God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  In retelling the story of the Fourth Crusade, eyewitnesses grouped noble recruits in regional or lordship associations. The Picard knight Robert of Clari described bodies of crusaders from Picardy, Flanders, Burgundy, Champagne, the Ile de France, the Beauvaisis and the Chartrain, dividing them between the very rich and those he called ‘poor’, men of his own modest but knightly standing who demonstrated and shared in the ‘prouesse’ of the chivalric elite, if not always their pick of the booty.13 Villehardouin similarly listed recruits according to family and regional affinities, although he arranged them more hierarchically under the precedence of their local counts. When Baldwin of Flanders took the cross, his wife and brother, Henry, and a significant entourage of local nobles accompanied him. His example was soon followed by neighbouring lords in Artois and Picardy, such as Hugh IV count of St Pol and his nephew Count Peter of Amiens, one of whose vassals was Robert of Clari. In Flanders, as in Champagne and Blois-Chartres, the public commitment of the great regional overlord drew in wider aristocratic circles. In Burgundy, by contrast, with Duke Eudes III declining to participate, numbers of prominent lords recruited were fewer, and included Odo of Champlitte and his brother William, who were closely related to the Champagne comital family. However, recruitment was not confined to the networks of locality, kin and clientage in northern France. Although there was minimal enrolment in England, by 1202, crusaders from southern Burgundy and Forez were making their way east via Marseilles. Southern Germany and the Rhineland had been evangelized from early 1200 to some effect. The force from Basel that set out in 1202 included Abbot Martin of Pairis, who had led some of the local preaching. This alternative focus of support around local bishops or a monastic order, such as the Cistercians, was shown by the bishops of Autun in Burgundy, Soissons and Troyes in Champagne, the abbot of Loos in Flanders and, more eccentrically, the bishop of Halberstadt in Saxony, an unorthodox crusader.

  In 1202, Conrad of Krosigk, the new bishop of Halberstadt, was excommunicated by the papal legate, Cardinal Guy of Palestrina, for his fierce partisanship on behalf of Philip of Swabia, whose claims to the German throne were then being strongly opposed by Innocent III. Undaunted, Bishop Conrad took the cross on 7 April 1202, ‘judging it wiser to fall into the hands of God than into the hands of men’.14 After accompanying the main crusade force from Venice to Zara and Constantinople, he fulfilled his vows in the Holy Land late in 1204. Only then did he receive absolution for his excommunication, reluctantly confirmed by the pope in June 1205. For the whole of his crusade, Bishop Conrad was an excommunicate. His equivocal status did not seem to interfere with his contacts with ecclesiastical authorities nor inhibit his acquisition in the Greek capital of choice relics, silks, precious stones and other lustrous fabrics and tapestries. Conrad’s status and enthusiasm cut across legal niceties. He seems to have arranged for his memoirs to be recorded during his retirement in 1209. In them, acceptance by the mass of sceptical crusaders of the decision to divert the crusade to Constantinople in 1203 was ascribed to the crusaders being ‘swayed partly by prayers, partly by price’.15 Prayers and price: rather a neat description of the whole crusade.

  The piety of crusaders in the cause of the Holy Land should not be discounted. Documentary as well as chronicle evidence for the now traditional pious bequests and arrangement of affairs survives in some abundance. The testimony of events proves personal and collective commitment even to death. As crucesignati poets put it, the choice between the lady love and the cross is an unfair contest, ‘whether to go to God or to remain here’.16 Theobald’s enthusiasm seems to have played a significant part in setting the crusade in motion, even if his early death allowed him to be given the role of the lost leader unsullied by the compromises of subsequent events. However, the importance at least of the comital commanders, Theobald especially, was due as much to their wealth as to their status or conviction. When Hugh count of St Pol complained that, by July 1203, when the crusade army arrived outside Constantinople, he was heavily in debt, this reflected the expense of the campaign rather than his original financial position.17 Baldwin of Flanders and Theobald of Champagne were probably the richest nobles in France, their combined resources rivalling those of the king. Louis of Blois, also by the right of his wife count of Clermont, controlled another extensive and rich block of territory. The ability of these lords to subsidize their followers provided the necessary mixture of incentive and control.

