The World of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

A final method of communal organisation can be found in crusade confraternities that existed on a more permanent basis to organise donations, recruitment, funding and material support for members on crusade. While some, like those of Florence and Pistoia during the Third Crusade, Châteaudun in northern France established in 1247 or the Parisian confrarie of the Holy Sepulchre of 1320, were based on specific urban centres, others, such as the North Italian confraternity of the Holy Spirit, operated with an extended geographical reach across a number of cities.40 Founded during the Fifth Crusade, its statutes received papal confirmation in 1255 and members played a significant part in the defence of Acre in 1291. However, the communal aspect of crusade was not class distinctive. Nobles played prominent parts in the North Sea fleet communes of 1147 and 1217 and the Paris confrarie of 1320. Kings swore with their followers to communal ordinances. Setting out on the Second Crusade in 1147, Milo, lord of Evry-le-Châtel in Champagne, swore oaths of mutual loyalty with his knights (‘se federaverunt juramentis’).41 The idea that the political and ideological dominance of lordship and hierarchy precluded other forms of social engagement and association is misleading. Outside lordship or kindred, communal bonds, of friendship, commerce, occupation or belief, were ubiquitous. For crusaders, technically equal as crucesignati, such associations could be both convenient and essential.

  In 1148, Damascus was no longer a Frankish ally as it had been for most of the time since 1129. Nor had it yet been absorbed into Nur al-Din’s growing empire. While the presence of so many troops encouraged Frankish hopes of success, the campaign turned into a dismal failure. A rapid march to Damascus in July 1148 was followed in days by an equally precipitate withdrawal. Although the Latin and Arabic sources do not agree, poor and indecisive tactics, the absence of a plan for a proper investment of the city, tensions within the leadership over who should rule the conquered city, perhaps sterner resistance than anticipated that dashed hopes of a quick surrender or early successful assault on the walls, all undermined the attackers’ resolve, as did rumours of an approaching Zengid relief army. No sustained operation, with catapults, sapping, battering rams and siege towers, was even attempted. As in 1129, the contrasting odds for successful sieges of inland cities and coastal ports were made clear. The retreat to Galilee was chaotic, with heavy casualties. Despite continued German support for an attack on Ascalon, divisions within Frankish and crusader ranks, exacerbated by the simmering rivalry between Queen Melisende and Baldwin III, prevented further action. Conrad left for home in September; Louis the following spring. In 1154, Damascus submitted to Nur al-Din.

  The Waning of the Crusade, 1149–87?

  The failure at Damascus represented a major humiliation, spawning an industry of blame, finger pointing and soul searching. Although papal bulls continued to call for new eastern expeditions, usually in response to appeals from Outremer, enthusiasm for using crusade formulae elsewhere became patchy. The tradition of associating campaigns against al-Andalus with the Jerusalem war continued, promoted chiefly by papal legates and church councils, holy war becoming embedded within the foundation of Iberian Military Orders. In the Baltic, while the language of religious war was bandied about, between 1147 and the 1190s only a bull of 1171 explicitly offered vows, cross and indulgence to war in the region. For Outremer, the Second Crusade signalled a wasted opportunity to construct a new frontier and stall the advancing unification of Syria. In the west, at least in the eyes of William of Tyre who saw the consequences first hand at both ends of the Mediterranean, enthusiasm to assist Outremer declined as the Damascus debacle was attributed to the allegedly duplicitous behaviour of the Outremer Frankish nobility.42 Despite papal attempts to excite new expeditions (at least seven between 1157 and 1184) and repeated embassies from Outremer calling for aid, western rulers tended to maintain only lip service to the cause.43 From the 1150s to 1180s, veterans of the Second Crusade, such as Louis VII and Frederick I Barbarossa (1152–90), Conrad III’s nephew and successor, but also Henry II of England, (1154–89) talked of taking the cross but failed to do so. Instead, in 1166 and 1185 the French and English kings agreed to levies on income as well as property to help Outremer, the first European income taxes. By the 1180s, Henry II, a close relative of the Jerusalem kings, had salted away a considerable treasure in Jerusalem supposedly to await his arrival. When in 1177–8, Count Philip of Flanders led a substantial army in the Holy Land chiefly drawn from northern France, he fell out with the Jerusalem government and his campaign in northern Syria proved ineffectual, fuelling western disenchantment. The increasingly dysfunctional internal politics of the kingdom of Jerusalem after the accession of the adolescent leper Baldwin IV (1174) presented particular challenges to visiting crusaders.44 Either, like Philip of Flanders, they came with sufficient forces to dictate their own policy that might not fit local plans; or they brought with them contingents too small to alter the military balance in Outremer.

