The World of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  This was matched by uncertainty over leadership. At the start of the siege, John of Brienne as king of Jerusalem was chosen as de facto commander, but with no explicit agreement over future control of any conquests. John lacked authority over the crusaders from the west. The arrival of German and southern Italian contingents from 1217–18 onwards, and the papal legate Cardinal Pelagius in the autumn of 1218, held out the prospect of the arrival and assumption of command by Frederick II of Germany, who had taken the cross in 1215. Pelagius’s control of the substantial sums that reached the crusaders from the Lateran Council church tax, worth according to a 1220 papal account 35,000 silver marks and 25,000 gold pieces,41 allowed him to create a central treasury for indigent crusaders and to hire those in search of regular payment, giving him a significant voice in any decisions. Competing interests made consensus in an inevitably collective leadership hard to achieve, especially as, in common with earlier expeditions, choices were regularly debated with the wider community of the army.

  83. The Nile at Damietta.

  During the siege of Damietta, from May 1218 to November 1219, neither the crusaders, established on the west bank of the Nile opposite the city, nor the Egyptian field army, camped on the east bank to the south, risked a major confrontation. Operations revolved around blockading the city and starving it into submission. The waterlogged terrain, an Egyptian blockade of the Nile, and the lack of timber for barges and siege engines prevented direct assaults on the walls. Disease and supply problems periodically threatened the crusade with dissolution. Even after the main defensive system of a mid-stream tower and chains was captured in August 1218 and a new canal dug to outflank Ayyubid defences, it was only the abandonment of the forward Ayyubid camp early in 1219 that finally allowed Damietta to be surrounded. The new sultan, al-Kamil, had withdrawn to combat a possible coup and rebuild his control over his professional regiments. Thereafter, he conducted forays against the crusaders from a distance while trying to rally support from fellow Ayyubids in Syria and encourage them to launch attacks on Acre, a tactic that drew John of Brienne back to the Holy Land for a year, in 1220–1. Starvation and the absence of any prospective relief forced Damietta to surrender in November 1219. The nearby Delta port of Tinnis fell soon after, leaving the crusaders in control of the main eastern outlets of the Nile Delta. The next twenty-one months saw stalemate. Damietta was formally Christianised, its mosques converted into churches. One of those, dedicated to the English St Edmund the Martyr, the king of East Anglia, was immediately decorated with frescoes depicting the saint’s martyrdom at the hands of the Danes in 869, a painting commissioned by an English knight, Richard of Argentan.42 Such visual demonstration of new ownership formed a typical aspect of the aftermath of conquest by all sides during the eastern crusades where artistic and aesthetic assertions of power played essential public symbolic roles, as in Jerusalem in 1099 or 1187.

  84. Thirteenth-century wall painting of the martyrdom of St Edmund, Cliffe-at-Hoo, Kent, perhaps similar to the one painted by crusaders at Damietta.

  The turnover of crusaders continued alongside debates over the next course for the expedition; a negotiated settlement was mooted by the Egyptians. Diplomatic contacts were cast into unexpected relief by the appearance of the charismatic mendicant, Francis of Assisi, who attempted to convert al-Kamil in person during the summer of 1219, and by a shoal of prophecies that swept through the crusader army. Some foretold victory; others offered garbled echoes of the Asiatic conquests of Genghis Khan. The sense of divine providence may have influenced the rejection of al-Kamil’s offers to restore Jerusalem and Palestine west of the Jordan to the Latins in return for the crusaders’ evacuation of Egypt: the first in 1219, shortly before the fall of Damietta; the second before the crusaders’ advance towards Cairo in August 1221. Given the invaders’ military advantage in 1219, refusal of al-Kamil’s terms made sense, even though voices, probably including John of Brienne’s, were raised in favour of acceptance. Two years later, the balance of advantage was less obvious. However, any negotiated settlement would have meant the end of the crusade, leaving thousands of vows unfulfilled. On both occasions, but especially in 1221, the influence of the absent leaders Pope Honorius III and Frederick II, who had again taken the cross in 1220, inhibited abandonment of the crusade. Frederick’s arrival was regularly proclaimed as imminent, lending influence to the papal and German representatives, Pelagius and Duke Louis of Bavaria. By contrast, King John, who favoured acceptance, lacked a large army of his own and the death of his wife Queen Mary in 1212 had in any case effectively made him only regent for his daughter Isabel II.

