The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

  So long kept from their promised prey, they now—in Easter week—subjected the rich city to such spoliation as Rome had never suffered from Vandals or Goths. Not many Greeks were killed—perhaps 2000; but pillage was unconfined. The nobles divided the palaces among them, and appropriated the treasures they found there; the soldiers entered homes, churches, shops, and took whatever caught their fancy. Churches were rifled not only of the gold, silver, and jewels accumulated by them through a millennium, but of sacred relics that would later be peddled in Western Europe at good prices. St. Sophia suffered more damage than the Turks would inflict upon it in 1453;51 the great altar was torn to pieces to distribute its silver and gold.52 The Venetians, familiar with the city that had once welcomed them as merchants, knew where the greatest treasures lay, and stole with superior intelligence; statues and textiles, slaves and gems, fell discriminately into their hands; the four bronze horses that had surveyed the Greek city would now romp over the Piazza di San Marco; nine tenths of the collections of art and jewelry that would later distinguish the Treasury of St. Mark’s came from this well-managed theft.53 Some attempt was made to limit rape; many of the soldiers modestly contented themselves with prostitutes; but Innocent III complained that the pent-up lust of the Latins spared neither age nor sex nor religious profession, and that Greek nuns had to bear the embraces of French or Venetian peasants or grooms.54 Amid the pillage libraries were ransacked, and precious manuscripts were ruined or lost; two further fires consumed libraries and museums as well as churches and homes; of the plays of Sophocles and Euripides, till then completely preserved, only a minority survived. Thousands of art masterpieces were stolen, mutilated, or destroyed.

  When the riot of rapine had subsided, the Latin nobles chose Baldwin of Flanders to head the Latin kingdom of Constantinople (1204), and made French its official language. The Byzantine Empire was divided into feudal dominions, each ruled by a Latin noble. Venice, eager to control the routes of trade, secured Hadrianople, Epirus, Acarnania, the Ionian Isles, part of the Peloponnesus, Euboea, the Aegean Isles, Gallipoli, and three eighths of Constantinople; the Genoese were dispossessed of their Byzantine “factories” and outposts; and Dandolo, now limping in imperial buskins, took the title of “Doge of Venice, Lord of One Fourth and One Eighth of the Roman Empire”;55 soon afterward he died, in the fullness of his unscrupulous success. The Greek clergy were mostly replaced by Latins, in some cases precipitated into holy orders for the occasion; and Innocent III, still protesting against the attack, accepted with grace the formal reunion of the Greek with the Latin Church. Most of the Crusaders returned home with their spoils; some settled in the new dominions; only a handful reached Palestine, and without effect. Perhaps the Crusaders thought that Constantinople, in their hands, would be a stronger base against the Turks than Byzantium had been. But generations of strife between the Latins and the Greeks now absorbed the vitality of the Greek world; the Byzantine Empire never recovered from the blow; and the capture of Constantinople by the Latins prepared, across two centuries, its capture by the Turks.

  VIII. THE COLLAPSE OF THE CRUSADES: 1212–91

  The scandal of the Fourth Crusade, added in a decade to the failure of the Third, gave no comfort to a Christian faith soon to be faced with the rediscovery of Aristotle and the subtle rationalism of Averroës. Thinkers were much exercised to explain why God had allowed the defeat of His defenders in so holy a cause, and had granted success only to Venetian villainy. Amid these doubts it occurred to simple souls that only innocence could regain the citadel of Christ. In 1212 a German youth vaguely known to history as Nicholas announced that God had commissioned him to lead a crusade of children to the Holy Land. Priests as well as laity condemned him, but the idea spread readily in an age even more subject than most to waves of emotional enthusiasm. Parents struggled to deter their children, but thousands of boys (and some girls in boys’ clothing), averaging twelve years, slipped away and followed Nicholas, perhaps glad to escape from the monarchy of the home to the freedom of the road. The swarm of 30,000 children, leaving mostly from Cologne, passed down the Rhine and over the Alps. Many died of hunger; some stragglers were eaten by wolves; thieves mingled with the marchers and stole their clothing and food. The survivors reached Genoa, where the earthy Italians laughed them into doubt; no ships would carry them to Palestine; and when they appealed to Innocent III he gently told them to go home. Some marched disconsolately back over the Alps; many settled in Genoa and learned the ways of a commercial world.

