Three sons born to Philip IV sat on the French throne during the last years of Capetian kingship. The reign of Louis X (1314–16) saw alliances of regional nobles reacting against the fiscal demands initiated by Philip, and Louis’s decision of 1315 to grant freedom to French serfs was prompted by the need to plug the consequent gap in royal revenue. Serfs owned directly by the king had to pay him for their freedom, and those owned by the king’s subjects had to pay a sum shared equally between Louis and the former owners. Serfs who could not, or would not, buy their freedom had their goods confiscated, with the proceeds going to the Crown. The revenue-producing capacity of Jewish commerce prompted another major change in government policy: in 1315 Jews were allowed to return to France for an initial 12-year period under specific conditions that excluded them from practicing usury.
Some of the Crown’s money was spent keeping military and commercial pressure on Flanders, whose independence and great wealth irked its feudal suzerain, the French monarchy. Philip V (1316–22) succeeded to the throne when John I, Louis X’s posthumously born son, died after a reign lasting five days, and it was Philip who attempted a diplomatic solution of the Flemish question. Count Robert III agreed that his grandson Louis would inherit, and since the young prince was being brought up at Philip’s court the agreement seemed to guarantee a reliably pro-French future for Flanders. Louis I (1322–46), however, lacked a local power base, and French forces had to intervene in his support following the Flemish revolt (1323–26) against the count’s rule.
ASSERTING CAPETIAN DOMINANCE
Philip V’s accession had been controversial initially, but those nobles who supported the rights of Louis X’s daughter, Joan, were trumped by Philip’s swift coronation at Rheims in 1316. Thereafter, he relied on the famous Salic law, and its denial of a female right of regal succession, to bolster his authority. Philip’s establishment of the cour des comptes, charged with governmental audit and prompt revenue payment, proved to be a lasting feature of French administration. Both Philip and his brother, who succeeded him as Charles IV (1322–28), nonetheless faced English challenges in the southwest. Guienne might be the only sliver of French land left to English kings, but it was a near-autonomous province. Edward II refused to pay homage to Louis X, only reluctantly paid homage to Philip V and then renewed his refusal in regard to Charles IV.
“TENNIS BALLS, MY LIEGE”
The insulting “treasure” that France’s Dauphin sent to Henry V in Shakespeare’s play had long since played its part in French sport. Louis X (1314–16) was an enthusiastic player of jeu de paume or “game of the palm” from which modern tennis is derived, and his innovation of an indoor court supplemented the game’s outdoor version.
In both cases the aim was to serve and hit the ball with gloved hands, though barehanded versions of the game were also played at an earlier stage. The server’s cry of “tenez,” or “look out,” may be the origin of the word “tennis.” Its indoor form, when played with the racket (a post-medieval innovation), would later be called “real” to distinguish it from the lawn-based version that became popular in the 19th century. Jeu de paume, when played indoors, involved the hitting of the ball within an entirely enclosed space, while the original outdoor version involved a court consisting of just a front wall and two side walls. The game Louis played, however, was already historic, and earlier versions of it were being played in France by at least the 12th century. The Spanish game of pelota and the Italian palla, also handball games played within a court, are of similar antiquity. The English fives, a game played without a racket, belongs to the same family of sports. Louis’s innovation was widely imitated in royal and aristocratic palaces across Western Europe, and the playing of jeu de paume in specially built indoor courts showed the emergent influence of the French as arbiters of fashion and social style. The pneumonia, or possibly pleurisy, that killed the young king has been attributed to the large amount of chilled wine he quaffed to cool himself down after a particularly vigorous game of jeu de paume.
Le Jeu de Paume, an anonymous 18th-century engraving of the precursor to modern tennis.
Anglo-French resentments came to a head in the military conflict of 1324 which is named after the village of Saint-Sardos in Guienne. It was here, just within the English-controlled side of the border, that a French subject had raised a bastide or small fortified town. Local landowners who feared it might attract their workers away from the land burned the bastide to the ground; in doing this, they had enjoyed the tacit support of the local English administration. Charles IV therefore declared that the English had forfeited the duchy of Aquitaine, and his forces encountered little resistance during their six-week campaign as they swept through Gascony. Charles IV, last of the Capetian kings, had made his point, and the English were allowed to retain their exiguous territorial presence in the southwest with the exception of the border region of Agenais, which became French controlled. Right to the last, therefore, Capetian kingship could exult in its triumphs, and England’s courtiers, nobles and soldiers were left pondering the question of how best to avenge so bitter a defeat.
