CHAPTER IX
The Ottoman Tide
1300–1516

I. SECOND BLOOMING IN BYZANTIUM: 1261–1373

THE Byzantine Empire, bloodlessly restored under a new Palaeologus dynasty in 1261, survived despite itself for almost two centuries. Its territory was reduced by the advance of the Moslems in Asia and Europe, by the expansion of the Slavs in its rear, and by scattered fragments of its former self retained by the Christian enemies who had sacked Constantinople in 1204—Normans, Venetians, and Genoese. Industry lingered in the towns of the Empire, but its products were carried in Italian vessels that paid no revenue into the treasury. Of the once numerous middle class only a fringe remained. Above it were luxurious nobles and prelates gorgeously garbed, who had learned nothing from history and had forgotten everything but their privileges. Below were turbulent layers of monks who salted piety with politics, and peasant proprietors lapsing into tenancy, and tenant farmers slipping into serfdom, and prolétaires dreaming of egalitarian utopias. A revolution at Salonika (1341) expelled the aristocracy, pillaged palaces, and set up a semi-communistic republic that ruled for eight years before it was suppressed by troops from the capital.¹ Constantinople was still a bustling nexus of commerce, but a Moslem traveler in 1330 noted “many destroyed houses, and sown fields within the city walls”; and the Spanish diplomat Ruy González de Clavijo, about 1409, wrote: “Everywhere throughout the capital are great palaces, churches, and monasteries, but most of them are in ruins.”² The glory had departed from the Queen of the Bosporus.

Amid this political decay the ever-cherished heritage of ancient Greek literature and philosophy combined with the Byzantine-Oriental tradition in architecture and painting to compose the cultural swan song of the Eastern Roman Empire. The schools still expounded Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno the Stoic, though they shunned Epicurus as an atheist; and scholars revised and commented upon classical texts. Maximus Planudes, Byzantine envoy to Venice, edited the Greek Anthology, translated Latin classics into Greek, and rebuilt a cultural bridge between Byzantium and Italy. The career of Theodoras Metochites illustrates this Palaeologian Renaissance. Prime minister to Andronicus II, he was at the same time one of the most learned and prolific scholars of his time. Nicephoras Gregoras, himself savant and historian, wrote of him: “From morning to evening he was wholly and eagerly devoted to public affairs, as if scholarship were quite irrelevant to him; but late in the evening, after having left the palace, he became absorbed in studies to as high a degree as if he were a scholar with absolutely no connection with any other interest.” ³ Theodorus composed history, poetry, astronomy, and philosophy, of an excellence unmatched by any Greek of that fourteenth century. In the revolution that dethroned his master, he forfeited position, fortune, and home, and was cast into prison; but, falling ill, he was allowed to end his days in the monastery of St. Saviour “in Chora” (i.e., in the fields), whose walls he had ennobled with some of the fairest mosaics in Byzantine history.

In philosophy the old contest between Platonists and Aristotelians recaptured the stage. Emperor John VI Cantacuzene defended Aristotle, while Plato remained the god of Gemistus Pletho. This most renowned of the new Greek Sophists studied philosophy at Brusa in Asia Minor, when that city was already the capital of the Ottoman advance. From a Jewish teacher there he learned the lore of the Zoroastrians; and when he returned to his native Peloponnesus—then renamed Morea—he had probably abandoned the Christian faith. Settling down at Mistra, he became both a judge and a professor. In 1400 he wrote a treatise bearing Plato’s title, The Laws, in which he proposed the replacement of both Christianity and Mohammedanism by the religion of ancient Greece, merely transforming all the Olympians but Zeus into symbolic personifications of creative processes or ideas; Pletho did not know that religions are born, not made. Nevertheless pupils gathered around him eagerly; one of them, Johannes Bessarion, was destined to become a humanist cardinal in Italy. Both Gemistus and Bessarion accompanied Emperor John VIII to Ferrara and Florence (1438) to attend the council in which the Greek and Roman churches were for a moment reconciled in theology and politics. At Florence Gemistus lectured on Plato to an elite audience, and almost touched off the Italian Renaissance. It was there that he added the cognomen Pletho (complete) to his name, playing upon both gemistos (full) and Platon. Returning to Mistra he subsided theologically, became an archbishop, and died at ninety-five (1450).

The revival of art was as marked as the rejuvenation of letters. The themes and figures were still ecclesiastical; but now and then a touch of landscape, a breath of naturalism, a new warmth of color and line gave life to the mosaics. Those recently uncovered in the Chora monastery (the Kahriye-Jami Mosque) have so much vitality that Western historians profess to see in them some fresh Italian influence. In the frescoes that increasingly replaced expensive mosaics in the decoration of churches and palaces, the ecclesiastical hold relaxed, and figures of vivid fantasy and secular story appeared beside the legends of the saints. The icon-makers, however, clung to the old hieratic style—forms thinned, faces burning with a puritanic piety strikingly absent from the morals of the time. Byzantine miniature painting suffered now a sharp decline, but the weaving of pictorial designs into silk still produced masterpieces unrivaled in the Western world. The so-called “Dalmatic of Charlemagne” dates from the fourteenth or fifteenth century; on a base of blue-dyed silk an artist designed, a skillful artisan wove in silk threads of silver and gold, scenes from the life of Mary, Christ, and divers saints. Similar splendors of textile painting took form in this age in Salonika, Serbia, Moldavia, and Russia.

