The World of the Crusades
Page 22
As royal power was swopped between factions in the 1180s, nobles were increasingly free to feather their nests. Raymond of Tripoli and Raynald of Châtillon pursued wholly different policies in their frontier lordships. Guy of Lusignan, when count of Jaffa and Ascalon, defied the ailing Baldwin IV’s attempts to dispossess him in 1183–4. In turn, after becoming king in a coup engineered by his wife Sybil and her allies in 1186, Guy was unable to prevent Raymond of Tripoli making a private treaty with Saladin. The gathering crisis of external threat, enfeebled monarchy and rotating regencies fed a culture of toxic mistrust. Yet, cutting across fratricidal divisions were broader loyalties to the monarchy and genuine disagreements over how best to secure the kingdom’s survival. Raynald of Châtillon, a previous prince of Antioch by marriage (1153–61), after his release from fifteen years of Muslim captivity (1161–76), displayed consistent support for the king, often as the army’s commander-in-chief. The majority of barons, when faced with the fait accompli of Sybil and Guy’s coronation in 1186, despite strong hostility towards the pair, recognised the need for unity and submitted.
Nevertheless, the papal encyclical launching the Third Crusade saw the disaster of 1187 as God’s judgement on ‘the dissention which the malice of men at the suggestion of the devil has recently roused in the land of the Lord’.3 Baldwin V’s death left the kingdom divided into separate enclaves. In 1187, Raymond of Tripoli allowed Saladin’s troops access to Galilee and even stationed some of them in Tiberias, while Raynald of Châtillon broke the 1185 truce with Saladin by attacking an Egyptian caravan bound for Damascus. Only the destruction of an outnumbered Templar-Hospitaller force by a Muslim foraging army at the Springs of Cresson near Nazareth in May 1187 compelled unity. Saladin’s troops had been given permission by Raymond to pillage the countryside beyond his Galilee lordship. The disaster forced Raymond’s reconciliation with Guy to face Saladin’s expected invasion. A general muster of the Jerusalem forces met at Sephoria in Galilee in late June, perhaps 1,200 knights, around 18,000 infantry and additional Turcopole auxiliaries. Facing them, Saladin had mustered an army of 30,000 professional fighters augmented by significant detachments of volunteers.
Saladin’s success in luring the Franks into battle on 4 July on unfavourable terms and waterless terrain has been much debated. The sultan needed a victory to justify his grand mobilisation and retain his allies’ support. Guy too appeared compelled to fight to secure his own credentials. Talk of Fabian tactics or withdrawal to the cities, especially when voiced by Raymond of Tripoli, smacked of passive defeatism and contradicted past Frankish success and Outremer’s culture of providential confidence symbolised in the relic of the True Cross the army carried with it. Unusually in this period, battle suited both sides. Poor local intelligence and faulty tactical decisions loaded the dice against the Franks, who nevertheless withstood more than twenty-four hours of Turkish attacks on the march to Hattin on 3–4 July. During the battle itself, despite being surrounded and short of water for their horses, the Franks resisted for almost a whole day in mid-summer heat despite desertions and undisciplined infantry, a tenacity that spoke of high levels of physical and psychological strength. The customary massacre of the defeated did not engulf the leaders or many of the knights. Some, like Raymond, had escaped through the enemy cordon, while Guy, Raynald and most of the remaining commanders were taken prisoner. Two hundred Templars and Hospitallers were executed, as was Raynald, apparently by Saladin himself. The other leaders were led off to captivity. The Mosul chronicler Ibn al-Athir, who crossed the bone-strewn battlefield two years later, commented: ‘Seeing the slain, you would not imagine that anyone had been taken alive, while seeing the captives, you would think that none could have been killed.’4 A shattering loss was the relic of the True Cross, the ensign of God’s favour, its capture providing important propaganda for Saladin but also for recruiters of the crusade that followed.
