The Glory of the Crusades
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The entire city, except for the citadel and the fortified compounds of the military religious orders, was in Muslim hands. King Henry II and Jean de Villiers hurried to the harbor where they boarded ships. The patriarch of Jerusalem tried to leave as well but was drowned in the attempt. Several stories exist as to how he drowned. One version indicates he slipped trying to get into a boat; another is that out of pity for the fleeing inhabitants of the city he allowed too many to board his ship and the vessel capsized.568
The last bastion of Christian resistance in Acre was now the Templar Tower, which was a heavily fortified castle at the end of the city. It was built on the tip of the landmass that jutted into the Mediterranean, “so close to the sea that the waves broke against it.”569
The Muslims tried to force the Templars and refugees out of the Tower but to no avail. Ten days after the final assault, the Templars recognized the situation was hopeless and offered to surrender the citadel if the sultan granted them safe conduct out of the city. Khalil agreed and sent a unit of troops into the Tower to oversee the surrender of the Templars.
Once inside the compound the Muslim troops could not restrain themselves from harassing the Christian civilians who had sought refuge with the Templars. They tried to take possession of the men for slaves and of the women to satisfy their sexual desire. The Templars reacted by grabbing their weapons and slaughtering the sultan’s troops. They shut the gates to the citadel and made up their mind to fight to the death.
Khalil sent word to the Templars that he did not harbor ill will toward them for the death of his men since they had acted foolishly. He reiterated his terms and asked them to open the gates. Peter de Sevrey, the marshal of the order, and several other Templars left the fortress and walked toward the waiting sultan. They were apprehended and beheaded.
After Khalil’s treachery the remaining Templars and civilians in the tower once more pledged to fight to the end. But when the Muslims began a mining operation to destroy the tower and with no means available to stop it, the Christians realized they had no choice but to surrender.
Khalil sent a force of 2,000 cavalry into the tower to accept the Templars’ capitulation. While overseeing the withdrawal, the mine underneath gave way and the tower collapsed killing the remaining Templars and the Muslim cavalry.570 It was a costly end to a costly siege that had killed nearly 30,000 Christians in five weeks.571 Khalil, following the example set by Baybars, ordered the city razed. Acre had fallen, a hundred years to the day of its capture by the forces of the Third Crusade.
News of its fall prompted outbursts of shock and dismay in Europe. It was inconceivable that the Kingdom of Jerusalem was no more. Although there were small pockets of Christian territory remaining in Outrémer, they soon surrendered and by the end of the summer of 1291, the Crusader States were gone.
Changes in the Crusading Movement
By the end of the thirteenth century, the Crusades were not simply armed pilgrimages to the Holy Land. They had become a way of life that encompassed a worldview shaped by the teachings of the Catholic Church. Despite the eradication of the Crusader States, pilgrimages continued to the Holy Land and a Christian presence at the holy sites in Jerusalem was guaranteed by the Franciscans, who, by the mid-1330s, were granted a license by the Mamluks to oversee the Latin sectors within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Upper Room, and the Grotto of the Nativity in Bethlehem.572
The reign of the Crusader States was short, lasting less than 200 years. But although the fall of Acre meant the end of Christian control of Outrémer, it did not produce the decline of the Crusading movement. The Crusades continued, but their focus changed.573 The movement received fresh impetus with the arrival of the Ottoman Turks, who in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries threatened the very existence of Christendom.
494 To his troops before the amphibious landing at Damietta, Egypt in 1249, in Pernoud, The Crusaders, 301.
495 David Nicolle, Acre 1291—Bloody Sunset of the Crusader States (New York: Osprey Publishing, 2005), 89.
496 The story is recounted by John of Joinville in his Histoire de Saint Louis, 61–63. Jacques Le Goff, Saint Louis, trans. Gareth Evan Gollrad (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2009), 109.
497 The story is from Matthew Paris as quoted in Le Goff, Saint Louis, 112.
498 France at the time of St. Louis contained 10 million out of a total 60 million people in Christendom. (R. Fossier, “Les campagnes au temps de Philippe Auguste: developpement demographique et transformations sociales dans le monde rural,” in La France de Philippe Auguste. Le Temps des mutations (Paris: 1982), 628. In Le Goff, Saint Louis, 33.) The royal capital of Paris contained 100,000 inhabitants (Le Goff, Saint Louis, 33).
