Volume 3 / Book 17 — BOOK XVII. (continued 2)

This discourse, in which the name of Christianity was invoked, but which breathed nothing but vengeance and hatred, made a lively impression upon the assembly. The passions which inflamed the diet of Augsburg, and which left no room for a thought of a war against the Turks, but too plainly showed the state of agitation and discord in which Christendom was then plunged. It is not consistent with our purpose to speak of the league formed, in the first place, against Venice, or of the league afterwards formed against Louis XII., or of the events which brought trouble into Italy, and even into the bosom of the Church, then threatened with a schism.

At the council of the Lateran, convoked by Julius II., the disorders of Christendom were deplored, without the least remedy being proposed for them. They touched upon the war with the Turks, without bestowing any attention upon the means for carrying it on. The exhortations of the pope, which were supposed to be animated by an ambitious policy, inspired no confidence. The pontiff, whom Voltaire represents as a bad priest but a good prince, entered in an active manner into the wars between Christian powers. Since war was carried on in his name, he could not fill the honourable part of a conciliator, and enjoyed no longer the consideration attached to the title of Father of the Faithful. He was not able to reëstablish the peace he had himself broken, and found it impossible to direct an enterprise against the infidels.

The preaching for a crusade, so often repeated, no longer made any impression on men’s minds; misfortunes which never arrived had been so often announced to nations, that they ceased to awaken any alarm. After the death of Mahomet, the Turks seemed to have renounced all idea of conquering Europe. Bajazet at first attacked the Mamelukes of Egypt without success; he afterwards sunk into voluptuousness and the pleasures of the seraglio, which gave the Christians a few years of repose and safety. But as an indolent and effeminate prince did not fulfil the first condition of Ottoman despotism, which was war, he irritated the army, and his pacific tastes brought about his fall from the throne. Selim, who succeeded him, more ambitious and more cruel than Mahomet, accused of poisoning his father, and covered with the blood of his family, had scarcely attained empire before he promised to the janissaries the conquest of the world, and threatened, at the same time, Italy, Germany, Persia, and Egypt.

In the twelfth and last sitting of the fifth council of the Lateran, Leo X. took upon him to preach a crusade against the redoubtable emperor of the Ottomans. He ordered to be read before the fathers of the council a letter from the emperor Maximilian, who expressed great grief at seeing Christendom always exposed to the invasions of a barbarous nation.

At the same time the emperor of Germany, writing to his counsellor at the diet of Nuremberg, expressed the desire he had always felt of reëstablishing the empire of Constantine, and delivering Greece from the domination of the Turks. “We would willingly,” said he, “have employed our power and even our person in this enterprise, if the other leaders of Christendom had assisted.” When reading these letters of Maximilian, we might be led to believe that this prince was touched more than others by the misfortunes of the Greeks and the perils of Christendom. But the inconstancy and levity of his character would not allow him to carry on with ardour an enterprise to which he appeared to attach so much importance. He passed his life in forming projects against the Turks, and in making war against Christian powers; and in his old age consoled himself by thinking that the glory of saving Europe might perhaps one day belong to a prince of his family.

Whilst the Christian princes were thus reciprocally exhorting each other to take arms, without any one of them renouncing the interests of his own ambition, or offering an example of a generous devotion, Selim, after having conquered the king of Persia, attacked the army of the Mamelukes, dethroned the sultan of Cairo, and united to his vast dominions all the countries that the Franks had inhabited or possessed in Asia. Jerusalem then beheld the standard of the crescent floating over its walls, and the son of Bajazet, after the example of Omar, profaned by his presence the church of the Holy Sepulchre.[83] Palestine only fell under a fresh domination, and no change took place in the fate of the Christians. But as Europe dreaded the Turks more than the Mamelukes, against whom war had ceased to be carried on, the news of the conquests of Selim spread consternation and grief everywhere. It appeared to Christendom as if the holy city passed for the first time under the yoke of the infidels; and the sentiments of grief and mourning that the Christians then experienced, necessarily revived the idea of delivering the tomb of Christ.

We must add that the late victories of Selim completed the overthrow of all the powers in the East that had rivalled the Turks, and that whilst increasing in a fearful manner the strength of the Ottoman empire, they left it no other enemies to contend with but the nations of the West.

Leo X. contemplated seriously the dangers which threatened Christendom, and resolved to arm the principal powers of Europe against the Turks. The sovereign pontiff announced his project to the college of cardinals. The prelates most distinguished for their learning and their skill in negotiations, were sent into England, Spain, and Germany, with the mission of appeasing all quarrels that divided princes, and forming a powerful league against the enemies of the Christian republic. Leo X., who declared himself beforehand the head of this holy league, proclaimed a truce of five years among all the states of Europe, and threatened those who disturbed the peace with excommunication.

Whilst the pope was thus giving all his attention to preparations for a crusade, the poets and orators, whose labours he encouraged, represented him as already the liberator of the Christian world. The celebrated Vida, in a Sapphic ode addressed to Leo X., sang the future labours and conquests of the pontiff. Carried away by his poetical enthusiasm, he swore to go, clad in shining steel, to the extremities of the world, and to drink from a brazen helmet the waters of the Xanthus and the Indus. He boasts of cutting down with his sword the barbarous heroes of Asia, and fancies that he already sees posterity placing his name among those of warriors who had never known fear. Vida, in his ode, speaks of neither Christ nor the cross, but of Bellona and Apollo. His verses appear to be much less an inspiration of the Gospel than an imitation of Horace; and the praises he addresses to the head of the Christian Church resemble, both in tone and form, those which the bard of the Tiber addressed to Augustus. Whilst Vida, in profane verses, thus felicitated Leo X. upon the laurels he was about to gather amidst the labours and perils of a holy war, another writer not less celebrated, in a prose epistle printed at the head of the Orations of Cicero, addressed the sovereign pontiff with the same congratulations and the same eulogies. Novagero took delight in celebrating beforehand those days of glory in which the pope would return in triumph to the eternal city, after having extended the limits of the Christian world,—those happy days in which all Italy, in which all nations, should revere him as a divinity descended from heaven for their deliverance.

Italy was then filled with fugitive Greeks, amongst whom were some illustrious scholars, who exercised a great influence over men’s minds, and never ceased to represent the Turks as a barbarous and ferocious people. The Greek tongue was taught with success in the most celebrated schools, and the new direction of studies, with the admiration which the masterpieces of Greece inspired, added greatly to the hatred of the people for the fierce dominators of Byzantium, Athens, and Jerusalem. Thus all the disciples of Homer and Plato associated themselves, in some sort, by their wishes and their discourses, with the enterprise of the sovereign pontiff. It may have been remarked, that the manner of preaching the crusades, and the motives alleged to excite the ardour of the Christians, differed according to circumstances, and were almost always analogous to the prevailing ideas of each period. In the times of which we now speak, everything naturally bears the character and stamp of the great age of Leo X.; and if the crusade had been able to contribute to the restoration of letters, it was just that letters in their turn should do something in a war undertaken against the enemies of civilization and intelligence.

The envoys of the court of Rome were received with distinction in all the states of Europe, and neglected neither evangelical exhortations, nor seductions, nor promises, nor any of the resources of profane policy, to induce Christian princes to join the crusade proclaimed by the pope. The sacred college rejoiced at the success of their mission, and the pope, to prove his gratitude to Heaven, and to draw down divine blessings upon his enterprise, ordered that processions should be made and prayers put up, during three days, in the capital of the Christian world. He himself celebrated the divine office, distributed alms, and walked barefooted and with his head uncovered to the church of the Holy Apostles.

Sadoletus, secretary to the Holy See, one of the most distinguished favourites of the Muses, and who, in the judgment of Erasmus, possessed in his writings the copiousness and the manner of Cicero, pronounced, in the presence of the clergy and the Roman people, a discourse, in which he celebrated the zeal and the activity of the sovereign pontiff, the eagerness of the Christian princes to make peace with each other, and the desire they evinced to unite their powers against the Turks: the orator reminded his auditory of the emperor of Germany and the king of France, glorious pillars of Christendom; of the army of Charles, king of Castile, whose youth exhibited all the virtues of ripened age; of the king of England, the invincible defender of the faith; of Emanuel, king of Portugal, always ready to sacrifice his own interests to those of the Church; of Louis II., king of Hungary; and Sigismund, king of Poland; the first, a young prince, the hope of Christians; the second, worthy to be their leader; of the king of Denmark, with whose devotion to religion Europe was well acquainted; and of James, king of Scotland, the examples of whose family must keep him in the road of virtue and glory. Among the Christian states, upon which humanity and religion must build their hopes, Sadoletus did not forget the Helvetians, a powerful and warlike nation, which burned with such zeal for the war against the Turks, that its numerous bands of soldiers were already prepared to march, and only waited for the signal of the head of the Church. The holy orator finished by a vehement apostrophe against the race of the Ottomans, whom he threatened with the united forces of Europe, and by an invocation to God, whom he conjured to bless the arms of so many princes, of so many Christian nations, in order that the empire of the world might be wrested from Mahomet, and that the praises of Jesus Christ might at length resound from the south to the north, and from the west to the east.

