God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  This story reveals contact, exploitation and understanding by each side of the other’s interests and opportunities, as well as of the narrow terrain in contention. Residents of Outremer remained dependent and closely linked to their neighbours and opponents. Occasionally, fraternization turned sour. The assassin who attacked Edward of England during his stay at Acre in 1271–2 was a recent local convert from Islam retained by Edward as a spy.17 While Edward, not being a pullanus, needed an interpreter, many locals were more linguistically adept. The knowledge of Arabic by some Outremer nobles proved useful during the crusade on the Nile in 1250.18 The author of the fullest eyewitness account of the last days of Christian Acre, known misleadingly as ‘The Templar of Tyre’ (in fact probably a Cypriot by birth and certainly not a Templar) read and spoke Arabic, being closely involved in the network of espionage run by the Master of the Temple, William of Beaujeu (1273–91) linking the Frankish ports of Syria to the Mamluk court in Egypt.19

  THE THREAT TO OUTREMER

  By then, of course, prospects for the Franks were grim. Yet this had not always been the case. Neighbouring Muslim rulers were repeatedly willing to enter into agreements to avoid conflict, some of them including the return of territory lost in 1187. Truces with Jerusalem-Acre covered seventy of the ninety-nine years between Richard I’s Treaty of Jaffa in 1192 and the final loss of Acre in 1291. The later Ayyubids seemed to accept the Christian enclaves, their extinction desirable but not a determining political necessity. Only with the advent of the new rulers of Egypt, the Mamluks, in 1250 did a harder Muslim ideology emphasizing the commitment to jihad return to the rhetoric and politics of Outremer’s enemies.20 In thirteenth-century Syria, the aggressive, more militant Mamluks overrode the undemanding convivencia of the later Ayyubids in a manner reminiscent of, but more successful than, the Moroccan fundamentalist Almoravids and Almohads in Spain challenging Christian power by displacing the accommodating indigenous Muslim rulers of al-Andalus.

  Western awareness of events in the Holy Land existed on many levels. Innocent III had requested information from the patriarch of Jerusalem before the Fourth Crusade.21 In the century that followed, newsletters and diplomatic correspondence were circulated to courts and through the networks of the preaching mendicants and monastic orders. Such material found its way into the works of chroniclers such as Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris in the English abbey of St Alban’s. Matthew Paris also tapped returning crusaders and passing travellers for his information.22 Personal appeals for aid, for example from the bishop of Beirut in 1245, provided a focus for renewed commitment.23 Gregory X, in planning a new crusade in the 1270s, asked for memoranda on the whole range of crusade issues including the state of the Holy Land and the ways it could be defended.24 Beyond this elite circulation, repeated preaching disseminated news of the successive crises to a wider audience primed by the new crusading liturgies and the embrace of crusade taxation. The engagement of alert and critical public opinion was confirmed by the French popular movement known as the Shepherds’ Crusade of 1251.25

  The image of Outremer presented in the west was largely one of challenge, crisis and threat. The reality in the Holy Land was somewhat different. Exploiting Ayyubid divisions, through a mixture of local action, alert diplomacy, superior sea-power and western military assistance, by the early 1240s the Franks had re-established control of sorts over the coastal plain from Tortosa to Ascalon; Jerusalem and Bethlehem had been restored by treaty in 1229. After further agreements in 1240 and 1241, while Samaria, Hebron and Transjordan remained in Muslim hands, the coastal plain and Galilee were reabsorbed and a number of key inland fortresses reoccupied, such as Saphet and Beaufort, or refortified, such as Crac des Chevaliers.26 In the north Antioch remained apparently secure within a rump of a principality based on the lower Orontes valley, since 1219 united dynastically, if separate geographically, with Tripoli.

