6.
Fratres Armis
The three Popes of Mehmet's reign: Nicholas V, Clement VII and Leo X
On April 3rd 1460 Pope Clement VII, remembered little but for his weight and in the words of the Bishop of Siena [1], his “army of bastards”, died of a massive heart attack while in the throes of passion. During his two year reign the Papal States had continued its geopolitical decline that had plagued his predecessor. While Nicholas V had been hampered in the west by the Hundred Years War and in the east by Christian reluctance to combat Ottoman expansionism, Clement was a nonentity, happy to indulge himself with food and women behind the walls of his palaces. When the papal conclave met several weeks later there was a clear desire to choose a man of action. A candidate quickly made himself known in the Archbishop of Rouen, Guillaume d’Estouteville. An ascetic monk with decades of experience in everything from Roman administration to the inquisition of Joan of Arc, Guillaume was enthroned on May 1st as Pope Leo X.
One of his first acts was to organise a meeting of European leaders in Mantua to discuss the issue of the
antichristus, Mehmet II. Leo believed the Sultan preyed on the division of the Christians to pick off their kingdoms one by one. As Archbishop of Rouen he had been a vocal supporter of the efforts to reunite the Catholic and Orthodox churches to encourage a crusade to save Constantinople in 1453. Seven years later, the Pope saw Turkish victories in Anatolia not as a sign they had shifted their attentions away from Europe but as a move to secure their eastern flank before returning west once more in force. This viewpoint, of a master plan to crush the Christian world, was perhaps crude but not entirely inaccurate and certainly struck a chord with European princes. At Mantua, representatives from Venice, Tuscany, Hungary, Naples, and the city-state itself agreed with Leo to form an alliance against Mehmet.
It had been no easy feat. Backed by his benefactor Charles VII of France, Leo had combined astute politicking with hellfire grandstanding to bring the fear of God (or rather perhaps fear of the Grand Turk) into the hearts of his apathetic guests. The Genoese were notably reluctant to sign the treaty [2], while France, Aragon and the German states provided only moral support. The Pope too failed to get the signatories to agree to a crusade, instead settling for a defensive pact. Regardless the League of Mantua was a powerful bloc, dedicated to battling further Turkish encroachment into the continent. The Sultan and his pashas could be forgiven for not taking the League seriously. For over a century similar pacts and promises had been made amongst the Christians only for them to collapse at the sight of Turkish arms. The fall of Constantinople and the failed crusades of Hunyadi had only reinforced the idea of Western callowness in recent years.
As Mehmet set his sights on the Morean Despotate, an isolated fiefdom and Orthodox to boot, it is unlikely he gave Leo X and his machinations much thought. The twin despots Thomas and Demetrios were forever bickering, their respective parties engaging in low-level civil war through the winding alleys of Mystras. Their struggle for streets, businesses and the patronage of merchants would no doubt be familiar to the gangsters of the 20th century. Tired of the unrest’s effect on their Greek ports, the Venetians tossed aside their neutrality and backed Demetrios as sole ruler of Morea. By 1462 Thomas had fled north to Glarentza splitting the Despotate in half. Fearful of the Doge, the younger brother in turn offered his loyalty to the Ottomans if they would aid him in taking the throne for himself. In May the response came with the placing of the seven imperial horse tails at Constantinople's Edirne Gate. The Sultan marched for Europe.
(l) The Battle of Nikli. (r) An Akinci raider tears into his Latin foe.
We cannot know what Thomas anticipated to come of Mehmet’s aid but it would have been incredibly naïve to expect the services of 12,000 men to be given purely in the name of camaraderie. The Ottomans were just as weary of Morean unrest as their opposites in Venice and intended to use the intervention to stamp their authority on the peninsula once and for all. The army crossed the narrow Gulf of Corinth in late June and made camp outside Glarentza, their great tent-city dwarfing Thomas’ capital. No Turk except a young page entered the town, and his visit was purely to command the pretender take audience with his ally in the imperial yurt. It was a brief meeting, Thomas paid homage and was then instructed to remain in Glarentza, his haggard band of mountain warriors deemed of no value to the coming campaign. Mehmet soon set off along the coastal road. Corinth, the supposed gatehouse of Morea fell without fight, its citizens fearful of a Turkish pillage.