Leo X. was constantly engaged with the crusade he had preached. He consulted with able captains, and acquired information concerning the strength of the Turks, and upon the means of attacking them with advantage: the most certain means was to raise numerous armies. In his letters to the princes and the faithful, he exhorted Christians not to neglect prayers and the austerities of penitence; but he recommended them above all things to prepare their arms, and to oppose their redoubtable enemies with strength and valour. In concert with the principal states of Christendom, he laid down the plan of the holy war. The emperor of Germany was to furnish an army to which the Hungarian and Polish cavalry should be united. The king of France, with all his forces, all those of the Venetians, and several states of Italy, and sixteen thousand Swiss, was to embark at Brindisi, and make a descent upon the coast of Greece; whilst the fleets of Spain, Portugal, and England, should set sail from Carthagena and the neighbouring ports, to transport Spanish troops to the shores of the Hellespont. The pope proposed to embark himself at the port of Ancona, to repair to Constantinople, under the walls of which city all the forces of the Christian powers were to meet.

This plan was gigantic, and never would the Ottoman empire have been in greater danger, if such vast designs could have been carried into execution. But the Christian monarchs were only able to observe the truce proclaimed by the pope, and which they had accepted for a very few months; each of them had engaged to furnish for the crusade troops which every day became more necessary to them in their own states, and which they wished to aggrandize or defend. The old age of Maximilian, and the approaching vacancy of the imperial throne, at that time held all the ambitious in a state of expectation: very shortly the rivalry of Charles V. and Francis I. rekindled war in Europe, and Christendom, disturbed by the quarrels of princes, no longer thought it probable they should be invaded by the Turks.

But these political dissensions were not the only obstacles to the execution of the projects of Leo X. Another difficulty arose from the levy of the tenths. The clergy everywhere appeared to have the same indifference for the wars which ruined them. The people dreaded to see their alms employed in enterprises which had not for object the triumph of religion. The legate of the pope in Spain addressed himself first to the Arragonese, who replied by a formal refusal, expressed in a national synod. Cardinal Ximenes declared, in the name of the king of Castile, that the Spaniards did not believe in the threats of the Turks, and that they would not give their money until the pope had positively announced how he would employ it. If the dispositions and the will of the court of Rome found less resistance and occasioned no troubles in England or France, it was because Cardinal Wolsey, minister of Henry VIII., was associated in the mission of the apostolic legate, and that Leo X. abandoned the tenths of his kingdom to Francis I.

We have before us several historical documents which have never been printed, and which throw a great light upon the circumstances of which we are speaking. The first is a letter from Francis I., dated from Amboise, the 16th of December, 1516, by which Master Josse de Lagarde, doctor in theology, vicar-general of the cathedral church of Thoulouse, is named commissary, touching the fact of the crusade in the diocese. The king of France exposes in another letter the aim of the jubilate that is about to be opened: it was to implore means to make war against the infidels, and conquer the Holy Land and the empire of Greece, detained and usurped by the said infidels. To these letters patent are joined instructions given by the king, in concert with the legate of the pope, for the execution of the bull which orders the preaching of the crusade in the kingdom of France during the two years 1517 and 1518. These instructions, in the first place, recommend the choice of good preachers, charged to make good and devout sermons to the people, and to explain the faculties and dispensations which are contained in the bull, as well as why the just and holy causes for which it is ordered, that during two years all other indulgences, all other general and particular pardons, are suspended and revoked.

After having spoken of the choice of preachers, and of the manner in which they ought to preach, the letters patent of the king give some instructions upon the choice of confessors. The commissary-general of the crusade could appoint as many as seemed necessary to him for every church in which were troncs et questes (poor-boxes and gatherings) for the jubilee. He was commanded to name six for the cathedral of the diocese, gens de bonne conscience, hors de suspicion (worthy people, above suspicion). The ecclesiastics thus chosen by the commissary had the mission to confess all such as were desirous of indulgences; and to avoid the disorders that might arise from the spirit of rivalry, they had, to the exclusion of all others, the power to make compositions and restitutions, and give absolution, &c. &c.

In short, the royal ordinance omitted none of the circumstances which accompanied the preaching of a crusade, or of the forms which ought to be adopted in the distribution of indulgences. It goes so far as to regulate the shape of the troncs placed in the churches to receive the offerings of the faithful, and the religious ceremonies that were to be observed during the jubilee.[84] Among other orders, one commanded that a great number of confessionals, or bills of absolution and indulgence, should be made; that these bills, signed by a notary, should be sent to the commissary-general, who would seal them WITH THE SEAL sent by the king, and that there should be left upon them a blank space for the name of him or her who wished to procure them. The royal instruction added, that the commissary should cause his tronc to be properly and handsomely set up, and that there should be in the centre of it a large handsome cross, upon which should be written, in great, fair letters, IN HOC SIGNO VINCES. In order that nothing might be wanting to excite the people to devotion, it was besides ordered, that solemn processions should be made, and that in them a handsome banner should be carried, upon which should be, on one side, the portraits of the pope and the king of France, and on the other, paintings full of Turks and other infidels.

In this ordinance, of which it gives us great pleasure to recall the spirit and the expressions, that which history particularly observes, is the numerous precautions against infidelity and fraud. The distributors of the indulgences were obliged to consult an assessment for their government in all expenses and reinstatements. The troncs, in which the money of the faithful was deposited, had three locks and three keys, and were only to be opened in the presence of witnesses; among the documents we have quoted, is one which is the legal order for the opening of the troncs,[85] with an account rendered of the receipts and expenditure, in which the most minute details are not neglected, and which shows to what a degree exactitude and watchfulness were carried. These rigorous precautions were the more necessary, from the people being led to be suspicious by the examples of past times; it was pretty well known that many of the collectors of the money for the crusades were not people of worth, and above suspicion. The more sacred the motive for levying this tribute was said to be, the more promptly was suspicion awakened; and the more anxious did charity itself appear as to the manner in which its offerings might be expended. Upon this point, as upon others, authority had so much the more necessity for keeping a severe watch, from there always being among the orators of the crusades some who showed more zeal than wisdom, and whose preachings were really a subject of scandal. As most of them received a salary proportionate with the amount of money dropped into the troncs of the churches, many did not hesitate to exaggerate the promises of the sovereign pontiff and the privileges attached to gifts of charity. History gives us the example of a preacher who put forth from the evangelical pulpit the following culpable maxim: When a piece of money shall be placed in the tronc of the crusade for the deliverance of a soul from purgatory, immediately that soul will be delivered, and will fly away towards heaven. The Faculty of Theology of Paris censured this proposition as contrary to the dogmas of the Church. The prudence of the heads of the Gallican Church, and the wise measures adopted by the king of France, thus prevented great disorders. It was not so in Germany, where the greatest excitement and dissatisfaction prevailed, and where seeds of heresy and trouble began to spring up even in the bosom of the clergy.

It may have been observed, how much more easy the court of Rome had hitherto daily made the opening of the treasury of pontifical indulgences. In the early expeditions to the East, these indulgences were only granted to the pilgrims of the Holy Land. They were afterwards granted to all who contributed to the support of the Crusaders. Still later, they were granted to the faithful who listened to the sermons of the preachers of the crusades; sometimes even to those who were present at the mass of the pope’s legates. As the distribution or sale of indulgences was an inexhaustible source of wealth, Leo X. took upon him to grant them not only to those who, by their alms, were willing to aid in defraying the expenses of the war against the Turks, but to all the faithful whose pious liberality should contribute to the amount necessary for the completion of the building of the church of St. Peter, which had been begun by his predecessor Julius II. Although this destination might have something noble and truly useful in it; although it might be worthy, in some sort, of an age in which the arts burst forth with great splendour, many Christians, particularly in Germany, saw nothing in it but an actual profanation, and a new means by which the court of Rome sought to enrich itself at the expense of the faithful.

Albert, archbishop of Mayence, charged with appointing the preachers of the jubilee and the distributors of papal indulgences, named for Saxony, Dominicans, to the exclusion of Cordeliers or Augustines, who had sometimes filled these kinds of missions. The latter showed themselves jealous of this preference; and as no precaution had been taken either to avert the effects of this species of rivalry, or put a stop to the abuses which might be committed, it happened that the Augustines censured severely the conduct, manners, and opinions of the Dominicans, and that the latter but too well justified the complaints of their adversaries.

Luther, an Augustine monk, put himself forward in these violent quarrels, and distinguished himself by his fervid eloquence;[86] he spoke strongly against the preachers that had been selected to receive the contributions of the faithful; and among the propositions he put forth from the pulpit, history has preserved the following, which was censured by Leo X.: “It is a sin to resist the Turks, seeing that Providence makes use of this faithless nation, to visit the iniquities of his people.” This strange maxim obtained faith amongst the partisans of Luther; and when the pope’s legate demanded, at the diet of Ratisbon, the levy of the tenths destined for the crusade, he met with a warm opposition. Murmurs and complaints arose in all parts of Germany. The court of Rome was reproached with putting holy things up to sale: it was compared to the unfaithful shepherd, who shears the sheep confided to his care; it was accused of despoiling credulous people; of ruining nations and kings; and of accumulating upon Christians more miseries than the domination of the Turks could cause them.

