Holy Warriors

by Jonathan Phillips

  The Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa did not take place until July 1212, but—crucially for Innocent’s way of thinking—the Christians prevailed. The triumphant pope read Alfonso’s letter to the people of Rome and the victory, self-evidently, was proof that the procession had influenced the result. Thus, if people’s spirituality was directed correctly—and that meant the prayers of the entire community—then God would favor them.

  THE CRUSADE AGAINST MARKWARD OF ANWEILER

  At the start of Innocent’s pontificate, the chances of a successful campaign appeared less propitious. A crusade to the Holy Land directed by Henry VI of Germany had promised much but after his advance forces recaptured Beirut and Sidon, the emperor’s death in 1197 (before he set out in person) brought the enterprise to a close.3 The Holy Land remained in Muslim hands, therefore. In Iberia, Christian forces had been smashed at the Battle of Alarcos (1195) and the six rival rulers of the kingdoms of Spain continued their long-running feuds. Around the same time, a smaller, but no less significant, struggle took place in southern Italy, and its proximity to the papal lands spurred Innocent into a rapid—and, in the long term, highly significant—extension of the concept of crusading.4

  On the death of Henry VI, a dispute arose over possession of his southern Italian and Sicilian lands. Henry’s marshal, Markward of Anweiler, wished to be regent for the child heir, Frederick (later Emperor Frederick II), and possibly planned to rule in his own right. Markward allied with Philip of Swabia, another claimant to the German throne, and together they threatened to squeeze the papal lands in central Italy into oblivion. Markward’s brutal military campaigns made strong progress and the pope became so desperate that he contemplated unleashing the ultimate weapon in his spiritual armory: the crusade. In March 1199 Innocent claimed, rather tendentiously, that Markward impeded the planning of the new campaign to the Holy Land and he threatened holy war against the German.

  By the autumn of 1199 Markward—perhaps foolishly—had made an alliance with Muslim groups in Sicily, and in November the pope responded to this by offering people who fought his German enemy the same indulgence as those who went to the Holy Land. He wrote: “He [Markward] has called on their [Saracens] help against the Christians . . . and so as to stimulate their spirits more keenly . . . he has spattered their jaws with Christian blood and exposed Christian women to the violence of their desire. . . . Who would not rise up against him who rises against all and joins the enemies of the Cross so that he might empty the faith of the Cross and, having become a worse infidel than the Infidels, struggles to conquer the faithful?”5

  Markward’s treaty with the Muslims gave Innocent an obvious reason to initiate a crusade; primarily, however, it was the danger posed to papal lands that pushed him to act. In doing so, Innocent gave life to the idea that political opponents of the Church were appropriate targets for a holy war, a concept that—ironically—in future would find its greatest expression in the conflict with Innocent’s young ward, Frederick. There is little evidence that the localized crusade against Markward ever really blossomed. The pope used the French nobleman Walter of Brienne, from a proud crusading dynasty in the county of Champagne, to try to protect his interests. Walter duly raised an army and between 1201 and 1203 he managed to hold off the German until the latter’s death as a result of surgery for kidney stones. The contemporary Gesta Innocenti reported that at one battle Walter “received the blessing and indulgence from the papal legate . . . [and that] a shining golden cross was seen carried miraculously before the count”.6 The indulgence hints at a crusading ethos, while the reference to a golden cross certainly indicates a belief in divine favor. Walter himself succumbed to wounds suffered in a battle in 1205 but his family’s service would not go unnoticed. Four years later, the French crown and the nobility of Jerusalem, with Innocent’s blessing, chose his younger brother, John of Brienne, to marry the heiress to Jerusalem and to take the crown of the holy city.

