The History of the Renaissance World (88 page)

This left Orhan and the Ottomans as John V’s greatest problem: a problem that would occupy him for the next seventeen years of his reign.

Unlike the older John, he was very willing to attack the Turks. But he soon realized that his deposed co-emperor had had a point. The Byzantine army alone was completely incapable of driving out the Turks.

So, having learned precisely nothing from history, he sent an appeal to the pope for help. His letter to Avignon made an offer that would never have crossed Alexius Comnenus’s mind. In exchange for Christian soldiers and ships, John V offered to convert to Catholicism and to return the entire empire to the Catholic fold.

Clement VI had survived the plague, dying in 1352 after a long illness; his successor in Avignon was the Frenchman Innocent VI. Innocent, a lawyer by training, politely sent a papal legate to instruct the emperor in the faith, but he ignored the request for soldiers. John V had not bothered to consult his advisors about the offer, and Innocent VI was a realist; he knew the chances that the Orthodox church would willingly dissolve itself were less than slim.
⁹

After the pope, John V tried the Serbs (too embroiled in their own civil wars), Genoa and Venice (unable to supply the necessary numbers), and the king of Hungary (too busy with his own war against Bulgaria). Meanwhile, the Ottoman occupation of Thrace crept forward. The opportunistic Suleyman Pasha was killed in a riding accident in 1357 (his horse was executed and buried next to his body on the Thracian shore), and Orhan sent his second son Murad across the Hellespont to take his place as governor of Gallipoli and leader of the Turkish invasion. “The Turkish historians say that the prince Murad . . . was the most powerful of the line of the Ottomans,” says the
sixteenth
-century Greek chronicler Theodore Spandounes, “for there was no one to be found who could defeat him in battle. He was always the first to strike.”
¹⁰

Under Murad, the occupation turned into an out-and-out invasion. He besieged and captured the city of Didymoteichon, the second-largest in Byzantium, and then took Adrianople as well. Renamed Edirne, the latter city became the Ottoman capital in Thrace.

His father Orhan died sometime late in 1361 or early in 1362 (the Turkish chronologies are unclear), and Murad became the Ottoman chief. Orhan had taken the title of sultan to himself for the first time in the year of his death; now Murad adopted it as well.
¹¹

And the conquest of Thrace continued.

76.1 The Ottoman Empire

A
BRUPTLY
, the Avignon papacy tottered.

The lawyer Innocent VI died in September of 1362, and the conclave of cardinals decided to elevate the Benedictine monk William Grimoard in his place. At the time, Grimoard was in Italy on a papal mission; when he heard of Innocent VI’s death, he is said to have burst out, “If a Pope were elected who would restore the seat of St. Peter to Italy, I would die content!” News of his own election came shortly after.
¹²

On his return to France, he took the name Urban V. He was ascetic by nature, severe and pious by training, and he had little patience with the luxury that Innocent VI had lived in. He also believed that the papacy could not serve both God and the king of France, and from the moment of his election he began to plan a return to Rome.

The cardinals, most of whom preferred France, objected; but the Roman Senate sent messages of encouragement, and the poet Petrarch (now in his sixties) sent a long and flowery appeal. “While you are sleeping on the shores of the Rhone, under a gilded roof,” his letter began, “the Lateran is a ruin, the Mother of Churches open to the wind and rain; the churches of the Apostles are shapeless heaps of stones.”
¹³

In April of 1367, Urban V set sail from Marseille
*
and took the papacy (and the unwilling cardinals, who complained the whole way about Italian customs, Italian manners, and Italian food) back to its birthplace. The papal palace was indeed a ruin, but he took up temporary residence near Viterbo.

It was there that John V of Constantinople arrived, two years later: at his wits’ end for help, he had decided to appeal once again to the Church. He had realized that the Greek church would not tamely surrender to the pope, but as a last-ditch attempt to raise support, he had decided to convert himself, in the hopes that the Orthodox back in Constantinople would follow.

Urban V agreed to receive the emperor back into the fold of the faithful. In an elaborate ceremony on October 21, 1369, John V kissed the pope’s feet, hands, and mouth, and was welcomed into the Catholic faith.
¹⁴

In return, Urban V supplied him with three hundred soldiers, hardly enough to mount an attack on the Ottomans. But the pope also issued an official bull ordering all Christian monarchs in the west to do everything possible to assist the emperor, as he was now a full brother in the faith. Armed with this assurance, John V tried to raise support from both Genoa and Venice; he was too broke to get home without help, in any case. But when he arrived in Venice, he discovered that the Doge was still calculating interest on the unpaid 30,000-ducat loan taken out by his mother Anne, back in the days of the civil war with John Cantacuzenus. The Doge politely refused to forgive the debt; John V had no money left for travel; and so the emperor of Byzantium was stranded in Venice, saddled with debt, and unable to get back to Constantinople.