  Crusading had developed into a joint enterprise operation. Great lords paid the expenses of their immediate entourage as well as any mercenaries. Beyond that, almost as an attribute of lordship, many leaders saw it necessary to subsidize their aristocratic vassals as well. Fleets, such as Richard I’s, could also be partly funded by a commander. The experience of twelfth-century crusading had suggested that central funding contributed to efficiency and order in planning and execution. Against this, the canonical assumption of payment by the individual crucesignatus remained strong, although, with Innocent III’s financial expedients, beginning to weaken. The Fourth Crusade occurred during a period of change from mainly self-financed expeditions to those predominantly underwritten by the leaders and the church that became a feature of the mid-thirteenth century and later. In this, crusading armies reflected patterns of military organization emerging across Europe. In 1199–1202, at the very least, to attract support, the crusade leadership, as the pope recognized, needed to be prepared openly to offer financial support to their followers. However, as they were to be forcibly reminded, the paymaster retained authority only for as long as he remained solvent. No cash, no control and, ultimately, no crusade. The experience of the Fourth Crusade stripped aside sentimental views of the material basis of crusading, its course almost wholly determined by finance and the constant quest for resources. From the outset, the crusade leaders understood this. Theobald of Champagne had calculated he needed 25,000 livres to pay his own retinue and proposed another 25,000 livres to retain other troops. Innocent III assumed the conscription of warriors for pay. On campaign at Constantinople, Hugh of St Pol reckoned knights as well as mounted sergeants and infantry required wages, if only to cover expenses.18 Baldwin of Flanders provided Gilles de Trasignies, later a hero of a vernacular verse romance and one of his sworn vassals (home lige), 500 livres to go with him on crusade. The count also hired experienced troops. Along with clothing, food and other provisions, Baldwin sent some of these in his own ships with a fleet that sailed from Flanders in the summer of 1202 under the command of the governor of Bruges and others. This was evidently a comital project. When they arrived at Marseilles at the end of the year they sought Baldwin’s orders as to where to go next.19 Without such investment by the leaders there would have been no crusade.

  Funds were sought across Europe. Count Baldwin was one of the richest men in Europe, his county the centre of a woollen cloth industry and trade that stretched from the British Isles to the Mediterranean. Even so, in 1202 he tried to raise money directly from his subjects, with the permission of their immediate overlords.20 Bishop Conrad of Halberstadt received 550 silver marks from the dean of Magdeburg.21 Apart from the apparently unsuccessful clerical tax of 1199, a voluntary lay tax of a fortieth was proposed in England and France in 1201. This may have aroused Philip II’s hostility, as did other ecclesiastical crusade ordinances.22 In England some money may have been raised and paid out, possibly including 1,000 marks King John of England gave his nephew Louis of Blois.23 Odo of Champlitte and Guy of Thourotte, poet and castellan of Coucy, may have received money collected by Fulk of Neuilly.24 Lesser crusaders resorted to traditional methods of fundraising. Hilduin of Villemoyenne in Champagne, in a series of land sales, received at least 280 livres, 200 of which was paid over by the monks of St Peter of Montier-le-Celle in pennies.25 A ‘fidelis’ of Baldwin of Flanders, Romond, mortgaged property for a six-year loan of 140 livres in Hainault money.26 The problem with all these measures, as on previous campaigns, lay in the inability of crucesignati to budget accurately for future
expenses. Hugh of St Pol was not the only one forced into debt by the expenses of the campaign. Finance may have determined the initial structure of the crusading armies but, again in common with earlier crusades, the need to find large sums of money during the expedition itself exerted a no less overwhelming influence on strategy, objectives and outcome.

