Suleiman The Magnificent 1520 1566 (6 page)

17 Hammer, V, 14.

18 Hammer, V, 61. He had been governor of Tripoli in Syria since 1521; Stripling, op. cit., p. 61.

19 lorga, II, 357-358 and references.

course of events, took pains to send the friendliest messages of congratulation to Suleiman.

The powers of Christian Europe were less wise. It will be worth while to devote a couple of paragraphs at this point to their attitude towards the recent progress of the Turks. During the weak reign of Bayezid II, King Louis XII of France, "the eldest son of the Church," and heix to inspiring memories of the mediaeval struggles of the Cross against the Crescent, had despatched two expeditions, in 1499 and 1501, to dislodge the Moslems from their island strongholds in the Levant. Both, however, had disastrously failed, owing chiefly to the refusal of the Venetians to fulfil their promises of cooperation; and now the memory of them was revived, with acid clarity, after the accession of the "Terrible'' Selim in 1512. If the Christians had been defeated when the Turkish Sultan was so notoriously inefficient, what could they possibly hope to accomplish against an enemy now led by an able ruler who literally thirsted for war? No wonder that Western Europe trembled. There was, of course, much talk of new crusading. Pope Leo X kept constantly harping on the necessity for it. During Selim's Persian and Egyptian campaigns, he had repeatedly pointed out the opportunity thereby offered. If the Sultan should be victorious, he declared, he would be much more dangerous and therefore should be attacked at once; if, on the other hand, he should be defeated, there would be the best of all chances to render him harmless forever. In principle no one seemed to disagree with the Pope. King Francis I of France was especially zealous for a crusade. When he was striving to win the imperial crown, in 1519, his agents were instructed to emphasize his fitness to lead an army against the Moslems. He himself declared, in typically grandiloquent fashion, that if elected he would engage within three years either to reach Constantinople, or else to perish on the way. The

Emperor Maximilian and the other sovereigns of Western Europe all promised their loyal support for the great cause; but when it came to translating their words into deeds every one of them drew back. They were far too anxious to get the better of one another to unite for a common cause. The smaller states to the east of them were in terror of their lives.

Under all the circumstances it is no wonder that the powers of Western Europe hailed the news of the death of Selim with feelings of profound relief. Most of them had been convinced that the "Terrible" Sultan, after finishing off his own coreligionists, intended to launch devastating attacks against the Christians. Rumors that he was preparing to assault Rhodes had already reached them. Moreover, it was well known that the savage corsair Khair-eddin Barbarossa, whose elder brother Aruj had made life miserable for the Spaniards in the western basin of the Mediterranean for many years before his death in 1518, had sent an envoy to Constantinople to declare himself the vassal of the Sultan. It looked as if Selim was planning to add North Africa to his empire, and possibly even to attempt the reconquest of Spain. 20 And then came the happy and unexpected news of Selim's early death. The West knew nothing of Suleiman. "It seemed to all men," as Jovius puts it, "that a gentle lamb had succeeded a fierce lion, . . . since Suleiman himself was but young and of no experience . . . and altogether given to rest and quietness." When Pope Leo had "heard for a surety that Selimus was dead, he commanded that the Litany and common prayers be sung throughout all Rome, in which men should go barefoot." n

