The World of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  The Failure of Recovery

  There was no return. Despite loud ululations, the loss of Outremer re-inforced perceptions of the immense task of reconquest, now discussed in terms of budgets, manpower, training, logistics, intelligence and diplomacy as much as faith and devotion. Pope Nicholas IV (1288–92) authorised another ecclesiastical tenth and, like Gregory X, appealed for advice, some of which proved very detailed, accompanied with illustrative, if not particularly useful maps.18 Any attempt to coordinate a new crusade was wrecked by the fractious politics of the 1290s: the War of the Sicilian Vespers spluttered on; Philip IV of France (1285–1314) fought Edward I of England over Gascony, challenged papal authority over the French Church and failed to resolve tensions with Flanders; Edward I became embroiled in trying to dominate then annex Scotland; Pope Boniface VIII (1294–1303) used a crusade against his Italian rivals, the Colonna. News of the victory of the Mongol Il-Khan Ghazan (1295–1304) over the Mamluks, and his brief re-occupation of Syria (1299–1300) in alliance with Christian Cilician Armenia, provoked illusory optimism.19 Diplomacy continued. The Templars briefly occupied the island of Ruad off Tortosa (1300–3). Prospects for an anti-Mamluk coalition with the Persian Mongols proved a mirage.

  Nonetheless, planning, advice and research into the recovery of the Holy Land continued to flourish. A strong literary tide of ‘recovery literature’ only ebbed with the outbreak of the Hundred Years War between France and England in the late 1330s, leaving an increasingly attenuated tradition that persisted for generations. While the possibility of re-occupying the Holy Land had long ceased to be practical, instead it was partly refashioned into a metaphor or allegory for the reform of Christendom.20 The fourteenth century saw only three major attempts to organise a new international crusade to reverse the decision of 1291 – under Clement V (1305–14); by Philip VI of France (1328–50) in the 1330s; and by Peter I of Cyprus (1359–69) during a lull in the Anglo-French wars in the 1360s. Only the last produced military action, an attack on Alexandria in 1365. Sporadic raids on the Levant littoral continued into the early fifteenth century, and Mamluk resources remained a subject of concern for the defenders of Frankish Cyprus and for western merchants. Nevertheless the expansion of Turkish emirates in the Aegean and the subsequent rapid emergence of the Ottoman Turkish Empire in Asia Minor and the Balkans in the second half of the fourteenth century rendered the recovery of the Holy Land a second-order objective even before the Cypriot-Mamluk treaty of 1370 effectively brought the Palestine crusades to an end.

  Clement V and Philip IV

  Clement V attempted to use the Holy Land crusade as a means to restore the papacy’s position after damaging conflicts during Boniface VIII’s reign had seen a dramatic collapse in Franco-papal relations, which ended with the pope being manhandled by agents of the French king at Anagni in 1303. France, with its substantial resources, direct access to Mediterranean ports and public devotion to the legacy of St Louis (canonised 1297), remained central to any scheme for a major new eastern campaign. With Philip IV of France asserting an increasingly strident quasi-imperial form of royal sovereignty in the Church as well as the State, Clement found he had little room to manoeuvre, especially once Philip demanded papal support as he began to persecute the Templars in 1307. The Templar affair, which dominated Franco-papal relations between 1307 and 1312 (see ‘The End of the Templars’, p. 380), and prompted fresh proposals for the recovery of the Holy Land. French courtiers and hangers-on developed ideas for a French-led crusade that conveniently served extravagant claims of royal supremacy. Shows of papal independence were greeted with threats and bullying. While consistently and possibly sincerely proclaiming his devotion to the cause of the Holy Land, Philip failed to contribute to the independent Hospitaller crusade of 1309. Ostensibly designed to relieve Cilician Armenia and blockade Egypt, in line with current strategic orthodoxy, this planned crusade attracted considerable popular enthusiasm across north-west Europe but, lacking sufficient logistical resources, failed to employ the masses who had taken the cross. The small professional expedition that did embark in 1310 delivered nothing more than completion of the Hospitaller conquest of the Greek island of Rhodes, the Order’s front-line bolt hole to escape the fate of the Templars.