  The Holy Land still offered career advancement for nobles and clerics with limited prospects in the west. The pious and those obligated by penance, punishment or oaths still sought Jerusalem. William Marshal, the future Regent of England (1216–19), went east in the mid-1180s to fulfil the crusade vow of his dead master, Henry, the eldest son of Henry II (d. 1183). The north Italian nobleman William of Montferrat was attracted by the promise of a royal marriage to Baldwin IV’s sister Sybil and heir in 1176. The pilgrimage trade still flourished, adding to the growth in the commercial profits of Italian cities whose fleets still underpinned Outremer’s survival. However, short of a defining crisis in Outremer, European politics precluded the necessary diplomatic consensus for a new grand expedition. The papacy was involved in a series of disputes with potential crusade leaders, most draining and damaging being those with Frederick Barbarossa from 1159 to the early 1180s over power in Italy, but also with Henry II of England over his struggle with Archbishop Thomas Becket of Canterbury over church jurisdiction in the 1160s. England only emerged from a long civil war in the mid-1150s. Louis VII and his successor Philip II (1180–1223) conducted a near-permanent feud with Henry II who, as duke of Normandy and Aquitaine and count of Anjou also ruled most of western France. Successive ineffectual treaties between the contestants included mutual agreements to depart on crusade, convenient diplomatic cover rather than binding commitment. In Italy, Frederick Barbarossa’s attempts to assert imperial rule met decades of local opposition that drew in the rulers of Sicily as well as the papacy. The maritime cities remained willing partners but not initiators of an eastern crusade. The failure to take advantage of a papal and Outremer-backed Byzantine alliance in the 1170s represented an opportunity that, after Manuel I’s defeat by the Turks at Myriokephalon in 1176 and death in 1180, followed by the overthrow of the pro-western Greek regime in 1182, did not recur.

  Revulsion at the failed Second Crusade did not abolish interest in the Holy Land. Surviving vernacular literature, much of it critical of the antics of crusaders, kept both the images and stories of holy war in the east alive, reflecting continued interest and understanding. Outremer remained a focus of absentee religious devotion and occasional pious chivalric self-fulfilment. General understanding of holy war remained: reward for fighting for the faith. An assumption of Outremer’s permanence naturally grew with the passage of time and the mundane reality of contact through pilgrimage, immigration and trade, consolidating a normalisation of attitudes. Outremer became just another in the community of states in Christendom, elevated by its status not its predicament, its demands assessed on politics not eschatological transcendence. The traditions and memories of past crusades did not disappear. Physical mementos did not lose their attraction. Outside academic refinement, ecclesiastical rules or political calculation, popular understanding, for example of the act of taking the cross, persisted, providing a receptive audience to the dramatic call to arms in 1187 when the sudden collapse of Outremer turned general sentiment into shocked action.

  SECOND CRUSADE MANUSCRIPTS

  Chroni
cle accounts of crusades can provide a barometer of contemporary responses. The explosion of texts concerning the First Crusade told its own story not just of the initial reception of those startling events but, in subsequent copying and circulation, of how the memorialised narratives continued to be used in promoting later expeditions and encouraging crusading commitment more generally.45 The reverse is also evident. A dismal crusade left fewer immediate literary traces and even less succeeding interest. Contemporary written accounts of the Second Crusade (1145–8) exemplify this, while simultaneously demonstrating the often precarious and random bases of modern historical information. The most detailed accounts of any parts of the crusade cover the siege of Lisbon in 1147 and Louis VII’s campaign to Antioch in 1147–8. They only survive in a single manuscript each without which our knowledge of events would be both very diminished and very different.

