, 426, 432, 490, 496, 504, 511, 524, 576, 586, 590, 619, 626, 634, 653, 661, 672, 682

Homs, 347, 348

Honan, 505

Hongwu emperor (Zhu Yuanzhang), 527–29, 565, 567–69, 637–38

Hongxi, emperor of China, 642

Honorius III, pope, 258–59, 278–79, 282–84, 293, 294

Honorius IV, pope (Savelli, Giacomo), 391, 392

Honshu, 62

Ho (Le) Quy Ly, 534–35

Horikawa, emperor of Japan, 63

Horns of Hattin, 157

Hosokawa Yoriyuki, 566

Houkouang, 505

Hoysala, 112, 115

Hoysala Kingdom, 429, 479

Huai river, 59, 505

Huete, 91–92

Hue Tong, king of Dai Viet, 298–99

Hugues de Boves, 250

Huitzilopochtli, 491, 493, 495

Hujwiri, ‘Ali, 545

Hulagu Khan, 341–43, 347–49, 374, 405–6

Humai, 94–95

human sacrifice:

Moche, 192

Toltec, 187

Hunac Ceel, king of the Mayans, 187

Hundred Years’ War, 499–503, 500

Hungary, 137–39, 141, 144, 168, 170, 177, 281, 315–16, 354, 388, 424, 539, 553–54, 601, 633, 645, 673–77, 678

in Crusades, 177, 275

German knights in, 282

timelines, 140, 147, 183, 280, 286, 292, 297, 317, 325, 556, 564, 570, 603, 610, 619, 653, 661, 672, 682

Huniades, John, 675–77

Hus, Jan, xxiv, 613, 615–18, 646

Husain, ‘Ala’ al-Din, 122

Husayn, Amir, governor of Balkh, 557–58

Hussites, 614, 618, 646–50

Hussite Wars, 618, 675

Hu Wei-yung, 529

Ibn al-Ahmar, king of Arjona, 307

Ibn al-Athir, 61, 105–6, 155, 157–59, 170, 172, 276, 296

Ibn al-Qalanisi, 103

Ibn Amir Hajib, 456

Ibn ‘Arabshah, 561

Ibn Battuta, 95, 451–53, 456–59, 480, 506, 547–48

Ibn Hud, 306–7

Ibn Khaldun, 349, 351, 457, 459, 629

Ibn Mardanish, 88–89, 89

Ibn Munir, 36

Ibn Sa’id, 289–90

ibn Shaddad, 155, 172

Ibn Tumart, 44, 373

Ibn Wasil, 295–96, 336, 347

Iceland, 604

Idris II, Almohad caliph, 372

Ife, 98–99

Ilah Ahai, 107

Il-khanate, 343, 349, 369, 374, 376, 379, 405–6, 419–21, 450–53, 453, 558, 560, 627, 630

timelines, 426, 432, 439, 454, 460, 469

Illyricum, 137

Iltumish, sultan of Delhi, 229–30, 229, 326, 327, 329, 330

Ilyas Shahi dynasty, 480

‘Imad al-Din al-Isfahani, 34

Imam al-Shafi’i, 106

imperial cities, 611–12

Inca, 192–93

Incarnation, doctrine of, 236

India, 29, 108, 112–15, 117–24, 228–31, 279, 291, 328, 546, 627, 638

Eastern and Western Chalukya in, 112

famine in, 480

Ghaznavids in, 121–23

Mongols in, 405

new sultanates in, 481

north of, 264

numbering system of, 46

Pala empire in, 117–20, 123–24

plague in, 507

Sena empire in, 117, 119–24

south of, 270, 272, 273

timelines, 116, 125, 133, 232, 241, 274, 280, 321, 338, 409, 432, 439, 448, 483, 490, 496, 550, 556, 560

Timur and, 561–63, 627–28

see also Delhi

Indian Ocean, 230, 272

Indravarman II, king of Khmer, 300

Indravarman V, king of Champa, 385

Indus, Battle of the, 264–66

Indus river, 226, 264–66, 482, 561

Inferno, 364

Injong, king of Goryeo, 70

Innocent III, pope, 176–78, 180–82, 204–5, 220, 236–37, 240, 242–46, 248–49, 253–54, 257–58, 277, 283

Innocent IV, pope, 323–24, 330, 359–61, 408

Innocent V, pope, 340

Innocent VI, pope, 539–41

Inquisition, 260, 260, 320, 324

in Italy, 259

interdict, 8, 130, 205, 238

investiture, papal right of, 5, 7–8, 10–11

Iran (Persia), 121, 122

Irbil, 157

Ireland, 6, 150, 166, 203, 436–37, 465, 507

England’s invasion of, 148–50

timelines, 154, 160, 165

Irene, queen of Germany, 176, 178

Irish Sea, 148

Iron Crown of the Lombards, 648

Iron Gates, 675

Isaac Angelus, emperor of Byzantium, 145–46, 170, 176, 178–79, 219

Isabeau, queen of France, 621

Isabella (daughter of Charles VI), queen of England, 594–95

Isabella (daughter of Philip IV), queen of England, 401, 435, 464–68

Isabella of Angoulême, 202, 308

Isabelle, queen of France, 153, 499

Isami, 327, 329

Isar river, 83

Isfahan, 558

Isfizar, 558

Islam, 34, 277, 279, 283, 430, 451, 463, 601, 629, 638

in Africa, 588–89

in central Africa, xxiv, 94–97, 288, 290

code of hospitality of, 157–58

Crusaders vs., 170, 172–73, 449

in Georgia, 264

in Hagia Sophia, 680

in India, 124, 225–31, 327–28, 427–31, 478, 480, 545

Islamic states, 155–56

in Jerusalem, 158–59, 296, 332–33, 337, 351

in Middle East, 351

Mongols and, 348, 349

in North Africa, 373

in old Il-khanate lands, 453

in Ottoman empire, 419

ruling custom of, 346

Shi’ite, 226–28

slavery and, 226, 588

in Spain, xxiii, 43–47, 88–92, 177, 242–46, 306–7, 372, 373, 515, 655

Sufism in, 544–45

Sunni, 226n, 228

in Syria, 102–5

Timur and, 558, 628

among Turks, 134

and the West, 681

in West Africa, 99–100, 208–9, 455, 459

Islamic law, 44

Isle of Wight, 579

Issyk-Kul, Lake, 505

Istanbul, Constantinople’s transformation into, xxv

Italy, 53, 76, 135, 141, 144, 257, 294, 295, 318, 320, 359, 364, 370, 374–75, 389, 410, 413, 414–16, 465, 485–86, 540–41, 616, 648

city-states of, 16, 83, 85

in Crusades, 13–14

Holy Roman Empire in northern, 8, 83–86, 646

liberal arts in, 6

maritime republics of, 16

northern, 83, 321, 364, 411, 484, 604, 645–46

northern, Lombard League in, 318

Papal States of, 10, 15, 82–83, 86, 360, 410, 571–73

Renaissance in, xxiii–xxiv

scholarship in, 46

southern, 360, 365, 373, 389, 391, 410

southern (Dukedom of Apulia and Calabria), 13, 15, 135, 141

timelines, 18, 24, 87, 93, 101, 147, 154, 325, 331, 418, 426, 432, 490, 496, 504, 511, 524, 576, 586, 590, 619, 626, 634, 653, 661, 672

trading posts of, 16

war within, 571–75, 573

Itinerarium Regis Ricardi, 171

Ivan Asen, emperor of Bulgaria, 367

ivory, 95, 97–98, 290

Izu, 213

Izu Islands, 162

Jackson, Peter, 230

Jacques Bonhomme insurgents, 520, 583

Jaén, 307

Jaffa, 172

Jaffna, 547–48

Jalal ad-Din, shah of Khwarezm, 263–66, 333

Jalalu-d din Firu Khilji, 404

Jalandhar, 406

James, king of Aragon, 243, 246, 305–7, 372–73, 390, 410, 420

James II, king of Aragon, 463

James II, king of Sicily, 392

Jamuqa, 196–98

Japan, 61–67, 63, 69, 161–65, 382, 383, 386, 470, 566–69, 569

Chrysanthemum Throne in, 214, 215, 470

Cloistered Emperors in, 63–67

Kamakura Shogunate in, 162

pirates from, 566–67

Records Office in, 62

samurai in, 62, 66, 161, 163, 211, 382–83, 470, 473, 475

shoguns in, xxiv, 211–15, 470

Southern and Northern Courts in, 475, 475

timelines, 68, 75, 80, 165, 175, 216, 224, 477, 483, 490, 570, 576, 586

Jargeau, 665

Jatavarman Sundara, 272

Jaunpur, 549

Java, 108

Javakas, 274

Jaya Indravarman II, king of Champa, 29–30

Jaya Paramesvaravarman II, king of Champa, 300–301

Jayasi, 428

Jayavarman II, king of Khmer, 30

Jayavarman VIII, king of Khmer, 385

Jeanne d’Arc, 664–68

Jebe, 263, 264

Jeong Dojeon, 568

Jeong Jung-bu, 71–72

Jeroschin, Nicolaus von, 284–85

Jerusalem, 40, 76, 134n, 168, 173, 178, 179, 233, 237, 275, 282, 293, 295–96, 318, 351, 375, 450, 676

