38 Chrissis
the works of William of Adam and Ramon Lull. Most of these works did not
assign great importance to them and used the Turkish threat as an additional
argument for the need to capture Constantinople and then open the way to
Jerusalem through Anatolia.36 Nevertheless, the significance of the Turks had
clearly started to impinge on the consciousness of these authors. The one
who seems to have most clearly grasped the danger posed by the Turks in the
Eastern Mediterranean was the Venetian Marino Sanudo, an enthusiastic and
tireless advocate of the crusade, who had a good knowledge of circumstances
in the Aegean as well as an extensive network of contacts throughout Europe.
Although in his earlier work, the Liber secretorum fidelium crucis, Sanudo had
spoken favourably of the conquest of Constantinople in the context of the
recovery of the Holy Land, in a series of letters in the 1320s he tried to convince
both the powers in the West and the Byzantine emperor about the need for
cooperation and common action.37
The shift of crusade plans, from wresting Constantinople from the Byzantines
to halting the Turkish advance, was gradual and not always straightforward.
The pontificate of John xxii (1316–34) coincides with this era of change,
and the ambivalent attitudes with regard to crusading aims in the Eastern
Mediterranean are reflected in his policies. For the greatest part of his pontifi-
cate, John continued to grant indulgences and funding for the support of Latin
Romania against the schismatic Greeks.38 Probably the most characteristic
example of this transitional period, however, is the letter of 29 November 1322,
which granted an indulgence to the Latins of Achaea who would die fighting
“the schismatic Greeks, and Bulgarians and Alans and Turks and other infidel
36 Leopold, How to Recover, pp. 90–91, 149–50; Schmieder, “Enemy, Obstacle, Ally?”,
pp. 363–64.
37 Peter Lock, “Sanudo, Turks, Greeks and Latins in the Early Fourteenth Century,” in Contact
and Conflict in Frankish Greece and the Aegean, 1204–1453, ed. Nikolaos G. Chrissis and
Mike Carr (Farnham, 2014), pp. 135–49; Christopher Tyerman, “Marino Sanudo Torsello
and the Lost Crusade: Lobbying in the Fourteenth Century,” Transactions of the Royal
Historical Society 32 (1982), 57–73, esp. 69–72; Angeliki Laiou, “Marino Sanudo Torsello,
Byzantium and the Turks: The Background to the Anti-Turkish League of 1332–1334,”
Speculum 45 (1970), 374–92; Friedrich Kunstmann, “Studien über Marino Sanudo Torsello
den Älteren,” Abhandlungen der Historischen Klasse der Königlich Bayerischen Akademie
der Wissenschaften 7 (1855), 695–819, at 776–77, 798–804, 808. For the Liber secretorum,
see Marino Sanudo Torsello, The Book of the Secrets of the Faithful of the Cross, trans. Peter
Lock (Farnham, 2011).
38 Mollat, Jean xxii, nos. 2128, 8241; Tautu, Acta Ioannis xxii, no. 22.