Greece was now again a center of great art. As the thirteenth century neared its end the Franks who had dotted the classic sites with picturesque castles made way for the revived Byzantine power. In 1348 the Emperor John VI sent his son Manuel to be despotes of the Morea. He established his provincial seat on a hill overlooking the ancient Sparta. To the new capital came nobles, patrons, monks, artists, scholars, and philosophers. Magnificent monasteries were built, and three of them have kept in their churches some of their medieval frescoes: the Metropolis and Peribleptos abbeys from the fourteenth century, the Pantanassa from the early fifteenth. These are the finest murals in the long history of Byzantine art. In their precise draftsmanship, in the flowing grace of their figures, in the depth and glow of their colors, they compare with the best frescoes of the same period in Italy; indeed, they may owe some of their novel grace to Cimabue, Giotto, or Duccio—who all owed so much to Byzantium.

On the eastern coast of Greece, high on the promontory of Mount Athos, monasteries had been raised in the tenth century, and in most centuries since: in the fourteenth the majestic Pantocrator, in the fifteenth St. Paul’s. Of the murals in these retreats an eighteenth-century Greek Guide to Painting ascribed the best to Manuel Panselinos of Salonika, who “showed such brilliance and skill in his art that he was raised above all painters ancient or modern.”⁴ But of Manuel’s dates or works there is no certainty; he may have belonged to the eleventh or the sixteenth century; and no one can say which of the paintings on Mount Athos are from his hand.

While Byzantine art experienced this final ecstasy, the Byzantine government declined. The army was in disorder, the navy in decay; Genoese or Venetian vessels controlled the Black Sea, and pirates roamed the Greek archipelago. A band of mercenaries from Catalonia—the “Catalan Grand Company”—captured Gallipoli (1306), mulcted the commerce of the Dardanelles, and set up a republic of robbers in Athens (1310); no government succeeded in suppressing them, and they were left to be consumed by their own violence. In 1307 Pope Clement V joined France, Naples, and Venice in a plot to recapture Constantinople. The plot fell apart, but for many years the Byzantine emperors were so fearful of the Christian West that they had no energy or courage to resist the Moslem advance. When that fear subsided the Ottoman Turks were at the door.

Some of the emperors bought their own destruction. In 1342 John VI Cantacuzene, involved in civil war, asked aid of Orkhan, Sultan of the Ottomans; Orkhan sent him ships and helped him take Salonika; the grateful Emperor gave him his daughter Theodora as an extra wife; the Sultan sent him 6,000 additional troops. When John Palaeologus undertook to depose him, John Cantacuzene robbed the churches of Constantinople to pay Orkhan for 20,000 more Turks, and promised the Sultan a fortress in the Thracian Chersonese. In the hour of his apparent victory the people of Constantinople turned against him as a traitor, and revolution transformed him overnight from an emperor into an historian (1355). He retired to a monastery, and wrote the history of his times as a last attempt to overwhelm his enemies.

John V Palaeologus found no ease on the throne. He went to Rome as a suppliant (1369), and offered, in return for help against the Turks, to bring his people into obedience to the papacy. Before the high altar of St. Peter’s he abjured the Greek Orthodox Church. Pope Urban V promised aid against the infidels, and gave him letters to the princes of Christendom. But these were busy with other affairs. Instead of receiving assistance, John was held at Venice as a hostage for the payment of Greek debts. His son Manuel brought the money; John returned to Constantinople poorer than before, and was denounced by his people for forswearing the Orthodox creed. Failing in a second attempt to get succor from the West, he recognized Sultan Murad I as his suzerain, agreed to provide military aid to the Ottoman army, and gave his beloved Manuel as hostage for the fulfillment of his pledge.⁵ Appeased for the moment, Murad spared Byzantium, and turned to subjugate the Balkans.

II. THE BALKANS MEET THE TURKS: 1300–96

Hitherto the fourteenth century had been for the Balkans a peak in their history. In Wallachia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia, and Albania hardy Slavs cut the forests, mined and tilled the earth, pastured flocks, and eagerly bred their own replacements. From the Adriatic to the Black Sea, from the Black Sea to the Baltic, Slavs, Italians, Magyars, Bulgars, Greeks, and Jews carried the trade of East and West, and cities sprouted in their path.