The captivity and subsequent release of the Frankish leaders revealed a feature of Outremer contemporaries took for granted. While commentators on all sides tended to emphasise the binary nature of conflict, exchanges across political and cultural divides were commonplace, from trade, employment and diplomacy to spying. Constant warfare inevitably drew contending parties close. Three of the main Jerusalem politicians in 1187 – Raymond of Tripoli, Raynald of Châtillon and the Seneschal, Joscelin III of Courtenay, titular count of Edessa – had spent long periods in Muslim prisons, their release being matters of extended negotiation. Frankish knights served in Turkish armies for pay and, if stories circulating among western crusaders in the early 1190s can be believed, some even negotiated with Saladin in the 1180s to apostatise and attack Outremer.5 The regiments of light-armed mounted archers, known as Turcopoles, who fought using Turkish battlefield tactics, comprised Franks, Syrian Christians and converted Muslims.6 Diplomatic links with Muslim neighbours went back to 1098; alliances and treaties to the earliest years of Outremer. The intense diplomacy with Saladin that characterised Richard I’s Palestine campaign during the Third Crusade in 1191–2, and the subsequent negotiated truces by the restored kingdom of Jerusalem after 1192, were unexceptional.
63. An Arab slave market.
In 1187 each side was familiar to the other, their relations based more on politics than faith. Saladin’s relative generosity in his treatment of Frankish captives and refugees earned him some retrospective Muslim disapproval. In addition to allowing ten Hospitallers to continue working in the Jerusalem hospital, Saladin also permitted Frankish refugees from Jerusalem wishing to reach Europe access to the port of Alexandria. There they received the protection of the city’s governor, who put pressure on reluctant Italian shippers to take them on board. The refugees were well treated and the wealthier among them even indulged in some commercial enterprises of their own. Apart from his diplomatic relations with Raymond of Tripoli, it was claimed that Saladin was in correspondence with the wife of the lord of Burzey, a castle in the south of the principality of Antioch, who ‘exchanged gifts with him and used to inform him of many significant matters’. She was the sister of the wife of Bohemund III of Antioch and allegedly it was on her account that the lord of Burzey and his family were freed after the castle’s capture in 1188. Even if fabricated to extol the sultan’s generosity and Frankish ladies’ lack of scruple, the story suggests fluidity in cross-community relations. Ibn al-Athir mentioned meeting a Muslim who had served the Hospitallers of Crac des Chevaliers, fought with them against fellow Muslims, and even claimed to have accompanied a Hospitaller embassy to western Europe.7
Saladin understood the public requirement to emphasis religious conflict. A prime target during the battle of Hattin was the seizure of the True Cross. Symbolism was important. However, the conquest of Outremer in 1187–8 was not without compromise. Antioch was saved by a truce agreed with Bohemund III in 1188. After Saladin’s victories, not every surviving Frank was enslaved or expelled. As late as 1217, a Frankish widow was living in the village beneath the castle of Montreal south of the Dead Sea.8 The fall of Outremer led to a glut of slaves in the markets around the Near East, providing Arabic moralists with a host of touching, pointed, tragic or uplifting stories that fail to disguise the brutal horror of people trafficking. However, the victims of 1187–8 were not unique, even if their numbers were greater. The Franks enslaved those they defeated as readily as did their opponents. In 1187–8 wealth, payment of ransom or conqueror’s caprice spared thousands, some providing the basis for a Christian counter-attack. The fall of Outremer in 1187–8 revealed the limits of Frankish assimilation into the Near Eastern world. Paradoxically, it also showed how far Franks had adapted and been accommodated within the Levant.
The Third Crusade: Preparation
News of Hattin and the loss of the True Cross reached the west by early autumn 1187. Before word of the capture of Jerusalem had arrived, Pope Gregory VIII issued a call to arms, Audita Tremendi (October/November 1187). Within six months the king of Sicily had sent a fleet to Syria;
the kings of England and France and the Holy Roman Emperor had taken the cross with many of their leading nobles; special taxation had been instigated in France and England; official preaching under the general direction of papal legates had been in operation since November. Recruitment had started immediately, from Denmark to the Mediterranean, from Austria to the Atlantic. Plans, armies and fleets had been put in motion; international negotiations over routes, supplies and transport had been instigated; and one monarch, Frederick Barbarossa of Germany, a veteran of 1147–8, had even fixed a muster date (23 April 1189 at Regensburg) for departure.