  In France, in this same year, a twelve-year-old shepherd named Stephen came to Philip Augustus, and announced that Christ, appearing to him while he tended his flock, had bidden him lead a children’s crusade to Palestine. The king ordered him to return to his muttons; nevertheless 20,000 youngsters gathered to follow Stephen’s lead. They made their way across France to Marseille, where, Stephen had promised them, the ocean would divide to let them reach Palestine dryshod. It failed them; but two shipowners offered to take them to their destination without charge. They crowded into seven ships, and sailed forth singing hymns of victory. Two of the ships were wrecked off Sardinia, with the loss of all on board; the other children were brought to Tunisia or Egypt, where they were sold as slaves. The shipowners were hanged by order of Frederick II.56

  Three years later Innocent III, at the Fourth Lateran Council, again appealed to Europe to recover the land of Christ, and returned to the plan that Venice had frustrated—an attack upon Egypt. In 1217 the Fifth Crusade left Germany, Austria, and Hungary under the Hungarian King Andrew, and safely reached Damietta, at the easternmost mouth of the Nile. The city fell after a year’s siege; and Malik al-Kamil, the new Sultan of Egypt and Syria, offered terms of peace—the surrender of most of Jerusalem, the liberation of Christian prisoners, the return of the True Cross. The Crusaders demanded an indemnity as well, which al-Kamil refused. The war was resumed, but went badly; expected reinforcements did not come; finally an eight-year truce was signed that gave the Crusaders the True Cross, but restored Damietta to the Moslems, and required the evacuation of all Christian troops from Egyptian soil.

  The Crusaders blamed their tragedy upon Frederick II, the young Emperor of Germany and Italy. He had taken the crusader’s vow in 1215, and had promised to join the besiegers at Damietta; but political complications in Italy, and perhaps an inadequate faith, detained him. In 1228, while excommunicate for his delays, Frederick set out on the Sixth Crusade. Arrived in Palestine, he received no help from the good Christians there, who shunned an outlaw from the Church. He sent emissaries to al-Kamil, who was now leading the Saracen army at Nablus. Al-Kamil replied courteously; and the Sultan’s ambassador, Fakhru’d Din, was impressed by Frederick’s knowledge of the Arabic language, literature, science, and philosophy. The two rulers entered into a friendly exchange of compliments and ideas; and to the astonishment of both Christendom and Islam they signed a treaty (1229) by which al-Kamil ceded to Frederick Acre, Jaffa, Sidon, Nazareth, Bethlehem, and all of Jerusalem except the enclosure—sacred to Islam—containing the Dome of the Rock. Christian pilgrims were to be admitted to this enclosure to perform their prayers on the site of Solomon’s Temple; and similar rights were to be enjoyed by Mohammedans in Bethlehem. All prisoners on either side were to be released; and for ten years and ten months each side pledged itself to peace.57 The excommunicate Emperor had succeeded where for a century Christendom had failed; the two cultures, brought together for a moment in mutual understanding and respect, had found it possible to be friends. The Christians of the Holy Land rejoiced, but Pope Gregory IX denounced the pact as an insult to Christendom, and refused to ratify it. After Frederick’s departure the Christian nobility of Palestine took control of Jerusalem, and allied the Christian power in Asia with the Moslem ruler of Damascus against the Egyptian Sultan (1244). The latter called to his aid the Khwarazmian Turks, who captured Jerusalem, plundered it, and massacred a large number of its inhabitants. Two months later Baibars defeated the Christians at
Gaza, and Jerusalem once more fell to Islam (October, 1244).

