The History of the Renaissance World (109 page)

*
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

T
HE FIERCE YOUNG
O
TTOMAN SULTAN
M
URAD
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.

T
HE KING OF
H
UNGARY
, 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, J
OHN
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.