The World of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  66. Frederick Barbarossa the crucesignatus receiving a copy of Robert of Rheims’s history of the First Crusade.

  How much of the Saladin Tithe was spent on the crusade is not easy to judge. More generally, money and materiel were sought from subjects and dependants. Hearth taxes were widespread (used for example by Frederick Barbarossa in Germany and the count of Nevers in France); land was sold, leased or mortgaged, with the Church still the chief lender and beneficiary. In 1189–90, Richard I of England (1189–99), who had succeeded his father Henry II in July 1189, indulged in an orgy of asset-stripping, selling offices, titles, property and rights. An experienced general, Richard recognised the huge expense of war and the especially great costs of crusading. Government receipts for 1190, at over £30,000, showed a 50 per cent increase on normal revenue in the 1180s, excluding income from the Saladin Tithe, which a contemporary optimistically believed may have reached upwards of £60,000; and other extraordinary levies, such as that on the Jews, which may have brought in a further £10,000.16 Even so, equipping and manning Richard’s crusade fleet of about one hundred vessels of various sizes alone may have cost almost £9,000 just for the first year’s wages, a further £5,700 for hiring ships and thousands more on equipment (from horses to siege engines) and food (bacon, cheese as well as grain for biscuits). These expenses did not cover the costs of Richard’s own military entourage or subsidies to allies, such as the king of France (over 13,000 gold ounces) or the count of Champagne (4,000 measures of wheat, 4,000 sides of bacon and 4,000 pounds of silver). Small wonder Richard sought every opportunity to re-endow his campaign, in Sicily where he wintered in 1190–1, and in Cyprus, which he conquered in May 1191. While English bureaucratic procedures allow uniquely precise insight into the nature of costs, the pattern was familiar. Frederick Barbarossa calculated a minimum of three marks per head for two years’ service, costs he avowedly did not even attempt to meet from royal resources, leaving fund-raising for those outside his service to individual crusaders. Philip II of France’s contract with Genoa in 1190 to ship a force of 650 knights and 1,300 squires plus their horses, at 5,580 marks, cost the equivalent perhaps of 60 per cent of ordinary annual royal income. The bailing out of some of his leading magnates in Sicily in 1190–1 may have cost Philip the equivalent of a quarter of ordinary annual income.17

  Beyond the recruits themselves, taxpayers, shipping contractors, artisans supplying war materials, or farmers selling provisions, all felt the effect of the great mobilisation. Increased demand drove prices higher. Domestic sacrifices could be considerable. As one veteran recalled: ‘And none to sell his heritage/Delayed the holy pilgrimage’.18 While outright disposal of property was not universal, mortgages and loans could strain family resources. Creditors, mortgagers or buyers of property benefited, prompting resentment and violence. Despite official disapproval, anti-Jewish riots in London and other English market towns culminated in the massacre and mass suicide of Jews in York in March 1190. By contrast, in the Rhineland, the centre of crusader anti-Jewish violence in 1096 and 1146, Frederick Barbarossa personally guaranteed and enforced royal protection of the Jewish community, preventing crusaders from attacking the Jewish quarter in Mainz during March 1188, riding through the streets of the city with a leading rabbi, and issuing an edict imposing corporal and capital punishments for those who assaulted Jews.19 However, like Richard I, asserting royal protection did not inhibit Frederick from taxing the Jews for his crusade.

  The ability of western European economies to sustain such extensive investment in war, demanding huge quantities of cash and bullion, speaks of robust and diverse capacity. Yet the translation of these material fundamentals into concerted military action required a diplomatic and political transformation that only the disasters of 1187–8 could provoke. Frederick Barbarossa was able to come to accommodation with both Philip II of France and the papacy over contentious issues of territory and preferment. The association of Frederick and the papal legate, Henry of Albano, in the emperor’s taking the cross in March 1188 symbolised new mutual acceptance of their reciprocal roles and interests, not least in Italy. Taking the cross together helped Philip and Henry II appear to resolve differences without either side losing face. Across society, the cause of the cross provided an opportunity to settle or suspend disputes. This could be evanescent. The coalition of German princes that followed Frederick Barbarossa presaged no new accumulation of imperial power. The great feudatories of France, the duke of Burgundy or the counts of Flanders and Champagne, operated as independent commanders, their association with Philip II’s commitment based on convenience not subservience. Nevertheless, the recovery of Jerusalem challenged normal political constraints.

