God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  With reinforcements for both sides beginning to arrive, any element of phoney war began to dissipate amid preparations for offensive action. By March 1190, Conrad of Montferrat had recognized the dangers of his intransigence and agreed to be reconciled with King Guy in return for possession of Tyre and, when reconquered, Beirut and Sidon. Just before Easter (25 March) Conrad reinforced his faithful credentials by returning by sea from a refitting trip to Tyre with food, men and equipment, managing to break a Muslim naval blockade. The survivors of one captured Egyptian galley were dragged ashore to be humiliated, tortured and finally killed by a group of termagant Christian women.22 After Beaufort finally surrendered to Saladin on 2 April, the sultan began to concentrate his forces on what he hoped to be a decisive engagement at Acre. On 28 April, perhaps warned of the impending arrival of more of Saladin’s allies, the Christians launched a concerted assault on the walls of Acre with three great siege engines. While these wooden towers were slowly manoeuvred against the walls of the city, Saladin tried to disrupt operations by attacking the Christian camp. A week of fierce fighting ended on 5 May, when the siege towers were destroyed by Greek fire. With Acre’s walls secured and its garrison relieved by a supply flotilla, Saladin began a series of forays to test the strength of the Christian positions. If his intention had been to provoke the enemy to break out and try the luck of action on the open plain, the plan worked. On 25 July, what may have begun as a fast-moving attempt to turn the Muslim right flank soon became a general engagement between the two armies. Christian sources hinted at a failure of discipline, with the commanders and the patriarch of Jerusalem unable to dissuade a mass of disorganized, leaderless knights from seeking battle. If so, it proved a disastrous collapse of control and unity. The Christians were severely mauled, narrowly avoiding total rout. Western and Arabic sources agreed that over 4,000, and perhaps more than 5,000, Christians were killed.23 If, as alleged, unruly knights and impatient sergeants chafing under the privations of a beleaguered camp and their own leadership’s inaction had precipitated the battle, their folly, and their generals’ wisdom, was confirmed just three days after the battle. On 28 July a very large crusader fleet arrived offshore carrying many of the greatest lords of northern and eastern France under the command of the count of Champagne.

  Henry II, count of Champagne since 1181, was one of the wealthiest and best-connected nobles in western Europe, nephew to both Philip II of France and Richard I of England. He led what was effectively the advance guard of the French crusade being prepared by Philip II. Henry had taken the cross with King Philip, the count of Flanders and Henry II of England in January 1188. A later commentator in Outremer remembered that he brought with him to Acre some of the French king’s matériel and siege engines, possibly in prefabricated sections.24 He was accompanied by his uncles, Count Theobald of Blois, seneschal of France, and Count Stephen of Sancerre, with Count Robert of Clermont, constable of France, and a dozen other lords from northern France. In recognition of his status and the men and equipment he brought, Count Henry assumed effective command of the Christian army from Louis of Thuringia and James of Avesnes, a sign that western crusaders far outnumbered the Outremer Franks of King Guy and Conrad of Montferrat. Henry’s arrival raised Christian morale and allowed renewed bombardment of the walls of Acre using the newly arrived French trebuchets.

  However, the significance of Henry’s landfall was almost completely overshadowed by news from the north. Saladin had been kept informed of the march of the German army across Asia Minor in the spring of 1190. To meet this threat, the sultan despatched troops from Acre to Aleppo and northern Syria. This meant that, when faced with the crusader reinforcements under Henry of Champagne, Saladin felt compelled to withdraw most of his remaining army to a distant blockade of the Christian lines. But by that time he knew that his northern forces were facing a rather different threat to the one he had imagined for most of the previous year. Some time in late June or early July, Saladin learnt that, on 10 June, while crossing the river Saleph in Christian Cilicia, the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa had died suddenly.25 Although the scale of the subsequent disintegration of the German army only became apparent to the watchers at Acre in late July, the death of Frederick proved disastrous for the prospects of the whole enterprise.