Further south on August 16th the Sultan and Demetrios met for the first time near Polyfengos but after a single Janissary charge the Moreans, outnumbered three to one, broke and fled into the hills. A week later the two armies engaged again at the Battle of Nikli. Demetrios formed his army with its back against a crescent ridge to protect himself from flanking cavalry and to mitigate his numerical inferiority. This proved a terrible mistake. Ottoman muskets, bows and cannon tore through the tightly packed Greek ranks, their splendid archaic armour and Byzantine tactics proving useless in the face of modern technology. Attempting to flee through the narrow passes of the ridge a crush developed killing as many as fell to enemy fire. Mehmet’s men supposedly suffered only one hundred causalities to the over two thousand dead and wounded Moreans left behind in the retreat. His army in tatters, the Despot fled back to his mountain stronghold of Mystras.
Mystras was no easy prospect even for Mehmet the Conqueror. Its ancient squat walls and commanding position above the Morean valleys created an imposing bastion. The physics of its position made the artillery train, still led by an elderly Urban, of little use to the Turks and after several disastrous charges up the steep incline in the face of arrows, boulders and pitch, the Sultan accepted it would be necessary to starve out Demetrios. With only a fraction of the army needed to maintain the siege, the rest were sent out to secure the peninsula. Mainly composed of Akinci volunteers paid by plunder, they quickly began to collect their salary, terrorising the merchants and fishing villages of Morea for all they could carry. In the process of this region-wide free for all the Venetian outposts of Nauplion and Modon came under attack by the Ottoman raiders.
The invasion of the pro-Venetian Despot’s territory was already a growing concern in the Republic’s Great Council but direct attacks on their trading posts led to anger and outrage. For some time the Venetians had come to believe their Genoese rivals, dependent on Kaffa and the Black Sea trade, had submitted themselves to Turkish patronage and the two were working to muscle out Venetian merchants in the Aegean. From this viewpoint the attacks were simply a new belligerent step in their scheme. In October 1462 Doge Cristoforo Moro sent a letter to Pope Leo asking for help and guidance on the Ottoman matter, the message’s cloying deference clearly intended to flatter him and mobilise the League of Mantua. It seems Leo already had plans of his own. In May he had sent envoys to Demetrios asking him to convert in return for Papal protection and by association that of the League. The Despot had rebuffed his offer then but now the raids against the Venetian ports granted Leo a second chance to wage war against the Turks.
Allegory of the League of Mantua by Palma il Giovani. Note the Doge not the Pope is at the centre of the unity of holy arms in this piece of Venetian propaganda
At the turn of 1463 the Papal Bull
Fratres Armis was published. It called on all Christendom to do battle with the Ottoman Empire, which Leo described as a ‘heathen plague’ that had swept up Byzantium, chastened the Serbs and was in the process of gripping the Aegean in oriental tyranny. Hunyadi and a now of-age King Ladislaus raised a great army in Buda upon hearing the call. The Hungarian response heartened the League of Mantua and others besides. Venice, Mantua and Tuscany all joined Leo in Italy, who began mustering the largest Papal armies and fleets ever seen. Petru II Aron of Moldavia, long under the shadow of Ottoman influence sent word to Hunyadi offering aid and decapitated the Sultan’s envoy before a baying mob in Budjak. Bosnia sent a letter to Rome asking to join the League’s crusade. In the Caucasus, David X of Georgia heard of the building Latin campaign and seized his chance, riding west alongside Emperor John to liberate newly conquered Trebizond. Even the Bey of Kastamon, who had ridden with Murad II at Varna, took the chance to free himself of Ottoman hegemony, no doubt expecting to fall once Mehmet was done with Morea. Though even Leo was stunned by the fallout from the Bull he was disappointed in some quarters. The French and Germans again offered only words, while the Neapolitans renounced their responsibilities to the League, their new King Ferdinand denying he was bound by his father’s pledges, in turn freeing his brother John II of Aragon from direct action [3]. None of this discounted the tremendous coalition now ranged against Mehmet. When word reached Mystras of events, Mehmet's generals were mortified. Leaving them to their arguments the Sultan supposedly climbed a nearby hill and sat beneath a date tree. After a day in contemplation he came down, mounted his horse and led a corps of Janissaries with speed back to Constantinople. The War of the League of Mantua had begun.
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[1] OTL’s Pope Pius II, a man known not to mince words and for his bizarre success as an erotic novelist.
[2] See Chapter 5
[3] Alfonso V being both king of Aragon and Naples, his younger son Ferdinand took the Neapolitan throne on his death. Though of no importance to our story, OTL’s John II known as ‘The Faithless’ was the perfect unscrupulous monarch, poisoning his enemies, including his own son, pawning off land to France to feed his coffers and spending most of his reign warring with his own subjects. I imagine his brother’s actions here would be used as a weasely excuse to avoid joining the League. Fun guy.
