The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean

by John Julius Norwich

  But Emperors could not be thrown out so easily. The Hohenstaufen name retained immense prestige in Germany, while in the Regno Frederick’s endless peregrinations had ensured him a consistently high profile, to the point where he seemed omnipresent, part of life itself. Loftily ignoring the papal pronouncement, he continued the struggle; it was still in progress when in December 1250 he was seized by a sudden violent attack of dysentery at Castel Fiorentino in Apulia. He died a few days later on Tuesday, 13 December, just thirteen days short of his fifty-sixth birthday. Inevitably there were rumours of poison, but no real evidence has ever been put forward. His body was taken to Palermo where, at his request, it was buried in the cathedral, in the magnificent porphyry sarcophagus that had been prepared for his grandfather Roger II at his own foundation of Cefalù but had till then remained unoccupied.

  As his heir in Germany and the Regno Frederick had named Conrad, son of Yolande of Jerusalem, and during Conrad’s absence in Germany he had entrusted the government of Italy and Sicily to Manfred, the favourite of his eleven illegitimate children. Manfred proved a worthy scion of his father. He recreated Frederick’s brilliant court, founded the Apulian port of Manfredonia and married his own daughter Helena to Michael II, Despot of Epirus, an alliance which gained him the island of Corfu and a considerable stretch of the Albanian coast, including the historic city and port of Durazzo. Another daughter, Constance, became the wife of Peter, heir to the throne of Aragon (the second Constance of Aragon to rate a mention in this chapter).

  Even after his half-brother Conrad died in 1254, Manfred did not–to the Pope’s inexpressible relief–seek authority over northern or central Italy; nevertheless, his increasing power in the south could not but reawaken anxieties in Rome, and these became greater still when, in August 1258, he prevailed upon the Sicilian baronage to proclaim him king. Ever since Frederick’s theoretical deposition in 1245, Pope Innocent had been seeking an ‘athlete of Christ’ who would rid south Italy once and for all of the house of Hohenstaufen and lead the army of the Church to victory in the peninsula. Richard Earl of Cornwall, the brother of King Henry III and the richest man in England–he had been elected King of the Romans in 1257–had at one moment seemed a possibility, but Innocent had been unable to persuade him to take up the challenge. The Pope was still trying to find a suitable candidate when he died in 1261, to be succeeded by Urban IV, the first Frenchman to occupy the papal throne. Urban’s eye soon fell on a compatriot, Charles of Anjou.

  The brother of King Louis IX, Charles was now thirty-five. In 1246 he had acquired through his wife the county of Provence, which had brought him untold wealth; he was also lord, inter alia, of the thriving port of Marseille. To this cold, cruel and vastly ambitious opportunist the Pope was now offering a chance not to be missed. The army which Charles was to lead against Manfred, and which began to assemble in north Italy in the autumn of 1265, was to be officially designated a Crusade–which meant that it would be as always something of a ragbag, with the usual admixture of adventurers hoping to secure fiefdoms in south Italy, pilgrims seeking the remission of their sins and ruffians simply out for plunder. With them, however, was an impressive number of knights from all over western Europe–French, German, Spanish, Italian and Provençal, with even a few Englishmen thrown in for good measure–who, Charles firmly believed, would be more than a match for anything that Manfred could fling against them.

  On 6 January 1266 Pope Urban crowned Charles of Anjou with the crown of Sicily; less than a month afterwards, on 3 February, Charles’s army crossed the frontier into the Regno. This time there was to be no long campaign. The two armies met on the 26th outside the old Roman city of Benevento, and it was all over quite quickly. Manfred, courageous as always, stood his ground and went down fighting, but his troops, hopelessly outnumbered, soon fled from the field. The battle had been decisive: the Crusade was over. And so–or very nearly–was the house of Hohenstaufen. Two years later King Conrad’s son Conrad IV–better known as Conradin–and Prince Henry of Castile made a last desperate attempt to save the situation, leading an army of Germans, Italians and Spaniards into the Regno. Charles hurried up and met them at the border village of Tagliacozzo. This time the battle, which was fought on 23 August 1268, proved a good deal harder, resulting in hideous slaughter on both sides; eventually the Angevins once again won the day. Conradin escaped from the field, but was captured soon afterwards. There followed a show trial in Naples after which, on 29 October, the young prince–he was just sixteen–and several of his companions were taken down to the marketplace and beheaded on the spot.

