Holy Warriors (50 page)

An intriguing feature of this period of crusading—and really over the two generations after the fall of Acre—was the production of a large number of elaborate plans designed to hold on to, or regain, the Holy Land.
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Often produced at papal request, these so-called “Recovery Treatises” took two basic forms: either a
passagium generale
, that is, a papally directed, pan-Christian enterprise—rather like the First Crusade—or the use of a far more focused, professional force that aimed to strike hard at a particular target. The latter would be prefaced by a blockade of the Mamluk ports (a reflection of Christian naval superiority) and, with calls for a general peace in Europe, was to be followed up by a larger, more traditionally constituted expedition. Perhaps the plan that came the closest to fruition was that of King Philip VI of France (1328–50), who in October 1332 announced his intentions to a splendid gathering of nobles in Sainte-Chapelle, the wondrous creation of his crusading predecessor, King (and by now Saint) Louis
IX. The papacy tried hard to encourage this venture through clerical taxation and offers of generous spiritual rewards, yet public enthusiasm for the expedition was mixed.

Twice in the fourteenth century (in 1309, known as the Crusade of the Poor and 1320, the Shepherds’ Crusade) there had been unauthorized popular movements in support of a new campaign to the Levant. Thousands of people—mainly from peasant stock—gathered in northern France and headed south to the Languedoc where they had massacred the Jewish populations and then hoped to set out for the Levant. Such anarchic bands posed an intolerable threat to civil order and the authorities had to suppress them, but anti-Semitism aside, they represented a fervent desire to recover the Holy Land.
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By the time of Philip’s planned crusade, however, a wider level of skepticism proved a serious barrier to recruitment. As one contemporary chronicler wrote of the royal project: “fewer people than expected took the cross, for they had had their fingers burnt too often, and they suspected that the sermons being delivered in the name of the cross were only being given to get money.”
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Outright resistance from the French towns brought Philip’s enterprise to a halt; a year later, the beginning of the Hundred Years War compounded this and delivered a severe blow to crusades to the Holy Land. Other factors soon made their mark as well: in 1343, the Italian bankers, whose financial backing was vital to any new campaign, went into crisis; shortly afterward the Black Death broke out, and thus crusading started to slip down the list of priorities of Christian Europe.

Even though major expeditions became less feasible, numerous manifestations of crusading, or an evolving form of the genre, were in evidence during the latter half of the fourteenth century. These were often channeled through, or alongside, notions of chivalry—in itself a theme that had become a dominant feature of European society; in fact, with its fusion of military, aristocratic, and Christian mores, there were times when the boundary between chivalry and crusading became almost imperceptible.
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Holy wars continued to take place in the eastern Mediterranean, the Baltic, and Iberia, and one—fictional—person who fought in all three of
these arenas was the knight in the Prologue of Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
, written c. 1384. As has been argued elsewhere, this figure probably formed an accurate template of the aspirations and attitudes of leading men of the day:

It seems likely that Chaucer’s knight was a conflation of the crusading feats of the Scrope clan of Yorkshire, a family represented at all the episodes described above. But the Scropes were no aberration and their exploits were paralleled by numerous men from senior families across northern Europe (including royalty), as well as esquires and men of fortune.
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This is not to say that military activity elsewhere, such as the recurrent conflicts of the Hundred Years War, was not the dominant concern of these people, but the point remains that all of these crusading outlets were deemed worthy of the risk and the expense. For the higher echelons of society the primary attraction of such escapades was simple: to gain an honorable reputation through great feats in battle, and the fact that this service was in the armies of God—the ultimate Lord—gave it particular prestige. For men-at-arms, unemployed during periods of peace between the major European wars,
more basic motives operated and the lure of wages was paramount, but in the case of the nobility (who had to finance their own campaigns), repeated experience would have shown that most of these adventures—especially those in northern Europe—were physically arduous and rarely profitable. Yet that was not the point: the material outlay and personal hardship were more than compensated for by the boost to one’s good name and the sense of belonging to an exclusive club, an elite group with shared values and experiences; the very pinnacle of chivalry. The escapades of two Englishmen can offer us a glimpse of this mentality: Sir Richard Waldegrave (an acquaintance of Chaucer), a well-to-do Suffolk knight from Bures Saint Mary, and Henry Bolingbroke, earl of Derby, later King Henry IV of England (1399–1413).

Over a five-year period, Richard took part in a trio of crusading enterprises: in southern Turkey in 1361, Prussia in 1363, and Egypt in 1365.
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The first and third of these campaigns were under the leadership of King Peter I of Cyprus (1359–69), a man canny enough to note this contemporary enthusiasm for individuals to venture to the eastern Mediterranean. In 1361 Waldegrave, aged twenty-three, followed the trend when he fought in the capture of the southern Turkish port of Satalia. Peter’s motives were not simply to defeat the Mamluks but also to protect Cyprus from Turkish invasion and to boost his own economy. The presence at Satalia of westerners such as Richard encouraged the king to seek further help and in 1363, aided by a period of peace between England and France, he began a two-year tour of the West. Guillaume de Machaut’s sympathetic account portrayed the king as a dynamic, persuasive leader determined to regain Jerusalem, but as we have just seen, other ideas were also in play.
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Edward III of England was adamant that he would not join the crusade, although his subjects were free to do so. King John II of France was keen to follow in the crusading footsteps of Saint Louis but his death in 1364 left the crusade’s leadership to King Peter. While much of the early preaching for the expedition was framed in terms of a broader recovery of the Holy Land, the target of the campaign was eventually revealed as the prosperous Mamluk port of Alexandria.