  More immediately, as in 1191–2, the defensibility of Jerusalem without the castles of Transjordan was questioned, while, with Palestine under the authority of al-Kamil’s brother al-Mu’azzam, sultan of Syria, the Egyptian ruler’s capacity to deliver on his promises was doubtful. By 1221 any negotiated peace would have challenged the carefully nurtured prophetic optimism among the crusaders and, under Muslim law and convention, would in any case be time limited. The 1219 and 1221 Egyptian offers spoke of tactical manoeuvres to cover al-Kamil’s immediate political weakness rather than a lasting Near East settlement. The 1221 offer came as both sides were consolidating their forces for an impending crusader march on Cairo which, despite his doubts, King John had returned from Acre to Damietta to join. With al-Kamil reinforced by Ayyubid allies from Syria, his offer may have been designed to sow dissent. In the event, the crusaders’ attempt on Cairo failed dismally, their army forced to surrender after being trapped by Nile floods and the Egyptian army. In return for the crusaders’ freedom and safe conduct, Damietta was evacuated (September 1221), ending the central action of the crusade and casting a possibly distorting retrospective glow on earlier failed diplomacy.

  The negotiations of 1219 and 1221 fully exposed the Egyptian strategy’s contradictions. While the 1218 invasion stirred Ayyubid disunity, divisions that leaders of Outremer would exploit to their advantage over the following thirty years, the crusaders’ repeated refusal to trade Jerusalem for a withdrawal from Egypt questioned their objectives. Rejection did not necessarily come from blinkered zealous optimism. Their reading of the geopolitics of the Middle East persuaded enough of them that Jerusalem without its hinterland or a subservient Egypt was not viable in the medium let alone long term; and they were right. The Fifth Crusade’s intransigence implied that only conquest, a regime change or an inconceivable diplomatic volte face would allow for the safe return of Jerusalem, a city with a worrying tendency to succumb to hostile sieges (about six in 175 years to 1244). The Fifth Crusade seemed to be banking on a military knock-out or the implosion of the Ayyubid regime. Both were feasible. Latin armies from Palestine had campaigned throughout the Delta in the 1160s. Using methods of extreme brutality, Saladin had been able to subdue Egypt in a relatively few years. The Fifth Crusade and the later expedition of Louis IX both reached to within a hundred miles of Cairo. Yet no plan of how to manage Egypt in the aftermath of any victory existed. Perhaps some sort of Latin overlordship was envisaged, for which precedents were hardly encouraging. The diplomatic option held no better prospects. The demilitarised Jerusalem agreed in a deal struck between the Ayyubid Sultan al-Kamil and the western Emperor Frederick II in 1229 easily fell to Turkish freebooters in 1244.

  The Crusade of 1228–9

  The logic of the 1221 defeat was not lost on the rulers of the rump of Outremer or planners in the west. For the former, diplomacy was as important as conflict. Antioch and Tripoli, dynastically united since 1187, became increasingly absorbed in the politics of Christian Cilician Armenia and in cutting deals with local Syrian rulers. At Acre, territory was conserved and extended largely through a rhythm of diplomacy shaped by the expiry of the recurrent truces with Ayyubid neighbours in Damascus, Transjordan and Egypt, and by playing them off against each other. The politics of Outremer were complicated by the role of Frederick II, from 1225 absentee king of Jerusalem by virtue of his marriage to t
he heiress Isabel II (d. 1228). While preparing to honour his crusade vows of 1215 and 1220, he conducted direct negotiations with al-Kamil over returning Jerusalem. When Frederick finally arrived in Palestine in 1228, his role had been compromised by papal excommunication for dilatoriness, the death of his wife, and the hostility of sections of the Outremer political elite, including the Cypriot Franks, Templars and Hospitallers. After military manoeuvring by both parties, Frederick and al-Kamil reached a ten-year agreement (treaty of Jaffa, February 1229) that restored Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth and all of Sidon to the Franks, although the Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount) was left in Muslim hands, with free access for Christian pilgrims. Despite attracting opprobrium from all sides, the 1229 treaty fitted a pattern established since 1192, signalling an asymmetrical concern over the status of Palestine: Transjordan and Syria were of far greater strategic and political significance to Egypt provided the religious sensibilities of the ulema were appeased by continued control of Jerusalem’s Islamic holy places. A German poet in Frederick’s army likened the deal to watching two misers trying to divide three gold pieces equally.43

