The World of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  The 1270 crusade was expertly organised. Repeating techniques familiar from the 1240s, finance came from a French clerical tithe, legacies, redemptions, taxes on towns and tenants, expropriation of Jewish funds and sales of private assets. Ships were commissioned from Genoa, Marseilles and ports in Catalonia. As in 1248–9, the king underwrote the expenses of leading companions, including the duke of Burgundy and the counts of Poitiers, Champagne, Brittany and Flanders. English and Gascon involvement was attracted by loans of 70,000 livres tournois to Louis’ English nephew, Edward, the future Edward I. As well as the usual recruiting devices of kinship, lordship, friendship and geographic association, formal contracts were issued on both sides of the English Channel specifying pay and other rewards for a stated number of knights: Louis paid for a contracted core of 325 knights; Edward paid for one of 225. In total, a combined force of between 10,000 and 15,000 could have been assembled. Beyond France, recruits came from Frisia, the Netherlands, Aragon, Scotland, England and the kingdom of Sicily, now ruled by Louis’ brother, Charles of Anjou. Louis secured the adherence of James I of Aragon. In England, Edward and his brother Edmund took the cross in 1268; in 1270 they managed to extract a parliamentary tax on moveables of a twentieth, perhaps worth £30,000, the first lay subsidy granted to the English crown since 1237.8

  120. Baibars and his court.

  Yet, despite central contracts and royal funding, the new crusade was a disjointed affair. Louis planned to depart in May 1270 and did so in July; James of Aragon had embarked in June 1269; Charles of Anjou only took the cross in February 1270, starting to equip his fleet in July when his brother was already at sea en route for Tunis; Edward only set out from England in August 1270, arriving at Tunis in November just as the crusaders were packing up to leave; and his brother Edmund did not set out until the winter of 1270–1. Storms wrecked the Aragonese fleet, only a few ships reaching Acre. Recruitment in France fell short of initial estimates. The long papal interregnum from the death of Clement IV in November 1268 to the election of Gregory X in September 1271 exactly coincided with final preparations and the campaign itself. In 1268 or 1269 the original French plan for direct aid for the Holy Land and another assault on Egypt was replaced by a scheme to attack Tunis, confusingly an ally of the king of Aragon. Despite the declared muster ports in Sardinia and western Sicily, the fiction of an eastern objective was maintained, the public announcement of Tunis as the destination only coming after Louis had embarked in July 1270.

  As a staging post for an invasion of Egypt, Tunis may have appeared more convenient than Cyprus. Commercial and diplomatic relations between western Mediterranean Christian powers and the emirs of Tunis were of long standing, alternately of alliance, competition and conflict. A Tunisian embassy was in negotiation with Louis in 1269, while Louis’ Dominican contacts may have argued that Tunis and north Africa were ripe for evangelism, a common optimistic mendicant trope in this period. Although possibly suiting the Sicilian ambitions of Charles of Anjou, Louis’ decision may have owed more to a combination of a mendicant-inspired commitment to convert non-Christians, a vague strategic hope of denying Egypt an ally, and securing the north African route to attack the Nile that had been suggested since the early twelfth century. The Tunis crusade reflected lasting networks of contact, commerce, competition and exchange between the powers around the western Mediterranean that belied any two-dimensional model of religious conflict.

  Louis’ departure followed the precedents of 1147, 1190 and 1248, with the king receiving the oriflamme and pilgrim’s scrip and staff at St Denis (14 March 1270), and that of 1248 with him setting out from Paris as a barefoot penitent. Immediately things went wrong. At Aigues Mortes, commissioned ships arrived late and illness broke out in the army. After a stormy passage from Aigues Mortes to Sardinia (2–4 July), Louis, unsure of where he was, is said to have been shown a map of Cagliari and its situation, probably a Genese portolano, or navigational map, the first recorded instance of a crusader consulting a map or chart on campaign.9 After Tunis was revealed as the destination on 13 July, the French fleet made landfall on 17 July, the troops disembarking the next day before moving camp to Carthage a few miles away on 24 July to be nearer adequate water. Apart from some perfunctory skirmishing, operations stalled while the army waited for Charles of Anjou. Heat, poor food and dire sanitation soon sparked disease, typhus or dysentery, which ravaged the high command as well as the mass of the army. Louis (25 August 1270) and his son John Tristan (born at Damietta in the dark days of 1250) died; the king’s eldest son and successor Philip III fell seriously ill. When Charles of Anjou arrived in late August and assumed command, he had little option but to negotiate a withdrawal. With the Hafsid emir Mohammed eager to pay the crusaders to go away, terms were agreed (1 November) including an exchange of prisoners, agreement to allow Christian worship and evangelising in Tunis, and payment of 210,000 gold ounces (c. 500,000 livres tournois) of which Charles claimed a third. The crusaders, now reinforced by Edward of England, sailed for Sicily where a storm (15/16 November) destroyed dozens of ships and claimed over 1,000 lives. Thereafter, only Edward wished to continue to Acre. The convalescent Philip III returned to France with the remains of his father, brother, brother-in-law, wife and stillborn son. In Tunis, trading relations were soon restored with Sicily, Aragon and the Genoese.