The great man of Serbia in this century was Stephen Dushan. His father, Stephen Urosh III, begot him in a brief detour from monogamy, gave him the affectionate name Dusha—i.e., Soul—and had him crowned as heir apparent. When a more legitimate son arrived, and received fond nicknames in his turn, Stephen deposed his father, allowed him to be strangled, and ruled Serbia with a strong hand for a generation. “Of all the men of his time,” wrote a contemporary, he was “the tallest, and terrible to look upon.”⁶ Serbia forgave him everything, for he waged successful war. He trained a large army, led it with masterly generalship, conquered Bosnia, Albania, Epirus, Acarnania, Aetolia, Macedonia, Thessaly. Transferring his capital from Belgrade to Skoplje, he convened there a parliament of nobles, and bade it unify and codify the laws of his diverse states; the resultant Zabonik Tsar a Dushana, or Lawbook of Czar Dushan (1349), revealed a level of legal development and civilized usage not far below that of Western Europe. Financed and perhaps stimulated by this political exaltation, Serbian art in the fourteenth century rivaled the contemporary flourish in Constantinople and the Morea; magnificent churches were built, and their mosaics were freer and livelier than those normally allowed by the more conservative ecclesiasticism of the Greek capital. In 1355 Dushan assembled his armies for the last time. He asked them whether they preferred to be led against Byzantium or Hungary. They answered that they would follow him wherever he chose to lead. “To Constantinople!” he cried. On the way he fell sick and died.

His empire was too heterogeneous to be held together except by a man of alert intelligence and disciplined energy. Bosnia seceded, and attained for a proud moment, under Stephen Trtko, the hegemony of the Balkans. Bulgaria under John Alexander had its last great age. Wallachia, once part of the Byzantine Empire, detached itself (c. 1290), and ruled the spreading delta of the Danube. Moldavia threw off its allegiance to Hungary (1349).

Upon these centrifugal statelets the Turkish blight fell even before John V Palaeologus made Byzantium vassal to Murad I. Suleiman, the dashing son of Sultan Orkhan, had led Turkish troops to the aid of John VI Cantacuzene; he received, or took, as his reward the fortress of Tzympe on the European side of the Dardanelles (1353). When an earthquake shattered the walls of near-by Gallipoli, Suleiman moved into the defenseless town. At his invitation Turkish colonists crossed from Anatolia and spread along :he northern coast of the Sea of Marmora almost to Constantinople itself. With an expanding Turkish army Suleiman marched into Thrace and captured Adrianople (1361). Five years later Murad made it his European capital. From that center the Turks would for a century aim their blows at the divided Balkans.

Pope Urban V, recognizing the significance of this Turkish infiltration into Europe, called upon all Christendom for another crusade. An army of Serbs, Hungarians, and Wallachians marched gallantly toward Adrianople. At the river Maritsa they celebrated their unresisted advance with a feast. Amid their cups and revelry they were surprised by a night assault from a relatively small Turkish force. Many were slain before they could arm; many were drowned trying to retreat across the river; the rest fled (1371). In 1385 Sofia capitulated, and half of Bulgaria fell to the Ottomans. In 1386 they took Nish, in 1387 Salonika. All Greece lay open to the Turks.

For one heroic year little Bosnia stemmed the tide. Stephen Trtko joined his forces with the Serbians under Lazar I, and defeated the Turks at Plochnik (1388). A year later Murad marched west with an army that included many Christian contingents. At Kosovo he was met by a coalition of Serbs, Bosnians, Magyars, Vlachs, Bulgars, Albanians, and Poles. A Serb knight, Milosh Kobilich, pretending to be a deserter and informer, made his way into Murad’s tent, killed the Sultan, and was hacked to death. Murad’s son and heir, Bajazet I, rallied the Turks to angry courage, and led them to victory. King Lazar was captured and beheaded; Serbia became a tribute-paying vassal of the Turks, and its new king, Stephen Lazarevitch, was compelled to send arms and men to Bajazet. In 1392 Wallachia under John Shishman joined the roster of Balkan states tributary to the Ottomans. Only Bulgaria and Byzantium remained capable of defense.

In 1393 Bajazet invaded Bulgaria. After a siege of three months Trnovo, the capital, fell; the churches were desecrated, the palaces were set on fire, the leading nobles were invited to a conference and were massacred. The Pope again appealed to Christendom, and King Sigismund of Hungary summoned Europe to arms. France, though engaged in a life-and-death struggle with England, sent a force of cavaliers under the Count of Nevers; the Count of Hohenzollern and the Grand Master of the Knights of St. John came with their followers; the Elector Palatine brought a company of Bavarian horse; John Shishman renounced his vassalage and came with his troops to fight under the Hungarian King.

The united army, 60,000 strong, marched through Serbia and besieged the Turkish garrison in Nicopolis. Warned that Bajazet, with an army from Asia, was coming to raise the siege, the French knights, gay with wine and women, promised to annihilate it, and boasted that if the sky should fall they would hold it up with their spears. For his part Bajazet vowed that he would stable his horse at the high altar of St. Peter’s in Rome.⁷ He placed his weakest troops in front, with strategy that should have been obvious. The French knights plunged through them triumphantly, then through 10,000 Janissaries, then through 5,000 Turkish cavalry, then charged recklessly up a hill. Just beyond its summit they found themselves faced by the main body of the Turkish army—40,000 lancers. The nobles fought nobly, were killed or captured or put to flight, and the allied infantry behind them were disordered by their rout. The Hungarians and Germans were nevertheless driving back the Turks when Stephen Lazarevitch of Serbia led 5,000 Christians against the Christian army, and won the crucial battle of Nicopolis for the Sultan (1396).