  THE ORIGINS OF THE FOURTH CRUSADE, 1198–1201

  While these events were of considerable concern to Pope Innocent, they were of secondary importance compared to his efforts to regain the Holy Land. The limited progress of the Third Crusade and the German Crusade of 1196–97 meant it would require another major expedition to take back Jerusalem.7 Within months of his accession as pope, Innocent issued a new crusade appeal, Post miserabile. Its compelling language exhorted the faithful to act and it railed against the destructive infighting that so crippled the response of the rulers of England, France, and Germany:

  Following the pitiable collapse of the territory of Jerusalem, following the lamentable massacre of the Christian people, following the deplorable invasion of that land on which the feet of Christ stood and where God, our king, had deigned before the beginning of time, to work out salvation in the midst of the earth, following the ignominious alienation from our possession of the vivifying Cross . . . the Apostolic See, alarmed over the ill fortune of such calamity, grieved. It cried out and wailed to such a degree that due to incessant crying out, its throat was made hoarse, and from incessant weeping its eyes almost failed. . . . Still the Apostolic See cries out, and like a trumpet it raises its voice, eager to arouse the Christian peoples to fight Christ’s battle and to avenge the injury done to the Crucified One.8

  To shame his audience into action Innocent even pretended to quote a Muslim who mocked the Christians’ failures. The pope also criticized the arrogance of earlier crusaders (presumably a reference to the dissent between Richard and Philip during the Third Crusade) and urged new recruits to set out in the correct frame of mind, unclouded by vanity and greed.

  Innocent dispatched preachers to France, England, Hungary, and Sicily, although he ignored Spain, where the reconquest continued, and Germany because it was torn apart by civil war. The death of Richard the Lionheart in April 1199 and tensions over Philip’s marital status prevented two obvious candidates from taking the cross, but in November 1199 the elite knighthood of northern France assembled for a tournament at Écry-sur-Aisne, just north of the city of Rheims, in the county of Champagne. There is a paradox here because during the twelfth century the Church consistently censured tournaments as events that promoted the sins of pride, envy, and murder. In contrast, the contemporary nobility were—with no exaggeration—addicted to the thrill and opportunity of such occasions. They were the perfect platform on which to gain status and, more pertinently, to train for war. The massed charges by teams of up to two hundred knights, in an arena that ranged across several miles, was the closest possible replica of real warfare. The idea of a tournament was to capture and ransom opponents, rather than to kill them, but deaths were not uncommon. After such competitions the nobles gathered to feast, dance, and listen to stories and songs—particularly epics that told of the heroes of the First Crusade such as the Chanson d’Antioche. This was, Church disapproval aside, the ideal environment in which to nurture crusading enthusiasm and it is no coincidence that the two comital houses with the greatest crusading traditions, the counts of Flanders and Champagne, were ardent tournament-goers.9

  Count Thibaut of Champagne and Count Louis of Blois both had splendid crusading lineages. Thibaut’s father had ruled Jerusalem from 1192 until 1197 when his dwarfish entertainer toppled from a balcony and pulled him to his death. At twenty-eight years old Louis was already a veteran of the Third Crusade, a campaign that had seen his father’s death at the siege of Acre. Once these men took the cross several other important nobles followed suit, including Geoffrey of Villehardouin, a senior figure on the expedition and the author of a memoir of his experiences.10 (Rather than the Latin texts composed by clerical writers that so dominated accounts of crusading during the twelfth century, the growth of vernacular literacy among laymen meant that accounts of the sort Villehardouin wrote became more common.) Simon de Montfort, a noble from the Île-de-France, was another to join the crusade at Écry, and within a couple of months Count Baldwin of Flanders also committed himself to the expedition. Thus it was t
he nobility of northern France who came to form the nucleus of the Fourth Crusade.11

  In the spring of 1200 they gathered at Soissons and started to plan their campaign. Here they made a decision that, unforeseen by them, was to have the most profound consequences for the direction of their expedition and, ultimately, for the history of Christendom itself. The crusaders resolved to sail to the Levant and, given that Pisa and Genoa were at war, they approached the other maritime experts of the day, the Venetians. Pope Innocent had already sent a legate to the city to petition their involvement so this linkup dovetailed with papal thinking anyway.

