The World of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  The Crusades of 1239–41

  By incremental diplomacy backed by threats of force, the thirteenth-century kingdom of Jerusalem had gradually recovered lands in Galilee and west of the Jordan, a process the crusades of 1239–41 reinforced. In the autumn of 1234, in good time to prepare for the end of the ten-year 1229 truce, Pope Gregory IX (1227–41), a veteran of preaching the Fifth Crusade, called for a new eastern campaign. In addition to the usual spiritual and temporal privileges to active crucesignati, he offered indulgences for vow redemptions to any who contributed materially, instituted a clerical income tax, and proposed a new ten-year garrison force for Outremer. Preaching was assigned to the new mendicant orders of Dominican and Franciscan friars.53 The funding system allocated proceeds from legacies, alms and vow redemptions to crusaders, chiefly the already well provided. With none of the crowned heads of western Europe committing themselves, recruitment revolved around great nobles, prominently Duke Hugh IV of Burgundy; Counts Theobald IV of Champagne (posthumous son of the lost leader of the Fourth Crusade) and Peter of Brittany; and Earls Richard of Cornwall and Simon of Montfort of Leicester (Henry III’s brother-in-law). The muster of French nobles was the largest since the Fourth Crusade. On both sides of the Channel, aristocratic recruitment operated as part of complex arrangements of reconciliation after periods of rebellion and dissent. The resulting campaigns in Palestine in 1239–41 lacked coherent timing, direction or leadership. Modest diplomatic successes were achieved chiefly because of Ayyubid division. The main French contingents arrived in 1239, their stay of a year marked by indiscipline, confused strategy between Damascus and Egypt, and being mauled in battle with the Egyptians near Gaza (13 November 1239). Simultaneously, al-Nasr, ruler of Kerak, had briefly reoccupied Jerusalem. Nonetheless, the presence of western troops was unwelcome to the Ayyubids, so deals were secured with Damascus and Kerak covering Frankish control over Galilee and southern Palestine, including Jerusalem. Richard of Cornwall’s even briefer stay (October 1240–May 1241) witnessed the rebuilding of a fort at Ascalon and a largely empty treaty with Egypt confirming the agreements of the previous year over lands outside the sultan’s control. Prisoners taken at the battle of Gaza were released from Egyptian captivity and Earl Richard was allowed to bury the remains of some of those killed in the battle, gestures that earned the earl more praise than for any other action seen on these ramshackle crusades. Nevertheless, by the end of 1241, the kingdom of Jerusalem appeared secure, with most of its pre-1187 lands west of the Jordan restored except for Nablus; the port of Acre booming; the main Holy Places, barring Hebron, under Frankish jurisdiction; and calm diplomatic relations with the Ayyubid princes. Yet the insignificance of these arrangements in the wider scheme of Asiatic geopolitics was soon revealed.