Maddened by the sight of so many of his men lying dead on the field, and by the claim of the rescued garrison that the Christian besiegers had killed their Turkish prisoners, Bajazet ordered the 10,000 captives to be put to death. The Count of Nevers was allowed to choose twenty-four knights to be saved for the ransom they might bring. Several thousand Christians were slaughtered in a bloody ritual that went on from sunrise to late afternoon, until the Sultan’s officers persuaded him to spare the rest.⁸ From that day till 1878 Bulgaria was a province of the Ottoman Empire. Bajazet now took most of Greece, and then marched against Constantinople.

III. THE LAST YEARS OF CONSTANTINOPLE: 1373–1453

No other government ever so fully deserved to fall as the Byzantine. Having lost the will to defend itself, and unable to persuade the too sophisticated Greeks that it is sweet and noble to die for one’s country, it sent no contingent to the Christian armies at the Maritsa, Kosovo, or Nicopolis. It provided 12,000 soldiers for the Sultan in 1379; and it was Byzantine troops that, on the order of John VII Palaeologus, compelled the Byzantine city of Philadelphia, in Asia Minor, to surrender to the Turks (1390).

When Bajazet resumed the siege of Constantinople (1402), the Byzantine Empire was reduced to its capital: Bajazet commanded both coasts of the Sea of Marmora, controlled the Dardanelles, ruled nearly all of Asia Minor and the Balkans, and passed safely between his Asiatic and European capitals. The final hour seemed to have struck for the beleaguered city. Starving Greeks let themselves down over the walls, and deserted to the Turks in order to eat. Suddenly from the Moslem East an “infidel” savior appeared for the outpost of Christendom. Timur the Lame—Tamerlane the Great—had determined to check the growth and insolence of Ottoman power. As the Tatar hordes rolled west Bajazet abandoned the siege of Constantinople, and hurried to regroup his forces in Anatolia. Turks met Tatars at Ankara (1402); Bajazet was defeated and captured. The Turkish tide ebbed for a generation; God at last seemed to be on the side of the Christians.

Under the wise rule of Manuel II Byzantium recovered most of Greece and parts of Thrace. But Mohammed I reorganized the Turkish army, and Murad II led it, after a major defeat, to major victories. The Moslems still drew inspiration from the belief that to die for Islam was to win paradise; even if there should be no paradise and no houris, chey were impartial enough to consider the Greek maidens beautiful. The Christians were not so impartial. Greek Catholics hated Roman Catholics and were hated in turn. When Venetians hunted and massacred Greek Catholics in Crete for refusing to accept the Roman ritual and papal supremacy, Pope Urban V joined Petrarch in congratulating the doge on his firm protection of the one true Church (c. 1350).⁹ The populace and lower clergy of Byzantium repudiated all attempts to reunite Greek with Latin Christianity; and a Byzantine noble declared that he would rather see the Turkish turban at Constantinople than the red hat of a Roman cardinal.¹⁰ Most Balkan states hated their neighbors more than the Turks, and some preferred to submit to the Moslems, who taxed no more than the Christian rulers, persecuted heresy less or not at all,¹¹ and allowed four wives.

In 1422 Murad II renewed the attack upon Constantinople. A revolt in the Balkans compelled him to abandon the siege, and John VIII Palaeologus was allowed to reign in relative peace on condition of paying a heavy annual tribute to the Turks. Murad reconquered Greece, Salonika, and most of Albania. Serbia resisted manfully under George Branković; a combined army of Serbians and Hungarians under Hunyadi János defeated Murad at Kunovitza (1444), and Branković ruled Serbia till his death at the age of ninety (1456). After victories at Varna and in the second battle of Kosovo (1448), Murad signed a peace with the Emperor Constantine XI Palaeologus, and retired to Adrianople to die (1451).

Mohammed II, surnamed the Conqueror, came to the Ottoman throne at twenty-one. He confirmed the treaty with Constantine, and sent his nephew Orkhan to be brought up (possibly as a spy) at the Byzantine court. When other Moslem powers challenged his authority in Western Asia, Mohammed ferried his army across the Straits, and left his European possessions in charge of the Vizier Khalil Pasha, known for friendliness to Byzantium. Constantine had more courage than wit; he informed the Vizier that unless the pension paid for the care of Mohammed’s nephew should be doubled, Orkhan would be put forward by Byzantium as a claimant to the Ottoman throne.¹² Apparently Constantine thought that the revolt in Asia offered an opportunity to weaken the Turks in Europe. But he had neglected to secure either his alliances in the west or his communications to the south. Mohammed made peace with his Moslem enemies, and with Venice, Wallachia, Bosnia, and Hungary. Crossing back to Europe, he raised a powerful fortress on the Bosporus above Constantinople, thereby ensuring the unimpeded passage of his troops between the continents, and controlling all commerce entering the Black Sea. For eight months he gathered materials and men. He hired Christian gunsmiths to cast for him the largest cannon yet known, which would hurl stone balls weighing 600 pounds. In June 1452, he declared war, and began the final siege of Constantinople with 140,000 men.¹³