THE THIRD CRUSADE
1144–1192
By the late 12th century the predominant power in the Islamic Middle East was the Ayyubid dynasty, whose founder Saladin (Salah ad-Din, c.1138–93) was of Kurdish descent. Following the deposition of Egypt’s Fatimid caliphate Saladin became first the country’s vizier (1169) and then its sultan. In 1174 he imposed his rule over Damascus, and in subsequent years his authority extended to Aleppo (1176) and then Mosul (1183). Saladin’s construction of an Egyptian-Syrian power block meant that Muslim territories administered by a single ruler now surrounded the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem.
In the early 12th century Jerusalem’s Latin rulers had enjoyed substantial success in consolidating and extending their kingdom. Baldwin I’s reign (1100–18) saw the capture of Acre (1104), Beirut (1110) and Sidon (1111). With its command of the Palestinian coast secured, Jerusalem’s suzerainty was acknowledged by the crusader states to the north at Tripoli, Antioch and Baldwin’s own county of Edessa. The first military Orders of monastic knights, the Templars and the Hospitallers, were established in Jerusalem during the reign of the king’s relative and successor Baldwin II (1118–31), who maintained a series of offensives against Fatimid Egypt and the Seljuk Turks. The Council of Nablus, composed of the higher clergy and leaders of the aristocratic laity, issued in 1120 the canons that comprised the kingdom’s earliest written laws, and although Baldwin II was held captive by Aleppo’s emir in 1123–24 the king subsequently led his army to victory over the Seljuk Turks at the Battle of Azaz (June 11, 1125). A regency government ran the Latin kingdom during Baldwin’s captivity, and the extensive trading rights granted to Venice’s merchants in the agreement of 1124 guaranteed significant Venetian military support in the campaign of that year which secured Jerusalem’s capture of Tyre.
The marriage of Baldwin II’s heir Melisande to the recently widowed Fulk V of Anjou, who ruled Jerusalem as co-sovereign (r. 1131–43), brought the kingdom within the ambit of the Angevin empire. Fulk was the father of Geoffrey V of Anjou and paternal grandfather of England’s King Henry II, but his reign saw the start of serious internal dissidence because many opposed the influence of the king’s Angevin retinue. There was also now a major external threat; Zengi (c.1095–1146) had been imposed by the Seljuks as governor both of Mosul (1127) and of Aleppo (1128), and then recognized by them as an independent ruler. The two cities were thereby united under Zengi’s rule, and he became the founder of a new dynasty of Turkic rulers. In 1144 the Zengid army invaded and conquered Edessa, the last of the crusader states to be established and the first to fall. This was recognized as a major crisis in the West, and the Second Crusade (1147–49) led by Louis VII of France and the German king Conrad III made Damascus its primary object of attack.
RIGHT Crusaders fight a bloody battle during the Crusades in this detail from “Passages fait Outremer”(Overseas Voyages), b
y Sébastien Mamerot, c.1475.
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THE THIRD CRUSADE
1144 The county of Edessa, a crusader state, is captured by Zengi, the Turkic ruler of Mosul and Aleppo.
1148 Leaders of the Second Crusade (1147–49) fail to capture Damascus, which is now allied to Nur ad-Din, Zengi’s son and successor.
1154 Nur ad-Din establishes control of Damascus.
1174 Death of Nur ad-Din. Saladin, already established as sultan in Egypt, extends his power across Syria.
1186 Saladin declares war on the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem.
1187 The Battle of Hattin, near Tiberias: Saladin’s victory leads to Acre’s capture and the surrender of Jerusalem. Western leaders prepare for a crusade.
1191 Philip II of France lands in Palestine (May) where his forces combine with those of Leopold V, duke of Austria. Richard I effects a military takeover of Cyprus en route, and on arriving in the Holy Land (June) he and his army join the forces besieging Acre. The city falls in July.
1192 Richard and Saladin agree a peace treaty: Acre becomes the Latin kingdom’s capital and Jerusalem remains Muslim-controlled.
