The World of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  MAPS

  The traditional image of crusaders heading off into the unknown directed only by hope and prayers is wholly untrue. From the beginning, their leaders knew where they were going and how to get there. They knew the world was a sphere and understood a tripartite continental division – Europe, Asia and Africa. The learned knew of the third-century BC Greek Eratosthenes’ nearly accurate calculation of the earth’s circumference of c. 25,000 miles. A thirteenth-century English monk was well aware of the equator where the sun stood exactly overhead twice a year. However, a sense of geography or knowledge of possible routes was not necessarily or primarily derived from or enshrined on maps. Crusaders’ information rested on memory (e.g. of pilgrims or crusade veterans), experience (e.g. of merchants or sailors), and oral testimony and written literary descriptions rather than visual cartography. From the First Crusade onwards, many chroniclers who had travelled on crusade, or recorded the witness of those who did, produced detailed itineraries of land and sea routes and times taken between cities or landfalls. By the time of the Third Crusade there existed a mass of detailed geographical, nautical and topographical information for planners to use. Nautical handbooks, such as the late twelfth-century Pisan On the existence of the coasts and form of our Mediterranean sea or the English De viis maris (Sea Journeys), exploited Arabic and Sicilian geographic texts. It is likely that some of this information was transcribed onto maps and charts, although none survives until a century later.

  However, pictorially visualising the world was not conditioned solely by practical utility. Rather, it operated at two levels, representation of the actual physical world initially being overshadowed by virtual, schematic mappae mundi, world maps. These depicted an idealised globe and portrayed images derived from the Bible or popular neo-classical fables, commonly placing Jerusalem at the centre of the world, illustrating religious or imaginative not geographical trigonometry. Mappae mundi were diagrammatic and indicative of an orderly imagined world, not intended as accurate guides to the physical world but rather as illustrations of scripture or history. However, their Jerusalem-centred vision of the world matched the idealism of the crusade. Mirroring chroniclers’ and preachers’ depictions of the cosmic centrality of the Holy City, they suggested the scale of the crusaders’ task and may have been employed in crusade promotion: by the mid-thirteenth century, crusade preachers were being encouraged to acquaint themselves with mappae mundi. By this time, however, written travelogues were being illustrated and supplemented by maps. The English chronicler Matthew Paris produced detailed linear maps of pilgrim routes from England to southern Italy as well as maps of the Holy Land and the city of Acre festooned with text. Increasingly, stylised illustrative maps accompanied pilgrim narratives and crusade advice that proliferated in the later thirteenth century and beyond. In particular, the map accompanying the Dominican Burchard of Mount Sion’s detailed description of the Holy Land (1274–85) inspired a whole cartographical tradition.27

  127. The Hereford Mappa Mundi.

  128. Pietro Vesconte’s portolan for Marino Sanudo’s crusade advice, 1320s: a chart of the Near East.

  These maps were aids, more or less practical, for pilgrimages and religious devotion. More directly functional were the nautical charts that began to be produced in the later thirteenth century in the ports of Italy and the western Mediterranean. Known as portolan charts (from the Italian adjective portolani, ‘to do with ports’), they showed with some precision coastlines, ports, harbours and the distances between, connected with directional gridlines from a number of fixed points. Such charts supplemented the greater knowledge of winds and currents and the use from the twelfth century of compasses, chiefly employed when sun, moon or stars were not visible. Both navigation and forward planning became more informed if not more certain. The habit of creating and consulting maps reflected both practical needs and cultural developments that increased the role of writing and record-keeping, in this case visual, as evinced by the survival of larger numbers of mappae mundi and geographical handbooks from the time of the Third Crusade. However, the earliest explicit evidence for a crusade commander consulting a map, probably a portolan chart, dates from 1270 when Genoese sea captains were reported as showing Louis IX a chart of the port of Cagliari in Sardinia during the king’s stormy passage from Aigues Mortes en route to Tunisia.28