Constantine led the defense with desperate resolution. He equipped his 7,000 soldiers with small cannon, lances, bows and arrows, flaming torches, and crude firearms discharging leaden bullets of a walnut’s size. Sleeping only by snatches, he supervised, every night, the repair of the damage done to the walls during the day. Nevertheless the ancient defenses crumbled more and more before the battering rams and superior artillery of the Turks; now ended the medieval fortification of cities by walls. On May 29 the Turks fought their way across a moat filled with the bodies of their own slain, and surged over or through the walls into the terrorized city. The cries of the dying were drowned in the martial music of trumpets and drums. The Greeks at last fought bravely; the young Emperor was everywhere in the heat of the action, and the nobles who were with him died to a man in his defense. Surrounded by Turks, he cried out, “Cannot there be found a Christian to cut off my head?” He threw off his imperial garments, fought as a common soldier, disappeared in the rout of his little army, and was never heard of again.

The victors massacred thousands, till all defense ceased. Then they began that rampant plunder which had so long been the substance of their hopes. Every usable adult among the defeated was taken as a prize; nuns were ravished like other women in an impartial mania of rape; Christian masters and servants, shorn of the garb that marked their state, found themselves suddenly equalized in indiscriminate slavery. Pillage was not quite uncontrolled; when Mohammed II found a Moslem piously destroying the marble pavement of St. Sophia, he smote him with the royal scimitar, and announced that all buildings were to be reserved for orderly rapine by the Sultan. St. Sophia was transformed into a mosque after proper purification; all its Christian insignia were removed, and its mosaics were whitewashed into oblivion for 500 years. On the very day of the city’s fall, or on the ensuing Friday, a muezzin mounted the tallest turret of Hagia Sophia and summoned the Moslems to gather in it for prayer to victorious Allah. Mohammed II performed the Moslem ritual in Christendom’s most famous shrine.

The capture of Constantinople shook every throne in Europe. The bulwark had fallen that had protected Europe from Asia for over a thousand years. That Moslem power and faith which the Crusaders had hoped to drive back into inner Asia had now made its way over the corpse of Byzantium, and through the Balkans to the very gates of Hungary. The papacy, which had dreamed of all Greek Christianity submitting to the rule of Rome, saw with dismay the rapid conversion of millions of southeastern Europeans to Islam. Routes of commerce once open to Western vessels were now in alien hands, and could be clogged with tolls in peace or closed with guns in war. Byzantine art, exiled from home, found refuge in Russia, while in the West its influence disappeared with its pride. The migration of Greek scholars to Italy and France, which had begun in 1397, was now accelerated, fructifying Italy with the salvage of ancient Greece. In one sense nothing was lost; only the dead had died. Byzantium had finished its role, and yielded its place, in the heroic and sanguinary, noble and ignominious procession of mankind.

IV. HUNYADI JÁNOS: 1387–1456

The population of Hungary, numbering some 700,000 in the fourteenth century, was a fluctuating mixture of Magyars, Pannonians, Slovaks, Bulgars, Khazars, Patzinaks, Cumans, Slavonians, Croats, Russians, Armenians, Wallachians, Bosnians, and Serbs: in summary, a minority of Magyars ruling a majority of Slavs. In the nascent cities a mercantile middle class and an industrial proletariat began to form in the fourteenth century; and as these were mostly immigrants from Germany, Flanders, and Italy, new racial tensions were added to the ethnic maze.

When Andrew III died, ending the Árpád dynasty (907–1301), a war of succession further divided the nation, and peace returned only when the higher nobility, having made the monarchy elective, conferred the crown of St. Stephen upon Charles Robert of Anjou (1308). Charles brought with him French ideas of feudalism and chivalry, Italian ideas of business and industry. He promoted the development of Hungary’s gold mines, encouraged enterprise, stabilized the currency, cleansed the judiciary, and gave the nation a competent administration. Under Charles and his son Louis, Hungary became a Western state, eager to win the help of the West against the proliferating East.

Louis I, wrote Voltaire, “reigned happily in Hungary forty years” (1342-82), and (not so happily) “in Poland twelve years. His people gave him the surname of the Great, which he well deserved; and yet this prince is hardly known in [Western] Europe, because he did not reign over men capable of transmitting his fame and virtues to other nations. How few know that in the fourteenth century there was a Louis the Great in the Carpathian Mountains!”¹⁴ His character mingled urbane culture and chivalrous sentiments with military ardor and capacity. He indulged occasionally in wars—to avenge his murdered brother in Naples, to recover from Venice the Dalmatian ports that had long seemed to Hungary its due outlets to the sea, and to check the aggressive expansion of Serbia and Turkey by bringing Croatia, Bosnia, and northern Bulgaria under Hungarian control. By example and precept he spread the chivalric ideal among the nobility, and raised the level of manners and morals in his people. During his reign and that of his father, Hungarian Gothic achieved its finest embodiments, and Nicholas Kolozsvari and his sons carved such notable statuary as the St. George now in Prague. In 1367 Louis founded the University of Pécs; but this, along with much of Hungary’s medieval glory, disappeared in the long and exhausting struggle with the Turks.