  In March 1201 a specially deputed group of crusaders arrived in Venice to arrange the terms of passage. There they encountered one of the most amazing figures in medieval history: Doge Enrico Dandolo, a man already over ninety years of age and who, for at least the previous two decades, had been blind.12 In spite of his handicap Dandolo was an individual of enormous energy and drive whose behavior on the campaign would attract strong praise and sharp criticism alike. Bishop Gunther of Pairis (a Cistercian monastery in Alsace) described him thus: “He was, to be sure, sightless of eye, but most perceptive of mind and compensated for physical blindness with a lively intellect and, best of all, foresight. In the case of matters that were unclear, the others always took every care to seek his advice and they usually followed his lead in public affairs.”13 To Pope Innocent, however, he behaved in an outrageous fashion that did nothing but cause the crusaders to fight Christians rather than Muslims. Dandolo had governed Venice since 1192 and was clearly a hugely experienced and able politician. After a few days’ consideration the Venetians made their response to the crusaders’ request:

  We will build horse transports to carry 4,500 horses and 9,000 squires with 4,500 knights and 20,000 foot sergeants travelling in ships. And we will agree to provide food for all these horses and people for nine months. This is the minimum we will provide in return for a payment of four marks per horse and two marks per man. All the terms we are offering you would be valid for one year from the day of our departure from the port of Venice, to do service to God and Christendom, wherever that might take us. The total cost of what has just been outlined would amount to 85,000 marks.14 And what’s more, we will provide, for the love of God, fifty armed galleys, on condition that for as long as our association lasts we will have one half of everything we capture on land or at sea, and you will have the other. Now you should consider whether you have the will and the means to go ahead.15

  The envoys duly agreed to these terms, but the doge still needed the approval of the people of Venice. Such was the scale of this undertaking that it would require the city to suspend its entire commercial operations for a year to fulfill the treaty—a breathtaking and unprecedented commitment. At a meeting held in the mosaic-covered splendor of Saint Mark’s Cathedral, Villehardouin himself addressed the congregation.16 He implored the Venetians, as the greatest seafaring power of the time, to act to help recover Christ’s land. He sought to harness their civic pride and their commercial aspirations to the intrinsic religiosity of the age. Of all the Italian communities, the Venetians are frequently imagined as money-grabbing mercenaries, devoid of the spirituality of many of the other crusaders.17 In large part, the outcome of the Fourth Crusade is to blame for this, but as we will see, their behavior does not entirely merit such opprobrium. They had already taken part in the First Crusade and the 1124 crusade that captured Tyre; on both occasions they eagerly sought relics, just as the other crusaders had. The numerous churches in Venice bear obvious testimony to their conventional, and deep-seated, spiritual values. As Villehardouin reached the climax of his speech, he fell to his knees and cried out to the congregation for help. The doge and crowd responded with cries of “We agree! We agree!” and with “this great outpouring of piety,” as Villehardouin described it, the pact was sealed and the Venetians had joined the crusade.18

  The execution of these terms came to exert an unyielding and pervasive influence on the outcome of the Fourth Crusade, far beyond anything that could have been calculated or forecast. The costs per individual were broadly in line with what the Genoese had charged King Philip during the Third Crusade, but it was the sheer scale of the project that proved the devastating structural flaw which drew the expedition to its terrible conclusion. The numbers promised were massive, particularly given the absence of a major monarch to pull troops along with him. By way of comparison, Frederick Barbarossa had led twelve thousand to fifteen thousand men on the Third Crusade, while the money required to pay the Venetians amounted to twice the annual income of the English or French crowns.19 Yet Villehardouin and his colleagues were highly experienced nobles, many of whom had taken part in the Third Crusade; how could they have been so mistaken? Either they must have been confident in promises from people in northern France who planned to take part in the crusade, or else they were breathtakingly—and criminally—optimistic.

  One further dimension to the campaign was a secret agreement between the leadership and the doge to begin the crusade with an assault on Egypt, rather than the Holy Land; the intention was to use the former as a staging post en route to Jerusalem.20 Sound strategy and considerable financial advantages lay behind such a plan. As we saw earlier, King Amalric of Jerusalem had made several attempts to conquer Egypt, the Sicilians attacked Alexandria in 1174, and Richard the Lionheart had favored an invasion of the Nile as a prelude to an approach on Jerusalem in 1191. The immense resources of Egypt offered unparalleled opportunities to the Christian military, while control of the coastline would all but guarantee Frankish security at sea. If Egypt came under Frankish power, then the Muslim world—which, since Saladin’s death in 1193, was in a highly fragmented condition anyway—would certainly struggle to recover. The existence of an ongoing truce between the kingdom of Jerusalem and Muslim Syria was a further reason to begin the campaign on the Nile because this arrangement excluded Egypt.

