* Motta is roughly: the revolutionary popular party.—Tr.
IV. The Crusade
Rendezvous in Brindisi, 1227—Plague—Frederick falls
ill and turns back—Hostility of Gregory IX—Excommunication—
Gregory’s entente with Lombards—Loyalty of Rome
to Frederick—Frederick’s first manifesto—
Frederick sails for East, June, 1228—Gregory
attacks Sicily—Frederick recovers Cyprus—Lands at
Acre—Treaty with al Kamil; ten-year truce—Saracen
chivalry—Treachery of Templars—Influence of East
on Frederick—Entry into Jerusalem, March 17, 1229,
and Self-Coronation, March 18—Jerusalem manifesto—
Last scenes in Palestine—Frederick lands at Brindisi,
June, 1229—Exeunt papal troops from Sicily—
Attitude of Gregory IX; truce—Peace of Ceperano
IV. The Crusade
It has at all times been the case in Western history that none might reach the heights of world dominion save the Conqueror of the East, the man who brought the Orient into his Empire. It seems almost a natural law that each World Ruler must renew his youth in the land of the rising sun, and return thence crowned with glory to build up his Western power. World monarchs have been few, but all have brought from the East the authority and the halo of a God. From the moment that the Hohenstaufens began to dream of world power the Crusade became their proudest ambition.
Soon after the first Franco-Norman Crusade of Godfrey, Bohemund and Tancred, St. Bernard called men to the second. The leaders of the Christian host were the Hohenstaufen Conrad III with the King of France. Twenty years later Barbarossa deliberately treated Emperor and Crusader as synonymous terms. His first step was the canonisation of Charlemagne, and shortly afterwards he commissioned a monk of Aix to write the Legenda Karoli Magni, in which much space was given to Charles, the Crusader, and his Pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Charlemagne’s wholly utilitarian campaign against the Moors of Spain had gradually been sublimated by legend into a Crusade. The legend was French in origin, but Barbarossa eagerly imported it, and with further Christian-imperial embellishments gave it currency in Germany. Many a dream of the time he thus fulfilled and many a dream he conjured up. The Western world was waiting, with bated breath, till an Emperor of the West should make his entry into Jerusalem. Ever new prophecies hinged on the great event: he who rides into Jerusalem as King will bring the long-awaited Reign of Peace before the Anti-Christ shall come. Toledo was the medieval capital of prophecy, and her astrologers announced that after plague and earthquake the days of Islam should be numbered; while Sibylline sayings ran: “An Emperor of the East shall in Jerusalem meet an Emperor of the West and the dry tree shall send forth green shoots when the Emperor of the West shall hang his shield upon it as the token of his law-giving.” Such prophetic utterances gained in strength and pervasiveness, and men looked towards the Emperors’ Crusades with hope. In spite of his age, Barbarossa had not hesitated to take on him the highest duty and proudest privilege of an Emperor when the Sultan Saladin conquered Jerusalem in 1187. At his departure men hailed the aged King as a “Second Moses” who was to lead the host of the chosen into the Promised Land: it was only granted him to see the land of promise from afar. His mighty son, Henry VI, was also destined not to enter the Royal City as Christian Emperor: no German Emperor yet had trodden the sacred soil.
Frederick II began where his ancestors left off. Not only did the Crusade represent his services to the Church, his duty as Roman Emperor—a new crown awaited him in Jerusalem. Moreover, the East was for him no magic land of wonders as it had been to his ancestors; it was the spiritual home of a mind well versed in oriental lore. Frederick made most extensive preparations for his imperial crusade. He had sent on in advance Count Thomas of Aquino to act as Regent of his Syrian kingdom. He had succeeded by great efforts in kindling once more crusading enthusiasm in the West, not by inspired preaching: his agents numbered no St. Bernard, no Hermann of Salza in their ranks. The Emperor’s promises, however, and the Emperor’s gold, lavishly bestowed on all who enlisted, were not without their power to lure men to the Holy Land. Frederick not only promised free transport to princes, knights and esquires, but made them generous cash advances. He had thus attracted a number of German princes, most important of them all Landgrave Lewis of Thuringia, the husband of St. Elizabeth, who arrived in Frederick’s Sicilian kingdom in August 1227 with an entire crusading army. Pilgrims of every German race crossed the Alps in numbers and travelled to Brindisi, the port of embarkation. The Frisians preferred the long sea route round Spain as did the English who, under several bishops, had responded to the call in thousands. By a generous issue of indulgences the Church had lent the necessary weight to Frederick’s recruiting campaign. Thus, enticed by the favourable offers, stream after stream of pilgrims poured ceaselessly into Brindisi. A few turned back en route, but they did not preceptibly reduce the masses who poured on. Many of the pilgrims had travelled by way of Rome. A swindler, disguised as Vicar of the Pope, took up his station at the gate of St. Peter offering to release the pilgrims from their vows, without detriment to their indulgences, for the sum of four silver marks. The Romans looked on this comedy with great amusement and did not interfere. It was weeks before the Pope, who was in Anagni, heard of the affair and hastily put the “vicar” out of action.
