A History of the Crusades

by Jonathan Riley-Smith

  King Hugh III of Cyprus (1267–84) became ruler of Jerusalem as well in 1269. Christian Palestine was riven by faction-fighting and Hugh’s efforts to focus the Franks’ remaining strength against the Mamluk Sultan Baybars were unavailing, as we shall see. After the fall of Acre in 1291 Cyprus was flooded with refugees. The island moved into a new era in which it assumed a vital role as the remaining outpost of Latin Christianity in the north-eastern Mediterranean and the obvious point from which to try to re-establish a Christian presence on the mainland.

  Frankish Greece

  On 12 April 1204 the city of Constantinople fell to the Fourth Crusade. There followed three days of looting. In advance of the assault the crusaders had decided to elect a Latin emperor who would control one-quarter of the territory conquered from the Greeks and in May 1204 Count Baldwin of Flanders was crowned. The remaining three-quarters of the land was divided between the Venetians and the other crusaders. The occupation of the Byzantine empire by colonists was a direct consequence of the crusading movement, but there was nothing religious about it. It was a conquest driven primarily by the prospect of financial and territorial gain. In the case of Venetian Greece, the settlers’ close ties with Venice and the political and economic direction provided by the mother-city are facets of a relationship usually associated with a more conventional definition of colonialism. In fact, the prosperity and relative safety of Frankish Greece drained settlers from the Latin East and thereby weakened the ‘religious colonies’ of the Levant.

  The impact of the Latin conquest varied widely, largely because the westerners themselves were from different backgrounds which were reflected in the methods of government they imposed upon the indigenous population. The Greeks were accustomed to a society in which all free men were subject to the same law, regardless of social or economic standing. The Latins introduced a highly stratified society with different laws for nobles, burgesses, and peasants. The land was divided up into fiefs and Greeks who remained loyal to the Orthodox faith were treated as villeins. Soon, however, the basic distinction between conquerors and subjects became blurred. The Franks needed to exploit the resources of their new territories and the simplest way to do this was to adapt the existing Byzantine fiscal structure. They utilized the archontes, former imperial landowners and officials, to penetrate the complexities of the tax system. The archontes were, in effect, the Greek nobility and although they remained religiously and culturally separate from the Franks, by the latter half of the thirteenth century they had begun to receive fiefs from the settlers. From 1262 there is evidence of Greek knights being dubbed, which demonstrates that the archontes were beginning to enter the Frankish hierarchy. This bound the locals’ interests to those of the settlers and helped to compensate for the Franks’ numerical weakness in the face of attacks from the hostile Bulgarian state to the north and the Greek exiles in Asia Minor and Epirus. As far as the archontes were concerned, movement into the Frankish feudal system was a way to improve their position and may help to explain why the Greeks in occupied areas rarely rebelled against their western overlords.

  Venetian holdings included Crete, Modon and Coron in the southern Peloponnese, and the European coast of the Sea of Marmara. Crete was the most important of these because it was located at a key point on the trade routes between Egypt, Syria, and Constantinople. The Venetians impinged less on the Greeks than the other westerners did because they maintained a centralized bureaucracy, and imperial prerogatives, such as fiscal dues, were kept under a single authority and not distributed to individuals as occurred elsewhere in Frankish Greece. A podestà was elected to govern but his powers were limited by directions from Venice.

  As elsewhere in the East the Franks did not try to impose the Catholic rite on their new subjects. The size of the Orthodox population would have made such a policy impractical anyway. The Franks did, however, elect a Latin as patriarch of Constantinople and replaced Orthodox bishops with Catholic ones. Catholic churchmen tended to live in urban areas and for the few westerners who lived in rural districts—often in fortified towers for reasons of security—it was hard to find a priest trained in the Latin rite. In consequence, isolated settlers might use local Greek priests to perform the sacraments for them and this led to a degree of hellenization. Culturally, however, the Franks remained separate from their subjects and on Venetian Crete intermarriage was banned, at least in theory.

