Until the summer of 1227, Frederick’s preparations had gone smoothly. Recruiting hardly seemed designed to produce a mass response. The context for Frederick’s campaign was limited and precise, focused on the assertion of his royal and imperial rights in Outremer; fulfilling political obligations to the papacy as part of consolidating his power in Italy and Germany; and exploiting the diplomatic opportunity presented by al-Kamil of Egypt. Aware of the emperor’s plan to come east, in 1226 the sultan had sent Emir Fakhr al-Din to Frederick offering an alliance against his brother al-Mu ‘azzam emir of Damascus. Al-Mu ‘azzam was challenging for supremacy in the Ayyubid empire and had recently allied with Jelal al-Din, the ruler of the Khwarazmians, a Turkish federation from the steppes between the river Oxus and the Caspian Sea. Khwarazmian raiders could tip the balance of power in Syria decisively against al-Kamil.25 As a lure, the Egyptian sultan proposed the return of Jerusalem and other towns to the Christians, in effect reviving his offers to the crusaders in 1219–21. Frederick evidently got on well with Fakhr al-Din, apparently even knighting him; in 1249 the emir still bore the emperor’s arms on his banner.26 An imperial embassy travelled to Egypt in 1227 and went on to Damascus, where they were rebuffed by al-Mu ‘azzam. For the treaty with al-Kamil to be realized, Frederick needed to appear in Outremer with an army. However, as the abortive talks in Damascus suggested, Frederick probably wondered how far al-Kamil was in a position to deliver on his promises. The death of al-Mu ‘azzam in November 1227 reconfigured the political map. With al-Kamil and another brother, al-Ashraf, concentrating on trying to annexe Damascus, their need for Frederick ceased. According to Ibn Wasil, a well-informed Ayyubid official of the next generation, Frederick had become ‘an embarrassment’.27 Yet the sultan could not afford to fight him either, as this would deflect from his aim of subduing Damascus. Yet, by honouring his promise to Frederick, al-Kamil risked hardening opposition to his rule from the Damascenes, who regarded Palestine as part of their sphere of influence. When news of the 1229 treaty reached Damascus, it provided al-Kamil’s enemies with a fine propaganda weapon as the city went into public mourning, with preachers and poets fanning a sense of Islamic outrage.28 Thus Fredrick’s Egyptian diplomacy required a far more delicate use of military strength than had initially seemed in prospect.
This was not apparent in the summer of 1227, when the roads from Germany to Apulia were clogged with crusaders.29 The muster at Brindisi attracted many thousands, although the core comprised a force of over 1,000 knights in the emperor’s pay. The crowding and summer heat took their toll as plague broke out in the crusader camps. As victims mounted, some abandoned the journey. The main German fleet sailed in mid-August, probably including the English bishops. Frederick and the landgrave of Thuringia embarked with Sicilian levies on 8 September. Within days, probably from the effects of plague, the landgrave was dead and Frederick incapacitated, forcing him to put in at Otranto to recuperate. As a token of his continuing commitment, he despatched Hermann von Salza and the patriarch of Jerusalem to Syria with twenty galleys to join the main force, whose command he entrusted to Henry, the new duke of Limburg. What in other circumstances would have seemed an unfortunate but unavoidable setback became the pivot around which the crusade was transformed from an enterprise of Christian solidarity into one of confrontation and division. Despite being told the reasons for this further delay, on 29 September Pope Gregory IX excommunicated Frederick for having broken the terms of the Treaty of San Germano.30
The unreasonable vehemence of Gregory’s condemnation and his refusal to accept Frederick’s subsequent restrained defence suggested that the pope had been waiting for a chance to strike against the emperor. Unlike his predecessor, Honorius III, whom he had succeeded only in March 1227, Gregory was not by nature a conciliator. A nephew of Innocent III, an early patron of the friars, a canon lawyer and papal diplomat of wide and long experience, Gregory had come to mistrust Frederick personally and politically. Fearing an extension of Hohenstaufen power across all Italy and suspicious of Frederick’s imperious attitude to ecclesiastical independence within his kingdom, Gregory presumably hoped excommunication would force Frederick into a new submission or overt disobedience. Frederick thought Gregory’s stance a form of papal monarchic extremism that ran counter to and undermined the traditional just order of Christendom. Within a year, the remarkable spectacle arose of an excommunicated crusader sailing to restore Jerusalem, while the pope was organizing armies, one of which was led by the former king of Jerusalem, to secure the crusader’s political overthrow in the west.