  CRUSADERS’ BAGGAGE

  Whatever plunder and booty crusaders acquired on campaign, few initially set out empty handed. The symbols of pilgrimage, the scrip and staff, took their place alongside the necessities of travel: clothing, arms, armour, cash (in currency, plate or ingots), cooking utensils, containers for food and drink, pack animals, harnesses and wagons. The clergy carried travel altars, liturgical books, religious vessels and writing implements. According to one witness, in 1096 the less well off piled their children and modest possessions onto simple two-wheeled carts to which they tied their cattle.54 The presence of extensive, slow-moving baggage trains provided a much commented on feature of land expeditions. The wealthy habitually travelled with the accoutrements of their class. Beyond direct military or obvious financial requirements, such as weaponry, silver ingots or, as in the case of the English noble William Longsword in 1249, saddle bags stuffed with cash, luxury items, such as gold or silver plate, jewels and precious textiles, could also be bartered for supplies or exchanged for local currency.55 Some objects served social as well as military purposes. When he reached Constantinople in 1097, Tancred of Lecce wanted a tent large enough to act as a hall for his growing cohort of clients, while the Bolognese crusader Barzella Merxadrus used his tent at Damietta in 1219 to live in with his wife.56 Barzella’s tent was equipped with furniture. Commanders took signs of their cultural identities with them. Richard I travelled with what he claimed was King Arthur’s sword Excalibur, while his great-nephew, the future Edward I, carried a manuscript of Arthurian stories with him to Acre in 1271. The sometimes lavish nature of the goods that accompanied crusaders is displayed in surviving wills and inventories. In his will drawn up at Acre on 24 October 1267, the English crusader Hugh Neville’s bequests included, in addition to cash, horses and armour, a standing goblet decorated with the arms of the king of England, a gold buckle, other buckles studded with emeralds and a gold ring. A year earlier, an inventory of the goods at Acre of the recently deceased French crusader Count Eudes of Nevers provides elaborate insight into aristocratic travelling style, itemising rings, enamels, bejewelled belts and hats, gold and silver cups, goblets, jugs, ewers, bowls, basins and spoons, some garnished with gems and enamel; expensive cotton and linen fabrics including numerous bed hangings, tablecloths, napkins, quilts, even the count’s cloth of gold shroud, as well as quantities of curtains and carpets; gloves, leggings and shoes, alongside a miscellany of whistles, armour, spurs, weapons, banners, trunks and chests, food, drink, culinary utensils, leather bottles; the contents of the count’s wardrobe; the furnishings of his travelling chapel – chalice, vestments and breviary; and three books: two romances and a ‘romanz de la terre d’outre mer’, either a translation of William of Tyre or possibly a version of one of the texts in the popular chanson de geste Crusade Cycle. While some of this bounty may have been purchased in Outremer, where certainly the whole lot was put up for sale to pay the count’s debts, the bulk would have come with him from France. Crusaders took their intimate possessions with them just as they did their servants, clerics and military entourages.57

  86. Loading up, from the statutes of the fourteenth-century crusading Order of the Knot.

  The French Crusade, 1248–54

  In August 1244, Khwarazmian Turkish mercenaries in the pay of Sultan al-Salih of Egypt, invading Syria and Palestine from Iraq on the sultan’s behalf, captured Jerusalem, slaughtering Franks and desecrating Christian shrines, before joining an Egyptian Ayyubid army that routed a combined Syrian Ayyubid-Frankish army at Forbie near Gaza in October. Soon, most of the Frankish gains of 1241 in southern Palestine were wiped out; Ascalon was lost in 1247. The future of Frankish Outremer looked precarious, contingent on regional forces over which the Franks exerted no real influence. Al-Salih’s consolidation of power over Syria as well as Egypt, supported by his increasingly powerful personal Mamluk askar (the Bahriyya or Salihiyya), seemed to recreate the encirclement of Saladin’s day. The western European response, although more modest than that after 1187, produced the best organised eastern crusade. Its complete failure imposed a bleak, forbidding realism.

  Louis IX of France took the cross in December 1244 while in the grip of a serious illness, when he was thought, and probably thought himself, to be dying. He may or may not have heard of the loss of Jerusalem. His crusading commitment expressed a very individual intensity of devotion, a profound religious conviction that embraced public acts of piety, political reform, aggressive anti-Semitism, elaborate personal penance, and the patronage of religious orders and relics. Louis’ crusade became a French enterprise, an extension of the newly powerful Capetian monarchy’s ability to exploit the human and financial resources of the kingdom, backed by access to international revenues: vow redemptions, donations and clerical taxes authorised by Innocent IV at the First Council of Lyons in 1245. Over five years, the clerical tax alone may have contributed as much as 950,000 livres tournois, perhaps equivalent to four years’ royal revenue. Royal accounts later put the overall costs of the expedition at over 1,500,000 livres tournois. However, extraordinary income from the church levies, redemptions, donations, taxes on royal lands and extortions from the Jews largely covered the costs of the invasion of Egypt.5
8 To facilitate transport, Louis constructed his own Mediterranean port at Aigues Mortes. Contracts for ships and men were carefully drawn up. While there was some international involvement, for example a contingent from England, the main recruitment revolved around Louis, his brothers, and French dukes and counts, many of whom were further bound by generous royal subsidies. Massive dumps of wine and grain – the staples of crusaders’ diet – were collected in Cyprus to await the crusade’s arrival in 1248.