  One key to the Frankish revival had been a deliberate policy of tactical rebuilding of castles and the refortification of important coastal sites. This became a particular role for visiting crusades: in 1217–18 at Athlit and Caesarea; Caesarea, Sidon and Jaffa in 1227–9; Ascalon in 1240–41; Caesarea in 1250–54; Acre in 1271–2. Even the rebuilding of Saphet in 1240 was stimulated by western visitors and an unfulfilled promise of crusader money. Control of territory meant ownership of strongholds and lordship, not physical occupation and settlement of the countryside. In this respect, even more than in the twelfth century, the Franks were falling into line with successive Muslim overlords in Syria at least from the Seljuks onwards. This strategy only unravelled in the face of Sultan Baibars’s systematic destruction of Frankish strongholds in the 1260s. Before this, parts of the coastal plain, western and northern Galilee and many castles in the interior remained in Christian hands.27

  The collapse of the Ayyubid sultanate in Egypt in 1250, the eradication of the Ayyubids of Syria by the Mongols in 1260 and their subsequent defeat by the Mamluks and withdrawal from the region presented the Franks with a more tenacious and aggressive threat. The Mongol challenge to Mamluk control of Syria persisted for the next four decades, punctuated by border warfare and occasional invasions.28 The eradication of any potential allies of the Mongols became a Mamluk priority as it had not been for the Ayyubids. The Franks were thrown on to constant defence, the truces with the Mamluks increasingly desperate and disadvantageous. After the crusade of Louis IX of France (1248–54), western assistance comprised small crusades and the despatch of professional armed contingents. The French were especially wedded to this form of support. Louis IX had left the commander of his bodyguard, Geoffrey of Sergines, as commander of a garrison of 100 knights in 1254. In 1259, Geoffrey rose to become bailli, effectively regent. On his death in 1269, the French regiment was led by Oliver of Termes, the former Cathar sympathizer and veteran of Louis’s first crusade.29 It was later estimated that between 1254 and 1270 the French crown had spent an average of 4,000 livres tournois a year on men and subsidies for the Holy Land.30 Others contributed, notably Pope Gregory X, who had learnt of his election as pope when visiting Acre in the winter of 1271–2. One of his first acts was to send a contingent of 500 troops.31 Edward of England left a paid garrison at Acre in 1272; in 1278 he made over the defence of a tower he had built at Acre to an otherwise ephemeral Order of St Edward.32 The funds of the three great international military orders still flowed east, where, at Acre, each still maintained its headquarters. Such cross-Mediterranean assistance, puny as it was, provided a sketch for what could have been effective military and material support. However, no substantial military assistance was forthcoming. The anguished west largely consigned Outremer to its own fate.

  THE POLITICS OF OUTREMER

  The internal politics of the kingdom of Jerusalem in the thirteenth century presents the observer with an almost impenetrably dense pointillist picture of confusion, competition and conflict. The military vulnerability of mainland Outremer was compounded by perennial political and dynastic bickering. While hardly responsible for the collapse of Outremer, the enervating effect of the labyrinthine rivalries scarcely encouraged consistent planning or political direction. Occasionally, as in the late 1220s and 1230s, it prevented full advantage being taken of favourable opportunities to consolidate gains. Not all the dissension was home grown. To customary jealousies within a nobility jostling for preferment in a very small pool of patronage were added the attempted annexation of Jerusalem by Frederick II and the Hohenstaufen as well as the clashing interests of the Italian communities and the three great military orders. The absence of a significant rural dimension to Frankish settlement in the thirteenth century and the insistence in the regular truces of free passage and intercommunal tolerance limited inter-faith tensions in Jerusalem-Acre. However, in Antioch during the succession struggle 1201–19 Frankish supporters of Bohemund IV were pitted against the Frankish and Armenian adherents of his nephew Raymond Roupen, son of Bohemund IV’s elder brother, with the large Greek community in the middle,
by turns flattered and bullied for their favour.33

