1453 a Tale of Two Battles

By Julian Reynolds

This book is the author’s second published by Xlibris, the first being Defending Rome: The Masters of the Soldiers, published in 2011. It explores the consequences of two battles fought in 1453 – the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in May and the French victory over the English two months later at Castillon in the last battle of the Hundred Years War. The book considers the impact of these events on a diverse range of topics, including military outcomes, strategic consequences, economic developments, and cultural and religious implications. It concludes by assessing the significance of these two battles in influencing the transition of Europe from the medieval to the modern age.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Oct 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664106802

Book preview

Copyright © 2021 by Julian Reynolds. 831629

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Xlibris

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www.xlibris.com.au

ISBN: 978-1-6641-0679-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6641-0681-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6641-0680-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021914368

Rev. date: 10/08/2021

Contents

DEDICATION

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

MAPS

PREFACE

PART ONE - EUROPE BEFORE THE BATTLES

Chapter 1. Europe in Transition

PART TWO - THE BATTLES OF 1453

Chapter 2. Constantinople

Chapter 3. Castillon

PART THREE – THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE BATTLES

Chapter 4. New Threats and New Horizons 1: Constantinople

Chapter 5. New Threats and New Horizons 2: Castillon

Chapter 6. To a Wider World - Navigation, Exploration and Discovery

Chapter 7. The World Turned Upside Down - Warfare: Guns, Gunpowder and Fortifications

Chapter 8. Religion 1: Filioque: A Church Divided

Chapter 9. Religion 2: Struggle for Supremacy: Popes and Emperors, Councils and Kings

Chapter 10. Religion 3: Turban or Mitre: A Clash of Loyalties

Chapter 11. Ideas: Constantinople and the Rediscovery of Classical Knowledge

Chapter 12. Conclusion

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dedication

To my son, Toby Reynolds (31 January 1977-17 April 2018), a lovely man who died far too young.

Acknowledgement

Thanks to my good friends, John and Julia Carter

for their invaluable editorial assistance and

for kindly allowing me to use their photos of

the walls of Constantinople.

Maps

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Europe in the Mid-15th Century

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Constantinople in 1453

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France in the Mid-15th Century

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Aquitaine/Gascony in Mid-15th Century

Preface

Dates matter in history. They provide points of reference that help us to approach a subject whose vast sweep might otherwise prove too daunting. Similarly they provide structure, a framework upon which we can develop an appreciation of the themes that make up the fabric of history, and of the personalities and events that form the detail of these themes. But the significance we attach to past dates may not reflect the way they were regarded at the time the events that marked them occurred. Nor do the broad periods into which Western historians divide European history necessarily apply with equal relevance to the cultures and civilisations of non-Europeans. What the West delineates as ancient, medieval and modern historical periods in the history of Europe may often only apply to other parts of the world as a consequence of the intervention of Western states and the imposition of their authority in areas beyond Europe. That said, some historians, beginning most famously with Edward Gibbon, saw the ancient period ending and the medieval beginning with the deposition of the last Western Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus, in 476 CE. But while this may have some relevance to the successor states to the Western Roman Empire, where the classical heritage of Rome became more and more tenuous, it hardly applies in the Eastern or Byzantine Empire, centred on Constantinople, where Rome’s influence persisted for another thousand years. And even in the western successor states, the Roman ideal endured through the legal and administrative systems developed by these states and through the aspiration to retain or recreate an empire in the West, eventually realised with the coronation of Charlemagne in 800 CE and through the subsequent creation of the Holy Roman Empire. (1)

Human nature can influence us to attribute significance to specific dates. Concern was felt throughout Christian Europe as the first millennium drew to an end with dire predictions of the Second Coming and the End of Days. Even in our more secular and sophisticated age, fears were expressed about the potential effects of the end of the second millennium. These fears and concerns in both cases anticipated outcomes that, by and large, did not occur. Other dates acquired their significance after the event. 476 CE was one such date, seen by Gibbon and others as more significant than it was by chroniclers of the time, compared to 410 CE, the year in which the city of Rome was seized by the Visigoths under Alaric and regarded by such great Christians as Augustine and Jerome as the end of the civilised world. 1066 and 1204 were seen by contemporaries as dates of significance, the first for the defeat of the Anglo-Saxons and the establishment of the Norman kingdom of England, and the second for the seizure of Constantinople by the Western armies of the Fourth Crusade and the temporary replacement of the Byzantines by the Franks as the rulers of the Eastern Empire. Today we may still acknowledge the enduring significance of 1066 but we would probably not recognise 1204 as being of any lasting importance.