  For the Venetians, the chance to become the preeminent trading city in Alexandria was impossible to resist. The city was by far the greatest commercial center in the Mediterranean, yet by the year 1200 Dandolo’s people conducted only 10 percent of their trade there: by contrast, the Pisans and the Genoese held a much stronger position. The pope frowned upon dealings with the Muslims, especially in materials of war such as iron and timber, but in the run-up to the crusade Innocent was flexible enough not to alienate the Venetians and he condoned trade in nonmilitary goods. Dandolo himself had visited Egypt in the 1170s so he was well aware of this tremendous opportunity. If the crusade succeeded, then it would bring the most phenomenal wealth to Venice and, of course, be the crowning achievement of Dandolo’s time as doge. The fact that it might then lead to the recovery of Jerusalem itself would only add further luster to his triumph.

  It must be said that this was a hugely ambitious scheme—previous campaigns had seen pretty limited Christian progress in Egypt, although the plan to deliver a large force by sea marked an advance on previous strategy. The decision to take 4,500 horses required the construction of dozens of special galleys, each equipped with slings to carry the beasts, as well as low-level doors that, on landing, could be opened to allow mounted knights to pour straight out of the ship and into battle. In other words, these vessels were a form of medieval landing craft and disgorged, in the form of a charging crusader, the equivalent of an armored car. The Venetians had fifty of their own battle galleys, headed by the vermilion-painted ship of the doge, along with around sixty to seventy large sailing boats that each carried up to six hundred passengers and a hundred crew. In total it would need about thirty thousand Venetians to man the whole fleet—possibly half the adult population and another indication of the scale of the city’s commitment.

  The envoys made a down payment of 5,000 silver marks so the work could start immediately and then headed back to France, eager to announce the agreement. By the time they arrived home, however, the crusade had been dealt a heavy blow because the charismatic young
Thibaut of Champagne had fallen ill and died on May 24, 1201. The death of this immensely popular figure provoked genuine distress in the region: “no man of his era was loved more by his vassals and by others,” as Villehardouin wrote.21 He could have been an inspirational and unifying figure to the crusaders and his presence might well have drawn many more to take the cross. The epitaph on his richly decorated tomb in Troyes (sadly, no longer extant) revealed his loss as a potential crusader, as well as showing a belief that he would attain the heavenly Jerusalem:

  Intent upon making amends for the injuries of the Cross and the land of the Crucified

  He arranged the way with expenses, an army, a navy.

  Seeking the terrestrial city, he finds the celestial one;

  While he is obtaining his goal far distant, he finds it at home.22

  Thibaut’s passing meant that the crusade needed a new leader, a man of comparable authority and connections. The nobles decided to contact someone from outside France—perhaps a move designed to broaden the crusade’s appeal—and approached Boniface, marquis of Montferrat. We have already met his brothers, namely William Longsword, briefly the husband of Sibylla of Jerusalem and father of Baldwin V; and Conrad, the man chosen to rule Jerusalem but murdered (probably) by the Assassins in 1192. Boniface could boast, therefore, a formidable crusading ancestry. The Montferrat clan also had a history of involvement with Byzantium because another brother, Renier, had married into the imperial family in 1179, although three years later he was poisoned by the usurping Angeloi dynasty. Conrad himself had served as the commander of the imperial army later in the decade before political intrigue forced him to flee for his life in the summer of 1187. Given this history, plus family ties to the ruling houses of France and Germany, coupled with his long experience of war and diplomacy (he was in his mid-forties), Boniface was a genuinely astute choice. The marquis traveled up to Soissons and there, in late August, he formally took the cross.23