It would have been no bad thing if more pilgrims had bought themselves off in Rome. We cannot attempt even an approximate estimate of actual numbers, but gradually an appalling horde of crusaders had accumulated in the pilgrims’ camp at Brindisi—immensely more than the Emperor had calculated on or provided for. In spite of all preparations the ships were insufficient; the pilgrims ran out of food—which, in any case, had not been amongst the things Frederick had promised. The ship room, however, was destined to prove in the end more than sufficient—indeed ships remained empty behind—for in the middle of August a terrible plague broke out to which the Crusaders succumbed in shoals, while it was said that tens of thousands fled from the plague-camp and scattered over Italy. No one could be held responsible for this outbreak: many a German army before had perished in the same way in the August heat of southern Italy, and no modern observer needs to seek any further cause than the herding together of thousands of pilgrims, unaccustomed to the food, climate and conditions of the south. Many of the German nobles also died of the disease, and finally the Emperor himself caught it. In spite of illness he superintended the embarkation of the first two squadrons in person, and then just before the third division of the fleet was to start, which was to take him and Count Lewis of Thuringia, he betook himself with his friend to the small island of St. Andrea outside Brindisi harbour to try to recover by escaping the poisoned air. For the Landgrave, his chief assistant in the undertaking, had also been attacked. In spite of everything they both embarked on the 9th of September in the hopes that the sea air and the sea journey would cure them. Two days after Count Lewis died, and the Emperor took the advice of his doctors and the German Grand Master, in which the Patriarch Gerold of Jerusalem concurred, and landed again in Otranto, postponing his Crusade till after his complete recovery. He handed over the chief command to the Duke of Limburg and, promising to follow in the Spring with fresh contingents, he went off to the Baths of Pozzuoli to seek a cure. He immediately despatched two court judges to the Pope at Anagni to announce what had happened and to excuse his defection.
*
The Emperor’s relations with Pope Gregory IX during the few months of the new pontificate had been friendly. Frederick had, on several occasions, gone out of his way to gratify the Pope, and there existed at the moment no grounds for irritation. The Emperor had started on his Crusade according to agreement, and Gregory IX, while a Cardinal, had always seemed particularly favourable to the erstwhile protégé of the Church. Not so many years before he had even called the Hohenstaufen “the Church’s beloved sapling.”
The Pope’s benevolent attitude had, however, undergone a radical change. Perhaps his intimacy with St. Francis had sharpened his senses to detect potential foes, perhaps he had naturally a very delicate perception; be that as it may, Pope Gregory IX was the first fully to realise the immense danger latent in Frederick II which no one else yet suspected. Gregory was not a real statesman but an astute diplomat with an eye for all political cabals, and he suddenly detected—perhaps during the days of the Lombard Diet—the dawning of a new danger that immediately threatened the States of the Church. For the Patrimony blocked the Emperor’s passage from south to north, and if the Emperor attained sufficient power the papal territory would be in certain danger. The Pope, judging from Frederick’s early career, could cherish no hope of making the Emperor a docile tool of the Curia: he saw only one possible line of action, he must at all costs strive to keep him down. From the first moment of his power Pope Gregory’s one aim was the humiliation—if not the annihilation—of Frederick II.
