Once the invasion of Egypt was underway the crusaders made contact with the Copts and in mid-1219 a prophecy, written in Arabic, was given to Pelagius.12 The legate was told its meaning and he became intrigued; it updated a ninth-century Nestorian tract to include Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem. This was followed by the prediction that an army from the West, led by a tall man with a lean face, would take Damietta and Egypt. Furthermore, a king would come from over the mountains and conquer Damascus while the king of the Abissi would destroy Mecca. The Abissi meant the Abyssinians, in other words, the powerful Christian kingdom of Ethiopia. Pelagius—in what, to a modern reader, seems a moment of alarming hubris—believed that he was the tall man with the thin face. He had the document translated into Latin and sent it back to western Europe where it was widely circulated.
In the meantime, the position inside Damietta had become desperate and in the autumn of 1219 Sultan al-Kamil suggested terms that included the return of the True Cross, the city of Jerusalem and other former Christian lands, and all prisoners. In return he wanted to keep Damietta and the strategically valuable castles of Kerak and Shaubak in Transjordan. On the surface this seemed immensely advantageous to the Christians, yet it provoked a furious debate in the crusader camp—Pelagius, the clergy, the Templars, the Hospitallers, and the Italian merchant communities were against it because they felt victory was imminent; with Damietta taken, the remainder of Egypt would fall and lead to a permanent reconquest of the Holy Land. On the other hand, King John of Jerusalem, most of the northern European crusaders, and the Teutonic Knights preferred the certainty of having possession of Jerusalem. Pelagius won the argument and al-Kamil’s proposal was rejected.
Within a few days, on November 5, 1219, Damietta capitulated. Al-Kamil had tried time and again to bring relief to his coreligionists but to no avail; it seemed as if the legate was right to turn down the sultan’s offer. Inside Damietta the crusaders found a city filled with the dead and the dying, but also containing immense riches. King John was entrusted with control of Damietta and it became part of the kingdom of Jerusalem. John minted coins bearing the legend “Iohannes rex” and “Damietta” to demonstrate the permanent nature of the conquest and his place as its ruler.13 Yet the need for reinforcements remained acute and the leadership issued a desperate appeal to the pope for more money and manpower; most particularly they wanted Frederick to fulfill his vow. Pelagius’s control over the income sent by the papacy (the result of levies in the West) meant his influence increased considerably. While other leaders simply ran out of money and went home, and John of Brienne could not fund large numbers of troops himself, Pelagius’s treasure chest allowed him to dictate the direction of the crusade.
Over the next few months the expedition stalled as contingents from the West came and went—a revolving-door effect that meant there was little continuity. John and Pelagius quarreled over strategy while the king also had to return to his territories in the Levant to face attacks from Damascus. The crusader army stayed encamped outside Damietta; any sense of advantage from its capture soon evaporated. In the summer of 1220 an imperial fleet reached Damietta bearing the news that Frederick planned to join the campaign later in the year. In the event he had to postpone his plans because of troubles in Sicily. The arrival of the emperor himself, presumably accompanied by a massive army, would, in theory, do much to secure victory. In the meantime, the crusaders remained pinned on the coast and, as with any military force that lies idle, discipline in the army degenerated and prostitution and gambling became rife. From the Muslim perspective this was a vital period of calm. The fall of Damietta had been a considerable blow; Ibn al-Athir, a contemporary Aleppan writer, claimed, “thus all the lands in Egypt and Syria were on the point of being overcome and all the people were fearful of them [the Franks] and had come to expect disaster any morning or evening. The population of Egypt wanted to evacuate their land for fear of the enemy, but it was not a time to escape, for the enemy had encompassed them on every side.”14 While al-Kamil issued desperate pleas for help to his brothers in Syria he also began to consolidate his own resources and to harass the Christian camp.
As the tedious, torpid months of 1220 and 1221 wore on, the clergy began to pay even greater attention to a number of new prophecies. More than almost anything else from the medieval period, the idea of trusting a prophecy seems peculiarly alien to the present day—a real whiff of superstition before the age of reason took over—yet the senior churchmen of the time were ideologically predisposed to recognize the biblical provenance of such ideas and to have faith in them. In any case, several of the predictions appeared to have come true: for example, Hannan’s prophecy had indeed foretold the Christian capture of Damietta in 1219.