Christian Europe was soon to discover that it was sadly

20 R. B. Merriman, Rise of the Spanish Empire, 4 vols. (New York, 1918-34), II, 255 if.; Ill, 288if. , „, .,

21 Paolo Giovio, A Shone Treatise upon the Turkes Chronicles, tr. Peter Ashton (London, 1546), folio C.

mistaken in the estimate thus hastily made. On the strength of it men ceased, for five most crucial months, to trouble themselves about the affairs of the Levant. The Pope, indeed, continued to dwell upon the opportunities for a great crusade, but the sovereigns of Western Europe still hung back. All of them knew that for many years past contributions which had been made for the fight against the Moslems had been diverted to other uses less holy and far nearer home; moreover, whereas in Selim's day they had felt that the sacred cause was wellnigh hopeless anyway, they now were convinced that everything was so serene that there was no reason that they should bestir themselves. It is really extraordinary how completely they failed to comprehend the character and abilities of the new Sultan. They thought that he had no knowledge of the duties of his office; whereas, as a matter of fact, he had had more experience of the art of government previous to his accession than had any one of his predecessors. It is true that Suleiman was not of a bloodthirsty disposition, nor did he delight in war as a mere pleasure. On the other hand, as we have already pointed out, he was thoroughly imbued with a sense of his own position and of the duties as well as the dignities that it implied. We must not forget that the Ottoman state regarded all its members, from the sovereign to the humblest soldier, primarily as warriors for the Faith, and that it was chiefly through combats against the Christians that its rulers had risen from nomad chiefs to become lords of a mighty empire. Even the wars of Selirn against other states of his own creed were, as he conceived of them, in the nature of a pan-Islamic movement. Their ultimate object was to group under one head all the powers of the Moslem world, so as to render them more terrible than ever to their Western enemies. The guardianship of the Holy Cities had further emphasized this idea; and the extent of its influence is strikingly dem-

onstrated in the subsequent history of the Ottoman Empire by the fact that from the day that it ceased to be a conquering power it began to decline. Suleiman, a thoroughly pious and zealous Mussulman, showed throughout his whole reign that he regarded it as his first duty to be a soldier of Islam. In this duty as Commander of the Faithful he never faltered to the end of his days. In order, however, to understand the wars and the diplomacy of the next forty-sk years we must begin by taking a glance, from the Turkish standpoint, at the contemporaneous situation in Western Europe.

Ever since the first battle of Kossovo in 1389 had crushed the powers of resistance of the Slavs of the Balkan Peninsula, two states had done more than all the rest of Christendom to check and to hamper, though they had been unable completely to prevent, the progress of the victorious Turk. The republic of Venice on the seas, and the kingdom of Hungary on land, had been the bulwarks of Western Europe. In spite of many reverses, and in spite of the fact that the disproportion between the resources of the combatants grew greater and greater as time went on, both Venice and Hungary had managed to hold their own; and both could look back with pride on what they had already accomplished. Venice, it is true, had lost more than one outpost, and no longer commanded the seas; nevertheless she still remained the great commercial power of the Levant; her fleet was still a factor to be reckoned with; and her fortunate acquisition in 1489 of the island of Cyprus—though it not improbably was accomplished by shady means—obliterated the memory of the loss of Euboea in the reign of Mohammed II. The Hungarians too, in spite of their defeats at Nicopolis and Varna, and at the second battle of Kossovo in 1448, had succeeded in keeping their own frontiers intact. In the bloody border

warfare which raged there even in times of nominal peace, the successes were at least evenly divided. With all their efforts, the Turks had not been able to overcome these two barriers to their further progress.

During the past two or three decades, however, the relative positions of the three states had been profoundly modified to the advantage of the Turks. Even before Selim's conquests in Persia and Egypt had enhanced the power and prestige of the Ottoman Empire, its two nearest Christian rivals had begun to show ominous signs of disintegration and decay.

Contemporaneous historians are wellnigh unanimous in dating the beginning of the decline of Venice from her defeat at Agnadello (May 14, 1509) at the hands of her Christian enemies, banded together in the League of Cam-bray. "In this battle," says one of them, "there was conquered a rich, wise, and powerful people, who had never been subjugated since the days of Attila, king of the Huns." 22 But if we look at the picture from the vantage point of the twentieth century, we shall not be at a loss to find many earlier portents of ultimate disaster. In the first place the power of the republic rested on too small a foundation. No one city-state, however rich, well situated, public spirited and well governed, could possibly hope permanently to hold her own against the great modern consolidated monarchies of the West which had begun to replace the loose feudal aggregations of the Middle Ages. The wealth of the republic, primarily dependent on her commerce, was exhausted by the expense of the wars which she was obliged to wage, both to the east and to the westward, in order to maintain her ancient prestige. Her trade, moreover, was still further menaced by two other recent events. The conquest of Egypt by Selim had put her Eastern commerce almost wholly at the

