Henry III / Enrique III of Castile. Wikimedia
YOU CAN LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE HERE OR ON YOUR FAVOURITE PODCATCHER.
The context is this. It’s July of 1402, and the Battle of Ankara has just occurred. Timur, who you may or may not know as Tamerlane, has just been victorious over Ottoman Sultan Bayezid I. He’s taken his adversary prisoner, and with Bayezid dying soon after, he has thrown the entire future of the Ottoman Empire into question. Bayezid’s surviving sons are going to struggle for a decade to piece together and rule over the remnants. But there is also another storyline that is beginning to play out at the battle.
Present there in central Anatolia on the day of the battle were two knights, two representatives of King Henry III of Castile, or Enrique de Castilla of the House of Trastámara, known as el Doliente, “the sufferer,” for his ill health and short life. Enrique was not exactly a stay-at-home king, in terms of policy I mean. His ships, many of them under the command of a man named Pero Nino, were active in the Mediterranean. They were conquering the Canary Islands. They were raiding and pillaging along the south of England. And his people, in this case Payo Gomez de Sotomayor and Fernan Sanchez de Palazuelos, were in present day Turkey, observing, as that great clash of the early 15th century took place.
They were going to come away impressed. They had just witnessed a dominating victory over the dreaded Ottomans, the power that had been haunting much of Europe. Going quite a bit beyond haunting really. They came away with gifts. They came away with a pair of women who would settle in Spain and have children. And I want to pause here to note how the preface to an old translation of this account is absolutely smitten with this pair, referring to “the lovely captives,” “the lovely strangers,” and their “loveliness [that] was celebrated by many poets.”
They also came away with Timur’s ambassador, a man named Muhammad al-Qazi, and this is getting more to our focus here. They brought Muhammad to Castile, and things obviously went well. Things went so well that a diplomatic mission was soon going the other way, from Enrique to Timur. Making that journey would be Muhammad al-Qazi, returning to his lord, along with Alfonso Paez de Santa Maria, Gomez de Salazar, and Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo.
That’s whose story we will be following.
Hello and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the podcast that covers medieval history through the stories of its travellers. And the podcast is a listener-supported one. It does have a Patreon, and you can sign up for it via my website at humancircuspodcast.com or at patreon.com/humancircus. There, for as little as $1 a month, or more if you’re so inclined, you can listen to episodes early, ad-free, and with extra listening on the end. And today I want to thank the following new supporters to the Patreon. Thank you, Dianna. Thank you, Shaun. Thank you, Ashley. And thank you, John. Thank you all very much!
And now, back to the story. It’s been a little delayed, by a false-start on another topic, by sickness, and other circumstances, but I hope you enjoy it.
Today, it’s an early 15th century tour of the Mediterranean, picking up intelligence all along the way. Today, it’s a new story, a new traveller, or mostly a new traveller. He did come up in an extremely early episode of the podcast, but I felt that, some three years later, he and his companions were worth their own episodes. We begin here in this episode with the way east toward Constantinople, and with a Mediterannaen island and its Genoese family’s entanglement in the politics of a fading Byzantine Empire.
We should of course start this story with the “why.” Why were our two powers here brought together? Why had those knights from northern Spain been present on that Anatolian battlefield in the first place. What was the source of Enrique’s interest in the Central Asian emperor?
One answer as to why the Castilian king would be interested in his powerful counterpart is to ask “Why wouldn’t he?”
That “counterpart” was of course not really an equal. Enrique was an Iberian power looking to stretch his legs beyond that peninsula, but Timur the Conqueror was absolutely continental and coming off a run of realm-expanding advances.
There was his capture of Baghdad, his tremendous victories over the Ottomans there in Anatolia and, on the same campaign, in Syria, his dominance of the Mamluks in taking Damascus and Aleppo. His customary, or perhaps legendary, piling of heads into pyramids. So you had that happening some 3,000 km west of his court in Samarkand on the one hand, and just a few years earlier you had Timur successfully assaulting the Delhi Sultanate in India, around 1,500 km southeast of that court. By the time he was finally done, he would be turning his attention all the way to the Yongle Emperor in China, dying a giant at the head of a great empire, an empire which could hardly fail to interest others.