Crusader retaking of, 296

patriarch of, 296

Saladin’s conquest of city of, 158–59

Jerusalem, Kingdom of, 13–16, 15, 21, 35–36, 103–6, 135, 156–59, 166, 171–73, 171, 275n, 293, 333, 351, 353, 369, 376–77

Jews, 457

in Egypt, 89

English imprisonment of, 205

expulsion from France of, 153, 413, 463

French, Pastoureaux’s murder of, 462–63

laws of, 395

Philip IV’s taxes on, 401

in Spain, 89

Jiangzhou, 527

Jianwen, emperor of China, 638

Jiaozhi, see Dai Viet

Jien, court priest, 213

jihad, 34, 35–36, 102–3, 155, 157

Jin dynasty (Jurchen), 25, 28, 29, 55–59, 59, 195, 197–200, 262, 379

timelines, 33, 42, 60, 68, 75, 201, 206, 210, 269, 274, 302, 325

Jin empire, 310, 311–13, 341

jivatman, 119n

Joan (daughter of Louis X), 417

Joan, queen of France, 507, 515

Joan, queen of Navarre, 374, 515

Joan, queen of Scotland, 498

Joanna, queen of France, 579

Joan of Navarre, queen of France, 398, 416, 516

Jochi (son of Genghis Khan), 263, 266–68, 310, 313, 339, 560

Jogaila, grand duke of Lithuania, 554–55

Johannes Scotus Erigena, 6

John, duke of Burgundy, 621–23

John, king of England (John Lackland; John Softsword), 150–51, 166–67, 173–74, 202–5, 233, 238, 240, 248–55, 308, 360, 362, 399, 625

John, king of Jerusalem, 276, 293–95

John (son of Louis IX), 374

John I, king of Castile, 592

John I (John of Aviz), king of Portugal, 592–93, 654–56

John II, king of Castile, 654

John II, king of France, 515–22

John II Comnenus, emperor of Constantinople, 16–17, 35, 135

John III Vatatzes, ruler of Nicaea, 222–23, 222, 367–69

John IV Lascaris, ruler of Nicaea, 369–70

John V, emperor of Byzantium, 423, 425, 537–42, 598–99

John VI, emperor of Constantinople, 423–25, 507, 537–39, 541

John VII, emperor of Byzantium, 629–30

John VIII, emperor of Byzantium, 650–52, 676

John XXII, pope, 461–62, 484–88

John XXIII, pope, 615–17

John Cinnamus, 143

John Ducas, 135

John of Bohemia, 500

John of Brienne, 293n, 318

John of Fordun, 399, 400, 434, 437, 447

John of Gaunt, 517, 521, 577–79, 581, 583, 591–93, 595, 596n, 620, 654

John of Procida, 389

John of Salisbury, 53, 77

John of Trokelowe, 445

Joinville, Jean de, 226, 303, 308, 332–37, 353, 355, 373–74

Jordan river, 347

Joseon, Goryeo as, 567–69, 569

Jurchen people, 25–27, 57–58

see also Jin dynasty (Jurchen)

jury trial, 129

Justinian, emperor of Rome, 135

Juvaini, 264, 268

Juzjani, Minhaj Siraj, 122, 329

Ka’aba, 429, 457

Kabil Shah, khan of Chagatai, 557

Kadan, 315

Kaesong, 71, 311

Kafur, Malik, 407, 429, 478

Kahta, 450

Kaifeng, 25, 26, 29, 55, 56, 199, 310, 312–13

Kajoor, 459

Kaka, 587

Kakatiya, 112, 115

Kakatiya Kingdom, 429, 478–80

Kalachuri, 112

Kalka, 313

Battle of, 267

Kalka river, 266

Kalmar, 607

Kaloyan, emperor of the Bulgarians, 220–21

Kalyani, 112

Kamakura, 470

Kamakura shogunate, 162–64, 162, 211–15, 382, 471–75

kamikaze, 383

Kamo river, 63

kampaku, 61n

Kanem, 94–96, 288–90, 289, 372, 587–89

Saifawa dynasty of, 95

timelines, 101, 107, 116, 210, 216, 292, 297, 302, 590, 597

Kangdong, 310

Kanghwa, 311, 341

Kannauj, 329

Kano, 588

Kara, 404, 405

Karakorum, 316, 339, 342–43, 347, 379–80, 637

Kardashian family, 519n

Karl Knutsson, king of Sweden, 609

karma, 119n

Katsina, 588

Kaveri, 546

kayasthas, 121

Ked-Buqa, 347–48

Keita clan, 208–9

timelines, 210, 216

Kemmu Restoration, 474

Kent, 78, 583

Kent, earl of, 304

Kerait tribe, Mongol, 195–96

Kerak, castle of, 449

Khalil, 346

Khalil al-Ashraf, sultan of Egypt, 376–77, 449

Khandesh, 548, 549

khans, 195, 196

Khatun, 452

Khentil mountains, 195

Kherlen river, 304

Khilji dynasty, 404

Khitan people, 310–11

Khmer, 28, 29–31, 300–301, 301, 385, 531–33, 533

timelines, 33, 42, 60, 302, 309, 536, 543, 550

Khojend, 263

Khokars, 228

Khorasan, 34, 121, 122, 134, 480

Khusrau Malik, sultan of the Ghaznavids, 122–23

Khusru, Amir, 428–29

Khusru Khan, sultan of Delhi, 430–31, 478

Khwarezm, Kingdom of, 262–67, 279, 333, 558

timelines, 269, 274

Khyber Pass, 121, 407

Kiev, 266, 310, 313, 315, 316, 367

Kilu-ghari, 404

Kilwa Chronicle, 97

Kilwa empire, 97–98

Shirazi dynasty of, 97

timelines, 101, 107, 116, 210, 216

Kim Bo-dang, 72

Kim Bu-sik, 71

Ki-Ming-Chan mountain range, 505

Kim Ton-jung, 71–72

Kingdom of Two Sicilies, 333, 335, 337, 364–65, 373–75, 389, 390–91, 410

Kinghorn, 497

Kirman, 34

Kitabatake Chikafusa, 476

Knighton, Henry, 507, 509–10, 613

Knights Hospitallers, 44, 157–58, 601

Knights of the Holy Sepulchre, 44

Knights Templar, 44, 157–58, 377, 413–14, 416, 420

Grand Master of, 335

Koblenz, 321

Kogon, emperor of Japan, 473–75

Koje Island, 72

kola nuts, 95

Konoe, emperor of Japan, 61, 64–65

Konrad, duke of Mazovia, 283

Konyali, 419

Korea, see Goryeo

Koryeo-San, 342

Kosovo, Battle of, 598

Kotte, 548

Krakow, 367, 551–52, 674

Krewo, 555

Krishna, 546

Krishna river, 479

Kublai Khan, 341–43, 349, 379–86, 381, 405–6, 505, 525–26, 565, 637

Kujawy, 284

Kuju, 311

Kumano, 66

Kumbi-Saleh, 99–100, 207

Kuniyoshi, 471, 472

Kurds, 104

Kurikara, Battle of, 163

Kutluk, 505

Kyong, prince, 70–71

Kyoto, 62, 66, 67, 163, 212–15, 383, 470, 472–76, 566, 569

Kyushu, 382

laborers, 582–84

Ladislaus, king of Hungary, 677

Lagos, 658–59

Lahneck Castle, 613

Lahore, 122, 123, 226, 228–29, 326, 328, 545

Lakhnawati, 480

Laknaur, 328

Lakshman Sen, king of the Sena, 119, 123–24

Lalibela, Gebra Maskal, 287–88

Lanark, 400

Lancaster, duke of, 591

Lancaster, House of, 596, 625

Landa, Diego de, 188

Lanfranc, 5–6

Langton, Stephen, archbishop of Canterbury, 204, 248–49, 252

Languedoc, 236–37, 238, 240, 246, 250, 258–59, 320, 391, 517, 582

Laodicea, 39

La Rochelle, 578

Lascaris, Beatrice, duchess of Milan, 645–46

Las Huelgas, 244

Las Navas, 244, 245

Las Navas de Tolosa, Battle of, 244, 245, 246

Lastours, 240

Latin, 354

classical Greek texts available in, 5

Qur’an translated into, 46

Latin Empire, 180, 217–23, 367–70, 389

timelines, 224, 232, 371, 378

Latin language, xxiii

law:

