Sea of Faith

by Stephen O'Shea

  Pope Innocent HI, as depicted in a fresco in Subiaco, Italy.

  Innocent, professing chagrin that his armed pilgrims never reached the Levant, nonetheless saw opportunity in the sordid event. The Great Schism of 1054 could be undone, and the independence of the Orthodox Church finally squelched. The pope installed an Italian, Thomas Morosoni, as patriarch of Constantinople, to dispense the Latin rite in the east. Baldwin of Flanders, a leader of the crusade, was crowned Latin emperor of Constantinople. The Greeks were appalled—the survivors of the court moved to Nicaea (Iznik), in Bithynia near the Sea of Marmara, where a Byzantium-in-exile was established under the guidance of the Lascaris family.

  Undeterred, Innocent continued his work promoting the faith to the world at large. Under his stewardship the Teutonic Knights, a military order modeled along the lines of the Templars, were encouraged to keep up their raids around the Baltic and deep into eastern Europe, as part of a campaign of armed proselytism. For those already within the bounds of Christendom, Innocent proved even more zealous. Several sects of dissident Christians—heretics, to the Church—had bubbled up in the cultural effervescence of twelfth-century Europe, only to be suppressed with difficulty. With Innocent in charge, the hunt for heretics intensified.

  The pope's ire came to be focused on the region of Languedoc, a patchwork of cities and towns whose leaders owed allegiance to France, the Crown of Aragon, and various lesser entities. The greatest nobleman of the area, Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, was of the same Saint-Gilles family that had stormed Jerusalem and, more recently, in the person of Raymond of Tripoli, had unsuccessfully counseled caution at the spring of Zippori on the eve of Hattin. This crusading lineage failed to impress the pontiff, who bewailed the "foxes in the vineyard of the Lord" being sheltered by Raymond of Toulouse and his kinsmen.

  Those foxes were the Cathars, or Albigensians, believers in an austere, pacifist form of Christianity. They held the worldly trappings of Innocent and his clergy and the cult of relics to be heretical abominations that proved the message of Jesus had been hijacked by Roman worshipers of an evil, material god. As with the Almoravids and the Almohads on the other shore of the Mediterranean, the enmity between the two sides of the same coin was profound. Innocent dispatched a Castilian preacher of genius, Domingo de Guzman, the eponym and founder of the Dominican order of friars, to the Midi in the hope of coaxing the Cathars back into the fold. When he failed, and his successor, a Cistercian papal legate, was murdered in 1208, Innocent finally had the pretext to goad the northern nobility of France into a full-scale assault on Languedoc. Known to history as the Albigensian Crusade, the campaign raged intermittently for twenty years, reducing a once-wealthy region to a smoking ruin and consigning thousands to death in battle, captivity, or the flames of giant bonfires in which scores, sometimes hundreds, of unrepentant Cathars were burned alive while their cowled executioners sang hymns to the glory of God. Such was Innocent's response to dissent.

  Even without the active promotion of the pope, the era was capable of generating similarly arresting spectacles of piety. In 1212, as the Albigensian Crusade was in full swing, a strange, unsanctioned mass movement took place in northern Europe. A peasant named Stephen in France, and one named Nicolas in the Rhineland, exhorted young men and women to leave their humble occupations in the fields and go marching to Jerusalem, to prove that the poor could succeed where the great lords and ladies of the Second, Third, and Fourth Crusades had so abysmally failed. Long embellished in folklore as the "Children's Crusade,"* this mysterious, spontaneous procession, numbering in the thousands, begged its way down the Rhone and through the passes of the Alps to the ports of the Mediterranean. Although trustworthy contemporary sources are scarce, on arriving at the shore they apparently expected the sea to part to allow them to continue their march. When this did not happen, the movement broke up in confusion. The mariners of Genoa and Marseille no doubt offered passage to Outremer at prices reminiscent of those the Venetians demanded in the Fourth Crusade. The fate of these starry-eyed youths remains unknown—though some may well have been lured aboard ships with the promise of free passage, then been sold on the high seas to Almohad slavers out of Algeria.