499 The term “perfect Crusader” is Pernoud’s. See Pernoud, The Crusaders, 294.
500 Le Goff refers to the thirteenth century as the century of St. Louis. Le Goff, Saint Louis, xx.
501 Le Goff, Saint Louis, xxi.
502 Ibid., 74.
503 Joinville, Histoire de Saint Louis, 40–41, in Le Goff, Saint Louis, 6.
504 Le Goff, Saint Louis, 587.
505 Ibid., 205.
506 The Franciscans, especially the Poor Clares, have a special devotion to her. She is also one of the “incorruptibles,” or saints whose bodies have not decayed or decomposed since death.
507 Le Goff, Saint Louis, 204.
508 Ibid., 610.
509 Ibid., 630.
510 William of Saint-Pathus, Vie de Saint Louis, ed. Henri-François Delaborde (Paris: 1899), 123, in Le Goff, Saint Louis, 622.
511 Le Goff, Saint Louis, 625.
512 Previous Crusade historians numbered the two expeditions of Louis as the Seventh and Eighth Crusades but modern Crusade historians refer to them as the First and Second Crusades of St. Louis.
513 Tyerman, God’s War, 781.
514 Le Goff, Saint Louis, 126. According to Le Goff, fifteen of the twenty-eight royal investigators were mendicant friars: eight Dominicans and seven Franciscans. Le Goff, Saint Louis, 613.
515 Tyerman, God’s War, 782.
516 W.C. Jordan, Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 65–104, in Tyerman, God’s War, 777.
517 Louis Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont, Vie de Saint Louis (Société de l’Histoire de France: 1847–1851), 3:177–78, in Le Goff, Saint Louis, 132.
518 Le Goff, Saint Louis, 66.
519 Tyerman, God’s War, 784.
520 Ibid., 788.
521 Gabrieli, Arab Historians of the Crusades (New York: Routledge, 1969), 90, in Tyerman, God’s War, 792.
522 John France, Western Warfare, 109.
523 Le Goff, Saint Louis, 202.
524 Ibid., 225.
525 Tyerman, God’s War, 793.
526 Ibid., 795.
527 Ibid.
528 Ibid., 796.
529 William of Nangis, Gesta Ludovici IX, Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France, vol. 20, ed. C.F. Daunou and J. Naudet (Paris: 1840), 381, in Le Goff, Saint Louis, 616.
530 Le Goff, Saint Louis, 624.
531 William of Saint-Pathus, Vie de Saint Louis, 127–128, in Le Goff, Saint Louis, 624.
532 David O’Connell, Les Propos de Saint Louis (Paris, 1974), 163–172, in Le Goff, Saint Louis, 139.
533 Le Goff, Saint Louis, 143.
534 Grousset, The Epic of the Crusades, 258.
535 Ibid., 260.
536 Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, 248.
537 Tyerman, God’s War, 807.
538 Francesco Gabrieli, Arab Historians of the Crusades (New York: Routledge, 1969), 311, in Madden, The New Concise History of the Crusades, 182.
539 Tyerman, God’s War, 808, 809.
540 Vita in Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France, xx, 20, in Tyerman, God’s War, 810.
541 Tyerman, God’s War, 810.
542 Ibid., 812.
543 The hour of mercy is 3 p.m., the time when Jesus died on th
e Cross. For Louis’s death at that time see Vita in Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France, 20:23, in Le Goff, Saint Louis, 226. For Louis’s last words see William of St. Pathus, Vie de Saint Louis, ed. Delaborde (Paris: 1899), 153–155, in Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades—vol. III, The Kingdom of Acre and the later Crusades (London: The Folio Society, 1994), 244.
544 Tyerman, God’s War, 812.
545 It was not uncommon for women to journey on Crusade. The presence of women can be traced back to the First Crusade. Some were wives of noblemen and took the cross motivated by their faith as well as a desire not to be separated from their spouse. Like the men, most desired to receive the spiritual benefits promised for participation in the holy endeavor.