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CAPTURING DAMASCUS FOR THE TURKS
Zengi had targeted Damascus earlier when he launched a campaign against its Turkic ruling dynasty in the mid-1130s, but the alliance signed in 1139 between Damascus and Jerusalem had frustrated his goal of hegemonic power in Syria. By 1147, however, Damascus was in alliance with Zengi’s son, Nur ad-Din, the emir of Aleppo. The siege of Damascus in July 1148 ended in utter failure and the disintegration of the entire crusade. Disputes about military strategy had divided the crusading leaders—and especially Conrad—from the nobility in Jerusalem whose reputation for fractious behavior made it difficult to interest Western leaders in crusading during the decades that followed. These, however, were the years when Nur ad-Din, sustained by his interpretation of jihad as an anti-Western holy war, succeeded in entrenching a new pattern of power in the Middle East. His forces’ defeat of the army of Antioch at the Battle of Inab (June 29, 1149) exposed the principality to new levels of danger. Furthermore, the death in that conflict of the principality’s ruler, Raymond of Poitiers, was a grievous blow to the collective interest of the crusader states.
By 1154 Nur ad-Din was in control of Damascus. Baldwin III (r. 1143–62) formed a protective alliance with the Byzantines in 1158, and this was renewed in 1168 by his brother King Amalric I (r. 1162–74). In the 1150s the Fatimid dynasty’s authority over Egypt decayed, and in 1169 Nur ad-Din ordered his general, Shirkuh, to seize Egypt from the vizier Shawar. Shirkuh died just two months later, however, and supreme authority was transferred to his nephew Saladin who established himself as Sultan and asserted his independence of Nur ad-Din. Following Nur ad-Din’s death in 1174 Saladin extended his authority in Syria.
BALDWIN IV, THE LEPER KING
Manuel I Commenus had been a close ally of Amalric and had supported the Latin kingdom’s own attempts at exerting authority within Egypt. The Greek emperor’s death in 1180 removed an important source of support. When Amalric’s son and successor Baldwin IV (r. 1174–85) came to power he was able to exert his own authority, despite the fact that he suffered from leprosy. Baldwin could also call on the support of his uncle, Joscelin III of Edessa, whenever the authority of his cousin Raymond III of Tripoli seemed to be overbearing. Furthermore, the marriage of his sister Sibylla to William of Montferrat, a cousin of Frederick I Barbarossa and of Louis VII of France, carried with it the prospect of substantial Western support. However, William’s death in 1177, soon after arriving in Jerusalem and leaving Sibylla pregnant with the future Baldwin V, was a major blow. Moreover, the influence of Raynald of Chatillon within the kingdom created enormous problems. Raynald’s ruthless military strategy helped to defeat Saladin at the Battle of Montsigard (November 25, 1177), but his reputation for extreme and wanton cruelty was by now fully deserved.
LEFT This detail from the Chronica Majora, by Matthew Paris (c.1200–59) depicts Saladin’s capture of the True Cross.
A leper king who could not be expected to live long, and an heir who was a mere infant, created a tense situation for the dynastic succession. Count Raymond III, along with his cousin Count Bohemond of Antioch, plotted to persuade the widowed Sibylla to marry into the Ibelins, a powerful and ambitious local family. But her brother, although an ailing king, stole a march on them by securing Sibylla’s marriage to Guy of Lusignan, a nobleman who had recently arrived in the kingdom. Baldwin’s disillusion with Guy’s military performance prompted another strategic shift. The coronation of the sickly five-year-old Baldwin V in 1183 was designed to limit the influence of Guy and Sibylla in the immediate royal circle, and Raymond of Tripoli regained his authority. The infant survived his uncle by barely a year, and after he died in 1186 Sibylla reigned in Jerusalem as co-consort with Guy. However, Guy’s influence, exerted in combination with his close associate Raynald, only contributed to the kingdom’s problems.
THE BUILDUP TO THE THIRD CRUSADE
An advantageous marriage had made Raynald lord of Oultrejourdain, whose fortresses controlled the trade routes between Damascus and Egypt. It was in this area that he launched an unprovoked attack on a Muslim caravan in 1186—an action that led Saladin to declare war on Jerusalem. Raymond had returned to Tripoli in protest at Sibylla and Guy’s joint rule, and had gone so far as to ally himself with Saladin, whom he allowed to occupy his fiefdom in Tiberias. A reconciliation between Raymond and Guy in 1187 led to their joint command of the force sent to do battle with Saladin at Tiberias. But their failure to agree on a strategy led to the crusaders’ defeat at the Battle of Hattin (July 4, 1187), and following his capture Raynald was executed on account of his flagrant disregard for Muslim custom both in war and in peace. Guy was imprisoned in Damascus before being allowed to return to Jerusalem in return for a ransom payment.