  In the specialist advice generated by the decline and fall of Outremer between 1270 and 1330, considerations of the geography of the Levant became central to discussions of military options and logistics. The irruption of the Mongols into Europe and western Asia in the thirteenth century opened new geographical as well as diplomatic horizons, underlining Europe’s inferior size relative to Asia and Africa. By the early fourteenth century, any potential leader of an eastern crusade could be expected to have consulted maps. Some of the earliest portolans were produced between c. 1310 and 1330 by a Genoese cartographer, Pietro Vesconte, working in Venice, many of whose maps were used by the Venetian crusade lobbyist Marino Sanudo Torsello (c. 1270–1343). When he presented his voluminous crusade tract the Liber Secretorum Fidelium Crucis (Book of the Secrets of the Faithful of the Cross) to Pope John XXII (1316–34) in 1321, Sanudo included a portfolio of maps of the world, the eastern Mediterranean and Asia and Palestine, plans of Acre and Jerusalem and five portolans of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Maps became an essential tool in Sanudo’s continuing campaign of persuasion into the 1330s, integral to, occasionally cross-referencing, his written texts, as with his grid-plan map of the Holy Land.29 These charts and maps demonstrated the twin pragmatic and prophetic cartographical traditions so appropriate for the promotion of the crusade. While Vesconte’s portolans represented the most up-to-date nautical charts, the map of Acre harked back to before 1291, and that of Jerusalem mixed modern topography with Biblical site-spotting. The plan of Palestine followed Burchard of Mount Sion’s combination of the Biblical past and physical present, deliberate or not, a metaphor for the crusade phenomenon as a whole.30

  129. The siege of Jerusalem, 1099, in a luxury copy of William of Tyre’s Historia commissioned by a member of Philip VI’s court.

  Alexandria, 1365, and the End of a Tradition

  Realpolitik determined the final stages of the Holy Land wars. By 1343–4, Pope Clement VI (1342–52), who had led Philip VI’s crusade propaganda campaign in the 1330s, was issuing licences to trade with Mamluk Egypt while simultaneously encouraging a campaign against Turkish predators in the Aegean. While lip service was still paid to the needs of the Holy Land in attempts to end the Anglo-French war, only with the long truce following the treaty of Brétigny (1360–9) did prospects for a new eastern expedition revive. The driving force was Peter I of Cyprus. As well as asserting a brand of energetic chivalric kingship, confronting Mamluk Egypt furthered Peter’s attempts to sustain Cypriot commercial interests in the Levant for which the dilapidated Palestinian ports and cities were peripheral. Economics not religion propelled Peter’s occupation of Armenian Gorhigos and Turkish Adalia on the southern coast of Asia Minor in 1360–1. Not a realistic strategic target, recovering the Holy Land nonetheless acted as a recruiting agent during a tour that Peter conducted between 1362 and 1365 across Italy, France, England, Flanders, Poland and Bohemia. At Avignon in March–April 1363, at a conference organised by Pope Urban V (1362–70), King Peter, John II of France (1350–64), Count Amadeus of Savoy, the Master of the Hospitallers and nobles from across western Europe (including an English crusade enthusiast Thomas Beauchamp, earl of Warwick) took the cross, preaching was instituted, indulgences offered, taxes proposed, and a legate appointed – the experienced diplomat Elias of Perigord, Cardinal Talleyrand.

  130. Armed galleys, like those of the anti-Turkish naval leagues and the planned passagium particulare.

  The momentum of Avignon soon dissipated. John II and Cardinal Talleyrand died in 1364. John’s successor, the cautious, pragmatic Charles V (1364–80), did not share his father’s crusading commitment. However
, by June 1365, Peter and the new legate, Pierre de Thomas (d. 1366), supported by papal subsidies, had assembled a polyglot force of perhaps 10,000 at Venice, including hired troops and recruits from France, England, Scotland and Geneva. Although the papal crusade bull had not distinguished between Mamluks and Turks, the Cypriot leadership took the bold decision to attack Alexandria, Egypt’s main and massively defended port. In one of the most spectacular military coups of the age, the city fell by storm to the crusaders on 10 October 1365 after just one day’s fighting. The following week was spent in massacre and pillage. However, the victorious crusaders immediately faced a familiar strategic conundrum of what to do next. Their army lacked the numbers, materiel or cohesion for a serious invasion of the Nile Delta or even, many thought, to defend their conquest. It was later claimed that the Cypriots wished to retain Alexandria as a bargaining tool, ostensibly for the restoration of Jerusalem. More likely, beyond securing enormous booty, they hoped to persuade the Mamluks to accommodate Cypriot trading interests, enhance the position of Famagusta as a Levantine entrepôt while also attracting friendly western European engagement in the region unseen for decades. Whatever the intention, the crusaders evacuated Alexandria on 16 October. Thereafter, the army soon dispersed. The next western European invasion of Egypt was led by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798.