  The Tunis campaign, in a traditional crusading perspective a disaster, tested but failed to break the resilience of the ideal. Louis’ death in August 1270 provided the crusade with a popular martyr, even if, when canonised in 1297 it was as a confessor, to his friend Joinville’s annoyance. In 1271 the cardinals elected the well-connected archdeacon of Liège, Tedaldo Visconti, as pope (Gregory X, 1271–6), while he was in Acre on crusade with Edward of England. His attempts to recruit western rulers to a new eastern expedition culminated in the Second Council of Lyons (1274).10 Meanwhile Edward, ignoring appeals to return home where his aged father Henry III was nearing death, sailed to Acre in the spring of 1271 with a small force, possibly only 1,000 strong, carried in thirteen ships, arriving on 9 May 1271. He remained for a year, being joined in September by his brother Edmund. Edward’s stay was little more than a morale-boosting promenade. He largely avoided the traps of local Frankish infighting but, apart from helping see off a Mamluk attack on Acre in December 1271 and a couple of raids into Acre’s hinterland, contributed nothing to alleviate Outremer’s predicament. His diplomatic links with the Mongol Il-Khan of Persia proved typically nugatory. Baibars had captured Crac des Chevaliers in April 1271 and was hardly deflected from his grand design: his emollient May 1272 truce with the Franks ignored Edward’s presence. Edward’s followers, including his brother Edmund (May 1272), began leaving. The famous attempt on Edward’s life by a Mamluk assassin in June provided the most memorable incident of his Holy Land crusade, which ended when Edward sailed from Acre in October 1272 leaving behind a small English garrison and a mountain of debts. Although Edward’s quixotic crusade had cost a vast sum (perhaps more than £100,000) for no concrete achievement, in terms of fame and honour the investment paid handsomely: for the rest of his life as King Edward I (1272–1307), with the Holy Land’s fate an inescapable feature of western diplomacy and public discussion, he remained the only western monarch who had actually been there to fight for the cross, a status he reinforced by taking the cross again in 1287.

  The Loss of the Holy Land

  Despite statements of intent, Edward I never returned east. By pleading, not entirely disingenuously, pressing business at home, he exposed a central contradiction in attempts to rescue or restore Outremer. The application of the resources of kingdoms to crusading had shown, in 1248–50 and 1270 as in 1188–90, how costs and administration could be covered. However, the more powerful monarchs became, the more extensive their domestic obligations. Expanding bureaucracies ensured that the huge expenses of Holy Land crusades were now dauntingly measurable: the financial accounts of Louis IX’s crusades were still being examined in the 1330s.11 E
xtensive discussion of practical problems provoked by repeated failure inspired ideas such as the amalgamation of the Military Orders to achieve economies of scale, but inevitably tempered political enthusiasm. Before the Second Council of Lyons (1274), Gregory X collected advice and information. This revealed the scale of the challenge and, equally inconvenient, the largely negative impact exerted by the diverse theatres of crusading on the Holy Land enterprise.

