Holy Warriors

by Jonathan Phillips

  Meanwhile the Germans who had sailed ahead to the Latin East helped to establish the castle of Montfort as the headquarters of the Teutonic Knights; they also took control of Sidon and fortified Jaffa and Caesarea. Once recovered, Frederick still wanted to fulfill his vows—in part to try to clear his name, but also to enforce his title to Jerusalem and to assist the Christian cause. At this moment fortune finally presented him with an opportunity to accomplish all three of those aims.

  The rulers of Egypt, Sultan al-Kamil, and Damascus, Sultan al-Mu’azzam, were fierce rivals and in 1226 the former sent his vizier, Fakhr al-Din, on a mission to Sicily. The envoy offered to return Jerusalem to the Christians if the emperor would join him in an attack on Damascus. Almost forty years earlier, Richard the Lionheart had enjoyed a good relationship with Saphadin during the Third Crusade but Frederick, above all other western rulers during the age of the crusades, was particularly open to the idea of diplomatic engagement with the Muslims, in part on account of his own multicultural upbringing. The emperor sent an embassy to al-Kamil that bore splendid gifts, including a favorite horse with a jewel-encrusted saddle of gold. Just to cover all possible options, however, the imperial envoys also visited Damascus to sound out al-Mu’azzam. The response was exceptionally direct: “I have nothing for your master but my sword.” Nevertheless, Frederick’s approach to the Damascenes worried al-Kamil sufficiently for him to send Fakhr al-Din to Sicily again where it is likely that he was knighted by the emperor—a neat twist in the developing concept of chivalry as a broad-minded westerner bestowed the prime manifestation of his own warrior code on a Muslim.

  In November 1227, al-Mu’azzam died, and in consequence al-Kamil’s need to make peace with the emperor became far less compelling. For Frederick, however, the momentum behind his crusade steadily gathered pace; it seems that public sympathy lay with his account of the conflict with the papacy—for example, a riot against Gregory IX forced him to flee from Rome. The death of Isabella of Jerusalem soon after the birth of a son, Conrad, was a serious setback, however. Frederick was now simply king by right of his dead wife (much as John of Brienne had been) but he insisted on maintaining his title rather than acting as regent on behalf of the infant. Rumors spread that Frederick was responsible for Isabella’s death—a ridiculous idea, but one that provided the emperor with another incentive to clear his name through a successful crusade.

  FREDERICK IN THE HOLY LAND: A TRIUMPH OF DIPLOMACY

  Frederick set sail from Brindisi on June 28, 1228; thirteen years after he had taken the cross, his crusade was underway. The imperial fleet reached Cyprus in late July; five hundred knights had already sailed east in April, and several imperial vessels remained at Acre from the previous year’s sailings. Technically, Frederick was the imperial overlord of Cyprus and he demanded custody of the boy-king Henry, as was his right. He symbolically asserted his power at a banquet on the island. John of Ibelin, who had acted as regent for Henry, was made to serve wine and cut meat for the emperor—an imperial custom, but one that humiliated the locals. This unpleasant situation escalated further when a group of imperial soldiers entered the hall to intimidate the native barons. Frederick required ten years’ income from the period of John’s regency as well as the custody of the Ibelin fief of Beirut. John argued that the latter issue was a matter for the High Court of Jerusalem; as far as the money was concerned, he claimed that it had been spent on the defense of Cyprus. While Frederick’s actions had a basis in strict legal terms, his abrasive and confrontational attitude did little to secure support from the local baronage.

  It was early September 1228 when Frederick landed at Tyre. The Templars, Hospitallers, and clergy greeted him with huge enthusiasm, prostrated themselves at his feet, and kissed his knees; on account of the ban of excommunication they could not give him the customary kiss of peace on his face. The emperor’s status placed the Military Orders and clergy in a peculiarly difficult position—they were, as a religious institution, subject to papal authority and should, in theory, have shunned him. At the same time, however, he was the most powerful ruler of the West, the king of their lands, a source of immense potential patronage, and, most important of all, actually present in the Levant; “in hope that by his [Frederick’s] means there would be salvation in Israel.”28 The emperor sent envoys to Gregory trying to persuade him to lift the ban but to no avail and the pope urged people to shun Frederick. As his army left Acre the German invented a clever ruse to get around this problem: those groups uneasy about an association with him marched a day behind and followed orders issued in the name of God and Christendom, rather than the emperor.