But quite beyond the magnetic qualities of such a vast power, our Enrique had other interests, and they will sound very familiar to anyone who can remember all the way back to those Mongols episodes. That visit to the battlefield on the part of Enrique’s representatives had come in 1402, so that was just six years after the Battle of Nicopolis, the absolutely disastrous defeat suffered by crusading forces from France and central Europe against the Ottomans. The Ottomans were very much on people’s minds in Europe, even at such a safe distance as Spain, and just as earlier European rulers had been hopeful at the prospect of some tremendous power out there beyond the Muslims in the form of the Mongols or of Prester John and his realms, figures like Enrique were intrigued by this power great enough to have, it seemed, rescued them from the Ottomans.
For Timur’s part, it’s unclear at the outset what his immediate diplomatic goal was. But these were not his only dealings with western European lords. Only a month after the departure of the expedition we’re following, his envoy the Archbishop of Sultaniya would arrive in Charles VI’s Paris. On that same trip he would visit the courts of London, Genoa, and Venice. And back in the lead-up to that clash with Bayezid, he had reached out to the Genoese in hopes for their cooperation.
I’m not sure the tone Timur took in these communications, but I can only assume they were less confrontational than his ones with Bayezid as hostilities bubbled up.
Believe me, went Timur’s message to the Ottoman sultan, you are nothing but an ant; don’t seek to fight against the elephants because they will crush you under their feet. The dove which rises up against the eagle destroys itself. Shall a petty prince, such as you are, contend with us? But your boasts are not extraordinary, for a Turk never spoke with judgement. If you do not follow our counsel, you will regret it. This is the advice we give you. Behave as you think fit.
Presumably, Muhammad’s words were a little sweeter than that, and the possibility of a friendly force out beyond the Ottomans tempting enough that Enrique would have been interested, that he would have sent his representatives such a great distance to the court in Samarkand. Of course those representatives did not initially realize they would be travelling so very far, did not yet understand the kind of great chase they were about to undertake. They were not aiming for a stationary target here because Timur was not hanging around in Anatolia waiting on their arrival. If they wanted to see him, they were going to need to find him first. So let’s see how that went.
We pick up the story as the mission’s chronicler does, as the ambassadors and their mission reached port near Cadiz, on the Spanish coast south of Seville. It was Monday the 24th of May, in the year 1403, and in preparation for departure, provisions were loaded aboard a carrack under the command of captain Julian Centurio. The next day, they put to sea, and over those that followed they’d sail close to coastal towns, close enough to see them clearly as they passed through the strait and into the Mediterranean Sea. Their journey had begun.
The thing that leaps out immediately in this account is that the ambassadors are very much passengers aboard this ship. It and its people are not in any sense under their command. Instead, they are aboard more as cargo. They’re not even necessarily given priority as a rush shipment.
So we see the ship pause for several days in Malaga, with its fruit gardens, vineyards, and grain, while jars of oil and other goods are offloaded, and again at a place called Ivica, unloading more merchandise and taking on salt. That island, governed on behalf of the King of Aragon, was noteworthy for the large quantities of sea salt produced from its pans, and also, our chronicler tells us it was said, for being home to ibn Sina, known to some by the anglicized Avicenna. In more recent years it has become known more for other things under the name of Ibiza.
For sixteen more days, Clavijo and the other ambassadors stay in an inn in Gaeta, between Rome and Naples, while cargo is landed and oil brought aboard, but they clearly don’t keep themselves to the inn. Of this town we get as full a description as any, of its easily defended harbour with its narrowing opening that can be sealed off with a chain, its churches and its Franciscan monastery that you can still visit today, its attractive streets and gardens, its oranges, lemons, and vines, a fissure so narrow that only one person could enter and in which lived a hermit. There’s even room for a little gossip. How a woman had been married to a king there, how the king had parted from her and married her on to one of his vassals, how the woman had danced with the king at the wedding and then “said many ugly things in the streets,” as indeed one would. And you can imagine Clavijo and the rest of the Castilian party wandering those streets with their high, handsome houses that looked toward the sea, taking in their sights and those of the surrounding hills, thickly populated with villages and vines.