Gregory IX was not the man to flinch from the struggle. Though an old man he was still strong and handsome; he was a priest who knew the art, and loved to practise it, of enhancing the impressiveness of his person by pomp and ceremony: tiara-crowned, a papal Imperator. The wild fire of his youth still burned in the aged man and flamed up, now in the ecstatic mysticism of a Francis of Assisi, now in passionate unbridled hate towards Frederick II. This natural bent, reinforced by the recognition of threatening danger, make him ere long the aggressor. For Frederick had nothing to gain and much to lose by a conflict with the Church. Pope Gregory felt himself by stern necessity compelled to compass the destruction of the Hohenstaufen. He seized the first opportunity of compelling the foe to fight.
His weapons and methods were for the most part unattractive: slight untruths, imputations, calumnies: they were often too transparent and produced an ugly impression, robbing the Pope’s procedure of every shadow of right, especially as no one but himself recognised the deeper necessity of the struggle. The obstinate old man, drunk with hate, pursued his end with singleness of aim to his last hour, indifferent to the fact that he was called a “heretic,” that he was forsaken by those nearest him, until he became—for all his petty dishonesties—not only a dangerous enemy but a great one.
Here was his first big opportunity, and Gregory launched forthwith a savage attack on Frederick. It will have been the 12th or 13th September that the Emperor decided to halt in Otranto; on the 18th the Pope nominated several new Lombard cardinals to strengthen his hand; ten days later he excommunicated Frederick. He had not received the imperial messengers, still less given them a hearing. The Pope was entirely within his rights in excommunicating Frederick. In accordance with the agreement of San Germano the Emperor was declared unreservedly under the ban if for any reason whatsoever he failed to keep the appointed date, August 1227. In consideration of his illness Gregory could, of course, have given him dispensation, but he was fully entitled to exercise the ban, and Frederick II always recognised the right. There was no dispute as to the facts: the Emperor had not started—the reason was irrelevant—he had therefore incurred the penalty. Frederick was the very man to understand that facts should weigh heavier with the Pope than reasons or motives. Gregory, however, looked at neither the one nor the other. He paid no heed to the fact of the Emperor’s illness; he would neither see nor hear the numerous witnesses; he immediately pronounced it to be counterfeit. The simple truth might have sufficed him. Frederick had failed to keep his engagement; Frederick was therefore excommunicate. The whole Christian world would have understood. People were tired of the recurring postponements of the imperial Crusade and none too greatly prejudiced in Frederick’s favour, and “public opinion” was, in those clearsighted days, a potent weapon, dear alike to Pope and Emperor.
Actual events, however, played a small part, and baseless accusations a large one, in the envenomed encyclicals of the Pope. Pope Honorius shared the blame of specifying the month of August as the date of starting. He and the Emperor were calculating how to secure the whole autumn and winter for the Syrian campaign, and they gave too little thought to the dangers of the late summer heat in Southern Italy. The choice of Brindisi as starting point was a perfectly natural one. It was traditionally a favourite port for the Orient, and habitually used by the Venetians before leaving the Adriatic for the Mediterranean. Ignoring these things Gregory IX represented matters to the world as if Frederick’s mismanagement of his Sicilian kingdom—the papal fief—had been so gross that he was driven to the choice of the most unhealthy of all Sicilian harbours; further, that he deliberately chose the most unhealthy month of the year for setting out; further, that he intentionally supplied too few ships and intentionally detained the pilgrims, and was therefore the guilty cause of the Great Death. In later years Gregory went even further and accused Frederick not only of intentionally slaying the pilgrims by the plague, but of having poisoned Count Lewis of Thuringia. On this theory Frederick himself was suffering from mental not bodily illness. The Emperor had been unwilling to tear himself from the luxuries and lusts of his kingdom and had sacrificed to them the Holy Land. Gregory imparted still further information to the Christian world: the Emperor was also to blame for the catastrophe of Damietta and the Nile (Frederick had in fact forewarned the Pope of the dangers incurred), he had allowed his followers to loot the town and then surrendered it to the Sultan. From the first he had failed to fulfil his undertakings about the new Crusade: he had not only been short of ship room—which was true—but had made no arrangements for the care of the pilgrims; the thousand knights which he was to provide he had not provided; the 100,000 ounces of gold which he was to pay he had not paid. The Sicilian bishops and the Sicilian Admiral Henry of Malta hastened to inform the Pope that their master had sent considerably more than a thousand knights to Syria; that the gold had been paid; that the Emperor had made himself responsible for the transport of the pilgrims, but not for their maintenance. They were also able to remind the Pope that the Lombards had failed to send the 400 knights which they had undertaken to do under the Pope’s arbitration award—the only penalty they were to pay for blocking the mountain road. But the bishops’ protests bore no fruit, the Pope simply reiterated his excommunication of the Emperor.