22 Jean de Saint-Gelais, Histoire de Louys XII (Paris, 1622), p. 217.

mercy of the victorious Turks. The most valuable part of that commerce, moreover, was also threatened by the Portuguese discovery in 1486 of a new way to the East around the Cape of Good Hope. Not only did the Portuguese begin to trade at once in all those Oriental products which since the days of the crusades had come up the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf and had been distributed through Europe almost exclusively by Venetian merchants and vessels; they went further, and soon set to work to block the ancient routes in order to divert this precious commerce into the new channels so profitable to themselves. Against all this Venice alone could do nothing; and now she had no friends to help her. After the disaster at Agnadello, she was no longer regarded as a power of the first rank. When we add to all this the degeneration in the character of her citizens, due chiefly, perhaps, to the ever increasing narrowness of her jealous oligarchical government, the atmosphere of suspicion that pervaded everything, and the timidity that was increasingly evident in all her counsels, we cease to wonder why she could no longer play her old role in the world. The most clearsighted of her statesmen already realized that she was henceforth incapable of meeting her ancient rivals on equal terms alone; and ever since Selim's conquest of Egypt they had bent all their energies towards maintaining good relations, at the least possible sacrifice, with those in authority at Constantinople. Hitherto they had on the whole been successful in these attempts; but there was grave danger lest when they ceased to be feared, they would begin to be despised. 23

The kingdom of Hungary was in even worse case. It had not gradually declined; it had fallen with appalling suddenness from the highest pinnacle of its glory to the

23 W. R. Thayer, A Short History of Venice (New York, 1905), pp. 254-263.

depths of degradation and despair. Under the great Matthias Corvinus (1458-90), the younger son and successor of John Hunyadi, it had not only held back the Turks; it had even contemplated the organization of a crusade which should drive them from the Balkans. To the westward it had annexed Moravia, Silesia, and Lusatia, and driven the ridiculous Hapsburg Emperor Frederick III a fugitive from his capital at Vienna. Matthias' court gave brilliant welcome to the most outstanding figures of the Italian Renaissance. His entertainments were worthy rivals of the most magnificent of Western Europe. Commerce and industry flourished; internal order and security were complete. And then, in the twinkling of an eye, the entire situation had changed. Matthias had been suddenly cut off, in the midst of his triumphs, at the early age of forty-seven. The Hungarian nobility desired a king who should be their servant rather than their master; and their desires were gratified by the choice of Ladislaus Jagello as the successor of the great Corvinus. The new sovereign had been king of Bohemia since 1469; he was also the son of Casimir IV of Poland; outwardly it seemed as if his inheritance of itself would be enough to insure the maintenance of the power of the crown. But Jagello proved pitiably weak. The royal authority lapsed. The feuds of the nobility grew fiercer. Every year saw the confusion increase; and the effective military strength of the kingdom, equally essential to its continued existence and dependent on the power of the monarchy, ebbed away to the vanishing point. A single example will suffice. In 1514 an attempt to launch a crusade served to collect some 40,000 peasants, who promptly turned their arms against the nobles who had oppressed them, and the country was devastated by a horrible social war. When the aristocracy had put down the revolt, at the cost of 50,000 lives, they refused to be satisfied with the usual punish-

ments, and at the next meeting of the Diet they solemnly condemned the whole body of the peasantry to perpetual servitude. After Louis II had succeeded to his father's throne in 1516, the selfish struggles of the various party leaders became more violent than ever. The new sovereign, "born too soon, married too soon, king too soon, and dead too soon," was but ten years old and utterly unable to check them. 24

Venice and Hungary were thus no longer competent to act as the defenders of Europe against the Turk. They had rendered Christendom the inestimable service of holding back the Moslems until successors were ready to take their places, but it was evident by this time that the main burden must henceforth be borne by others. And the recent emergence in Western Europe of powerful national states, ably led by absolute kings, foreshadowed the way in which the need was to be met. As yet these states had had few direct dealings with the East, and were absorbed in their own jealous rivalries; but circumstances were soon to broaden their horizons and force them to take account of the advance of the Ottoman Empire. The entrance of the Turks into close continuous relations, sometimes hostile and sometimes friendly, with the great nations of the west, is enough in itself to shed lustre on the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent.