The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land (64 page)

With the close of negotiations, summer’s end brought a further disruptive round of departures and arrivals for the crusader army. In early November 1219, al-Kamil made one last attempt to dislodge the Franks, launching a major offensive, but his troops were driven back. By this point, Damietta’s populace was in a desperate state. On the night of 5 November, some Italian crusaders realised that one of the city’s partially ruined towers had been left undefended. Rushing forward with a scaling ladder, they mounted the walls and soon called more troops forward. Within, the Latins were confronted by a ghastly spectacle. Oliver described how they ‘found [the] streets strewn with the bodies of the dead, wasting away from pestilence and famine’ when houses were searched, enfeebled Muslims were discovered lying in beds beside corpses. The crusaders’ eighteen-month investment had exacted a horrific toll upon the defenders–tens of thousands had perished. Nonetheless, the Franks celebrated their long-awaited success, plundering large amounts of gold, silver and silks. James of Vitry, meanwhile, supervised the immediate baptism of the surviving Muslim children.
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Once al-Kamil realised that Damietta had fallen, he hurriedly retreated some forty miles south along the course of the Nile, to retrench his position at Mansourah. In the event, he had more than enough time to prepare his defences, because, fresh from the flush of success, the Fifth Crusade was paralysed by indecision. The first contentious issue was the fate of Damietta itself. John of Brienne thought to claim it for himself–and later even minted coins affirming his right to the city–but Pelagius wished to hold Damietta (and the lion’s share of the amassed spoils) in the interests of the papacy and Frederick II. A temporary compromise was eventually brokered that allowed John to hold the city until the German king appeared.

More problematic still was the issue of future strategy. The crusade had attacked Damietta as a means to an end, but intractable questions were now raised about the next step. Should the city be used as a bargaining chip to secure the return of the Holy Land on even more favourable terms than those already offered? Or might the Fifth Crusade consider a fully fledged assault on Egypt by marching up the Nile to crush al-Kamil and conquer Cairo?

To grasp victory

In an unprecedented feat of woeful indecision, the Fifth Crusade spent the next year and a half ensconced in Damietta considering these issues–ever haunted by the spectre of Frederick II’s promised arrival. John of Brienne left Egypt, in part to pursue a claim to the crown of Cilician Armenia following the death of King Leon I, but also to supervise Palestine’s defence against renewed attacks from al-Mu‘azzam. As the months passed, however, John began to face widespread criticism for his absence from the crusade.

Back in Damietta, Pelagius assumed control of the remaining Frankish armies and did his best to maintain order. It was around this time that the cardinal had a mysterious book in Arabic–supposedly shown to the crusaders by Syrian Christians–translated and read aloud to the host. The text was purportedly a collection of prophecies written in the ninth century, relating revelations from St Peter the Apostle. The book appeared to ‘predict’ the events of the Third Crusade, as well as the fall of Damietta. It also declared that the Fifth Crusade would be brought to victory under the leadership of ‘a great king from the West’. The whole episode might sound utterly fanciful, but Oliver of Paderborn and James of Vitry took the ‘predictions’ of this tome very seriously. Pelagius certainly used them to justify his continued refusal to negotiate with the Ayyubids and his determined patience in awaiting the advent of Frederick II.
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At last, on 22 November 1220, Pope Honorius III gave in to Frederick’s demands and anointed him as emperor of Germany. In return, Frederick renewed his crusading vow. The coming of spring in 1221, therefore, seemed to herald a new dawn for the Fifth Crusade. That May, the first wave of Hohenstaufen crusaders arrived under the command of Ludwig of Bavaria and, bolstered by these reinforcements, Pelagius finally made the decision to push south and attack al-Kamil’s now heavily fortified camp at Mansourah. Unfortunately for the Franks, the prosecution of this campaign was criminally inept. Even once the choice had been made, the Christians were slow to act, and the advance only began on 6 July 1221. The next day John of Brienne returned to Egypt and joined Pelagius’ and Ludwig’s force. A proportion of the crusader host was left to defend Damietta, but the Latins still mustered some 1,200 knights, around 4,000 archers and many other infantrymen. Their southward march down the east bank of the Nile was also shadowed by a sizeable Christian fleet.