  Louis embarked from Aigues Mortes on 25 August 1248. He spent the winter and spring in Cyprus, gathering his forces. After receiving ambassadors from the Mongols who, only seven years earlier, had invaded central Europe to devastating effect, Louis despatched in return the Dominican friar Andrew of Longjumeau to explore possibilities for an anti-Muslim alliance, a fantasy that western rulers continued to pursue for another half century. In late May 1249 the crusade armada, carrying perhaps 15,000 troops and auxiliaries (clerks, cooks, servants, physicians and the like), left for Damietta. Despite having given Sultan al-Salih (son of Sultan al-Kamil) time to muster his army and prepare Egypt’s defences, following a forced landing on 5 June, the crusaders captured Damietta in a day when its garrison abandoned the city, the sultan having decided to use Mansourah, forty miles upstream from Damietta, as his forward base. The speed of the city’s fall caught the crusaders off guard. Unprepared to take immediate advantage of their victory, they preferred to await new arrivals, notably Louis’ brother Alphonse of Poitiers in October; see out the annual summer Nile floods; and reconvert Damietta into a Christian seaport.

  In November, Louis, having rejected a proposal to capture Alexandria, led his army southwards towards Mansourah where, later that month, al-Salih died, perhaps of tuberculosis. Although his heir, al-Mu’azzam Turan Shah, took three months to reach the Nile, Egyptian defences held firm under the control of al-Salih’s widow, Shajar al-Durr, the army high command and al-Salih’s increasingly dominant Bahriyya Mamluks. From early December to early February the two forces faced each other across a branch of the Nile, the Bahr al-Sagir, a stalemate only broken in early February when a ford was found across the river. The ensuing battle for Mansourah (8–11 February), its gruelling bloody combat preserved in the vivid eyewitness remembrance of one of Louis’ closest associates, John of Joinville, ended in a pyrrhic victory for the crusaders.59 Heavy casualties included Louis’ brother, Robert, count of Artois. While the badly mauled Egyptian army withdrew into Mansourah itself, it remained intact, largely thanks to the discipline of the Bahriyya Mamluks who now moved to the centre of the political stage. Mansourah brought Louis no closer to Cairo, instead it confirmed his isolation. Further stalemate forced a withdrawal once more across the Bahr al-Sagir. Increasing food shortages, enemy harassment and devastating camp diseases were compounded when the Egyptians outflanked the crusaders by blockading the rivers between them and Damietta. Forced into a painful retreat, Louis’ army disintegrated in early April between Sharamshah and Fariksur, only halfway to Damietta. Louis and his troops were taken into hazardous captivity.

