by Michael Haag
This may have been the black propaganda of the papacy at Rome, which was worried at being encircled by his domains and was also agitated by Frederick’s claim to supreme authority and his boast that he would revive the Roman Empire, to which the papacy countered by saying the Church had a higher authority in God – it was the old dispute between the Church and secular powers that had riven eleventh-century Europe at the time of the Investiture Controversy.
Frederick had been twenty-one when he was crowned Holy Roman emperor and vowed to take the cross, but he failed to appear in Egypt during the Fifth Crusade and time and again put off his departure for the East. But in 1225, when John of Brienne, the aged king of Jerusalem, came West seeking a husband for his fourteen-year-old daughter Yolanda, whom he had crowned queen at Acre, Frederick saw his opportunity. After marrying her at Brindisi, Frederick broke his promise that John of Brienne could continue as regent; instead, Frederick claimed the right as Yolanda’s husband to become king, a move that would confirm him, he imagined, as the supreme sovereign in the Christian world.
Now in 1228, at the age of thirty-six, Frederick finally set out for the Holy Land, but he fell ill en route and rested in Italy for a while before continuing his journey. Pope Gregory IX, who distrusted Frederick’s imperial intentions in Italy, excommunicated him at once, using the excuse that this was yet one more instance of the emperor’s failure to fulfil his crusading vow. Then, when Frederick eventually arrived at Acre in September, the pope again asserted his authority, excommunicating him again, this time for attempting to go crusading without having first obtained papal absolution for his earlier excommunication. Frederick was not impressed, but the barons and clergy in Outremer were, as were the Templars and the Hospitallers who owed their allegiance to the pope, only the Teutonic Knights braving papal wrath to support their fellow German.
But before Frederick had even left Sicily, he and al-Kamil had been in secret negotiations over the objects of this Sixth Crusade. Frederick wanted Jerusalem, if only because it would be useful in promoting himself as the supreme power in the West. Al-Kamil was prepared to oblige, provided Frederick helped him capture Damascus. But by the time Frederick arrived in Outremer, al-Kamil had changed his mind. Determined to gain Jerusalem, Frederick now made a feint towards Egypt, in November leading his army from Acre towards Jaffa. The Templars and Hospitallers followed a day behind, not wanting to seem part of a crusade led by an excommunicant, but when Frederick placed the expedition under the nominal authority of his generals, the orders abandoned their scruples altogether and joined up with the main force. The show of unity did not last long.
Frederick’s advance was enough to make al-Kamil fear that he would have to abandon his siege of Damascus, and he quickly agreed a deal with Frederick: a ten-year truce and the surrender of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron and Nablus to the Christians as well as Gaza. It was a sudden and sensational result and gave Frederick what he wanted, but it outraged the patriarch and the military orders. The walls of Jerusalem had been torn down during the Fifth Crusade; if it was going to be given to them then, the intention was that it should not be defensible, and that remained the idea now, for part of the agreement was that the city should remain unfortified, and its only connection to the coast should be a narrow corridor of land. Moreover, the orders were forbidden to make any improvements to their great castles of Marqab and Krak des Chevaliers of the Hospitallers and Tortosa and Chastel Blanc of the Templars. And then there was the galling provision – a necessary face-saver for al-Kamil – that the Temple Mount should remain under Muslim control and that the Templars were absolutely forbidden to return to their former headquarters at the Aqsa mosque.
