The bulk of Louis’s funding, and the largest single resource for other crusaders, was money derived from or through the church. This came in two forms; private sources – vow redemptions, legacies and alms – collected by the clergy; and clerical taxation. The Council of Lyons in 1245 had encouraged crusade legacies, as had Odo of Châteauroux. Vow redemptions now operated as a central accompaniment to the preaching campaign. By 1247, redemptions were systematically being offered and collected by diocesan agents, usually friars.24 In Normandy in 1248, two groups of papal agents quarrelled over the right to collect the crusade redemptions.25 In the same year, Innocent IV expressed concerns lest the conditions for redemption were too lax and the rates accepted too low.26 The potential for peculation and fraud was evident. Early in the preaching campaign, a Franciscan in Frisia took advantage of feeble supervision to pass himself off as an authorized collector of redemptions and legacies which in fact went straight into his own pocket.27 Aware the system could degenerate into a vast racket, in 1247 Innocent IV imposed a form of audit. The process of scrutinizing redemptions appeared meticulous. A knight’s redemption, for instance, may have been around 200 l.t., a year’s wages.28 However, secular policy actually may have encouraged corners to be cut by preachers, collectors and the descroisieés alike. Louis, in seeking appropriate fighting men and support units, apparently left many behind when he embarked in August 1248. These presumably had little option but to redeem their vows for cash on the best, i.e. cheapest, terms available in order to enjoy the anticipated spiritual privileges.
While it is impossible to calculate how much was raised for Louis’s expedition by redemptions, legacies and alms, of clerical taxation there is little doubt. The Council of Lyons authorized a general clerical tax of a twentieth. The French clergy offered a tenth over five years. The distraction of the anti-Hohenstaufen crusade and the clear identification of the Holy Land venture with the French reduced international contributions, the English and German churches staying largely aloof. However, along the eastern frontiers of France, in Burgundy and Lorraine, the tax was levied, a sign of the growing assimilation of the regions beyond the Rhône and Meuse into French politics and culture. The combined proceeds from the clerical tenth, over five years, may have come to as much as 950,000 l.t.29 As in 1239–41, individual crusade commanders received subventions, notably the king’s brothers. They, and other property owners, also raised funds from their own lands. However, the bulk of crusade funds and clerical taxes probably found their way into the royal coffers. With the increased income for the king’s own demesne, this centralized system of financing the expedition gave Louis unprecedented control over his main followers.
The experience of John of Joinville was typical. Refusing to swear fealty to Louis in 1248, he embarked with his cousin in a ship they hired together at Marseilles with a company of twenty knights. John recorded that despite mortgaging most of his lands, by the time he reached Cyprus in the autumn of 1248, after paying for his passage, he had in hand only 240 l.t., or, at best, about enough for only a couple of knights’ annual expenses. His retinue became mutinous, forcing John to enter the king’s service, in return for which he received an immediate grant of 800 l.t.30 This pattern of debt rescued by royal aid was widespread, involving even substantial lords such as the counts of Flanders and Forez. Alphonse of Poitiers enjoyed substantial clerical grants and income from his vast estates (Auvergne alone contributing 7,500 l.t.). Yet he was forced to seek his brother’s financial help.31 The success of Louis’ financing of the operation found extraordinary testimony in his ability, even in the extremes of defeat, to find over 200,000 l.t. to pay his army’s ransom in 1250 and then still be able to finance his subsequent stay in the Holy Land, even though expenditure there reached over one million l.t. over 1250–53. Only in 1252–3 does it appear the money ran out, which may reflect the difficulties experienced in France after the death of the regent Blanche of Castile.32 Even with his improvement of royal finances and administration, it is hard to imagine that Louis’s solvency could have been achieved without the church’s money, a precedent that possessed wide and controversial future implications for clerical funding of the state.