  The youngsters of 1212, whoever they were, had picked the wrong crusade. Pope Innocent had chosen that year to turn his attentions to Spain. Truces had expired and the once-quarrelsome Christian kings, hectored by the clergy, were close to burying the hatchet. Further concentrating minds was a change in their opponents: having tired of Castilian and Aragonese raids into al-Andalus following the end of the truce, the Almohad caliph Muhammad al-Nasir finally acquiesced in calls for jihad from his own clergy and resumed large-scale operations in Iberia. In 1211 an Almohad army had crossed the Sierra Morena and, after a lengthy siege, taken Salvatierra, a castle manned by the Knights of Calatrava. An outpost of the Spanish warrior-monks in the southern swath of La Mancha held by the Almohads, Salvatierra had long been a bothersome anomaly to the Muslims. The castle's fall—news of which was trumpeted mournfully from the pulpits of Europe—occurred too late in the campaign season to follow up with further offensives. Muhammad retired to Seville, ready to resume the following year. Clearly, both sides were ready to abandon raiding for waging all-out war.

  Innocent thus gave his blessing to yet another crusade. His other initiative, against the Cathars, was proving a ghastly success: in 1211 his emissaries had performed the largest auto da fe of the Middle Ages by burning four hundred Cathars together in a small Languedoc town. Nothwithstanding this intra-Christian violence and that visited upon the Orthodox of Constantinople in 1204, in Spain the pope threatened to excommunicate anyone who engaged in hostilities against his fellow Christians. He announced a remission of sins to all who mustered for crusade in Toledo in the spring of 1212. There, King Alfonso VIII awaited, eager to cleanse the stain of his defeat at Alarcos some seventeen years earlier. His wife's brother, the late Richard Lionheart, had been a respected crusader; Alfonso aimed to establish an even more glorious legacy. With Innocent's blessing, the formidable archbishop of Toledo, Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada, patron of the translators but implacable foe of Islam, agreed to part with half of the Castilian Church's revenues to finance the crusade.

  King and archbishop were doubtless pleased to see the response to Innocent's summons. Throughout May and June, thousands of soldiers and knights arrived in Toledo and camped out in the Huerta del Rey, the same royal garden tended by eminent Arab botanists in the day, 150 years previously, when the monarch's great-great-grandfather, Alfonso VI, had fled Leon for the hospitality of the taifa king al-Mam'un. The sloping green became a blanket of tents. The citizen militias of most Castilian towns had heeded the call, with Madrid, Ávila, Segovia, Medina del Campo, Cuenca, Huete, Uclés, Valladolid, and So-ria furnishing both horse and foot warriors. Also present with his feudal levy was one other powerful Spanish king: Pedro II of Aragon. Still chary of the Castilians, the monarchs of Portugal, Leon, and Navarre had remained at home, although many of their barons had been permitted to come.

  A great number of foreigners were also in the encampment, mostly from France, ever the land of enthusiasts for crusading ventures. Among them with his knights was a vassal of the Aragonese, Arnold Amaury, archbishop of Nar-bonne. A Cistercian who led the Albigensian crusade in its first few years, Arnold was later credited with having said, in response to a question about distinguishing Cathar from Catholic, "Kill them all, God will know his own." True to their reputation and crusader tradition, the French at Toledo immediately set about despoiling and murdering the Jews of the city, only to be forcibly restrained by the Castilians and Aragonese. Convivencia had never been particularly strong north of the Pyrenees.

  Hundreds of kilometers to the south, near Seville, Caliph Muhammad gathered his armies in the same months of 1212. Volunteers for the jihad had streamed first into Marrakesh, then were shipped across the Strait of Gibraltar. An army was assembled from among the cities of al-Andalus, and smaller contingents of Berbers—t
he crack troops of the force—had also gathered. The treasury had been opened to mercenaries—Turkish mounted bowmen from Anatolia and Arab bedouin irregulars, the latter usually an enemy of the Berber elite. As with the crusade, jihad had momentarily trumped local resentments. Muhammad, a thirty-year-old whose red hair and penetrating blue eyes may have been inherited from his mother, Zahar, a Christian concubine, reviewed his troops down by the Guadalquivir from behind a line of black African bodyguards. The Muslims may have numbered as many as thirty thousand; the Christians, slightly fewer. In June, both armies set out, one heading north, the other, south.