On 29 March 1229 Frederick was crowned king of Jerusalem at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The patriarch had placed an interdict on the city, forbidding church ceremonies while Frederick was in Jerusalem, and so with no priests to crown him, and with the Templars and the Hospitallers keeping away, it was left to Frederick to place the crown of Jerusalem on his own head. Calling himself God’s Vicar on Earth, the title usually reserved for the pope, Frederick swore in the presence of the Teutonic Knights to defend the kingdom, the Church and his empire. He afterwards toured the city, and going to the Temple Mount he entered the Dome of the Rock through a wooden lattice door, put there, he was told, to keep the sparrows out. Venting his feelings about his papal enemies to whom he had restored the holy city, and using the vulgar Muslim term for Christians, Frederick pronounced, ‘God has now sent you the pigs’.18
Frederick stayed in Jerusalem for only two days. It was not a prepossessing place. The Franks had turned Jerusalem into a garden of Paradise, Saladin once said, but the city had fallen into disrepair and neglect since then, so that as al-Kamil dismissively described the once beautiful city, it amounted to nothing more than ‘some churches and some ruined houses’.19 According to Al-Qadi al-Fadil, the decay had already begun during Saladin’s lifetime, and al-Fadil feared the impression it would make on Christian pilgrims and how their indignation might lead to a new crusade.20
In any case, Frederick had achieved what he wanted and was eager to get back to Europe and the serious business of expanding his powers there. But he also feared that the Templars might make an attempt on his life while he was in the city. Chroniclers as far apart as Sicily, Damascus and England reported this story, which if nothing else reflected the intensity of ill-feeling and suspicion between the emperor and the pope, an enmity in which the Templars had become involved. When Frederick returned to Sicily, he seized the property of the military orders there, released their Muslim slaves without paying compensation and imprisoned the Templar brothers. Yet again the pope excommunicated him, and again Frederick ignored the pope. It was a foreboding of what could happen when the Templars stood in the way of the needs and ambitions of a secular prince.
21
The Mamelukes
IN 1239 THE TEN-YEAR TRUCE made between Frederick and al-Kamil ran out, but there was no immediate threat to Outremer. Al-Kamil had died the year before and Egypt was riven by factions, while the bitterness between the Cairo and Damascus branches of the Ayyubid family had increased. The Hospitallers favoured continuing close relations with Egypt, but the Templars were opposed. In violation of the truce, the Egyptians had failed to hand over Gaza, Hebron and Nablus, and when Templar emissaries went to Cairo in 1243 they were held as virtual prisoners for six months. The Templars saw this behaviour as a delaying tactic by the new Egyptian sultan, al-Salih Ayyub, giving him time to overcome Damascus and other Muslim rulers, and then to overwhelm Outremer.
Templar policy was to favour Damascus, and this showed some results: through negotiations adroitly handled by the Templars, Damascus and Cairo were lured to win the support of the Christian kingdom by outbidding one another until the Franks gained all the land west of the Jordan except Hebron and Nablus. They were also given a free hand to celebrate Christian services in every former church throughout Jerusalem, and to expel the Muslims from the Temple Mount and to reconvert to Christian use the Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock. In a remarkable diplomatic triumph for the Templars they had overturned almost all that Saladin had achieved.
Templar policy against Egypt continued to prevail. When war broke out again between Cairo and Damascus in the spring of 1244, the Templars persuaded the barons of Outremer to intervene on the side of the Damascene ruler Ismail. The alliance was sealed by the visit to Acre of al-Mansur Ibrahim, a Muslim prince of Homs, who on behalf of Ismail offered the Franks a share of Egypt when al-Salih Ayyub was defeated.
The continuing factionalism in Cairo meant that al-Salih could not rely on the regular army, but he had taken steps to counter that by purchasing Mamelukes in large numbers. These military slaves were at various times Nubians, Armenians and Iranians, but Turks were preferred for their fighting qualities.
They care only about raiding, hunting, horsemanship, skirmishing with rival chieftains, taking booty and invading other countries. Their efforts
are all directed towards these activities, and they devote all their energies to these occupations. In this way they have acquired a mastery of these skills, which for them take the place of craftsmanship and commerce and constitute their only pleasure, their glory and the subject of all their conversation. Thus they have become in warfare what the Greeks are in philosophy.1
Turks were also preferred for their physical beauty and not infrequently served as bedfellows for their owners.
In the event the Mamelukes would be hailed as a gift from God and the saviours of Islam. ‘It was God’s benevolence that he rescued the faith by reviving its dying breath and restoring the unity of the Muslims in the Egyptian realms, preserving the order and defending the walls of Islam’, wrote Ibn Khaldun, the fourteenth-century North African historian.