Louis’s son-in-law, Sigismund I, enjoyed a reign whose length (1387-1437) should have made possible long-term and farsighted policies. But his tasks were greater than his powers. He led a huge army against Bajazet at Nicopolis, and barely escaped from that disaster with his life. He realized that the Turkish advance was now the paramount problem of Europe; he devoted great care and failing funds to fortifying the southern frontier, and built at the junction of the Danube and the Save the great fortress of Belgrade. But his election to the Imperial office compelled him to neglect Hungary during long absences in Germany; and his acquisition of the Bohemian crown widened his responsibilities without enlarging his capacities.

Two years after his death the spreading Turks invaded Hungary. In this crisis the nation produced its most famous hero. Hunyadi János received his surname from the castle of Hunyadi in Transylvania, a stronghold granted to his father for services in war. János—i.e., John—was trained for war almost daily in his youth. He distinguished himself in a victory over the Turks at Semendria, and the new king, Ladislas V, made him commander-in-chief of the armies resisting the Turks. The repulse of the Ottomans became the absorbing devotion of his career. When they entered Transylvania he led against them newly disciplined troops inspired by his patriotism and his generalship. It was in that battle that Simon Kemény, beloved in Hungarian literature, gave his life for his leader. Knowing that the Turks had been instructed to seek out and kill Hunyadi, Simon begged and received permission to exchange costumes with him. He died under concentrated assaults, while Hunyadi directed the army to victory (1442). Murad II dispatched 80,000 new troops to the front; Hunyadi lured them, by feigned retreat, into a narrow pass where only a fraction of them could fight at one time; and again Hunyadi’s strategy triumphed. Harassed by revolts in Asia, Murad sued for terms, and agreed to pay a substantial indemnity. At Szeged, King Ladislas and his allies signed with Murad’s representatives a truce pledging both sides to peace. Ladislas swore on the Bible, the Turkish ambassadors on the Koran (1442).

But Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini, papal legate at Buda, presently judged the time propitious for an offensive. Murad had moved his army to Asia; an Italian fleet, controlling the Dardanelles, could prevent its return. The Cardinal, who had distinguished himself for probity and ability, argued that a pledge to an infidel could not bind a Christian.¹⁵ Hunyadi advised peace, and the Serbian contingent refused to violate the truce. The envoys of the Western nations agreed with Cesarini, and offered to contribute money and men to a sacred crusade. Ladislas yielded, and in person led an attack upon Turkish positions The promised reinforcements from the West did not come; the Ottoman army, 60,000 strong, eluded the Italian admiral, and crossed back to Europe. At Varna near the Black Sea—his standard-bearer holding the dishonored treaty aloft on a lance—Murad inflicted an overwhelming defeat upon Ladislas’ 20,000 men (1444). Hunyadi counseled retreat, the King ordered advance. Hunyadi begged him to stay in the rear; Ladislas plunged into the van of the fight, and was killed. Cesarini did not quite regain his honor by losing his life.

Four years later Hunyadi tried to redeem the disaster. Forcing his way through a hostile Serbia, he met the Turks at Kosovo in a furious engagement that raged for three days. The Hungarians were routed, and Hunyadi joined them in flight. He hid for days in a marsh; starving, he emerged, and was recognized by the Serbians, who handed him over to the Turks. He was released on promising never to lead an army across Serbian soil again.

In 1456 the Turks laid siege to Belgrade. Mohammed II aimed against the citadel the heavy artillery that had shattered the walls of Constantinople; Europe had never known so violent a bombardment. Hunyadi led the defense with a skill and courage never forgotten in Hungarian poetry.¹⁶ At last, preferring the anesthesia of battle to the agonies of starvation, the besieged rushed from the fortress, fought their way to the Turkish cannon, and so decisively vanquished the enemy that for sixty years thereafter Hungary was spared any Moslem attack. A few days after this historic defense Hunyadi died of a fever in the camp. Hungary honors him as its greatest man.

V. THE TIDE AT FULL: 1453–81

The Turks now resumed the conquest of the Balkans. Serbia finally succumbed in 1459, and remained a Turkish province till 1804. Mohammed II took Corinth by siege, and Athens without raising a lance (1458). The conqueror, like Caesar, gave the Athenians easy terms out of respect for their ancestors, and displayed a cultivated interest in the classical monuments. He could well be genial, having avenged not only the Crusades but Marathon. Bosnia, whose port and capital, Ragusa, had by some veneer of culture received the title of the South Slavonic Athens, accepted Turkish rule in 1463, and adopted the Moslem faith with an ease that startled the West.