  The fertility of the Peloponnese peninsula and Crete encouraged economic expansion. Demand grew for the export of bulk products such as wheat, olive oil, wool, and wine, as well as luxury items such as silk, and the Franks grew wealthy. They were by no means safe, however. Emperor Henry I (1206–16) had managed to consolidate their hold on Thrace but within a decade the Greeks, ruled by an emperor in exile in Nicaea, had recovered almost all of the lands they had lost in Asia Minor. The threat of a Mongol invasion temporarily prevented the Nicaeans from finishing their work, but in July 1261 the Byzantine Emperor Michael VIII reclaimed Constantinople for the Greeks. Other Frankish settlements enjoyed better fortune. Achaea was the most glamorous, and under the Villehardouin princes its court became regarded as one of the finest manifestations of chivalry in Christendom. The princely court at Andravidha was perceived as a finishing school for the flower of French knighthood, a view which reflected close cultural ties between the settlers and their homeland. A later writer remarked that the French spoken in Achaea was as good as that in Paris. Prince Geoffrey II (1229–46) demonstrated the style of the Achaeans as he rode through the Peloponnese accompanied by eighty knights with golden spurs. A period of peace allowed the nobles to entertain themselves with tournaments and hunting; fine frescoes adorned the walls of their palaces. Very little of this culture survives today.

  In 1259, however, Geoffrey’s flamboyant successor Prince William II (1246–78) was captured by the Nicaeans in the battle of Pelagonia and before he was freed he was forced to swear an oath of fealty to his enemies. Achaea was to survive but it could no longer act independently.

  Latin Palestine and Syria, 1187–1291

  In July 1191, after the seizure of Cyprus, Richard I of England and Philip II of France achieved a notable success by helping the Frankish settlers regain the port of Acre. By the end of the Third Crusade the Christians had secured the coast from Tyre to Jaffa and a truce with Saladin permitted pilgrims to travel freely to Jerusalem, even if the primary aim of recapturing the holy city had not been achieved. Saladin’s death in 1193 afforded the Christians an opportunity to consolidate their recovery. The early decades of the thirteenth century were characterized by economic growth in the Frankish states, a series of succession crises, and a number of crusades to Egypt, the conquest of which was believed to be the best route to the reoccupation of Jerusalem.

  The kingdom of Jerusalem’s economic survival was dependent on Christian control of Acre. For most of the twelfth century Alexandria had been the dominant commercial centre in the eastern Mediterranean, but around the 1180s the Asiatic trade routes began to focus on Acre as the prime outlet for their goods. The English chronicler, Matthew Paris, wrote that the royal revenues of Acre were worth 50,000 pounds of silver a year around 1240: this was more than the income of the king of England at that time. Even if the accuracy of the figures for Acre may be doubted, the kingdom of Jerusalem was certainly wealthy. The Italian mercantile communities increased their involvement. Pisa, Genoa, and Venice sent permanent officials to the Levant. The merchants profited from the increased volume in commerce and the king secured more revenue from taxes, but eventually the trading communities became so powerful that they began to exert a destabilizing influence on political life: in 1256 commercial rivalry between the Genoese and the Venetians led to the war of St Sabas in Acre, a destructive conflict which also involved the Frankish nobility and the military orders. In the meantime, the relative security of the coast meant a considerable rise in the population of Tyre and Acre. Jewish communities flourished in urban areas, partly attracted by the economic op
portunities there, and swollen by migrants determined to settle in the Holy Land. Acre, in particular, contained a noted community of Jewish intellectuals.