In the spring of 1221 a text known as the Relatio de Davide reached James of Vitry. He considered this work so important that he dispatched numerous copies to the West where the recipients included the pope and the chancellor of Paris University.15 The letter described how David, the great-grandson of Prester John, had attacked Persia and taken cities such as Bukhara, Samarkand, and Khurasan. The story was “confirmed” by the amazing adventures of a group of Frankish prisoners who had been captured in Egypt and dispatched by al-Kamil to the caliph of Baghdad to try to convince him to help. The caliph sent them on to “David” (in reality a Mongol warlord), who, realizing that these men were fighting the same Muslims as he was, ordered them back to Frankish Antioch and thence they returned to Damietta! Given the Christians’ almost complete ignorance of the Mongols’ existence, plus the men’s obvious linguistic limitations, it is not surprising they had failed to appreciate the true identity of their captors. On the other hand, because the latter seemed hostile to Islam and ruled the areas said to be governed by Prester John, it appeared reasonable to suppose that this was indeed King David bringing the fight to Islam from the east. The reality, for both Christianity and Islam, was incalculably more sinister because this was an early report of the most westward foray to date of Chinggis Khan, emperor of the Mongols and arguably the most terrifying warlord in history; by c. 1240 the Mongol military machine would conquer lands from the China Sea to Hungary—the greatest land empire of all time.16 The fact that the Relatio de Davide mentioned the Mongol destruction of the Christian kingdom of Georgia was one inconsistency the clerics failed to take due note of, but in essence James and Pelagius were so receptive to the prophecies that they accepted the bulk of these works as fact.
The Copts soon gave Pelagius a third treatise, allegedly written by Saint Clement, which recorded the prophecies of Saint Peter himself. The Book of Clement predicted the capture of Damietta, and presaged that the decline of Islam and its defeat would be signaled by the meeting in Jerusalem of two kings, one from the East and one from the West, in a year when Easter fell on April 3. The next two occasions such dates would align were 1222 and 1233. Once again Pelagius believed he recognized what was happening. The king from the West was evidently Frederick and his counterpart was King David, about whom the Relatio de Davide had just reported such positive progress. For Jerusalem to be in Christian hands by the appointed time the crusade had to get a move on, starting with the capture of Cairo. Coupled with clerical anger at the continued moral decay in the Christian camp, this prophecy, along with the arrival of a group of imperial crusaders led by Duke Louis of Bavaria, jolted the leadership into action.
THE MARCH SOUTHWARD AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE FIFTH CRUSADE
Pelagius made an impassioned speech in which he called upon the crusaders to march south. The need to depart immediately was compounded by the timing of the annual Nile flood—roughly early or mid-August to mid-November—which gave the Christians an extremely narrow window to operate in; the army set out on July 17, 1221.17 The Muslim world, meanwhile, had responded to al-Kamil’s pleas for support and started to pull together. The rulers of Damascus and Iraq came to help al-Kamil, and his call to resist the infidel, “I have set out on a jihad and it is essential to fulfil this intention,”
began to take effect.18
Hundreds of boats began to move up the Nile. They contained 1,200 knights, 400 archers, and many noncombatants; a similar-sized force remained in Damietta. Ibn al-Athir commented on the crusaders’ apparent self-belief—or their naïveté: “The Franks, because of their overconfidence, had not brought with them sufficient food for a number of days, only imagining that the Muslim armies would not stand against them and the settlements and the hinterland would all be left in their hands, so that they could take from them all the provisions they wanted.”19 The Christians placed a heavy reliance on supplies from their fleet, and at first all appeared well; the army and accompanying vessels moved south in tight formation, reminiscent of the textbook advance by Richard the Lionheart’s forces from Acre to Arsuf during the Third Crusade. By July 24, however, ferocious Muslim attacks had slowed their pace; King John advocated a withdrawal but he was shouted down by his colleagues. The further the army moved from Damietta the greater became its dependence on ships coming up the Nile. The Egyptians quickly realized this and exploited their local knowledge to the full. Al-Kamil seized his chance and dispatched boats to a back canal and slipped behind the Christians. The plan worked to perfection; the crusader shipping was blocked and the army’s supplies quickly dwindled. By late August the crusaders accepted they could make no more headway and decided to retreat to Damietta. In contrast to the ordered march toward Cairo, the return journey was an utter fiasco; almost a parody of a military operation. The crusaders set out under the cover of darkness but soon lost any advantage because, having drunk all their remaining wine, they set fire to the camp making their intentions entirely plain. Noisy, inebriated, hampered by many sick and wounded men, plus the fact that by now the Nile was in full flood, they were easy prey for al-Kamil’s troops. The Egyptians opened sluice gates to restrict the Christians’ path even further and by August 28 there was no choice but to surrender. The crusaders had to hand over Damietta—a humiliating contrast to the offer that Pelagius had so haughtily rejected.