546 Kenneth M. Setton, A History of the Crusades, vol. II (Madison, WI: 1969), 517, in Carroll, The Glory of Christendom, 294.
547 Nicolle, Acre 1291, 52.
548 Ibid., 53.
549 Ibid.
550 Ibid.
551 Acre was on a thirteenth-century list of Islamic holy sites. Nicolle, Acre 1291, 8.
552 For Muslim numbers see Seward, The Monks of War, 87. For Christian numbers see Nicolle, Acre 1291, 39.
553 Tyerman, God’s War, 821.
554 Ibid., 818.
555 Ibid., 820.
556 Nicolle, Acre 1291, 53.
557 557. Ibid., 57.
558 Ibid., 65.
559 Ibid.
560 Ibid., 68.
561 Templar of Tyre in Nicolle, Acre 1291, 68.
562 Nicolle, Acre 1291, 76.
563 Ibid.
564 Ibid.
565 Grousset, The Epic of the Crusades, 265.
566 Templar of Tyre in Nicolle, Acre 1291, 77.
567 Grousset, The Epic of the Crusades, 265.
568 Nicolle, Acre 1291, 81.
569 Templar of Tyre in Nicolle, Acre 1291, 82.
570 The events in the Templar Tower were recorded by the Templar of Tyre in Pernoud, The Crusaders, 330–331.
571 Nicolle, Acre 1291, 84.
572 Tyerman, God’s War, 826.
573 Ibid., 825.
9
Defending Christendom
Mehmet will never lay down arms except in victory or total defeat. Every victory will be for him a stepping-stone to another, until, after subjecting all the princes of the West, he has destroyed the gospel of Christ and imposed the law of his false prophet upon the whole world.
Pope Pius II574
It’s an extraordinary thing how the very mention of the Turks is so horrifying and terrible to the Christians that it makes them lose not only their strength but also their wits.
Jérome Maurand575
Warning bells rang out from the church, and people rushed to their homes. Men took up arms to defend their families and fellow townspeople. The town of Otranto had fallen into the crosshairs of the mighty Ottoman Empire.
Sitting on the heel of Italy near the Adriatic Sea, Otranto provided a strategic base of operations for an invasion of Italy, and the ultimate destruction of Christendom. The Muslim invasion force was ruthless and unmatched in its savagery. Turkish warriors massacred more than half of the town’s residents, and martyred the archbishop, who was seized during Mass, taken outside the cathedral, and sawed in two.576
As an example to the rest of the townspeople and to all inhabitants of Italy, the Muslim commander, Pasha Ahmet, arranged to have 813 men put to death. Before the execution, they were exhorted to convert to Islam; a tailor named Antonio Primaldi replied that he was willing to die a thousand deaths for Christ.577 His brothers in Christ, moved by his faith, also agreed to remain steadfast.
The next morning, on the Vigil of the Assumption, the men were led to the hill overlooking the city. Pasha Ahmet ordered the executioner to strike the neck of Antonio Primaldi first. Upon his decapitation, Antonio’s body miraculously stood up and could not be moved. It remained standing throughout the executions. One executioner was so moved by the faith of the martyrs that he converted to Christ on the spot and then joined the ranks of the martyrs.578
The Church recognized the brave witness of these men when they were officially declared martyrs by Pope Benedict XVI in July 2006, and then canonized as saints by Pope Francis in May 2013.
The Rise and Advance of the Ottoman Turks
In the late thirteenth century, a Turkish emir known as Osman established a strong government bolstered by an efficient and ruthlessly effective military. After winning dominance over other Turkish tribes, Osman pushed westward, expanding his Ottoman Empire, and engaged the Byzantine Empire in the first of a long series of conflicts that would eventually culminate in the total destruction of the Byzantines. By the late fourteenth century the Ottomans were making incursions deep into imperial territory in the Balkan states. Military victories were the foundation of the Ottoman Empire, and the goal of its every ruler was expansion, conquest, and world domination. During his reign every Ottoman sultan was expected to bring at least one foreign state under Islamic rule.
