God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Tyerman, Christopher

  In England, recruitment was interrupted by the civil war of 1215–17 to which, with ecclesiastical encouragement, some protagonists as well as observers applied the instruments and rhetoric of holy war.42 Following King John’s reconciliation with the papacy in 1213, his rule was supported by the presence of a succession of papal legates. Preaching the cross was in the hands of a team of academics, Walter, archdeacon of London, Philip of Oxford, a veteran of organizing the Fourth Crusade, John of Kent and, after 1214, William of London and Dean Leo of Wells. The crusade became an important political gesture with the king’s adoption of the cross in March 1215, a precedent followed, on John’s death, by his nine-year-old son and successor, Henry III, immediately after his coronation in October 1216. Both sides in the civil war were led by crucesignati, some of whom were offered commutation of their vows if they fought for the royalist cause while others may even have been induced to take the cross to fight for the king, an early and rather confused example of a crusade with an essentially secular political purpose. Despite attempts to the contrary, in England the crusade not only failed to achieve a political reconciliation, it may have temporarily exacerbated divisions as one side tried to appropriate a cause common to both. Only once the civil war had ended, when magnates from both sides left for the east, did the reconciling aspects of the Holy Land crusade emerge. Between 1218 and 1221, departing crusaders included rebels, such as the earls of Hereford and Winchester and the rebel leader Robert FitzWalter, and royalists such as the earl of Chester, who may, as John’s executor, have been fulfilling his late master’s crusade vow, and the loyalist captain Savaric of Mauléon. Savaric’s contacts with crusading illustrate the futility of judging crusaders’ motives and perceptions, still less the integrity of the institution itself. He fought against Simon of Montfort’s crusaders at Castelnaudary in 1211 and seems to have temporarily commuted his crusader vow in favour of defending the Angevin cause in England in 1216, before joining the Fifth Crusade in Egypt and, finally, accompanying Louis VIII’s crusade to Languedoc in 1226. A professional fighting man, Poitevin lord and royal servant, Savaric seemed attracted to paymasters and respectability. His actions reveal much about the cosmopolitan reach of the western European aristocracy but little of any inner spiritual life.43

  The English contingent was not negligible but without royal leadership it lacked cohesion in structure or timing of departure. Groups, based around lordship or regional affinities, reached Egypt on each biannual passage from western ports. The earl of Chester, briefly a strong voice in the crusade’s high command, left soon after the capture of Damietta in November 1219 after two years’ stay, while the earl of Winchester had arrived only shortly before. Some, such as Philip of Aubigny, only appeared in eastern waters after Damietta had been returned to the sultan in 1221, while the bishop of Winchester, Peter des Roches, the controversial former justiciar, only took the cross eleven days after the city had, unknown to him, fallen. Repeatedly during the Egyptian campaign, the English presence was noted.44 The earl of Arundel played a prominent role in acrimonious debates on strategy. It was later recorded that, after the capture of Damietta in 1219, to honour the English presence two converted mosques were dedicated to the national saints Edmund the Martyr and Thomas Becket. The new church of St Edmund was decorated with wall paintings of the martyr’s passion commissioned by an English knight, Richard of Argentan, who during the expedition made himself something of an expert on eastern customs and legends. Whatever their military impact, the English crusaders reignited a habit of involvement in eastern crusading that lasted for generations. Philip of Aubigny, royalist and tutor to the young Henry III, arrived off Damietta in September 1221 to find the Christian evacuation in full swing. His father, Ralph, had died in the Third Crusade. In 1228 Philip again took the cross and, with his nephew Oliver and a significant company of knights, embarked for Palestine in 1235. He died in Jerusalem (which had been restored by treaty in 1229) the following year and was buried outside the church of the Holy Sepulchre in view and under the feet of all who visited. Philip’s tomb slab, bearing his arms, name and inscription ‘May his soul rest in peace’, still survives. In the words of his contemporary, the St Alban’s monk Matthew Paris, it was a grave ‘he had long yearned for in life’.45

