The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land (66 page)

Before long, though, the Christians were embroiled in squabbles of their own. In his rush to return westwards in 1229, Frederick had been forced to compromise his vision of direct Hohenstaufen hegemony of the Holy Land. But with the settlement in Italy, he dispatched Riccardo Filangeri to assert imperial rights over Cyprus and Palestine in 1231. Something of a hard-nosed autocrat, Filangeri proved to be deeply unpopular with much of the native Frankish nobility and clashed heavily with Jean of Ibelin, who now became the figurehead of anti-Hohenstaufen resistance. Through the remainder of the decade and beyond, the struggle to resist imperial authority simmered on–even leading Acre’s local populace to declare their city an independent commune, separate from the kingdom of Jerusalem. Distracted by this hapless bickering, the Latins made little attempt either to consolidate their recent territorial gains or to exploit Ayyubid weakness.

To compound this situation, the barely contained animosity between Frederick II and Gregory IX resurfaced once more in 1239. The emperor was again excommunicated and, this time, the pope called for a fully fledged crusade against his Hohenstaufen opponent–now defamed as an enemy of Christendom and ally of Islam. Another crusade against the emperor was announced in 1244 and this led to open warfare that rumbled on until Frederick II’s death in December 1250. Resolute in its desire to uphold and advance the strength of the Church, the papacy had finally embraced the idea of wielding the weapon of holy war against its political enemies. Similar calls to arms would follow for decades, even centuries, to come. These prompted some outcry, occasionally even vociferous condemnation, but nonetheless many willing recruits took the cross–content to fight on Latin soil against fellow Christians in return for an indulgence. Of all the criticisms levelled at the papacy by contemporaries for this dilution of the ‘crusading ideal’, the most telling was the frequent complaint that the true battlefield in the holy war lay in the East. It is certainly true that, over time, Rome’s redirection of crusade armies–both within western Europe and to other theatres of conflict in Iberia, the Baltic and the faltering state of Latin Romania–served further to isolate and enfeeble Frankish Outremer.

The Barons’ Crusade

These developments did not suddenly lead the papacy to abandon the Latin East. Rather, the Levant became one front among many, and it sometimes fell to secular leaders to prioritise the interests of the surviving crusader states. This was the case between 1239 and 1241 when two relatively small-scale expeditions (sometimes called the Barons’ Crusade) were led by Thibaut IV of Champagne–a member of one of the West’s great crusading dynasties–and by Henry III of England’s brother, Richard of Cornwall. Their campaigns enjoyed a marked degree of success, partly because they adopted Frederick II’s technique of forceful diplomacy, but primarily as a result of the fresh spiral of Ayyubid insecurity caused by al-Kamil’s death in 1238. With various members of the late sultan’s family vying for control of Egypt and Syria, Thibaut and Richard were able to play rival Ayyubids against one another, recovering Galilee and refortifying the southern coastal outpost of Ascalon.

In the wake of these successes, the kingdom of Jerusalem’s Frankish nobility finally threw off the yoke of Hohenstaufen domination, declining to acknowledge the authority of Frederick’s son and heir Conrad in around 1243. Tied up with events in Europe, the best response the emperor could muster was to install a new representative in Tripoli. From this point forward, the Jerusalemite crown shifted to the royal bloodline of Latin Cyprus, but in real terms power rested with the aristocracy.
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By 1244 the fortunes of Frankish Palestine seemed rejuvenated. Large swathes of territory had been reoccupied and Jerusalem, though still only sparsely populated, was in Christian hands. It looked as though the kingdom might return to the position of relative strength and security enjoyed before the ravages of 1187. But in truth, these signs of vitality were illusory and ephemeral. The Latins were actually in a desperately vulnerable state. Having alienated the Hohenstaufen Empire, their martial potency depended almost entirely upon the Military Orders and direct aid from the West in the form of crusades–a stream of support that might well diminish. Above all, the Franks’ recent fortunes were a direct consequence of Ayyubid weakness. Should that Muslim dynasty recover or, perhaps worse still, be replaced by another force, the consequences for Outremer might be catastrophic.