He did this by sending to the Muslims, from this Turkish nation and from among its great and numerous tribes, rulers to defend them and utterly loyal helpers, who were brought from the House of War to the House of Islam under the rule of slavery, which hides in itself a divine blessing. By means of slavery they learn glory and blessing and are exposed to divine providence; cured by slavery, they enter the Muslim religion with the firm resolve of true believers and yet with nomadic virtues unsullied by debased nature, unadulterated with the filth of pleasure, undefiled by the ways of civilised living, and with their ardour unbroken by the profusion of luxury. The slave merchants bring them to Egypt in batches, like sandgrouse to the watering places, and government buyers have them displayed for inspection and bid for them [. . .] Thus, one intake comes after another and generation follows generation, and Islam rejoices in the benefit which it gains through them, and the branches of the kingdom flourish with the freshness of youth.2
Al-Salih Ayyub, whose great uncle was Saladin, and who was himself a Turkified Kurd, relied mostly on Kipchak Turks from the steppes of southern Russia; bought, trained and converted to Islam, they became his powerful private army. Also al-Salih bought the help of the Khorezmian Turks, ferocious mercenaries then based in Edessa, who had been displaced from Transoxiana and parts of Iran and Afghanistan by the expansion of the Mongols. In June the Khorezmian horsemen, twelve thousand strong, swept southwards into Syria, but deterred by the formidable walls of Damascus they rode on into Galilee, captured Tiberias and on 11 July broke through the feeble defences of Jerusalem and brutally massacred everyone who could not retreat into the citadel. Six weeks later the defenders emerged, having been promised safe passage to the coast. The garrison together with the entire Christian population – six thousand men, women and children – left the city but were cut down by Khorezmian swords, only three hundred making it to Jaffa. For good measure the Khorezmians ransacked the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, tore up the bones of the kings of Jerusalem from their tombs, set the place alight and burned all the other churches of the city, pillaged its homes and shops, then left the smoking wreckage of Jerusalem to join al-Salih’s Mameluke army at Gaza.
With al-Salih’s army standing at Gaza, the Frankish forces which had been scattered throughout the cities and castles of Outremer gathered at Acre. Not since Hattin had such a considerable Christian army been put into the field, its numbers including over 300 knights from the Templars, at least another 300 from the Hospitallers, also some Teutonic Knights, and a further 600 secular knights, as well as a proportionate number of sergeants and foot soldiers. To these were added the yet more numerous, if more lightly armed, forces of their Damascene ally under the command of al-Mansur Ibrahim and a contingent of Bedouin cavalry.
On 17 October 1244 this Christian–Muslim army drew up before the smaller Egyptian army with its elite core of Mamelukes and the Khorezmians outside Gaza on a sandy plain at a place called La Forbie. The Franks and their allies attacked, but the Egyptians stood firm under the command of the Mameluke general Baybars, and while the Franks were pinned in place, the Khorezmians tore into the flank of al-Mansur Ibrahim’s forces. The Damascene forces turned and fled; the Franks fought on bravely, but after a few hours their entire army was destroyed. At least 5,000 Franks died in the battle, among them 260 to 300 Templars, while over 800 Christians were captured and sold into slavery in Egypt, including the Templar Grand Master, who was never seen again. Quite apart from the dreadful cost in human life, the loss represented a punishing financial blow to the defence of Outremer; the cost of maintaining 300 Templar knights for a year amounted to about a ninth of the annual income of the French monarchy. The catastrophe was comparable to Hattin, and when Damascus fell to al-Salih the following year, it looked as though time had run out for Outremer.
Relief to Outremer came in the form of the Seventh Crusade, led by King Louis IX of France, St Louis as he afterwards became thanks to his incessant warfare against enemies of the true faith, be they Muslims or Cathars – it was during Louis’ reign that the Cathars were finally beaten and incinerated at the stake. Now in the summer of 1249 he landed with his French army at the Delta port of Damietta with the familiar idea of overturning the Ayyubid regime in Cairo. Al-Salih Ayyub was suffering from cancer, and when he died in November his wife, Shagarat al-Durr, hid his corpse and kept morale alive by pretending to transmit the sultan’s orders to his army of Mameluke slave troops led by Baybars.