  Having taken the cross for the Fifth Crusade in 1215, the Emperor Frederick II was supposed to have joined the expedition but political problems in the West prevented him from departing. In 1225, however, he became closely involved in the affairs of Jerusalem when he married Isabella II, the heiress to the throne. The crown of Jerusalem carried considerable prestige and Frederick intended to enhance his position as Holy Roman Emperor through his involvement in the Holy Land. By 1227 he had assembled a sizeable crusading army but when he fell ill, delaying his own departure even further, Pope Gregory IX excommunicated him. The emperor finally set out for the East in June 1228. His actions on Cyprus have been outlined above and he encountered further difficulties on the mainland. Isabella had died during childbirth and he claimed and received the regency for his infant son, Conrad, who was in the West. He was determined to restore the power of the crown, which had suffered since the reign of Baldwin IV, but the leading nobles, who did not want their dominance challenged, were determined to resist him. One of their most important weapons in this struggle was their skill in legal affairs. An interesting development had been the emergence of a school of jurists, closely associated with, and including members of, the baronial families. The origins of this lay in a peculiarity of feudal service in the Latin East, the obligation of a vassal to give conseil, assistance in the presentation of a case in court, if called upon to do so. The prestige of vassals who were skilled in this way was enhanced by the fact that when Jerusalem had fallen, the laws of the kingdom, which had been written down and kept in a chest in the church of the Holy Sepulchre, had been lost. There could be no recourse to written law and in consequence memory and custom dictated judgements in the early decades of the thirteenth century, in direct contrast to developments in Europe where there was a growing reliance on written records rather than memory. There emerged a group of high-profile lawyers, skilled in the art of public pleading and, initially at least, dependent on their memory of past procedures. As the study of law blossomed, a number of important legal works were written, above all the Livre de Jean d’Ibelin (c .1265), written by that count of Jaffa whom we have seen (p. 84) arriving with such panoply in Egypt. We must be wary of being dazzled by the jurists’ own sense of importance although it is undeniable that they played a prominent role in deciding who ruled the kingdom of Jerusalem at a time of absenteeism and minorities. The nobles exploited the legal training of some of their number when Frederick confronted them. They rejected his confiscation of Ibelin fiefs around Acre and opposed his attempts to advance the position of the Teutonic Knights ahead of the hereditary claimant to the lordship of Toron. The assise sur la ligece, which had been instituted in the twelfth century by King Amalric to strengthen the crown, was now, under very different circumstances, turned to the nobles’ advantage. Since the law had stated that a lord could not take action against a vassal without the formal decision of his court, the nobles insisted that this applied to the king as much as to any other lord; if justice was not forthcoming they maintained that they were entitled to use force to reoccupy any confiscated fiefs and could withdraw their services, in theory leaving the king powerless. The Ibelin fiefs were regained by force and in the case of the Teutonic Knights the prospect of losing military service compelled Frederick to back down. The outcome of this episode, however, was as much a reflection of the emperor’s weakness as an indication of the strength of the nobility.

  Frederick enjoyed far better fortune in his dealings with the Muslims. The invasion of Egypt by the Fifth Crusade had perturbed the Egyptians and, fearing the consequences of Frederick’s expedition and politically weakened within the Ayyubid confederacy, the sultan al-Kamil agreed to surrender control of Jerusalem in February 1229, although the Muslims held on to the Temple area and would not allow the city to be fortified. A ten-year truce was agreed and Frederick promised to protect the sultan’s interests against all his enemies, Christian or Muslim. Frederick staged an imperial crown-wearing ceremony in the Holy Sepulchre, even though his status as an excommunicate resulted in the city being placed under an interdict by the patriarch of Jerusalem. He left the East in June 1229, pelted with offal by the local populace as he made his way to the port of Acre.

  Frederick’s departure did not mean the end of imperial involvement in the Latin East: when in 1231 his lieutenant, Richard Filangieri, tried to take control of Beirut, the nobility, basing its opposition on a sworn confraternity at Acre, managed to frustrate him. None the less, Richard retained control of Tyre and the kingdom was split between the imperialists and their opponents, led by the Ibelins. Richard appropriated Venetian revenues in Tyre, which encouraged the merchants to side with his enemies. The Genoese were already hostile to the imperialists and representatives of the two Italian communities offered to betray Tyre to the Ibelin faction. In the summer of 1242 these forces combined to expel the imperialists from the city. This required a legal justification and the jurist, Philip of Novara (d. 1265), who was a client of the Ibelins and our principal source of information for this period, produced a fictional argument to justify the ending of Frederick’s regency. He maintained that once Conrad had come of age—which would not occur until April 1243—his father’s regency would end. Since Conrad had not come to the East to claim the throne, there was still need for a regent and his nearest relative in Palestine, Queen Alice of Cyprus, was appointed in Frederick’s place. The emperor’s supporters soon lost what little remained of their influence in the East.