The problem was that Pelagius had little knowledge of the terrain around Mansourah and seems to have been entirely ignorant of the Nile Delta’s hydrology. By contrast, al-Kamil had chosen the location of his new encampment with great care and foresight. Positioned just south of a junction between the Nile and a secondary tributary–the Tanis River–running to Lake Mansallah, the Ayyubid base was practically unassailable. In addition, any attacking army would find themselves penned between two watercourses. The annual Nile flood of August was also fast approaching. This meant that if the crusaders tarried, their assault might be blunted not by Muslim swords, but by the unstemmable waters of the great river.

It was perhaps with a view to engineering just such a delay that al-Kamil now renewed his offer of truce on the same terms advanced in 1219. The postponement of hostilities also served al-Kamil’s interests, because he was eagerly awaiting the arrival of reinforcements under both al-Ashraf and al-Mu‘azzam. But despite some debate–and warnings from the Templars and Hospitallers about the growing concentration of Ayyubid forces in Egypt–Pelagius again declined to negotiate and the crusaders pressed on. It is impossible to judge whether al-Kamil would have honoured any deal settled at this late stage.

By 24 July the Franks had reached the settlement of Sharamsah, just a few days from Mansourah. There they repulsed a Muslim attack and Christian morale seems to have been buoyant. But, because of the imminent flooding of the Nile, John of Brienne counselled an immediate withdrawal to Damietta. His advice was overruled by Pelagius, who now seems to have been convinced that the Latins could grasp victory. In fact, they were marching into a well-prepared trap.

Continuing south, the Franks ignored a small tributary entering the Nile from the west. This was a grave error. The seemingly innocuous ‘tributary’ was actually the Mahalla Canal, a watercourse that rejoined the Nile miles to the south of Mansourah. Once the crusaders’ army passed by with their fleet, al-Kamil sent a group of his own ships up the canal to enter the Nile and block any retreat, even sinking four vessels to ensure that the river was impassable. By 10 August the Christians had taken up a position in front of Mansourah, in the fork between the Nile and the Tanis. Around the same time, however, al-Ashraf and al-Mu‘azzam arrived in Egypt and moved their troops to the north-east, thus blocking any land retreat. Soon after, the Nile flood began.

The Fifth Crusaders’ position rapidly became untenable. With the swelling waters, their fleet proved impossible to control and overloaded ships began to sink. Some thought was given to making a fortified camp and waiting for reinforcement, but by the evening of 26 August the sheer desperation of the situation led to a sudden and chaotic retreat, with only the Templars in the rearguard holding discipline. At this point al-Kamil ordered the sluice gates used to moderate the Nile flood to be opened, inundating the fields and further isolating his enemy–the terrain became so muddy and waterlogged that the Franks were left wading up to their waists. After an agonising day spent trying to trudge their way north, Pelagius accepted the irretrievable reality of the Christian position and sued for terms of surrender on 28 August 1221.

Having twice been offered the Holy City of Jerusalem, the cardinal and his fellow crusaders now had to accept the humiliation of abject defeat. Al-Kamil treated the Franks with marked respect–keen to bring the whole sorry affair to a swift conclusion so that he could finally consolidate his hold over Egypt–but, nonetheless, he demanded the immediate return of Damietta and the release of all Muslim prisoners. The only concession was that the eight-year truce between Latin Christendom and the Ayyubids would not be extended to the newly anointed Emperor Frederick II. On 8 September, al-Kamil duly entered Damietta, reclaiming dominion of the Nile, and in the weeks that followed the Franks left Egypt empty-handed.