  The Politics of Thirteenth-Century Outremer

  Frederick’s difficulties with the local baronage mirrored the fractured politics of thirteenth-century Outremer more generally. Although by the 1240s having gradually reasserted control over the territory between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, the Franks depended on the coastal ports, especially Tyre and Acre, for their wealth and power, supported by castles such as Athlit south of Acre, Margat between Tripoli and Latakia, Crac des Chevaliers in the Homs gap or, from 1240, Saphet in Galilee, all funded and held by the Military Orders. Even during the Frankish reoccupation of the Holy City (1229–44), Acre remained the capital of the kingdom of Jerusalem, the titles and jurisdictions of the twelfth century continuing often only as legalistic antiquarian memories, shadows or imitations. From 1219, Tripoli and Antioch were dynastically united under Bohemund IV and his successors, although each had been reduced to coastal ports and scattered castles, effectively isolated city states. There was little if any renewed Frankish rural resettlement after 1191–2. Outremer’s survival rested on income from commerce and its ability to defend itself, making it reliant on the trading Italian communes established in the ports – Venice, Genoa, Pisa – and the Military Orders – Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights, each with different, often competing, frequently hostile sets of interest. The potential for conflict was exacerbated by weak central political control. The royal dynasty failed to produce adult male resident rulers. From 1225, when Isabel II married Frederick II, until 1269, when Hugh III of Cyprus, a descendant of Isabel I, united the crowns of Cyprus and Jerusalem, the king was a distant absentee (Frederick and Isabel’s son, Conrad, 1225–54, and grandson Conradin, 1254–68), nominal rule resting in a series of usually and often violently contested regencies. Even after 1269, until his death in 1285, Charles of Anjou, the new king of Sicily, vigorously claimed sovereignty (sold to him by Mary of Antioch, another descendant of Isabel I) through agents sent east, leading to the bizarre position in the 1270s of the fast-diminishing Frankish kingdom squabbling over Sicilian or Cypriot legitimacy.

  In the absence of a resident monarch, the local baronage, notably the Ibelin family, assumed authority. However, neither the barons nor the Italian communes nor the Military Orders were united; nor were the dominant cities of Tyre and Acre. This created an extraordinary spectacle of near permanent factional contest both between local interest groups and between them and representatives of absent monarchs, conflicts that inevitably sucked in the rulers and nobility of Cyprus. Outremer politics most resembled the infighting familiar in and between contemporary Italian city states. Between 1228 and 1243 the so-called War of the Lombards pitted King Conrad’s (in reality his father, Frederick II’s) representative, Richard Filangieri, supported by Tyre, the Hospitallers, the Teutonic Knights and the Pisans, against the Ibelins backed by Acre, the Templars and the Genoese. In 1231, to resist Filangieri, his opponents in Acre formed a commune. In 1242 the Ibelin faction prevailed when Tyre was captured. Nominal rule then passed between a parade of Cypriot and Ibelin regents. From 1250 to 1254, Louis IX of France exercised a form of parallel authority, while in the 1260s his agent, Geoffrey of Sergines, commander of the French garrison at Acre, actually served as regent. Unity was not achieved. In 1256–8 the Venetians and the Genoese took up arms in the War of St Sabas, a dispute only finally resolved in 1288. Venice had the support of Pisa, the Templars, the Teutonic Knights and part of the Ibelin clan; the Genoese the backing of the Hospitallers and other Ibelins. In the 1270s further disruption was caused by Charles of Anjou’s agent Roger of San Severino, who managed to secure the support of Acre, Sidon and the Templars, while Tyre and Beirut remained loyal to Hugh III (I of Jerusalem). All the while, from 1265, the Mamluks of Egypt were systematically dismantling what remained of the kingdom and Frankish Outremer.