PREACHING
Preaching the cross provides some of the most iconic images of the crusades: Urban II at Clermont in 1095; Bernard of Clairvaux at Vézelay in 1146; Fulk of Neuilly before the Fourth Crusade; Oliver of Paderborn in Frisia before the Fifth Crusade. Both actual preparations and literary descriptions pivoted around the initiating rituals of the promotional sermon. Theoretically, these assumed regular form, open to modification according to an audience’s social, professional, gender or regional complexion: opening exhortation (exordium); the point of the address (narratio); then detailed explications and arguments (divisio, confirmatio and confutatio) before a final peroration. Increasingly, to spice the message and keep the listeners’ attention, sermons were invigorated with uplifting moralising anecdotes (exempla), perhaps often in the vernacular, featuring crusade heroes or addressing everyday anxieties of would-be recruits. By the early thirteenth century, crusade preaching, with its general Christ-centred appeal to Christian obligation, sacrifice, reward and redemption, had been assumed into a wider academic industry promoting broad pastoral evangelism to the laity. Model examples featured in formal sermon collections on penance in general. The potential for demagoguery, apparent in charismatic preachers such as Peter the Hermit in 1095–6 or the renegade Radulph in 1146, became tempered by closer coordination and licensing by the papacy and by the institutional dominance of the Cistercians, Paris-trained academics such as Gerald of Wales, Fulk of Neuilly, Robert Courson, Oliver of Paderborn or James of Vitry, and, from the 1220s, the friars. With the thirteenth-century extension of the crusade to the mass of the population with cash redemption of vows, preaching the cross became a more regular feature of communal religion; mere attendance at sermons earned increasing spiritual reward.
64. Preaching in grand style.
However, from the start, the literary and polemical image of sermons inspiring spontaneous commitment to the crusade misleads. Taking the cross came as part of a process of information, consultation, negotiation, decision and action involving the crusader’s family, superiors, dependants, religious advisers and possible financiers. Although the climax of crusade sermons happened when members of the audience came forward to take the cross – often in carefully staged and choreographed performances – the liturgy for blessing the cross only occurred much later when the crusader was about to embark. Sermons acted as much as rituals of encouragement and commitment as they did recruiting shows, preached to congregations already fully aware of what was going to happen, alerted by the preachers’ outriders or by newsletters. Preaching formed part of a multi-media publicity scheme that included written texts in support of the crusade message or to broadcast the success of the current recruiting campaign. The spiritual significance of sermons was habitually sharpened by coinciding with local saints’ days, the great penitential Christocentric festivals of the Church (Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter) and the context of the Mass, the impact of these occasions frequently enhanced by the use of props – crosses, relics and visual aids, canvasses illustrating infidel atrocities; crucifixes identified in clouds – and moving guest appearances by veterans and victims: ritual as drama. While sermons were recorded and probably often delivered in the lingua franca of Latin, interpreters or preachers versed in the local vernaculars were on hand to convey the detail, even though the central message was, like the liturgy of the Mass, formal, familiar and understood whatever the language employed. Not all listeners were impressed; crowds could be rowdy, bored, distracted, disruptive, their interest held by organised community chanting and singing as well as thespian tricks and stagecraft. With their unique element of necessary audience participation, crusade sermons, even if not as central to the conversion of laymen into crusaders as official accounts required, nonetheless supplied a very distinctive devotional activity in western European religious culture as well as representing a core feature of the crusade in practice and imagination.
Numbers taking the cross possibly outstripped those of the great recruiting drives of 1095–6 and 1146–7. All the traditional centres of enthusiasm were affected: Flanders, Champagne, Burgundy, Poitou, the Rhineland, the Low Countries, northern Italy; and great trading cities such as Cologne, London, Pisa and Genoa. Contemporaries recorded massive support across social, gender and geographic frontiers with the departure of local contingents throughout 1189–91. Armies numbered in the tens of thousands; Frederick Barbarossa’s in 1189 perhaps as many as 15,000; Richard I’s in 1190 about the same. Substantial fleets from Italy, France and the North Sea each carried hundreds if not thousands. Whole regions lost their lords, sometimes to the detriment of local law and order. Sicily contributed fleets, in 1188 and 1189. A whole generation of crusaders was formed and with it a lasting legacy of cultural involvement and recognition. One eyewitness summed up a common feeling: ‘it was not a question of who had received the cross but of who had not yet done so’.9 The commitment of monarchs made the crusade a function of government and royal power: people signed up ‘for the love of God, remission of sins and respect of kings’.10 Without rulers’ leadership, support stuttered. Official Sicilian involvement ended on the death of King William II in 1189. The refusal of King Sverre of Norway or King Canute VI of Denmark to take the cross stunted participation among their nobilities, a pattern repeated across Europe from Toulouse to south Wales.