  Diplomatic contacts opened with al-Kamil, although by now the sultan was unenthusiastic about a deal. Nonetheless, a combination of careful negotiation and a fear of Frederick’s military strength brought him to terms. As Ibn Wasil, a contemporary Muslim observer who later visited the court of Frederick’s son Manfred, wrote: “when the emperor reached Acre al-Kamil found him an embarrassment, for al-Mu’azzam . . . had died . . . [but] it was not possible to turn [Frederick] away because of the terms of the earlier agreement and because it would have led him to lose ‘the goals on which his heart was set’ at the time. He therefore made a treaty with Frederick and treated him with great friendship.”29 The phrase about losing “the goals on which his heart was set” indicates that al-Kamil saw the crusaders as a serious threat to his own power. By this time imperial forces in the Levant formed a potent task force: up to ninety galleys, a transport fleet of one hundred oared galleys capable of carrying horsemen (possibly 1,500 in number), and with the requisite shallow draft and maneuverability to penetrate deep into the Nile delta.30

  The emperor’s old acquaintance Fakhr al-Din was the chief Muslim negotiator and in Frederick he found someone capable of playing the diplomatic game to the full. The crusader pointed out that he had come to Jerusalem at al-Kamil’s invitation; moreover, he needed to achieve something to preserve his own reputation—in any case, surely the sultan could relinquish a defenseless city. Frederick impressed the Muslims with a series of conversations and questions about philosophy (including Aristotle’s Logic, which he was reading at the time), geometry, and mathematics. The combination of charm, backed up with substantial military force, paid off: on February 24, 1229, a truce was sworn for ten years, five months, and forty days, and it was agreed that Jerusalem should be handed over to the emperor, albeit with several provisos: the walls were to remain demolished; no land around it was to be held by the Franks, although pilgrims could use a narrow corridor linking the city to the coast; the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock were to stay in Muslim hands, although the Franks might still visit them; the Christians also recovered Bethlehem and Nazareth to secure the three holiest sites for their faith. In many respects, therefore, these terms echo those rejected by Pelagius during the Fifth Crusade.

  Controversy was almost inevitable with such extraordinarily sensitive issues at stake. The agreement sparked nearly as much dissent in the Islamic world as it came to provoke in the West. Many Muslims regarded it as deeply shameful that Saladin’s recovery of Jerusalem from the infidel had been cast aside. Sibt Ibn al-Jawzi, a contemporary Damascene writer, described the episode as a “disaster . . . so great a tragedy that public ceremonies of mourning were instituted. . . . [I] presided over a meeting in the Great Mosque of Damascus to speak of what had occurred.’31 Al-Kamil justified his actions by claiming the city was without walls and that once the truce expired he could drive the unbelievers out; in any case, he observed, the Muslims still administered their own sacred sites.

  Frederick approached the holy city in mid-March 1229, accompanied by his host, the qadi of Nablus. One wonders what the emperor’s emotions were as he laid eyes upon Jerusalem: in spiritual terms, it was the center of his faith and its recovery was desired by all of Christendom, yet as the capital of his kingdom, it had been stripped of its defenses and probably looked pretty dilapidated. Muslim reports of Frederick’s visit to
the Dome of the Rock may have been tinged with an element of propaganda as they tried to play down the fact that he had taken control of Jerusalem. They show him as rather casual in his Christianity, but by contrast interested in, and respectful of, Islam. He admired the mihrab in the Dome of the Rock, yet when he saw a Christian priest about to enter the al-Aqsa Mosque carrying a Bible he scolded the man in the harshest of terms and threatened to kill him if he behaved so tactlessly again. The emperor read out an Arabic inscription on the Dome of the Rock that said “Saladin purified this city of the polytheists” and teasingly inquired, “Who would these polytheists be?” After he had stayed overnight in the city, the emperor asked why the muezzin had not called the morning prayer, and was told by his host that it had been silenced out of respect for the emperor. Frederick responded: “my chief aim in passing the night in Jerusalem was to hear the call to prayer given by the muezzins and their cries of praise to God during the night.”32 He asked the qadi if he would have expected the bells to be silenced in a reciprocal visit to Sicily; the emperor also gave generous donations to the custodians and holy men of the sanctuary. Sibt Ibn al-Jawzi concluded that “it was clear from what he said that he was a materialist and that Christianity was simply a game to him.”33 While the Muslims were impressed with Frederick’s learning they seemed baffled by his apparent indifference to his faith; this may have reflected his understandable dislike of the contemporary papacy, rather than a deeper lack of religious feeling. Most crusaders were intolerant of Islam and overtly devoted to their own faith—Frederick, it seems, was not so easy to categorize.

