Source

by James A. Michener

  Opposed to him, Cullinane reflected, stood Louis of France, the positive beau ideal of knighthood. Saintly in personal character, a devoted husband and father, he was a king without a known blemish, and after a life dedicated to good works he was joyously canonized by the church and became one of its most popular saints. If I were a Frenchman, Cullinane mused, I’d have to choose St. Louis as my ideal. In battle he was courageous, in negotiations honest, in thought pure, in government just. Whom else can you say that of? There’s no record of his ever having broken his word, and in settling disputes he listened to the other man’s point of view; and often said without sanctimoniousness that his one ideal in life was to bring into the affairs of men and nations the rule of Christian love. We have some of his speeches on the eve of battle—glowing challenges to his troops to live up to their knightly vows, for if they did he was confident that victory would be theirs. He was a tall, handsome man, thin and on the sickly side, but of a noble appearance when decked out in armor, and in each of his battles the chroniclers agree that he fought in the front line, leading his men with outstanding heroism. Looking at him now Cullinane thought, as he stared down at the city of Akko where King Louis had lived for nearly five years, he seems too perfect, but it’s hard to pick a flaw in him. No Pope had to excommunicate Louis to make him undertake a Crusade. As a young man he had come close to dying of malaria, and on his presumptive deathbed had sworn that if God saved him he would go crusading. God heard, and as soon as Louis was able to walk he assembled an enormous fleet and in 1248 sailed for Egypt and the Holy Land, to which he brought dignity, faith and a kind of living poetry. As Cullinane looked at the narrow streets he thought he could see the tall king, dressed in armor and flowing robes, moving through the shadows, for he was the man above all who epitomized the strange malady that sent saintly men from France and Germany to these shores.

  It was confusing, therefore, to remember that everything King Louis attempted in the Holy Land ended in disaster. He fumbled and bumbled his way into one catastrophe after another, needlessly sacrificing hundreds, thousands and scores of thousands of the finest soldiers of Europe. On one disgraceful afternoon he ineptly lost so large an army that the Egyptians simply had to chop off the heads of most of his knights because there was nothing else to do with them. Later, by gross error, he allowed himself to be captured, and his faltering Crusade had to dig up one million bezants to ransom him. He squandered armies the way a careless lieutenant loses platoons, and when he was through, the Holy Land was near prostration and recovery was impossible. Frantically seeking allies this saintly Christian stumbled into the hands of the Assassins, the most disreputable of Muslim factions, and he found himself financing the murder of his own people. He was the worst disaster ever to strike the Holy Land, yet his knights worshiped him as their ideal commander; and many, on the eve of battles in which his ineptitude would cost them their lives, penned letters home which still breathe the sanctity he inspired. The Muslims recognized him as a truly good man, but their generals must have prayed that fate would pit them against Louis rather than a real general. In fact, his string of disasters raised embarrassing questions throughout the east: if this greatest of God’s servants could lose so constantly when victory was assured, could it honestly be said that God was on the side of the Christians? You still wonder, Cullinane mused. King Louis at last had to leave St. Jean d’Acre, a dejected man who had failed to accomplish a single aim, but he marched out of the city with flags flying as if he had been a great victor—which in some respects he had been. Years later the crusading zeal again obsessed him and as an old man he convened another great army. Due to some incredible aberration he persuaded himself that he could free Jerusalem by invading not Acre, but Tunisia, and to those inhospitable shores he led one of the most pathetic Crusades ever put together in madness and a love of God. In blazing summer heat he took his reluctant warriors to Africa, where no battles were fought, for plague struck the ships, mercifully killing the saint, who died muttering, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem.” In a lifetime of effort he had never come close to rescuing that city. Most prodigally he had wasted lives and money. Yet he lived on in memory, and still does, as the ideal Crusader.

  Frederick the Second, on the other hand, should have been a calamity but instead succeeded in all he tried. With his knowledge of Muslim ways he coldly surveyed conditions in the Holy Land and quickly decided that it would be a waste of manpower to fight the Muslims, who at this point wanted crusading no more than he did. Therefore, in a series of shrewd negotiations, the German king arranged a truce in which the Christians got everything they had been fighting for: control of the three holy cities of Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth, with corridors leading to each, plus protection of Christian pilgrims, plus ten years of guaranteed peace. Few Crusaders—no matter how large their armies or their stacks of bezants—had ever gained more; so after only a few months in the Holy Land the green-eyed, humpbacked German went back to Europe, having demonstrated how a war between equals should be conducted.

