Conclusion

Summary

Even if the Greeks deserve to pay for their stubborn persistence in rebellious sinfulness, the Turks are nevertheless crossing over from there towards us and true Catholicism. Already Cyprus, Crete, Rhodes, Euboea, and, closer to us, Achaia and Epiros, are being attacked.

Francesco Petrarch, letter to Pope Urban V, 29 June 1366 x 1368.

The words of Francesco Petrarch, echoing those of Marino Sanudo some thirty years earlier, aptly sum up the shift in the perceptions of the Turks and in the focus of crusading which came about during the first half of the fourteenth century. This was a time in which the religious and political makeup of the eastern Mediterranean was fundamentally altered. By the end of the period, the Turks and not the Byzantines were the undisputed masters of Asia Minor and were considered the greatest threat to Latin Christendom in the region. After this point the Ottomans were able to secure a foothold in Europe and overcome any Latin and Greek attempts to halt their advance. They expanded their empire at breakneck speed – only checked by Timur in 1402 – before conquering Constantinople itself in 1453. The Ottoman sieges of Vienna in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the ultimate manifestation of Turkish military might born on the plains of Anatolia in the early years of the fourteenth century.

The merchant crusaders of the Aegean played a fundamental role in helping shape the image of the Turks in western Europe, which would prevail into the early modern period. The reports of several significant naval victories against the beyliks, most notably the defeat of Masud the Mentesheoglu by the Hospitallers in 1312 and the joint victory of the Hospitallers and Zaccaria over a fleet from Aydin in 1319, combined with the reports of Turkish raids on Venetian territories, began the first step in this shift in the perception of the beyliks in the West. This was from one of general ambivalence to one where crusading could be considered as a feasible means with which to oppose them, reflected by the reports of these victories in the writings of the crusade theorists, as well as by authors from the Italian peninsula.