  To his opponents in the West the emperor’s willingness to engage with the Muslims and his long discussions with them—in the incomprehensible Arabic tongue—were further signs of his moral decay. Undeniably, however, he had achieved a tremendous success. On March 17, 1229, Frederick, accompanied by pilgrims and crusaders, entered the Holy Sepulchre to pray. Throughout the entire history of the crusades this surely stands as the moment of supreme irony: an excommunicate crusader took possession of Christ’s tomb wearing full imperial regalia and implementing his own claim to the throne of Jerusalem. To Frederick it was the ultimate justification of his actions—God had unambiguously endorsed his behavior and permitted the German crusaders to recover the holy city. The following day, in a frequently misunderstood ceremony, he placed the imperial crown on his own head, not, as often stated, the crown of Jerusalem. He was, in his own mind, already king of Jerusalem and this act of crown-wearing was a conventional aspect of ceremonial behavior for rulers across medieval Europe.34

  Hermann of Salza read a speech on Frederick’s behalf. He cast back to the emperor’s assumption of the cross at Aachen in 1215; he related the problems in fulfilling the vow, and decried the malicious stories that others had fed the pope, a device to remove Gregory from direct blame for the troubles. Here, then, was a call for peace with the papacy, a chance to move on from the bitterness of the previous decade. The emperor seized the moment to spread news of his triumph and a letter to King Henry III of England gives the emperor’s side of the story with, in today’s terms, an impressive, and probably justified, level of spin: “By a miracle rather than by strength that business [the recovery of Jerusalem] has been brought to a conclusion, which for a length of time past many chiefs and rulers of the world . . . have never been able to accomplish by force, however great . . . [but] Jesus Christ, the Son of God, beholding from on high our devoted endurance and patient devotion to His cause . . . brought it about that the sultan of Babylon restored to us the holy city, the place where the feet of Christ trod.” Thus Frederick made it clear to all that he had received God’s favor; by implication, therefore, the status of excommunicate had been unwarranted. He continued: “We, being a Catholic emperor, wore the crown which Almighty God provided for us from the throne of His majesty, when of especial grace, He exalted us on high amongst the princes of the world . . . it is more and more evident that the hand of the Lord has done all of this . . . and has raised up the horn of salvation for us in the house of His servant David.”35 The sheen of imperial authority now gleamed even brighter with Frederick’s succession to the throne of King David, a Christ-king, divinely ordained. Where the emperor stretched the truth a little further was in a claim that he was allowed to rebuild the city walls of Jerusalem (this was not so) and in his outline of the Christian position on the coast.

  In response to the coronation, Patriarch Gerold of Jerusalem declared an interdict against Frederick and banned church services in Jerusalem, although his ruling arrived after the ceremonies outlined above. The Templars and the Hospitallers came into open opposition against the emperor, in part frustrated by his generosity toward the Teutonic Knights; the local clergy and some of the nobility feared his interference in their affairs as well. Patriarch Gerold wrote an incendiary and innuendo-laden letter to people in the West, and suggested that “the conduct of the emperor . . . from beginning to end, has been to the great detriment of the cause of Jesus Christ and to the great injury to the Christian faith; from the sole of his foot to the top of his head, no common sense could be found in him. . . . After long and mysterious conferences, and without having consulted anyone who lived in the country he suddenly announced one day that he had made peace with the sultan.”36

  The day after his crown-wearing, Frederick departed from Jerusalem and headed toward Acre. The news that a papal army led by John of Brienne, the former king of Jerusalem, had invaded his lands in Sicily demanded urgent attention. These events exposed the difficulties in governing lands far distant from one another—Frederick had to cut short his stay in the Levant to preserve authority elsewhere in his dominions; the fact that it was the head of the Catholic Church who compromised his efforts in the Holy Land merely added another twist to the tale. In Acre itself tensions between the emperor and the Templars escalated. Rumors grew that Frederick planned to abduct the master of the order and take him back to Apulia; imperial troops blockaded the Templars’ quarters as well as those of the patriarch. By late April Frederick’s ship was poised to sail; he appointed representatives to govern on his behalf, although they would face a tough struggle against the legally minded nobles of Jerusalem whose insistence on preserving their rights meant that the imperial faction could never assert itself.

