Crusades and Crusaders in Medieval Greece 37
sation of the extent of the Turkish threat: the collapse of the Seljuk state in
the late 13th century had encouraged the rise of independent Turkish beyliks,
which by the early 14th century dominated the coast of Asia Minor. Motivated
by a ghazi mentality of Holy War and deprived from a land frontier with the
unbelievers where they could acquire glory and booty, the coastal beyliks
soon took to the sea, devastating the islands of the Aegean and disrupting the
trade routes.33 If the growth of Turkish power was the one side of the coin, the
enfeeblement of Byzantium was the other. After the loss of Asia Minor and
especially after the empire descended into civil war in the 1320s, Byzantium
hardly figured as a major threat to Latin interests in the Levant. Both sides had
more to fear from the Turks, and this was clearly realised in the efforts of rap-
prochement with the West that characterised the last years of Andronikos ii’s
reign and the entire foreign policy of Andronikos iii (1328–41).34 Finally, as it
was becoming clearer that the loss of Outremer was not likely to be reversed,
since plan after plan for a crusade foundered, the attention of the West slowly
shifted from the Holy Land to the Aegean and Anatolia; the full development
of this process, however, was still some time in the future.
The change of circumstances in the East led to a readjustment of attitudes
and perceptions in the West regarding the shape and direction crusading
action should take. The 1320s can rightly be identified as the decade of transi-
tion. It was at that period that the first tentative efforts were made for common
action on the part of the Christian powers against the Turks. The presence of
the latter was gradually realised by the Latin world in the early 14th century.
The Turkish threat had been invoked as an additional justification for the plans
of Charles of Valois, not only by the popes Benedict xi and Clement V, as noted
earlier, but also by the Byzantine nobles who promised to assist Charles, pre-
cisely because the government of Constantinople was unable to defend the
eastern provinces from the ravages of the “infidel barbarians”.35 The Turks also
started to figure in the treatises for the recovery of the Holy Land, including
33 Elizabeth A. Zachariadou, “Holy War in the Aegean during the Fourteenth Century,” in
Latins and Greeks in the Eastern Mediterranean after 1204, ed. Benjamin Arbel, Bernard
Hamilton and David Jacoby (London, 1989) [= Mediterranean Historical Review 4:1 (1989)],
pp. 212–25; Halil Inalcik, “The Rise of the Turkish Maritime Principalities in Anatolia,
Byzantium and Crusades,” Byzantinische Forschungen 9 (1985), 179–217, Housley, Later
Crusades, pp. 55–57.
34 Laiou, Constantinople, esp. pp. 284–329; Ursula Bosch, Kaiser Andronikos iii. Palaiologos:
Versuch einer Darstellung der byzantinischen Geschichte in den Jahren 1321–1341
(Amsterdam, 1965).
35 Grandjean, Registre, nos. 1006–07; Regestum Clementis, nos. 243–48; Laiou, Constantinople,
pp. 212–20, 341–43.