  While Innocent IV preached a crusade against Frederick II, and offered to all who would war against the Emperor in Italy the same indulgences and privileges granted to those who served in the Holy Land, the saintly Louis IX of France organized the Seventh Crusade. Shortly after the fall of Jerusalem he took the cross, and persuaded his nobles to do likewise; to certain reluctant ones, at Christmas, he presented costly garments bearing an inwoven cross. He labored to reconcile Innocent with Frederick, so that a united Europe might support the Crusade. Innocent refused; instead, he sent a friar—Giovanni de Piano Carpini—to the Great Khan, suggesting a union of Mongols and Christians against the Turks; the Khan replied by inviting the submission of Christendom to the Mongol power. At last, in 1248, Louis set out with his French knights, including Jean Sieur de Joinville, who would narrate the exploits of his King in a famous chronicle. The expedition reached Damietta, and soon captured it; but the annual inundation of the Nile, which had been forgotten in planning the campaign, began as the Crusaders arrived, and so flooded the country that they were confined to Damietta for half a year. They did not altogether regret it; “the barons,” says Joinville, “took to giving great feasts … and the common people took to consorting with lewd women.”58 When the army resumed its march it was depleted by hunger, disease, and desertion, and weakened with indiscipline. At Mansura, despite brave fighting, it was defeated, and fled in wild rout; 10,000 Christians were captured, including Louis himself, fainting with dysentery (1250). An Arab physician cured him; after a month of tribulation he was released, but only in return for the surrender of Damietta, and a ransom of 500,000 livres ($3,800,000). When Louis agreed to this enormous ransom, the sultan reduced it by a fifth, and trusted the King for an unpaid half.59 Louis led the remnant of his army to Acre, and stayed there four years, vainly calling upon Europe to cease its wars and join him in a new campaign. He dispatched the monk William of Rubruquis to the Mongol Khan renewing the invitation of Innocent—with similar results. In 1254 he returned to France.

  His years in the East had quieted the factionalism of the Christians there; his departure released it. From 1256 to 1260 a civil war of the Venetians against the Genoese in the Syrian ports dragged every faction into it, and exhausted the Christian forces in Palestine. Seizing the opportunity, Baibars, the slave Sultan of Egypt, marched up the coast and took one Christian town after another: Caesarea (1265), Safad (1266), Jaffa (1267), Antioch (1268). The captured Christians were slaughtered or enslaved, and Antioch was so devastated with plunder and fire that it never recovered.

  Roused to new fervor in his old age, Louis IX took the cross a second time (1267). His three sons followed his example; but the French nobility rejected his plans as quixotic, and refused to join; even Joinville, who loved him, would have none of this Eighth Crusade. This time the King, wise in government and foolish in war, landed his inadequate forces in Tunisia, hoping to convert its bey to Christianity, and to attack Egypt from the west. He had hardly touched African soil when he “fell sick of a flux in the stomach,”60 and died with the word “Jerusalem” on his lips (1270). A year later Prince Edward of England landed at Acre, bravely led some futile sallies, and hurried back to accept the English crown.

  The final disaster came when some Christian adventurers robbed a Moslem caravan in Syria, hanged nineteen Moslem merchants, and sacked several Moslem towns. Sultan Khalil demanded satisfaction; receiving none, he marched against Acre, the strongest Christian outpost in Palestine; taking it after a siege of forty-three days, he allowed his men to massacre or enslave 60,000 prisoners (1291). Tyre, Sidon, Haifa, and Beirut fell soon afterward. The Latin kingdom of Jerusalem maintained a ghostly existence for a time in the titles of vain potentates, and for two centuries a few adventurers or enthusiasts embarked upon sporadic and futile efforts to resume the “Great Debate”; but Europe knew that the Crusades had come to an end.

  IX. THE RESULTS OF THE CRUSADES

  Of their direct and professed purposes the Crusades had failed. After two centuries of war, Jerusalem was in the hands of the ferocious Mamluks, and Christian pilgrims came fewer and more fearful than before. The Moslem powers, once tolerant of religious diversity, had been made intolerant by attack. The Palestinian and Syrian ports that had been captured for Italian trade were without exception lost. Moslem civilization had proved itself superior to the Christian in refinement, comfort, education, and war. The magnificent effort of the popes to give Europe peace through a common purpose had been shattered by nationalistic ambitions and the “crusades” of popes against emperors.

  Feudalism recovered with difficulty from its failure in the Crusades. Suited to individualistic adventure and heroism within a narrow range, it had not known how to adjust its methods to Oriental climates and distant campaigns. It had bungled inexcusably the problem of supplies along a lengthening line of communications. It had exhausted its equipment, and blunted its spirit, by conquering not Moslem Jerusalem but Christian Byzantium. To finance their expeditions to the East, many knights had sold or mortgaged their properties to lord, moneylender, Church, or king; for a price they had resigned their rights over many towns in their domains; to many peasants they had sold remission of future feudal dues. Serfs by the thousands had used the crusader’s privilege to leave the land, and thousands had never returned to their manors. While feudal wealth and arms were diverted to the East, the power and wealth of the French monarchy rose as one of the major results of the Crusades. At the same time both the Roman Empires were weakened: the Western emperors lost prestige by their failures in the Holy Land, and by their conflicts with a papacy exalted by the Crusades; and the Eastern Empire, though reborn in 1261, never regained its former power or repute. The Crusades, however, had this measure of success, that without them the Turks would have taken Constantinople long before 1453. For Islam, too, was weakened by the Crusades, and fell more easily before the Mongol flood.