  Clement resorted to the familiar precedent of calling a general council of the Church that linked the crusade with wider church reform as well as the immediate crisis of the Templars. Although having to accept the suppression rather than condemnation of the Templars, Philip IV effectively, if temporarily, secured their funds and stood as the main beneficiary of a new crusade sexennial church tithe agreed by the council. The king assumed leadership of the proposed enterprise, in 1313 taking the cross with his three sons, son-in-law, Edward II of England, and large numbers of French nobles and members of the Parisian urban elite. The promise of 1313 soon vanished. In 1314, Philip IV died as did Clement V (leading to a two-year papal interregnum), and Edward II was defeated by the Scots at Bannockburn. The following year saw the start of a catastrophic northern European famine (1315–22). Yet the French court remained committed beyond rhetorical clichés and appropriation of church funds, despite a disruptively rapid succession of monarchs (Louis X, 1314–16; Philip V, 1316–22; Charles IV, 1322–8). Philip V consulted crusade veterans and experts and floated the idea of a lay crusade tax; plans for a relief force to beleaguered Cilician Armenia were briefly entertained by Charles IV in 1323.21 Such activity stimulated a wealth of written commentary, plans, studies and advice on the recovery of the Holy Land, as well as the production and collection of literary and historical crusade-related manuscripts in and around the French court, an interest that sustained fresh plans for a general crusade in the 1330s.22

  123. Cilician Armenia, a continental crossroads: Archbishop John of Cilicia in 1287 wearing a robe decorated with a Chinese dragon.

  Planning the Recovery of the Holy Land

  Advice on recovering the Holy Land fell into several categories, from visions of transforming the world to details of ships’ biscuits, occasionally in the same work. Usually framed by religious, missionary, political or commercial interests, most considered some or all of the means to conduct long-distance military campaigns: geography, routes, strategy, diplomacy, recruitment, training, fund-raising, taxation, wages, weaponry, shipping, logistics, implications for trade, intelligence on the enemy, arrangements for the rule of a reconquered Outremer. While much advice between 1270 and 1340 comprised special-interest lobbying, some was commissioned by popes, such as Gregory X, Nicholas IV or Clement V, or by putative crusade commanders, such as Count Louis of Clermont (c. 1280–1342), a grandson of Louis IX, who asked Marseilles for detailed information on shipping in 1318. Writers included kings (James I of Aragon, Charles II of Sicily, Henry II of Cyprus); Hospitallers (Master Fulk of Villaret and a former prisoner of war in Egypt, the Englishman Roger of Stanegrave); the last Master of the Templars (James of Molay); mendicants with experience of the east (the Franciscans Fidenzio of Padua and Galvano of Levanto; the Dominican William Adam); associates of the French court (Philip IV’s minister William of Nogaret, the Norman lawyer Pierre Dubois, Bishop William de Maire of Angers and the southern French Bishop Durand of Mende); maritime corporations (Marseilles and Venice); merchants (most notably an indefatigable Venetian lobbyist Marino Sanudo Torsello); visionaries (such as Ramon Lull); and an Armenian prince, Hethoum (or Hayton) of Gorigos.23

  Beneath the gloss of piety and sectional parti pris certain general features were agreed: Christian peace; united leadership; the destruction of Mamluk power in Egypt; the massive costs, many times royal and papal annual revenues; effective sea power. The need for disciplined professional troops was emphasised, at least for any preliminary campaign (known as a passagium particulare) that most advocated to secure bridgeheads for the mass crusade of conquest (passagium generale). Knowledge of Egyptian and western Asian politics, geography and resources was considered a desideratum. It was to be supported by reference to or – in the ca
se of a Franciscan friar, Fidenzio of Padua, and a Genoese doctor, Galvano of Levanto, in the late thirteenth century, and the Venetian merchant Marino Sanudo in the early fourteenth – the inclusion of maps or detailed navigational charts known as portolans.25 Some writers went into minute detail. Sanudo advised on everything from the prime season for felling timber for ships, to detailed estimated annual naval and military budgets, to precise calculations of crusaders’ daily consumption of biscuits, wine, meat, cheese and beans. While such information had been available from earlier arrangements with troops and shippers, its collation provided an unprecedented resource of information, some of which, notably the level of expense, was distinctly off-putting. The range of advice was impressive, as in Guy of Vigevano’s tract of 1335, Texaurus Regis Franciae, which combined fanciful illustrated war machines with practical advice on maintaining healthy ears, eyes, teeth and diet, and how to avoid poisoning. Guy, physician to Queen Joan of France, dedicated his work to his employer’s husband, Philip VI, then engaged in trying to put some of these plans into action.