  This process of piecemeal departures, fragmented leadership and almost permanent recruitment stretched across Germany and Italy. From the time he took the cross in 1215 with papal encouragement, Frederick II, king of Sicily as well as Germany, became the putative commander of the crusade. His departure for the east was repeatedly predicted and constantly expected. From his southern Italian ports, Innocent III announced in 1215, the main fleets were supposed to depart. Frederick’s failure to fulfil the vow, which he repeated at his imperial coronation in 1220, deprived his subjects of a focus for engagement. However, given the nature of his kingdoms as well as the role the crusade played in resolving a whole series of local and national disputes, Frederick’s delay, while central to the expedition’s weak leadership, was not crucial to the response, except in the kingdom of Sicily. There, the main contribution came as a direct result of Frederick’s command. When it became obvious he would be unable to travel east in the immediate future, the king despatched Matthew Gentile count of Lesina to Egypt in the summer of 1220 with seventy knights and six galleys and another fleet a year later under Count Henry of Malta. However, these expeditions were sent as tokens of good faith, neither being substitutes for the major Sicilian force that would have accompanied Frederick himself. In his German lands, Frederick’s procrastination inhibited the active involvement of crucesignati among his political partisans. Only in the spring of 1221, after his coronation as emperor at Rome in November 1220, did he send Duke Louis of Bavaria, a crucesignatus since 1215, to represent him on the Egyptian campaign, which was then about to enter its disastrous final phase. Other Italian contingents timed their departures east according to local conditions; Lucca, Genoa and Rome in the summer and autumn of 1218, Bologna a year later, followed by Milan and Venice in spring 1220.46

  This lack of cohesion was reflected in the time spent in the east. The main campaigns, in the Holy Land 1217–18 and in Egypt 1218–21, lasted four years in total, yet the average length of time lay and clerical aristocrats stayed in the east was about a year, the precedent of Philip II, not Richard I, still less the veterans of the first two great eastern enterprises.47 Even the expedition of the only western crowned head to embark, King Andrew of Hungary, although oversubscribed when it assembled at Split in August of 1217, fizzled out after its leader left the Holy Land in January 1218, a few weeks after arriving. While such insouciant disregard for the wider interests of the enterprise may have been unusual and Andrew possibly an unwilling crusader, this lack of staying power was typical. Due directly to the fragmented nature of assembly and command, the transient fluidity of tours of service between 1217 and 1221 ensured that the best funded, most widely preached and professionally recruited crusade to date failed to convert numerical popularity into lasting achievement.

  This was far from apparent in the summer of 1217, the deadline for departure. Despite the pope’s unexpected death on 16 July 1216 at Perugia, where his corpse, stripped by thieves of its rich vestments, was seen by James of Vitry, the momentum of preparations scarcely slackened.48 A new pope, Honorious III, the aged papal financial expert Cencius Savelli, was quickly elected, commended by his experience, understanding of the fiscal relationships between the Curia and ecclesiastical provinces and his past association with Frederick II, whose tutor he had been. Arrangements for the crusade became his prime concern. Within a year, two great armies gathered at opposite ends of Christendom, in the Adriatic and the North Sea. In August 1217, the armies of King Andrew of Hungary and Duke Leopold VI of Austria assembled at Split in Dalmatia. A longstanding crucesignatus, Duke Leopold’s contingent included partisans of both sides in the recent German civil war. By contrast, King Andrew appears to have been more reluctant, forced by papal pressu
re to honour the crusade vow of his father, Bela III (d. 1196), his crusade less of a process of pacification than an exercise in expiation. Andrew had rebelled against his brother King Emeric (d. 1204), another crucesignatus, and was accompanied largely by his own supporters from Slavonia and Dalmatia. Their combined forces were substantial. While Leopold sailed for Acre almost immediately, taking only sixteen days to complete the passage, Andrew found difficulty securing adequate transport for his followers. His shipping contract with Venice, secured by the formal ceding of Zara to the city, provided for at least ten large ships, with an unspecified number of smaller vessels, suggesting an expected military complement of perhaps as many as 1,000 knights and 5,000 infantry. In the event, in ironic and diametric distinction with 1202, the number of troops exceeded the Venetians’ immediate capacity to carry them. Surplus local shipping may have been requisitioned by the Germans, who were not covered by Andrew’s agreement, or by a number of other groups who arrived at Split, including some from France. Entering Split on 23 August, Andrew was not able to reach Acre until late September. If, as is just possible, he had been expecting to find or have news of the impending arrival of the great northern fleet, he would have been disappointed. In a failure of coordination that came to typify the whole enterprise, the Germano-Hungarian crusaders found themselves an isolated vanguard of the larger forces massing rather slowly in the west.49