Mobilisation was backed by effective propaganda. A carefully worked crusade message provided arguments for service, consistent across papal and legatine letters; polemical and academic tracts; sermons; correspondence from veterans of the 1187 disasters; chroniclers’ accounts, some by participants; poems; and descriptions of visual propaganda. The main features of Audita Tremendi were widely broadcast in an elaborate exercise led by the chief crusade legate to Germany and France, Henry of Marcy, former Cistercian abbot of Clairvaux and cardinal bishop of Albano. The promotional networks included local archbishops and bishops, internationally well-connected intellectuals such as Alan of Lille or Peter of Blois, and, as in the 1140s, the Cistercians. Preachers doubled as recruiting agents, organisers and commanders: Bishop Godfrey of Würzburg and Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury both led contingents and died in the crusader camp at Acre in 1190. Drama was added by the circulation of emotional letters, allegedly from the Holy Land front line, and the witness of Outremer refugees such as Archbishop Joscius of Tyre who had brought the news of Hattin to the west and given the cross to Henry II, Philip II and Philip of Flanders in January 1188. Stories reached the Near East of troupes of dispossessed Franks in penitents’ garb parading large canvass cartoons of Saladin’s obscene desecration of the Holy Places and of combat between Mohammed and Christ, images picked up in one of Henry of Albano’s recruiting polemics.11
65. Muslims defecating on a Christian shrine, a theme of Third Crusade visual propaganda.
The tone of this multi-media campaign came from Audita Tremendi: the atrocities committed by Saladin; the loss of the True Cross and profanation of the Holy Places; the universal Christian responsibility for the catastrophe through the sins of all the faithful, not just the Franks; the consequent duty to accept the God-given opportunity for service and repentance with the associated remission of confessed sin and temporal privileges. The crusade offered a test of Christian devotion and the chance to earn eternal life.12 Subsequently, the pope’s criticism of the Outremer Franks was tempered: they came to be seen as victims, focus shifting to
the injury done to the cross and Christ. Exhortation invoked duty, shame, honour, vengeance, self-sacrifice, repentance, salvation and chivalry. The cross provided a comprehensive image and slogan, fusing the personal and universal, the material and the mystical. In Henry of Albano’s phrases, copied by other promoters, the cross was ‘the ark of the vassal of the Lord, the ark of the New Testament . . . the glory of the Christian people, the remedy of sin, the care of the wounded, the restorer of health’, both physical battle standard for the faithful warrior and symbol of Christ’s redeeming sacrifice, demanding service while guaranteeing Audita Tremendi’s reassurance of death ‘in a brief moment’ to ‘gain eternal life’, or, as one Third Crusade preacher wrote, ‘the seal of our religion’.13 The cross dominated preaching and recruitment. Followers of different commanders were distinguished by the colour of their crosses: red for the forces of Philip of France; white for Henry II’s; green for those of Philip of Flanders. As the defining signal of commitment since the 1090s, words in Latin and the vernacular now decisively identified crusaders with the cross (crucesignati, cruisiati, etcetera). A famous manuscript illumination in a presentation copy of Robert of Rheims’s chronicle of the First Crusade, produced in 1188–9, showed the dedicatee, Frederick Barbarossa, surrounded by crosses, on his robe, on his shield and on a globe he is holding.14 Preachers employed crosses as props and spread stories of crosses in the sky to accompany descriptions of their sermons.
Symbols mattered, but Audita Tremendi also argued that material costs acted as an investment in salvation, sending earthly riches to ‘the heavenly barn’. A blanket exemption on interest repayment was developed from the Second Crusade privilege by simplifying the protected category to all ‘usurious interest’ (dandas usuras). Although this acknowledged crusaders’ need to borrow on the open market to fund their campaigns, the imprecision of Audita Tremendi soon led to local clarification and modification to reassure creditors and sustain crusaders’ credit-worthiness. Taxation stimulated support. Justified by Audita Tremendi’s extension of responsibility for the fate of the Holy Land to all Christians, the Saladin Tithe of 1188–9 exempted crucesignati as they were committing their own resources to the struggle. A levy of a tenth on lay and ecclesiastical revenues and movables for one year, the tithe was agreed in early 1188 by Henry II and Philip II, although the latter found himself impotent to collect it and in 1189 cancelled it. In England, the tax was raised. Propertied crucesignati were supposed to be given the proceeds from the non-crusading taxpayers on their lands. The material incentive to gain exemption by taking the cross was obvious. As Roger of Howden, a royal official and crusader, archly observed, ‘all the rich men of his [Henry II’s] lands, both clergy and laity, rushed in crowds to take the cross’.15