The bane of Palestine

Through the tumult of the early 1240s, one Ayyubid rose to prominence: al-Salih Ayyub, al-Kamil’s eldest son. By 1244 al-Salih had secured his position in Egypt, but, in so doing, lost Damascus to his uncle Ismail. With a view to reasserting his authority over Syria, al-Salih–like other Ayyubid rulers before him–looked to harness the feral brutality of the Khwarizmians, who were now under the command of their chief, Berke Khan. In response to al-Salih’s summons, Berke led his mercenary horde of around 10,000 ravening troops into Palestine in early summer 1244. Seemingly acting of their own volition, the Khwarizmians proceeded to launch an unexpected attack on Jerusalem. At their approach thousands of Christians streamed out of the city, hoping to reach safety at the coast, leaving behind a small garrison of defenders. The refugees suffered terribly as they hurried west. Falling prey to Muslim raiders and bandits in the Judean hills and then being picked off by Khwarizmian outriders on the plains near Ramla, barely 300 reached Jaffa.

The situation back at the Holy City was worse still. The remaining Franks put up some resistance, but they were hopelessly outnumbered and outclassed. On 11 July 1244 Berke Khan’s men broke into Jerusalem and went on the rampage. According to one Latin chronicler, the Khwarizmians ‘found Christians who had refused to leave with the others in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. These they disembowelled before the Sepulchre of Our Lord, and they beheaded the priests who were vested and singing mass at the altars.’ Having ripped down the marble structure enclosing the Sepulchre itself, they proceeded to vandalise and loot the tombs of the great Frankish kings of Palestine–the likes of Godfrey of Bouillon and Baldwin I. It was said that ‘they committed far more acts of shame, filth and destruction against Jesus Christ and the Holy Places and Christendom than all the unbelievers who had been in the land had ever done in peace or war’. With the work of destruction and desecration complete, Berke Khan led his forces to rendezvous near Gaza (in southern Palestine) with an army of around 5,000 warriors from Egypt.
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The shock of these atrocities goaded the Franks into action. Securing an alliance with Ismail of Damascus and another Muslim dissident, the emir of Homs, they marched south to confront the Egyptian–Khwarizmian coalition. Pooling the resources of the Frankish nobility and the Military Orders, the Christians managed to muster around two thousand knights and perhaps a further 10,000 infantrymen. This host–the largest field army amassed in the East since the Third Crusade–represented the Latin kingdom’s full fighting manpower. Yet, even joined with its Muslim allies, it barely exceeded that of the enemy. There was considerable debate over the best strategy to employ. The emir of Homs, who had fought and bested the Khwarizmians before, counselled patient caution and the establishment of a well-defended camp, suggesting that Berke Khan’s men would soon bore of any delay and disperse. However, the eager and overconfident Latins rejected this sage advice. On 18 October 1244 they launched an attack and battle was joined on the sandy plains near the village of La Forbie (north-east of Gaza).

For the Franks and their allies, the mêlée that followed was an unmitigated disaster. Lacking any clear numerical advantage, they had to rely upon closely coordinated action and a dose of luck–but they benefited from neither. To begin with, the Latins and the soldiers from Homs seem to have fought well, holding their ground. But in the face of an unrelenting Khwarizmian assault, the Damascene troops lost their nerve and fled. With their battle formation broken, the Franco-Syrian allies quickly became surrounded, and, though they bravely struggled on even as casualties mounted, the day ended in defeat. The losses sustained at La Forbie were appalling: of the 2,000 troops from Homs, 1,720 were killed or captured; only 36 Templar knights escaped out of 348; the Teutonic Order lost all but three knights from a force of 440. The master of the Templars was captured; his Hospitaller counterpart was slain. This was a calamity to match that endured at Hattin in 1187–a crushing blow that shattered Outremer’s remaining military strength. In the months that followed, half a century’s worth of gradual territorial recuperation would be all but erased.

In a state of dread, the few Frankish survivors regrouped at Acre that autumn, ‘weeping, shouting and crying as they went, so that it was grief to hear them’. Sending warnings to Cyprus and Antioch, they dispatched Bishop Galeran of Beirut ‘to take solemn messages to the pope and to the kings of France and England [and to emphasise] that if swift decisions were not taken about the Holy Land, it would soon be completely lost’.
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The grievous setbacks of 1244 that produced this heartfelt appeal mirrored those that five decades earlier had sparked the Third Crusade. But in that time the foundations of Christian holy war had begun to shift: customs and practices had changed; enthusiasms had waned or been refocused. Amid this new thirteenth-century reality, one obvious question must have gnawed at the minds of the Levantine Franks: would the Latin West once again mount a mighty crusade to save the Holy Land?