As the carrack travels, we can trace its location off this island or that town on such-and-such a day. So we’ll read that on Saturday the 14th of July, they were off the coast of Amalfi where it was said that St. Andrew’s head was preserved, and that around vespers they saw two masses of smoke plunge from the sky and strike the water with such noise and violence as to obscure the heavens in clouds. And I’m not sure what this was. Of course, maybe nothing of the sort happened at all. That’s always a possibility. But what if something of the sort did happen? Is this a twin-meteor strike? Or maybe just the one that was misunderstood and overblown, either in the drama and the danger of the moment, or later on, over time.
The following day there was more excitement as they passed Stromboli, the Italian volcano with its mouth of constant smoke and fire. They passed Lipari where the veil of Saint Agueda was periodically brought forth to calm the burning of the neighbouring islands, just as the saint’s prayers themselves were said to have done. As is often the case in this kind of travel narrative, the deeds and relics of this or that saint are prominent here as points of interest and orientation, and as would always be true of travel at sea, the weather figures pretty prominently here too.
On Tuesday the 17th of July, they were becalmed between two islands. Then later that night a gale sprung up and the situation worsened. By noon the next day, the sails were split and the ship in great peril. They were under bare masts, and under the smoke and flame of two nearby volcanoes. The captain ordered prayers sung out, and every one aboard sought mercy from God. The storm still raged all around them, but their prayers did seem to have some effect.
A bright light settled in parts about the carrack, on the masthead, the bow spirit, and the yardarm, and all on board verified that they too could see it. Leaving only Captain Centurio and some sailors necessary to mind the ship, everyone retired to their beds, but the lights did not disappear. They remained over the vessel all through the storm, and those still awake heard voices on the air, accompanying them on what I’m sure was a very long, long night.
It’s a pretty great description, I assume one of what’s generally referred to as the fire of St Elmo or St Erasmus. The day after that, they were in sight of Sicily and the weather was fair.
The greatest misfortune didn’t always come in the open seas from severe storms. At the port of Messina, currents kept them from entering the harbour. Then, when a pilot came out to steer them in, they promptly ran aground and damaged the rudder. On another occasion, they were driven so close to the rocks that the falcons who lived on them began to scream, and to illustrate just how close a call it was, it was close enough not only for the falcons to scream but for the captain and several others to strip out of their clothes, thinking that the need to abandon ship was nigh. Not really a great sign that Captain Centurio was among the first to do so, but then I suppose he was pretty well aware of the possibilities.
On Saturday, July 29th, they were off the Greek island of Kythira, passing between it and a large rock known as ‘The Wolf’. There, they saw ruins on a plain near the sea said to be those which Paris had left when he’d seized Helen. Not so much a version of the story that involves seduction, not even one which leans toward kidnapping. More like a violent and devastating raid that left irreparable harm to the place and people from which Helen was taken.
On August the 3rd, they passed an island covered in grain fields and another held by the Knights of Rhodes. By the afternoon, they were anchored at Rhodes itself, the place that had once said colossus but now spoke of other things.
They found a city built near the sea, a small city with a substantial castle and a large, well defended harbour, with windmills and with citron, lime, and lemon trees, with beautiful fruit gardens and a beautiful church, with a great hospital for the sick and a great many merchants, for it was close to mainland Anatolia and no vessel went on to Alexandria without stopping there. With the palace of the grand master, though he wasn’t there.
The Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes, the Knights Hospitallers was a survivor of the disaster at Nicopolis. He had been whisked away by boat, taking the river that so many had drowned in while trying to escape. Clavijo and the others had hoped to find him, but he was absent on other business. When the ambassadors dropped in, they learned from his lieutenant that he was away with another survivor of that battle, the marshal of France known as Boucicaut, that the two were off making war on Alexandria.
So the ambassadors waited for news. They waited most of the month of August, lodged in an inn belonging to one of the knights.
