The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean

by John Julius Norwich

  Five years later, if persistent rumours are to be believed, Baibars was involved in another attempt at assassination which went more calamitously wrong. It was said that he had prepared a bowl of poisoned kumiss–that fermented mare’s milk so unaccountably popular with Turks and Mongols alike–for an enemy, and had then thoughtlessly drunk from it himself. He did not live to see the end of Outremer; Franks were still to be found in plenty in most of the principal cities. In his seventeen-year reign, however, he had eliminated most of the Christian dominions around the coast. The days of the survivors, as they themselves well knew, were numbered.

  Then, halfway across the Mediterranean on Easter Monday 1282, there occurred a totally unexpected event which was to have an immense impact on virtually the whole of the Middle Sea. It has always been known, somewhat poetically, as the War of the Sicilian Vespers.

  If Charles of Anjou was to accomplish his grand design, he needed a suitably subservient Pope. On the death of Clement IV in 1268 he had therefore used his considerable influence in the curia to keep the papal throne unoccupied for three years (conveniently covering the time when he was away on his brother’s Crusade); the vacancy had ended only when the authorities at Viterbo–where the conclave was being held–actually removed the roof from the palace in which the cardinals were deliberating. Their hasty choice had then fallen on Gregory X, who proved distinctly unhelpful, thwarting Charles’s attempts to have his nephew Philip III of France elected Holy Roman Emperor and allying himself with Byzantium to the extent of actually effecting, at the Council of Lyons in 1274, a temporary reunion of the Eastern and Western Churches. Only in 1281, with the election of another Frenchman, Martin IV, did Charles get his way at last. Already master of Provence and the greater part of Italy, titular King of Jerusalem101 and by a long way the most powerful–and dangerous–man in Europe, he was now free to realise his greatest ambition by marching against Constantinople, whose Emperor, Michael VIII Palaeologus, Pope Martin had obligingly redeclared schismatic. It was only twenty years since the Greeks had recovered their capital from the Franks; as 1282 opened, their chances of keeping it looked slim indeed.

  They were saved by the people of Palermo. The French were already hated throughout the Regno, both for the severity of their taxation and for the arrogance of their conduct, and when, on the evening of 30 March, a drunken French sergeant began importuning a Sicilian woman outside the Church of Santo Spirito just as the bells were ringing for vespers, her countrymen’s anger boiled over. The sergeant was set upon by her husband and killed; the murder led to a riot, the riot to a massacre. Two thousand Frenchmen were dead by morning. Palermo, and soon afterwards Messina also, was in rebel hands. The rising could not have been better timed. In its later stages it was led by a Salernitan nobleman named John of Procida, a friend of Frederick II and of Manfred. John had recently spent some time at the court of Peter III of Aragon, husband of Manfred’s daughter Constance, and while there had encouraged Peter to make good his somewhat shadowy claim to the Sicilian crown. Here was the ideal opportunity to do so. Peter reached Palermo in September, and by the following month had captured Messina, where the French had made their last stand.

  For Charles of Anjou, surrounded by his court in Naples, the loss of Sicily spelt disaster. He naturally refused to recognise his defeat, even going so far as to propose deciding the fate of Sicily by single combat with Peter, to take place under English protection at Bordeaux–several weeks’ journey away. Peter rather surprisingly accepted, though in subsequent negotiations it was decided that since Charles was already fifty-five–an old man by the standards of the time–and Peter only forty, it would be fairer if each monarch were accompanied by 100 carefully chosen knights to fight beside him. The date for the great contest was fixed for Tuesday 1 June 1283; unfortunately–or perhaps fortunately–the precise hour was not specified. King Peter and his knights arrived early in the morning, to find no sign of Charles; after his heralds had duly proclaimed his presence, Peter accordingly left the field and on his return announced that his was the victory, his cowardly opponent having failed to put in an appearance. Charles arrived a few hours later and did exactly the same. The two never met. The cost to both, in time as well as money, was considerable, but honour was saved on both sides.