Many blamed Pelagius for the defeat. The Frenchman William the Clerk wrote: “Because of the legate who governed and led the Christians, everyone says that we lost that city through folly and sin. . . . For when the clergy take the function of leading knights certainly this is against the law. But the clerk should recite aloud from his Scripture and his psalms and let the knight go to his great battlefields. Let him remain before the altars and pray for the warriors and shrive the sinners. Greatly should Rome be humiliated for the loss of Damietta.”20
The troubadour Peirol, who had been at Damietta, targeted Frederick:
Emperor, Damietta awaits you
And night and day the White Tower weeps
For your eagle which a vulture has cast down therefrom:
Cowardly is the eagle that is captured by a vulture!
Shame is thereby yours, and honour accrues to the sultan.21
Still others put the responsibility at the pope’s door, but Honorius regarded Frederick to be at fault and on November 19, 1221, he gave vent to his feelings. A letter phrased in the most disparaging terms claimed the whole Christian world had waited for the emperor’s departure but his failure to crusade had demeaned the sacred offices of both pope and emperor. Ominously, Honorius suggested that he had been too easy on the emperor and from now on he would be far less tolerant. There is no doubt that Frederick’s repeated promises to appear in person had influenced the crusade considerably, but the constant coming and going of the other contingents, the dubious reliance on prophecies, squabbles between Pelagius and King John, and the increased cohesion of the Muslims were more important in denying the expedition any chance of success.
FREDERICK, KING OF JERUSALEM AND EXCOMMUNICATE CRUSADER
Frederick restated his determination to fulfill his vow and, over the next few years, he made further preparations. He showed a willingness to learn from the troubles of the Fifth Crusade by commissioning shallow-drafted ships for use in the Nile.22 In spite of his personal enthusiasm, the German nobility was indifferent and this caused another postponement; the papacy dispatched more preachers to try to rouse greater levels of support. Although the curia recognized there were good reasons for these delays, its patience was about to expire and a parallel dispute with Frederick over Church rights in Sicily gave an extra edge to Pope Honorius’s demands. At the Treaty of San Germano in June 1225—ten years after he had first taken the cross—the emperor submitted to an outrageous and demanding series of conditions that bound him to go on crusade or face the severest penalties. He agreed to depart on August 15, 1227, and promised to fight in the East for two years; during this time he was to pay for the maintenance of one thousand knights. He would provide fifty fully equipped galleys and one hundred transport ships capable of carrying a total of two thousand armed men with three horses each, plus ancillary personnel. He also consented to give 100,000 ounces of gold in five installments into the custody of the patriarch of Jerusalem, King John, and the master of the Teutonic Knights, Hermann of Salza. The gold would be returned to him at Acre, but if he did not reach the Levant it could be spent in defense of the Latin East. Lastly, Frederick accepted that if he failed to crusade then he would be placed under a ban of excommunication, the harshest penalty the Church could impose on a person, casting them out from the community of the faithful and placing their soul in danger of perpetual torment.