Church, 53, 323, 413

English, 395

English church, 126–27

in Germany, 388

Islamic, 226, 332, 351, 588

Jewish, 89, 395

Mongol, 198, 339

natural, 51

Salic, 417, 463, 467, 499, 515

Tang, 329

Western Xia, 198

“Law of the Fishes,” 117

Lazar, 598

Legnano, 85

le Gros, Guy Foulques, see Clement IV, pope

Leicester, 507

earl of, 205, 238

Leinster, 148–49

Le Loi (Binh Dinh Vuong), king of Dai Viet, 640–42

Le Mans, 594

Leo I, king of Cilician Armenia, 17

León, 43, 44, 88, 89, 242, 243

Leonardo da Vinci, xxxiv

León-Castile, 306–7, 307, 515

lepers, 463

Le (Ho) Quy Ly, 534–35

Lesser Brothers, see Franciscans

Letts, 284

Lewes, 362

li, 57

Li Anchaun, king of Western Xia, 198–99

Liegnitz, 315

Lille, 250

Limoges, 174, 577–78

Limpopo river, 290–91

Lin’an (Hangzhou), 55–56

Lincoln, earl of, 435

Lindholm Castle, 607

lingams, 108, 113, 300–301

lingayat, 113–14

Lionel of Antwerp, 620

Li-p’an mountains, 267

Li Qingzhao, 25

Li Renxiao, king of Western Xia, 197–98

Lisbon, 88, 658

Lithuania, 554–55

timelines, 556, 564, 570

Lithuanians, 284–85

Little Poland, 284

Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, prince of Wales, 394–97

logic, 6

Loire river, 251, 517, 578, 663, 665

Lollards, 614

Lombard, Peter, 53, 354, 647n

Lombard League, 85–86, 318–24, 364, 410, 484, 486, 571, 573

Lombardy, 322, 323, 486, 604, 646, 648

London, 30, 76, 203, 252, 361, 363, 434, 451, 465, 501, 520, 578, 582, 583, 584, 625

Long Campaign, 675

Longxing Peace Accord, 59

Lopburi, 531–32

Lorraine, duke of, 321

Lothair III, Holy Roman emperor, 20

Louis, duke of Orleans, 594, 621

Louis (dauphin, son of Charles VI), 621

Louis IV (Louis of Bavaria), Holy Roman emperor, 416, 484–86, 487, 499–503, 551, 571

Louis VII, king of France, 36–40, 37, 76–79, 128, 148, 150–52, 167

Louis VIII, king of France, 248–49, 254–55, 259, 303

Louis IX, king of France, 259, 303–4, 308, 332–37, 347, 353–57, 364, 367–68, 372–74, 391, 398, 410

Louis X, king of France, 416–17, 466

Louis of Anjou, 520, 521

as king of Hungary, 551, 552, 553

Louvre, 250

Lübeck, 83

Lucca, 415, 572–73, 575

Lund Cathedral, 608

Luong river, 534

Lusignan, Hugh de, 308

Lu Yu, 56, 59

Ly dynasty, of Vietnam, 27, 29, 298–99, 301

Lyons, 238, 324, 375, 376, 413

Ly Than Tong, 29

Ly Thuong Kiet, 27

Ma’bar, 506

Machaut, Guillaume de, 510, 551

Machiavelli, Niccolò, xxiv, 612, 646

Mac Murchada, Diarmait, king of Leinster, 148–49

Madanapala, king of Pala empire, 120

Madden, Thomas, 36

Madura, sultanate of, 480

Mafia, 97

Magha, 270–71

Maghan, king of Mali, 457

magic, 459

Magna Carta, 251–54, 251, 283, 361

Magnus Ericsson, king of Sweden and Norway, 604–5

Magyar tribes, 137

Mahakassapa, 111

Mahavansa, The, 108, 110

Mahmud, Nasiruddin, 561–63

Mahmud Ghuri, 225

Ma-Huan, 638

Maimon ben Joseph, Rabbi, 89

Maimonides, 89

Maine, 151, 202

Mainz, 19, 321

Mainz, archbishop of, 613

Majorca, 306

Malaya, 450

Maldives, 638

Malestroit, Treaty of, 501

Mali, 209, 209, 455–59, 456, 458, 459

timelines, 460, 469, 477

Malik Shah, 34

Malinke people, 100, 208

Malmesbury, 78

Malwa, 428, 549, 627

mamluks, 225–26, 228, 327, 336–37, 346–49, 376, 404, 449, 450, 459, 463, 628, 632

Circassian, 628

timelines, 352, 358, 366

Manco Capac, king of the Incans, 192–93

Manfred, 360, 363–64, 390

mangonels, 258–59

Mani, 455

Mannar, 109–10

Mansa Musa, king of Mali, 455–59, 458

Mansa Sulayman, king of Mali, 457–59

Mansurah, 335–36

Mantua, 321, 572

Manuel, 422, 541

Manuel I Comnenus, emperor of Constantinople, 35, 40, 103–5, 134–39, 138n, 141–44, 168n, 673

Manuel II, emperor of Byzantium, 598–601, 629–33, 650

Mao Ziyuan, 525

Mapungubwe, 289, 290–91

timelines, 292, 297, 302

Mar, earl of, 498

Maragheh, 349

Marara, king of the Zagwe, 287

Marcel, Etienne, 519

Marche, 308

Marche, count of, 202, 335

Mardin, 632

Margaret, queen of Norway, 397, 605

Margaret, queen of Scotland, 397

Margaret, ruler of Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, 605–9, 606

Margaret (heir to Scottish throne), 397–98

Margaret (wife of Henry the Younger), 153

Margaret of Provence, queen of France, 333, 336

Marguerite, queen of England, 401

Marica river, 537

Mari Diata II, king of Mali, 459

Marigny, 667

Marinids, 372, 655–57

timelines, 661, 672, 682

Marion of Lanark, 400

Marmande, 259

Marmara, Sea of, 170, 222, 370, 423, 680

Marrakesh, 45, 88, 244, 372

Marseille, 168, 507, 541

Marshal, William, 167, 252–55, 304

Marsilius of Padua, 485–86, 500, 582

Märstetten, count of, 484

Martin IV, pope, 389, 391

Martin V, pope, 618, 648

Martirano, 321

Marwan II, caliph, 134n

Mary, queen of Hungary and Poland, 553–54

Mary of Antioch, empress of Byzantium, 137, 144–45

Masakiyo, 67

Master of Hungary, 354–55, 462

mathematics, 46

Matilda, Holy Roman empress, 10, 19–22, 103

England invaded by, 22, 76–78, 149, 254

Matthew, gospel of, 257

Matthew (son of Emperor John VI), 537–38

Mayans, 187–88

Mayapan, 187–88

mazmudins, 242

Mazovia, 284, 552

Meath, king of, 148–49

Meaux, 579

Meaux, Geoffrey de, 445

Mecca, 95, 97, 103, 155, 290, 429, 451, 456, 480, 482, 638

sharif of, 351

Medici, Cosimo de’, 650

Medieval Warm Period, 443

Medina, 351

Mediterranean Sea, 14, 102, 104, 134, 135, 176, 236, 294, 306, 342, 351, 370, 372–73, 391, 445, 506, 551, 587, 588, 628, 655

Mehmed, emperor of the Ottomans, 632–33, 650

Mehmet II, emperor of the Ottomans, 676–80

Mekong river, 531

Melisande, queen of Jerusalem, 21

Melun, 49

Mencius, 341

Menelik, 288

Menteith, John, 434

Mercia, 394

Merkit coalition, Mongol, 196

Merv, 134, 264

Mesoamerica, 188–89

Mesopotamia, 157

Messina, 506

Messina, Strait of, 389

Mesufa tribe, 85

Metternich, Klemens von, 16

Meulan, 663

Meung, 663

Mewar, 230, 329, 428

Mexica people (Aztecs), 491–95, 493

Mexico, Valley of, 491

Michael, archangel, 288

Michael VIII Palaeologus, ruler of Byzantium, 369–70, 375–76, 389

Michael IX, co-emperor of Ottoman empire, 420–22

Michael Comnenus, ruler of Epirus, 220, 221

Michelangelo Buonarroti, xxiv

Middle East, 121, 343, 349, 450

Milan, 83, 85, 235, 320, 321, 323–24, 374, 484, 486, 571, 573–75, 612, 646, 648, 675