  No medieval monarchy could have flourished under the genetic handicaps and physical accidents of the house of Jerusalem. Queen Isabella I, daughter and sole surviving heir of King Amalric, married four times between 1183 and 1197, her last three husbands meeting extravagantly unlikely deaths. Conrad of Montferrat was assassinated walking home after dinner (1192). Henry of Champagne walked backwards out of a high window (1197). Aimery was said to have died of a surfeit of fish, white mullet (1205).34 Perhaps perplexed at the workings of providence, Isabella herself followed soon after, still only thirty-three, before other husbands could be put at risk. Her heir, Maria, was a teenager. Maria’s daughter, Isabella II, succeeded in 1212 as a tiny infant. She, in turn, after marrying Frederick II of Germany in 1225, died in 1228 aged sixteen, only a few days after giving birth to her successor, Conrad II of Jerusalem (IV of Germany). Although Conrad reached manhood (dying in 1254), he never visited his eastern kingdom. Nor did his son Conradin, who nominally succeeded aged two as Conrad III of Jerusalem, and was executed in 1268, aged only sixteen, by Charles of Anjou, his rival for the Sicilian throne.35 It says much for the reverence for the form of law, the respect for the blood of the old house of Jerusalem, or merely the convenient habit of an absentee lord that this extraordinary sequence was accepted, continuing a run of unsurpassed dynastic calamities reaching back to the 1170s. Yet the kingdom endured, supplied by its fleets, protected by the walls of its cities and castles and for more than six decades tolerated by neighbours who saw no easy way either to capture Acre or avoid it as an entrepôt for commerce.

  Following the death of Saladin, holding little more than Acre, Jaffa (lost 1197–1204) and a strip of the coastal plain, Henry of Champagne established a pattern that characterized the new kingdom: peaceful diplomacy with Muslim neighbours where possible; dependence for defence on the military orders; alliance with the Italian maritime communes; and a wary acknowledgement that, without a large royal landed fisc, his powers of independent action and patronage and hence authority over his barons were circumscribed. Henry’s main asset was Acre. After Henry’s death in 1197, the succession was passed to Aimery of Lusignan, brother of Guy and since 1194 ruler and, on receiving a crown from Henry VI of Germany in 1197, king of Cyprus.36 To gain the Jerusalem crown he married Henry’s widow, Isabella I. However, he failed to unite the crowns of Cyprus and Jerusalem.37 Although keen for an alliance, the prospect of a dual monarchy may have proved too much for the Jerusalem barons who had offered Aimery the crown. Only in 1269 was Isabella I’s and Henry of Champagne’s great-grandson, Hugh III of Cyprus, accepted as legitimate king of Jerusalem.

  Throughout Aimery’s reign the balance between Frankish – or rather Italian – naval power and Muslim land advantage encouraged compromise. The renewed six-year truce of 1204 restored Jaffa and Ramla to the kingdom, as well as confirming Frankish control of Sidon and improving pilgrim access to Nazareth in Galilee, a business convenience for both sides. The deaths in quick succession in 1205 of Aimery and Isabella I proved the wisdom of the diplomatic approach. The heiress, Maria of Montferrat, was under-age and unmarried. The regent of Jerusalem, Maria’s uncle, Isabella’s half-brother, John of Ibelin (1177–1236), so-called ‘Old Lord of Beirut’, son of Balian of Ibelin and Maria Comnena, could plan what to do when the 1204 treaty expired in 1210. His regency signalled the arrival of a baronial dynasty that came to dominate the politics of Cyprus and Jerusalem for the next century.38 The solution to the succession was unexpected. In a revival of twelfth-century tradition, a husband for Maria had been sought in the west, the choice falling on an energetic, dogged but strangely unsuccessful adventurer from a noble house in Champagne, John of Brienne. Armed with French royal approval, a large subsidy and a small army, he married Maria in 1210, becoming king of Jerusalem, a title he retained after his wife’s death in 1212 as regent for their daughter Isabella II.39 A new six-year treaty was agreed with al-Adil in 1211. On the expiry of the truce, the Fifth Crusade of 1217–21 led to the construction of fortifications at Athlit and Caesarea; the further fragmentation of the Ayyubid empire after the death of al-Adil in 1218; the collapse of John of Brienne’s Armenian ambitions; and another truce.40 More ominous, for John of Brienne personally and the kingdom as a whole, the crusade revealed the interest and influence of Frederick II.

