50 Chrissis
papal galleys, as well as Milanese and Burgundian contingents indeed showed
up at the rendezvous. However, Pius died soon after arriving in Ancona, and
the expedition fell apart.74
This marked the end of an era for crusades in the Greek lands. The irre-
versible consolidation of Ottoman power in south-eastern Europe and their
seemingly unstoppable expansion moved the line of Christian defence and
crusading action further to the north and west. There was panic when the
Turks made a successful attack in Italy, by temporarily capturing Otranto in
1480–81. The sympathy for the fate of the Byzantines and the sense of urgency
generated by the fall of Constantinople in the West soon expired as the years
dragged on and the war was brought closer to home for the European powers.
By the beginning of the 16th century, nearly all the Christian states and out-
posts in the Balkans and the Aegean were annexed by the Ottoman Empire.
Then, Hungary was broken too with the defeat at Mohács (1526). Calls for cru-
sading action against the “infidel Turks” continued long after that. However,
the war against the Ottomans was soon relegated to little more than obligatory
lip-service for Christian rulers who were more preoccupied with fighting each
other. From the 16th century, the Ottoman Empire was gradually integrated
into the diplomatic system of European powers. The last major “crusading”
success against the Ottomans was the victory of the Holy League, with the par-
ticipation of mostly Venetian and Spanish ships, at Lepanto in 1571.75 By that
time, the issue of the recovery of Constantinople or other formerly Byzantine
lands had faded from sight, despite the occasional grandiloquent rhetoric
which still reached as far as Jerusalem.
Characteristics of Crusading in Frankish Greece
A precise definition of crusading is notoriously elusive. Scholars have long
disagreed over which criteria qualify a specific expedition as a crusade.76 This
74 Setton, Papacy, 2:138–270; Nancy Bisaha, “Pope Pius ii and the Crusade,” in Crusading
in the Fifteenth Century: Message and Impact, ed. Norman Housley (Houndmills, 2004),
pp. 39–52; Silvia Ronchey, “Orthodoxy on Sale: The Last Byzantine and the Lost Crusade,”
in Proceedings of the 21st International Congress of Byzantine Studies (London, 21–26
August 2006), ed. Elizabeth Jeffreys, 3 vols. (Aldershot, 2006), 1:313–42; Norman Housley,
“Pope Pius ii and Crusading,” Crusades 11 (2012), 209–47.
75 For the crusade against the Turks in the 16th and 17th centuries, see: Géraud Pumarede,
Pour en finir avec la croisade: mythes et réalités de la lutte contre les Turcs aux XVIe et XVIIe
siècles (Paris, 2004); Housley, Later Crusades, pp. 118–50; Setton, Papacy, vols. 3–4.
76 See Norman Housley, Contesting the Crusades (Oxford, 2006), pp. 1–23.