Mantua Congress Convened

1459

Pope Pius II summoned European rulers to Mantua to plan a crusade against the Ottomans. Almost no one showed. The few who came quarreled over precedence. Pius eventually died in Ancona waiting for a fleet that never assembled. The age of crusades, even rhetorically, was over. The congress's failure demonstrated that multinational crusading was definitively over, replaced by bilateral alliances pursuing individual interests.