  THE END OF THE TEMPLARS

  The destruction of the Order of the Temple of Solomon, the Templars, between 1307 and 1314 provides one of the most dramatic, notorious and sordid episodes in the civil history of the western European Middle Ages. Despite contemporary slanders and later fantasies, the only sinister aspects in the process against the Templars came from the malignancy of their persecutors and the craven subservience of church authorities. As the fortunes of Outremer careered from dire to hopeless, the reputation of the Military Orders inevitably came under scrutiny. Given their history of rivalry, some argued that the Orders should amalgamate the better to provide moral as well as military leadership against the infidel. The loss of their final bases on the Levant mainland caused the Templars to move headquarters to Cyprus. From there, they continued to harass the Mamluks. With extensive estates and banking interests across Christendom, the Order remained prominent in political establishments throughout Europe, not least in France. The sudden coordinated arrest of all Templars in France by royal officers and confiscation of their property on Friday 13 October 1307 therefore came as a surprise and shock.

  The French king, Philip IV (1285–1314), claimed he was acting on behalf of the Church to eradicate gross misconduct and heretical beliefs within the secretive order. Charges levelled by Philip’s aggressive, sanctimonious and mendacious legal team included denial of Christ, spitting on the cross, idol worship, and a range of sanctioned homosexual activities and indecent kissing. In a technique later familiar from twentieth-century show trials, to achieve well-publicised confessions torture was freely applied, including on the Templar leadership. Although accepting the fait accompli of the arrests and ordering the detention of Templars across Christendom, Pope Clement V (1305–14) remained sceptical, suspending the inquiry (February 1308) after the Master of the Temple, James of Molay, revoked his earlier confession in front of cardinals sent to investigate. This provoked a sustained French campaign of political bullying, including more Templar forced confessions, until the pope renewed inquiries (summer 1308), one conducted by papal commissioners and another by local bishops. More confessions were extracted by French bishops in 1309, but where torture was not threatened or used, as mostly in England, Scotland and Ireland, Templars refused to admit to the charges. In 1310, Templar resistance to French persecution grew into organised denial of the accusations and the earlier confessions made under duress. The French government reacted savagely. On 12 May 1310 fifty-four Templars were burnt to death outside Paris after being condemned as relapsed heretics by the archbishop of Sens, a royal stooge; Templar resistance leaders were imprisoned or vanished. Increasingly, the issue became less about Templar guilt than about church authority versus royal power; defence of the former demanded accommodation with the latter, with the Templars paying the price.

  At a general council of the Church at Vienne (1311–12), despite widespread opposition, Clement, constrained by the attendance of Philip IV and his army, imposed a pusillanimous compromise. On the grounds that their reputation had been irretrievably damaged, the Templars were not condemned but suppressed (March 1312). Their property was granted to the Order of St John, the Hospitallers (May 1312), from whom, over the next few years the French crown extracted over 300,000 livres tournois in supposed compensation for costs incurred by the arrest and pursuit of the fallen Order. Some Templars were or remained imprisoned; others were despatched to retirement in religious houses; some returned to their families and the minor aristocratic obscurity from which many had come. Finally, in Paris, on 18 March 1314, the four leading Templars still in custody were sentenced by papal judges to perpetual imprisonment. Two, James of Molay and Geoffrey of Charny, protested their innocence and that of their Order. King Philip immediately rushed them to be burnt at the stake on the Ile des Javiaux (now the Quai Henri IV) in the Seine as relapsed heretics.