  The armies would contend across a terrain of spectacular natural barriers that is the Iberian peninsula's gift to the landscape painter and curse to the empire builder. The demarcation of geological change is unmissable between La Mancha and Andalusia. The gray-green heights of the Sierra Morena—which are not brown {morena)—rise at the southernmost edge of the central meseta of Spain, a note of drama closing off a vast expanse of grazing land and waving grains to the north. On the other side of the mountain range the land becomes unruly, folding and crumpling as it leads southward to the valley of the Guadalquivir, every summit, slope, and dale soon covered in a seemingly infinite grid of olive groves. The Manchegan side of the Morena exhibits monotony but no pattern; the Andalusian, the opposite.

  Getting from one landscape to another is difficult, as the mountains form a solid pine-covered wall stretching hundreds of meters tall. Here and there, a denuded gray outcropping can be seen, the rock like the pipes of an organ, hinting at a defile that might somehow lead the way through the barrier. The surest path is the Despeñaperros* gorge, the best natural gap to wind through the maze of rock and tree. Travelers racing along the main Madrid-Seville highway toward the gap must slow once it is reached, for the twists and turns of the road, and the view of the surrounding wilderness, command attention.

  The Despeñaperros, the defile through the Sierra Morena that links Andalusia to La Mancha.

  At the foot of the descent, in Andalusia, is the village of Santa Elena, a tidy, white settlement with a church to which is affixed an eighteenth-century commemorative plaque to the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa. The shrine set up in the vicinity by Alfonso VIII has long since vanished. The navas themselves—or flats—lie just to the west of the village in a plain studded by hills. The Arabs, by contrast, name the battle after these hills—al-Ikab (mound)—rather than the flat land in between them. The only man-made attraction in the area is an ecological highway rest stop, the Puerta del Andalucia, set up to inform northern Europeans barreling south to the Costa del Sol of the threshold of flora and fauna they have just crossed. No mention is made in the displays of the epochal battle that occurred nearby, but a dirt road leads from the center into the national park of Despeñaperros. There, a kilometer or two farther on, at a site un-visited and unmarked, two armies decided the future of Spain.

  The progress of the Christian army was chronicled through letters written by Alfonso VIII, Arnold Amaury, and Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada. The crusading force left Toledo in three separate detachments in the days around June 20, 1212, heading south toward the hot plain of La Mancha. Far ahead in the van were the French, led by a Castilian noble, Diego Lopez de Haro. Whether they received the honor of going first because the Toledans desired to see their backs is not addressed in the testimonies.

  The army crossed the Christian-held regions south of Toledo, a hilly open range for livestock, without incident. There, in the past few generations the warrior-knights of Calatrava and Santiago, as lords of this marchland, had pioneered the herding and rustling techniques that their descendants in husbandry, cowboys and gauchos, would practice in the New World. Eventually, the expanse that the crusaders traversed would come to be known as New Castile—like Old Castile in the north, a land named after its surfeit of defensive castles.

  At Malagon, a fortress just north of the present-day city of Ciudad Real, the French entered Almohad territory. They besieged the castle without waiting for the arrival of the Castilians or Aragonese. Many of them veterans of warfare in Outremer or Languedoc, they made short work of the defenses of the small fortress town. When the Muslim inhabitants surrendered in the expectation of being shown mercy, they found out that they had been disastrously mistaken. All but three—the lord and his two sons—were put to the sword. By the time Alfonso VIII arrived, the French had appropriated most of the town's booty for themselves.

  The crusaders pushed on, picking their way across streams that had been booby-trapped with iron spikes to lame the horses. At Calatrava, a site on the Guadiana River of inestimable significance for the warrior-monks, a halt was called. The friars of the Calatrava order, who had originally taken possession of the castle in 1158 from Templars unwilling to hold it against the Almohad advance, wanted their mother house back, for they, in turn, had lost the fortress after the debacle at Alarcos in 1195. Alfonso, judging the castle likely to occasion a lengthy siege that his massive army could ill afford in the mounting heat of the summer, offered generous terms to the Muslim garrison and townspeople. They could leave, unharmed but empty-handed. Yusuf Ibn Qadis, the Andalusi governor of the castle admired for his comportment in the frontier wars, gladly agreed to Alfonso's generous terms. The governor, according to a chronicler, wanted to save lives.