  Beyond a glorious and memorialised triumph of western chivalry, and, one distant English observer noted, pushing up the price of spices,32 the sack of Alexandria failed to benefit Cyprus. Cypriot raids on the Levantine coast continued and Peter toured western Europe once more to drum up support in 1367–8, without much effect. More western concern was directed at the growing Ottoman threat, with a new crusading venture led by Amadeus of Savoy to the Dardanelles and the Black Sea in 1366–7. Yet in parallel, from 1366, Peter had begun negotiations with Egypt for a peace treaty. These continued despite his assassination in 1369. Pressure for a deal with Egypt came from Genoa and Venice as well as the Cypriot merchant community, all suffering from the commercial dislocation caused by the 1365 campaign and subsequent Cypriot raids on Levantine ports. Agreement was finally reached with the Mamluk sultanate by Cyprus, Genoa and the Hospitallers of Rhodes and Venice in October 1370. This marked the end of prospects, although not dreams, of the recovery of the Holy Land, three centuries after Gregory VII’s scheme to lead an army to Jerusalem and Urban II’s realisation of it. Regional conflict did not vanish. The remains of the Cilician Armenian kingdom were conquered by the Mamluks in 1374–5; the efforts of the exiled King Leo V (d. 1393) notwithstanding, no retaliation was forthcoming. The Great Schism (1378–1417) intervened. Despite the assertiveness of the 1360s, Cypriot trade, already in decline since the 1340s, was fatally compromised as the Genoese captured Famagusta in 1373 and Italian merchants increasingly traded directly with Syrian and Egyptian ports. A raid on the Syrian coast in 1403 by Jean le Maingre, Marshal Boucicaut, was under the Genoese colours, linked to their continued occupation of Famagusta rather than any lingering hopes for Jerusalem, now accessible to western Christians through organised and regulated pilgrim package tours.33

  The recovery of the Holy Land continued to haunt western Christian imagination, attract literary attention and colour diplomatic rhetoric into the sixteenth century.34 Glamorisation of the Holy Land crusades slid as easily into allegory as planning did into wishful thinking. The career and literary trajectory of Peter I of Cyprus’s chancellor Philippe de Mézières (1327–1405) bore striking witness to the process. After joining a crusade led by Humbert Dauphin of Vienne in the Aegean (1345–7), Mézières, a Picard by birth and knight by profession, conceived the idea of a new crusading order, the Order of the Passion, the rules and recruitment for which he refined over thirty years from the 1360s to 1390s. A natural courtier, he played a central role in the organisation of Peter I’s Alexandrian crusade of 1365 and was later associated with the French royal court. However, by the time he composed his chief literary works calling for a new crusade, such as The Dream of the Old Pilgrim (1387) or the Letter to Richard II (1395), he used the crusade more as an emblem and metaphor of Christian morality, faith and unity than a call to arms. Even his later regulations for the Order of the Passion lost touch with reality in their prohibition on initiates fighting anywhere but the Holy Land, despite the advance of the Turks into the Balkans; while his reaction to the Turkish victory at Nicopolis on the Danube in 1396, when a coalition Franco-Hungarian army was crushed by forces under the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid I, relied on arcane allegory, not serious recipes for counter-attack.35 The Jerusalem wars were over.