Eventually his oldest son Manuel managed to raise the cash by confiscating treasure from the churches and monasteries in Thessalonica, where he was governor, and made his way to Venice to bail out his father. John V arrived at his capital city, humiliated, converted, and penniless, in October 1371. There, he learned that Murad had just led the Ottoman army in a shattering defeat of the Serbians, killing two of the princes who had claimed parts of the Serbian empire after Stefan Dushan’s death, and driving deep into Serbian territory. The Turkish threat now flanked Byzantium, cutting the remnants of the empire off from the rest of Europe; only by water could John return home.
¹⁵

The emperor gave up.

Contemporary accounts do not record the terms of the treaty, but by 1373, John V had sworn a vassal’s oath to Murad and was carrying out his duties by fighting with Murad against rival Turkish tribes in Anatolia. He had renounced his faith and humiliated himself at Venice for nothing; he had transformed himself from an Orthodox Byzantine emperor into a Catholic Turkish vassal, and in return had lost everything but Constantinople itself.
¹⁶

*
See chapter 60, p. 425.

*
See map 73.1, p. 518

Chapter Seventy-Seven

The Disintegration of Delhi

Between 1352 and 1388,
the sultan of Delhi exercises kindness,
the Shah of Bengal cultivates mysticism,
and the rulers of the south spend all their time fighting

I
N
D
ELHI
,
the reluctant Firoz Shah Tughluq had been on the sultan’s t
hrone for a little less than a year. Under his uncle’s cruel and careless rule, the sultanate had drastically shrunk; the early part of his rule was more concerned with matters at home than with enemies beyond Delhi’s current borders. His biographer, Shams-i Siraj, tells us that he began his reign by making massive government loans to the people of Delhi “for the purpose of restoring the land, villages, and the quarters which had fallen into ruin during the days of famine,” and then forgiving the loans.
¹

This was good domestic policy, and Firoz Shah was rewarded with the loyalty of his subjects; during his entire reign, Siraj says, “not one leaf of dominion was shaken in the palace of sovereignty. . . . Everyone had plenty of gold and silver. . . . Wealth abounded and comforts were general. The whole realm of Delhi was blessed with the bounties of the Almighty. . . . These facts are among the glories of his reign.”
²

While Firoz Shah prospered at home, the kingdoms that had broken away from his predecessor continued to expand.

E
AST OF
D
ELHI
, the Bengali kingdom ruled by Shams-ud-Din was evolving steadily away from its previous masters. Shams-ud-Din had expanded his reach, defeating the Hindu warlords around him; and as he did so, his kingdom was taking on a new character.

Since at least the eleventh century, a mystical strain of Islam known as Sufism had threaded through Muslim practice worldwide. Practitioners of Sufi focused their efforts on the present, not on the hereafter; they sought inner purification, working hard to rise to higher and higher levels of piety. They fasted, meditated, prayed, gave alms; internally, they practiced gratitude to God, tried to exist in a constant awareness of the divine bond between God and the believer, strove for a heart-felt affirmation of the oneness of the divine.
³

In this, they were like mystics worldwide: like the contemplative monks of Europe, like the original White Lotus seekers in China. But Sufi believers also held, strongly, that those who had reached inward purity—the
awliyâ’
, Sufi saints—were the true rulers of men. “God has saints whom he has specially distinguished by His friendship,” wrote the eleventh-century Sufi scholar ‘Ali Hujwiri, “and whom He has chosen to be the governors of His Kingdom.”

[He] has purged [them] of natural corruptions and has delivered [them] from subjection to their lower soul and passion, so that all their thoughts are of Him and their intimacy is with Him alone. . . . He has made the Saints the governors of the universe; they have become entirely devoted to His business. . . . Through the blessing of their advent the rain falls from heaven, and through the purity of their lives the plants spring up from the earth, and through their spiritual influence the Muslims gain victories over the unbelievers.
⁴

‘Ali Hujwiri, born in Ghazni, had traveled throughout the old Persian lands where Sufism flourished; but then he had settled in the north Indian city of Lahore, and had found ready ears among both the Muslim poor and the Hindu underclass. To hear that the authority of a saint trumped the power of a king, to be given a chance to rise through spiritual discipline from the mud of their daily lives to such a dazzling high place in the world—that was a rare and wonderful promise.

Sultan Shams-ud-Din was hardly powerless, but he had embraced Sufism as part of his break away from Delhi. He became a patron and follower of the Sufi teacher Shaikh ‘Ala al-Haq, a native Bengali who had achieved sainthood within the Sufi hierarchy. “He is the guide to the religion of the Glorious,” announced Shams-ud-Din, on a mosque inscription that still survives, “may his piety last long.” Sufism gave Shams-ud-Din a useful way to distinguish his rule from that of his former master; and with royal patronage behind it, Sufi mysticism spread throughout the Bengal kingdom.
⁵

Firoz Shah was unable to retrieve Bengal, either for orthodoxy or for the sultanate of Delhi. When Shams-ud-Din died in 1357, Firoz Shah marched into Bengal to confront his son and successor Sikandar. But he did not have the strength to compel the Bengali sultan, and he was forced to retreat after Sikandar offered him nothing more than a token tribute payment.
⁶