Common Knowledge About The Middle Ages That Is Incorrect, Part 5: Crusades In The Renaissance

History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged

Society & Culture, History

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 5 March 2019

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

The Crusades are typically bookended between Pope Urban II's call to reclaim the Holy Land in 1095 and the fall of Acre and the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1291. But two of the most notable religious figures of the 1400s—Pope Pius II and John of Capistrano—show that the lines between these periods were considerably blurred. Take the example of Pope Pius II’s famous 1461 letter to Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II, which he wrote following the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks. The humanist scholar-turned-pope called on Mehmet to convert to Christianity.

Yet behind his back Pope Pius denigrated Mehmet as barbarous due to the same Asiatic pedigree and for destroying classical Greek civilization. He simultaneously worked furiously to promote a crusade against the Ottomans. This fifteenth-century project did not come to pass, but scholars in the last two decades have shown that there was no reason to see a discrepancy between Renaissance intellectualism and Holy War. In fact, Pope Nicholas V issued a papal bull on September 30, 1453 (four months after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople) to urge Christian rulers to launch a crusade to save Constantinople and restore the fallen Byzantine Empire. They were called to shed their blood and the blood for their subjects and provide a tithe of their revenue for the project.

No such crusade was launched that year, but the call launched a final period of European crusading fervor that lasted until the end of the fifteenth century, what many historians consider an end point for the Middle Ages

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone, Scott here, I have a special announcement before we begin this episode.
0:03.6	I'm doing a five-part series on the Middle Ages, and I make the argument that the so-called
0:07.6	Dark Ages really weren't that dark. No one thought the Earth was flat, many things were
0:12.0	invented like clocks, windmills, and even flying machines, universities were built,
0:16.3	philosophy spread, and even the bad stuff that we associate with the Middle Ages, like
0:20.2	which burnings happened in the Renaissance and even the Enlightenment. The reason I'm doing
0:23.7	this series is because I'm also releasing a book that I just finished on the same subject.
0:27.6	It's called the Age of Illumination, Science, Technology, and Reason in the Middle Ages.
0:32.7	It covers all the things I'm going to mention in this podcast series, but goes into way more detail.
0:37.3	The book is now available on Amazon in eBook and Paperbackform. The eBook is only $2.99,
0:42.5	and you can find it by going to Amazon and search for the Age of Illumination in ScottRank.
0:47.2	So if you like this podcast, I think you'll really like the book. I get way into the details
0:51.2	of the Middle Ages and try to make the stories interesting as possible. So please go check it on Amazon,
0:55.7	and if you like the book, please leave a review as well. Thanks for listening.
1:02.2	Welcome to the History Unplugged Podcast. The unscripted show that celebrates unsung heroes,
1:08.8	Mythbust's historical lies, and rediscoveres the forgotten stories that changed our world.
1:15.4	I'm your host, Scott Rank.
1:18.3	Welcome to the final episode in our series on counterintuitive facts about the Middle Ages.
1:28.6	We've seen that there were many events that happened in the Middle Ages that we don't think
1:32.3	belong there, like Science or the development of technology. We've seen that events that we normally
1:36.9	chalk up to the Middle Ages, like Witchburnines, really find their home in the Renaissance in the
1:41.5	early modern period. Now we're going to talk about the end of the Middle Ages. Why did it end?
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