Bishop Galeran of Beirut reached the West in 1245, bearing tidings of La Forbie and the Frankish army’s destruction. In late June he attended a Church council convened by the new Pope Innocent IV at Lyons (south-eastern France), the papal court having fled Italy because of the conflict with Emperor Frederick II of Germany. Parlous as Outremer’s predicament was, the pope and his prelates judged other issues to be more pressing: namely, their own survival. Frederick’s excommunication was reconfirmed and, this time, he was officially deposed of his crown rights to Germany and Sicily–a move that prompted the outbreak of open warfare between the papacy and the Hohenstaufen Empire. Innocent IV was also concerned with directing resources to the Latin Empire of Romania, which was edging ever more certainly towards collapse. The pope agreed to proclaim a new crusade to the Near East, appointing the French cardinal-bishop Odo of Châteauroux as papal legate to the campaign, but it was evident that the Levantine cause was a relatively low priority.

Bishop Galeran’s prospects of securing support from the great monarchs of Latin Europe also seemed dismal. Emperor Frederick obviously was in no position to leave the West. Henry III of England was preoccupied with the business of bringing his over-mighty nobles to heel, and even sought to ban Galeran from preaching the cross on English soil. Only one king would stand out in this sea of preoccupation and indifference, responding to Outremer’s call, a sovereign devoted to the war for the Holy Land–Louis IX of France, a man who would be canonised by the Roman Church as a saint.

KING LOUIS IX OF FRANCE

In 1244 King Louis was some thirty years old, tall, slight of frame, pale-skinned and fair-haired. By ancestry, his royal blood was infused with the crusading impulse, born as he was of an unbroken line–stretching back to Louis VII and Philip II–of Capetian kings who had waged the holy war. King Louis IX also inherited a French realm that had been transformed from its position of weakness in the early twelfth century. The long-lived Philip II had proved to be a gifted bureaucrat, and his forty-three-year reign saw huge improvements in governmental regulation and financial administration. Success, likewise, was achieved in the struggle with England, culminating in the conquest of Normandy and vast tracts of Angevin territory in western France.

After Philip’s death in 1223, however, his son Louis VIII survived just three years. Thus, Louis IX was only twelve when he came to the throne. His forceful mother Blanche of Castile assumed the regency, ruling with assured competence; indeed, even as a full-grown man of thirty, King Louis had yet to emerge from Blanche’s rather overbearing shadow.

Louis appears to have been a devout Christian. He gained a reputation for attending mass daily and for his keen interest in sermons. In 1238 he bought the Crown of Thorns, thought to have been worn by Jesus on the cross, looted from Byzantine Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade and then sold by the penniless ruler of Latin Romania. Over the next decade, Louis built a magnificent new chapel in the heart of Paris to house this relic of Christ’s Passion–the Sainte-Chapelle–a towering masterpiece of the technologically advanced ‘Gothic’ style of architecture that had come to dominate western Europe. Louis was also a generous patron of religious houses across France. In his dealings with the papacy, the Capetian sovereign showed due deference and respect to the Latin Church, but not to the detriment of royal authority or his own spiritual beliefs. Thus, he allowed Frederick II’s excommunication to be announced in France, but forbade the preaching of a crusade against the emperor on French soil.

Louis’ early reign taught him something of war, but he had yet to reveal any spark of martial genius or strategic vision akin to that which had possessed Richard the Lionheart. The Capetian was capable, however, of inspiring loyalty and fidelity in his troops, not least through the assiduous care taken to ensure their wellbeing and morale. In fact, Louis’ whole approach to the business of monarchy and generalship was heavily influenced by notions of honour, justice and obligation. These principles were at the heart of the codes of chivalric conduct that had solidified in the course of the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, and now informed almost every aspect of Christian knightly culture. Nascent ideals of chivalry had played a role in crusading from the start; certainly they formed a backdrop to the Third Crusade. But by the 1240s they were a dominant force, shaping the approach to, and prosecution of, holy war.