At times, they heard news from those returning from the grand master’s fleet, from Syria, or from pilgrimage to Jerusalem. When six Genoese ships put in, they learned that the fleet had besieged a castle in Turkey and then a town in Syria, at each, it sounds, meeting with little success. Then the fleet had split up. The carracks had been dispatched to Alexandria, there to wait for the galleys that would in the meantime have been raiding and burning Beirut. And so it had gone, but the carracks had waited longer than they’d expected. Maybe because it wasn’t just Beirut that had been raided. It had been multiple ports along the Syrian coast, and maybe that was why the Alexandrian contingent sat at sea for nine days while their provisions ran short and their horses died for lack of water. Eventually, the carracks had turned away and made for Rhodes.
From those who’d come from Syria and Jerusalem, the ambassadors heard rumours as to their objective. They heard that Timur was intending to again invade Syria and had issued demands that money be coined in his name and tribute offered to him. But the Castilians were not sure they could trust this information. Only hearsay from among the Muslims of Jerusalem they thought. They waited to see if the carracks returning from Alexandria brought more certain news, but when none were forthcoming, they departed, their goal now being what the text describes as a place in Persia where Timur was believed to winter. There, they decided, they would be able to find him.
So there they went, though not directly of course. They did after all have some distance to go still, and we’ll join them as they continue on that in just a moment.
…
Clavijo and the rest hired a boat for the next stretch of their journey, for Captain Julian Centurio and his carrack would be going with them no further. The next stop was Chios, not so very far away really, a mere 280 km north into the Aegean, but a dangerous route to sail in bad weather nonetheless.
They set out on August 31st, facing day after day of contrary winds against which they tacked, maneuvering among the many islands that dotted the Anatolian coastline. At one of those islands, Kos, where one hundred friars and a commander from Rhodes always stayed, they put in on Wednesday, September 5th, for meat and water. The next Monday, they passed a city on the mainland and were told that Timur himself had been there when he’d invaded the area. Of course, the illusive conqueror was there no longer.
As they pass the many islands, they note them, this one for its occupants being Greeks, that one Turks. One, covered with farms, for being owned by a lady, of whom nothing else is said.
On the 18th, they reached Genoese owned Chios with its small, fortified town, and they brought all of their belongings ashore. News reached them that Bayezid’s eldest son was dead and the others busy struggling over the pieces of the Ottoman Empire, and they sought to leave immediately, but they could not at first find a way forward. The ship they had hired on Rhodes was not going in their direction, and for nearly two weeks no other could be found that would take them. Finally, on the 30th, they found their way off the island aboard a small Castilian vessel under a Genoese captain.
On this ship, they aimed to reach the Dardanelles, the strait that would take them to what was still, this early in the century, Byzantine Constantinople. They feared, however, that they would miss the strait’s opening in the dark of night. They had at least some of their sails split and carried overboard by a gale and were then pushed back by the winds from their goal. Finally, they pulled into Mytilene, on the island of Lesbos, to see about their sails and to find a pilot who better knew these waters. The master of the ship they had hired evidently did not.
In Mytilene they found a strongly-walled and well-populated city with sprawling suburbs and orchards in abundance, but also evidence of a more glorious past, the ruined remains of which lay scattered about among the nearby plains: fallen palaces and a set of marble pillars that were said to have once surrounded a council hall, intriguing remnants of bygone splendour. No less intriguing were the island’s more recent circumstances.
The location of Lesbos demanded dealings both with Ottoman sultans Murad and then Bayezid, and the imperial throne in Constantinople. Here, I’m going to focus on the Gattilusi and their entanglements with that throne and the family that held it.
The people Clavijo met on Lesbos were Greeks, one-time subjects of the emperor in Constantinople but now ruled over by a Genoese lord of whom an interesting story was told, a borderline miraculous one even. Francesco Gattilusio II had been asleep one night when an earthquake struck the castle in which he slept. Morning had found his father and lord of the island dead, his mother dead, two of his brothers dead, but the boy himself alive in a cradle that had settled somehow outside in the vineyard, apparently untroubled by the violent disaster of the night.