Meanwhile Frederick had stated that he was prepared to undergo any Church penances that might be assigned him as an amende honorable, and renewed his promise to sail the following May. He looked on the ban as the usual formal Church penalty incurred by dilatory Crusaders which was always rescinded on due penance being performed. Pope Gregory had no shadow of an excuse for refusing absolution to a penitent offender willing to make amends. But the Pope had other schemes brewing and was determined to continue the ban, so he took up an entirely new line of attack: there was soon no more talk of the abandoned Crusade save as a side issue; the front of the Emperor’s offending was his administration of Sicily, the papal fief; his enslavement of the Sicilian Church; quarrels long since disposed of; the banishment of the barons, and finally a mass of new, baseless accusations, some of which can be proved to have been entirely false. Pope Gregory had no wish to find a solution of the conflict; he did his best to make the breach complete. Frederick II could have his absolution only on condition of accepting papal tutelage in Sicily. This he could not conceivably submit to, and reconciliation was therefore for the time being impossible.
Pope Gregory’s aim was probably to create so many difficulties for the Emperor in the West that an imperial Crusade in the following May would be a sheer impossibility. If Frederick again failed to sail, public opinion would be behind the Pope if he should resume the Church’s fief of Sicily, or even depose the recreant Emperor, as Innocent had once deposed the Welf. Lombardy was the place to make difficulties: the Pope began to get into touch with the Lombards. He had completely overlooked their failure to provide a contingent for the Crusade and had appointed some Lombard cardinals: the entente now went still further. Frederick proposed to summon the German p
rinces to a Diet in Ravenna in March to discuss the breach with the Pope. The Lombards, at Gregory’s instigation, threatened again to bar the road, so the Emperor was forced to abandon the project. The understanding between Gregory IX and the Lombard League, which now embraced almost the whole of Lombardy except Cremona and three or four other towns, grew and flourished till it blossomed into a formal alliance. The Pope’s one thought was how best to hinder Frederick’s enterprise; he therefore prompted his Lombard allies to seize and plunder any Crusaders who crossed their territories on the way to join the Emperor.
Such were the Pope’s first preparations. It was not all plain sailing for him, however. Maundy Thursday was the usual day for proclaiming excommunications; when Pope Gregory renewed the ban against Frederick II an unedifying scene followed. The Roman town nobility, led by the Frangipani, a family whose support Frederick had won, stirred up the Roman populace against their Bishop; on Easter Monday during mass the people mobbed the Pope, and their attitude became so threatening that Gregory had difficulty in extricating himself and escaping to the Lateran. But the mob were roused and would not tolerate his presence in the city, so that he was forced to accept a safe conduct and fly to Rieti.
For a long time Frederick II was silent under all the Pope’s attacks; he hoped at first that the breach would soon be healed. At last he decided that he must defend himself against the accumulated accusations and reproaches, and now on his side began to issue circular letters to the world—his first. In contrast to the Pope’s effusions the Emperor’s were accurate and calm: they rehearsed without betraying heat the actual facts of the Brindisi happenings and the conduct of the Pope. Frederick II had no wish to widen the breach which, as a chronicler phrased it, “confused almost the whole Christian world with new and unaccustomed miseries.” He kept himself well in hand. Only towards the very end of his first letter is there a trace of feeling and appeal, when he solemnly enters a protest before “heaven and the circuit of the earth,” and begs the recipients of his letter, the kings and princes of Europe, the bishops and nobles of Germany: “pray cause this our present letter to be read aloud and listened to with honour and respect, so that from its contents the certainty of our innocence may be clear to all, and clear also the shame which is being done to us and to our Empire.” A remarkable reception awaited the imperial letter in Rome, his “capital city.” The Senate and People of Rome insisted that the Court judge, Roffredo of Benevento, should publicly read the Emperor’s letter from the Capitol.
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