  Preparations proceeded at different paces. In Germany, the imperial army was hurriedly – perhaps inadvisedly – ready by the spring of 1189. While smaller contingents, such as those of Louis of Thuringia (1189) or Leopold of Austria (1190–1), and forces from Bremen, Frisia and Cologne (1189–90), travelled by sea, Frederick’s army planned to follow the Danube to Constantinople and the Asia Minor route of the First and Second Crusades. Although both Henry II (in 1188) and Philip II (when stuck in Sicily in the winter of 1189–90) toyed with travelling overland at least some of the way, outside Germany the bulk of crusaders faced the prospect of sea voyages. Contingents from the Baltic, North Sea, Low Countries, England, the French Atlantic and Mediterranean seaboards, and Italy, were able to requisition or hire merchant shipping and exploit local shipbuilding expertise. From around the European coastline, fleets of a few score to hundreds of vessels embarked eastwards in 1189–90. French nobles commissioned at least four substantial fleets in 1189 and 1190. Richard I of England built, bought or hired his own fleet in England and western France in 1190 and secured a flotilla of Mediterranean galleys. Besides resourcefulness in shipping, armies required war engines, fiscal ingenuity, budgets for wages, provision of health care and navigational mapping. Armies travelled with ambulance carts; fleets with prefabricated throwing engines and even, in the case of Richard I, a wooden field fortress. Expenses were estimated in advance, with cash and bullion transported accordingly. As well as galleys, of various sizes, large cargo-carrying round ships, known as cogs, were deployed, capable of carrying hundreds of men and horses. Frederick Barbarossa and Richard I sought to impose discipline on the behaviour of their inter-regional coalitions of troops through punitive ordinances covering anything from murder and theft to excessive gambling.

  Planning was supported by past experience, trade, diplomacy, reconnaissance and espionage. Detailed itineraries had been a feature of chronicles describing crusades since the early twelfth century. By the second half of the century, maritime guides for the Mediterranean were being produced in ports such as Genoa and Pisa that seemed to borrow from Arab geographers, including the north African and Sicilian al-Idrisi (d. 1165). Roger of Howden, crusader and royal clerk, not only produced a very precise itinerary of his voyage from Spain to the Holy Land and back again to Marseilles in 1190–1, he also noted prevailing winds and provided a schematic account of sea lanes that reads like a description of a diagrammatic map. On return he may even have compiled his own guide to the coasts from eastern England to the Mediterranean, and beyond, citing the work of another Third Crusade veteran, the admiral Margarit, commander of the Sicilian fleet in 1188. Ship’s companies were advised to employ a conductor, an expert in sea routes. Nautical information was shared widely, both across cultural frontiers and within Christendom: a Pisan maritime handbook on the Mediterranean was copied in Winchester, a centre for Third Crusade organisation.20

  PAYING CRUSADERS

  The idealised crusader, as extolled by generations of crusade promoters, took the cross out of faith alone and, as a sign of devotion, funded his service out of his own resources. Many crusaders did both, yet more relied on the patronage and assets of lords or other associates, the need to provide board and wages representing a major element in recruiting and fund-raising. Every crusade depended
on paid troops. These fell into three broad categories: obligated vassals, clients and members of lords’ entourages, often knights themselves, who expected to provide their own war materials but to serve on campaign for pay; employees, such as household servants, who had little choice but to follow their lords but also customarily received wages; and a much wider pool of troops who owed no tenurial obligations to a lord but fought for necessary reward without which they could not have served. Pay did not preclude devotion but supported it as a necessity for continued participation, especially as crusaders were supposedly driven by free individual commitment not dragged by the shackles of hierarchy. The reality was rather different, with the usual constraints of social and economic power, service and employment fully in operation. Within crusade armies, the death or destitution of commanders led to fluid employment markets where knights and other soldiers looked for new patrons and successful ambitious lords sought additional followers, using pay as a necessary lure, sometimes in competition with other eager would-be patrons. This pay could go beyond simple rations or providing funds for basic subsistence. Rates were not restricted to costs but to generous purchase of loyalty. In 1195, Henry VI of Germany explicitly offered to pay knights and sergeants on his crusade salaries in gold above specified rations.