I should note that I’ve elsewhere read that the mother had already been dead for 7 or 8 years, and I should, in addition, note that this mention of being in a cradle in 1384 does not appear to line up with other aspects of his timeline or indeed with what I’ve elsewhere seen given as his date of birth. So, maybe he was more of a boy in bed, if one not yet of age to rule, than a baby in a cradle, but it is a good origin story.
By the time we meet Francesco, he is in any case well out of the cradle and old enough to be ruling the island himself, and though I described the people of Lesbos as being former subjects of the Byzantine Emperor, the connections between this island and that diminished but still fairly substantial nearby power were hardly severed.
Francesco’s family, the Gattilusi, had begun rulership over Lesbos around 50 years before the ambassadors’ visit. They’d been given it for services rendered to the emperor. More specifically, it had been Francesco’s father, also named Francesco, who had been given the island for having aided John V Palaiologos in an imperial coup against his father-in-law and co-emperor.
I’ve seen Francesco’s background described as that of a Genoese pirate, but he seems more than that, an opportunist, and one in good company. He had entered the scene in the 1350s seeking land and spoils among the wreckage wrought by Byzantine civil war, the Black Death, and a for-some-fortuitous earthquake that had smashed fortifications, and others did so too.
Different Turkic groups, hired by one side or another during those civil wars, took advantage of the opportunity to cross the Dardanelles and their winnings on both sides of the strait would be consolidated by the growing Ottoman dynasty. Access to the strait and the Black Sea beyond was again being fiercely fought over by Venice and Genoa in one of their many violent clashes. And the Serbian king had snatched up much of what had recently belonged to Byzantium.
Amidst all this chaos, Francesco was said to have played a decisive role, perhaps a slightly embellished one, in bypassing Constantinople’s walls and leading John’s followers through the city. Pirate or not, once the coup was successful, Francesco was not slain as a treacherous collaborator but rewarded as a good friend to the throne. He was given possession of Lesbos and married to the emperor’s sister, the marriage that produced our miraculous baby Francesco. And the imperial entanglements had not ended there.
The elder Francesco had supported his brother-in-law, the emperor, in one struggle after another. He’d held imperial rivals in his custody, gone to war against the rebellious governor of Phokaia, joined and led the naval component of an assault on Ottoman-held Gallipoli, and helped secure the emperor’s safety when he was threatened by the Bulgarians. The relationship had not been a one-time transaction, and for their part, the Gattilusi had been given control of various other places and ports and family members installed about the region while Lesbos itself seems to have remained the home of Francesco. Then, in 1384, that earthquake struck, and the younger Francesco, born Giacomo, took his father’s name and with it lordship over Lesbos, though not immediate governance. Cradle or no cradle, he was still young enough that his uncle would handle things for now.
The connection with the emperor in Constantinople did not die under the rubble with Francesco’s father. It carried on into a second generation. Our Francesco’s daughter was married to John V’s grandson, John VII, and he would take the side of that young co-emperor, his now son-in-law, against first the grandfather and then, following John V’s death, the uncle, Manuel II. So Francesco did, in a sense, follow in his father’s footsteps in supporting an imperial aspirant against an incumbent. However, as part of a broader Genoese turn in policy, he broke with his father’s position in that the incumbent in question was first the very man that his father had helped put on the throne and then that man’s son.
Francesco was there to aid John VII in briefly taking Constantinople, with the help, incidentally, of troops sent by Bayezid; Ottoman involvement in Byzantine politics is a fascinating topic in itself. Then, when that occupation fell apart, was there to defend John against Uncle Manuel and later to shelter him on Lesbos. It would not be on John VII’s behalf that he sent aid to the Ottomans’ prisoners after Nicopolis, but when he hosted many of them on their way home after paying much of the ransom, he was in the right place to act as John’s agent. The offer he sent along with the returning prisoners, Boucicaut among them by the way - he’s always around - was the sale of John VII’s claim to the Byzantine throne, an offer of perhaps questionable value, that was to be communicated to Charles VI of France. An offer that Charles would not in any case be accepting.
When our Castilian ambassadors arrived, they were told about little Francesco’s escape from the earthquake. They were given a little local background on the Gattilusi and their Byzantine connections, and they were told that Francesco and the “young emperor,” John VII, were away with a convoy of ships intending to conquer Thessaloniki. It should already have been his, John may well have reasoned, had his uncle not taken it from him.