Translating funds into crusading required similarly strenuous royal organization. The core of the expedition lay in the king’s fleet, based around the ships he hired, sixteen from Genoa and twenty from Marseilles. The contracts drawn up in 1246 specified delivery at Aigues Mortes, an unpromising little port with a small, shallow harbour in an obscure corner of the Rhône Delta.33 Although prone to silting and with an awkward channel to the Mediterranean, Aigues Mortes possessed one advantage. It had recently become part of the royal demesne. This allowed Louis to avoid negotiating with the patriciates of other, more obvious and better-equipped ports, some of which resented the growing royal power in the region. Other convenient ports were controlled by foreign powers, for example Montpellier by the king of Aragon. The ports of Apulia and Sicily were effectively closed by Frederick II’s excommunication. Nonetheless, the choice of Aigues Mortes showed Louis’s determination to preside directly over his crusade. It was not his best decision. Political expedience prevailed over practical efficiency. A new port, with sufficient access by land as well as sea, had to be built from scratch. It speaks for the energy and resolve of Louis’s government that the king was able to gather his army and navy there just three and an half years after deciding to go east.
Other problems concerned the nature and equipment of the fleet. Alongside the hired vessels, both Genoa and Marseilles agreed to supply additional shipping initially at their own expense which would later, once in the Levant, be available for the king’s hire. Some at least of the ships were horse-carriers, tarridae. But the fleet lacked landing craft, which had to be constructed once Louis had reached Cyprus in the winter of 1248–9. Although the contracts of 1246 contained details of each ship’s equipment, royal agents in 1248, as well as gathering food and wine, spent at least 5,926 l.t. on basic naval supplies, including canvas, rope, yard arms and rudders.34 There may also be a possibility that the shippers had driven an excessively hard bargain, knowing that, as at Venice in 1201–2, this was a very strong seller’s market. When returning from the Holy Land in 1254, Louis was told by his Genoese master mariners that his flagship, which had just run aground off Cyprus, was worth 4,000 l.t. when fully loaded with cargo. In 1246, Louis had paid up to 7,000 l.t. for the largest ship.35 However, in general Louis’s alliance with Genoa proved mutually highly beneficial. Crusade business was spread widely through the city. In return Genoese not only crewed ships and supplied significant military assistance in Egypt, but also provided important banking facilities for the king throughout his stay in the east.
The force that sailed with Louis from Aigues Mortes in late August 1248 may have been of comparable size with Richard I’s army when he left Sicily in April 1191, well over 10,000 strong. With Louis and separately went troops not directly in his pay or service. Not all followed the king to Aigues Mortes. The count of Toulouse, who died before he could depart, arranged a contract with shippers at Marseilles, as did John of Joinville and his cousin. Some vessels seem to have come a long way. The count of St Pol, another who died before setting out, apparently if improbably hired a ship from Inverness, while one of the transports for Raymond of Toulouse’s force had to come to Marseilles from the Atlantic coast via the Straits of Gibralter, a delay that kept the count in port for the winter 1248–9.36 Even the best-funded commanders, such as Alphonse of Poitiers, ran out of their own money and found raising an army more time-consuming than originally intended. Alphonse only sailed east in 1249. If the logistics of his followers ran less smoothly than his own, Louis also recognized the limits of what could be prepared in France. By the time he reached Cyprus, the designated muster point, his agents had spent two years stockpiling vast quantities of food. Joinville described the stacked barrels of wine as resembling great wooden barns while the heaps of wheat and barley looked like hills: ‘the rain h
ad made it sprout on the outside so all you could see was green grass’.37 Salt pork, another staple of western military diet consumed in great quantities, was either purchased in Cyprus or shipped with the army from France. By hiring, paying, buying or manufacturing, Louis appeared determined to leave as little as possible to fate or chance.
*
Crusading was never a matter of logistics alone. The personal and domestic were no less central than the public and material. Joinville, his memory gilded by sixty years’ nostalgia, left a vivid picture of the rituals of a propertied crusader’s departure.38 Joinville’s crusading pedigree was impeccable. His grandfather had died on the Third Crusade. Two uncles had joined the Fourth Crusade, one of them travelling to Palestine, where he was killed. His father, Simon, had fought in the Albigensian wars and in Egypt during the Fifth Crusade. To prepare for his departure in 1248, Joinville raised money through mortgaging most of his lands, possibly to bankers in Metz, and entered into a joint venture with his cousin to hire a ship at Marseilles to carry their combined retinue of twenty knights, which possibly implied a total force of over 100. Complying with the tradition of the crusade providing a context for justice, at Easter 1248, Joinville held an assembly of his fief-holders where, amidst an enthusiastic round of feasting, he settled all outstanding law suits and grievances held against him. The need to put affairs in order found repeated confirmation in the records of disputes that clogged the courts after every crusade, especially, Joinville admitted to his tenants, as it was quite likely the crusader would not return. Such general settlements went some way to ensure the continued integrity of the crusader’s lands. In Joinville’s case, his tenants and relatives at the same time probably recognized his recently born son as his heir. Western Europe was littered with examples of battered or murdered crusaders’ wives and deprived heirs. The jollifications and judgements at Joinville thus shared a common purpose.