FREDERICK II’S CRUSADE

The crushing reversal of fortune suffered by the Fifth Crusaders sparked criticism across Latin Christendom in the early 1220s. Cardinal Pelagius stood accused of ineffectual and misguided leadership–to some his failures in Egypt proved the underlying folly of Innocent III’s idealised vision of a Church-directed crusade. John of Brienne was also censured for neglecting his role as a field commander and for allowing the crusade to languish immobile at Damietta through 1220 and beyond. But perhaps the most forceful attacks were levelled against Frederick II, the great emperor who never did arrive in North Africa, despite all his promises. Even in 1221 he again had delayed his departure–distracted by an outbreak of political unrest in Sicily–and by late summer, with the disaster on the Nile and the crusade’s end, the time for action had passed.
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Frederick had demonstrated that his overriding priority was the defence, consolidation and expansion of the Hohenstaufen Empire. These were not uncommon concerns for a medieval monarch. The same burdens of crown rule had impacted upon the crusading careers of Henry II and Richard I of England and Philip Augustus of France. Indeed, from one perspective, Frederick’s dedication and determined ambition were commendable. But in the wake of the Fifth Crusade, the new emperor came under mounting pressure to make good his vows and enter the war for the Holy Land. This compulsion derived in part from public opprobrium, but it was driven most forcibly by the papacy. Honorius III was desperately concerned to renew the campaign for Jerusalem’s recovery and assuage his own guilt over the Damietta expedition’s dismal outcome. He also recognised that Frederick, now having encircled the Papal States, posed a clear threat to Roman sovereignty. The crusade might be a useful and effective means of controlling this potential enemy.

Stupor mundi

Frederick II was one of the most controversial figures in medieval history. In the thirteenth century he was lauded by supporters as
stupor mundi
(the wonder of the world), but condemned by his enemies as the ‘beast of the apocalypse’ today historians continue to debate whether he was a tyrannical despot or a visionary genius, the first practitioner of Renaissance kingship. A paunchy, balding figure with bad eyesight, physically Frederick was rather unprepossessing. But by the 1220s, he was the Christian world’s most powerful ruler: emperor of Germany and king of Sicily.

It has sometimes been suggested that Frederick had a distinctly unmedieval and enlightened approach to governance, religion and intellectual life, and that he brought this revolutionary perspective to the business of crusading, transforming the holy war and Outremer’s fate with a wave of his mighty hand. In reality, Frederick was not quite so radical, either as a monarch or as a crusader. Through his upbringing in Sicily–with its own indigenous Arab population and long-established network of Muslim contacts–Frederick was familiar with Islam: he knew something of the Arabic language, retained the services of a loyal group of Muslim bodyguards and even possessed a harem. He also had an inquisitive mind, an avid interest in science and an absolute passion for falconry. But the notion of maintaining a cultured royal court was far from unique. The Iberian Christian kings of Castile were perhaps even more open to Muslim influence in this period. And Frederick was not always tolerant in his attitude to faith and Christian dogma, violently suppressing Sicilian Arab rebellion between 1222 and 1224 and opposing heretics within his realm.

Contemporaries and modern commentators alike have also alleged that the new Hohenstaufen emperor was distinctly disinterested in holy war. Yet, despite his failure to fight in the Fifth Crusade, Frederick would prove, in time, to be driven by an authentic commitment to the crusading cause. His approach to the struggle for dominion of the Holy Land was conditioned, however, by the firmly held belief that he was destined to extend his imperial authority across all Christendom. By leading a crusade, Frederick sought both to fulfil what he regarded as his natural obligation as a Christian emperor and to exercise his equally innate right to recover and rule the most sacred city of Jerusalem.
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Imperial crusader, Jerusalemite king

In the mid-1220s, Pope Honorius III repeatedly sought to bind Frederick to a new crusading pledge. Initially, the campaign was supposed to start in 1225, but by March 1224 the emperor was requesting a further delay because of the ongoing difficulty of maintaining order in Sicily. With the pope’s patience now all but exhausted, a new agreement was formalised at San Germano (in north-western Italy) in June 1225. The treaty contained a number of strict provisions: Frederick was to recruit an army of 1,000 knights and fund their deployment in the Holy Land for two years; in addition, he had to provide 150 ships to transport crusaders to the East and furnish the master of the Teutonic Order, Herman of Salza (a close Hohenstaufen ally), with 100,000 ounces of gold. Most critically, the emperor promised, on pain of excommunication, to set out on crusade by 15 August 1227. Frederick accepted these terms partly because of his own willingness and determination to initiate an eastern campaign, but also to win support within the Hohenstaufen realm for a crusade tax–a levy that was unpopular because many feared, on past form, that its proceeds would end up in the imperial treasury. By agreeing to the Treaty of San Germano, Frederick was signalling categorically that, this time, he would redeem his vows. The move earned him the backing of his subjects, but it also left him tied to a dangerously precise schedule.