Milan, archbishop of, 235n

Minamoto clan, 62–63, 65–67, 161, 473

Minamoto Sanetomo, 213

Minamoto Tametomo, 65

Minamoto Tameyoshi, 65

Minamoto Yoriie, shogun, 212–13

Minamoto Yoritomo, 162–64, 211–13

Minamoto Yoshinaka, 162–63

Minamoto Yoshitomo, 65–67, 162

Minato river, 474

Minerve, 240

Ming dynasty, 528, 528, 534, 565–69, 637–43, 641

timelines, 570, 576, 586, 644, 653, 661

Minor Friars, see Franciscans

Mircea the Elder, prince of Wallachia, 633

Moche people, 191–92

Modena, 324

Monastery of St. George, 539

money, paper, 55–56

Mongke, Great Khan, 339–43, 382

Mongolia, 310, 379

timelines, 269, 274

Mongols, 55n, 195–200, 262–68, 279, 282, 301, 310–16, 312, 327, 328, 329, 333, 339–43, 344, 347–49, 374, 379–86, 405–8, 406, 420, 450, 452, 470, 525, 527, 531, 533, 554, 557–63, 565–66, 627–32, 637, 642

Christianity and, 340, 341, 348–49

drinking habits of, 339, 340, 341, 405

empire of, 265, 314, 343, 344

Islam and, 348, 349

timelines, 201, 206, 210, 325, 345, 352, 387, 393, 409, 418

Monreale, church of, 324

Monstrelet, Enguerrand de, 622–23, 625, 662, 664–65, 669, 678–79

Montclus, 462

Montfort-l’Amaury, count of, 205

Montlhéry, 303

Montpellier, 465

Montreal Castle, 155

Montrose, 399

Morava river, 598

Moravia, 388

Moray, Thomas Randolph, earl of Moray, 497–98

Morgannwg, 394

Morocco, 88, 91, 451

Mortimer, Catherine, 621

Mortimer, Edmund, earl of March, 620–21

Mortimer, Roger, 464–68

Moscow, 315, 339, 560

grand duke of, 509

Moses, 287

Mosul, 156, 157, 379

Mototsune, 61n

Mount Cadmus, 39

Mount Hiei, 472

Mourtzouphlus, see Alexius V Ducas

Mstislav III, grand duke of Kiev, 266

Mughulistan, 557

Muhammad, Prophet, 134n, 226n, 277, 351

Muhammad, sultan of Khwarezm, 300

Muhammad (brother of Ghiyas), 122–23

Muhammad bin Tughluq (Ulugh Khan), 478–82

Muhammad Ghuri, sultan of the Ghurids, 225–28

Muhammad Shah I, king of Vijayanagara, 546–47

Mühldorf, 484

Mu’izzu-d din, sultan of Delhi, 403–4

Mulahidah, 226

mune, 288–90

Munich, 83

Muntaner, Ramon, 421–22

Murad, emperor of the Ottomans, 539–42, 598

Murad II, emperor of the Ottomans, 650, 673–78, 674

Murcia, 88, 89, 306–7

Muret, 245–46

Musa (son of Bayezid), 630, 632

Muslims:

in Edessa, 39

in Palestine, 34–35

Mussis, Gabriele de’, 506

Myeongjong, king of Goryeo, 72–73

My Son, 30

Naiman tribe, Mongol, 196, 198

Nambokucho era, 475, 475, 569

Nam Dinh Province, 298

Nam Quoc Son Ho (“Land of the Southern Kingdom”), 27

Namur, Guy de, 412

Nanchang, 527

Nanjing, 25, 58, 527, 528, 638

Nantes, 304

Nanzhao, 341

Naples, 360, 391, 392, 574, 612

Kingdom of, 410, 571, 579

Nara, 62

Naramasimha Deva, 328

Nare Fa Maghan, king of the Keita, 208

Narmada river, 108, 405, 479

Nasiruddin, sultan of Delhi, 327–29

Nasrid dynasty, 307

National College of Dai Viet, 299

natural law, 51

Navarette, 522

Navarre, 43, 89, 89, 242–44, 373, 398, 416, 417, 516, 519–21

timelines, 524, 530, 536, 597, 603

Nayaka, Kapaya, sultan of the Andhra County, 480

Nazca people, 189–91, 190

Ndiadiane N’Diaye, emperor of the Wolofs, 459

Nemanjicć dynasty, 139

Nepal, 119

Neri (Black Guelphs), 411, 415

Neszmély, 674

Neustadt, 445

Nguyen Trai, 640–41

Niani, 209

Nicaea, 39, 219, 223, 234, 420, 423

empire of, 220, 222, 347, 367–70, 368

timelines, 224, 232, 371, 378

Nicene Creed, 234, 248

Nicetas Choniates, 144–46, 176, 180

Nichiren Shonin, 383

Nicholas III, pope, 389

Nicholas IV, pope, 392

Nicholas V, pope, xxv, 660, 677

Nicholas V, pope (Pietro Rainalducci), 486–87

Nicholas Mesarites, 180

Nicomedia, 423

Nicopolis, Battle of, 601, 616, 621, 629

Niger river, 95–97, 98, 208–9, 456–57, 588

Nijo, emperor of Japan, 65n, 66–67, 161

Nile river, 105, 276–77, 287, 326, 335, 419, 449, 451, 587

Ningbo, 27

Ninth Crusade, 375, 398

Nis, 598

Nishapur, 264

Nitta Yoshisada, 473–74

Nizami, Hasan, 228–29

Nizamu-d din, Chief Justice, 404

Nizari, 226–28, 227, 342

Njimi, 95, 588

Nogaret, Guillaume de, 412–13

Norfolk, duke of, 595

Norman Conquest, 584, 596

Normandy, 5, 8, 20, 21, 76, 77, 78, 131, 151, 167, 203, 249, 354, 501, 516–17, 520, 625, 667

Henry I’s invasion of, 4

Henry III as duke of, 304

kings of, 16

Normans, 22, 82, 83, 135, 141

North Africa, 43, 44, 88, 89, 90, 94–95, 135, 243, 306, 372–73, 655

timelines, 378, 387

North America, 189

Northampton, 397

North Equatorial Current, 455

North Sea, 447

Northumberland, 445

Norway, 372, 397, 604–6, 607, 608–9

timelines, 610, 619, 626

Notre Dame Cathedral, 31, 49, 53, 668

Novgorod, 266, 315

numerals, Hindu-Arabic, 46

Nur ad-Din, 38, 39–40, 102–6, 102, 134, 135, 137, 155–56

Nymphaion, Treaty of, 370

Obatala, 98

Odantapuri Buddhist monastery, 119

Offa’s Dyke, 394

Ogiso Owodo, king of Benin, 98–99

Ogodei Khan (son of Genghis Khan), Great Khan of the Mongols, 267–68, 310, 313, 316, 339

Oirat confederation, 637–43, 641

Oise river, 522

Oki, 473

Oki Island, 473

Olaf, king of Denmark and Norway, 605, 608

Old Man of the Mountain, 226

Oliver of Paderborn, 277, 284

Oljeitu Khan, ruler of Il-khanate, 421, 450

Ólodùmarè, 98

Oranmiyan, king of Benin, 99

Orda, 313

Oreja, 45

Orhan, ruler of Ottoman empire, 422–25, 537–40

Origen, 615

Orissa, 230, 270, 327–28

Orkney Islands, 398

Orleans, 235n, 354, 663, 665

Orleans, duke of, 622, 625

Ormus, port of, 273

Orvieto, 389

Os Lusiadas (Camões), 90

Osman, chief of the Ottoman Turks, 419–22

Otokoyama Shrine, 383

Otrar, 263

Otto IV, Holy Roman emperor, 177, 178, 249–50, 276

Ottocar II, duke of Bohemia, 388

Ottoman empire, 463, 537–40, 540, 551, 560, 598–602, 600, 621, 628–33, 631, 650, 660, 674