Frederick now needed the crusade more than ever to wrong-foot the pope and reassert his credentials for honesty and Christian leadership. He announced his departure for May 1228, began to raise more troops in Germany and Italy, and imposed a tax of eight gold ounces per fief in the kingdom of Sicily. In April 1228, the imperial marshal Richard Filangieri sailed for Acre with 500 knights to add to the 800 knights already there under the duke of Limburg’s command. Frederick himself followed in June with perhaps seventy ships.31 If this figure is accurate, such a fleet could have carried a few thousand men. At Acre, Frederick’s army could only be accommodated in a camp outside the city, at Recordana, behind the coastal sand dunes to the south of the city. One unreliable but knowledgeable source put the number of infantry as high as 10,000.32 If not a mass expedition, Frederick had assembled a significant and cohesive fighting force sufficiently strong to persuade al-Kamil to negotiate and to preside over a substantial refortification programme. The duke of Limburg had begun a rebuilding programme a year earlier. When news of Frederick’s delay caused many immediately to return home, to keep an army intact, Duke Henry marched down the coast to refurbish the defences of Caesaerea and Jaffa. Some of his troops dreamt of an assault on Jerusalem itself. On hearing of the death of al-Mu ‘azzam in November 1227, a separate group of crusaders left in Acre annexed the Muslim-held half of Sidon. During the winter of 1227–8 German crusaders and Teutonic Knights cooperated in constructing a castle on one of the order’s estates at Montfort about twenty miles north-east of Acre in the Galileean hills. This soon became the Teutonic Knights’ headquarters.
The activities of Henry of Limburg and the English bishops in 1227–8 were consciously preliminary to Frederick’s arrival. After an increasingly venomous war of words and despite the risk of leaving his European lands under the threat of papal confiscation, Frederick sailed from Brindisi on 28 June 1228, arriving at Limassol on 21 July. During five stormy weeks in Cyprus, Frederick sought to assert imperial overlordship, attempting to call John of Ibelin to account for his management of the kingdom on behalf of the young King Henry I (1218–53) and install a Cypriot regency more amenable to imperial interests. Only Frederick’s higher purpose prevented an open breach. Both John of Ibelin and King Henry were in the emperor’s entourage when he sailed for Acre on 2 September 1228, arriving five days later. There, for the first time in Outremer, Frederick encountered the inconvenience of excommunication. The pope’s refusal to lift the ban forced the patriarch of Jerusalem into opposition and elicited a rather nervous response to Frederick’s leadership from the Templars and Hospitallers. Frederick had to chart a careful course around Frankish sensibilities, appointing separate nominal commanders of the army’s divisions to avoid pious crusaders having to be seen to obey an excommunicate. The English bishops showed no such qualms and, in practice, the papal ban scarcely restricted Frederick. Even the litigious Jerusalem barons did not try to reject his authority because of the excommunication; they had quite enough to attack him under their existing law code.
Frederick’s challenge was threefold: to insist on his rights as king of Jerusalem; to keep his army together; and to secure the projected treaty with al-Kamil. In the first his position had seriously been weakened by the death of his teenage wife Isabella II, in May 1228 after childbirth. Technically, Frederick could thereafter only wield power in the kingdom of Jerusalem as regent for his and Isabella’s infant son Conrad IV/II,
compromising his insistence on exercising regalian rights. More awkwardly, with the removal of al-Mu ‘azzam, al-Kamil had no need to honour his earlier promises over Jerusalem as he and al-Ashraf began military action against Damascus to remove their young nephew, al-Nasir Dawud. Al-Kamil had agreed with al-Ashraf to partition al-Nasir’s territories, keeping Transjordan and Palestine for himself. Any concessions to the Franks might appear superfluous if not risky. However, for Frederick a satisfactory diplomatic outcome was essential, and, with rumours of papal armies attacking his lands in Italy, a speedy one at that. In the footsteps, at times literally, of Richard I three and a half decades earlier, permanent dialogue backed by a show of force was the only option available. However, unlike Richard’s, Frederick’s army was palpably incapable of conquering inland Palestine, still less conducting an effective siege or defence of Jerusalem. The most pressure that Frederick could exert over the Egyptian sultan was as a nuisance in the path of the new Ayyubid settlement.