After sending his luggage on ahead, Joinville received the scrip and staff of a pilgrim from the Cistercian abbot of Cheminon. So armed, and dressed as a penitent, barefoot, in only a shirt, Joinville toured local shrines to emphasize the religious character of his enterprise and to equip his soul as well as he had his soldiers. He recalled how, as he conducted these pilgrimages, ‘I never once let my eyes turn back towards Joinville, for fear my heart might be filled with longing at the thought of my lovely castle and the two children I had left behind’,39 one of them only a few weeks old. Reunited with his luggage at Auxonne on the Saoêne, Joinville travelled south by river, with his war-horses being led along the riverbank. Once at Marseilles, with men, horses and baggage stored on board, the ship weighed anchor and set sail with the whole ship’s company, led by priests, singing Veni Creator Spiritus as the vessel began its journey. Joinville, like many reluctant medieval mariners, was frightened of drowning and fearfully seasick on the three-week voyage to Cyprus.
Joinville’s experience, even if tidied by six decades of retelling, displayed the characteristic crusading mixture of pragmatism and ritual. Few understood the importance of this more than Louis IX himself. His carefully orchestrated departure displayed striking parallels with Joinville’s. He had invited his subjects to demand redress of grievances through his enquêteurs. As preparations neared completion, Louis stagemanaged his progress towards Aigues Mortes to resemble a religious procession as much as a royal progress. The climax of the ceremonies marking his departure from his capital saw him participate in April 1248 at the dedication of the new Sainte Chapelle in the royal palace on the Ile de la Cité in Paris. This had been built as a giant reliquary to house the relic of the Crown of Thorns which Louis had redeemed in 1239 from the Venetians, to whom it had been pawned by Baldwin II of Constantinople. With the Crown of Thorns were other major relics of the Passion acquired, at great expense, from the Latins in Constantinople, including a piece of the True Cross. Louis was signalling that France was now the heir of Israel, the protector of the holiest relics in Christendom, almost a second Jerusalem, a new Holy Land. The ‘Most Christian’ king of France (an honorific title dating from the twelfth century) was assuming the leadership of Christendom vacated by the excommunicated emperor. Before leaving Paris for the south in June, Louis received the insignia of a pilgrim and, following ancestral precedent, the oriflamme at St Denis. Louis was conducting his crusade as a penitent but also as a king of France; the two were inseparable in propaganda and policy. From St Denis, Louis, dressed as a penitent, walked to Notre Dame to hear mass before continuing to the abbey of St Antoine, still just like Joinville on his local pilgrimages, barefoot. On his slow journey south, Louis was careful to be seen in the garb of a pilgrim in a series of civic festivals and public appearances. After meeting Innocent IV at Lyons, he travelled towards the Mediterranean, dispensing justice as he went, the first French king to visit the region since his father in 1226. On 25 August, Louis sailed from Aigues Mortes, reaching Limassol in Cyprus on 17 September.40
THE ATTACK ON EGYPT 1249–50
Later Louis allegedly claimed he would have been happy to sail directly to Egypt.41 With hindsight this may have appeared an attractive option. In 1248 Sultan al-Salih Ayyub was out of the country, fully engaged in Syria trying to conquer Homs during another round of Ayyubid feuding. By June 1249, when the crusaders finally landed, he and his army were back home. There was little doubt that Egypt was the destination; otherwise there would have been no need to stockpile supplies in Cyprus. Long before Louis’s attack began, the sultan had strengthened Damietta, as if he knew where to expect the Christian assault, which, given the prevalence of espionage, he probably did. The delay in Cyprus from September 1248 to May 1249 devoured supplies, sapped morale and gave the Egyptians time to prepare their defences. However, Louis was not to know that Damietta, once again the chosen target, would fall such easy prey as it did. Wintering in Cyprus allowed Louis to wait for the stragglers, such as Alphonse of Poitiers who had yet to leave France, or the duke of Burgundy, who spent the winter in Sparta, the guest of William of Villehardouin, the Frankish ruler of that part of the Peloponnese. Contingents who had found harbour at Acre, Tripoli or Antioch were also given time to rejoin the main armada. Holding court at Nicosia, Louis