Crusades and Crusaders in Medieval Greece 29
Historical Outline
Crusading in Frankish Greece can be divided into three major phases. Those
phases are defined, first and foremost, by the objectives of these expeditions
and the enemies they were turned against. The first one, from 1204 to the
late 1320s, was characterised by efforts to prop up or restore the Latin states
which were established in the area in the wake of the Fourth Crusade, and as
a result crusading was directed mainly against the Byzantine Greeks. These
efforts petered out by the early 14th century, and in its third decade a slow but
significant change occurred. In this second phase, the Turks became the ene-
mies against whom Holy War was waged, while the Byzantines were now seen
as potential allies. The third phase of crusading also targeted the Turks, but
there were some significant differences from the second one: whereas the pre-
vious efforts were directed at neutralising the threat of the maritime Turkish
beyliks in the Aegean and consisted mostly of seaborne expeditions and naval
leagues of Latin powers, the later campaigns aimed to break the power of the
mostly land-based Ottomans and to halt their advance in the Balkans. This
effort was punctuated by two famous albeit disastrous campaigns: Nicopolis
(1396) and Varna (1444). The chronological limits between the second and the
third phase can be somewhat hazy. Geanakoplos and Housley have both used
1396 to mark the beginning of the later stage.14 However, in the context of cru-
sading in Romania, the Nicopolis campaign was a manifestation of a trend that
can be traced a few decades back, to the appearance of the Ottomans on the
European side of the Dardanelles (1354) and to the 1360s, when the Byzantine
government intensified its contacts with the West aiming at the organisation of
a major crusade, a passagium generale, against the Ottomans. This is another
difference between the second phase and the third. The stakes and the objec-
tives were now larger and so was the campaign plan: no less than a total com-
mitment of Christendom to stemming the Turkish tide. At the turn of the 15th
century, this goal had replaced the recovery of Jerusalem in the forefront of
crusade priorities. Our examination will end with the efforts, in the immediate
aftermath of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, to organise a crusade
for the recovery of the imperial city in the 1460s.
14 Geanakoplos, “Byzantium and the Crusades,” pp. 31–32 (Geanakoplos divides crusad-
ing activity in Byzantine lands into three periods: 1261–1331, 1331–1396, and 1396–1453);
Housley, Later Crusades, pp. 49–117, at 77–79 (Housely splits his examination of crusading
in Romania in two parts: 1274–1396 and 1396–1502).