John VII had been granted lordship over Thessaloniki. It was to be his. But then as he had sat in power in Constantinople, while his uncle Manuel was away in western Europe seeking aid against the Ottomans - this had been a few years earlier, back in 1400-1401, he had felt forced into a terrible promise. Should Bayezid be victorious in his clash with Timur, then John would give the Ottoman sultan Constantinople and become his vassal. If Bayezid were to have been victorious, John may well have felt there was little that he could do to prevent it, and there is, besides, little reason to think that he was alone in seeking to align himself with the Ottomans at whatever the cost may be.
In 1391, it was written of the squabbling imperial family that quote:
“The old evil which caused the general ruin still rages. I mean the dissension between the emperors over the shadow of power. For this they are forced to serve the barbarian; it is the only way of being able to breathe. For everybody admits that to whomever of the two the barbarian gives his support that one will prevail in the future. Therefore the emperors by necessity become his slaves before the citizens and live according to his injunctions.”
And just in case it wasn’t clear, “the barbarian” in question was Ottoman Sultan Bayezid, perhaps the most powerful man in Byzantine politics before his death.
But Manuel had not seen it that way.
When he’d returned from his lobbying at courts far-flung as that of England, the story goes that he had been furious with his nephew and he’d sent him on his way. Banished from Constantinople and deprived also of Thessaloniki, John had gone to his good friend Francesco to see what could be done about it, and Francesco, as the ambassadors learned, had set out to help him. Francesco had sent a ship asking for assistance from the ever-present Boucicaut and then sailed without waiting for an answer. That messenger did come back while the ambassadors were on Lesbos, bringing news that Boucicaut had returned to Rhodes from the naval campaign we covered earlier and had immediately set sail again, though whether or not it was to answer Francesco’s call no one knew.
At dawn, on the 6th of October, Clavijo and the others set sail from Lesbos with no news still as to what had happened.
So what did happen?
Boucicaut had not, it would turn out, left Rhodes to join the attack on Thessaloniki. He and the Genoese fleet had been headed west, soon to be violently intercepted by Venetian ships. There had been a certain amount of anger over the losses Venetian merchants had suffered in that raid on Beirut.
In any case, the attack on Thessaloniki would not materialize. A rapprochement of sorts would be managed. John VII Palaiologos would go on to rule that port city from 1403 to 1408. I won’t say “happily” rule as there was really no end to the tensions with his uncle, but I guess you could call that a win, or at least you could were it not for that 1408 part. John’s rule was going to come to an end in that year because that was when he would die, while his uncle would carry on in Constantinople until 1425, passing his power on not to his nephew, John VII, but his son, John VIII. John VII’s ambitions were sadly never going to be fully realized.
As for our Francesco II, he would not last even so long as imperial son-in-law. It was in October of the year 1403, the very same month that Clavijo and the others left his island, that he would die in an episode every bit as improbable and bizarre as the one in which he came unscathed through the earthquake. Francesco was away from home on a hunting expedition when the scorpion stung him in the night, but that was not necessarily even what killed him. When his cry of pain brought his followers and friends rushing into the room, their combined weight caused the floor to give way beneath them. If he had somehow cheated death that last time, back when he had been very young, he would not manage the same trick with this building collapse.
The Gattilusi would carry on with things after John and Francesco’s deaths. The family would have a hand in the region and in Byzantine politics for years to come, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes less so. They would rule over Lesbos and marry into the imperial family for another few generations, on into the 1450s. But in their final years of power there, they would start to look more and more like an imperial family themselves, with infighting, betrayal, conspiracy, and murder figuring heavily in their story’s last chapters. When the Ottomans finally came to take Lesbos, then the last of the Gattilusi holdings, there’s even suggestions of a family member who informed the invaders of weak points in the defences on the one hand and then spoke up for surrender on the other.
But that was not for another 50 years. Such matters were far from the minds of Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo and the other ambassadors as they made their way further east, searching for Timur the Conqueror. They had a long way to go, and next episode, we’re going to follow them on that journey.