managed to attract gifts and reinforcements from Christians of the eastern Mediterranean, including William of Villehardouin with a fleet of twenty-four ships, and large sections of the local Jerusalem-Cypriot baronage, led by John of Jaffa. Louis appears to have played on his status as king of the local Franks’ ancestral lands; the king of Cyprus declared he would take Louis ‘as his friend and lord’. Although prolonged by a characteristically messy and violent dispute between the Genoese and Pisans, Louis’s stay in Cyprus allowed him to consolidate his control over his followers by bailing out many of them as their private funds ran out, plan his Egyptian strategy and construct the necessary landing craft and subsidiary vessels required for warfare in the Nile Delta.42
While in Cyprus, Louis received direct intimations of how his providential understanding of his mission failed to grasp the realities of Eurasian politics. For many in eastern Europe and the Near East, the most significant and alarming recent development lay not in the ownership of a Judean hill town, however numinous, but in the advance of the Mongols on a front from Russia to Iraq.43 In the wake of the Mongol invasion of central Europe in 1241–2, the prospect of a crusade to the Holy Land that denuded Christendom of warriors astonished and alarmed Bela IV of Hungary, who lived in annual fear of a new attack. In the autumn of 1244, Bohemund V of Antioch-Tripoli had made a well-publicized appeal to Frederick II for help against a Mongol army menacing Syria. Innocent IV was well aware of the Mongol threat. In 1245, before the Council of Lyons had discussed the problem, the pope had sent at least three separate missions to the east with the dual purpose of contacting the various Mongol armies but at the same time building up a broad coalition of eastern Christian, even Muslim allies against them. While the response of many Orthodox and other eastern Christian rulers and communities appeared positive,
or desperate, the Dominican Andrew of Longjumeau made no headway with the Ayyubids, while the Franciscan John of Plano Carpini, who penetrated all the way to Mongolia to see a new khan, Guyuk, enthroned in 1246, returned with news of the khan’s outright rejection of anything other than Christian submission to the world-conquering Mongols.44 John’s accounts of the Mongol court and customs, while making him a minor celebrity, also conveyed the extent of Mongol power and future ambitions of seemingly limitless western conquest. Evidently, one of Friar John’s tasks had been to spy. The idea that Innocent IV and his envoys sought an alliance with the Mongols against the Muslims appears unlikely. The actions of his envoys suggested a policy of resistance and containment; their reports indicated that neither was liable to succeed.
Mongol disdain did not exclude Mongol diplomacy. In December 1248 at Nicosia, Louis received ambassadors from the Mongol general in Persia, Elijigidei.45 Ostensibly, the Mongol embassy sought Louis’s help in alleviating the plight of eastern Christians living under Frankish rule in Outremer. Under Mongol rule they enjoyed, it was alleged, freedom from the poll tax and forced labour. There were suggestions that Elijigidei was himself a Christian and that Khan Guyuk was sympathetic, a view that had been peddled only a few months earlier in a letter from Samarkand by an Armenian prince, Sempad, which Louis had seen on arrival at Cyprus. Some witnesses even remembered talk of Mongol help in recovering Jerusalem and the rest of Holy Land. After grilling Elijigidei’s ambassadors, Nestorian Christians from the Mosul region, Louis was sufficiently impressed to send an embassy in reply, led by the old Mongol hand, Andrew of Longjumeau, who had recently arrived in Cyprus. In retrospect, Louis’s involvement appears naive. He himself was said later to have regretted it.46 While some Mongols were converts to Christianity and the Olympian Mongol cultural superiority complex accommodated tolerance of other religions and the employment of their adherents, their policy was uncompromising. To them, Muslims and Christians came alike, potential subjects, not allies. Elijigidei’s initiative probably had more to do with countering the papal approaches to the Ayyubids and neutralizing Louis’s impact on Syrian politics where Mongol influence was already securing clients. A crusader attack on Egypt would nicely distract the Ayyubids, allowing further Mongol advances in the region. That Louis had been willing to go along with Elijigidei’s advances suggests a lack of strategic grasp, or one badly discoloured by excessively pious wishful thinking.
God's War: A New History of the Crusades Page 96