  THE GERMAN CRUSADE 1189–90

  When Frederick I took the cross from the papal legate Henry of Albano at Mainz on 27 March 1188, he confirmed his position as the leading monarch of western Europe. As one contemporary close to the German crusade remarked, Frederick had undertaken ‘the management of Christendom’s affairs’.26 Not only did the ceremony recognize his efforts to translate imperial claims into political authority within Germany, it also represented the consolidation of a new European order based on alliance between empire and papacy after decades of hostility and conflict that had dogged Frederick’s domestic and international policies for most of his reign. Frederick had been negotiating with successive popes in the 1180s to reach a settled accommodation over ecclesiastical jurisdiction in Germany and political influence in Italy. With the exception of the prickly Milanese Urban III, the generally aged and cautious popes were willing, if not eager, to secure a lasting reconciliation with the emperor in order to shore up the papacy’s increasingly desperate financial situation and maintain some element of integrity in its political and territorial position in Italy, where Frederick’s son, Henry, had occupied the papal states in 1186. Henry’s marriage to Constance, aunt and possible heiress to the childless King William II of Sicily, further encouraged papal cooperation. The imperial–papal treaty of Strassburg in April 1189 sealed this successful diplomacy as well as providing a necessary context for Frederick’s departure east.

  However, Frederick’s commitment to the Holy Land transcended political convenience. He had played a leading role in the Second Crusade as Conrad III’s chief lieutenant. In the autumn of 1184, responding to the mission from Jerusalem of Patriarch Heraclius, he had promised Pope Lucius III that he would begin immediate preparations for an eastern expedition. Now in his late sixties, having overcome internal opponents, survived defeat by the Lombard cities in the 1170s and established his son, Henry, as his heir in Germany, Frederick could afford to give substance to his chancery’s claims to world authority and simultaneously fulfil personal and imperial ambition. Only the accident of events denied Frederick a central role in the Third Crusade. Although Frederick’s expedition followed the traditions of the past, these proved more robust than hindsight has allowed. In some ways, Frederick was refighting the Second Crusade or even the First; and until 10 June 1190 it looked as though he was doing it rather well.

  The influence of history permeated Frederick’s preparations and the management of the enterprise. He was even the recipient of a glossy new edition of Robert of Rheims’s popular and influential account of the First Crusade.27 Frederick’s plans embraced the idealism but avoided the errors of the past. His army was to be adequately funded by participants, well disciplined and very large. Some estimated 20,000 knights and 80,000 infantry mustered under Frederick’s command; others put the fighting force at nearer 85,000. Arnold of Lübeck a generation later claimed that a census taken during the crossing of the Balkans had revealed 50,000 knights and 100,000 infantry. Even if these figures exaggerate, on two occasions the host was recorded as having taken three days to pass a single point.28 The path of this mighty force was paved by careful diplomacy, with the rulers of central Europe, the Byzantine emperor, the Seljuk sultan of Rum and even Saladin. Although the naval option was apparently considered, the land route was more convenient for the bulk of his followers, in terms of access and the ease of supply for such a substantial force, which was, in any case, too large to be transported by sea in its entirety or at the same time. While feasible for the extended military entourages of Louis of Thuringia in 1189, Leopold of Austria in 1190–91, or even Philip II of France in 1190, Italian maritime city fleets did not have the capacity to accommodate Frederick’s h
ost. Nor, probably, did Frederick have the ready cash or the diplomatic clout to secure the necessary contracts. The land route was familiar from the First and Second Crusades, as well as diplomatic and commercial exchanges with Hungary. Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony, had followed the Danube and the Balkan route to Constantinople on his elaborate pilgrimage in 1172, before resorting to the sea for the voyage to Acre.29 By taking the overland route, Frederick could hope to maintain political control both of his army and of his destiny.

