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Appealing to the enemy, breaking boundaries 171

have happened in a scenario of the Turkish conquest of Italy? What
would have happened to the Pope? Better then to look for a channel of
communication. In this climate of catastrophe Pius II wrote a letter to
Mehmed II taking advantage of the myth – deeply rooted in the
mediaeval image of Islam – of the Christian caliph: he exhorted him to
convert, offering in exchange the title of Emperor of the Christians and
the beginning of an era of peace. But, Ricci asks, «how and where
would this coronation of the new Christian emperor have taken place?
In Rome, in Saint Peter’s? In Constantinople, in the Hagia Sophia?...
So let us ask ourselves again: what Christian name would the Sultan
have taken...?» (p. 20). The letter was circulated in various languages
and was printed eight times by 1482, but was never forwarded to
Istanbul. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the argument had been
used, perhaps as a sort of warning to European sovereigns and Italian
princes that were reluctant to resort to force. Because in this climate,
in 1459, the Pope meanwhile announced a crusade against the Turks,
making use of the term in an official document for the first time. In the
end the crusade was not carried out because the Pope died at Ancona
in 1464, leaving everyone in the lurch. But he had undoubtedly made
himself the representative of behaviour that was soon to become
particularly widespread: mixing advances and flattery with threats and
blackmail.
On the other hand it is not surprising that the humanist Pope par
excellence promulgated a crusade, breathing life again into a cycle that
had come to an end in 1270 with the failure of Louis IX, Louis the Holy,
the most celebrated crusader of the Middle Ages. Italian Humanism of
the fifteenth century supported an ethics of boldness and of militancy
without reserve in a climate of general exaltation of crusade and
hostility towards the Turks who represented in the eyes of Christians
the synthesis of the infidel, inhuman people, immane genus where the
adjective ‘immanis’ is semantically the opposite of all that derives from
‘humanitas’. Only in the first years of the sixteenth century, with
Erasmus of Rotterdam, did the pacifist option begin to make its
presence felt, but the myth of Ottoman invincibility would only be
undermined much later, and by another myth, that of the victory of
Lepanto in 1571. Historiography has by now distinguished the
mediaeval phase, in which pilgrimages in arms were declared with the
aim of liberating the holy places, from the Renaissance crusades,
defined as “belated” in which the main objective by then was not so
much attack but defensio of the frontier. And it is certainly significant
that precisely in this situation the term crusade asserted itself in
official diplomatic usage by this time.
Pope Alessandro VI, the other great protagonist of Ricci’s book, also
promulgated one in 1500, refuting behaviour that had been philo-

n.45 Mediterranea - ricerche storiche - Anno XVI - Aprile 2019
ISSN 1824-3010 (stampa) ISSN 1828-230X (online)