For more than a century, these kinds of accusations resounded throughout Germany, every time that money was raised for crusades; or that any tribute whatever was imposed upon the Christians by the sovereign pontiff. The reformers took advantage of this disposition of men’s minds to circulate new ideas, and to attempt a revolution in the Church. Among a nation led by its genius and character to speculative ideas, philosophic and religious novelties were sure to find more warm partisans and ardent apostles than elsewhere. It must likewise be added, that Germany was one of the countries of Christendom that Rome had, in its omnipotence, spared the least; and that the spirit of opposition had there taken rise, amidst long quarrels between the priesthood and the empire. When once the tie that united the minds of people was broken, and the yoke of an authority consecrated by time was shaken off, opposition knew no bounds; there was no longer a limit to opinions: the Church was attacked on all sides at once, and by a thousand different sects, all opposed to the court of Rome, and most of them opposed to each other. From that period burst forth that revolution which was destined to separate for ever many nations of Christendom from the Romish communion.

It is not our task to describe the events which accompanied the schism of Luther; but it is curious to observe, that the origin of the Reformation should be connected, not directly with the crusades, but with the abuse of the indulgences promulgated for the crusades.

Like all who begin revolutions, Luther was not at all aware of the extent to which his opposition to the court of Rome might be carried: he at first began by attacking some abuses of the pontifical authority, and soon finished by attacking the authority itself. The opinions he had kindled by his eloquence, the passions he had given birth to among his disciples, led him himself much further than he could possibly have foreseen: those who had the greatest reason to combat the doctrines of the reformers saw, no more than he did, what those doctrines were to bring with them. Germany, divided into a thousand different states, and given up to all kinds of disorders, had no authority sufficiently strong and sufficiently prescient to anticipate the effects of a schism. At the court of Rome nobody could have believed that a simple monk could ever shake the pillars of the Church. Amidst the pomp and the splendour of the arts which he patronized, and diverted by the cares of an ambitious policy, Leo X. perhaps was too neglectful of the progress of Luther. Above all, he was wrong in entirely abandoning the expedition against the Turks, which he had announced to the Christian world, and which might, at least at the first, have offered a useful distraction to minds agitated by ideas of reformation. The undertaking of a holy war which he had followed up with so much warmth at the beginning of his pontificate and for which the poets promised him eternal glory,—this enterprise, at his death, no longer engaged his thoughts, or those of his contemporaries.

In the mean time Soliman, the successor of Selim, had recently taken possession of Belgrade, and threatened the isle of Rhodes. This isle was then the last colony of the Christians in Asia. As long as the Knights of St. John remained masters of it, the sultan of the Turks had reason to fear that some great expedition might be formed in the West for the recovery of Palestine and Syria, or even for the conquest of Egypt, which had lately been united to the Ottoman empire.

The grand-master of the Hospitallers sent to solicit the assistance of Christian Europe. Charles V. had just united, in his own person, the imperial crown with that of the Spains. Entirely occupied with opposing the power of France, and anxious to draw Pope Adrian VI. into a war against the most Christian king, the emperor was very little affected by the danger which threatened the Knights of Rhodes. The sovereign pontiff did not dare to succour them, or solicit for them the support of Christendom. Francis I. exhibited more generous sentiments; but in the situation in which his kingdom was then placed, he was unable to send them the assistance he had promised.

The Knights of Rhodes were left to their own resources. History has celebrated the labours and the prodigies of heroism by which the order of the Hospitallers illustrated its defence. After many months of combats, Rhodes fell into the hands of Soliman. It was a sad spectacle to behold the grand-master L’Isle-Adam, the father of his knights and of his subjects, dragging with him the sad remains of the order, and all the people of Rhodes, who had determined to follow him. He landed at first upon the coast of Naples, not far from the spot where Virgil makes the pious Æneas land, with the glorious wreck of Troy. If the spirit of the crusades could have revived, what heart could have remained unmoved, at seeing this venerable old man, followed by his faithful companions in misfortune, seeking an asylum, imploring compassion, and soliciting, as a reward of their past services, a little corner of earth upon which he and his warriors might still unfurl the standard of religion, and combat the infidels.

When the grand-master set forward on his march towards Rome, Adrian VI. had declared war against the king of France; a league was formed by the sovereign pontiff, the emperor, the king of England, and the duke of Milan. In this state of affairs, the Christians of the East could not hope for any succour. After the death of Adrian, Pope Clement VII. showed himself more favourable to the order of the Hospitallers. He received the grand-master with all the demonstrations of a paternal tenderness. When the chancellor of the order related, in the consistory, the exploits and the reverses of the knights, the sovereign pontiff and the Romish prelates shed tears, and promised to interest all the powers of the Christian world for such noble sufferers. Unfortunately for the order of St. John, the powers of Europe were more than ever divided among themselves. Francis I. was made prisoner at the battle of Pavia. The pope, who had wished to resume the old papal title of the conciliator, only drew down upon himself the hatred and the anger of Charles V. Amidst these divisions, the Knights of Rhodes were forgotten; and it was not till ten years after the conquest of Soliman, that these noble warriors were able to obtain from the emperor, the rock of Malta, where they became again the terror of the Mussulmans.

Whilst Europe was thus troubled, the conqueror of Rhodes and Belgrade reappeared in a threatening attitude upon the banks of the Danube. Louis II. endeavoured to reanimate the patriotism of the Hungarians, and caused the old custom of exposing in public a bloody sabre to be revived, as a signal of war and of danger for the country. But neither the exhortations of the monarch, nor those of the clergy, nor even the approach of the enemy, were able to appease the discords, born of feudal anarchy and the lengthened misfortunes of Hungary. The Hungarian monarch was only able to get together an army of twenty-two thousand men, to oppose to that of Soliman. Louis, a young prince without experience, who allowed himself to be led, even in war, by ecclesiastics, named, as general of his army, Paul Temory, lately issued from a convent of Cordeliers, to become archbishop of Colotza. We are unable to ascertain whether, in this circumstance, the king of Hungary was obliged to put himself in the hands of the clergy, because he was abandoned by the nobility; or, if the nobility abandoned him, because he had put himself in the hands of the clergy. As the pope constantly excited the Hungarians to defend their own country, the ecclesiastics of Hungary, who were his interpreters to the faithful, and even to the king, must naturally have exercised a great influence in all that concerned the crusade.

In this war twenty-two thousand Christians had to contend with an army of a hundred thousand Ottomans; and this was the Hungarian army which, according to the advice of the bishops, offered battle to the infidels. What is very remarkable in holy wars is, that the clergy may almost always be recognised by the rashness of the enterprises. The persuasion of the ecclesiastics, that they were fighting for the cause of God, with their ignorance of the art of war, prevented them from seeing perils, did not allow them to doubt of victory, and made them often neglect the means of human prudence. It was then, in the confidence of a miraculous success, that the archbishop of Colotza did not hesitate to venture upon a decisive battle. The clergy who accompanied him animated the combatants by their discourses, and set an example of bravery; but religious and warlike enthusiasm cannot triumph over numbers, and most of the prelates received the palm of martyrdom in the mêlée. Eighteen thousand Christians were left upon the field of battle; and what added greatly to the misfortune, Louis II. disappeared, and perished in the general rout, leaving his kingdom torn by factions and ravaged by the Turks.

The defeat of the Hungarians brought despair to the mind of Clement VII. The pontiff wrote to all the sovereigns of Europe; he even formed the project of visiting them in person, and to engage them by his prayers and his tears to defend Christendom. Neither the touching exhortations of the pope, nor his suppliant attitude, were able to move the princes; and it is here that we can plainly perceive the rapid decline of the pontifical power, which we have so lately seen armed with all the terrors of the Church, and whose decisions were considered as the decrees of Heaven. War was about to be rekindled in Italy, and the pope was not long in becoming himself the victim of the disorders he would willingly have prevented. The imperial troops entered Rome as into an enemy’s city. The emperor, who assumed the title of temporal head of the Church, did not fear to offer to Europe the scandal of the captivity of a pontiff.

Although the authority of the head of the Church no longer inspired the same veneration, or exercised the same ascendancy over men’s minds, nevertheless the violences of Charles V. excited general indignation. England and France flew to arms. All Europe was troubled: some wished to avenge the pope, others to take advantage of the disorder; but none thought of defending Christendom against the invasion of the Turks.

Clement VII., however, from the depths of the prison in which the emperor detained him, still watched over the defence of Christian Europe: his legates went to exhort the Hungarians to fight for their God and their country. As the pontiff had been ruined by the calamities of war, he implored the charity of the faithful; he ordered that the plate should be sold in all the churches of Italy; he solicited the assistance of several Italian states; and he ordered that indulgences might be distributed and the tenths collected to support the expenses of the holy war.