  It’s the damnedest thing, Cullinane reflected, but Frederick’s peaceful negotiations so outraged the knights who had been fighting for a cause that they openly reviled him. “A true knight should not capture Jerusalem without a battle,” they raged. “We should have killed every Muslim in the city.” Others contended that they should have laid waste the countryside and taken many slaves. “God’s blood! We should have marched like men and had an honest clashing of swords.” So impassioned did the outcry become, that when the crook-backed king scuttled out of Acre, citizens lined the streets and threw pigs’ guts at him and cursed him. At one corner they even threw slops over him, for he had done what no leader is allowed to do: by negotiation he had achieved the national purpose, but in doing so had cheated the citizens of an exhilarating war, and for this he could not be forgiven.

  • • •

  In the early summer of 1290 the position of the Crusaders seemed to improve and a restrained optimism could be felt creeping across the countryside. Crops promised to be above average. Olive oil and wine were being produced in abundance. The Mamelukes were at rest and word reached Acre that the call of Pope Nicholas IV for a Crusade had been ignored throughout Europe, and men could reasonably hope that the present truce would not be disturbed.

  When Volkmar of Ma Coeur observed this optimism rising in his principality he dropped his plan for sending his son to Europe. After inspecting the walls of his town and their glacis he concluded, “If some kind of minor trouble does erupt, these outside walls will surely hold for five or six days.” Then he studied the moat and the massive wall which protected the castle itself, and he judged that they could hold for at least half a year, as they had done in the past; their surfaces were as smooth as ever and their outward-sloping bottom sections were as well prepared to ricochet boulders among the attackers. “When the next century comes we’ll be in this castle,” he whispered to himself.

  In early July he decided to visit St. Jean d’Acre to see if the leaders of the kingdom agreed with his hopeful assessment, and as he approached the famous city, its towers rising from the sea, his sensation of security increased, for in some mysterious way Acre communicated its strength to all who saw it. Disaster the city had known, but always it had recovered. After his crucial victory a hundred years ago at Hattin, Saladin had taken it; but four years later Richard the Lion Heart had thrown eighty thousand of his men to death against its gates and forced them open. Volkmar felt content that Acre was destined to remain in Crusader hands.

  It was a town on a peninsula, surrounded by the sea; its strength came from the sea, and its fortresses stood with their great stone feet in salt water. Across the peninsula ran a massive wall, and the heart of the city was protected by a second. It was the noblest town of the coast, and as Count Volkmar led his party to the iron gate leading beneath the towers his men shouted proudly, “Volkmar of Ma Coeur!” and the ponderous doors swung open to admit the dusty knights to the security of Acre.


  But as soon as he entered this stronghold of the Crusaders, Volkmar was hailed by a Venetian merchant, who cried, “Sire, sire! Don’t sell your olive oil this year to the Pisans. They’re robbers.” And he found himself drawn back into that frustrating whirlpool of conflicting interests and cross purposes that characterized Acre in the days of its death. “Oh, God,” he muttered as the angry cries of competing groups reached him. “This city can’t survive another week. We are indeed doomed.”

  For in those lovely days, as the Crusades ground to their mournful halt, Acre summarized the reasons why this movement was crumbling in disaster, for few cities in history had been so sorely divided as was Acre in 1290. Nominally it was ruled by the Franks of Henry II, King of Jerusalem, who controlled neither a kingdom nor Jerusalem, but actually it was a sorely divided Italian city, torn by the feuds of Guelph and Ghibelline. The heart of Acre was divided into three commercial quarters, each completely walled off from the other, with its own churches, town hall, magistrates and unique body of law. Each of these Italian areas centered upon its fonduk, a large, open-square warehouse from which the quarter took its name, and from which it maintained an open warfare, featuring soldiers and assassinations, against its competitors. The largest fonduk, running along the eastern waterfront and commanding the best industrial area, belonged to Venice and was subject only to laws promulgated in that Adriatic mother-city, for the functionaries of King Henry were not even allowed inside the walls. In the heart of Acre, well fortified on all sides, stood the fonduk of Genoa, whose residents obeyed only Genoese law. And at the southern tip of the city, enjoying a wind-swept spot along the sea, stood the autonomous fonduk of Pisa. The relationships between the quarters in this critical year of 1290 epitomized a basic weakness of the Crusades: differences in Europe determined behavior in the Holy Land, for in Italy, Genoa had declared war on Pisa, and Venice was maltreating Genoese merchants; so in Acre local Venetians had driven Genoese from the city, and Genoese ships were retaliating by capturing both Venetian and Pisan sailors and selling them to the Mamelukes as slaves. It was war, conducted solely for economic advantage, and if it ever became profitable for the factions to betray Acre to the Mamelukes they would do so without a twinge of conscience.

