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Latin Christendom: Common Causes and Compromises

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Latin Christendom: Common Causes and Compromises CHAPTER SIX LATIN CHRISTENDOM: COMMON CAUSES AND COMPROMISES The identity of the Gattilusio lords as Catholics was of basic importance in framing the conditions for their relationships with their Greek sub- jects and the Orthodox empire which had installed them in power. In this context it was a potential source of alienation, compromising their efforts to integrate their subjects into their own political structures and complicating the integration into the wider Byzantine sphere on which their authority was founded. Conversely, however, it formed the basis for their participation in a much larger network, the community of Catholic Christendom. Unlike the Latin regimes which had arisen out of the Fourth Crusade or the enclave established at Smyrna by the cru- saders of the 1340s, the collective enterprises of that community did not play a formative role in creating the Gattilusio lordships. However, as well as forming a bond between their rulers and the Latin minority among their subjects, Catholicism was fundamental to the lordships’ orientation in the context of the Aegean and the wider world. It offered the Gattilusio the benefits of solidarity while placing them under a burden of expecta- tions as to their own behaviour. As the principal organising framework for efforts to check the rise of Turkish power, affiliation with this network counterpointed the lordships’ ties with the most powerful and transfor- mative force at work in the region. Among the clergy the Catholic Church took the form of a centralised organisational structure, but in the world of lay politics it operated as an associative network. Membership placed rulers under expectations of deference, compliance and protectiveness towards ecclesiastical institu- tions, encouraged them to identify and cooperate with one another, and implicated them in a range of common interests and concerns. In the con- fessional frontier country of the Aegean basin, religious affiliation was a particularly significant element in social interactions and political align- ments. However, the weakness of the imperial tradition in the West and the ineffectual and brief career of the Latin Empire of Constantinople had left Catholic Christendom in the region without the sharp political focus which Byzantine supremacy had given to Orthodox Christendom and Ottoman dominance would later give to Islam. This lack helped ensure 320 chapter six that there would be no era of Latin hegemony in the Aegean, akin to the Byzantine epoch which had been and the Ottoman one which was to come. The particular nature of Latin Christian society was thus a criti- cal factor in the emergence and continuation of the diverse, fragmented Aegean world in which the Gattilusio lordships operated. The authority of the papacy gave Latin Christendom a limited degree of central coordination and mobilisation for common endeavours. However, rather than forming a continuous structure, in the sphere of lay author- ity the network took practical effect largely through sporadic bursts of activity which depended on voluntary participation by individual rulers. In the eastern Mediterranean, confrontation with Orthodox Christianity and Islam led Catholic solidarity to take concrete political, diplomatic and military form in two enduring common enterprises, closely bound to one another: the crusade and the pursuit of Church Union. Throughout the Latin West the ethos of political solidarity within Christendom was embodied in the crusade, a common cause whose the- ory embodied an ethos of Christian unity and cooperation against com- mon enemies and whose effective practice demanded the suppression of conflict within Latin Christendom.1 While the crusade tightened bonds within the Catholic world, the schism between the Churches of East and West sharpened the delineation of Latin Christian identity by narrowing its cultural horizons. Aspirations to end this division and recreate a united Christendom did not demand any serious revision of this definition, since on the Catholic side the prospective Union was generally understood as the absorption of the Christians of the East into a system of Church gov- ernment based on Rome, rather than the restoration of the more widely- based model of ecclesiastical authority that had preceded the schism. The two causes had been intertwined since their eleventh-century ori- gins. During the last century of Byzantium, emperors engaged in sustained efforts for Church Union with the aim of bringing the empire within the compass of Western Christian solidarity and thus enlisting the crusading energies of the Latins for its own defence.2 The cause of Union did not form a broad social phenomenon in Latin Christendom as the crusade 1 Tomaz Mastnak, Crusading Peace: Christendom, the Islamic world and Western political order (Berkeley, California and London 2002), pp. 34–54, 91–152. 2 Deno J. Geanakoplos, ‘Byzantium and the Crusades, 1261–1354’, A History of the Cru­ sades, ed. Kenneth M. Setton, 6 vols. (Madison, Wisconsin 1969–90), vol. 3, pp. 27–68 at pp. 52–68; idem, ‘Byzantium and the Crusades, 1354–1453’, ibid., vol. 3, pp. 69–103; Donald M. Nicol, The Last Centuries of Byzantium 1261–1453 (London 1972), pp. 48–57, 256–74, 351–9..
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