  The beginning of the Hohenstaufen period in 1225 saw Isabella II married to Frederick II, who became king in her right, immediately depriving John of Brienne of his position. John was left without a kingdom (he later went to Greece in search of another one) and the kingdom without a king, as Isabella and her husband stayed in the west 1225–8. By the time Frederick finally arrived to claim his realm in 1228–9, Isabella was dead and he no longer king. As discussed in the next chapter, his rights as king were challenged at every step by elements of both church and state. Thereafter Frederick attempted to assert by proxy power as regent for his infant son Conrad IV/II. This provoked an extended and bitter civil war, known as the War of the Lombards (1228–43), largely conducted between Frederick’s representative, Richard Filangieri, and local barons led by John of Ibelin, the former regent, and, after his death in 1236, by his son Barisan, and then, from 1239, Philip of Montfort, lord of Toron and Tyre, a nephew of John and relative of the Albigensian crusader Simon of Montfort. The war involved Cyprus, where Frederick claimed overlordship, as well as the mainland.41 Filangieri, even when recognized as Frederick’s legal representative, was denied authority under the cloak of traditional Jerusalem law. Filangieri was based at Tyre and supported by the Teutonic Knights, Hospitallers, Bohemund V, the new prince of Tripoli-Antioch, the Pisans, and a few Cypriot and Jerusalemite enemies of the Ibelins. His only symbolic trump was his control of Frankish Jerusalem. Most of the rest of the mainland and Cypriot nobility, Acre, the Templars and the Genoese were behind the Ibelins, whose family lands included Beirut, Caesarea and Arsur. In 1231, a commune was established based on the church of St Andrew at Acre to give some corporate cohesion to opposition to Filangieri beyond the legalisms of the High Court; John of Ibelin was its mayor in 1232.42

  In May 1232, the imperialists defeated the Ibelins at Casal Imbert but, taking the fight to Cyprus, Filangieri was badly beaten at Agridi the following month; within a year, his supporters had been driven out of Cyprus altogether. The conflict spluttered on acrimoniously until 1242.43 The year before, Simon of Montfort, younger son of the Albigensian crusader, earl of Leicester, and later famous as the leader of the baronial rebellion against Henry III of England in 1258–65, had been offered the post of bailli of Acre by the barons and commune. Married to the sister-in-law of Frederick II, brother-in-law to the king of England and, through his cousin, Philip of Montfort, related to the Ibelins, Simon looked an ideal candidate to reconcile the warring parties. But nothing came of it.44 The Lombard War ended the following year, when Conrad IV/II’s majority was declared. Frederick’s claim to the regency was rejected by the High Court in favour of Alice of Cyprus, wife of Hugh I and daughter of Isabella I and Henry of Champagne. She promptly announced the rejection of any authority wielded by Conrad IV/II or his agents. Tyre was seized by the Ibelins and Filangieri arrested. For the next twenty-five years, Jerusalem was an established regency, rather than monarchy.

  The main winner from this disorder was the local baronage, especially the Ibelins, who remained the dominant dynastic affinity in both Jerusalem-Acre and Cyprus. Whatever rights of the crown persisted amidst the incessant round of legal and constitutional wrangling were further undermined by the loss to the royal demesne of Tyre. After its capture by the Ibelins in 1242 it quietly slipped into the firm grip of Philip of Montfort, a leader of the Ibelin faction until his assassination in 1270. At the same time, Philip’s cousin John of Ibelin received the exposed county of Jaffa, again with dubious legality. The regencies of Alice of Cyprus (1242–6) and Henry I of Cyprus (1246–53) were almost as ineffectual as the absent Conrad IV/II. From 1253 to 1258 the regency dev
olved on to rival members of the dominant Ibelin clan while, for selfish rather than prudent reasons, on the death of Conrad IV/II in 1254, the barons accepted as king his two-year-old son Conradin (Conrad III of Jerusalem). However, during his stay in the Holy Land in 1250–54, Louis IX of France exercised effective authority through a sort of parallel administration based on his royal household, military establishment and money. The appointment of Geoffrey of Sergines, commander of the regiment Louis left behind, as marshal, seneschal and, after 1259, lieutenant of the kingdom, finally regent (1261–3, 1264–7), exposed the serial inadequacy and failure of the indigenous politicians.45