  A MEAL IN PARIS, 6 JANUARY 1378

  On Wednesday, 6 January 1378, during a state visit to Paris, after visiting Louis IX’s Sainte Chapelle with its relics of the Passion, the Emperor Charles IV of Germany was entertained to dinner by his nephew King Charles IV of France in the great hall of the neighbouring royal palace on the Ile de la Cité. The feast was sumptuous: three courses, each of ten dishes, followed by spiced wine, served to a gathering of five tables of nobles plus a further 800 ‘below the salt’. The emperor, his son and future successor, Wenceslas, and King Charles sat at the high table facing the hall. The diners were presented with a fancifully elaborate theatrical presentation of the siege of Jerusalem in 1099, complete with armed crusaders in a moving ship and a large tiered stage-set of the Holy City defended by soldiers dressed as Turks. Above the defenders perched a figure who ‘in Arabic cried the law’. Led by Godfrey de Bouillon, the crusaders, identified by heraldic flags and surcoats, attacked up ladders, with some falling off, until the city was won. Watching the proceedings from the stern of the pantomime ship was the figure of Peter the Hermit, whose costume, according to the detailed official account of the event, was modelled as closely as possible on chronicle descriptions of him. The lavish production values of this remarkable performance were confirmed by a stunning fine-detailed illumination of the event that accompanied the description in the manuscript text (Bibliothèque Nationale Fr 2813, fol. 473 verso). While unusual in showing a secular, if sanctified, historical scene, the 1378 Jerusalem show was not unique. On 20 June 1389, to celebrate the entry into the city of Charles VI’s queen, Isabelle of Bavaria, Paris staged an outdoor production of a Third Crusade romance, the Pas Saladin.36

  The crusades evidently still made good theatre if not good politics. Charles V (1364–80) was the first king of France since Philip I (1060–1108) not to take the cross. However, the idea of and plans for a renewed attempt to retake the Holy Land persisted, if only, by the 1370s, as an idealised cause that might encourage political and ecclesiastical reform in the west and a cessation of the Hundred Years War. Such a policy had been advocated over many years by one of Charles V’s associates, Philippe de Mézières (c. 1327–1405), crusader, former chancellor to the crusading Peter I of Cyprus, and writer of tracts urging moral renewal and a new eastern crusade. He also may have had some experience directing staged performances. The Jerusalem dinner play may have been his idea or staged under his direction. He may even have played the part of Peter the Hermit, strikingly depicted in the manuscript illumination, a role that well suited his later self-image of a poor pilgrim. If so, he subsequently appeared to repent his involvement, writing a decade afterwards criticising the wasteful expense of the lavish feast and lamenting that it had not even served its diplomatic purpose as one of the guests, Wenceslas, had shortly after married off his sister to France’s enemy, Richard II of England.37 Yet, for all that, the Jerusalem show offers tangible evidence of the continued cultural traction of the crusade if only in its dramatic historical resonance, still able to generate recognition, interest and excitement.

  131. The play of the siege of Jerusalem, Paris 1378: the figure in the bottom left portraying Peter the Hermit may depict Philippe de Mézières who possibly helped design and direct the performance.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE OTTOMANS

  After 1291, crusading became increasingly regionalised, fragmented, its institutions more
bureaucratic, devotion channelled into administrative form and fiscal expediency. Continuing to inform a state of mind, crusading was sustained by habit, liturgy, appeals for alms, taxation, buying indulgences and occasional active service. In a late medieval paradox, there were more crusades, more varied preaching campaigns yet fewer crucesignati. Imaginative association with the Holy Land became formalised. Western Christians’ physical engagement settled on visits by pilgrims, spies, merchants and visiting clergy. Package tours of Jerusalem from the 1330s were officially delegated by the Mamluk authorities to Franciscan friars, who devised suitably moving ceremonies and itineraries, even rerouting the Via Dolorosa for convenience. By contrast with such chaperoned site-seeing, new Islamic powers further west provided fresh, urgent settings for holy war. By the middle of the fourteenth century, the Ottoman sultanate of north-west Asia Minor presented the most serious challenge to Christendom’s integrity since the Mongols in the 1240s. By the sixteenth century, with the Turks battering at the gates of Austria, the survival of Christendom itself appeared at stake, seemingly reduced, in the words of Pope Pius II in 1463, ‘to an angle of the world’.1