  And so the Regno was split down the middle, Charles reigning (as Charles I) in Naples and Peter in Sicily, each determined to expel the other and to reunify the country. But Charles’s reputation was gone. His Mediterranean empire was seen to have been built on sand. He had ceased to be a world power. There could no longer be any question of an expedition against Byzantium. In Outremer his principal supporters, the Templars and the Venetians, fell away; soon he recalled his viceroy from Acre, leaving only a relatively junior officer in his place. Three years later–on 7 January 1285–he died at Foggia. For twenty years he had dominated the Mediterranean, possessed by both an insatiable ambition and a driving energy that allowed him no rest. He was genuinely pious, but his piety brought him no humility, since he had always seen himself as God’s chosen instrument. Nor did it bring him humanity, or mercy; his execution of the sixteen-year-old Conradin had shocked all Europe, and was held against him all his life. He might on occasion have been admired; never could he be loved.

  The War of the Sicilian Vespers–for which Charles was largely responsible–was to continue well into the next century. It was not only Philip III ‘the Bold’ of France, and his son and successor Philip IV ‘the Fair’ after him, who were bound for reasons of family honour to recover the island so rudely wrenched away. There was also the fact that Sicily and the Regno had been granted to Charles by the Pope, so the Papacy too had to look to its prestige. Pope Martin IV had promptly proclaimed a Crusade against the Aragonese; King Philip, for his part, had begun to raise an army. But it took more than these two powers to overawe the house of Aragon and its faithful ally, the Republic of Genoa. From both sides of the dispute diplomatic missions criss-crossed Europe, until almost all the Mediterranean nations were to a greater or lesser degree involved.

  The notable exception was, of course, the Mamelukes of Egypt. They had little interest in Sicily; their eyes were fixed on the lands of Outremer and the destruction of the Crusader states. Those states might have been saved, at least temporarily, if the Christian nations of the west had forgotten their other preoccupations and marched to the defence of their beleaguered co-religionists; but they did not do so. The first alarm was sounded, surprisingly enough, by the Mongols; in 1287 the Great Khan–now Hulagu’s grandson Arghun–sent to the west a Christian ambassador, a certain Rabban Sauma. He first visited Constantinople, then went on to Naples, Genoa, Paris and Bordeaux, where King Edward I of England was in residence in his mainland capital.102 He returned via Rome. Everywhere he was accorded a royal reception. In Paris, Philip IV personally showed him round the Sainte-Chapelle to admire the sacred relics that his grandfather St Louis had purchased from the Byzantine Emperor; in Bordeaux, Edward–who was after all an old Crusader himself–invited him to celebrate Mass with his court; in Rome, he received the sacrament from the hands of the newly elected Pope Nicholas IV. Everywhere he stressed the urgent necessity of an expedition to recover the Holy Places and to save Outremer. Everywhere he received a sympathetic hearing, but never once was he given a firm undertaking or a definite date. The old Crusading spirit was gone. It would not return.

  The Great Khan found this difficult to believe. In the early summer of 1289 he despatched to Europe another ambassador, a Genoese by the name of Buscarel, with letters to the Pope and the French and English kings. (Their impact must have been somewhat reduced by the fact that they were written in Mongolian, but Buscarel was presumably able to translate.) This time Arghun went so far as to propose an alliance. He himself, he wrote, intended to lead an army of 20–30,000 horsemen that would reach Damascus in mid-February 1291. If the two kings were prepared to send armies of their own and the Holy Places were consequently recovered, he would be happy to hand the
m over. Alas, this initiative was no more successful than its predecessor. The Great Khan made one more attempt, but it too proved a failure, and by the time his envoys returned he was dead.

  By this time, as if to confirm Arghun’s worst fears, the Mameluke Sultan Qalawun had moved his entire army into Syria. His pretext was to prevent the Genoese from taking over the County of Tripoli, as they were admittedly threatening to do, though there seems little doubt that his long-term objective was more sinister. Towards the end of March 1289 he drew up his troops beneath the walls of Tripoli and on 26 April they swarmed into the city. Every Christian man they found was put to death, every woman and child carried off into slavery, every building burned to the ground. Now at last the west began to take notice. Thanks to the urgings of Pope Nicholas, the Venetians–who had been delighted to see the Genoese deprived of Tripoli but had now begun to fear for their own interests in Acre–sent twenty war galleys, which were joined by five from King James of Aragon. Unfortunately, however, this fleet was accompanied by a rabble of peasants and smalltime adventurers from north Italy, all of them out for what they could get; from the day of their arrival in Acre they proved drunken and irresponsible, and one sweltering day in August 1290 they went on the rampage, charging through the streets and killing every Muslim they encountered.