  As has been described, the ‘Christ’s court’ at Mainz in March 1188 provided a focus and a confirmation of plans and commitments already established. These were extended in the next few months. At Mainz, the muster had been fixed for 23 April 1189. A series of assemblies, courts and diets reaffirmed recruitment and established certain rules, such as the stipulation for crusaders to be able to fund themselves for a year. Just as in 1147, political conflicts were resolved under the aegis of the higher cause and imperial authority was lent added moral force. Henry the Lion, whose youthful ambitions had been temporarily deflected by Conrad III’s crusade, now was presented with a choice of acknowledging his rival’s lordship by joining Frederick on crusade at the emperor’s expense or of accepting imperial judgement by going into exile for three years. Henry chose the less humbling of these two unwelcome options by choosing exile at the court of his father-in-law, Henry II of England (although he was soon back). Ambassadors and letters were despatched along the German’s proposed route, to Bela III of Hungary, Stephen, the ruler of Serbia, and Emperor Isaac II Angelus of Byzantium. A Franconian knight, Godfrey of Wiesenbach, visited Sultan Kilij Arslan II of Rum (1155–92), grandson of the Seljuk sultan defeated by the First Crusade, with whom Frederick had been allied for some time. According to western sources, but not those Arabic writers closest to the Ayyubid sultan, the count of Birstein, Henry of Dietz, was sent to Saladin.30 News of Frederick’s preparations and the huge response to the call to arms seem to have intimidated those living in his projected path. At a diet in Nuremberg in December 1188, representatives from Hungary and the Balkans promised cooperation, as did a delegation sent by Kilij Arslan II. This constructive diplomacy with the Seljuks, and, if not apocryphal, the mission to Saladin, conformed to a consistent pattern evident in German planning and especially during the campaign itself. Throughout, Frederick kept his eyes fixed firmly on the goal of the Holy Land and Jerusalem. He saw himself as a knight of Christ bound to avenge the events of 1187, not an indiscriminate hammer of Islam or anybody else. The Byzantine ambassadors were less convinced, asking that another German embassy be sent to Constantinople to reassure Isaac II that neither he nor any western monarch harboured hostile intentions towards the Greek empire; more shades of 1147. Only when Frederick agreed to continue negotiations by sending the requested new delegation did the Byzantine representatives commit their government to helping the crusaders with guides, markets, security and transport for the crossing to Asia Minor. The German envoys would help coordinate this assistance. Even so, Greek fear was hardly assuaged. So large an army, whatever its motives, would have the material effect of an invasion.

  Despite Frederick’s energetic preparations, the need for haste was loudly proclaimed, not least by Henry of Albano, who lamented the backsliding of some crusaders and the in-fighting of others, which he likened to dogs returning to their own vomit.31 In fact, compared with the kings of England and France, Frederick moved with vigour and drive, at the head of a genuinely popular movement that redirected the lives and funds of nobles, their ministeriales and knights, lesser lords, higher and lower clergy, urban and rural elites and freemen from all parts of Germany. As a sympathetic contemporary noted, Frederick, ‘who had been the last king to make his vow of pilgrimage, hurried to be the first to discharge it’.32 The experience of 1147–8 prompted Frederick to maintain a very tight grip on his huge coalition. Twice on the march to Constantinople, he refined disciplinary ordinances for his disparate troops and non-combatants, establishing a system of justice and punishment sworn by the whole army and, later, dividing the host into self-regulating judicial units within this agreed communal system. In sharp contrast to Louis VII’s ordinances for his crusade army in 1147, Frederick’s were enforced. Loutish behaviour led to loss of hands; theft to execution. Such harsh discipline was coupled with a constant emphasis on the pious nature of the operation. At Vienna, Frederick purged the army of undesirable elements, including the prostitutes. The general effect on morale and military effectiveness stood in marked contrast to the shambles into which Conrad III’s army had descended in Asia Minor in the autumn of 1147. Frederick remembered. His army’s reputation for order and piety became notorious. Ibn Shaddad recorded a possibly genuine letter to Saladin by the Catholicos of the Armenian church in northern Syria, Gregory IV, written in 1190, which testifies at least to the nature and success of German propaganda if not their piety:

  They are of varied races and strange ways. Their cause is a great one and they are serious in their enterprise and of prodigious discipline, so much so that, if one of them commits a crime, the only penalty is to have his throat cut like a sheep. I was informed about one of their nobles, that he did wrong to a page of his and beat him beyond the limit. The priests gathered to give judgement and the case by general decision demanded that his throat be cut. Many petitioned the emperor on his behalf, but he paid no attention and had his throat cut. They have forbidden themselves pleasures even to the extent that, if they hear that anyone has allowed himself any pleasure, they treat him as an outcast and chastise him. All this because of grief for Jerusalem.33