For Louis IX and those who followed him, crusading was a means to fulfil a debt of dutiful service owed to God and a struggle in which one’s reputation might be preserved and advanced. Cherished renown was there to be earned through valorous feats of arms, although, of course, the danger of cowardice or failure–and thus the threat of deleterious shame–also hung in the air. Crusaders continued to be attracted by the spiritual reward of an indulgence, but while many still conceived of themselves as pilgrims, this idea of holy war as a devotional journey was increasingly balanced or even eclipsed by the image of crusading as a chivalric endeavour. This shift would have marked consequences on the battlefield, not least because of the inherent tension between seeking personal glory and following orders.

Louis may have harboured thoughts of enlisting in a crusade during the 1230s, and he lent financial support to the Barons’ Crusade, but by late 1244 his determination to take the cross was hardening. By this stage, news of Jerusalem’s capture by the Khwarizmians was probably circulating in the West, but Bishop Galeran had yet to report the shattering defeat at La Forbie. That winter the French king fell ill with a severe fever and in December he lay abed in Paris, ‘so near dying that one of [his servants] wanted to draw the sheet over his face, maintaining that he was dead’. In the grip of this dire infirmity, Louis declared his unswerving determination to lead a crusade and was said to have ‘asked for the cross to be given to him’ there and then. The crusade became the enterprise through which he asserted his adulthood and independence–and the cause to which he would dedicate his life.
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THE PREPARATIONS FOR WAR

It would be almost four years before Louis IX embarked on his crusade. This delay was not the result of deliberate prevarication, but, rather, a consequence of the meticulous precision with which the king sought to prepare for the holy war. The expedition was to be dominated by the French. The conflict between the Hohenstaufen Empire and the papacy precluded German and Italian involvement, although Frederick II did make Sicily’s ports and markets available to the Capetian monarch. A few prominent English nobles took the cross, in spite of Henry III’s misgivings–most notably, the king’s half-brother William Longsword.

In France, Louis’ ardent enthusiasm and the efforts of the papal legate Odo of Châteauroux prompted widespread enrolment. All three of the king’s brothers enlisted: Robert of Artois, Alphonse of Poitiers and Charles of Anjou. A grand assembly held in Paris in October 1245 ended with many other leading counts, dukes and prelates committing to the expedition. The count of Champagne was busy in northern Spain, but many leading members of his household joined up, among them a twenty-three-year-old knight named John of Joinville, who had inherited the title of seneschal of Champagne (by this date, an office with oversight of lordly ceremony). As a participant in the coming crusade, Joinville came to know King Louis well and witnessed the holy war first-hand. Years later the seneschal wrote a vivid record of what he saw and experienced, albeit one that portrayed the French monarch in a heroic light. Joinville’s Old French account–a mixture of personal memoir and royal biography (at times even hagiography)–offers one of the most visceral and illuminating insights into the human experience of crusading.
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Joinville’s testimony, alongside a wealth of other contemporary evidence, makes it abundantly clear that Louis IX threw himself into the preparations for his forthcoming expedition with enormous energy. The elaborate measures taken reveal a commendable degree of foresight and an eye for detail. It is also apparent that the king’s approach to planning grew from a belief that the crusade’s success depended on both practical and spiritual considerations.

Louis adopted a remarkably clinical approach to the matter of logistical preparation, tapping into the increasing administrative sophistication of thirteenth-century France. He had no intention of leading a ramshackle foraging force into the East. Selecting Cyprus as his advance staging post, the king set about building up a supply of the food, weaponry and resources needed for war. After two years of stockpiling goods on the island the vast mounds of wheat and barley awaiting the army apparently resembled hills, while the stacks of wine barrels were, from a distance, easily mistaken for barns. Aigues-Mortes, a new fortified port on France’s south-eastern coast, served as the expedition’s European base of operations.