As soon as he landed Frederick reopened negotiations with al-Kamil. After an initial friendly but empty exchange of gifts, talks proceeded between Frederick and Fakhr al-Din. During these exchanges, Frederick showed himself in his element, skilfully exploiting his cosmopolitan culture to charm the Ayyubid negotiators and persuade them of his sincerity and good intentions. The widespread but largely false accusations by his opponents in the west of his sympathy for Islam and general irreligious scepticism finds a rather more approving parallel in Arabic observers, who liked to depict him as a man of reason and faith, tolerant if not sympathetic to Islam. Frederick enjoyed showing off, from elaborate royal ceremonial to swapping esoteric academic arguments. Accompanied in Palestine by his Arabic logic tutor, with whom he was apparently reading Aristotle, Frederick sent al-Kamil a list of detailed questions on philosophy, geometry and mathematics.33 This kind of intellectual showing off reflected Frederick’s Sicilian education, as did his refusal to engage in crude anti-Islamic posturing once Jerusalem had been restored. He was critical of decisions by the local Jerusalem qadi to suspend the call of the muezzin. While preventing Christian priests insulting Muslim sensibilities by carrying copies of the Bible into holy places in the Haram al-Sharif to which the treaty specified joint access, he allowed his Muslim bodyguards from Sicily to say their midday prayers there. While such behaviour left Arabic commentators favourably impressed, it allowed Latin critics to attack what they perceived as decadence or, worse, a lack of sincere faith. The Patriarch Gerold, uncomfortably placed on the spot but loyal to the papal ban, accused Frederick of enjoying the sultan’s gifts of not just mathematical solutions but ‘singing girls and jugglers, persons who were not only of ill repute but unworthy even to be mentioned by Christians’ (although naturally that did not stop the patriarch doing precisely that). There were stories that Frederick reciprocated by providing his Muslim guests with Christian dancing girls.34 Alleged miscegenation was almost guaranteed to summon the interest if not blood of watching monastic commentators in the west.
However cosy their social relations, Frederick and al-Kamil’s negotiators had no easy task. Al-Kamil felt he needed a settlement with Frederick to free his hands in Syria but was nervous at the price in prestige of a peaceful settlement or surrender, as his opponents would say. He could not be seen as giving too much too freely. On the other hand Frederick, although desperate for a treaty to restore his reputation in Christendom and allow him to return to defend his Italian territories, could not appear as a suppliant. Both had to be cautious but persistent. One member of Frederick’s forces, the poet Freidank, likened the process to watching two misers trying to divide evenly three gold pieces.35 In November 1228, with negotiations deadlocked, al-Kamil moved to southern Palestine. Frederick followed in a show of force, almost a copy of Richard I’s march of September 1191, leading a coalition of local barons, the military orders and the western crusaders down the coast road to Caesarea and Jaffa, ostensibly preparatory to an assault on Jerusalem itself. So as not to appear to be serving under an excommunicated commander, the Templars and Hospitallers followed the main body a day behind. However, on reaching Arsuf they realized the folly of such division and the armies united before reaching Jaffa unopposed. There, supplied by the sea, Frederick completed the refortifications and built up supplies. At the same time, news from the west of papally sponsored invasions of his Italian territories sharpened the emperor’s dilemma. Although he sent for more galleys from Sicily, a winter return passage was hardly feasible for the whole of the emperor’s force.