The active solicitude of the pope went so far as to seek enemies against the Turks even in the East and among the infidels. Acomath, who had in Egypt shaken off the yoke of the Porte, received encouragement from the court of Rome. A legate of the pope went to promise him the support of the Christians of the West. The sovereign pontiff kept up continual relations on all the frontiers and in all the provinces of the Turkish empire, in order to be made aware of the designs and preparations of the sultans of Constantinople. It is not out of place to say here, that most of the predecessors of Clement had taken, as he did, the greatest care in watching the projects of the infidels. Thus the heads of the Church did not confine themselves to exciting the Christians to defend themselves upon their own territories; but, like vigilant sentinels, they constantly kept their eyes fixed upon the enemies of Christendom, to warn Europe of the perils which threatened it.

When the emperor broke the chains of Clement VII., the holy pontiff forgot the outrages he had received, to give all his cares to the danger of the German empire, which was about to be attacked by the Turks. The capital of Austria was soon besieged, and only owed its safety to the bravery of its garrison. In the diets of Augsburg and Spire, the pope’s legate endeavoured, in the name of religion, to rouse the ardour of the people of Germany for their own defence. A physician, named Riccius, spoke in the name of the emperor, and added his exhortations to those of the apostolic legate; he made an appeal to the ancient virtue of the Germans, and reminded his auditors of the example of their ancestors, who had never endured a foreign domination. He pressed princes, magistrates, and people, to fight for their own independence and safety. Ferdinand, king of Bohemia and Hungary, urged the princes and states of the empire to adopt prompt and effective measures against the Turks. These exhortations and counsels met with but little success, but had to encounter a strong opposition from the still too active spirit of the new doctrines. All the cities, all the provinces, were occupied by questions agitated by the Reformation. We may at this time compare the nations of Germany, menaced by the Turks, to the Greeks of the lower empire, whom history represents as given up to vain disputes, when the barbarians were at their gates. As among the Greeks, there was a crowd of men among the Germans, who entertained less dread of seeing in their cities the turban of Mahomet than the tiara of the pontiff of Rome; some, governed by a spirit of fatalism scarcely to be equalled in the Koran, asserted that God had judged Hungary, and that the safety of that kingdom was not in the power of men; others (the Millenarians) announced with a fanatical joy the approach of the last judgment; and whilst the preachers of the crusades were exhorting the Germans to defend their country, the jealous pride of an impious sect called for the days of universal desolation.

The paternal proceedings and counsels of the pope were neither able to calm men’s minds, nor to rekindle an enthusiasm for the holy war, in Germany, or even among the Hungarians. Ferdinand, brother of Charles V., whom the imperial power had caused to be declared king of Hungary; and the vaiwode of Transylvania, who, with permission of the Turks, reigned over the ruins of his country, were contending for this unfortunate kingdom, oppressed at the same time by its enemies and its allies. When Soliman returned, for the third time, to the banks of the Danube, called thither by a party of the Hungarian nobility, he found no army to oppose his march. The Ottomans advanced towards the capital of Austria, and prepared to invade the richest provinces of Germany. So pressing a danger determined the head and the princes of the empire to unite their forces against the common enemy. But when the Turks retired in disorder, no one thought of either fighting with them, or pursuing them in their precipitate retreat. The king of Hungary, abandoned all at once by the Germans, and fearing fresh attacks, had no resource but to sue to his enemies for peace. It is a circumstance worthy of remark, that the pope was comprised in the treaty: Soliman gave the title of father to the Roman pontiff, and that of brother to the king of Hungary. Clement VII., after so many useless attempts to interest the princes of Christendom, appeared to entertain no hope but in Providence; and exclaimed with bitterness, when approving the issue of the pacific negotiations, “We have nothing left but to supplicate Heaven to watch itself over the Christian world.”

It might be believed that the holy wars were drawing towards an end, when the head of the Church had laid down his arms, and made peace with the infidels. But this treaty of peace, like others that had preceded it, could only be considered as a truce, and war would most likely break out again when either the Christians or the Mussulmans saw any hopes of carrying it on with advantage. Such was the policy of the times; particularly that which governed the Christian and Mussulman powers in their mutual relations. Soliman had abandoned his projects upon Germany and Hungary, less out of respect for treaties, than because he was employing his forces against the Persians, or that he required his army to quell some revolts which had broken out in Asia against his authority. On the other side, Christendom left the Ottomans in peace, because it was a prey to discord; and because most Christian princes, occupied by their own interests, listened to nothing but the counsels of their ambition.

Europe had at that time three great monarchs, whose united strength would have been quite sufficient to crush the power of the Turks; but these three princes were as much opposed to each other by their policy as by their character and their genius. Henry VIII. of England, who had refuted Luther, and leagued himself with the king of France, to deliver the captive pope, had just separated himself from the Romish Church. Sometimes allied with France, sometimes allied with the emperor, occupied in bringing about the triumph of the schism of which he was the apostle and the head, he had no time to bestow upon war with the infidels. Francis I. had, in the first place, made pretensions to the imperial crown, and afterwards to the duchy of Milan and the kingdom of Naples. These pretensions, which were a source of misfortunes to himself and France, disturbed the whole of his reign, and never allowed him an opportunity for seriously undertaking a crusade against the Turks, a crusade which he himself had preached in his states. The feeling of vengeance and jealousy which animated him against a fortunate and powerful rival, inspired him twice with the idea of seeking an alliance with Soliman. To the great scandal of Christendom, an Ottoman fleet was received in the port of Marseilles, and the standard of the lilies was mingled with the crescent under the walls of Nice. Charles V., master of all the Spains, head of the German empire, sovereign of the Low Countries, and possessor of several empires in the new world, was much more anxious to humble the French monarchy, and establish his domination in Europe, than to defend Christendom against the invasion of the Turks. During the greater part of his reign, this monarch conciliated the Protestants of Germany, on account of the Ottomans; and avoided collision with the Ottomans, on account of his enemies in the Christian republic. He satisfied himself with protecting, by his arms, the capital of Austria, when threatened by the Turks; but when the pope conjured him to employ his forces for the deliverance of Hungary, he preferred attempting an expedition to the coast of Africa. A war against the Moors of Africa was more popular in Spain than an expedition upon the Danube; and Charles was more desirous of acquiring popularity among the Spaniards, than of meriting the gratitude of Christendom. The Barbary powers were recently formed, under the protection of the Ottoman Porte, and began to render themselves formidable in the Mediterranean. Charles carried his arms twice to the coast of Africa: in the first expedition, he got possession of Tunis, planted his standards upon the ruins of Carthage, and delivered twenty thousand captives, who went to publish his victories in every part of the Christian world; in the second expedition, he would have annihilated the Barbary powers, so destructive to the navigation of the Franks; but a hurricane, which destroyed his fleet and his army, dispersed the hopes of commerce and navigators.

At the time Charles experienced so great a disaster whilst combating the Mussulmans of Africa, the Ottomans, invited by Francis I., were ravaging the coasts of Italy, and had recently entered Hungary, from whence they threatened Germany.

Then fresh cries of alarm resounded all over Europe, and among those who exhorted the nations to oppose the Turks, the voice of Martin Luther was heard. In a book entitled Prayer against the Turk, the reformer condemned the indifference of people and kings, and advised the Christians to resist the Mussulmans, if they did not wish to be led into captivity, as the children of Israel had formerly been. In a formula of prayer which he had composed, he expressed himself thus: “Arise, Lord, great God, and sanctify thy name, which thy enemies outrage; strengthen thy reign, which they wish to destroy, and suffer us not to be trampled under-foot by those who are not willing that thou shouldst be our God.”

Murmurs had several times arisen against Luther, who was accused of having, by his doctrines, weakened the courage of the Germans. Some time before the period of which we are speaking, he published an apology, in which, without disavowing the famous proposition censured by the pope, he gave to his words a different sense from that which the court of Rome gave them, and which he himself, no doubt, had given them in the first instance. All his explanations, which it is not very easy to analyze, were reduced to this idea:—“That it was allowable to fight with the Turks, but that it was not allowable to fight with them under the banners of Christianity.” Although the leader of the Reformation required all the qualities of a perfect Christian in the warriors called upon to fight the Mussulmans, and although he drew all the principles of his preaching from the religion of Christ; the standard of the cross in a Christian army, caused him, he said, more horror than the sight of the demon. The true motive for his repugnance for a crusade may be easily guessed; a crusade appeared necessarily to require the concurrence of the pope; and the concurrence of the pope, in a war which interested Christendom, was the thing in the world most dreaded by Luther. He had so strong an aversion to the court of Rome, that in his writings he asks himself if war ought not to be made against the Pope as well as the Turk; and in the excess of his hatred, does not hesitate to answer, against the one as against the other.

We will not repeat here the declamations and the sophisms of Luther. Through the puerile subtleties and the contrary reasonings which he employs for his justification, we must, however, remark the distinction he has made between civil authority and ecclesiastical authority: it is to the first, says the reformer, that it belongs to combat the Turks; the duty of the second is to wait, to submit, to pray, and to groan. He adds, that war was not the business of bishops, but of magistrates; that the emperor, in this circumstance, ought to be considered as the head of the German confederation, and not as the protector of the Church, nor as the support of the Christian faith; a title which can only properly be given to Jesus Christ. All these arguments, doubtless, had something reasonable in them; and the opinion of Luther upon the civil authority, although he might have adopted it only out of opposition to the papal power, would have obtained the approbation of enlightened minds, if he had not employed, in supporting it, all the passion of irritated pride; and if his apology, in particular, had not been stained by abuse which decency will not allow history to repeat.