  The kingdom of Jerusalem was not the only settlement to be affected by political upheavals. In 1201 claimants from Armenia and Tripoli began to dispute the succession of Antioch and many years of conflict followed before Bohemond IV (1219–33) triumphed. He ruled over both Antioch and Tripoli, although the legal and administrative systems of the two settlements remained distinct. The prince chose to reside in Tripoli and in his absence Antioch was heavily influenced by its large Greek community. The politics of northern Syria were complicated further by the influence of the military orders which were based in powerful castles—Margat, Baghras, Tortosa, Crac des Chevaliers, and Chastel Blanc—and constituted semi-independent forces in the region, as we shall see.

  The era of relative prosperity ended in the 1240s. The settlers broke a truce with the sultan of Egypt and discovered that they had stirred up a hornets’ nest when the Muslims allied with the Khorezmians, a displaced people forced into nomadism by the Mongols. Jerusalem was lost in August 1244 and two months later the Christian forces were crushed at the battle of La Forbie in which over 1000 knights were killed. New calls for help resulted in the first crusade of King Louis IX of France. After the disaster which befell it in Egypt, the French king remained in Palestine and organized, at great expense, the refortification of the defences of Acre, Sidon, Jaffa, and Caesarea.

  Louis’s invasion of Egypt led, as we shall see, to the replacement of the Ayyubid dynasty by Mamluk government. Around the same time the Mongol armies appeared on the scene. In 1258 they sacked Baghdad and two years later attacked Aleppo. Bohemond VI of Antioch-Tripoli (1252–75) became their ally, but the leaders of Jerusalem, pincered between the Mongols and the Mamluks, allowed the Egyptians to pass through their territory before their victory over the Mongols at the battle of Ayn Jalut in 1260. The leadership of the Mamluks passed to the formidable Sultan Baybars, who soon imposed his authority in Syria.

  The settlers’ lack of manpower dictated their military response. A strategy based on holding isolated strongpoints, often under the control of the military orders, was a key element in the defence of Frankish territory. The Christians had insufficient troops to form a field army and provide adequate garrisons for their fortified sites as well, although Louis IX’s innovation of establishing a permanent French regiment in the East was a positive development. Financed largely by the French monarchy, the force consisted of about
100 knights, along with crossbowmen, and mounted and foot sergeants. Unlike the military orders it was not tied to the defence of individual sites and therefore could be deployed in a more flexible fashion. It became customary for the captain to hold the position of seneschal of the kingdom of Jerusalem (the royal deputy in the High Court and the administrator of royal castles) which demonstrates the regiment’s standing in the East. Overall, however, the French regiment was a case of too little too late. The Franks’ offensive action was usually restricted to raiding, because with their limited resources they could hardly envisage permanent territorial gains, and pitched battles were generally avoided. Unless crusaders were in the East the Franks’ inferior numbers meant that the unpredictability of battle held far greater risks for them than their opponents. The Franks’ military problems were exploited by the brilliant generalship and careful strategy of Baybars, who methodically cut back the area under their control. Confined to a passive form of defence, the settlers could only watch as their lands were devastated. Even their increasingly sophisticated castles such as Margat and Crac des Chevaliers could not resist the huge enemy invasion forces. From time to time a city or fortress would fall and Christian-controlled territory would shrink even further. The Frankish economy began to decline too. The Mongol invasions of Iraq and north Syria had disrupted the trade routes and the Black Sea replaced the Levant as the terminus for much oriental commerce. All sections of society suffered financial strain. Hugh III of Cyprus found the kingdom of Jerusalem ungovernable in the face of a claim from Charles of Anjou, who had bought the crown from a pretender to the throne, and he decided to concentrate his attention on Cyprus. In 1286 his successor, King Henry II, regained Acre and was crowned amid great pageantry and splendour, but the Mamluks were closing the net on the remaining settlements. In 1287 Tripoli fell and on 5 April 1291 the final assault on Acre began. A vast army battered its way through the town walls. The king and his nobles escaped to Cyprus but many of the defenders perished. On 28 May the final resistance was crushed and within three months the Christian hold on the mainland had ended. The Latins in the eastern Mediterranean no longer ruled any land that had ever been occupied by Muslims: ironically, a movement which had originally expressed itself through religious colonization was now exploiting the resources of territories which had always been in Christian hands.