This feverish activity cost a fortune. The Capetian monarchy made an extraordinary financial commitment to the crusade and Louis amassed a sizeable war chest with which to fund the campaign. Royal accounts suggest that his expenditure during the first two years totalled two million
livres tournois
(gold ‘pounds’ of the weight accepted in Tours), much of which went on paying either wages or subsidies to French knights. Given that total royal income was no more than 250,000
livres tournois
per annum in this period, the economic strain of mounting the campaign was massive. To help foot the bill, Louis was granted one-twentieth of all ecclesiastical revenues in France by the pope, and this was later increased to one-tenth for three years. Crown officials also extorted money from heretics and Jews, and, all in all, Louis was content to beg, borrow and steal in the name of the holy war. In addition, he encouraged other leading crusaders to raise their own funds and to contribute to the organisation of transport.
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Many earlier crusades had been derailed by the internal rivalries that beset Latin Christendom. This same hostile political environment had caused monarchs to delay or abandon their plans to campaign in the Levant because of anxiety caused by the potential consequences of a prolonged absence. But although Louis IX was conscious of his commitments to the realm of France, he evidently considered these to be outweighed by the absolute necessity to lead a crusade. Thus, before setting out for the East, the king conferred the regency of his Capetian domain upon his experienced mother Blanche. Likewise, he did his best to settle the political affairs of Europe: attempting to broker a settlement between the papacy and Frederick II; encouraging peace with England. But even when these steps enjoyed negligible success (as in the Hohenstaufen conflict with Rome) and the threats to France’s safety and Louis’ own position as king remained, he refused to postpone his departure or commute his pledge.

Alongside his efforts to bring harmony–and, as he saw it, Christian fellowship–to the West, in a more personal sense the Capetian king set about making peace with his people and with his soul. Louis clearly believed that his crusade would not prevail simply through the works of man, but that it had to be conducted in a spirit of contrite devotion and with a purified heart. He took the innovative step of instituting a series of enquiries, conducted in the main by Mendicant Friars, to settle any outstanding legal disputes within his realm, and to root out any corruption and injustice caused by himself, his officials or even his ancestors. As far back as the First Crusade, some of those taking the cross had sought to put their affairs in order and to resolve disputes before departure, but never on this scale.

Louis’ crusade began in Paris on 12 June 1248 with an emotive, ritualised public ceremony designed to echo the piety of his crusading forebears. The king received the symbols of the crusading pilgrim–the scrip and staff–at Notre-Dame Cathedral and then walked barefoot to the royal Church of St Denis to take up the
Oriflame
, France’s historic battle standard. From there he made his way south to the coast, departing with his army from Aigues-Mortes and Marseilles in late August.

Best estimates suggest that Louis led a total force of between 20,000 and 25,000 men. This included around 2,800 knights, 5,600 mounted sergeants and a further 10,000 infantry. In addition, some 5,000 crossbowmen fought in the crusade and significant advances in the accuracy and power of the bows they wielded enabled these troops to play an important role in the campaign. This was certainly not a vast host, but the king seems to have made a conscious decision to go to war with a select fighting force rather than a sprawling horde–he even left behind many thousands of other troops and non-combatants who, hoping to join the expedition, had gathered at Aigues-Mortes of their own accord.

Following the now established practice, the crusade made its journey to the Near East by sea. Louis travelled aboard a grand royal vessel, dubbed
Montjoie
, or ‘Hill of Joy’, the name given to the spot from which pilgrims to Jerusalem gained their first sight of the Holy City. But for most Franks the voyage to the eastern Mediterranean was a frightening and desperately uncomfortable affair. Normal transport craft offered perhaps 1,500 square feet of deck space (roughly equivalent to half the size of a modern tennis court) but had to carry around 500 passengers, and sometimes many more. Not surprisingly, one crusader likened sea travel to being locked in a prison. Lower decks were often used to ferry horses, although Louis also commissioned specially designed transports for this most precious cargo of animals, essential to the Latins’ preferred style of mounted warfare.

John of Joinville described the experience of departing from Marseilles in late August 1248. Having boarded his ship, he watched as horses were led below decks through a door in the hull. This portal was then carefully sealed with caulking ‘as is done with a barrel before plunging it into water, because once the ship is on the high seas, that door is completely submerged’. Urged on by the vessel’s captain, all the crew and passengers sang a hymn popular with crusaders, ‘Veni, Creator Spiritus’ (Come, Creator Spirit), as the sails were unfurled and the journey began. But even with his morale lifted, Joinville admitted to feelings of intense trepidation over sea travel, observing that no one ‘can tell when he goes to sleep at night, whether or not he may be lying at the bottom of the sea the next morning’. On this occasion, his fears proved unfounded, and the seneschal reached Cyprus about three weeks later, where King Louis had already arrived on 17 September.
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