Constantinople overthrown by, xxiv–xxv, 14, 600–602, 629–30, 673, 677–81

origins of, 419–25, 421

timelines, 426, 432, 439, 454, 460, 469, 543, 550, 556, 603, 610, 619, 634, 644, 653, 682

see also Turks

Otto of Freising, 36, 52, 82–83

Ourique, Battle of, 45

outlaws, in Japan, 471

Oxus river, 134, 262, 263, 342–43, 525, 557

Pachymer, George, 420

Padmini, queen of Mewar, 428

Padua, 572, 575

Pak So, 311

Pala empire, 117–21, 123–24

Palermo, 324, 390, 391, 392

Pali language, 270, 271, 273

Palk Strait, 270, 547

Palma, 306

Panciatichi family, 411

Pandyan Kingdom, in south India, 272–73, 428, 547–48

Pandyan realm, 428

papacy, timelines, 12, 18, 24, 33, 42, 48, 54, 60, 68, 87, 93, 183, 241, 247, 256, 261, 269, 280, 286, 292, 297, 325, 331, 338, 345, 358, 366, 371, 378, 387, 393, 402, 418, 426, 469, 477, 483, 490, 496, 504, 511, 524, 543, 550, 556, 576, 586, 590, 603, 610, 619, 653, 661, 672, 682

papal monarchy, absolute, 323, 413

Paphlagonia, 144, 222

Parakrama Bahu, king of Sri Lanka, 108–12, 114, 270

Parakrama Bahu II, rebel king of Sri Lanka, 271, 273

Parihars, 123

Paris, 20, 31, 36, 49, 50, 53, 152, 203, 204, 205, 238, 260, 355, 356, 368, 412, 464, 507, 519, 520–21, 579, 581, 593, 595, 622, 625, 662–63

Paris, Matthew, 322, 354, 359–63

Paris, Treaty of, 260

Parma, 85

Pasak river, 532

Paschal II, pope, 5, 7–11, 16

Paschal III, antipope, 85–86

Pasquerel, Jean, 664

Pastoureaux, 354–57, 462–63, 486, 582

Paul, Saint, 233

Paul the Deacon, 604

Pavia, 571, 645

Peace of Alcalá, 305

Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, 582–85, 591, 613

Pedro (Pedro the Cruel), king of Léon-Castile, 515, 522, 591

Pedro II (Pedro the Catholic), king of Aragon, 242–46

Pedro IV, king of Aragon, 515, 522

Pelagius, 278

Pemba, 97

Pembroke, earl of, 435

Pennine moors, 443

Percy, Henry “Hotspur,” 621

Pereira, Duarte Pacheco, 659

Perfeddwlad, 394–95

Pergamum, 420

Perpignan, 392

Persia, 429, 545

Persian Gulf, 97, 451

Perth, 434

Perugia, 258, 391, 575

Pest, 315

Peter, Saint, 233

Peter (claimant for crown of Constantinople), 220, 221

Peter III, king of Sicily and Aragon, 390–92

Peter of Aragon, 457

Peter of Blois, 78

Peter of Coimbra (son of John I of Portugal), 655, 657–59

Peter of Langtoft, 434

Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, 52

Petit, Jehan, 622

Petrarch, xxiii–xxiv, 488–89, 510, 541

Pha Muong, 300

Philadelphia, siege of, 599

Philip, king of Germany, 176–79, 249

Philip (son of Baldwin II of Constantinople), 368

Philip (son of John II of France), 518

Philip II Augustus, king of France, 152–53, 166–67, 170–71, 173–74, 177, 202–3, 205, 233, 238, 240, 248–51, 254, 259, 303, 398

Philip III “the Bold,” king of France, 391–92, 397, 521

Philip IV “the Fair,” king of France, 398–99, 401, 411–14, 416, 435, 466

Philip V, king of France, 417, 461–63, 466, 499

Philip VI, king of France, 467, 467, 488, 499, 501–3, 507, 515

Philip of Navarre, 517

Philip of Swabia, 360

Philip of Valois, count of Anjou, see Philip VI, king of France

Philippa, queen of Portugal, 654–55

Philippa, queen of Scandinavia, 608

Philippa (mother of Edmund Mortimer), 620

Philippoupolis, 221

Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, 625, 662–63, 667, 669, 673

Phrygia, 420

Physics (Aristotle), 46

Piacenza, 646

Piast dynasty, in Poland, 283–84, 555

Piazza, Michele da, 506

Piers of Exton, 596

pirates, in Japan, 471

Pir Muhammad, 561, 632

Pisa, 16, 83, 104, 141, 144, 176, 367, 369–70, 415, 416, 573, 575

papacy in, 615, 617

Pisan, Christine de, 521

Pistoia, 415

Pius II, pope, 616

Place of the Moon (Huaca de la Luna), 191–92

Place of the Sun (Huaca del Sol), 191

plague, 505–10, 508–9, 515–16, 523, 525, 579, 645

timelines, 511, 524, 530

Plantagenet dynasty, xxiv, 76–79, 255, 596

Plato, 53

world soul of, 50

Plato of Tivoli, 46

Plymouth, 579

Plzenň, 649

“Poem on the Evil Times of Edward II,” 445

Poitiers, 77, 151, 203, 308, 518

Poitou, 152, 250, 520

Poland, 551–55, 673, 674, 675, 677

timelines, 556, 564, 570, 682

Polans, 283, 315, 316

timelines, 286, 292, 297, 317, 325

Politics (Aristotle), 354

poll taxes, 581

Polo, Marco, 381–82, 386

Polonnaruwa, 108, 270–71

Pontefract Castle, 596

Ponwars, 123

porcelain, 56

porphyria, 577–78

Portchester, 595

Portsmouth, 304

Portugal, 45–46, 46, 88, 89, 90, 242–43, 515, 591–93, 654

Cortes of, 656–57

explorers from, xxiv, 656, 657, 658

slave trade and, xxv, 654, 658–60

timelines, 597, 603, 661, 672, 682

Posilge, Johann von, 608

pottery:

Nazca, 189

Song, 97

Powys, 394

Poyang, Lake, 527

Pradyumnesvara, 120

Prague, 552, 615, 618, 646–47, 649

First Defenestration of, 618

Prague, archbishop of, 612, 615

Prague, University of, 613, 615

Pratapa Rudra, king of Kakatiya, 478–79

Prester John, 279

Prignano, Bartolomeo, see Urban VI, pope

Priscillian, 234n

Prithvi Raj, king of the Chauhans, 123

Privilege of Košice, 553

Prokop the Shaven, 647, 649

Proslogion (Anselm), 6

Provisions of Oxford, 361–62

Provisions of Westminster, 362

Prussia, 284–85, 552, 554, 608

Ptolemy, xxiii

Punjab, 226, 228, 431, 478

P’yongyang, 73

Pyrenees, 233, 236, 245, 392

Qadi al-Fadil, 156

Qalawun, sultan of Egypt, 376, 449

Qara Yusu, 632

qi, 57

Qila Mubarak, 327

Qinzong, emperor of China, 25

Quantum praedecessores, 36

Quanzhou, 56

Qur’an, 46, 458

Qutb-ud-din, sultan of north India, 228–29

Qutb ud-Din Mubarak Shah, sultan of Delhi, 429–30

Qutuz, sultan of Egypt, 347–49

Rabat, 243

Rajput Parama clan, 428

Rajputs, 123, 230, 329, 427–28, 427

Ralph of Diceto, 151, 166

Ramadan, 155

Ramapala, king of Pala empire, 117, 119

Ramathibodi (U Thong), 531–33

Rambouillet, 663

Ramesuan, king of Syam, 532–33

Ramiro II, king of Aragon, 44, 242

Ramla, 172

Rano, 588

Ranthambhore, 228, 428

Ranulf de Broc, archdeacon of Canterbury, 130–31

Raphael, xxiv

Raska, 137–39

Raspe, Henry, 323

Ravenna, 319

Ravenspur, 595

rawk, 450

Raymond, prince of Antioch, 35, 40, 135

Raymond, ruler of Tripoli, 156–57

Raymond VI, count of Toulouse, 237, 240, 242–43, 245–46, 249, 257–59

Raymond VII, count of Toulouse, 259–60

Raymond of Burgundy, 44n

Raynald of Chatillon, 135–37, 156–59

Raziyya, sultan of Delhi, 230–31, 326–27

Red Sea, 97, 105, 287, 451

Red Turban rebellions, 526–28, 565

Reformation, Protestant, xxiv

Reiche, Maria, 191

Reims, 53, 665

Rhine river, 321

Rhodes, 420, 422

Rhone river, 233, 258, 541

Riazan’, 313, 560

Richard I (Lionheart), king of England, 150–52, 166–68, 171–74, 177, 202, 203, 399