Not content with this apology, which had for title, Of the War against the Turks, Luther, two years after the siege of Vienna, published another work, entitled, A Military Discourse, in which he also urges the Germans to take arms. This second discourse begins, as the first had done, by theological distinctions and subtleties; by declamations against the pope and the bishops; by predictions upon the approaching end of the world; and upon the power of the Turks; which the author finds clearly announced in Daniel. Although he endeavours to prove, as in his first writing, that the war against the Mussulmans is not at all a religious war, but an enterprise entirely political; he promises, not the less, the palms of martyrdom to those who shall die with arms in their hands. He represents this war as agreeable to the Divinity, and as the duty of a true disciple of the Gospel. “Thy arm and thy lance,” says he to every Christian soldier who shall take arms against the infidels, “shall be the arm and the lance of God. In immolating Turks, thou wilt not shed innocent blood, and the world will consider thee as the executioner of the decrees of divine justice; for thou wilt but kill those whom God has himself condemned. The Turk,” adds he, “ravishes terrestrial life from Christians, and procures them eternal life; he at the same time kills himself, and precipitates himself into hell.” Luther appears to be so penetrated with this idea, that he is on the point of deploring the fate of the Mussulmans; and to chastise indifferent Christians, and pusillanimous Germans, he has no punishment to wish them, unless it be that they should become Turks, and thus be the property of the devil.

A short extract is not sufficient to show what whimsical and singular ideas are contained in Luther’s discourse; it may, however, be easily perceived how much this kind of preaching differs from that of the orators who preached the crusade in preceding ages. In the second part of his discourse, the leader of the Reformation addressed himself to the various classes of society; to the nobility, who are immersed in luxury and pleasures, but for whom the hour of fight is at length come; to the citizens and merchants, for too long a time addicted to usury and cupidity; to the labourers and peasants, whom he accuses of deceiving and robbing their neighbours. The tone of the preacher is full of an excessive severity; he speaks like a man who feels no sorrow at the misfortunes which are about to happen, because he has foretold them, and his warnings and prophecies have been despised. He says, with a sort of satisfaction, that after days of joy and debauchery, after seasons of festivity and pleasures, comes the time of tears, miseries, and alarms. He finishes by a vehement apostrophe, addressed to all who shall remain deaf to his voice, and whom the enemy shall find without defence: “Listen now, then, to the devil in the Turk, you who are not willing to listen to God in Jesus Christ; the Turk will burn your dwellings; he will bear away your cattle and your harvests; he will outrage and slaughter your wives and your daughters before your eyes; he will impale your little children upon the very stakes of the hedge which serves as an inclosure to your heritage; he will immolate you yourselves, or will carry you away into Turkey, to expose you in the market, like unclean animals; it is he who will teach you what you will have lost, and what you ought to have done. It is to the Turk belongs the task to humble the haughty nobility, to render citizens docile, and to chastise and tame the gross multitude.”

Luther then gives his advice upon the manner of making war against the Turks; he is desirous that all should defend themselves even to death, and that all the countries through which the enemy was about to pass should be laid waste; he terminates his discourse by addressing consolations to them who shall fall into the hands of the Turks, and traces out for them a plan of conduct for the time of their captivity among the infidels.

This language, of which we are far from exaggerating the singularity, was not at all calculated to warm and rally men’s minds for a struggle against the enemies of Germany and Christendom. At this period, the princes and the states of the empire frequently met to deliberate on their own dangers. It was more easy to convoke diets than to get together armies. The Protestants were not willing to take arms against the Turks, for fear of strengthening their adversaries; and the Catholics were restrained by their fear of the Protestants: amidst the violent debates that agitated Germany, the Church, and even the civil authority which Luther had proclaimed, lost all that unity of action, without which it is impossible to combat a formidable enemy with advantage. Among the Germans, the spirit of sect weakened by degrees the spirit of patriotism; among Christians, the hatred they conceived for one another caused them to lose that pious ardour which had animated them against the Mussulmans. In proportion as the Reformation proceeded, Germany became divided into two parties, which were like two enemies face to face. Both parties soon had recourse to arms, and, in the fury of civil wars, the invasions of the Turks were forgotten. It was thus that the Reformation, which took its birth at the end of the crusades, completely extinguished the enthusiasm for holy wars, and no longer permitted the nations of Christendom to unite against the infidels.

The name of the Turks was still pronounced in the diets of Germany, and even in the council of Trent; but no measures were adopted for making war against them. From that time there passed nothing in either Hungary or the East which was able to fix the attention of the Christian world. The only event upon which Europe seemed interested was the defence of Malta against all the forces of Soliman. This defence increased the reputation of the military order of St. John. The port of Malta became the only place of shelter for Christian vessels on the route to Egypt, Syria, or Greece. The corsairs of Tunis and Algiers, and all the pirates who infested the Mediterranean, trembled at the sight of the rock, and of the galleys over which floated the standard of the cross. This military colony, always armed against the infidels, and constantly recruited from the warlike nobility of Europe, offered, up to the end of the eighteenth century, a living image of ancient chivalry, and of the heroic epoch of the crusades. We have described the origin of this illustrious order,—we have followed it in its days of triumph, and in its reverses, still more glorious than its victories. We will not say by what revolution it is fallen, nor how it has lost that isle which was given to it as the reward of its bravery, and which it defended, during more than two hundred years, against the Ottoman forces and the barbarians of Africa.

Whilst the Turks miscarried in their expedition against Malta, Soliman was pursuing the war in Hungary, and still threatening Germany. He died on the banks of the Danube, in the midst of victories obtained over the Christians. Christendom must have rejoiced at his death, as it had rejoiced at the death of Mahomet II. Under the reign of Soliman, who was the greatest prince of the Ottoman dynasty, the Turks not only invaded a part of the German empire, but their marine, seconded by the genius of Barberossa and Dragut, made a progress that must have alarmed all the maritime powers of Europe. Selim II., who succeeded him, had neither his qualities nor the genius of most of his predecessors; but he followed not the less their projects of aggrandizement, or the views of their ambitious policy. The Ottomans, masters of the coasts of Greece, Syria, and Africa, were desirous of adding to their conquests the kingdom of Cyprus, which was then possessed by the Venetians.

After a siege of several months, the Ottoman army obtained possession of the cities of Famagousta and Nicosia. The Turks stained their victory by cruelties without example. The bravest of the defenders of Cyprus expiated in tortures the glory of an obstinate resistance; and it may be said, it was the executioners that finished the war. The barbarity of the Turks disgusted the Christian nations afresh; and the maritime countries of the West beheld with terror an invasion which threatened to exclude Europeans from every road to the East.

At the approach of the danger, Pope Pius V. exhorted the Christian powers to take up arms against the Ottomans. A confederation was formed, consisting of the republic of Venice, Philip II., king of Spain, and the pope himself, always ready to add the authority of his example to his preaching. A numerous fleet, equipped for the defence of the isle of Cyprus, arrived too late in the eastern seas, and was only able to repair the disgrace of the Christian arms. This fleet, commanded by Don John of Austria, met that of the Ottomans in the Gulf of Lepanto. It was in this sea Antony and Augustus disputed the mastership of the Roman world. The battle which took place between the Christians and the Turks reminds us in some degree of the spirit and enthusiasm of the crusades. Before the commencement of the conflict, Don John hoisted on board his ship the standard of St. Peter, which he had received from the pope, and the army saluted with cries of joy this religious signal of victory. The leaders of the Christians passed along the line of barques, exhorting the soldiers to fight for the cause of Christ. All the warriors, falling upon their knees, implored divine protection, and arose full of confidence in their own bravery and the miracles of heaven.

No naval battle of antiquity can be compared to this of Lepanto, in which the Turks fought for the empire of the world, and the Christians for the defence of Europe. The courage and skill of Don John and the other leaders, the intrepidity and ardour of the soldiers, and the superiority of the Franks in manœuvring their vessels, and in their artillery, procured for the Christian fleet a decisive victory. Two hundred of the enemy’s ships were taken, burnt, or sunk. The wreck of the Turkish fleet, whilst announcing the victory of the Christians, carried consternation to the coasts of Greece and to the capital of the Ottoman empire.

Terrified by the results of this battle, Selim caused the famous castle of the Dardanelles to be built, which to the present day defends the entrance to the canal of Constantinople. At the time of the battle, the roof of the temple of Mecca fell in, and the Turks believed they saw in this accident a sign of the anger of Heaven. The roof was of wood; and that it might become, says Cantemir, a more solid emblem of the empire, the son of Soliman ordered it to be reconstructed of brick.

Whilst the Turks deplored the first reverse their arms had met with, the whole of Christendom learnt the news of the victory of Lepanto with the greatest joy. The Venetians, who had awaited in terror the issue of the battle, celebrated the triumph of the Christian fleet by extraordinary festivities. In order that no feeling of sadness should be mingled with the universal joy, the senate set all prisoners at liberty, and forbade the subjects of the republic to wear mourning for their relations or friends who had been killed fighting against the Turks. The battle of Lepanto was inscribed upon coins, and as the infidels were defeated on the day of St. Justin, the seigneury ordered that this happy day should be every year a festival for the whole population of Venice.