The stalemate was broken by al-Kamil’s agreement to most of Frederick’s terms. While insisting to his subjects that any territorial concessions could easily be reversed once the crusade army had departed and exaggerating the threat posed by Frederick’s continued stay, al-Kamil’s acceptance of a treaty recognized the priorities of Ayyubid policy.36 Damascus and Transjordan were more important than Judea; peaceful relations with the Frankish masters of the coastal entrepôts more crucial to the rulers of the hinterland than stubborn points of principle. A sign of successful diplomacy, each side was able to gloss the details of the treaty to suit their domestic needs, and critics on both sides could condemn the whole deal as unprincipled. Reminiscent of the 1192 agreement between Saladin and Richard I, the Treaty of Jaffa of 18 February 1229 gave both parties what they immediately wanted.37 The Ayyubids’ priorities concerned political strategy; the Christians’ what could be called religious strategy. Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth, the sites of the Crucifixion, Nativity and Annunication, were restored to Christian rule, with territorial corridors linking them to the Frankish-held coastal plain. The whole of Sidon was relinquished to the Franks, as was Toron in western Galilee, although with a stipulation that it should not be fortified, a restriction that, despite al-Kamil’s claim to the contrary, did not apply to Jerusalem or elsewhere. Prisoners of war, always a very sensitive issue, from the Fifth Crusade and since, were to be returned. A truce was established that was to last for ten years. Excluded or ignored by the terms were the castles of the Templars and Hospitallers and the lands of Bohemund IV of Antioch-Tripoli, perhaps in revenge for his refusal to swear fealty to Frederick in the summer of 1228. Within Jerusalem, the Temple Mount, al-Haram al-Sharif, was to remain under the jurisdiction of Islamic religious authorities, the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque to remain Muslim places of worship. Christians were allowed free access to these sites, just as Muslim pilgrims were to be protected in their devotions, with their own resident qadi. Otherwise, the Muslim population was evacuated, being replaced by Franks, who immediately began to refortify the city, even though the political capital effectively remained at Acre.
The Treaty of Jaffa appalled sections of the Muslim world, especially al-Kamil’s enemies in Damascus. Even writers sympathetic to al-Kamil acknowledged the distaste provoked by the surrender of Jerusalem, reversing, as one pointedly commented, ‘one of Saladin’s most notable achievements’.38 On the Christian side, the Templars and Hospitallers had few reasons to rejoice, especially as Frederick had so very obviously favoured the Teutonic Knights during his stay. Few were more vitriolic in their condemnation than Patriarch Gerold of Jerusalem, who lambasted Frederick for his temerity, disobedience, deceit, misbehaviour and pride.39 The restoration of Jerusalem posed an awkward problem for local churchmen and their allies in the baronage and military orders. Recovery of territory offered a return of property that, if opposed, could be in danger of being given to another. Alice of Armenia had to appeal to the High Court to prevent Toron remaining in the hands of the Teutonic Knights, to whom Frederick had given it.40 Most pilgrims relished the prospect of fulfilling their vows at the Holy Sepulchre despite not having shed any infidel blood. Denying access to the Holy Places or insisting on violence rather than diplomacy placed churchmen in a tricky situation, especially as some clerics, notably the bishops of Winchester and Exeter, supported Frederick, earning themselves papal censure. Quite quickly, self-interest won over the Templars and Hospitallers
to the benefits of reoccupying Jerusalem and the other restored areas. Christian opposition to the 1229 treaty had far more to do with its architect, Frederick, than its content which in essence repeated much of what Richard I had suggested in 1191–2.
Frederick could afford no such doubts. On 17 March, before an interdict could reach him from Patriarch Gerold in Acre, Frederick entered Jersualem. After visiting the Muslim shrines in the company of the local Islamic authorities, the following day he led his followers into the church of the Holy Sepulchre. There, in one of the most memorable pieces of political and religious theatre of thirteenth-century Christendom, Frederick took his crown from the high altar in the great twelfth-century Romanesque nave of the church and placed it on his own head. This was not a Napoleonic self-coronation as king of Jerusalem so much as an imperial crown-wearing, a demonstration of his unique authority, a reminder of his pre-eminent role in the order of the Christian society and, boldest of all, an assertion of his inheritance of the special favour once bestowed by God Himself on King David. One of the most skilled propagandists and self-promoters of his age, Frederick made this very clear in his letter to Henry III of England describing the scene:
we, as being a Catholic emperor… wore the crown, which Almighty God provided for us from the throne of His majesty, when of his especial grace, he exalted us on high among the princes of the world; so that whilst we have supported the honour of this high dignity, which belongs to us by right of sovereignty, it is more and more evident to all that the hand of the Lord hath done all this: and since His mercies are over all His works, let the worshippers of the orthodox faith henceforth know and relate it far and wide throughout the world, that He, who is blessed for ever, has visited and redeemed His people, and has raised up the horn of salvation for us in the house of His servant David.41
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