  Frederick was ready to leave early in the morning of May 1; such was the ill feeling toward him that this was no grand send-off, but a private, hurried affair. As he waited on the quayside by the butchers’ quarter some hostile locals spotted him and began, first, to jeer and then to pelt him with offal. John of Ibelin arrived on the scene and, in spite of his disagreements with Frederick, reminded the unruly butchers who their king was and that he deserved their respect. This amazing little cameo brought to an end one of the most controversial crusades ever—not contentious because of some atrocity, but on account of a diplomatic agreement between Christianity and Islam. The image of a shower of stinking pigs’ innards raining down upon the most powerful ruler of the medieval age is an extreme indication of the passions the emperor’s expedition aroused. In spite of the immensity of his achievement, Frederick’s uncompromising determination to impose his authority as king of Jerusalem had alienated the nobility of the Levant, a group whose support could have added real luster to his triumph. In the West, what should have been the crowning achievement of his life was clouded in contention and propaganda.

  Frederick arrived back at Brindisi on June 10, 1229. Gregory tried hard to displace him from southern Italy and Sicily to prevent the empire continuing to surround the papal states. The pope raised troops to invade, although he stopped short of calling a crusade against the excommunicate, and his soldiers wore the symbol of the keys of Saint Peter rather than the cross. Imperial forces had resisted strongly and a groundswell of support enabled the emperor to sweep aside his enemies. He also confiscated lands owned by the Templars and Hospitallers in southern Italy as a punishment for their opposition to him in the Holy Land. After months of t
hreats and insults—Gregory, for example, described the emperor as “the disciple of Muhammad”—agreements in the summer of 1230 brought peace. Frederick managed to preserve his hold on northern Italy, Germany, and Sicily (as he always wished) although he promised the Sicilian Church elections free of interference and to return the properties of the Military Orders. On August 28 the ban of excommunication was lifted and thus Frederick had eventually emerged the victor, although he was careful not to humiliate the pope. At a private dinner at Anagni, Gregory, Frederick, and Hermann of Salza gathered together to plan the way forward for the Christian cause.37 In the short term, peace between Frederick and al-Kamil ensured a period of calm but by the mid-1230s Gregory started to make sure that a new crusade would be ready to set out once the agreement expired.

  THE BARONS’ CRUSADE: MILITARY DISASTER, DIPLOMATIC SUCCESS

  In 1234 the pope dispatched preachers across Europe. While the response from imperial lands was muted, France and England reacted with vigor to begin what is known as the Barons’ Crusade.38 A swath of the French nobility, headed by Thibaud IV, the count of Champagne and king of Navarre, took the cross. From England, Richard, Earl of Cornwall, brother of Henry III and brother-in-law of Frederick II, led a large contingent. Neither King Louis IX of France nor Henry III joined the expedition, in part out of mutual suspicion. In Louis’s case his youth may also have counted against him (he was only twenty years old) although his later career would show an unmatched devotion to the crusading cause. Henry expressed some interest in the defense of the Holy Land and the settlers continued to target him for support. In the summer of 1247 he was sent a relic of the Holy Blood by the patriarch of Jerusalem and the masters of the Templars and Hospitallers. On October 13 the king personally carried the crystal vase that contained Christ’s blood from Saint Paul’s Cathedral to Westminster Abbey, and after Mass and a sermon it was presented to the clergy. Henry also had rooms at Westminster’s royal palace decorated with stories of the First Crusade, and while he assumed the cross in 1250 he never actually went to the Levant.39 The year after Thibaud took the cross, the papacy received a desperate appeal for help from Baldwin II, the Latin emperor of Constantinople. So alarmist was the tone of this message that Gregory decided to direct Thibaud to Constantinople instead of the Holy Land. Thus the tragedy of the Fourth Crusade continued to play itself out; the morally questionable circumstances in which the Latin Empire was created, coupled with the fact that Constantinople lacked the spiritual pull and unparalleled status of Jerusalem, caused the count to decline this proposal.40 Gregory tried to withhold papal funding for his campaign but Thibaud was rich enough to crusade from his own resources (although he did mistreat the Jewish communities in his lands to raise cash). If one considers the deviation of the Fourth Crusade to Constantinople, the success of the excommunicate Frederick II in recovering Jerusalem, and now Thibaud’s resistance to attempts to steer him toward the Latin Empire, papal control over crusades can be seen to be in tatters—yet impressive levels of recruitment for the Barons’ Crusade showed that the basic idea of fighting for God in the Holy Land remained strong.