  Manfred and Conradin were both, in their own different ways, heroes. It was hardly their fault that they were overshadowed by their father and grandfather; so, after all, was much of the known world. Fluency in six languages was an even rarer accomplishment in the thirteenth century than it is today; in addition, Frederick was a sensitive lyric poet at whose court the sonnet was invented,94 a generous patron of the arts, a skilled general, a subtle statesman and the greatest naturalist of his time. A passionate intellectual curiosity gave him a more than passing knowledge of philosophy and astronomy, geometry and algebra, medicine and the physical sciences. Not the least remarkable of his qualities was his talent for showmanship. His force of character alone, the sheer dazzle of his personality, would always have ensured that he impressed himself on everyone with whom he came in contact, but he deliberately built up his image still further: with that extraordinary menagerie, with his personal regiment of Saracens, even with his harem. These last two attributes were regularly held against him by his enemies, but they too carried a clear message: the Emperor was not as other men. He was a giant, a demigod, to whom the accepted rules of conduct did not apply.

  In a word, he had style–and style has always been, as it still is today, a speciality of the Italians. Frederick was probably one of the first men–and in all history there have been surprisingly few–to have had a foot in both worlds, the Italian and the German, and to feel equally at ease on either side of the Alps; but his heart remained in Italy where he spent most of his life, and it is as an Italian that he finds his place in this book. Culturally, he gave the country much. Had the Provençal troubadours, fleeing from the horrors of the Albigensian Crusade, not found a warm welcome at the court of Palermo and fired the local poets with their ideals of courtly love, Italian literature might have taken a diametrically different course and the Divine Comedy might never have been written. In the field of architecture, too, he was an innovator. The immense fortified gateway to his frontier city of Capua, built to defend its bridge across the Vulturno river and designed by the Emperor himself, no longer stands; but much of its sculpture is preserved in the local museum, from which it is clear that the Emperor drew liberally on the decorative language of ancient Rome, pre-echoing the Renaissance well over a century before its time. Classical pediments and pilasters appear even more remarkably in his magnificent hunting-box of Castel del Monte, a vast turreted octagon in limestone crowning a remote Apulian hilltop. But perhaps we are wrong to be surprised. Frederick was after all a Roman Emperor, and he was determined that we should not forget it.

  Politically, on the other hand, he was a failure. His dream had been to make Italy and Sicily a united kingdom within the Empire, with its capital at Rome; the overriding purpose of the Papacy, aided by the cities and towns of Lombardy, was to ensure that that dream should never be realised. It was unfortunate for the Emperor that he should have had to contend with two such able and determined men as Gregory and Innocent, but in the long run the struggle could have had no other outcome. The Empire, even in Germany, had lost its strength and cohesion; no longer could the loyalty of the German princes be relied upon, or even their deep concern. As for north and central Italy, the Lombard cities would never again submit to imperial bluster. Had Frederick only accepted this fact, the threat to the Papacy would have been removed and his beloved Regno might well have been preserved. Alas, he rejected it, and in doing so
he not only lost Italy; he signed the death-warrant of his dynasty.

  CHAPTER X

  The End of Outremer

  No two contemporary European rulers have been more different than the Emperor Frederick II and King Louis IX of France. Frederick was an intellectual and a free-thinker. He had little respect for religion; indeed, he spent a good deal of his life under the ban of the Church. He could, on occasion, take a strong line with heretics, particularly if they threatened the peace or security of the Empire; at the same time, having been raised in the court of Palermo among Arabs and Greeks, he had a deep respect and understanding both of Islam and of eastern Orthodoxy, and liked nothing better than to discuss the finer points of theology with scholars of the two faiths. As a statesman he was by no means without principle, but he was also a pragmatist, and he knew full well that if he and his empire were to survive he simply could not afford too delicate a conscience. In appearance he had never been handsome: broad and stocky, with thin reddish hair. Physically he was hard as nails.