With those caveats in mind, I plan in this book to look at events surrounding 1453 to assess whether this year marked a turning point in European history. Was it, in fact, a critical point, as some have argued, at which Europe shook off its medieval constraints and structures and began to emerge as the modern continent of increasingly secular nation states of today? Or was it instead merely a time in which an apparently epic disaster for the European Christian world lent greater significance to a year that was merely one of many that saw the evolution of this new world? 1453 is historically significant for one major event – the capture of Constantinople by the Muslims under Mehmet II and the consequent end of the Byzantine Empire, the Greek empire that had evolved from the Roman Empire and the foundation of the city of Constantinople by the emperor Constantine in 330 CE. But another event on the other side of Europe occurred within two months of the fall of Constantinople that also made 1453 a politically significant year. This was the battle of Castillon in southern France, the last major battle of the Hundred Years War between England and France, in which the victory of the French forces over those of the Anglo-Gascon army of John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, effectively ended the long conflict between the kingdoms of England and France. The fall of Constantinople and the battle of Castillon changed respectively the military and political environments of eastern and western Europe. But both events had consequences that extended beyond their immediate political and military outcomes, and my aim is to describe these consequences and to demonstrate that, both directly and indirectly, 1453 can be regarded as a year of genuine significance.

The military consequences that flowed from each event are obviously noteworthy. Even these can be looked at on two levels: the tactical or battlefield outcomes, particularly in the area of military technology, and the strategic implications for the protagonists and, more broadly, for the politico-strategic environments of eastern and western Europe. Military technology developments include gunpowder, fortifications, field artillery and handguns. Strategy can encompass such things as Islamic expansion and the threat this posed to Christian Europe; the retreat of Islam in Spain; the English and French focus on national issues, following the end of the Hundred Years War; and the impact on Venice, Genoa and other Italian trading states of the fall of Constantinople, in regard to their naval power, their control of trade with the East, and the threat posed to the territory they controlled in the eastern Mediterranean.

Economic consequences flowed on from the strategic changes wrought by both the fall of Constantinople and the end of the Hundred Years War. These included the effect on Italian trade with the East; the movement of the European economic centre from Eastern to Western Europe; and the renewed impetus given to the search for alternative routes to the East, around Africa and across the Atlantic. There were also profound cultural effects related to these changes, evident in art, philosophy and religion. Since the early Middle Ages, Western Europe had been gradually rediscovering the classical heritage of ancient Greece and Rome. The problem lies in determining the extent to which events in the fifteenth century influenced or intensified the exposure of Western Europeans to this heritage in such areas as painting, sculpture and literature, and whether the fall of Constantinople, or fears of its impending fall in the century preceding the event, lead to a significant flow of people and ideas from the Byzantine world to the West. This requires an appreciation of the extent to which knowledge of the classical age had already penetrated Western Europe from other sources, particularly Islamic Spain and from southern Italy and Sicily where Byzantine influences remained strong.

The Christian religion formed the bedrock of medieval European civilisation and by the fifteenth century it faced challenges from several quarters that threatened its omnipotent grip on the minds of Europeans. Some came from within the Church itself, some from without, challenging the claim of the papacy to act as the intermediary between man and God, and also questioning the very doctrines enunciated by the Church as the Word of God. Critics within the Church like John Wycliffe in England and John Hus in Bohemia sought radical reform of the whole structure of the Church, attacking its hierarchy as an obstacle to man’s relationship with his Maker. At the same time knowledge of the teachings of the classical philosophers began to spread through Western Europe from the thirteenth century, finding receptive audiences among students at such places as the University of Paris and planting doubts that began the erosion of the monolithic faith of the medieval Church.