  PREPARATIONS AND THE TREATY OF VENICE 1201

  Preaching, recruitment and planning were not sequential processes but ran in parallel. Until late 1199, there is little evidence of the last. However, Innocent’s appeal of August 1198 was not produced in a vacuum. In terms of international strategy, thanks to the German crusade, knowledge of events in the Holy Land was recent and vivid. The following year, the pope elicited a report on the situation in the Holy Land from Patriarch Aymar of Jerusalem.27 One of the striking features of the Fourth Crusade was the acute awareness of the high command of the politics of the Near East and the constant stream of communication between western planners and the Franks of Outremer. Given the Palestine truce of 1198, an expeditionary force to the Holy Land would not have been welcome. This seemed to be of some importance to the crusade high command. In their 1201 treaty with the Venetians to mount an attack on Egypt, they explicitly agreed the fleet would sail direct to Egypt, implying an avoidance of a landfall in mainland Outremer, which would compromise King Aimery’s diplomacy.28 This insistence on deferring to the 1198 truce may partly explain the leadership’s consistent and strident hostility to any who wished to leave the army to sail straight to Palestine. However, even if Egypt had been suggested to or by the pope in 1198–9, no evidence of it emerged, and circumstantially it seems unlikely. The propaganda talked exclusively of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. Even in 1201 the choice of Egypt as a destination was deliberately kept secret. In a sign of the fluidity rather than clarity of strategic planning, the Flemish fleet that sailed into the Mediterranean in the summer of 1202 had no exact idea where they were going to rendezvous with Count Baldwin, still less their ultimate destination. Despite distant orders to the contrary, left to themselves, in the spring of 1203 they proceeded to Acre.29 Countless others who embarked in 1201–2 did the same.

  From the start, Innocent cast his diplomatic net wide. He sought to engage the Byzantine emperor Alexius III in his plans more constructively than Henry VI had treated Alexius and his predecessor. Between 1198 and 1202, the pope and the Greek emperor exchanged at least eight embassies and twelve substantial letters.30 At first, Innocent conducted an intensive diplomatic effort to persuade Alexius to accept church union and give material assistance to the crusade, beginning by proposing Greek participation in the expedition in return for crusade indulgences. This offer presupposed Byzantine acceptance of papal authority that Innocent assumed as a sine qua non. Repeated references to the example of Manuel I stood as coded criticism of Greek failure to help the crusade. After some cautious encouragement from Alexius, in the winter of 1199–1200 the negotiations soured. Alexius called for the restoration of Cyprus and restated imperial independence from Rome. This prompted a harder line from the pope, who had also been securing alliances with neighbours of Byzantium: King Emeric of Hungary took the cross, and Kalojan of Bulgaria received coronation from a papal legate. However, Alexius III’s ultimate rejection of Innocent’s approaches failed to persuade the pope that Byzantium merited destruction or conquest. As late as the spring of 1203, with the crusade fleet already under sail for Byzantium, Innocent expressly forbade any attack on Constantinople.31

  If diplomacy and gathering intelligence had begun in 1198, no grand scheme could be devised until a crusade army and leadership were in place. At meetings at Soissons and Compiègne in the summer of 1201, the French crusade leaders discussed timing and objectives. The Compiègn meeting of the crusader counts and barons – a parlement according to Villehardouin, who was there32 – provided a foretaste of how the crusade was to be run, by committee and deliberative assembly. Although Theobald of Champagne had provided the initiative for the enterprise and was, in some senses, accepted as its prime mover, in the absence of a royal overlord, command was collegial. The crusaders at Compiègne held a lively debate, chiefly it seems on transport, but possibly also on the destination of the expedition. It was decided to send to Italy six ambassadors, drawn from the affinities of the three dominant figures, the counts of Flanders, Champagne and Blois, to choose and negotiate with a carrier for transport east. Given that Egypt appeared in the agreement reached by this delegation, it is possible that the Compiègne parlement proposed it. At least four of the ambassadors, who were given plenipotentiary powers to seal a treaty binding their principals, were veterans of the Third Crusade: Villehardouin himself and Milo of Brébant (Champagne); Conon of Béthune (Flanders); and John of Friaise (Blois). Egypt had been regarded as the key to the fate of the Holy Land since before the Third Crusade, but Richard I’s campaign had emphasized its importance, a theme of various accounts of the Palestine war of 1191–2 that were already beginning to circulate. It had now become something of an orthodoxy, a convenient one in view of the 1198 Palestine truce.