The most valiant opponent of the Turks in the second half of the fifteenth century was Scanderbeg of Albania. His real name was George of Castriota, and he was probably of modest Slavonian lineage; but legends precious to his people endow him with royal Epirote blood and an adventurous youth. In his boyhood, we are told, he was given as hostage to Murad II, and was brought up at the Adrianople court of the Ottomans. The Sultan so liked his courage and bearing that he treated him as a son and made him an officer in the Turkish army. Converted to Mohammedanism, George received the mighty name of Iskender Bey—i.e., Alexander the Prince—which busy time shortened to Scanderbeg. After leading the Turks in many battles against the Christians, he repented his apostasy, and plotted escape. He renounced Islam, seized the Albanian capital Kruja from its Turkish governor, and proclaimed revolt (1442). Mohammed II sent army after army to chasten him; Scanderbeg defeated them all by the rapidity of his military movements and the genius of his elusive strategy; finally Mohammed, distracted by larger wars, gave him a ten-year armistice (1461). But the Venetian Senate and Pope Pius II persuaded Scanderbeg to break the truce and renew the war (1463). Mohammed, denouncing the Christians as literally faithless infidels, returned to the siege of Kruja. Scanderbeg defended it so tenaciously that the Sultan again raised the siege; but amid the debris of victory Scanderbeg died (1468). Kruja surrendered in 1479, and Albania became a province of Turkey.

Meanwhile the insatiable Mohammed absorbed the Morea, Trebizond, Lesbos, Negroponte (the old Euboea), and the Crimea. In 1477 one of his armies crossed the Isonzo, ravaged northeastern Italy to within twenty-two miles of Venice, and then, laden with booty, returned into Serbia. Frightened Venice, which had fought long and tenaciously for its possessions in the Aegean and the Adriatic, yielded all claim to Kruja and Scutari, and paid an indemnity of 10,000 ducats. Western Europe, which had failed to help Venice, denounced her for making and keeping peace with the infidel.¹⁷ The Turks had now reached the Adriatic, and only the waters that Caesar had crossed in a rowboat separated them from Italy, Rome, and the Vatican. In 1480 Mohammed sent an army across these waters to attack the Kingdom of Naples. It took Otranto with ease, massacred half the 22,000 inhabitants, enslaved the rest, and cut an archbishop in two.¹⁸ The fate of Christianity and monogamy teetered in the scales. Ferrante of Naples ended his war with Florence, and sent his best forces to recapture Otranto. Mohammed had entangled himself in besieging Rhodes; amid that enterprise he died; Rhodes remained Christian till Suleiman; the Turks left Otranto, and retired into Albania (1481). The Ottoman tide for a moment ceased to flow.

VI. THE HUNGARIAN RENAISSANCE: 1456–90

In the half-century of security that Hunyadi had won for Hungary his son Matthias Corvinus led the nation to its historic culmination. Matthias was only sixteen at his accession, and not entirely royal in form; his legs were too short for his trunk, so that he seemed tall only when on a horse; however, he had the chest and arms, the strength and courage, of a gladiator. Not long after his coronation he challenged to single combat a German knight of massive frame and power, who in a tournament at Buda had felled all competitors; and Matthias threatened to have him executed if he failed to fight with all his vigor and skill. The Hungarian historians assure us that the young King, aided by the horns of this dilemma, decisively vanquished the giant.¹⁹ Matthias matured into a good soldier and general, defeated the Turks wherever he encountered them, absorbed Moravia and Silesia, failed to conquer Bohemia. He fought four wars against the Emperor Frederick III, took Vienna, and annexed Austria (1485); the first Austro-Hungarian Empire was Hungarian.

His victories made the monarchy transiently supreme over the nobility; here, as in Western Europe, centralization of government was the order of the day. At Buda, and in the King’s palace at Visegrad, his court equaled any royal grandeur of the age; great noblemen became his servitors; his ambassadors were noted for the splendor of their dress, equipage, and retinue. Matthias’ diplomacy was cunning and unscrupulous, amiable and generous; he bought with gold what would have cost twice as much by arms. Meanwhile he found time and zest to restore every department of the government, and to labor in person as a careful administrator and impartial judge. Roaming in disguise among the people, the soldiery, and the courts, he inspected at first hand the behavior of his officials, and corrected incompetence and injustice without favoritism or fear. He did what he could to protect the weak from the strong, the peasants from their rapacious lords. While the Church continued to claim the country as papal property, Matthias appointed and disciplined prelates, and enjoyed the furore when he made a seven-year-old Italian lad the primate of Hungary. The merchants of Ferrara, with rival humor, sent the new archbishop an assortment of toys.²⁰

In 1476 Matthias married Beatrice of Aragon, and welcomed to Hungary the gay Neapolitan spirit and refined Italian tastes of the granddaughter of Alfonso the Magnanimous. Intercourse between Hungary and Naples had been encouraged by the Angevin kinship of their kings, and many men at the Buda court had been educated in Italy. Matthias himself resembled the Italian Renaissance “despots” in his cultural proclivities as well as his Machiavellian statecraft. Lorenzo de’ Medici sent him two bronze reliefs by Verrocchio, and Lodovico il Moro commissioned Leonardo da Vinci to paint a Madonna for the Hungarian King, assuring the artist that “he is able to value a great picture as few men can.”²¹ Filippino Lippi turned out another Madonna for Corvinus, and his pupils adorned with frescoes the royal palace at Esztergom. An Italian sculptor made a pretty bust of Beatrice;²² probably the famous Milanese goldsmith Caradosso designed the masterly Calvary of Esztergom; Benedetto da Maiano carved decorations for the palace at Buda; and divers Italians built the Renaissance-style tabernacle in the parish church of the Inner City of the capital.²³

