The Crusade of Varna, 1443–1445: What Motivated the Crusaders?

Abstract

Assessments of what motivated crusades and crusaders are inevitably speculative,¹ some commentators seeing crusading as ‘a genuinely popular devotional activity’,² while others prefer to explain it as a search for economic or other material benefits. All, however, admit — if sometimes unwillingly — that there can be no single explanation for the phenomenon. The Crusade of Varna — a campaign in which the combined forces of the pope, the king of Hungary, the Byzantine Emperor, the duke of Burgundy, Venice, Ragusa and the emir of Karaman confronted the Ottoman sultan, Murad II ³ — provides a good case study of the complexities of crusading. At one level it is easy to understand the events of 1443–5 simply in terms of Realpolitik, with the alliances during the crusade of Christian with Muslim and Muslim with Christian highlighting its secular character. The campaign was, however, still a crusade. It was a military enterprise under the leadership of the pope, undertaken by the church against an infidel enemy and, as such, it satisfies the definition of a crusade formulated in the thirteenth century by the Decretalist Hostiensis (d. 1271).⁴ Nonetheless, even if the participants in events publicly proclaimed the war to be a crusade, this does not necessarily explain their motives. The idea of a crusade can just as easily serve as a justification for an action undertaken for other reasons, as it can for inspiring the action in the first place, and this complicates the question of motivation. So too does the question of individual motives. The knights and common soldiers who took part in the campaign cannot have shared the secular goals of its leaders, nor would they have understood a crusade in the same terms as canon lawyers or cardinals. In brief, therefore, the motives that inspired the crusade of Varna were tangled and certainly not uniform.