  Despite Innocent’s diplomacy in central Europe, the decision to travel east by sea was inevitable, even if the Nile Delta had not been the objective. It had been proved to be quicker, safer and more conducive to professional control, although requiring more initial capital outlay. Crusading fleets had been sailing from northern European waters to Syria for over a century. They had materially sustained the efforts of the Second Crusade as well as the siege of Acre in 1189–91. Baldwin of Flanders was preparing to send a squadron of his own, as had Richard I in 1190. However, as in 1190, embarkation of the whole expeditionary force from North Sea and Channel ports was precluded by the numbers of crusaders, their political affiliations and geographic locations, the length of the voyage around the Iberian peninsular and a general landlubbers’ fear of the sea and seasickness. The shortest passage with the most experienced carriers was necessary. This meant Italy.

  The options facing the ambassadors were limited. Genoa and Pisa had played central roles in the Third Crusade, but were still locked in fierce, hostile competition. Robert of Clari recorded the rumour that the Genoese refused help outright, perhaps in reaction to their possibly less than satisfactory experiences with Philip II. The Pisans apparently balked at the sheer size of the contract. This may have persuaded the ambassadors to try the greater shipbuilding capacity of Venice first. Innocent III had already despatched Cardinal Soffredo of St Praxedis to Venice in 1198 ‘to help the Holy Land’ (‘pro Terrae Sanctae subsidio’), although there is no evidence of Franco-papal collusion.33 Venice could claim a crusading tradition only little less consistent than her Ligurian and Tuscan rivals. For a century, pilgrims and crusaders had used Venice as a port of embarkation for the Holy Land and Venetians as carriers for their return journeys. For the Venetians, piety and profit were not mutually exclusive but, ideally, complementary. In a demonstration of enthusiasm for the cause of the Holy Land, a significant Venetian fleet had travelled to Palestine in the wake of the First Crusade in 1099–1101, assisting in the capture of Haifa but also acquiring the relic of St Nicholas of Myra. Their crusade of 1122–5 was designed to put pressure on the Byzantines to renew trading privileges.34 It included raids on Adriatic ports and plundering Greek islands for booty and relics. However, the Venetian fleet also fought an Egyptian fleet off southern Palestine and supplied vital assistance in the capture of Tyre in 1124. That this help came at the price of extensive commercial and legal rights in the conquered port did not contradict the material and human cost. Campaigning in the Levant represented a hugely risky venture, individually and civically. The potential rewards were great, but so too were the dangers of ruin. Ships engaged in war were unavailable for trade. The twelfth-century balance sheet of Venetian involvement with the crusades was not exclusively financial.

  Nonetheless, any bargain struck between Venice and the crusaders needed to be realistic for both sides. On it depended the fate of the whole enterprise
, a significance evidently not lost on the crusade planners at Compiègne or their representatives, still less the doge of Venice, Enrico Dandolo (1192–1205) and his advisors. The French ambassadors arrived in Venice in early February 1201. Weeks of careful negotiation ended in agreement in April. After a highly theatrical ceremony in St Marks’s designed to symbolize the corporate sanction and commitment of the Venetian popolo, a treaty was sworn, signed and sealed. Under it, the Venetians engaged to provide specialist transport vessels (uissiers) for 4,500 horses with 9,000 squires, as well as ships (nes) for 4,500 knights and 20,000 foot sergeants, with provisions for men – water, wine, wheat, flour, fruit, vegetables, etc. – and horses for a year. In return, the crusaders would pay four marks per horse and two per man, a total of 85,000 marks. The Venetians themselves would contribute their own fleet of fifty galleys on condition that each party shared equally all conquests, by land or sea, for the duration of the contract. The crusaders were to muster at Venice by 29 June 1202. Payments were to be made in four instalments: 15,000 marks on 1 August 1201; 10,000 on 1 November; 10,000 on 2 February 1202; the balance of 50,000 at the end of April 1202. To allow building of the fleet to begin immediately, the crusader ambassadors borrowed 5,000 marks, which they deposited with the doge. A secret understanding that the destination of the armada would be Egypt, specifically Cairo, ‘because from there the Turks could be more easily crushed than from any other part of their territory’, was omitted from the text of the treaty for public relations reasons.35 However, the nature of the fleet, including the specialist uissier landing craft and the large squadron of Venetian galleys, clearly indicated an intended attack on hostile beaches and fighting at sea or in rivers, the Nile Delta, not the friendly port of Acre or the hills of Judea.