ABSTRACT
The role of the Burgundian dukes as the great protagonists of the crusading movement in their day—outlined in Chapter 9—can only be understood in the light of the events in south-eastern Europe which are the subject of the present chapter. The diminishing coastal strip of Palestine which remained in the hands of the western Christians in the thirteenth century finally disappeared with the fall of Acre (1291). Its history since the days of Saladin and Cœur de Lion had been so discouraging that one can sympathise with the disillusioned Knight Templar who wrote after the loss of Arsouf in 1265 that ‘he is mad who seeks to fight the Turks since Jesus Christ does not deny them anything … God, who used to keep watch over us is now asleep, but Mahomet works with all his might’. 1 Meanwhile the restored Byzantine state of the Palaeologi was, as we have seen in Chapter 2, a mere skeleton, the relic of a body politic whose flesh had been consumed by Bulgars, Franks, Venetians and Genoese, not to mention such separatist Greeks as the Despots of Epirus. An account of military and political developments in Byzantine and formerly Byzantine Europe will make it clear why crusading triumphs filled the dreams and daydreams not only of the Avignon popes and the Burgundian dukes, but of Henry IV of England (1399–1413), who dreamt that he would die at Jerusalem, and of his son, Henry V, who liked to think of his French victories as mere preliminaries to greater exploits performed against the ‘malignant and turban'd Turk’. Indeed, for all the great warrior-kings of the west the Turk came to figure as a sort of ‘last enemy’, the supremely formidable opponent who took his place at the end of a queue of more immediate minor foes: even Charles VIII's invasion of Italy in 1494 was presented as the prelude to a great Turkish campaign.