  To the French crusaders, this was the ultimate betrayal. First the Jews of Toledo, now the Muslims of Calatrava—the enemies of their faith were being allowed to go about their business with impunity. The loot from Calatrava could not placate them, even after Alfonso, denying his Castilians their share, split the abundant take in food and weapons between the Aragonese and the French. It was to no avail: the northerners, declaring that the sun had become unbearable, had already decided that these feckless Spanish kings lacked sufficient ardor. They spurred their horses northward, to retrace their route to the Pyrenees and beyond; only Archbishop Arnold Amaury and his 150 knights, vassals of Pedro of Aragon, remained. As the retreating French crusaders passed by the walls of Toledo—which prudently shut its gates to them—they were pelted with refuse.

  The caliph, whose spies were at work in the crusader army, must have been delighted. He ordered his large and unwieldy force to move away from the protective walls of Jaén, the principal city south of the Sierra Morena. He too had his problems—victualing the great host he had assembled was proving difficult. Two intendants had been decapitated on his order in early June, and his rough treatment of the native peasants may have disconcerted his Andalusi troops. Worse yet for morale was his treatment of Ibn Qadis, the commander who had surrendered Calatrava. Two Arab chroniclers relate that this great lord, under whom many of the Andalusi militias had willingly served, was summarily beheaded for giving up the fortress. If news of the French defection—perhaps a third of the Christians' best heavy cavalry—pleased the Muslim army, the execution of Ibn Qadis could only have sown discord.

  The Muslims advanced north to the rough country just below the Despenaperros Pass. The Almohad leader set up camp near what is now the village of Santa Elena. At this stage he could have moved his army up beyond the Sierra Morena and deployed it on the wide meseta, but his strategic intention lay elsewhere. He would have his men block the passageways through the mountains, leaving the Christians stranded in the unforgiving sun of the plateau of La Mancha. Their propensity for internecine feuding would do the rest. Once a demoralized, thirsty crusader army had split up in acrimony, Caliph Muhammad, presumably, planned to take the offensive.

  For Alfonso and Pedro, the departure of the French may have seemed a calamity, but the absence of that querulous, headstrong contingent was not without its benefits. The Spaniards, despite their diverse origins, were united in purpose, and thus more likely to avoid the pitfalls of indiscipline when the decisive moment arrived. Morale was further raised when King Sancho VII of Navarre and his knights galloped into view to join the march southward. The Navarrese monarch had put aside his quarrels with both Aragon and Ca
stile and decided, not a moment too soon, to participate in a collective effort against al-Andalus. The threats and blandishments of Pope Innocent had had their desired effect: three Spanish monarchs had come together, at last, to take on the enemy as one.

  The Christians made their way through Almohad La Mancha, reducing as many fortresses as they could without getting bogged down in long engagements. Fortunately for Alfonso's pride, the castle of Alarcos, the scene of his humiliation in 1195, fell quickly. Several lesser strongholds were captured as well, but another symbol of Almohad triumph—Salvatierra—presented a dilemma. To lay siege to the great castle would have expended precious time and effort, and the French, despite their treachery, had been right—the heat was growing stifling. Ten months earlier, the knights of Calatrava had surrendered this island in a sea of Muslim castles. Alfonso proposed attacking it but was dissuaded by Pedro and Sancho, who feared the onset of high summer and the resulting strain on the army's stores. Further dissension arose when news reached the camp of the actions of the king of Leon. Immune to the threats of excommunication issued by Innocent earlier in the year, the Leonese monarch had taken advantage of the absence of his rivals to launch an attack on northern Castile. Alfonso, arguing that the large army gathered at Salvatierra would never be equaled in power, advocated heading back up north to confront his treacherous neighbor. The Almohads were as good as beaten, Alfonso maintained—their army had failed to show up for a fight. Sancho of Navarre was not amused and reminded the Castilian that he had joined forces with him to fight Muslims, not Christians. In the end, the Spaniards staged a great parade before Salvatierra, marching past its fortifications with banners flying and reliquaries held high. The ceremony took place less to impress the Muslim garrison than to reassure themselves.