  JOHN OF JOINVILLE

  Perhaps the most vivid, personal description of the experience of crusading is contained in the Life of St Louis by John of Joinville (1224/5–1317), a Champenois nobleman and veteran of the 1248–54 French crusade to Egypt and the Holy Land. He could boast ancestors who had fought on every major eastern crusade since 1147. Written in northern French vernacular and completed in 1309, the account of the crusade in the Life may have first been compiled separately, perhaps in the 1270s, which may explain its autobiographical rather than strictly hagiographical focus. Joinville, hereditary seneschal of Champagne, became a close friend of Louis IX on crusade, during which the king had bailed him out with funds to help pay his retinue of knights. His proximity to the king did not prevent his voicing criticisms of the campaign’s conduct or the behaviour of participants. However, Joinville’s description of the crusade is distinguished by details of military preparations, observations on camp and court life, vivid anecdotes of opponents and local curiosities, and especially close-quarter accounts of the harrowing atmosphere of battle and captivity. Joinville captures the horror and terror of war and its consequences while being sustained by confidence in the holy cause, in the social code of chivalric behaviour and in the outstanding personal qualities of Louis IX, an admiration that does not, however, blind him to the king’s faults or one that he extends to all members of the king’s family. By the time Joinville composed the final text, which had originally been commissioned by Joan of Navarre (d. 1305), wife of Louis IX’s grandson Philip IV, the crusader king had been canonised (1297), his example being used by Joinville in not so veiled criticism of the conduct of his successors. After Louis’ death, Joinville was rarely at court, occupied with family and regional business in Champagne, and by the time he died, aged at least ninety-two, he had become disillusioned with the increasingly bullying Capetian regime, even putting his name to charters of protest against Louis X (1314–16), the dedicatee of the Life. The absence of royalist obsequiousness may help explain the apparent limited circulation of the work in the later Middle Ages. While in Syria with Louis between 1250 and 1254, Joinville also wrote a devotional commentary on the Creed, a Credo, and possibly a song arguing that the king should remain in the east after his defeat in Egypt. In 1311, to underline his own and his family’s crusading lineage, he composed an epitaph for the tomb at Clairvaux of his great-grandfather, Geoffrey III of Joinville (d. 1188), a veteran of the Second Crusade. Pious, literate, independent-minded, Joinville exemplified a certain type of thoughtful regional aristocrat in whom the cultures of crusading and chivalry seamlessly combined, and on whom continued support for the crusades depended.

  87. John of Joinville (recognisable from his horse’s heraldic device) and Louis IX at the storming of Damietta, from a fourteenth-century manuscript of Joinville’s Life of St Louis.

  In an unexpected irony, two of the dominant figures in the subsequent negotiations for the ransom and release of the crusader prisoners of war, and the ceding of Damietta back to the Egyptians, were women: al-Salih’s widow, Shajar al-Durr, now the arbiter of power in Egypt, and Louis’ heavily pregnant wife, Margaret, who took the lead in maintaining the morale of the remaining crusaders in Damietta. The agreement, which included a ransom the equivalent of c. 400,000 livres tournois, was further complicated by a coup, orchestrated by the Bahriyya Mamluks who, fearful of losing power under the new sultan, assassinated Turan Shah and installed Shajar al-Durr as sultana, ending Ayyubid rule in Egypt. On his release, Louis stayed in Palestine, effectively as its ruler, for the next four years, shoring up its defences. He only returned to France in 1254.

  The scale of Louis’ defeat in the Nile Delta in 1250 matched his ambition. His plan envisaged the conquest and occupation of Egypt. He apparently took with him agricultural equipment for western settlers – hoes, harrows, ploughs, ploughshares, etc. – and hoped to convert indigenous Egyptians to Christianity. The conquest of Damietta in 1249 was not envisaged as a bargaining chip for the return of Jerusalem. In rejecting an attack on Alexandria in favour of an assault on Cairo, Louis agreed with his brother Robert of Artois: ‘if you wish to kill the serpent, you must first crush its head’.60 However, even the ever-optimistic Louis saw the flaw in his scheme, regretting after the capture of Damietta that ‘he had not enough people to guard and inhabit the territory in Egypt which he had already occupied and was about to seize’.61 Once again the logistics of conquest proved defeating. The only alternative to occupation and settlement was regime change. Here Louis superficially had a better chance, as his invasion coincided with the death of the sultan and prompted a major Egyptian succession crisis. Unfortunately for the crusaders, this only resulted in the ascent to power of the militant Bahriyya Mamluks. Yet even with a sympathetic Muslim regime installed at Cairo, Louis’ plan for domination possessed a fatal flaw. The ideology of the crusade precluded lasting accommodation with Muslim Egyptians. In restricted cir
cumstances Muslim rulers or competitors for rule might tolerate Latins as allies, even co-rulers, but never as masters. Grandiose hopes of mass conversions were fanciful; seemingly there had been few in the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem in the twelfth century. The only stable contemporary Latin conquest in the Levant was Cyprus: its population was Greek Orthodox Christian; and, as an island, it was defensible. It remained in westerners’ hands until 1571. Egypt, like Palestine, lacked any of these favourable qualities.

  88. Aerial view of Caesarea, the perimeter walls built by Louis IX.