  That was the first division, but not the most important. The city was defended not by a traditional army but by monks who had entered one or another of the military orders—Templar, Hospitaller, Teutonic—and each of these stubborn units was also self-directing, self-paid and dedicated to warfare against the others. The monkish knights who led the orders were permitted to make their own treaties with the Mamelukes and to determine when and how they would do battle. To get all three to agree on any plan of defense was difficult if not hopeless. In Acre each had its own fortified section of the town, not included in the Italian quarters but equally distinct and self-governing; monks and merchants looked at each other with contempt, but since each was essential to the other, a grudging truce was maintained.

  The third division, while of lesser importance militarily, was probably of greatest significance where morale was concerned. There were thirty-eight churches in Acre: Latin churches loyal to Rome; Greek Orthodox obedient to Byzantium; Greek Catholics who supported Rome but retained their own rites; and the stubborn, colorful Monophysites who ignored both Rome and Constantinople in their adherence to the old belief that Christ had but one nature. These included the Copts of Africa, the Armenians, and above all the Jacobites of Syria, whose priests made their sign of the cross with one bold finger, proclaiming to the world the oneness of Christ. Among these groups flourished bitter hatreds, with the priests of one confession ignoring or hampering the presence of the others. There were four sets of churches, four rituals, four competing theologies. In any crisis the interests of the four groups were almost sure to be divergent and any hierarchy might try to throw its enemies into confusion or even into the arms of the waiting Mamelukes.

  And so the turreted town of Acre, so powerful when seen from a distance, was actually eleven separate communities bound together only by their fear of the encroaching enemy: the Venetian, Genoese and Pisan fonduks; the Templar, Hospitaller and Teutonic orders; the Roman, Byzantine, Greek and Monophysite churches, plus the fragile eleventh, the kingdom of Jerusalem, ruled by a handsome, ineffectual young king whose intimates had succeeded in hiding from the public the fact that he was an epileptic.

  In this confusion there was only one redeeming feature, the bells of Acre, and now as the time for evening prayers approached, their magic quality drifted across the walled city. First came the deep iron bell of the SS. Peter and Andrew, the Roman church near the waterfront, establishing a stately rhythm which was soon joined by the dancing bronze bell of the Coptic church and then by the tinkling chatter from the Syrian church of St. Mark of Antioch. One by one the other thirty-five bell towers sent forth their messages until the sea-girt peninsula was throbbing with sound. No city in the kingdom of Jerusalem—so great a name now signifying so little—had ever known an assembly of bells like those of Acre, and from his childhood Volkmar had loved them. Now as he looked aloft toward the azure sky from which they sounded, his hope revived for a moment and he listened to their noble symphony, the only thing their churches could agree upon, but then a Pisan merchant tugged at his sleeve and whispered, “Sire, don’t listen to the Venetians if they promise to buy your oil for more than we paid last year. Words, words. You know Venetians.”

  Disgusted with the interlocking feuds that surrounded him, and feeling the old sense of doom returning, Volkmar rode to the Venetian fonduk, whose entrance was marked by the statue of a pig placed there to insult the Muslims, and went to the caravanserai, a spacious courtyard whose bottom rooms contained fodder for camels and whose upper floor served as a kind of inn. He looked for Muzaffar, hoping that the old Arab might still be trading with the Venetians—and there the old man was. Volkmar grabbed his hands and led him to the church of SS. Peter and Andrew, which Volkmar preferred because these men had been fishermen of Galilee; and there the Crusader went to one of the Christian chapels to give thanks for his safe arrival, while Muzaffar went to a chapel reserved for Islam, where before a delicately carved screen with a mark indicating the direction of Mecca, he prostrated himself on the pavement to whisper his Muslim prayers.

  This was an arrangement guaranteed to startle hot-headed visitors from Europe—this business of sharing a consecrated Christian church with the enemy one had come to slay—but it was justified on the logical basis that outside the town walls stood a Muslim mosque in which a chapel containing a statue of the Virgin Mary was set aside for Christian use. There were other confusions for the stranger: most of the internal trading was in Arab hands, so that trusted Muslims like Muzaffar of Damascus were courted by the Italian merchants; and if one finally did meet a Catholic priest, he was apt to be a bearded Syrian with long oriental-looking garments, and it was this which helped bring about the final catastrophe in Acre.

  For the time being the town was delightful. The boy-king, Henry II, and his recent bride were in residence, and in the long afternoons the knights dressed in ancient costume and rode horses caparisoned with ribbons and flowers. Those in men’s clothes pretended that they were Lancelot or Tristram or Parsifal, while the others, dressed as women, were their ladies; and mock-jousts and tournaments were held, men against women, and there was much singing. The sight of real women, dressed handsomely and seated with the young queen, reminded Volkmar of the exciting days he had enjoyed in Acre when he was young and when all the families—the Volkmars were rich then and the Jewish rumor was forgotten—wondered which young girl he would select as his countess; and he had tried many. Those were the good days, before the Mamelukes took Saphet.