The History of the Renaissance World (53 page)

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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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

T
HE
H
OLY
R
OMAN
E
MPEROR
F
REDERICK
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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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