In February 1250 the French advanced through the Delta towards Cairo but owing to the impetuosity of the king’s brother, the count of Artois, suffered heavy losses at Mansoura. He had urged the crusader knights to charge into the town, where they were trapped within the narrow streets, the Templars alone losing 280 mounted knights, yet another massive blow so soon after La Forbie. A stalemate followed, and the crusaders were weakened by scurvy and plague. In April they retreated but were captured by the Mamelukes, along with King Louis himself, who was released only after a huge ransom was paid, to which the Templars, who as bankers to members of the crusade had a treasure ship offshore, refused to contribute.
That same year Shagarat al-Durr openly declared herself sultan, basing her claim to the succession on having borne al-Salih a son, although the child had predeceased the father. The Abbasid caliph refused to recognise her, so she married Aybek, one of her Mameluke slave warriors, and ruled through him instead, then murdered him in 1257, when she suspected him of turning his attentions to another woman. Purchased as a slave by al-Salih, then made one of his concubines, Shagarat al-Durr had eventually become his wife and then became the first and last female ruler of Egypt since Cleopatra. Owing to her courage and resourcefulness she had saved Egypt from the Seventh Crusade, but she proved to be the last of the Ayyubid line. Aybek’s supporters killed her and threw her naked body over the wall of the Citadel at Cairo to be devoured by the dogs. The Mamelukes then made themselves the masters of Egypt in the person of their first sultan, Qutuz.
The shock of the Mongol invasion of the Middle East established the Mamelukes as the accepted defenders of Islam against the infidels of East and West. In February 1258 the Mongols, led by Hulagu, a grandson of Genghis Khan, captured Baghdad, put the Abbasid caliph to death, then plundered and destroyed the city. In January 1260 they took Aleppo, and in March Damascus fell. The Mongols appeared to be unstoppable. The Franks sent urgent letters westwards pleading for help; ‘a horrible annihilation will swiftly be visited upon the world’, wrote Thomas Bérard, the Templar Grand Master, in a message carried by a brother of the order to London.3 But it was the Mamelukes who responded to the threat. That summer, when Mongol ambassadors arrived in Cairo demanding Egypt’s submission, they encountered an adversary more ferocious than themselves; Qutuz had them killed on the spot. And in September, after being allowed free passage through Christian lands, a Mameluke army under Qutuz inflicted a stunning defeat on the Mongols in the battle of Ain Jalut, south-east of Nazareth.
But among the jealous Mamelukes victory was no guarantee of success, and a month later Qutuz was murdered by a group of fellow Mamelukes, among them Baybars, al-Salih’s general at La Forbie, who then became sultan. Rejecting the dynastic principle, Mame
luke rulers would in future come to power more by the blood on their hands than by the blood in their veins, a practice fatalistically accepted by the religious leadership of the Muslim community. As Baybar’s panegyricist Ibn Abd al-Zahir put it, ‘Fortune made him king’4 – he ruled by the decree of fate.
Ruthless, brutal and energetic, Baybars now held Syria and Egypt under his control. Outremer was encircled, and the Franks were confronted by one of the most formidable fighting machines in the world. Moreover Baybars and his successors possessed overwhelming resources. ‘The Mameluke sultans were able to replenish their supplies of troops by the import of new Turkish slaves from the Caucasus and Central Asia along the trade routes through Anatolia. The Mameluke state could draw on far more troops than the Franks were ever able to do.’5 Moreover, when the time came for the systematic destruction of the Frankish castles, settlements and ports, the Mamelukes could marshal tens of thousands of auxiliary troops, Turkish, Kurdish and Mongol, to execute the task.
Just as systematically the Mamelukes devastated Christianity in the East and heterodox Islam too. Baybars forced the Alawites, mystical followers of Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed, to build mosques in their villages, but he could not force them to pray in them. Instead they used the buildings as stables for their cattle and their beasts of burden. But the persecution was relentless: ‘In pursuit of the “scorched earth” policy Mameluke sultans methodically ravaged Lebanon.’6 As for Christians, in 1263 Baybars announced his fanaticism by personally ordering that the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth should be razed to the ground. Baybars well understood the importance of the church, whose origins may have gone back before the time of Constantine and stood over a grotto where, in the view of the faithful, the Christian religion had its beginning and to which Christians had been making pilgrimages since at least the fourth century. His obliteration of the church was so total and systematic that the original ground plan can be discerned only through archaeological excavation; the Mamelukes forbade Christians to rebuild on the site.