  From the First Crusade onwards, chronicles are littered with words for money contracts (conventio solidorum), wages (vadia, stipendia), paid troops (stipendiarii), retaining (retinere), hiring (conducere). Paid retainers and financial contracts appear in accounts of the First Crusade; Tancred of Lecce was both a paymaster and a recipient of a paid contract to serve Raymond of Toulouse. Engineers at the sieges of Nicaea and Jerusalem were paid to work on siege machinery, while Bohemund claimed at Antioch that he could not afford to continue paying his followers, producing an account book to prove it. On the Second Crusade, in 1148, Conrad III used money he had been given by the Byzantine emperor Manuel I to hire a new army when he arrived in Palestine. In 1190, Richard I fixed payment for the soldiers and salaries in his crusade fleet (2d a day for soldiers; 4d for steersmen). At the siege of Acre, Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury led a paid regiment of 200 knights and 300 sergeants. Other knights were paid for guard duty. On arrival at Acre, Richard I hired archers with ‘bona stipendia’ and outbid Philip II in competing for the paid service of knights, bidding first 2 then 4 gold pieces. Thereafter, the evidence of pay becomes more prominent. In 1201, Theobald II of Champagne left 50,000 livres to pay for crusaders, while the treaty of Venice stipulated the inclusion of 20,000 paid sergeants in the crusade host. Crusaders in Languedoc were paid fixed daily rates, as were Louis IX’s household troops on crusade in 1248. At the same time, John of Joinville was paying his knights slightly less than the king’s rates. In the second half of the thirteenth century, crusaders were retained through written fixed contracts specifying the rates of pay and terms of employment. Schemes for fresh eastern expeditions in the fourteenth century were accompanied by detailed lists of salaries for knights as well as infantry.

  67. Contract of Robert Tibetot and Payn de Chaworth to accompany the Lord Edward on crusade in 1270 with five knights each in return for shipping, water and 100 marks per knight.

  The ubiquity and importance of pay on crusades exerted significant influence on their character and organisation. Pay helped secure a measure of order and discipline on campaign. The cost stimulated paymasters’ financial expedients, from mortgages and sales of property to innovative schemes for attracting donations; estate, national and clerical taxation; and vow redemptions. The requirements of pay forced commanders to have access to large amounts of coin. One Champagne crusading lord raised as much as 200 livres in pennies (48,000 of them), a physically inconvenient but more adept currency to pay his followers. The ultimate recognition of the tension between the idea of a free crucesignatus and the reality of a paid warrior came with the advocacy around 1300 of paid professional preliminary assaults on Egypt prior to any traditional mass crusade. Pay did not contradict the ideals of crusading or exclude the presence of self-funded crusaders, but perhaps it gave both more chance of success.21

  The Campaigns of the Third Crusade

  The Siege of Acre

  Saladin’s victories in 1187–8 were incomplete. Crucially, the port of Tyre, still in Frankish hands, provided a relatively safe harbour for western fleets. Protected from landward attack by a narrow isthmus, Tyre had resisted Saladin in the summer 1187 thanks to the fortuitous arrival of Conrad of Montferrat, a paternal uncle of the late Baldwin V. Without Tyre, the sultan’s navy would have made any future crusader landings almost impossible. Sea power determined the pattern of the western military response, with the regular arrival in Levantine waters of western fleets from the spring passage of 1188 onwards. With prevailing currents and winds more or less confining naval expeditions to spring and autumn, direct passages from western Mediterranean ports took from a few weeks to a couple of months. While Tyre supplied defensive cover, reconquest demanded aggression. This came from an unlikely source. On his release from Ayyubid captivity in the summer of 1189, Guy of Lusignan had been excluded from political authority over the rump of Outremer by Conrad of Montferrat exploiting his role as the saviour of Tyre. In August, Guy suddenly took advantage of the arrival of the first substantial group of crusaders with a Pisan fleet to march south and lay siege to Acre. A typically cautious reaction by Saladin allowed Guy to dig in across the sand dunes around the port. Despite a serious defeat in October 1189 and heavy losses through disease as well as combat, the Frankish crusade army clung on with attritional trench warfare. Although unable to impose a complete blockade of Acre, time favoured the crusaders provided they could keep open the sea lanes for new arrivals and food supplies while Saladin’s difficulties in keeping his coalition in the field only increased. As the numbers in the western camp swelled to many thousands, the siege of Acre began to acquire epic dimensions for participants, many of whom wrote vividly of their experiences. Comparisons were even drawn with the siege of Troy.22