Richard II, king of England, 578–85, 580, 594–96, 620

Richard of Cornwall, 360

Robert, duke of Normandy, 3–4

Robert, king of Naples, 416

Robert (illegitimate son of Robert the Bruce), 498

Robert (Louis IX’s brother), 333, 335–36

Robert II “the Pious,” king of France, 235n

Robert III, count of Flanders, 462

Robert Guiscard, 13

Robert of Artois, 412

Robert of Courtenay, ruler of Constantinople, 221–22

Robert of Geneva, see Clement VII, pope

Robert of Ketton, 46

Rogerius of Apulia, 315

Roger of Hoveden, 166, 172, 202

Roger of Lauria, 391

Roger of Wendover, 78, 168, 174, 203, 204–5, 248, 250–55, 257–58, 275, 294–95, 304

Roman Catholic Church, 179, 219, 240, 539, 542, 555

absence of pope in, 375

anticlericalism and, 354–55, 357

antipopes of, 83, 85–86

Cathar opposition to, 236

Hussites as part of, 649

Louis IX’s devotion to, 357

Orthodox beliefs vs., 376n, 651–52

Papal Schism and, 413, 486–87, 579, 601, 612–18, 645

slavery supported by, xxv, 659–60

Wycliffe’s defiance of, 582

Roman empire, 144, 443

Romanus Pontifex, xxv, 660

Rome, 7, 10, 77, 82–83, 128, 172, 180, 204, 235, 238, 242, 244, 249, 257, 258, 283, 296, 320, 321, 322, 339, 359, 364, 365, 375, 376, 389, 391, 413, 416, 461, 486, 488–89, 541, 571–74, 615, 650, 659–60, 669, 673, 677

Senate of, 541

Rome, ancient, 488–89, 633

Christianity in, 3

ideas and thinkers of, xxiii–xxiv

Romulus, 489

Rory O’Connor, high king of Ireland, 148–49

Rothelin Continuation, 369

Rouen, 174, 203, 625, 667–68, 669

Rouen Castle, 517

Rousillon, 391

Royal Chronicles of U Thong, 531–32

Rudolf of Hapsburg, king of Germany, 365, 388–89, 410

Ruhuna, 108

ruins, Nazca, 189

Rum, Turkish sultanate of, 17, 34, 135, 222, 340, 419, 599

Runnymede, 253–54

Rupert, king of Germany, 613, 616

Rus’ people, 266, 283, 284, 315, 341, 349, 506, 509, 555, 560–61, 627

timelines, 269, 274, 317, 325

Russia, 560

Rye, 579

Sabbah, Hasan, 227–28

Sabea, 288

Sahara Desert, 94–95, 457, 587

Saifawa dynasty, 288

St. Denis, 665

St. Denis abbey, 50

St. Edmonds, 251

St. John Lateran, 416

Saint-Leu-d’Esserent, 520

Saint-Malo, 304

St. Mary’s of the Germans, 282

St. Peter’s Basilica, 486, 649

St. Romanus gate, 678, 680

Sajo river, 315

Saladin, 89, 105–6, 155–59, 166, 168, 170–73, 275, 282, 449, 628

conquests of, 158

Saleph river, 170

Salian dynasty, 20

Salic Law, 417, 463, 467, 499, 515

Salih Ismail, as-, 333

Salimbene, 24, 324

Salisbury, earl of, 335

Salmama I, king of Kanem, 97

salt, 95

Salt Range mountains, 230

Salvatierra, 243–44

Salzburg, 445

Samana, 404

Samarkand, 264, 558, 561, 563, 627, 632

Samguk Sagi, 71

samurai, 62, 66, 161, 163, 211, 382–83, 470, 473, 475

Sancho, king of Castile, 88

Sancho I, king of Portugal, 242–44

Sancho the Strong, king of Navarre, 242–44

Sanctus, Louis, 507

Sandwich, rumored French landing at, 593

Sankama, king of Kalachuri, 115

Saracens, 239

Sarai, 316, 561

Sardinia, 321–22

Sargon, 102

Sarrasin, John, 335

Sartaq, 310–11

satin weave, 56

Savelli, Giacomo (Pope Honorius IV), 391, 392

Savoy, 574

Savoy Palace, 521, 583

Saxony, 82

Count Palatine of, 316

Scandinavia, 604–9, 606, 607

Scania, 608

Schiltberger, Johann, 601–2

Schweppermann, Siegfried, 484

Scipio Africanus, 488

Scone Abbey, 398, 399, 498

Scotland, 22, 394, 396, 463, 466, 574, 583, 621

England at war with, 397–401, 433–38, 497–99

France and, 433, 501, 663

timelines, 24, 402, 409, 439, 448, 454, 469, 477, 483, 504, 511, 524, 536, 586, 597, 603

scutage, 203–4, 252, 361

Sea of Parakrama (reservoir), 109

Second Barons’ War, 361–63

Second Council of Lyons, 375

Second Crusade, 39–41, 76, 81, 135

Secret History of the Mongols, The, 195–97

Secrets (Galen), 46

Seine, 249

Semlin, 139

Sena empire, 117, 119–24, 225

Senegal, 459

Senegal river, 455

Sens, bishop of, 52

Seoul, 568

Sephoria, 157–58

Serbia, 137–39, 144, 168, 170, 424, 424, 537, 539, 542, 598, 599, 600, 630, 632, 673–76

timelines, 140, 147, 426, 432, 543, 550, 556, 603, 610

Serbia, archbishop of, 222

sessho, 61n

Setton, Kenneth, 285

Seuna, 112, 115

Seven Summits, 189n

Seventh Crusade, 333–37, 334, 353–55, 364

Seville, 45, 306–7

Shahnameh (Firdausi), 121

Shah Rukh, 632

Shams-i-Siraj, 482, 548–49

Shams-ud-Din, sultan (Malik Haji Ilyas), 480–81, 544–45

Shang-ching, 58

Shangdong Peninsula, 526

Shangdu, 380, 386

Shaoxing Treaty, 27, 53

Shawar, Fatimid vizier, 104–5

sheep, 445

shepherds, 582

Shewa, 288

Shi’ite Muslims, 226–28

shikken, 212–15, 382–83, 470–75

Shimotsuke, 473

Shin Ton, 565–67

Shirakawa, emperor of Japan, 62–63

Shiraz, 97

Shirkuh, 104–6

Shiva, 108, 110, 113–14, 119

Shizong, 58

Short, Jack, 434

Shoshi, 64

Shrewsbury, Battle of, 621

shugo, 471

Siberia, 561

Sibylla, queen of Jerusalem, 156–57

Sic et Non (Abelard), 51

Sicilian Code of 1231, 320

Sicilian Vespers, 390–91, 390

Sicily, 82, 141, 176, 318, 319, 320, 323, 359–61, 363–65, 365, 373, 374, 389, 390, 391, 410, 571

Siena, 415, 573, 574, 575

Sigismund, Holy Roman emperor, 553–54, 600–601, 616–18, 645–50, 648, 673, 675, 677

Sikandar, 545

Silesia, 284

Simeon of Durham, 21

Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, 205, 238, 240, 242–43, 245–46, 257–59, 305

Simon de Montfort the Younger, 308, 361–63

“Simonie, The,” 463

Sind, 228, 229, 329

Singh, Jaitra, 230

Sinjong, king of Goryeo, 73

Siraj, Shams-i, 544

Sira-ordu, 339

Sirisamghabodhi, king of Sri Lanka, 271

Sixth Crusade, 295–96

slavery:

in Africa, 95, 97, 100, 208–9, 588, 654, 658–60

in Byzantium, 145

Christianity and, 659–60

Circassian, 628

in Delhi, 327, 330

Egypt and, 349

fall of Antioch and, 351

Islam and, 226, 588

mamluks and, 225–26

Mongols and, 349

Portuguese trade in, xxv, 654, 658–60

Slavic territories, 81, 83

Slavic tribes, 137, 238, 283

Sluys, 593

Sluys, Battle of, 499, 501

Smolensk, 266

Sofia, 598

Sogut, 419

sohei (warrior monks), 62, 63

Soissons, 49, 51, 235n

Solankis, 123

Solomon, king, 288

Solomonid dynasty, 288

Someshvara, king of Kalachuri, 114, 115

Somesvara IV, king of Western Chalukya, 115

Song:

Northern, 526

Southern, 27–29, 28, 55–59, 57, 59, 195, 312–13, 339, 340–43, 379–80, 382–83

timelines, 33, 42, 60, 68, 75, 201, 206, 210, 269, 274, 317

Song Bing, 383

Song of the Cathar Wars, 259

Song Duanzong, 382–84

Song Duzong, emperor, 379, 380, 382–83

Song dynasty, 25–29, 197, 199

laws and institutions of, 299

Song Gaozong, emperor of China, 26–27, 55–58

Song Gong, emperor of the Southern Song, 382

Song Qinzong, 55

Soninke people, 99–100

Sosso clan, 100, 207–9, 209

timelines, 101, 107, 116, 210, 216

South America, 188–93, 189

timelines, 194, 201, 206

Southampton, 501, 579

Southeast Asia, 28, 298–301, 301, 533

Spain, 89, 135, 177, 275, 293, 522, 574

in the Americas, 188, 192

Christian reconquest of, xxiii, 43–47, 88–92, 243–46, 304–7, 515, 655

Crusade in, 244–46

discord between Christian kings of, 242–44

Muslim, xxiii, 43–47, 88–92, 177, 242–46, 306–7, 372, 373, 515, 655

timelines, 48, 54, 93, 101, 107, 246, 247, 261, 309, 317, 378, 393, 402, 418

Spandounes, Theodore, 539–40

Sri Lanka, 108–12, 109, 110, 113, 113, 119, 270–73, 428, 547, 548, 638

timelines, 116, 125, 133, 274, 280

Staines, 253

Statute of Rhuddlan (1284), 397

Stefan Dushan, king of Serbia, 424–25, 537, 539, 542

Stefan Lazarević, king of Serbia, 630

Stefan Nemanja, grand prince of all Serbia, 139, 144, 424

Stephen III, king of Hungary, 139

Stephen of Blois, king of England, 21–22, 76, 78, 127, 149, 254

Stirling, 399

Stirling Bridge, 400–401, 433

Stirling Castle, 433

Stockholm, 607

Stone of Scone, 398, 399–400

Studium Arabicum, 373

Subotai, 263, 264, 310, 312–13, 315–16, 340

Sudan, 458–59

Sufism, 544–45

Sukhothai, 300, 531–32

Sulayman, Dawed b., 97–98

Suleyman (son of Bayezid), 630

Suleyman Pasha, 538–39

Sully, 667

Sultanpur, 479

Sumanguru Kante, 100, 207–9

Sumatra, 108

Sundiata, king of the Sosso, 208–9, 455

Suphanburi, 531

Suryavarman II, king of Khmer, 29–31, 300

Sussex, 579

Sutoku, emperor of Japan, 64–65

Swabia, 611–12, 616

Swabian League, 611–12

Swahili peoples, 97

Sweden, 604–7, 607, 609

timelines, 610, 619, 626

Syam, 300, 531–32

timelines, 302, 309, 536, 543, 550

Sylvester II, pope, 46

Sylvius, Aeneas, see Pius II, pope

Syr Darya river, 313

Syria, 34, 102, 156, 157, 295, 333, 335, 347, 348, 375, 450, 506, 628

First Crusade and, 3

plague in, 50

timelines, 12, 18, 24, 33, 42, 48, 107, 116, 125, 140, 160, 165, 175, 183, 194, 201, 280, 286, 292, 297, 302, 325, 331, 338, 345, 352, 358, 366, 378, 387

Syrian revolt, 296

Szörény, 675

Tabakat-i-Nasiri, 122, 200, 225–26, 326, 329

Tabriz, 558, 632

Tacaynamo, 192

Taejo, emperor of Joseon, 566–68

Tafur, Pero, 673, 675

Taghaza, 95, 456

Tagliacozzo, Battle of, 365

Taichi’ut clan, Mongol, 195

taiga, 195

Taiheiki, 472, 474

Taillebourg, 308

Taira clan, 62–63, 65–67, 161, 163

Taira Kiyomori, 66–67, 161–63

Taira Munemori, 162–63

Taira Shigemori, 161

Taira Tokuko, 161

Taira Yorimori, 161

Takakura, emperor of Japan, 161

Tale of Hogen, The, 65

Tales of the Heike, 161–63

Talsandah, 329

Tamar, queen of Georgia, 264

Tamil language, 273

Tang dynasty, 341, 640

Tangier, 451, 656–57

Tangut language, 198

Tanis, 105

Tarain, Second Battle of, 123

Tayisi, Esen, 643

Ta Yu, see Dai Viet

Tbilisi, 264, 313, 630

Temple Bar, 583

Temple Mount, 296

Temujin, see Genghis Khan

Tenedos, 538

Tenochtitlán, 494–95

Teotihuacan, 192

Terek river, 561

Battle of, 561–63, 562

Termes, 240

Teutonic Knights, 282–85, 315, 552, 554

Teutonic Order of Prussia, 646

Texcoco, Lake, 492–94

Tezozomoc, king of Azcapotzalco, 494–95

Tezozómoc, Fernando Alvarado, 492

Thai, 531, 533

Thailand, 300

Thai Tong, see Tran Canh, king of Dai Viet

Thames river, 78, 253

Thang Long, 27, 29, 30, 298, 301, 342, 385, 534

Thanjavur, 273

Theobald, king of Navarre, 373–74

Theobald of Bec, archbishop of Canterbury, 127

Theoderic the Ostrogoth, 5–6

Theodore Comnenus Ducas, ruler of Epirus, 221

Theodore II Lascaris, ruler of Nicaea, 369

Theodore Lascaris, rule of Nicaea, 220–21, 222

Theodosian Code of 438, 234

Theologia Scholarium (Abelard), 49, 50–52

theological categories, 53

Thessalonica, 219, 223, 368, 425, 537, 541, 598, 630, 673

Third Crusade, 159, 166–74, 169

Thomas (son of Edward III), 595

Thong Lan, 532

Thoros II, prince of Cilician Armenia, 136

Thrace, 217, 220, 368, 422, 423, 537–39, 540

Thyateira, 370

Tiberias, 157

Tigris river, 419

Timurid empire, 557–63, 627–33

Timurids, 630

Timur-Leng (Timurlane), 557–63, 559, 565, 627–32, 631

timelines, 564, 570, 576, 634, 644, 653

Tinchebray, 4

Tirmidh, 264

Titus, emperor of Rome, 489

Tizapan, 491

Tlatelolco, 494–95

Tlemcen, 372

Toba, emperor of Japan, 63–65

Toghan, prince, 385–86

Toghon Temur (Emperor Huizong), emperor of China, 505, 525–28

Toghrul, 196

Toghto, 526–27

Toktamish, 560–61

Tokuko, 64

Toledo, 44–45, 244

libraries in, xxiii, 46–47

Tollan, 491

Toltecs, 187

Tolui (son of Genghis Khan), 267, 310, 339

Toregene, 339

Toulouse, 43, 152, 237, 243, 245–47, 259–60, 462, 517, 520

Toulouse, University of, 260

Tournai, 250, 501

Tournelles, 665

Tours, 202, 354, 389

Tower of London, 362, 397, 400, 464, 497, 583, 596, 621

Trade Winds, 455

Tran Canh, king of Dai Viet, 298–301, 342

Tran Due-tong, king of Dai Viet, 534

Tran dynasty, 298, 640

Tran Hoang, 342

Tran Quoc Toan (Tran Hung Dao), prince of Dai Viet, 385–86

Transoxiana, 134, 506, 557–58

transubstantiation, 6

Transylvania, 282–83, 675

Tran Thuan Tong, emperor of Dai Viet, 535

Tran Thu Do, grand chancellor of Dai Viet, 298–301

Trapani, 391

Trausnitz Castle, 484–85

Treaty of Birgham, 397–98

Treaty of Bretigny, 521–23

Treaty of Conway, 395

Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton, 466, 497

Treaty of Nymphaion, 370

Treaty of Paris, 260

Treaty of Troyes, 625, 667

Treaty of Wallingford, 78

Treaty of Windsor, 149

Trebizond, 219

empire of, 220, 222, 368

timelines, 224, 232, 371

trebuchets, 379–80, 433

Trier, archbishops of, 320

Trinity, 376n, 651

Tripoli, 14, 15, 97, 351, 374, 376, 587, 588

Troyes, 665

Troyes, bishop of, 6

Troyes, Treaty of, 625, 667

Tughluq dynasty, in India, 478, 561

Tumu, 643

Tungabhadra, 480, 546

Tunis, 95, 208, 372–74, 375, 392

Turan-shah, Ayyubid sultan, 335, 337, 346, 347

Turks, 34, 121–22, 134–35, 137, 227, 282, 326, 327, 335, 560

in Asia Minor, 420

Constantinople invaded by, 3, 39, 104–5

in Delhi, 326, 327, 478

empire of, see Ottoman empire

fall of empire of, 134–35

in India, 404

refugees from Cilician Armenia, 264

in settlements north of Georgia, 266

as slave officers (ghulams), 229

slavery and, 145

timelines, 42, 48, 107, 116, 125, 140, 160, 165, 175, 194, 201, 280, 286, 292, 297, 302, 338, 345

