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Crusading and the Ottoman Threat, 1453-1505

Norman Housley author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:6th Dec '12

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Crusading and the Ottoman Threat, 1453-1505 cover

The fifty years that followed Mehmed II's capture of Constantinople in 1453 witnessed a substantial attempt to revive the crusade as the principal military mechanism for defending Christian Europe against the advance of the Ottoman Turks. Norman Housley's study investigates the origins, character, and significance of this ambitious programme. He locates it against the broad background of crusading history, and assesses the extent to which protagonists and lobbyists for a crusade managed to refashion crusading to meet the Turkish threat, combining traditional practices with new outlooks and techniques. He pays particular attention to diplomatic exchanges and political decision-making, military organization, communication, and devotional behaviour. Housley demonstrates the impressive scale of the effort that was made to create a crusading response to the Turks. Crusaders were recruited in very large numbers between 1454 and 1464, and in 1501-3 substantial sums of money were raised through the vigorous preaching of indulgences in the Holy Roman Empire. But while the crusading cause was recognized as important and urgent, the mobilization of resources was prejudiced by the volatile nature of international politics, and by the weakness of the Renaissance papacy. Even when frontline states such as Hungary and Venice welcomed crusading contributions to their conflicts with the Ottomans, building robust structures of cooperation proved to be beyond the ability of contemporaries. As the Middle Ages drew to a close, the paradox of crusade was that its promotion and finance impacted on the lives of Catholics more than its instruments affected the struggle for domination of the Mediterranean Sea and south-eastern Europe.

Overall, it is an impressive contribution to Housleys voluminous body of work on crusading in a Europe undergoing significant political, religious, and cultural transformation. * Scott Rank, European Review of History: Revue europeenne d'histoire *
This is a thoroughly well-researched and well-written study, and Housley is to be congratulated on a remarkable achievement. * Peter Edbury, History *
Housley has succeeded admirably in producing not only a clear and concise work of synthesis, but one which seeks to put forward new conclusions and reconfigure the way in which historians view the crusading movement in the latter half of the fifteenth century ... Housley has once again succeeded in producing a monograph that will no doubt remain the authority on the topic for many years to come. * Mark Whelan, English Historical Review *

ISBN: 9780199227051

Dimensions: 240mm x 162mm x 20mm

Weight: 548g

256 pages