My account begins with an outline in the opening chapter of the state of Europe in the mid-fifteenth century, setting the scene for the battles at Constantinople and Castillon. The next two chapters describe the course and outcome of the battles themselves. They are followed by several chapters addressing the significance of the two battles, in which I consider a number of developments that helped shape European politics, society and culture and the extent, if any, to which these developments were influenced by the two battles. These include military and strategic concerns that emerged in the second half of the fifteenth century; the entrenchment of political systems involving the exercise of absolute power; the exploration of the world beyond the borders of Europe and the discovery of routes around Africa and across the Atlantic; the evolution of weapons and of the means to resist them; an extended consideration of religion and the challenges it faced; and the rediscovery of classical knowledge and its impact on the late medieval European mind. I conclude with an assessment of how much these two battles contributed to the emergence of a new post-medieval Europe and whether the year 1453 should be regarded as a pivotal time in European history.

Part One - Europe

before the Battles

Chapter 1:

Europe in Transition

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between. (2)

In the year 1453 two major battles were fought within two months of each other at the opposite ends of Europe. On 29 May the Ottoman Turks under their sultan Mehmet II attacked the city of Constantinople after a siege that had endured for almost two months. Inside the city its Byzantine inhabitants under their emperor Constantine XI fought desperately to save this last remnant of the ancient Roman Empire. They fought in vain; the city fell to the Turks. On 17 July a French army sent south by King Charles VII confronted an English force commanded by John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, outside the walls of the town of Castillon in Aquitaine. Talbot’s task was to defeat the efforts of the French to drive the English from one of their last territories on the European mainland. Like the emperor in Constantinople, he failed; he lost the battle at Castillon and, again like the emperor, he lost his own life in the process.

Each of these battles was momentous in its immediate effects. The fall of Constantinople ended Europe’s last direct link with its classical past. The English defeat at Castillon ended the Hundred Years War. In military and geopolitical terms, the outcomes of these battles contributed to the emergence of a new Europe. And by the mid-fifteenth century, Europe was definitely emerging from its medieval chrysalis. The revival of trade in the late Middle Ages had begun the process of challenging the social structures and political institutions that dominated medieval Europe. The impact of the Black Death in the fourteenth century had also helped to undermine the feudal system that had held medieval society in rigid hierarchical social forms. And the Catholic Church was subject to growing pressures for change both to its claim to speak as the only legitimate representative of God on earth and to the doctrines that it propounded as the authorised word of God. Prolonged strife and divisions within the Church throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth century, combined with the growing exposure of Western European intellectuals to the teachings of classical philosophers, served to weaken the grip of the papacy. Change was in the air.

The borders of Europe were stretching and groaning by the mid-fifteenth century. In the middle of the continent sat the old Holy Roman Empire, broadly located within Germany but also claiming sovereignty over all or parts of Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Austria and the present Czech and Slovak republics. Descended from Charlemagne’s empire of the eighth and ninth centuries, it was already an anachronism, deserving Voltaire’s later description in the eighteenth century of being neither holy, Roman nor an empire. The authority of the emperor was defied in northern Italy, challenged in Switzerland, and often derided within Germany whose secular and religious leaders were not prepared to recognise the ultimate power of someone they regarded at best as primus inter pares or first among equals. The empire was to survive in name until the early nineteenth century but any authority the emperor enjoyed derived not from the imperial title but from the power of the Habsburg family who occupied the imperial throne almost unchallenged from 1440 to 1806. Although the weakness of the empire stemmed from a number of causes, at least one of these was incipient nationalism, a growing sense of national differentiation, that made the residents of the cities and towns of northern Italy and those of the cantons of Switzerland determined to resist the dictates of a ruler they increasingly viewed as a German alien. (3)

It would be wrong, however, to see this as an age in which strong nationalistic forces emerged to undermine the power of monarchs and aristocrats. Supra-national empires were to survive into the twentieth century and the interests of the rich and powerful continued to drive the policies of European governments. Religion also remained a fundamental interest in driving these policies and it was either a cause or an excuse for conflict throughout the sixteenth and into the seventeenth centuries. But whatever the cause of conflict at this time, dynastic, religious or otherwise, it does often seem to have had the effect of raising national consciousness. England and France went to war in 1337 over rival dynastic claims to the throne of France. More than one hundred years later, this rivalry had created in both countries a greater sense of national identity than either had possessed when their war began. English victories at Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt stimulated among the English a sense of pride and a sense of difference from the French people whose language and culture had been shared by the ruling classes of both countries. The erosion of English power in France following the triumphs engendered by Joan of Arc had a similar effect on French consciousness of their national identity. And in Spain at this time, religion may have been a prime influence in driving the Catholic monarchs of Castile in their reconquest of territory from the Muslims but it also had a unifying effect on the population now contained within Castilian and Aragonese borders, an effect soon to be amplified by the expulsion from Spain of all Muslims and Jews. (4)