see also mamluks; Ottoman empire

Tursun Bey, xxv

Twelve Peers, 399–400

Tyler, Wat, 583–84

Tyre, 16, 104, 159

Tyre, archbishop of, 159

Tyrrell, Walter, 3

Tzympe, 538

Ubeda, 88

Uijong, king of Goryeo, 70–73

Uiju, 311

Uí Néill, 149

Ulm, 611

Ulster, 149

Ulugh, 406

Ulugh Khan (Muhammad bin Tughluq), 478–79

‘Umar ibn Idris, king of Kanem, 588

Umayyad caliphates, 134n

Union of Kalmar, 607, 608

Union of Krewo, 555

Union of Lyons, 389

Urban (cannon maker), 678–79

Urban IV, pope, 362

Urban V, pope, 540–51, 571–73

Urban VI, pope, 574, 579, 612

Urraca, queen of Aragon, Navarre, León, and Castile, 43, 44n

Usk, Adam, 584, 595

Uthman, 134n

U Thong (Ramathibodi), 531–33

Utrar, 632

Uzbek, 450

Valdemar IV, king of Denmark, 605

Valencia, 88, 89, 243, 307

Valenciennes, 249

Valois dynasty, of France, 466, 467, 499, 623

Varangian Guard, 139

Varna, Battle of, 676–77, 680

Vatican, 413

Venice, 15, 16, 17, 85, 141–44, 142, 144, 168n, 177–80, 219, 367–70, 380, 386, 391, 420, 425, 539, 541, 542, 553, 575, 600, 601, 645, 648, 673, 676, 678, 680

doge of, 389, 424, 541

Verona, 85, 320, 321, 575

Vicenza, 321

Victor IV, antipope, 83, 85

Vienna, 168, 316, 674

Vietnam, see Dai Viet

Vijaya, 29, 385

Vijaya Bahu, king of Sri Lanka, 108, 110, 112

Vijaya Bahu III, rebel king of Sri Lanka, 271

Vijayanagara, 480, 482, 545–48, 628

Vijay Sen, king of Sena, 117, 119–21, 123

Vikings, 604

Vikrampur, 124

Villani, Giovanni, 294, 321, 374–77, 390–91, 415

Villani, Matteo, 510

Villehardouin, Geoffroy de, 177–80, 219–20

Vindhya mountains, 480

Virasaivas, 114

Virgil, 489

Visconti, Bernabò, 571–72, 574–75

Visconti, Filippo Maria, duke of Milan, 645–46, 648

Visconti, Gian Galeazzo, duke of Milan, 575, 612–13, 645

Visconti, Gian Maria, duke of Milan, 645

Visconti, Giovanni, 571–72

Visconti, House of, 571–75

Visconti, Matteo, 571

Visconti, Ottone, archbishop of Milan, 571

Visconti, Teobaldo (Pope Gregory X), 374–75

Vishnu, 31, 119

Vistula river, 284, 285

Vita Edwardi Secundi, 435–37, 464

Vitale Michiel, doge of Venice, 143–44

Viterbo, 375, 541

Vitry, 36–37

Vitry, Jacques de, bishop of Acre, 258, 277–79

Vlad Dracul, prince of Wallachia, 633, 676–77

Volga river, 98, 313, 316, 560–61

Volterra, 415

Voskresensk Chronicle, 313–14

Vox in Rama, 320

Waalo, 459

Wainganga river, 546

Waldensians, 235, 354, 486, 582, 647

Waldo, Peter, 235

Wales, 21–22, 394–97, 396, 398, 620–21

timelines, 402, 409, 439, 448, 454, 469, 477, 483, 504, 626, 634, 644, 672

Wallace, William, 400–401, 433–34

Wallachia, 633, 673, 675–77, 678

Wallingford, Treaty of, 78

Walsingham, Thomas, 582–85, 593, 595–96, 614, 623, 625, 662

Walter of Guisborough, 435

Wang Yansou, 57

Wang Zhen, 642–43

Wanyan clan, 25

Warangal, 429, 478–80

Warwick, earl of, 435, 595

“War-wolf” (trebuchet), 433

Weiming Chunyou, king of Western Xia, 198

Weishaowang, Jin emperor, 199

Wenceslaus, 388

Wenceslaus IV, king of Germany and Bohemia, 611–13, 615–18, 645

Wendish Crusade, 81–82, 238

Wends, 81–82

Western Llao people, 134

Western Xia, 197–200, 267, 379

timelines, 201, 206, 210

Westminster Abbey, 78, 608, 623

White Lotus Society, 525–26, 545

White Sheep “Aq Qoyunlu” Turkomans, 632

Why God Became Man (Anselm), 7

Wight, Isle of, 254

Wigmore, 363

William (son of Henry I of England), 19

William I “the Conqueror,” king of England, 4, 7, 21, 126, 253

William II, king of England, 3, 7

William Fitz Stephen, 131

William Longsword (illegitimate brother of King John), 250, 254

William of Canterbury, 127–28

William of Conches, 76

William of Holland, 323–24, 359–60

William of Malmesbury, 3, 5, 19

William of Newburgh, 78, 151

William of Puylaurens, 244–46, 259

William of Tudela, 237–40, 246

William of Tyre, 21, 34, 39, 40–41, 53, 103–4, 105n, 106, 136, 159, 336

William the Clerk, 278, 354

William the Good, 141

Winchester, 362, 463

Winchester, earl of, 463

Windsor, 253, 254, 519

Windsor, Treaty of, 149

witchcraft, 208

Wladyslaw III, king of Poland and Hungary, 674–77

Wladyslaw the Elbow-High, 552

Wolof empire, 459

timelines, 460, 469, 477

Worms, 11, 321

Wu, emperor of Goryeo, 567

Württemberg, count of, 611

Wycliffe, John, xxiv, 582, 613–16, 618

Wye river, 465

Xiangyang, 379–80

Xiaozong, emperor of China, 58–59

Xuande, emperor of China, 642

Yadava, 429

Yakub, 598

Yalu river, 310–11

Yangtze river, 26, 27, 58, 379, 382, 526

Yangzhou, 26

Yanjing, 58

Yasuki Harbor, 473

Yellow emperor, 25

Yellow river, 25, 27, 313, 526

“Ye Warriors of God,” 647

Yi In-im, 567

Yi Ko, 71–73

Yi Kyu-bo, 70

Yi Seong-gye, see Taejo, emperor of Joseon

Yi Uibang, 71–73

Yolanda, ruler of Constantinople, 221

Yolande, queen of Jerusalem, 276, 293, 295, 318

Yoleta de Dru, queen of Scotland, 397

Yongle emperor, 638–42, 639

Yordanos river, 288

York, 397, 443, 498

York, archbishop of, 130, 502

Yoruba peoples, 98–99

Yoshino, 474–75, 569

Ypres, 445

Yu, Second Sage emperor, 535

Yuan dynasty, 383–86, 384, 470, 503, 525–26, 528–29, 565–67, 630–32, 637

Yucatán Peninsula, 187

Yueh, 27

Yu-ke-hsia, 311

Yusuf I, Almohad caliph, 90–91, 243

Yusuf I, ruler of Granada, 515

Yusuf II, Almohad caliph, 244

Yutahito, emperor of Japan, 475

Zadar, 177–78

Zafar, 406–7

Zaghawa people, 94–95

Zagwe dynasty, of Axum, 287–88, 289, 290

timelines, 292, 297, 302

Zanzibar, 97

Zara, 240

Zaria, 588

Zayyanids, 372

Zella, 587

Zengi, 34–36, 38, 39, 104

Zhengtong, emperor of China, 642–43

Zhongdu, 58, 199–200, 262, 310

Zhu Di, see Yongle emperor

Zhu Xi, 57

Zhu Yuanzhang, see Hongwu emperor

Zil-i-llahi, 330

Zimbabwe, 291

Zizka, John, 646–47

Zurara, Gomes Eanes de, 655, 658–59

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bauer, S. Wise.

The history of the Renaissance world : from the rediscovery of Aristotle

to the conquest of Constantinople / Susan Wise Bauer.—First edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-393-05976-2 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-0-393-24067-2 (e-book)

1. Renaissance. I. Title.

CB361.B36 2013

940.2'1—dc23

2013021092

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