  In late May and early June 1217, flotillas from Frisia, the Netherlands and the Rhineland left their home ports to rendezvous, like their predecessors in 1147 and 1189, at Dartmouth. Led by William count of Holland and George count of Weid, and carrying their recruiting officer Oliver of Paderborn, the combined fleet may have comprised between 250 and 300 ships, including numerous cogs capable of shipping upwards of 500 people each, implying a force of many, perhaps tens of thousands.50 Their leaders appeared to regard their expedition as part of the greater design to be led, in due course, by Frederick II, but there was no indication of any direct imperial direction. During a brief stop at Dartmouth they again followed precedent by forming what amounted to a commune under which ‘new laws’ to secure peace within the army were agreed. Although at the same time they appointed ‘communiter’ the count of Weid as ‘lord of the army’, subsequent decisions and disagreements operated within a communal rather than command structure. New arrivals in the fleet were incorporated into this sworn commune, from those who met the main armada off Brittany later in June 1217 to those from Civitavecchia in Italy in March 1218 who joined the Frisian contingent, which had spent the previous winter there. While the commune may have provided the means of maintaining peace and discipline within the fleet, it failed to impose political unity. Reaching Lisbon in late July after a stormy and costly passage of the Bay of Biscay, the fleet split. The main part, under the counts of Weid and Holland, accepted the proposal of local bishops and commanders of the military orders to attack the troublesome Muslim garrison at al-Qasr (Alcazar do Sal). The Frisians under the abbot of Werde refused to join them, insisting that their duty was to press forward to the Holy Land and that, in any case, Innocent III had refused support for such a campaign at the Lateran Council. Leaving Lisbon on 28 July 1217, the eighty or so Frisian ships entered the Mediterranean and, hugging the northern shore, finally wintered at Civitavecchia, where they enjoyed papal protection. Meanwhile the counts, with possibly up to 160 ships, helped in the costly investment of al-Qasr, which fell on 21 October. As in 1147 and 1189, the effort of this act of vigorous fraternal charity seemed adequate service for some, who managed to obtain absolution from their crusader vows. The rest remained in Lisbon until March 1218 before sailing to Acre. In late April and May, the various surviving elements of the great fleet that had gathered at Dartmouth almost a year earlier arrived in the Holy Land. A year from the North Sea to Palestine repeated patterns established on the Second and Third Crusades. As with those earlier campaigns, this northern fleet found that, by accident or design, they had timed their arrival to coincide with the most significant action of the crusade.

  WAR IN THE EAST

  A decision to attack Egypt had been taken at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.51 Unlike in 1201–2, there was no need for secrecy, the new strategic orthodoxy being apparently well established and accepted. Preliminary operations in northern Palestine in late autumn and early winter of 1217 by the newly arrived Germans and Hungarians provided employment for restless western troops, badly needed food supplies for Acre and a measure of increased security for the Frankish enclave without provoking any serious counter-attack by al Mu ‘azzam of Damascus. From their camp south of Acre, the crusaders, careful to avoid a pitched battle with local Ayyubid forces, conducted a leisurely promenade across the river Jordan and a circuit of the Sea of Galilee, followed in December by two fruitless assaults on the Muslim fortress on Mt Tabor, Pope Innocent’s casus belli of 1213. A subsequent foray by a splinter group of 500 Hungarians into the Lebanese mountains ended in disaster. However, the success of the earlier foraging excursion was followed in the New Year by the crusaders’ refortification of two vital links on the road south, the Templar castle of Athlit or Château Pèlerin south of Haifa (now the site of an Israeli naval base) and Caesarea. Although this did not foreshadow an immediate march on Jerusalem, reestablishing these strongholds put pressure on Muslim strategists as well as protecting Acre. These manoeuvres may also have played a part in an alliance with Kay Kavus, the Seljuk sultan of Rum, who invaded northern Syria and attacked Aleppo in 1218. Given the westerners’ Egyptian plan, such Syrian diversions were extremely useful in stretching the resources and resolve of Sultan al-Adil’s family and allies who controlled Muslim Syria and Palestine in uneasy cooperation or competition.