  King Louis IX, on the other hand, was a saint and looked it. A contemporary friar who saw him just before he left for the Holy Land describes him as ‘thin, slender, lean and tall, with an angelic countenance and a gracious person’. At times his face beneath his fair hair was disfigured by angry-looking patches caused by the erysipelas to which he remained a martyr all his life; nevertheless, goodness seemed to shine out of him. ‘Few human beings,’ writes Sir Steven Runciman, ‘have ever been so consciously and sincerely virtuous.’ Yet, strangely enough, there was no trace of sanctimoniousness; on the contrary, Louis was energetic, brave in battle, when necessary stern and uncompromising. He spent much of his waking life in prayer, often prone on the ground and forgetting himself so completely as to emerge in a daze, uncertain where he was; but, as he himself confessed, he had no tears ‘to water the aridity in his heart’. This may have been one reason for his regular physical mortification with fasts, scourges and hair shirts, and his personal tending of the sick–particularly those with seriously unpleasant diseases. As for sin, he could hardly bear to contemplate its existence. To the heretic and the infidel, however, he was pitiless; never could he have bloodlessly regained the Holy Places, as Frederick did so stylishly.

  Desperately ill with malaria at the end of 1244, the thirty-year-old King Louis vowed that if he lived he would lead a Crusade. As always he was as good as his word, and immediately on his recovery he began his preparations. They took three years, but on 25 August 1248, leaving his mother Blanche of Castile95 as regent, he set sail from the specially constructed port of Aigues-Mortes accompanied by his wife, Margaret of Provence,96 and two of his three brothers, Robert of Artois and Charles of Anjou. On 18 September they landed at Limassol in Cyprus, the appointed rendezvous for the Crusading army, and Louis settled down to plan his campaign. Despite the disaster of the Fifth Crusade it had been generally agreed that the objective should once again be Egypt, the richest and at the same time the most exposed province of Saladin’s empire. Unfortunately the year was already too far advanced for operations to be started at once–the hidden sandbanks in the approaches to the Nile delta could be negotiated only in calm weather–so the King was reluctantly persuaded to winter on the island. With the coming of spring there arose another difficulty: an acute shortage of ships. Louis had relied on the Italian maritime republics to furnish the number necessary, but when the moment came Pisa and Genoa were at war and in need of all the vessels they could get, while the Venetians–who disapproved of the whole Crusade–simply refused. Not until the end of May 1249 could the King muster the necessary transport, and even then the first part of the fleet to sail was scattered by a violent storm and was obliged to limp back to Limassol.

  After that the situation improved, and at dawn on 5 June, in the teeth of heavy opposition, the Crusaders landed on the sands to the west of the delta. The fighting was long and fierce, but the superior discipline of the French knights won the day; as night fell the Egyptian army withdrew over the permanent bridge of boats to Damietta. On its arrival the order was given for a general evacuation, and all the Muslims obeyed. The Christian Copts who remained sent word that resistance was at an end, and the Crusaders marched triumphantly over the bridge–which had unaccountably remained intact–and into the city. All this made a refreshing contrast to the Fifth Crusade, which had achieved a similar result only after a seventeen-month siege. As in 1219, the great mosque was converted into a cathedral; the three military orders–Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights–were installed in suitable accommodation; the Genoese, Pisans and–rather more surprisingly–the Venetians were each allotted a street and a market; and Damietta became, briefly, the effective capital of Outremer.

  All too soon, however, the cracks began to show. The annual flooding of the Nile was imminent. Mindful of the experience of the Fifth Crusade, Louis was determined not to advance until the waters subsided, which in turn meant his army having to sweat it out in forced inactivity through the grilling heat of the delta summer. Food supplies began to run short; dysentery and malaria made their appearance in the Crusader camp. Like his father before him, the Egyptian Sultan al-Ayub–who was himself dying of tuberculosis–proposed from his sickbed an exchange of Damietta for Jerusalem, but his offer was rejected out of hand: King Louis refused to treat with an infidel. Instead, when the Nile went down at the end of October, he gave orders to march on Cairo.

