“Yes,” Volkmar said with the sensation of doom settling upon him.
“Look down there,” the Mameluke said, pointing to the hillside village over which a cloud was passing while the rest of the world remained in sunlight. “We can see the shape and direction of the cloud, but the villagers can’t, because they’re in it. We can also see what the Pope ought to do, but he can’t, because he’s in it.” The cloud drifted off.
“I’m really worried,” the old trader broke in. “When the recent truce was arranged I thought: I’ll be trading with Acre for the rest of my days. But with Tripoli gone, with the Christians behaving so blindly …” He rose in agitation. “I’m afraid you Mamelukes will destroy Acre within the year.”
“We may have to,” the captain agreed, and as he spoke Muzaffar saw that, undetected, young Volkmar had approached the group and was listening.
Next morning Muzaffar and the two Volkmars rode north to Kafr Birim, where a settlement of Jews returned from Spain clustered about the ruins of that once-noble synagogue, and while the boy ran about gawking at the first group of Jews he had seen, his father spoke secretly with Muzaffar: “On your trip back to Damascus would you take my son with you? Get him to Constantinople and somehow to Germany?”
“You’re so concerned?” Muzaffar whispered.
“I am.”
“Then I’ll confess what I’ve told no one else. This is my last trip, old friend.”
“You think the Mamelukes will strike so soon?”
The Arab nodded, and the company started mournfully westward across the finest hills of Galilee, but at Starkenberg they found only ruins. That fair, poetic castle, perched on its crag like a solitary eagle, had once been the beau ideal of Crusader castles, but it had been overwhelmed by the Mamelukes, and now its jagged turrets and crumbling walls seemed like the broken teeth one finds in a weathering skull. Count Volkmar rode apart from the others to study the ruins, for here as a boy he had come to meet the Germans whose companionship his father enjoyed. Here he had learned to speak German and had kissed his first girl, and the lustful knights had followed the young couple as they tried to lose themselves in the surrounding hills, asking them when they returned, “Did you? Did you?” Impregnable Starkenberg—castle that could never be subdued—how had it fallen? Sheer cliffs protected it on three sides and on the fourth the Crusaders had chopped their own cliff, down through living rock, until the castle was protected on that flank, too. The German knights had seemed so powerful and their cisterns so deep—forty feet cut into the heart of rock and splashing with sweet water—how had such defenses crumbled? For some time the count spoke with the ghosts of those he had known, and then the horsemen headed south.
There had always been a sense of excitement as one rode home from Starkenberg, for the path was mountainous and the horses kept coming to one rise after another, and at each summit the rider was certain that this time he must see Ma Coeur, but always some new hill interceded until … “It’s there!” the boy cried, and on his swift Turkish horse he dashed down the trail, throwing sparks, and through his dust the knights with longing in their eyes saw the tall round towers of Ma Coeur.
… THE TELL
John Cullinane, brooding one day as he sat on the walls of Akko, trying to reconstruct the city as it must have been during Crusader days, thought: Everyone I know studies the wrong men when they want to understand that period. They take Richard the Lion Heart to represent the Christian side and Saladin to be the noble Muslim. They contrast the two and end with nothing. But I was lucky. When I was a boy doing my first reading about the Crusades I came upon the two men whose lives sum up the whole business, and I wish Plutarch had lived long enough to compare them. I’m certain he wouldn’t have used Richard and Saladin. He’d have used my friends.
Frederick the German, the Holy Roman Emperor, was a grandson of the noble Barbarossa, with whom he had nothing in common. After shrewdly gaining control of Sicily and much of Italy, he found himself without a wife and looked around for a likely match, hitting upon the idea of wedding the fourteen-year-old queen of the moribund kingdom of Jerusalem; and on their wedding night she found him seducing her cousin. Frederick, after a few days with his child-bride, packed her off to his harem in Sicily, where she had a baby and died, leaving him Jerusalem, if he could get it from the infidel. Was there ever a worse king than Frederick? And for a place that called itself the Holy Land? He was short, fat, bald and myopic. He was humpbacked and had watery green eyes. As a young man he had sworn to go crusading to recapture Jerusalem, but he was so cowardly that he deferred year after year until at last the Pope had to excommunicate him, which enraged him so much that in 1228 he finally made the long trip to Acre, where the local barons found to their astonishment that he respected Islam just about as much as he did Christianity. He brought with him a Muslim counselor to whom he spoke Arabic, and he preferred Muslim customs. He was also suspected of being in the pay of Jews, for when plotters came with the oft-circulated myth that “two Christian children were found this morning dead outside a synagogue,” he disappointed them by refusing to sanction a massacre. Said he, “If the children are dead, bury them.” As he had suspected, there were no dead children. Frederick was a difficult man to understand because he understood so much. Wherever he went his shrewd, inquiring mind sought information about history, architecture, medicine, philosophy and local custom. He was the most brilliant church historian of his day and a radical improviser in economics and government, and by force of personality he bulled through the founding of the University of Naples. He had a rude, German honesty but was one of the most sexually corrupt men of his time, and his knights said of him, “He studied Islam and learned all the wrong things.” Early in his stay at Acre he accepted as hostages two young sons of a local lord, waited till their father was gone, then strung them up to an iron cross so that they could not move and kept them there until their father honored his promises. His own son he drove to suicide. Because he was excommunicated his colleagues despised him, and no more pathetic man ever came crusading than this watery-eyed German. Nor did the Muslims respect him. In spite of his numerous gestures of friendship they described him in their chronicles as a red-faced, myopic little fellow who didn’t have the manhood to grow a beard and who would bring no more than a few bezants in a slave market. They also suspected him of being an atheist, since they had heard him proclaim that his study of history had pretty well convinced him that Moses, Jesus and Muhammad were impostors. This impiety also repelled his own people, so that when he inherited the kingdom of Jerusalem after his child-bride’s death, he could find neither churchman nor knight who would place the crown on his head; he went almost alone to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, had a servant put the crown upon the altar, from which he raised it with his own hands, announcing that he was crowning himself King of the Holy Land. He was an arrogant man, self-seeking, ugly in manner and in all conceivable aspects a travesty of the crusading spirit.
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 t
hat 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 a
reas 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.
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