  Some of the military orders suffered tragic fates. Those Hospitalers who survived the massacre at Acre fled to Cyprus. In 1310 they captured Rhodes from the Moslems, changed their name to the Knights of Rhodes, and ruled the island till 1522; expelled then by the Turks, they removed to Malta, became the Knights of Malta, and continued to exist there till their disbandment in 1799. The Teutonic Knights, after the fall of Acre, transferred their headquarters to Marienburg in the Prussia they had conquered for Germany from the Slavs. The Templars, driven from Asia, reorganized in France. Possessed of rich holdings throughout Europe, they settled down to enjoy their revenues. Free from taxation, they lent money at lower interest rates than the Lombards and the Jews, and reaped lush profits. Unlike the Hospitalers, they maintained no hospitals, established no schools, succored no poor. At last their hoarded wealth, their armed state within the state, their insubordination to the royal power, aroused the envy, fear, and wrath of King Philip IV the Fair. On October 12, 1310, by his order, and without warning, all Templars in France were arrested, and the royal seal was set on all their goods. Philip accused them of indulging homosexual lusts, of having lost their Christian faith through long contact with Islam, of denying Christ and spitting upon the cross, of worshiping idols, of being in secret league with the Moslems, and of having repeatedly betrayed the Christian cause. A tribunal of prelates and monks loyal to the King examined the prisoners; they denied the royal charges, and were put to the torture to induce them to confess. Some, suspended by the wrists, were repeatedly drawn up and suddenly let down; some had their bare feet held over flames; some had sharp splinters driven under their fingernails; some had a tooth wrenched out day after day; some had heavy weights hung from their genitals; some were slowly starved. In many cases all these devices were used, so that most of the prisoners, when examined again, were weak to the point of death. One showed the bones that had fallen from his roasted feet. Many of them confessed to all the charges of the King; some told how life and liberty had been promised them, under the royal seal, i
f they would admit the allegations of the government. Several of them died in jail; some killed themselves; fifty-nine were burned at the stake (1310), protesting their innocence to the end. Du Molay, the Grand Master of the order, confessed under torture; led to the stake, he withdrew his confession; and the inquisitors proposed to try him again. Philip denounced the delay, and ordered him to be burned at once; and the royal presence graced the execution. All the property of the Templars in France was confiscated by the state. Pope Clement V protested against these procedures; the French clergy supported the King; the Pope, a virtual prisoner at Avignon, ceased resistance, and abolished the order at Philip’s behest (1312). Edward II, also needing money, confiscated the property of the Templars in England. Some of the wealth so appropriated by Philip and Edward was surrendered to the Church; some of it was granted by the kings to favorites, who by these means founded great manors, and supported the kings against the older feudal nobility.

  Possibly some of the Crusaders had learned in the East a new tolerance for sexual perversions; this, and the reintroduction of public baths and private latrines in the West may be included among the results of the Crusades. Probably through contact with the Moslem East, the Europeans returned to the old Roman custom of shaving the beard.61 A thousand Arabic words now came into the European languages. Oriental romances flowed into Europe, and found new dress in the nascent vernaculars. Crusaders impressed by the enameled glass of the Saracens may have brought from the East the technical secrets that led to the improved stained glass of the developed Gothic cathedrals.62 The compass, gunpowder, and printing were known in the East before the Crusades ended, and may have come to Europe in the backwash of that tidal wave. Apparently the Crusaders were too unlettered to care for “Arabic” poetry, science, or philosophy; Moslem influences in such fields came rather through Spain and Sicily than through the contacts of these wars. Greek cultural influences were felt by the West after the capture of Constantinople; so William of Moerbeke, Flemish Archbishop of Corinth, furnished Thomas Aquinas with translations of Aristotle made directly from the original. In general the discovery, by the Crusaders, that the followers of another faith could be as civilized, humane, and trustworthy as themselves, if not more so, must have set some minds adrift, and contributed to the weakening of orthodox belief in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Historians like William, Archbishop of Tyre, spoke of Moslem civilization with a respect, sometimes with an admiration, that would have shocked the rude warriors of the First Crusade.63