At Toledo, and in all the churches of Spain, the people and the clergy offered up hymns of gratitude to Heaven for the victory it had granted to the valour of the Christian soldiers. No nation, no prince of Europe, was indifferent to the defeat of the Turks; and, if one historian may be believed, the king of England, James I., celebrated in a poem the glorious day of Lepanto.

As the pope had effectively contributed to the success of the Christian arms, it was at Rome that the strongest symptoms of delight were exhibited. Mark Antony Colonna, who had commanded the vessels of the sovereign pontiff, was received in triumph, and conducted to the Capitol, preceded by a great number of prisoners of war. The ensigns taken from the enemy were suspended in the church of Ara-Cœli. After a solemn mass, Mark Antony Mureti pronounced the panegyric of the triumphant general. Thus the ceremonies of ancient Rome were mingled with those of the modern, to celebrate the valour and exploits of the defenders of Christendom. The Church itself was desirous of consecrating a victory gained over its enemies among its festivals; Pius V. instituted one in honour of the Virgin, by whose intercession it was believed the Mussulmans had been conquered. This festival was celebrated on the 7th October, the day of the battle of Lepanto, under the denomination of “Our Lady of Victories.”

Thus a unanimous concert of prayers and thanksgivings arose towards heaven, and all Christians at the same time showed their gratitude to the God of armies for having delivered Europe from the invasion of the Mussulmans. But it was not long before this happy harmony was disturbed: ambition, reciprocal mistrusts, diversity of interests, all that had till that time favoured the progress of the Turks, prevented the Christians from deriving the proper advantages from their victory. The Venetians were anxious to pursue the war, in order to recover the isle of Cyprus; but Philip II., dreading any increase in the power of Venice, withdrew from the confederation. The Venetian republic, abandoned by its allies, hastened to make peace. It obtained it by sacrificing all the possessions it had lost during the war,—a strange result of victory; by which the vanquished dictated laws to the conqueror, and which plainly shows us to what extent the pretensions of the Turks would have been carried if fortune had favoured their arms.

The war which was terminated by the battle of Lepanto, was the last in which the standard of the cross animated or rallied Christian warriors.

The spirit of the holy wars at first arose from popular opinions. When these opinions became weakened and great powers were formed, all that relates to war or peace became concentrated in the councils of monarchs. No more projects for distant expeditions were formed in public councils; no more warlike enterprises were recommended from the pulpits of the churches, or before assemblies of the faithful. States and princes, placed at the head of human affairs, even when they made war against the Mussulmans, obeyed much less the influence of religious ideas than interests purely political. From that period the enthusiasm of the multitude, and all the passions that had given birth to the crusades, were reckoned as nothing.

The alliance of Francis I. with Soliman was at first a great scandal for all Christendom. The king of France justified himself by accusing the ambition and the perfidy of Charles V. His example was quickly followed by Charles himself, and by other Christian states. Policy, disengaging itself more and more from that which was religious in it, came at last to consider the Ottoman Porte, no longer an enemy against whom it was a duty always to be fighting, but as a great power, whom it was sometimes necessary to conciliate, and whose support might be sought without outraging the Deity, or affecting the interests of the Church.

As the voice of the sovereign pontiff was always the instrument to summon Christians to take arms against the infidels, the spirit of the crusades necessarily grew weaker as the authority of the popes declined. It may be added, that the political system of Europe was making its development, and the ties and springs which were to found the equilibrium of the Christian republic had an increasing tendency to their establishment. Each state had its plan of defence and aggrandisement, which it followed with a constant activity; all were employed in endeavouring to attain the degree of power, force, and influence to which their position and the fortune of their arms entitled them. Hence those restless ambitions, those mutual mistrusts, that ever active spirit of rivalry, which scarcely ever permitted sovereigns to turn their attention towards distant wars.

Whilst ambition and the desire of increasing and defending their power detained princes in their own states, the people became attached to their homes by the blessings and the enjoyments of a rapidly-rising civilization. In the eleventh century, the Franks, the Normans, and other barbarians from the north, had not quite lost the character and habits of nomadic races, which favoured the rise and the progress of that warlike enthusiasm which had precipitated the Crusaders upon the East. In the sixteenth century, institutions consecrated by time, the precepts of Christianity better understood, respect for ancestry, love of settled property, the constantly increasing wealth of cities, with the progress of industry and of agriculture, had changed the character of the Franks, destroyed their partiality for a wandering life, and had become so many ties to attach them to their country.

In the preceding century the genius of navigation had discovered America and the passage of the Cape of Good Hope. The results of this discovery effected a great revolution in commerce, attracted the attention of all nations, and gave a new direction to the human mind. All the speculations of industry, for so long a time founded upon the crusades, were directed towards America or the East Indies. Great empires, rich climates, offered themselves all at once to the ambition or the cupidity of all who sought for glory, fortune, or adventures—the wonders of a new world made men forgetful of those of the East.

At this so memorable epoch, a general emulation arose in Europe for the cultivation of arts and of letters. The age of Leo X. produced masterpieces of all kinds.[87] France, Spain, and still more Italy, turned the newly-discovered art of printing greatly to the advantage of knowledge. The splendid geniuses of Greece and Rome were everywhere revived. In proportion as men’s minds became enlightened, the new career opened before them expanded. Another enthusiasm succeeded to that of religious enterprises; and the exploits of the heroic times of our history excited much more admiration in our romances and poets, than they created desire in people of the world to imitate them. Then the Epic Muse, whose voice only celebrates distant events, sang the heroes of the holy wars; and the crusades, for the same reason that Tasso became at liberty to adorn the recital of them with all the wealth of his imagination,—the crusades, we say, were no longer anything for Europe but a poetical remembrance.

One fortunate circumstance for Christendom is, that at the period when the crusades, which had for their object the defence of Europe, drew near to their end, the Turks began to lose some part of that military power which they had displayed in their contests with the Christian nations. The Ottomans had at first been, as we have already said, the only nation that kept on foot a regular standing army, which gave it a vast superiority over powers that it was desirous of subduing. In the sixteenth century, most of the great states of Europe had likewise armies which they could at any time bring against their enemies. Discipline and military tactics had made great progress in Christendom; artillery and marine became more perfect in the West every day, whilst the Turks, in all that concerns the art of war, or that of navigation, gathered no advantage from either the lessons of experience, or from the knowledge to which time and circumstances had given birth among their neighbours. We ought to add, that the spirit of superstition and intolerance which the Turks associated with their wars, was very injurious to the preservation and extent of their conquests. When they took possession of a province, they insisted upon making their laws, their customs, and their worship paramount. They must change everything, they must destroy everything, in the country in which they wished to establish themselves; they must either exterminate the population, or reduce it to the impossibility of disturbing a foreign domination. Thus it may be remarked, that, although several times masters of Hungary, they retired from it after every campaign, and were never able, amidst all their victories, to found a colony or make any durable establishment there. The Ottoman population which had sufficed for occupying and enslaving the Greek empire, could not people and preserve more distant countries. It was this, above everything, which saved Germany and Italy from the invasion of the Turks. The Ottomans might, perhaps, have conquered the world if they had been able to impose their manners upon it, or furnish it with inhabitants.

After the battle of Lepanto, although they had preserved the isle of Cyprus, and dictated laws to the republic of Venice, the Turks not the less lost the idea of their being invincible, or that all the world must submit to their arms. It was observed that from that time most of the leaders of Turkish armies or fleets became more timid, and felt less assured of victory, when in the presence of an enemy. Astrologers, who had till then beheld in the phenomena of the heavens the increase and the glory of the Ottoman empire, saw nothing during the reign of Soliman and following reigns but sinister auguries in the aspects of the celestial bodies. We mention astrologers, because their predictions have considerable influence upon the policy of the Turks. It is not improbable that these pretended conjurers did not confine their observations to the celestial bodies, but that they watched the manners and the opinions of the people, and the march of events and affairs. It is for this reason that their prophecies were found true, and that they belong, in some sort, to history.

The spirit of conquest, however, which had so long animated the nation, still subsisted, and sometimes fortune favoured the Ottoman banner with victory.

Towards the end of the sixteenth century, the Turks carried war to both the banks of the Danube and to the frontiers of Persia. Among the Christian warriors who flew to the aid of Germany, the duke of Mercœur, brother of the duke of Mayenne, must not be forgotten; he was followed by a crowd of French soldiers, who had fought against Henry IV., and who went to expiate the crimes of civil war by fighting the infidels. The duke of Mercœur, to whom the emperor Rodolph II. gave the command of the imperial army, gained several advantages over the Ottomans.

