Crusade to retake Constantinople 1454-1455

AHC: Europeans unite on last crusade to retake Constantinople

How do we have this happen?

How long would a reconquered Constantinople hold.

So Pope Nicholas V advocated a crusade to retake Constantinople from the Ottomans

The European powers at the time reply can be summarized as "dang sorry that happened but not interested"

Can a crusade to retake Constantinople be thrown together?

If so how?

If not why not?

If either through God(or obviously ASBs) the European powers coordinate and push the Turks back across the Bosphorous how long could a revived Latin Empire last?

Or would they hand the throne a surviving member of the palailogos dynasty?
 
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It's not physically impossible. Maybe a POD 30 years earlier make Western Europe richer so that they feel like kicking muslim butt.
 
It's not physically impossible. Maybe a POD 30 years earlier make Western Europe richer so that they feel like kicking muslim butt.

PoD thirty years earlier could make the Varna Crusade succeed, so it'd have to be a very specific divergence to have that fail and a later crusade still occur
 
AHC: Europeans unite on last crusade to retake Constantinople
At this point, Western Europe and especially the traditional polls of crusaders were dried out by war : last stages of the second Caroline phase in France, and Frederick III had to deal with a shriking imperial sphere of influence.

Furthermore, at this point, crusade were more blessed secular campaigns than real nobiliar expeditions as it existed until the XIIIth century : while some idealized spirit of Crusade was maintained on courts high on idealization of late feudalism as in XVth century Burgundy, it had little structural reality beyond that.
After the late XIVth century, anything that would be called a crusade would be a national campaign (or at best a coalition) parading with the name but not really different from any other campaiging.
How long would a reconquered Constantinople hold.
Late medieval Crusade as Nicopolis' prooved to be badly tought, planned and executed. Ottomans were too well structurated to be taken down by a rag coalition of this sort, and prooved to be quite efficient when it came to push back more organised coalition of late feudal/early renaissance campaigning. The odds of any "crusade" to manage to besiege Constantinople are extremely low, let alone take it.

So Pope Nicholas V advocated a crusade to retake Constantinople from the Ottomans
It was more of a symbolical device, without any real drive in the XVth and XVIth centuries : some princes fancied themselves as liberators of Constantinople and Holy Land, some kings brought titles and claims to long lost empires and kingdoms, and it stopped at this because it was nothing but fantasy and narrative convenience.
 
As far as I remember, the Portuguese were bullish on the idea and had assembled an army. When no one else joined in, they attacked Tangers instead.
 
PoD thirty years earlier could make the Varna Crusade succeed, so it'd have to be a very specific divergence to have that fail and a later crusade still occur

If you butterflied (butterflew?) away the Varna Crusade somehow, would Christendom be less Crusade-weary and more ready to attack the Ottomans in 1453?
 
Actually, the europeans (mostly poles and hungarians) did go to war against the ottomans in the 1440's
Conflating Europeans with only Polish and Hungarians is a really weird way to state things : it could be compared the Aragonese Crusade, as in a proto-national expedition, with the title of Crusade, when it comes to its goals.
I agree that the Crusade of Varna is arguably in-between, not entierly an armed pilgrimage with benefits, not entierly a campaign with secular objectives, and early announcement of Ottoman-Hungarian wars.


It seems to handwave several problems : namely the poor Hungarian logistics, the lack of Venetian commitment, and Jan Hunyad.
Not that the Crusade of Varna couldn't have met some victories, especially with joining with other local forces as Skanderbeg, but we would more looking for a breathing space for balkanic states and possibility of reinforcement from Hungary and Poland, rather than a return of Crusades : these, in the medieval sense, did disappeared before the decline of pontifical monarchy and the rise of bureaucratic states to became something more idealized and formal.
 
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