  Gregory X was committed to the relief of the Holy Land. On his election he preached to the text ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning’ (Psalm 137:5). The council he summoned to consider church reform and a new crusade, to be led by the pope himself, met at Lyons in May 1274. Armed with written and oral advice from a wide range of interested parties, the council produced the most complete programme for planning a new crusade yet achieved. The decree Constitutiones pro zeli fidei (18 May 1274) authorised indulgences, a trade embargo, a sexennial ecclesiastical tithe, and a voluntary lay poll tax. The collection of the church tax was organised into twenty-six collectories. Diplomatic provision included the council’s reception of Mongol ambassadors and a proposed union between the Roman and Greek Orthodox Churches negotiated with the Greek emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus (1261–85), part of his efforts to parry the Balkan ambitions of Charles of Anjou. Only in 1261 had Michael expelled the westerners from Constantinople, but he now needed allies against this new Mediterranean power. Yet only one western monarch attended, the veteran James I of Aragon, and even his offer of 500 knights and 2,000 infantry came to nothing. Following the council, preaching was authorised in September 1274 and Philip III of France, Charles of Anjou and the new king of Germany, Rudolf of Habsburg, took the cross in 1275. Large sums were raised, a departure date was fixed (April 1277), a papal fleet planned. Yet concerted political will was absent, as speakers at Lyons had warned.12 Impressive papal administrative reach failed to translate into action. The indifference of the Military Orders at Lyons spoke loudly. Gregory X’s crusade died with him in January 1276. The crusade tithes were redirected to papal crusades in Italy. Despite continued diplomacy, the Mongol alliance remained illusory. Church union foundered on rejection by the Greek Orthodox faithful. A pattern was set, copied in varying detail after the Council of Vienne (1311–12), in the 1330s and in the 1360s: papal or royal initiatives; public endorsement; diplomacy, fund-raising, administrative preparations; then delay, distraction and cancellation. As the Italian Franciscan commentator Salimbene of Adam remarked: ‘it does not seem to be the Divine Will that the Holy Sepulchre should be recovered’.13

  By 1272, mainland Outremer had been reduced to a few castles and ports. Despite Christian bases in Cyprus and Cilician Armenia and maritime superiority, recovery was stymied by western inertia and Baibars’ systematic destruction of the harbours and coastal cities he had captured. The pause in attacks after Baibars’ 1272 treaty with the Franks followed by his death in 1277 combined with continuing Mongol ambitions in Syria to distract the Mamluks and delay Outremer’s final collapse. With the defeat of the Mongols at Homs in 1281 and the death of Abaqa, the expansionist Mongol Il-Khan of Persia, in 1282, Sultan Kalavun (1279–90) was given a free hand. Marqab fell in 1285; Latakia in 1287; and Tripoli in 1289, after 180 years of continuous Frankish rule, accompanied by a massacre and the demolition of the city’s defences. Although Acre still received aid, men and money, visiting crusaders, with their modest military entourages, and western-funded garrison troops could only observe, not counter the approaching end. Attempts by Charles of Anjou (1277–85) to absorb the kingdom of Jerusalem into a trans-Mediterranean empire exacerbated factional contests within Acre, while the War of the Sicilian Vespers from 1282 destroyed prospects of a united western crusade. Philip III of France died on crusade in 1285, but against Aragon not Egypt. Edward I was occupied with conquering Wales (to 1284) and the Scottish succession (from 1290). German involvement was compromised by the divisions left by the imperial interregnum (1250–73). After Charles of Anjou’s death in 1285, the restoration of unified rule in Acre under Henry II of Cyprus and I of Jerusalem did nothing to stem the crisis. No meaningful help came from the west.

  121. The fall of Tripoli, 1289.

  SIEGES

  The military history of the crusades is punctuated by decisive sieges, the commonest form of set-piece large-sale armed encounter in the Middle Ages. In the west they occurred in a landscape of castles; in the eastern Mediterranean in a world of cities. The course of crusades rested on sieges: Nicaea, Antioch, al-Bara, Ma’arrat al-Numan, Arqah, Jerusalem on the First Crusade; Lisbon and Damascus on the Second; Acre on the Third; Zara and Constantinople on the Fourth; Damietta on the Fifth and in 1249; Tunis in 1270. The fate of Outremer was similarly mapped by sieges, both in its establishment and demise: Jerusalem (1099) and the coastal ports from Jaffa (1099) to Tyre (1124) and Ascalon (1153); Jerusalem and Tyre (1187); Acre (1189–91); Beirut (1197); and the systematic Mamluk capture of cities and castles from 1265, including Antioch (1268) and Tripoli (1289), until the conclusive siege of Acre in 1291. Power in the region depended on urban centres and strategic strong-points, possession of which did not rest on rare pitched battles, Hattin excepted. The nature and conduct of sieges differed depending on whether the target was a walled city or a castle, as well as local topographical or architectural circumstances. Cities could rarely be completely sealed by blockade, while castles could more easily be deprived of provisions.