The resurgence of trade was a more influential agent for change in the fifteenth century than early stirrings of national feeling. Early Italian mercantile connections with Constantinople were accelerated by the trading opportunities provided by the Crusades and the decline of Byzantine power, allowing Venice, Genoa and other Italian city-states to acquire the wealth that helped them to assert their independence of imperial, papal or any other overriding authority. Trading connections between the Mediterranean and northern Europe had flourished in the thirteenth century but warfare, plague and lawlessness had reversed this trend in the 1300s. By the mid-fifteenth century, improved marine technology and enhanced security on both land and sea saw trade between the Mediterranean and northern and western Europe return to its former healthy state, particularly as rulers appreciated how their own interests were best served by protecting and encouraging commerce. (5)

The needs of trade led Europe to look beyond its confines to a wider world. The Mongol Empire, that had united central Asia in the thirteenth century and allowed overland trade to flourish between east Asia and Europe, fragmented in the fourteenth century into warring khanates. Trade was diverted south to the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea which increased the cost of Asian goods for the European market. European states began to look for alternative routes to the markets of Asia. Chief among these was the kingdom of Portugal. Barred by Venice and Genoa from the eastern Mediterranean, the Portuguese began to sail south down the African coast in the early fifteenth century, exploiting improved navigation techniques and ship designs to explore the possibility of circumnavigating Africa and reaching Asia. In so doing, they challenged traditional medieval European views of the shape of the world and prepared the way for geographers to argue that Europeans could reach Asia by sailing either east or west around what most educated people accepted was a globe. (6)

The challenge to the medieval European outlook extended beyond geography to include fundamental religious and philosophical concepts. Aristotelianism had reached Christian Europe from Muslim Spain as early as the mid-thirteenth century and, despite a hostile reception from the Church, it spread widely throughout the universities and academies of Europe over the next two centuries. The papacy was vehemently opposed to any philosophy or doctrine that undermined its claim that God created the world. But the popes of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were seriously weakened, at first by their flight from Rome to Avignon between 1309 and 1378, then by the schism that divided the Church for forty years until its resolution at the Council of Constance in 1417. Their authority was challenged within the Church by the conciliar movement that claimed that even the popes were subordinate to ecumenical councils. They were also challenged by reformers like John Wycliffe in England and John Hus in Bohemia who preached against the whole concept of hierarchical authority within the Church, denying that popes or bishops had any role in acting as intermediaries between God and man. (7)

The fifteenth century was a time of cultural revolution in Europe. Literature was flourishing, in part through the groundwork laid by writers in the previous century including Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch in Italy and Chaucer in England. Some were beginning to experiment with the vernacular, providing potential opportunities for much broader audiences than those who read Latin. The invention of moveable type by Johann Gutenberg in the mid-fifteenth century provided the vehicle by which a vastly greater audience would be exposed to knowledge that had previously been restricted to a largely ecclesiastic community with an understanding of Latin. Painters, sculptors and architects emulated writers in experimenting with traditional medieval forms, reaching back to the classical world of ancient Greece and Rome for inspiration in their experimentation. Brunelleschi developed the concept of linear perspective and applied it to his architectural design in 1420 of the dome of Florence Cathedral, modelled on the Roman Pantheon. In painting Masaccio adopted Brunelleschi’s discovery of linear perspective and combined it with atmospheric perspective to create a sense of three dimensional space on flat surfaces, with the illusion of distance enhanced by light and colour. And in sculpture Ghiberti’s sculptural reliefs on the north and east doors of the Baptistery of Florence Cathedral saw the beginning in this field of art of more realistic forms, inspired by man and nature. They were just three of many contemporary artists in the fifteenth century who exploited classical motifs to create art that emphasised the beauty of humanity and its world. (8)

Change did not occur at the same pace in all respects throughout the whole of fifteenth century Europe. Trade accelerated the breakdown of medieval social structures in Western Europe and brought about the urban prosperity that fuelled the Renaissance but it was a different story in the east. Traditional social structures prevailed in the newly-emerging states of Poland/Lithuania, united as one Catholic power since the late fourteenth century, and further east in the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, now shaking off the suzerainty of the Mongol khans of the Golden Horde. Here and in Hungary and the Balkans, power remained firmly in the hands of autocratic monarchs supported by landowning aristocracies, a combination that ensured that feudalism continued to hold sway into the nineteenth century. In the south-east of the continent, the Ottoman Turks were posing an increasing threat not only to the beleaguered remnants of the Byzantine Empire but also to the Christian states of the Balkans and beyond. (9)