Frederick’s involvement in the Holy Land had increased in April 1223 when it was decided that he should marry Isabella, the heiress to the kingdom of Jerusalem. In August 1225 the emperor sent a fleet of galleys to bring back his fiancée to Sicily, although a curious ceremony took place at Acre where Isabella received her wedding ring and a bishop performed the marriage with Frederick in absentia. The queen reached Brindisi in November where she met her husband and the marriage was celebrated properly.
In theory, Frederick was supposed to wait until he arrived in the Levant to assume the title of king of Jerusalem from Isabella’s father, John of Brienne, whose own claim to the crown had rested upon his marriage to Isabella’s dead mother, Marie. Frederick was far more ambitious, however; he disregarded assurances from his own envoys that John could hold the kingdom for life and seized the title for himself. John was outraged and sought support from Honorius; the pope duly condemned the emperor’s actions as “no less prejudicial to your own reputation than to the interests of the Holy Land,” but could do little else.23 At this stage of his career Frederick had assembled a stupendous array of honors and the addition of the kingship of Jerusalem to his imperial title and the crown of Sicily meant his power far exceeded anyone else’s in Christendom. While becoming the ruler of Jerusalem certainly pulled Frederick toward a campaign in the East, it also meant that the Holy Land became just one element among his portfolio of dominions and his actions in the Levant would always be to some extent influenced, or potentially complicated, by affairs elsewhere in the empire. Frederick’s new title also sparked an increased German presence in the kingdom, most particularly through the Teutonic Knights, who had gained considerable prestige during the recent campaign in Egypt. Like the Templars and the Hospitallers they combined martial activity with the care of pilgrims and, as the recipients of generous gifts of lands, became highly important in the affairs of the Latin East.24
Back in Europe recruitment for the crusade gathered momentum and a good number of northern Germans took the cross, as well as a strong contingent from England. In the summer of 1227, as required by the pope, they moved over the Alps and began to gather at Brindisi. Ironically, given the earlier lack of manpower, the problem now became one of overcrowding and a lack of food. In the intense heat of an Apulian summer disease broke out. Fearful of breaching his promise to the pope, Frederick ordered a first group of ships to set sail ahead of him. Several members of the imperial court fell ill, then the emperor himself was laid low. He moved along to Otranto but it became impossible to continue and he went to the thermal town of Pozzuoli to recover. Common
sense dictated that the new pope, Gregory IX (1227–41), should waive the strict application of the Treaty of San Germano; an illness was hardly something Frederick could control. Yet Gregory would not even receive the imperial ambassador; he had to act now, “or seem like a dog unable to bark,” as one contemporary wrote. Frederick’s ban of excommunication was invoked—no one in the Christian community was to have any contact with him.25 Gregory’s letter to the emperor pulsed with anger and disgust. He recounted how Innocent III had protected the young man: “see if there is any grief like that of the apostolic see, your mother, who has been so often and so cruelly deceived in the son, whom she suckled, in whom she placed confidence that he would carry out this matter, and on whom she has heaped such abundant benefits.” He emphasized that Frederick had now broken four oaths to help the Holy Land and was henceforth subject to the excommunication he had voluntarily submitted to. Gregory censured the emperor directly for the failure of the Fifth Crusade and claimed that it was his prevarication that had caused the loss of Damietta. He also blamed him for the death of many crusaders in the summer of 1227 because his delays had trapped them in the unhealthy ports of southern Italy.
Another of Gregory’s letters concentrated on the emperor’s alleged misdemeanors: his abuse of Church rights in Sicily, his use of Muslim soldiers in his army and hostility to the Templars and Hospitallers. The first of these points in particular suggested that Gregory saw the excommunication as an opportunity to advance long-standing papal claims against imperial power in Sicily, rather than dealing solely with the matter of the crusade. He also argued that Frederick took “more account of the servants of Muhammad than those of Christ,” an early sign that the emperor’s contact with Muslims was a target for papal ire.26 The belief that Frederick’s actions had impeded the crusade had some broader currency as well. Roger of Wendover, a contemporary English writer, noted a widely reported vision in which Christ appeared in the sky, suspended on the cross, pierced with nails and sprinkled with blood, “as if laying a complaint before each and every Christian of the injury inflicted upon him by the emperor.”27
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