  The De expugnatione Lyxbonensi (The Siege of Lisbon) survives in one messy copy written on poor parchment probably dating from the 1160s or 1170s, now bound into a volume of other texts collected in the sixteenth century by Archbishop Matthew Parker of Canterbury and in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.46 Both its original authorship and subsequent provenance are obscure, although the dedicatee (Osbert, clerk of Bawdsey in Suffolk) and probably the author (‘R’ in the manuscript) came from the circle of a prominent East Anglian family, the Glanvills, one of whom, Hervey of Glanvill, led a contingent of crusaders at Lisbon.47 The text is in a short book form, a libellus, familiar from texts that lay behind First Crusade chroniclers. It describes the course of a North Sea crusade fleet between May and October 1147, from assembly at Dartmouth to the successful completion of the Lisbon siege. Composed in a common narrative epistolary format, despite its apparent eyewitness immediacy, the text’s content is artfully composed, shot through with tropes of canon law, classical and scriptural allusion, and contemporary arguments for holy war. When recording one of Hervey of Glanvill’s speeches to the troops, in a marginal note the text warns the reader that these were not his actual words.48 The general accuracy of the narrative finds some corroboration from a much shorter German account, also in letter form.49 Without the survival of the sole manuscript, we would know little about the Dartmouth commune or details of how the crusaders were hired to besiege Lisbon, and less about the organisation of such fleets and armies or the cultural penetration of central themes of crusade ideology and advocacy in the mid-twelfth century.

  60. De expugnatione Lyxbonensi.

  The sole manuscript of Odo of Deuil’s account of the crusade of Louis VII of France from Christmas 1145 to his arrival in Antioch in March 1148, De profectione Ludovici VII in orientem (The Journey of Louis VII to the East), is also couched in the context of a letter, in this case to Odo’s monastic superior Abbot Suger of St Denis. Odo claimed to be providing material for the abbot’s putative biography of King Louis.50 Twelfth-century St Denis had established itself as a centre for royalist historiography. Odo (d. 1162), who served as one of King Louis’ household chaplains on crusade, wrote within this tradition, placing the king at the dramatic and didactic heart of the narrative as an exemplar of Christian kingship and personal virtue whose piety prevailed over personal mistakes and extreme challenges. The work’s lack of circulation and its critical appraisals of the crusaders’ actions have led some modern critics to wonder, perhaps implausibly, whether the text is a contemporary literary fiction critiquing crusading ideology and practice. To a standard scriptural and classical education, Odo, who succeeded Suger as abbot of St Denis in 1151, added close awareness of chronicles of the First Crusade, a copy of one of which he took with him on the journey east. Yet Odo’s work led nowhere. Suger died before using it; other writers either ignored or did not encounter it. It survives in a single later (c. 1200) high-class manuscript, probably copied at the Cistercian abbey of Clairvaux in whose library it was until the French Revolution.51

  61. Seal of King Louis VII of France.

  The survival of these two unique texts allows detailed insight into singular perspectives on just two limited parts of the campaigns of the Second Crusade. While numerous other sources exist, none is as full or seemingly immediate. If these two solitary manuscripts had not survived, our knowledge of the crusade would have been at once severely curtailed and more balanced. Thus they can stand for the study of much of the crusades: inverted triangles of imposing interpretive superstructures perched on narrow evidential support.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE THIRD CRUSADE AND THE REINVENTION OF CRUSADING, 1187–1198

  On 4 July 1187 a 20,000-strong Frankish army led by King Guy of Jerusalem (1186–92) was destroyed near Hattin in the hills above the Sea of Galilee by superior forces commanded by Sultan Saladin of Egypt and Damascus. The battle was long and hard fought; the Frankish defeat was total, leaving Outremer denuded of troops, money and morale. Within three months, all bar one of the major cities and ports of the kingdom of Jerusalem had been captured or surrendered, their Frankish populations becoming either refugees or slaves. In most places, resistance was absent, forlorn or minimal. Jerusalem itself, crowded with displaced Franks, capitulated on terms after a sharp siege on 2 October. The great castles of the interior succumbed one by one; the Hospitallers at Belvoir held out until January 1189, Montreal in the desert beyond the Dead Sea until May 1189; and, thanks to some clever if desperate diplomatic shadow boxing by its Arabic-speaking lord Reynald of Sidon, Beaufort on the River Litani above Tyre until April 1190, by which time the verdict of Hattin was being challenged in the sand dunes before Acre. Only Tyre remained of the Frankish cities of the kingdom of Jerusalem, saved in the summer of 1187 by the fortuitous arrival of a western adventurer with close connections with the east, Conrad of Montferrat. Saladin’s 1188 campaign continued the rout, reducing northern Outremer to Tripoli, a tower in Tortosa, the castles of Margat and Crac des Chevaliers and the city of Antioch itself. Saladin’s conquest of Outremer provoked the largest international western European military enterprise of the whole Middle Ages.