  The image of a ‘Christian militia’ fostered by Frederick’s later panegyrists may not simply have been a construct of preachers, observers and historians but, as on the First Crusade, an integral part of the army’s own mechanisms of self-regulation and morale. Chroniclers’ comparisons with the Theban legion and the Maccabees may have seemed appropriate to the troops themselves as they struggled across Asia Minor in the spring of 1190. In letters home in the autumn of 1189, Frederick himself described his followers as ‘the army of the Holy Cross’ or ‘of the life-giving Cross’, in clear association with the central image of the recruiting campaign.34 This sense of identity and destiny underpinned the whole enterprise. The tone for the expedition had been set by the careful orchestration of Frederick’s adoption of the cross in March 1188 and his receiving the scrip and staff of a pilgrim at Hagenau in April 1189. However, throughout the German march, the maintenance of morale and a sense of purpose ran in tandem with Frederick’s careful planning and judicious use of force.

  The German contingents for the land route mustered, as arranged, at Regensburg on 23 April 1189. On 11 May, the army or, more realistically, armies, moved off down the Danube, the high command in boats, the rest on shore. Progress was rapid and peaceful, past Vienna to Bratislava (Pressburg), where disciplinary regulations were promulgated. By 4 June the Germans reached Esztergom (Gran) on the Hungarian frontier. They were greeted with lavish hospitality by King Bela III and his wife Margaret. Poised between Byzantium and the west, Hungary’s involvement in crusading reflected an eagerness to be associated with Latin Christendom, not least as a means of ensuring independence. Queen Margaret, daughter of Louis VII of France, Frederick’s companion in arms on the Second Crusade, embodied this policy. More immediately, the Hungarians supplied the crusaders with provisions, equipment and access to plentiful if expensive markets. After what appeared, in retrospect at least, a comfortable passage through Hungary, the crusaders reached the Byzantine border at Branitz (Brnjica) on 2 July.

  Relations with the Byzantine empire were complicated by Isaac II’s uneasy hold on his Balkan provinces, his need to secure his eastern frontier by a treaty with the Seljuk Turks, past tensions with the Germans in Italy, a tradition of hostility with Sicily, now allied with Frederick, and with the west more generally over Italian trading rights and Antioch.35 There persisted a fear, especially among the Constantinopolitan elites, that
all western armies held as an ulterior motive the conquest of the Greek empire. On the westerners’ side, the religious schism sharpened the feeling that the Greeks were poor Christians in their apparent indifference to the Holy Land. Isaac Angelus had acquired the throne in 1185 after a coup marked by mob sadism unusual even in Byzantium, the previous emperor Andronicus I Comnenus, himself a murdering usurper, being torn to pieces in the streets of the capital. Isaac balanced his political weakness with petulant diplomatic bluster. Having promised assistance to the Germans, in the summer of 1189 Isaac suddenly threw the German ambassadors he had asked for into prison. He continued to pursue amicable relations with Saladin, whom he kept informed of the German progress.36 Saladin’s envoys were in Constantinople when the German ambassadors arrived and allegedly received the horses of the unfortunate westerners when they were incarcerated. It is hard to divine the immediate advantage for the Greeks in the Ayyubid alliance, a feature of Byzantine foreign policy after 1182. Isaac may have hoped to counteract any agreement Frederick had reached with the Sicilians or the Seljuks or use it as a lever to engineer recognition of suzerainty over Antioch and other former Greek territories that the crusaders conquered. Yet such hopes were fatally undermined by Isaac’s lack of adequate military strength to exert pressure on the crusaders. More immediately damaging was his failure to prevent the German army from being attacked more or less the entire length of their journey from the Danube to the plains of Thrace. The net result of Isaac’s policy, if such a farrago of myopic expedience and folly can be so described, was to provoke Frederick into contemplating precisely what the Greek feared most, an attack on Constantinople.