ABOVE Richard I (“the Lionheart”), accompanied by his troops, embarks on horseback for the Third Crusade in 1191, in this 15th-century illuminated manuscript produced by the Burgundian scribe David Aubert.
Saladin’s forces overran the whole of the Latin kingdom except for the port of Tyre, which was defended by Conrad of Montferrat, Baldwin V’s paternal uncle. The surrender of the city of Jerusalem in October 1187 marks the end of the first kingdom of Jerusalem, although the principality of Antioch and the county of Tripoli managed to survive Saladin’s onslaught on the Latin kingdom to their south. Jerusalem city was already swollen with refugees who had escaped from the countryside during Saladin’s advance, and its population were allowed to escape to Tyre, Tripoli and Egypt from where they often fled back to Europe. Those who could not afford to pay for their freedom, however, often ended up in slavery. Confronted by this collapse, Western leaders launched the Third Crusade. Henry II of England and Philip II Augustus of France put aside their differences and issued a joint call to arms financed by a levy known as the “Saladin tithe.” Following Henry’s death in 1189 it was his son and successor, Richard I (“the Lionheart”), who led the English crusaders. The German emperor Frederick I Barbarossa also joined the expedition, and on May 18, 1190 his army captured Iconium, the capital of the sultanate of Rum. Three weeks later, Barbarossa’s horse slipped while crossing the Saleph river, and he died after being thrown onto rocks. Most of his men then returned to Germany.
THE LIONHEART IN THE HOLY LAND
Richard the Lionheart and Philip II Augustus of France started the crusade as allies, and it was their joint campaign in Anjou in the summer of 1189 that had forced Henry II of England to pay homage to Philip for his French territories. In July 1190 Richard (now king of England) and Philip set sail from Marseilles for Sicily en route to Palestine. The landing in Messina was initially an opportunity to resolve a dynastic conflict: Sicily’s ruler Tancred had imprisoned Joan, who was the wife of his predecessor and also Richard’s sister. Joan was released after her brother captured Messina on October 4, 1190, but the issue of the Lionh
eart’s own betrothal now emerged as a thorny issue. Richard had been engaged to Philip’s half-sister Alys, but he now declared that he intended to marry Berengaria of Navarre instead. An offended Philip left Sicily without Richard at the end of March 1191 and arrived in Palestine in the middle of May. His forces now joined those of Leopold V, duke of Austria, who was Barbarossa’s successor as commander of the imperial troops.
Richard’s armada left Sicily on April 10, 1191 but soon encountered a severe storm. His own ship was able to dock at Limassol in Cyprus, but several other ships bearing a substantial amount of treasure ran aground, whereupon Duke Commenus, the ruler of Cyprus, seized the booty. This act prompted Richard’s retaliation, and he launched a swift military takeover of the island. In June 1191 he arrived in Acre where he and his men joined the crusader forces besieging the town.
Guy of Lusignan had been denied entry to Tyre by Conrad of Montferrat, and the king of Jerusalem had therefore shifted his military campaign to the south where he embarked in 1189 on a two-year siege of Acre. Queen Sibylla’s death in 1190 had deprived Guy of the right to rule as consort, and the right of succession reverted to Baldwin IV’s half-sister Isabella. Conrad’s arranged marriage to Isabella therefore allowed him to claim the Crown, although Guy refused to cede his rights. The leaders of the Third Crusade therefore had to decide whom to back in this succession dispute once they arrived in the summer of 1191. Richard decided to back Guy, who was one of his vassals in Poitou. Philip of France, however, supported Conrad, who was a cousin of his father Louis VII. This added to the ill will between them, and Philip returned home after Acre fell to the Christians on July 12. Another quarrel was in progress, too. Richard had offended Leopold by casting down the duke’s flag which had been raised, along with the banners of the English and French Crowns and of the kingdom of Jerusalem, in Acre following its recapture. By the end of 1191 the duke, who was another significant backer of Conrad for the Crown of Jerusalem, was back in Austria.
The Age of Chivalry Page 13