  The siege fell into three phases. The bridgehead around the city was established and defended for a year from August 1189. Substantial western reinforcements then arrived in the summer and autumn of 1190, including a French force under Henry of Champagne, the remnants of the German crusade under Frederick of Swabia, and an English advance guard under Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury and the former Chief Justiciar Rannulf Glanvill, followed by stalemate, hunger, disease and low morale. Finally, the kings of France and England landed in May and June 1191 and the city fell in July. The crusaders in their fetid and overcrowded camp were consistently harried by Saladin’s forces. Epidemics cut through all ranks. Problems of supplies and distribution were exacerbated by hoarding and too much bullion chasing stretched resources of food. Until the arrival of the French and English kings with their heavy siege weapons and throwing machines, direct assaults on the city walls were ineffectual, while Egyptian ships repeatedly broke the naval blockade. Discipline was undermined by tensions over tactics, food, and between regional groups, mirroring acute rivalries within the leadership, especially the competing claims of Guy of Lusignan and Conrad of Montferrat to the kingship of Jerusalem. The deaths of Queen Sybil and her and Guy’s daughters in the camp in October 1190 provoked an unseemly wrangle over the succession. In November, Conrad of Montferrat married Sybil’s half-sister and heiress, Isabel, who had to be summarily divorced from her existing husband, Humphrey of Toron. Guy still insisted on his rights as the anointed monarch. Political deadlock persisted. Yet, with Saladin unable to cut supply lines or dislodge the camp, the crusaders’ cohesion, reinforced by newcomers, held, in anticipation of the arrival of the kings from the west.

  68. Acre, from an engraving of 1839.

  8. The Third Crusade.

  Delay?

  The First Crusade had taken two years from Urban II’s Clermont speech to reach northern Syria; the Second Crusade two and a half years from the first papal encyclical to the arrival of the French a
nd German kings in Outremer in the spring of 1148. One criticism of the Third Crusade, at the time and since, concerned its slow progress. This misleads. The strategy of the Third Crusade differed from that of its predecessors: travel by sea played a dominant role, allowing the main armies to set out serially from 1189 onwards: a Pisan flotilla, the German land army, a large French force and fleets from northern Europe in the spring of 1189; another northern European force later in 1189; a French army under Henry of Champagne in the spring of 1190; the first section of the Anglo-Norman–Angevin army in the summer of 1190; the main French and Angevin forces in the summer of 1190 but leaving Sicily only in the spring of 1191. The laborious pace of the expeditions of Richard I and Philip II, who only reached Palestine three and half years after the initial papal call to arms, was exceptional. Smaller forces were quicker. In 1190 the English advance guard that left central France in July managed to reach Acre that October. If the German army had not disintegrated after the unexpected death of Frederick Barbarossa in Cilicia in June 1190, the largest crusade force would have appeared in Outremer just over two and half years after recruitment began, and joined an already large army besieging Acre. Even the Anglo-French armies took less than a year from departure to arrival in Palestine, as Richard I’s budget to pay his troops anticipated. The stepped pattern of departure eased supply difficulties and became a feature of later expeditions. Sea transport, despite organising shipping and embarkation ports, was quicker, if costlier, than travel by land. The requirements of provisioning determined regular landfalls; horses needed substantial quantities of fresh water to survive. Given the size and shape of most open-decked oared twelfth-century ships, long-distance travel by sea in winter was dangerous and rarely undertaken. If embarking from northern Europe after spring, this almost inevitably meant finding winter quarters to shelter and refit: Marseilles for the great North Sea fleet in 1189–90; Messina for Philip II and Richard I in 1190–1. The problem of winter campaigning was not confined to sea-borne armies. Frederick Barbarossa prudently wintered in Thrace in 1189–90 rather than follow the unfortunate precedent of Conrad III and Louis VII of attempting a winter crossing of Asia Minor.