Whilst the war was being carried on in Hungary, the king of Persia sent an embassy to the emperor of Germany and the princes of the West, to persuade them to form an alliance with him against the Turks. The Persian ambassadors repaired to the court of the sovereign pontiff, and to those of several Christian powers, conjuring them to declare war against the Ottomans. This embassy of the king of Persia, and the exploits of the French on the Danube, created great uneasiness in the Divan, and an ambassador was sent to the king of France, as the most to be feared of the Christian princes. The letters of credit of the Turkish envoy bore this title: “To the most glorious, magnanimous, and greatest lord of the faith of Jesus, pacificator of the differences which arise among Christian princes, lord of greatness, majesty, and riches, and glorious guide of the greatest, Henry IV., emperor of France.” The sultan of the Turks conjured the French monarch, in his letter, to bring about a truce between the Porte and the emperor of Germany, and to recall from Hungary the duke of Mercœur, whose valour and skill brought victory to the banners of the Germans. Henry IV. interrogated the Ottoman ambassador, and asked him why the Turks dreaded the duke of Mercœur so much. The ambassador replied, that a prophecy, credited by the Turks, declared that the sword of the French would drive them from Europe, and overthrow their empire. Henry IV. did not recall the duke of Mercœur: this able captain continued to beat the Ottomans, and having covered himself with glory in the war against the infidels, he was seized, whilst on his return to France, by a purple fever, “which,” says Mezerai, “sent him to triumph in heaven.”

In their wars against the Christians, the Turks often found themselves on the defensive, which was for them a sign of decline. History remarks that at no period did their reverses cause them more alarm, or their victories more surprise and joy. Their defeats were almost always a signal for sedition and revolt, which the decline of power rendered bold.

And yet the Ottoman empire still carried on war, and advanced like a storm ready to burst. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the isle of Chio, which had belonged to the Genoese, was added to its maritime possessions, and the Turks directed their victorious arms towards Candia, an important colony of the Venetians. At the same time an Ottoman army entered Transylvania, and greatly alarmed Austria.

Pope Alexander VII., pressed by the emperor Leopold I. and by the Venetian senate, endeavoured to form a league among the princes and states of Christendom, and addressed the king of Poland, the king of Spain, and more particularly the king of France, to implore their succour against the Turks.

Louis XIV. yielded to the prayers of the sovereign pontiff, and sent to Rome an ambassador charged to announce to his holiness, that he entered into the confederation of the Christian princes. On the other side, the states of the Germanic empire, which were the allies of France, assembled at Frankfort, and engaged to raise money and troops, promising to unite their efforts with those of the French monarch, for the defence of Christendom.

This generous forwardness on the part of the king of France and his allies merited, no doubt, the gratitude of Leopold; but, what is difficult to be believed, the zeal they showed for the common cause, and which exceeded what was first hoped for, only awakened the jealous uneasiness of the emperor. We have even reason to think that this uneasiness extended to the sovereign pontiff; for his holiness welcomed the propositions of Louis XIV. very coldly; and when the resolutions of the Germanic body reached Rome, Alexander received with indifference news for which any other pope, say the memoirs of the time, would not have failed to go and return solemn thanks in the church of St. Peter or of St. John of the Lateran. The king of France could not dissemble his surprise; and in a letter, which he caused to be written to his ambassador, are these remarkable words: “For the rest, it is more an affair of his holiness than ours; it will suffice for his majesty, for his own satisfaction and his duty towards God, to have made all the advances with respect to this league, that a king, the eldest son of the Church, and the principal defender of religion, could do in a danger imminent for Christendom.”

It was soon known that the Turks were making progress, and had penetrated into Moravia. The emperor Leopold, at their approach, quitted his capital. The pope then consented to resume the suspended negotiations. But they were resumed with a sentiment of jealousy and reciprocal mistrust, that left no hope of a happy result. Louis XIV., nevertheless, omitted nothing to prove the frankness of his intentions, or to forward the formation of a league. It was then believed that an enterprise against the Turks was the business of all Christendom, and that, in this case, one Christian power alone, ought not to decide for peace or war.

We enter into some details here, because these details have not been hitherto generally known, and that present circumstances may give them additional interest. We know, likewise, in the days in which we live, we must search for examples in old remembrances, and often for our true titles to glory likewise.

The emperor could not be reassured by the demonstrations of the French monarch; and the rancour which he retained on account of the treaty of Westphalia, made him forgetful of his own dangers and of those of the Germanic body. Louis XIV. engaged to set on foot an army of twenty thousand men, and the confederates of Germany offered as many. Leopold feared this army on his own account. In the end, Louis satisfied himself with furnishing six thousand soldiers, under the command of the count de Coligny and the marquis de la Feuillade. The pope, not to remain neuter in a war against the Mussulmans, granted the emperor a subsidy of 70,000 florins, and the faculty of levying tenths upon all the ecclesiastical property in the Austrian states. All the united succours of Germany, the king of France, and the other confederate states, formed an army of thirty thousand men. This army marched to Hungary. When united to the troops of the emperor, they gained many advantages over the Turks, and defeated them completely at the battle of St. Gothard. The Ottomans solicited a suspension of arms, and the jealous passions which had at first prevented the war being carried on with vigour, allowed the Divan to conclude an advantageous peace.

The Ottomans, thus delivered from a formidable war, were able to direct all their strength against Candia, which Venice, now left alone, was not strong enough to defend. A great number of French warriors then flew to the succour of a Christian city besieged by the infidels: among the knights whom the love of glory led to this perilous and distant war, history takes pleasure in naming the marquis de Fénelon, whose care had brought up the archbishop of Cambrai, and whom his age considered as the model of gallant gentlemen. His young son, whom he took with him, was wounded in an affair against the Turks, and died of his wounds. France, in the same expedition, had to lament another hero, the young duke of Beaufort; Mascaron, who pronounced the funeral oration of this new Maccabeus, thus describes his death: “After the flight of all the others, yielding rather to number than to strength, he fell upon his own trophies, and died the most glorious death that a Christian hero could wish, sword in hand against the enemies of his God and his king, in the sight of Europe, Asia, and Africa; and more than all that, in the sight of God and his angels.” Louis XIV., always considering it consistent with his glory to protect the Christian states, sent fresh succours to Candia: four French vessels appeared before the isle; but they arrived too late; the city of Candia, after a siege of two years and four months, had just capitulated.

This conquest revived the courage of the Turks, and their power, sustained by the genius of Kiouprouli, whom the Mussulmans called the great destroyer of the bells of impiety, might have still rendered themselves formidable to the Christian nations, if their policy had not been governed by a foolish pride. Intoxicated with some trifling successes, the Turks resumed their project of invading Germany. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, they made a last attempt, and the capital of Austria beheld beneath its walls an army of two hundred thousand infidels.

Germany was exhausted by the thirty years’ war. The king of Poland, urged by the pope to come to the succour of the Germanic empire, hastened with his Polish cavalry to the scene of action, and revived the courage of the Germans and the garrison of Vienna. The Turks, upon being attacked with impetuosity, abandoned their camp, their artillery, and their baggage. The wreck of the Ottoman army did not rally till they reached the banks of the Raab, where they encamped around the tent of the grand vizier, the only one that had not fallen into the hands of the conquerors. John Sobieski entered in triumph into the city he had saved by his courage. This happy event was celebrated throughout Germany by public rejoicings; and, as had been done after the victory gained by Don John of Austria, amidst the ceremonies of the Church, these words from Scripture were repeated: “There was a man sent from God, named John.”

The defeat of Vienna was for the Turks a signal for the greatest reverses. The vengeance of the people and the army pursued the grand vizier, who had conducted the war; and the sultan, Mahomet IV., fell from the throne at the report of these sanguinary disasters, the effects of which were felt to the very heart of the empire. The famous treaty of Carlowitz testifies the losses that the Ottoman nation had undergone, and the incontestable superiority of its enemies. The decline of Turkey, as a maritime power, had commenced at the battle of Lepanto; its decline as a military or conquering power, dates from the defeat of Vienna. History has two things to remark in the negotiations of Carlowitz. Hungary, which had for so long a time resisted the Turks, weakened at length by civil discords and foreign wars, and given up at the same time to the emperors of Germany and the sultans of Constantinople, then lost its national independence, and became united to the possessions of the house of Austria. Among the states and princes who signed the treaty, the czars of Muscovy, who were destined, at a later period, to inflict such terrible blows upon the Ottoman empire, appeared for the first time as a power interested in the Christian struggle against the infidels.

We have described the origin and progress of the Turks; it only remains for us now to speak of the causes of their decline.

The Turks were only constituted to contend with a barbarous people, like themselves, or with a degenerate people, like the Greeks. When they met with nations that were not corrupted, and were not deficient in bravery or patriotism, their career was checked. It is a circumstance worthy of remark, that they were never able to make an impression upon any of the nations of the Latin Church; the only nation that was separated from Christendom by the conquests of the Turks was one that had separated itself from it. When the Ottomans were no longer able to prosecute their scheme of general invasion, all the passions which had stimulated them to conquest only served to disturb their own empire; which is the ordinary destiny of mere conquering nations.

The wars they prosecuted at the same time against Christian Europe and Persia, were the principal causes of the decay of the military power of the Turks. The efforts they made against the Persians, diverted their forces from their expeditions against the Christians; and their expeditions against the Christians crippled their means for the wars in Asia. In these two kinds of war they had a very different manner of fighting. After having for any length of time contended with the warriors of the Oxus or Caucasus, they were incapacitated for making war in Europe. They were never able to triumph completely over either Persia or the Christian nations; and remained at last pressed between two enemies, equally interested in their ruin, and equally animated by religious passions.