  This persistent internecine feuding was sustained by thirteenth-century Outremer’s wealth. It funded political conflict as well as providing the prizes all factions wished to acquire. Henry III of England’s brother, Earl Richard of Cornwall, reported after his crusade of 1240–1 that Acre alone was worth £50,000 sterling a year, significantly more than King Henry’s entire annual royal income.44 Until the advent of the Mongols in the Near East from the later 1250s gradually readjusted western Asian trade routes, Acre and the other Outremer ports provided major entrepôts for Mediterranean trade from across Eurasia: foodstuffs, spices, base metal, metalwork, porcelain, glass, sugar, perfumes, wine, jewels, slaves, pilgrims, relics, silk, linen, cotton, wood and specialities such as Tuscan saffron.45 ‘Antioch cloth’, whether or not actually manufactured in Syria, was a label that commanded high prices and conveyed social kudos across western Europe.46 A large suburb was added to Acre to accommodate its swelling population. The Templars were so wealthy that they were able to spend over a million bezants over two and half years after 1240, rebuilding their castle at Saphet. For families such as the Ibelins, in the east since the early twelfth century, Outremer was home and, just as elsewhere in Christendom, profits were there to be had. Visiting crusaders encountered a rich, polyglot and increasingly bilingual society (Arabic and Romance languages), where, as in Italy, the nobility lived in cities and where markets offered customers anything from exotic fruit to illuminated manuscripts. Viewed through an economic lens, Outremer was booming, its cities worth mercantile investment to the end. However, just as its wealth depended on international trade so its survival was predicated on international assistance.

  ACRE MANUSCRIPTS AND ‘CRUSADER ART’

  The aesthetics of the crusades lacked distinctive form. In painting, sculpture, architecture, manuscript illumination, songs, poems, plays, clothes, food, weaponry, heraldry, the art of crusaders drew technique, inspiration and styles eclectically from prevailing cultural ambience. For the Franks of Outremer this included local influences – Greek, Syrian Christian, Arab, Armenian – as well as European (see ‘The Melisende Psalter’, p. 138, and ‘A Palace in Beirut’, p. 230). Although almost all the artefacts created by or for the Outremer Franks have not survived, it is hard to identify special Outremer style, except perhaps in concentric castle fortifications and in deliberate religious imagery on coins (St Peter in Antioch or the Holy Places in Jerusalem). Frankish ecclesiastical architecture, while incorporating local features such as domes and flat roofs, also relied on borrowing from western Romanesque, then Gothic models, making a religious point.47 Divorced from their devotional settings, Frankish architecture could be admired for itself: Mamluk conquerors seemed happy to incorporate looted Frankish Gothic doorways, columns and decorative sculpture as trophies into mosques and a madrasa in Cairo.48 Secular and domestic architecture and decoration appropriated indigenous styles, although in places, such as planned villages and suburbs, they introduced western ground-plans, such as two-storied houses opening directly onto the street, with individual plots of
land behind.49

  Similarly for western crusaders, content not form distinguished works associated with the war of the cross. Images of warrior saints such as St George, and of militant episodes from the Old Testament, proliferated in sculpture and illumination, as did what has been described as a ‘Christo-mimetic movement’ in art and relic collecting.50 Crusade-related themes became popular in devotional manuscripts, especially those associated with the court of Louis IX.51 Decorative schemes directly or indirectly focused on the crusade, such as the stained glass at St Denis showing scenes of the First Crusade or Louis IX’s Sainte Chapelle in Paris, a giant reliquary for the relics of the Passion. Inevitably, visual art needed to be framed in conventional styles to engage the conscious or subliminal understanding of the viewer. The luxurious textiles, clothes, jewellery or metalwork that wealthy crusaders took with them or acquired on campaign lacked specific crusader motifs, except perhaps in the manuscripts they purchased or commissioned.

  85. A volume commissioned in Outremer in 1250–4 on Louis IX’s crusade.

  In Outremer, the Franks embraced regional diversity while importing western styles and artisans, such as painters and illuminators from Italy, Germany, England and France. Louis IX’s stay in the Holy Land between 1250 and 1254 appears to have stimulated local luxury manuscript production at Acre, probably supported by French artists in his entourage. One volume, the so-called Arsenal Bible, comprising lengthy vernacular extracts with 115 illuminated scenes showing Byzantine as well as French influence, has been attributed to Louis’ stay and even to his personal patronage and use. Although only a handful of manuscripts have been tentatively identified as originating in Acre, it appears that production increased in the final years before the city’s fall, a sign of Acre’s international status and the continued presence of wealthy patrons, some possibly visiting crusaders, most probably laymen or members of the Military Orders, as the texts are in the vernacular: works of history, literature, law and military advice. The styles reflect continuing borrowing between Christian Levantine, western European and Greek models. This typified a cultural identity that, both in Outremer and western Europe, even when highlighting specific ideological messages, exploited but did not transform existing fashions, techniques and expectations.52