In spite of the enthusiastic advocacy of Pope Urban V, no crowned heads from the West took part, although a number of English and French nobles, including Richard Waldegrave, saw it as a worthy cause. Peter also employed European mercenaries (the notorious Free Companies), a measure supported
by the pope, who offered indulgences to these men as a means of steering their unruly presence away from France and Italy. Spiritual rewards for hired thugs might seem a little out of tune with Pope Urban II’s original crusading ideas, but stipendiary troops had been employed on crusades for much of the thirteenth century, and, in one sense, this echoed Urban’s desire to export the lawless nobility of western Europe back in the eleventh century. Peter’s crusade was also joined by the Knights Hospitaller, who had been based on Rhodes since the fall of the Holy Land. The Hospitallers had developed an important naval function and Christian fleets worked hard to keep the seas free from Muslim raiders and to promote trade and pilgrimage. Thus—as with so many previous crusading expeditions—participants in this campaign had a plethora of interlocking, possibly contradictory, motives, and while it was endorsed by the papacy, European knights fought in a personal, rather than a national, capacity.

On Rhodes the legate “piously preached to the king’s little army on the mystery of the cross and the Lord’s Passion and gave the venerable sign of the cross to all who were setting out.”
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On October 4, 1365, the fleet departed for Alexandria—a formidable target and one that brought trepidation to the hearts of many. Peter encouraged them to be brave and he chose to blend a message of determination with the prospect of gaining fame and repute: “you will defeat these men, you’ll see it happen and you’ll live to talk of it!” The shallow waters outside Alexandria made for a difficult landing because the galleys needed to hold just offshore. This meant the crusaders had to jump down from their ships and wade up the beach in the face of stern enemy resistance. Peter proved his courage—“he excels them all” reported Machaut—and the king urged the troops forward: “Those are God’s enemies. . . . Forward my lords, let each man amaze his neighbour.” After successfully forcing their way onto dry land the Christians paused to consider their next move—again, expressed in terms suggestive of a spiritual and chivalric blend: “Think of our Lord helping us to win such fame against the pagans.”

After a vigorous effort the crusaders managed to set fire to one of the gates and then burst inside to take control of the city on October 10, 1365. Overnight, however, poor discipline briefly enabled the enemy to recover a gate before Peter rallied and drove the Muslims out. The visiting crusaders began to reflect on just how large a task they faced holding on to Alexandria and they started to comprehend the sheer scale of resources the Egyptians
possessed. They became overwhelmed by fear of the Muslim response and demanded to depart, although Peter wanted to stay and secure the prosperity of his kingdom. He proclaimed his faith in God’s support, the strong walls of Alexandria, and the flood of people he believed would arrive from the West, inspired by his success. The legate pleaded with the Europeans to remain, couching his argument in spiritual terms: “He [the legate] showed clearly how God’s honour, the good of Christendom, and the acquisition of the city of Jerusalem hung on the retention of Alexandria . . . but by the Devil’s work, the majority stood in his way . . . they had no trust in God . . . and entirely forgot His incredible victories.”
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Machaut gave Peter’s pleas a more chivalric spin: “Honour, ladies and love, what are you going to say when you see these crowding to run away? They’ll never win glory and honour, all are marked in shame!”
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Yet the crusaders were adamant—they would leave. As they began to reembark, the Muslims poured back into the city and, for the second time in just under two hundred years (remembering Amalric of Jerusalem’s brief tenure of the city in 1167), the Christian hold on Alexandria was over within a couple of days.

Peter soon renewed his attempts to recruit help from the West but he met with little success and the following year returned to Cyprus. In spite of the brevity of his conquest, this all too rare blow against the Mamluks had won him widespread renown and was reported in glowing terms across the Christian world, as far afield even as Russia. Yet the king’s ultimate fate is hard to reconcile with this image of a gallant holy warrior. His attack had infuriated the Mamluks and thereby damaged the Cypriot economy, and this, coupled with his own appalling temper, provoked a political crisis. Relations with his nobility deteriorated and Peter was frequently offensive toward their womenfolk. Such was his level of irrationality that he is reported to have imprisoned his steward for failing to provide oil for his asparagus! These matters culminated in a decision to kill him and on January 16, 1369, he was attacked in his own bed. The murderers smashed his skull, cut his throat open, dressed him in a tramp’s clothes, and left the corpse in the palace hall.
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The siege of Alexandria represented one of the few high points of crusading warfare in the Mediterranean and, in effect, it came to mark the end of major conflict with the Mamluks. Richard Waldegrave survived the campaign and returned home, soon to venture into another field of war, the Baltic. Once more, he endured and in 1376 entered Parliament, and five
years later he ascended the political hierarchy to become the speaker of the House of Commons (one of his descendants, William Waldegrave, was a member of the cabinet under Margaret Thatcher and John Major). Richard’s days of long-distance travel were over and he settled down in England until his death in 1402. His career had overlapped with a much more influential figure, the future Henry IV of England, Henry Boling-broke, and through him we can glimpse something of crusading in the Baltic region.

Henry was only twenty-four years old when he proposed to campaign against the infidel in, first, the Mediterranean and then the Baltic. His plans to join a crusade against Muslim pirates, based at al-Mahadia in Tunisia, foundered when promises of safe conduct through France failed to materialize, but he sustained his enthusiasm for holy war by going to northeastern Europe in July 1390. After a second visit to the Baltic in 1392 he headed south to Venice and made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1393. The survival of his household accounts permit an exceptionally vivid reconstruction of both these journeys: as the son of John of Gaunt, the wealthiest man in England, and as a cousin of King Richard II (1377–99), he was able, and expected, to travel in some considerable style.
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