  The sense of a carefully prepared strategy was reinforced in the early months of 1218. Even Andrew of Hungary’s precipitate departure from Acre with many of his Hungarian followers in January 1218 may have played an incidental role. Unusually, he travelled west overland, giving money to northern Syrian castles, arranging marriages for his sons with Armenian and Greek princesses as well as probably passing through Seljuk territory.52 There may well have been a subsidiary diplomatic purpose in this unusual itinerary to assist shoring up the crusaders’ distant northern flank. To allow Acre or Antioch to be attacked while the main armies fought in the Nile Delta would have made no sense. That the Egyptian attack was planned by this time cannot be doubted, as immediately the northern fleets arrived in late spring an assault was launched. When the fleets’ commanders assembled with the duke of Austria and the local lay, clerical and military order leadership, their support for the Egyptian campaign was, according to James of Vitry, who was there, unanimous. The only issue in the mind of the king of Jerusalem, John of Brienne, was whether the crusaders should sail for Alexandria or Damietta. Regarded by common consent in Outremer as ‘the key to Egypt’, the choice fell on Damietta.53 By the end of May, the crusaders had established a bridgehead on the left bank of the Nile opposite Damietta and began to probe the city’s formidable defences. For the next three and a half years, this narrow waterlogged region of flats, marsh, canals and rivers remained the focal point for the thousands who joined the crusade from the west, the longest static campaign in the history of the eastern crusades.

  Damietta, set among the silt, lagoons, sandbars, dunes and mud flats at the mouth of the main eastern estuary of the Nile, was, in Near Eastern terms, a relatively minor port, with a population of perhaps 60,000, smaller than Alexandria, much smaller than Cairo. However, because of its strategic importance, guarding one of the main routes of access to Cairo, it was well fortified with walls and protected by canals and river channels. The warfare around Damietta fell into four phases. After the initial landings in late May 1218 and the establishment of a camp opposite Damietta, strenuous assaults led to the taking of the so-called Tower of Chains, which stood in the Nile, midstream between the crusaders’ camp and the city, on 24 August 1218. A series of increasingly desperate efforts to secure a hold on
the right bank of the river, as well as some fruitless sallies against the city walls led, in February 1219, to the complete investment of the city when the new Sultan, al-Kamil, withdrew from his camp at al-Adilyah. During the summer of 1219, despite some heavy mauling, the crusaders held their positions. At this moment Francis of Assisi arrived in the crusader camp.54 After accurately predicting the crusaders’ failure to dislodge the Muslims from their camp at Fariskur, he was reluctantly given permission to cross through the lines on a hopeless mission to convert the sultan. Francis barely escaped with his life. The failure of Ayyubid relief, increasingly dire conditions within the city and consequently negligent defence led to the fall of the city in November 1219. The nearby port of Tinnis fell soon after. The third phase witnessed a long, curious twenty-one-month period of edgy diplomacy and phoney war, during which the leadership squabbled as to the best strategy to adopt; whether to accept Muslim peace terms, as preferred by King John of Jerusalem, or to press forward to capture Cairo, a policy supported by the increasingly assertive Cardinal Pelagius. These disagreements were conducted against a backcloth of regular crusader departures for which new arrivals failed to compensate. A growing impatience at inaction was exacerbated by the failure of Frederick II to honour his commitment to join the Egypt campaign. The final act saw a failed march on Cairo in August 1221 and the Christian evacuation of Damietta the following month. While a few crusaders remained to help defend Outremer and a trickle of new recruits continued to travel east, the surrender of Damietta marked the end of the central action of the crusade. The lesser expeditions of 1227 and of Frederick II in 1228 acted as codas for the Damietta enterprise as well as setting a pattern of continual small-scale western military assistance for Outremer that characterized the rest of the thirteenth century, with the exception of the French crusade of 1248–50.