  However, three consistent factors determined the outcome of sieges: morale; numbers, especially of besiegers; and the availability or prospect of relief. The Franks’ successes on the First Crusade and in the twelfth century rested on their ability to resist land and sea relieving forces, as did their final victories at Acre in 1191 and Damietta in 1219. Throughout the twelfth century, Frankish sea-power, provided severally by Genoa, Pisa and Venice, played a vital role in effective investment of cities. Even the timbers of derelict ships could supply necessary materials for siege engines, from Jerusalem in 1099 onwards. The collapse of Outremer in 1187–8 and after 1265 was hastened as garrisons of even the strongest castles saw no prospect of relief. Such considerations obviously played directly to the morale of either side. Numerically, garrisons could be modest – a few score or hundreds at most in castles or a few thousand in cities – while besiegers tended to prevail if possessed of enough manpower to withstand inevitably heavy casualties, as with the constant western reinforcements at Acre in 1189–91 or during the later thirteenth century when Mamluk attackers massively outnumbered the besieged Franks: at Acre in 1291, it has been calculated, by 11 to 1.14 Numbers also dictated tactics. The Franks, usually needing to preserve troops even during large crusades, tended to opt for the slower technique of surrounding, harrying and starving opponents into submission, while the Turks and Mamluks, with greater access to additional local forces, adopted more aggressive direct assaults, more able to sustain the ensuing casualties. Successful Frankish sieges tended to last months (Antioch, 1097–8; Tyre, 1124; Damietta, 1217–19) and even years (Acre: 653 days, 1189–91); Turkish and especially Mamluk operations, days and weeks (six weeks at Acre, 1291).

  122. Artillery, archery and assault in the thirteenth century.

  This was not due to very different siege weapons or tactics. All sides employed ladders; wooden siege towers on wheels or rollers; battering rams; and a range of artillery. Traction- or torsion-propelled throwing machines (mangonels and petraries) and, from the mid-twelfth century, counterweight trebuchet catapults capable of throwing horses or weights over 100kg were used by besiegers and defenders alike.15 They were considered so important that crusaders brought models with them by sea in 1191 and 1202. During their final push to eradicate Outremer in 1265–91, the Mamluks perfected their own massive versions, some, like a number of Frankish ones, prefabricated in transportable sections. Franks, Turks and Mamluks all used sappers, resistance to whom drove many aspects of castle defensive systems, such as elaborate talus (or glacis) stru
ctures that also kept siege engines at a distance. All siege warfare was conducted under a mutual hail of arrows and crossbow bolts. However, it appears that only the Franks’ enemies used varying forms of Greek Fire (a preparation of crude oil or naphtha; Byzantine Greek Fire comprised distilled crude oil). However generated, fire proved a very effective weapon in its own right, as gates and many defensive superstructures were wooden as were vulnerable, slow-moving or stationary siege engines. Various mixtures of vinegar were employed to combat flames, with uneven rates of success. However, for all the sophisticated technology, the outcome of sieges depended on the human element on both sides: adequate provisioning for both sides; starvation; disease; hope or prospect of relief; morale; weight of numbers; leadership. Most sieges included efforts to negotiate, not all successful or honest. Depending on the intent of the successful besiegers, defenders were massacred (Antioch in 1098; Jerusalem in 1099; the early Frankish conquests of coastal ports; Antioch in 1268; Acre in 1291); taken into captivity; allowed to leave; or even the civilian elements permitted to remain or return (Tyre in 1124). Castle garrisons most commonly agreed terms. As with any static military confrontation, opponents engaged in various forms of contact, not all violent or hostile.16

  The remaining Frankish lordships succumbed piecemeal, some, like Beirut, to temporary Mamluk clientage or shared lordship, others, as at Tripoli, to destruction. The final siege of Acre, prepared by Kalavun in 1290 and completed by his successor al-Ashraf Khalil, lasted from 6 April to 18 May 1291, before the city, pummelled by huge mangonels and overwhelmed by vastly superior numbers, fell amidst incandescent scenes of bravery, mayhem, butchery and despair. The fortified Templar quarter held out for a further ten days before being overrun. Frankish survivors were killed. On the sultan’s orders, the city was ‘razed to the ground’.17 By August, the last Frankish holdings on the mainland – Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, Tortosa and Athlit – had surrendered or been abandoned.