The Turks, like all the hordes from the north of Asia, brought with them the feudal government. The first thing to be done by all nomadic nations, who established themselves in conquered countries, was the division of the lands, with certain conditions of protection and obedience. From this division naturally emanated feudalism. The difference, however, which existed between the Turks and the other barbarians who conquered the West, was, that the jealous despotism of the sultans never allowed fiefs to become hereditary, or that an aristocracy should grow up round it, as in the monarchies of Christendom. Thus in the Turkish empire nothing was to be seen on one side, but the authority of an absolute master; and on the other, nothing but a military democracy. The Ottoman monarchy was thus built upon that which is weakest in political societies—the will of a single man, or that of the multitude.

The Turks have been compared to the Romans. Both nations began in the same manner; for both were nothing but bands of brigands. What distinguishes them in history is, that the Turks have remained the same as they were in their origin; whilst the Romans, in their conquests, never rejected the knowledge, the customs, or even the gods of the people they conquered. The Turks, on the contrary, took nothing from other nations, and made it their pride to continue barbarians.

We have said above, that hereditary aristocracy has never been established by the side of despotism; and this is, perhaps, the reason why the Ottoman nation has remained in a state of barbarism. They who have studied the march of human societies know that it is by the aristocracy that the manners and morals of a people are formed, and that it is in the middle classes that knowledge has its birth, and civilization begins.[88] The absence of an aristocracy in oriental governments, not only explains to us the fragility of those governments, but it assists us also in explaining why progress has not been made in a country where nothing distinguished the men from each other, where no one had sufficient influence to guide the crowd, or was sufficiently elevated to serve as an example or model.

In consequence of the indifference of the Turks for the arts and sciences, the labours of industry, agriculture, and navigation, were confided to their slaves, who were their enemies. As they held in horror everything new, or that they had not brought from Asia with them, they were obliged to have recourse to foreigners for everything that was invented or perfected in Europe. Thus the sources of prosperity and power, the strength of their armies and their fleets, were not at all in their own hands. Every one knows what the Turks have lost by neglecting to learn or to follow the progress of the military tactics of the Europeans. At the battle of Lepanto, disorder was introduced into their fleet entirely from their having promised liberty to their sailors, who were all Christians.

Some modern writers, seeking everywhere for similitudes, have compared the janissaries to the pretorian cohorts. This comparison has nothing exact in it: among the Romans, the empire was elective, and the pretorians got possession of it for the purpose of putting it up to sale. Among the Turks, the idea of choosing their prince never suggested itself to the minds of either the people or the soldiery. The janissaries contented themselves with disturbing the government, and keeping it in such a state of disorder, that they could never be dismissed, and might always remain masters. All their opposition consisted in preventing any amelioration whatever in discipline or military usages. The abuses and prejudices the most difficult to be destroyed in a nation, are those which adhere to a body or a class in which power happens to be placed. All-powerful despotism was never able to overcome the opposition of the janissaries and spahis; and those redoubtable corps, which had so effectively contributed to ancient conquests, became the greatest obstacle to the making of new ones.

The Turks established in Greece had more respect for old usages and old prejudices, than they had of love for the country they inhabited. Masters of Stamboul, they had their eyes constantly fixed upon the places of their origin, and appeared to be but travellers, or passing conquerors of Europe. They preserved the manners of Asia, the laws of Asia, the remembrances of Asia; and the West was, in their estimation, less a country than a theatre for their exploits.

Amidst their decline, nothing was more fatal to the Turks than the memory of their past glory; nothing was more injurious to them than that national pride which was no longer in harmony with their fortune, or in proportion with their strength. The illusions of a power that no longer existed prevented them from foreseeing the obstacles they were likely to meet with in their enterprises, or the dangers with which they were threatened. When the Ottomans made an unsuccessful war, or an unfavourable treaty, they never failed to lay the blame on their leaders, whom popular vengeance devoted to death or exile; and whilst they thus immolated victims to their vanity, their reverses became the more irreparable, from their persisting in mistaking the true causes of them.

Tacitus somewhere expresses the joy he felt in seeing barbarians making war upon one another; and we experience something of this joy when we see despotism threatened by its own institutions, and tormented by the very instruments of its power. Another spectacle, no less consoling to all who love humanity and justice, is to behold this family of fierce despots, before whom the entire East trembled, devouring itself. It is well known what victims each sultan, on ascending the throne, was compelled to offer to the suspicious genius of despotism. But Heaven does not permit the most sacred laws of nature to be constantly violated with impunity; and the Ottoman dynasty, in expiation of so many crimes against family ties, sunk at last into a species of degradation. The Ottoman princes, brought up in subjection and fear, lost the energy and the faculties necessary for conducting the government of a great empire. Soliman II. only increased the evil by decreeing a constitutional law, that no son of the sultan’s should command armies or govern provinces. From that time none but effeminate princes, timid and senseless men, occupied the Ottoman throne.

If the will of the prince became corrupt, it was quite sufficient to render the corruption general. In proportion as the character of the sultans degenerated, everything degenerated around them. A universal apathy displaced the noisy activity of war and victory. To the passion for conquests succeeded cupidity, ambition, selfishness, and all the vices that signalize and complete the decline of empires. When states rise and march on towards prosperity, there is an emulation to increase their powers; when they decline, there is also an emulation to urge on their destruction, and take advantage of their ruin.

The empire had always a numerous army; but that army, in which discipline every day degenerated, was only formidable in time of peace. A crowd of Thimariots, or possessors of fiefs for life, having nothing to leave to their families, passed over the lands that were given to them like locusts, which, in the plains where the winds have wafted them, destroy even to the germs of the harvests. The pachas governed the provinces as conquerors. The wealth of the people was for them like the booty which conquerors distributed among themselves on the day of victory. Such as could amass treasures were able to purchase impunity. Such as had armies proclaimed their independence. Subalterns everywhere followed the example of the leaders. In the government, as well as in the army, everything was put up to sale, everything was subject to pillage. Thus this empire, which had displayed such energy, fell like a prey into the hands of all those whom fortune or the favour of the prince called to authority; and if we may be permitted to employ a not very elevated comparison to express the degree of abasement of a nation, the Ottoman power no longer presented any aspect but that of those lifeless bodies in which we can perceive no motion but in the insects that are devouring them.

The sultans of Constantinople, while slumbering in their seraglios, were often awakened by the thunder of popular revolts. Violences of the army or the people were the only justice able to reach despotism. But this justice itself was one calamity the more, and only assisted in precipitating the general decline.

Although the successors of Othman, after the reign of Selim, were the pontiffs of the national faith, this important dignity added nothing to their power. The Mussulman faith, which commanded with severity the observance of many minute practices, did not at all repress the passions of the multitude. A religious belief which permitted a prince to commit fratricide could be no safeguard for either the authority or the life of the prince. A religion always ready to consecrate the triumph of force, could find no motives in its moral code for the condemnation of revolt, particularly when the revolt happened to be crowned with success.[89]

But what is remarkably singular, the Turks, when they rose against a prince of the Ottoman dynasty, preserved a profound veneration for that dynasty. They immolated the tyrant to their vengeance, and were ready to immolate themselves for the tyranny. Thus license, in its greatest excesses, always respected despotism; and what carried disorder to its highest pitch was, that despotism in its turn respected license.

The Turks lived in this state of decline as in their natural condition. Nothing is more remarkable in history than the carelessness of a nation in the midst of a revolution that is dragging it down to its ruin; and this revolution with the Turks was not brought about by new ideas, but by old ideas, not by love of liberty, but by habits of slavery. They respected the causes of their ruin, because these causes were connected with the history of barbarous times; and religion, by constantly repeating to them that “he who is in the fire ought to be resigned,” prevented them from seeking a remedy for the ills they suffered.

Among nations which incline towards destruction, in the very bosom of corruption a certain politeness, a certain polish or elegance of manners, may be observed. The Turks, on the contrary, had a brutal and savage corruption, and their empire grew old without the nation’s losing anything of that fierceness of character, of that proud roughness, which belong to the infancy of society.

We shall be asked why Christendom did not take advantage of this decline of the Turks to drive them back again into Asia. We have seen in this history, that the nations of Christian Europe were never able to combine and agree for the defence of Constantinople, when it was attacked by the Turks; and they showed no more inclination to combine to deliver it after it was taken. We may add that the less redoubtable the Turks became, the fewer were the efforts made to conquer them. They inspired, besides, no jealousy in the commercial nations of Christendom. It was in vain that fortune placed them between the East and the West; that she rendered them masters of the Archipelago, of the coasts of Africa, of the ports of the Black Sea and the Red Sea: their finest provinces were deserts, their cities were abandoned. Everything perished in the hands of an indolent and unpolished people. The Turks were spared, because they made no use of their advantages; and because they were, to employ an expression of Montesquieu’s, the men the most fit to hold great empires carelessly.