  62. The Horns of Hattin.

  The Fall of Outremer

  The fall of Outremer in 1187–8 was neither predicted nor predictable. The shock in the west was seismic. Even in the Near East, Saladin’s triumph appeared to some, including the Abbasid caliph, unexpected and not entirely welcome.1 Within Outremer, despite acute political difficulties, many had retained confidence in the Franks’ survival, famously witnessed by the building programme still underway in 1187 at the Church of the Annunciation at Nazareth. To escape the attention of Saladin’s conquerors, newly carved but not yet installed capitals were buried, suggesting hopes for Frankish recovery even in the depths of disaster.2 Two years of intense factional conflict over the succession and control of government in Jerusalem after the death of Baldwin IV in 1185 had threatened the unity of the kingdom, provoking near civil war. However, the army that King Guy led in Galilee in July 1187 drew on a full muster across the kingdom, with contingents from Tripoli and Antioch. While poisonous relationships among the high command complicated strategy and tactics, the link between political dysfunction and defeat at Hattin is not simple, clear or direct.

  The failure of a Jerusalem embassy to western Europe led by Patriarch Heraclius of Jerusalem in 1184–5 to elicit either substantial military aid or a new candidate for the throne threw the kingdom back on its own resources. While commerce and religious tourism thrived, the nobility and government struggled to meet growing expenses of military readiness. To cover costs of defence, in 1183, a general census of all subjects had led to the levy of a general tax on income and property on the whole population, falling, in the way of such things, disproportionately on the poorer. Lordships and castles were increasingly transferred to wealthy religious corporations, especially the Military Orders, and the crown. At the same time as this increased the importance of royal patronage, consistent or effective royal leadership was eroded by the declining health of Baldwin IV and the succession of the child king Ba
ldwin V (1185). Factional infighting revolved around the succession to the crown; the strategy to combat Saladin; assertion of independence by the great lordships of the kingdom; and personal political rivalries.

  The future succession to the crown excited three factions: those of Baldwin IV’s elder sister, Sybil, and her husband Guy of Lusignan; of Baldwin’s younger half-sister Isabel and the family of her mother the dowager queen Maria’s second husband, Balian of Ibelin; and of Raymond III of Tripoli, allied to the Isabel faction, but with royal designs of his own as Baldwin IV’s first cousin once removed and, after the death of young Baldwin V in 1186, the closest male heir to the throne. Married to the heiress to the rich lordship of Galilee, as intermittent regent for Baldwin IV and V, Raymond, who had spent a decade in Muslim captivity (1164–74), relied on truces with Saladin, including one of four years in 1185 which meant that the Franks failed to take advantage of Saladin’s near-mortal illness in the winter of 1185–6. The state of royal finances and the vulnerability of Raymond’s agrarian estates in Galilee may have encouraged this approach: his enemies accused him of treachery. An alternative strategy called for aggression not diplomacy. Despite setbacks in northern Outremer, the kingdom of Jerusalem had retained most of its territorial integrity even after the unification of Muslim Syria with Egypt after 1174. The Jerusalemites maintained confidence in their military strength. Saladin’s armies had been defeated at Montgisard in 1177 and Le Forbelet in 1182, the year he failed to take Beirut. Twice in 1183 the Jerusalem host had forced Saladin to withdraw, first from a siege of Kerak and then by outfacing his army in Galilee. The leading exponent of taking the attack to the enemy, Raynald of Châtillon, lord of Transjordan and hero of the Montgisard victory, orchestrated dramatic raids on ports on the Red Sea in 1183 which, while militarily insignificant, threatened severe damage to Saladin’s prestige. Like Raymond, Raynald’s policy chimed with his particular self-interest, as revenues in his desert lordship came from predation on passing caravans.