  His army had advanced about a third of the way to the capital when it found itself confronted by the Saracen army at Mansurah, a town built only a few years before by the Sultan al-Kamil on the site of his victory over the Fifth Crusade. Then came catastrophe–a catastrophe which was exclusively the fault of Count Robert of Artois. Defying his brother’s strict instructions not to attack until he was ordered to do so, and followed only by the Templars and a small contingent from England, he charged into the Egyptian camp where he took its occupants by surprise, slaughtering a good many and putting the rest to flight. Had he halted there all might have been well, but the camp was about two miles outside Mansurah itself, and in his exhilaration Robert galloped on into the city. This time the Egyptians were ready for him. The gates were wide open, and he and his followers found their way clear right up to the walls of the citadel. Only then did the defenders appear, pouring in on them from the side streets. The gates clanged shut, and the result was a massacre. Robert himself was killed, with most of his knights, and so were virtually all the English; of the 290 Templar knights, only five survived.

  This disaster did not quite mark the end of the Crusade. Not until the beginning of April 1250–by which time dysentery and typhoid were doing far more damage than the Egyptians to his men–did Louis decide to return. Now it was he who proposed the exchange of Damietta for Jerusalem, but the Sultan Turanshah–who had succeeded his father al-Ayub some three months before–was not interested. For those still able to ride or walk, the journey back was a nightmare. The King’s own conduct was beyond praise, especially as he too was now seriously ill. At last the commander of his bodyguard, seeing that he could go no further, took him into a nearby house; but he was soon found, captured and taken in chains to Mansurah, where he slowly recovered. His knights and soldiers surrendered en masse and were led away into captivity, but they, alas, were not so lucky. Seeing that they were far too many to be effectively guarded, the Egyptians soon executed all those too weak to march; the remainder they beheaded in the course of the following week, at the rate of 300 a day. They spared only the leading barons–in the hope, it need hardly be said, of a good ransom.

  And they got one. As well as the return of Damietta itself, which paid for the freedom of the King, it was agreed that the Egyptians should receive the enormous sum of half a million livres tournois97 for all the rest. It was a hard bargain, and even that would have been impossible but for Queen Margaret. In the last stages of pregnancy, she had remained at Damietta; there her child was safely delivered–with an octogenarian knight as midwife–just
three days after she had received reports of the surrender. She named her little son John Tristan, ‘the child of sorrow’. Now there came a double blow: the news that food supplies were running dangerously short, and that the Pisans and Genoese had begun to evacuate the city. Summoning their leaders to her bedside, she begged them to stay, pointing out that she could not hope to hold Damietta without them, and that if it were to fall she would have nothing with which to ransom her husband. Only when she offered to buy up all the food left in the city and make herself responsible for its distribution did they agree to remain. The cost was enormous, but Damietta was saved until the ransom could be arranged. It was eventually handed over on 6 May 1250, while the balance of the funds required was later disgorged, with considerable reluctance, by the Templars. A week later Louis and those of the barons who were still able to walk disembarked at Acre. Those who were too sick or badly wounded to travel were left behind at Damietta on the understanding that they would be properly looked after. Scarcely had the ships left port than the whole lot were massacred.

  In the Islamic world, the failed Sixth Crusade caused a major upheaval. Much of the Muslim fighting force was composed of Mamelukes, a vast corps of soldiers, mostly Georgian or Circassian, who had been bought as boy slaves in the Caucasus and trained as crack cavalrymen. Their power and influence had steadily increased during the reign of the Sultan al-Ayub; after his death in November 1249, Turanshah had tried to cut them down to size. It proved a fatal mistake. On 2 May 1250 he gave a banquet for his emirs; just as he rose to depart a band of Mameluke soldiers burst in and attacked him. Badly wounded, he fled and plunged into the Nile, but a leading Mameluke general named Baibars followed him and finished him off. The Ayubid dynasty perished with him.