The rise and advance of the Ottoman Turks necessitated an evolution in the Crusading movement. Previously, the movement had focused on wars to liberate ancient Christian territories from the forces of Islam. With the Turks, however, the Crusading movement focused on defensive wars to protect the European homeland, and to survive. The war against the Ottomans would be a long “war of self-defense waged by a European community that was both Christian and civilized, against an implacably aggressive and uncivilized Islamic power.”579
A New Weapon
A man called the “Blood-Drinker” for his cruelty became sultan of the Ottoman Empire in 1451 at the age of nineteen. Mehmet II was “deeply secretive and suspicious of others; self-reliant, haughty, distant from human affection, and intensely ambitious … astute, brave, and highly impulsive—capable of deep deception, tyrannical cruelty, and acts of sudden kindness … a personality of paradox and complexity.”580
Mehmet embarked on a policy of total domination and victory over the Byzantine Empire. He knew the key to destroying Byzantium was the conquest of Constantinople. He had begun his studies of the city and its defenses and started planning his conquest at the age of thirteen.581 Conquering Constantinople “would unite his empire, remove a potentially troublesome base for hostile troops and help define a universalist imperial ideology.”582 Intelligence reports arrived in Constantinople informing the Byzantines of Mehmet’s plans, so Emperor Constantine XI sent envoys to Mehmet to negotiate a treaty. Mehmet had them beheaded. War was imminent.
Mehmet knew that his army was superior to the Byzantine army in terms of numbers of men, quality of officers, and expertise in siege tactics; however, he had also studied and learned from past Ottoman failures at Constantinople. Those armies had failed because they could not find a way past the massive Theodosian defensive walls. But Mehmet had something in quantity and quality those previous Ottoman armies did not: cannon. He designed a siege that focused on destroying the walls using gunpowder, but he also knew that available cannons were not strong enough to destroy the walls themselves. He needed a bigger gun.
A year before the siege, he met a Hungarian engineer named Urban who was looking for work. He had recently offered his services to the Byzantine emperor who had no use (or funds) for his skills, so he went to the Ottomans.583 Mehmet ordered Urban to begin work on a super gun that would bring Constantinople to its knees.
It took Urban three months of hard work, but he produced the largest bronze cast cannon in the world. It was twenty-seven feet long with a barrel surrounded with eight inches of solid bronze, and measured thirty inches across the muzzle.584 The cannon fired a solid shot eight feet in circumference, weighing fifteen hundred pounds, a full mile.585 The cannon was so large it required sixty oxen and 200 men to move it and could only travel two and half miles a day.586 Firing the gun was so complex and labor-intensive that it could only be done seven times a day.587
Mehmet now had a weapon that would demolish the walls of
Constantinople.
The Attack
The Ottoman force left the capital of Erdine on Friday, March 23, 1453 and arrived outside Constantinople on Easter Sunday (April 1). In accordance with the rules of war at the time, the city was asked to surrender, and it refused.
The emperor, Constantine XI, was a fighter more than an administrator, and it was providential he “held the purple” during Constantinople’s most desperate hour. Born of a Serbian mother named Helena and a half-Italian father, Constantine was “capable and trustworthy, ‘a philanthropist and without malice,’ imbued with resoluteness, courage, and a deep patriotism.”588
Mehmet’s strategy was one of attrition, since he had soldiers to spare. He also gave orders to “batter the walls day and night with artillery fire and to launch unpredictable skirmishes to wear down the defenders and to make a major breach for a final assault.”589 The bombardment began in earnest and continued non-stop from April 12 through April 18. The sixty-nine guns in the Turkish artillery fired 120 shots a day.590 Urban’s super gun hammered the Theodosian walls and caused extensive damage, but it developed cracks and ruptured early in the siege, robbing Mehmet of his special weapon.
The Time Is Near
A month into the siege, the situation was desperate for the defenders. Food was scarce, supplies were dwindling, and the constant Turkish artillery barrage and assaults had taken their toll. Many soldiers left the wall to find food for their families, further weakening the defenses. A major council of war recommended Constantine leave the city for the Peloponnese, gather new troops, regroup, and strike the Turks from the rear. But Constantine refused to leave the city in its hour of desperation.591
As the siege approached its second month, both sides were eager for it to end. Mehmet sent a proposal of surrender to the city that stipulated an annual tribute payment of 100,000 bezants and abandonment of the city. Constantine rejected the offer.