Nobles and prelates joined the King in supporting artists and scholars; even the mining towns of the interior had rich men who sublimated wealth into art. Handsome buildings, civic as well as ecclesiastical, rose not only at Buda but at Visegrad, Tata, Esztergom, Nagyvárad, and Vác. Hundreds of sculptors and painters ornamented these edifices. Giovanni Dalmata made notable statues of Hunyadi János and other Hungarian heroes. At Kassa a veritable school of artists formed. There, for the high altar of the church of St. Elizabeth, “Master Stephen” and others carved (1474–77) an immense and complex reredos, whose central figures are quite Italian in their refinement and grace. In the parish church of Beszterczebánya another group carved in stone a great relief, Christ in the Garden of Olives, astonishing in its careful details and dramatic effect. A similar vigor of expression and artistry appears in the Hungarian paintings that survive from this age, as in the Mary Visiting Elizabeth, by “Master M.S.,” now in the Budapest Museum.²⁴ Almost all the art of this Hungarian heyday was destroyed or lost in the Ottoman invasions of the sixteenth century. Some of the statues are in Istanbul, to which they were carried by the victorious Turks.

Matthias’ interests were literary rather than artistic. Humanists, foreign or native, were welcomed at his court, and received lucrative sinecures in the government. Antonio Bonfini wrote a history of the reign in a Latin modeled on Livy. Janós Vitez, Archbishop of Gran, collected a library of ancient classics, and provided funds to send young scholars to study Greek in Italy. One of these, János Pannonius, spent seven years at Ferrara, won admission to Lorenzo’s circle at Florence, and, back in Hungary, astonished the court with his Latin verses and Greek discourses. “When Pannonius spoke Greek,” wrote Bonfini, “you would think he must have been born in Athens.” ²⁵ Probably in Italy alone could one find, in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, such a galaxy of artists and scholars as received sustenance at Matthias’ court. The Sodalitas Litteraria Danubia, founded at Buda in 1497, is among the oldest literary societies in the world.²⁶

Like his Medici contemporaries, Corvinus collected art and books. His palace became a museum of statuary and objets d’art. Tradition has it that he spent 30,000 florins ($750,000?) yearly on books, which in many cases were costly illuminated manuscripts. Yet he did not, like Federigo da Montefeltro, reject printed works; a press was established at Buda in 1473, three years before printing reached England. The Bibliotheca Corvina, which held 10,000 volumes when Matthias died, was the finest fifteenth-century library outside of Italy. It was housed in his Buda palace in two spacious halls, with windows of stained glass looking on the Danube; the shelves were richly carved, and the books, mostly bound in vellum, were curtained with velvet tapestries.²⁷ Matthias seems to have read some of the books; at least he used Livy to induce sleep; and he wrote to a humanist: “O scholars, how happy you are! You strive not after blood-stained glory, nor monarchs’ crowns, but for the laurels of poetry and virtue. You are even able to compel us to forget the tumult of war.”²⁸

The centralized power that Matthias had organized only briefly survived his death (1490). The resurgent magnates dominated Ladislas II, and embezzled revenues that should have paid the troops. The army mutinied, the soldiers went home. Freed from taxation, the nobles wasted their income and energies in riotous living, while Islam pressed against the borders and a bitterly exploited peasantry seethed with revolt. In 1514 the Hungarian Diet declared a crusade against the Turks, and called for volunteers. Peasants in great number flocked to the cross, seeing little to choose between life and death. Finding themselves armed, the thought spread among them, Why wait to kill distant Turks, when hated nobles were so near? A soldier of fortune, György Dózsa, led them in a wild jacquerie; they overran all Hungary, burning castles and massacring all nobles—men, women, children—who fell into their hands. The nobles called in aid from all directions, armed and paid mercenaries, overwhelmed the disorganized peasants, and punished their leaders with frightful torments. For two weeks Dózsa and his aides were kept without food; then he was tied to a red-hot iron throne, a red-hot crown was placed upon his head, a red-hot scepter forced into his hand; and his starved companions were allowed to tear the roasted flesh from his body while he was still conscious. From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.

The peasants were not slaughtered, for they were indispensable; but the Tripartite Code (1514) decreed that “the recent rebellion... has for all time to come put the stain of faithlessness upon the peasants, and they have thereby forfeited their liberty, and have become subject to their landlords in unconditional and perpetual servitude.... Every species of property belongs to the landlords, and the peasant has no right to invoke justice and the law against a noble.” ²⁹

Twelve years later Hungary fell to the Turks.