This threat was enhanced by yet another innovation in this century of change, the development and refinement of gunpowder and cannon capable of reducing the walls of medieval fortifications that had previously proved impregnable. And events in fifteenth century Europe provided many opportunities to put this emerging technology into practice. A century of intermittent warfare between England and France, with first one side then the other seeming to gain the upper hand, had left both parties exhausted and desperate to find some means of breaking the deadlock and ending the deadly cycle of conflict that drained the resources of the two kingdoms and threatened their internal unity. The English Parliament was increasingly reluctant to fund campaigns in France and the population at large was beginning to reject the taxation needed to provide these funds. Despite the successes that followed the intervention of Joan of Arc, the French monarchy could still not rely on the loyalty of its over-mighty subjects, particularly the dukes of Burgundy and Brittany. (10)

Elsewhere in Europe, conflict seemed endemic. In Iberia Portuguese horizons had extended beyond the confines of the peninsula, taking the crusade against the Muslims to their African heartland with the capture in 1415 of the city of Ceuta, a prelude to a century of navigation down the west coast of Africa in their quest for an alternative route to Asia. In Spain itself, the kingdom of Castile alternated between civil war, squabbles with the neighbouring kingdom of Aragon, and its ongoing conquest of Muslim Spain, now reduced to the emirate of Granada in the far south-east of the peninsula. Aragon was more intent on expanding its influence and territory into the western Mediterranean than seeking territorial gains in Spain, securing control of the Balearic Islands, Sardinia and Sicily and involving itself in the politics of southern Italy. (11)

Fifteenth century Italy was marked as much by incessant warfare as it was by cultural renaissance. The peninsula was fragmented into the Kingdom of Naples in the south, ruled by the House of Anjou but disputed between the Angevins on the mainland and the Aragonese rulers of Sicily; the Papal States, straddling central Italy, nominally subject to the popes in Rome but whose authority was challenged by the rulers of cities throughout their domains; and the city states of northern Italy, again nominally subject to the authority of the Holy Roman Emperor but effectively independent. Real authority in the north was disputed between three powerful states centred on the cities of Milan, Florence and Venice. The rulers of these states and many other smaller cities sought to outdo each other in their patronage of the arts but equally they sought to assert their political dominance over each other. And in this endeavour they were aided by soldiers of fortune, known as condottieri, commanders of private armies prepared to fight for whoever was prepared to hire them. In their style of warfare, the condottieri were the last medieval warriors, normally fighting a deliberately restrained form of combat designed to win the day but not to destroy the enemy, conscious that they too might face defeat and anxious to ensure that they would survive to fight another day. But their activities could be destructive, particularly in the unprotected countryside, and also disruptive of trade, the lifeblood of Renaissance Italy. Many a ruler longed for the weapons that would break the deadlock of endless war. Gunpowder, cannons and handguns were to provide the solution they sought and to bring an end to the age of the condottieri. (12)

Warfare was equally common throughout the rest of Europe. For much of the first half of the fifteenth century, the Holy Roman Empire was disturbed by rebellion in Bohemia, by the Hussite War, in which the followers of the reformer, John Hus, defied the forces of the Emperor Sigismund, following the execution of Hus by the Church, despite the promise of security provided to Hus by Sigismund. On the shores of the Baltic, the combined forces of Poland and Lithuania defeated the Germanic crusading order, the Teutonic Knights, in the battle of Tannenberg (or Grϋnwald) in 1410. The Knights had created a powerful independent state under their Grand Master through successful campaigns against the pagan peoples of Prussia, Lithuania and the eastern Baltic. But by the fifteenth century they were, like the Holy Roman Empire, fast becoming an historical anachronism in the face of the rising nationalism of the Poles, Lithuanians and other emerging nations like the Prussians in north-eastern Europe. The spread of Christianity among these formerly pagan people removed the crusading raison d’être of the Knights. It also provided the basis for the creation of a united Polish/Lithuanian kingdom in the late 14th century when the Lithuanian Grand Duke, Jogaila,