  124. The burning of James of Molay.

  125. The destruction of the Templar Order.

  Two questions hang over the trial and suppression of the Templars: the truth of the charges and the motives of Philip IV and his ministers. The only sustained evidence of guilt came from confessions extracted under torture or the threat of torture. Despite some modern Roman Catholic apologists and literary hucksters, few give them much credence. The Templars, like other closed institutions, may well have developed idiosyncratic rituals hard to explain to outsiders, but reflecting a homosocial not homosexual environment. As with other religious orders, wealth was no necessary bar to the sincere performance of vocation. Without torture, inquiries failed to uncover coherent evidence of doctrinal unorthodoxy beyond the levels of eccentricity and ignorance common throughout Christian society. Why then the persecution? And why just the Temple? Part of the answer lay in French politics and finance. Since the twelfth century, the Templars had played a central role in the administration of royal finance, providing a tempting target for Philip IV’s cash-strapped but hugely ambitious centralising regime. Whether Philip himself was a useful idiot or evil genius remains contested, but if, as is likely, he played the lead in activating the anti-Templar policy, it is just possible that he sincerely believed in their demonic quality. The attack also played directly into his government’s wider assertion of the French monarchy as a rival if not superior to the papacy as guardian and leader of Christendom, a policy that had led to the attempted abduction of Pope Boniface VIII in 1303, sustained bullying of Clement V, and insistence, at the council of Vienne, on a new crusade with associated taxes under French command.

  For the crusades, the consequences of the Templar affair involved the other international Military Orders’ rapid reassertion of their primary military role and relocation of their headquarters: the Hospitallers to Rhodes (1306–10) and the Teutonic Knights to Marienburg in the Baltic (1309). Inevitably there were loose ends. In 1340 a German pilgrim in the Holy Land encountered two ex-Templars, former prisoners of the Mamluks after 1291, living near the Dead Sea. They knew nothing of the grim fate of their colleagues. Persuaded to return to the west, they found themselves welcomed at the papal court.24

  126. A plan for a crusade siege tower by Guy of Vigevano.

  Philip VI’s Crusade

  The crusading legacy of St Louis continued to frame projections of French regality, creating tension between political necessity, public expectation and operational possibility. As the first French king of a new cadet dynasty, Philip VI of Valois (1328–50) embraced the crusade between 1331 and 1336 to bolster his legitimist credentials at home and international standing abroad. He may also have believed it was the right thing to do. Preparations included diplomacy that stretched to the eastern Mediterranean; consulting current and past expert advice; scrutiny of the financial records of Louis IX’s crusades; negotiations with Pope John XXII (1316–34) over money from the Church; and cultivating domestic support through a series of public assemblies at which the crusade was preached. Even knightly salaries were determ
ined. Courtiers and nobles commissioned luxury copies and translations of crusade histories equally as icons of commitment as for scholarly enlightenment.26 In July 1333, Philip was created ‘Rector and Captain-General’ of the crusade by the pope and took the cross the following October. Crucial to Philip’s commitment was the pope’s grant of a new sexennial tithe, the last such general ecclesiastical crusade tax. Much diplomatic wrangling concerned Philip’s access to these funds. While assisting a joint Hospitaller, Byzantine and Venetian naval league against the Turks in the Aegean (1332–4) and considering help to Armenia, Philip appears to have decided on a traditional unitary mass campaign, a so-called passagium generale, without a coordinated preliminary expedition favoured by contemporary strategic orthodoxy. Departure was fixed for 1336.

  However, the whole scheme rested on the impractical premise of international peace. Papal hostilities against Italian enemies and suspicions of the German emperor Louis IV after his invasion of Italy in 1328–30 and Spanish indifference were compounded by the deteriorating relations between England, France and Scotland. Edward III of England (1327–77), involved in the French crusade plans from 1332, proved to be the first English monarch since Stephen (1135–54) not to take the cross. Another monarch with something to prove, his bellicose attempts to impose his own candidate as king of Scotland (1332–5) in place of Philip’s ally David Bruce reignited Anglo-French hostility, provoking Philip to link the crusade with agreement over Scotland. This reassertion of traditional rivalries quickly pushed the crusade to the margins of practical politics. The accession of the austere and meticulous Pope Benedict XII (1334–42) further complicated Philip’s schemes, as the new pope was vigilant lest church taxes were diverted away from the crusade. With prospects for an eastern expedition receding and suspicion of French motives and misappropriation of resources growing, Benedict cancelled the crusade in 1336, paradoxically hastening the outbreak of the Anglo-French war he had tried to avoid. The French crusade fleet was diverted to the Channel, and crusade funds misappropriated to pay for French armies, giving the English the excuse to brand Philip’s crusade intentions disingenuous and bogus. Although Philip had encountered delay and difficulty in providing men, materiel and money, his emotional, ideological, political and diplomatic investment in the crusade appears serious. However, the collapse of relations with England destroyed the necessary conditions for such a huge and risky enterprise, a situation rendered near permanent by the subsequent Hundred Years War.31