  Following the fall of Tripoli, Qalawun had agreed to a truce with the Christians; had all gone well, they might have been able to enjoy a few more years of independence. But after the massacre at Acre the truce had clearly ceased to exist, and there was no doubt left in the Sultan’s mind: the Franks must be eliminated. On 6 March 1291, under his son and successor al-Ashraf Khalil, the great army once again set forth. Its size was given as 60,000 cavalry and a 160,000 infantry: a wild exaggeration, perhaps, but there could be little doubt that the Christians of Acre–with a total population of fewer than 40,000, some 800 knights and some 14,000 foot-soldiers, including Venetians, Pisans and the three Military Orders–would find themselves outnumbered many times over.

  The siege began on 6 April. The defenders fought bravely, with both the Templars and the Hospitallers making sorties–alas unsuccessful–into the enemy camp. They still had command of the sea, so they were not short of food; but they lacked armaments, and above all the manpower adequately to protect the length of the landward wall, which extended for well over a mile. Morale received a considerable boost when King Henry II of Jerusalem,103 twenty years old and an epileptic, arrived from Cyprus on 4 May with forty ships, 100 horse-men and 2,000 infantry; but, welcome as they were, these numbers could not hope to make much difference. It was only a fortnight later that the Sultan ordered the general assault.

  A full account of the fall of Acre makes horrifying reading.104 There was no surrender; the Sultan in any case would never have accepted it. All that the people could do was to die fighting, or to try to escape by sea. A few, including King Henry and his brother Amalric, succeeded in getting back to Cyprus, and a number of the women and children ended up in the harems or slave markets; but the vast majority perished. Meanwhile, Acre itself was systematically destroyed, and the remaining Frankish settlements–Tyre, Sidon, Tortosa and Beirut, together with a number of castles–soon suffered a similar fate. It was the end. Crusader Outremer had lasted for 192 years. From its beginnings a monument to intolerance and territorial ambition, its story had been one of steady physical and moral decline and monumental incompetence. There were few people in western Europe who shed tears over its passing, or were sorry to see it go.

  CHAPTER XI

  The Close of the Middle Ages

  The War of the Sicilian Vespers was not responsible for the fall of Outremer; since the rise of the Mamelukes in 1250–perhaps even since the capture of Jerusalem by Saladin in 1187–this had been only a matter of time. But it certainly preoccupied the princes of Europe to the point where they could not concentrate on the plight of their fellow Christians in the east. As it was, the war was to continue for another eleven years after the destruction of Acre. It was not until 1302, after an abortive attempt to place Philip the Fair’s brother Charles of Valois on the throne of Sicily, that Pope Boniface VIII was reluctantly compelled to recognise King Peter’s son Frederick as ruler of the island, with the title of King of Trinacria105–a necessary if somewhat precious appellation since the Angevins in Naples still technically retained the Sicilian crown. Even now, however, their triumph was not as complete as the Aragonese would have liked; by the terms of the agreement Frederick was to marry Leonora, daughter of Charles of Valois, and at his death the island would revert to the house of Anjou.

  Pope Boniface had been elected in 1294, after the abdication–the only one in papal history–of the saintly but incapable hermit Celestine V, whose only qualification for the Papacy was that he had once, at the court of Gregory X, hung up his habit on a sunbeam. The new Pope was his antithesis in every respect. For him the great sanctions of the Church existed only to further his own temporal ends and to enrich his family, the Caetani. Foreign rulers he treated less as his subjects than as his menials, while the rival Ghibelline house of Colonna, of which he was bitterly jealous and whose power he feared, was excommunicated en masse, its lands at Palestrina seized and devastated in the name of a Crusade. Such conduct brought the Papacy to a point of debasement from which it took many years to recover, and it made Boniface hated and reviled throughout Europe. When the Colonna all fled to France, his principal enemies in Italy became the Fraticelli, the Spiritual Franciscans, who had rebelled against the increasing worldliness of their order to return to their founder’s principles of asceticism and poverty. Boniface they loathed, not only for his wealth and arrogance but because they held him responsible–rightly–for Celestine’s abdication and his subsequent imprisonment and death.

  Still more serious for Boniface was the hostility of Philip the Fair, whom he had excommunicated and threatened with deposition after Philip had forbidden his French clergy to obey a papal summons to Rome. In the spring of 1303 Philip retaliated by calling a General Council, at which he intended that the Pope himself should be arraigned. An army of 1,600 was despatched to Italy with orders to seize Boniface and to bring him, by force if necessary, to France. They found him at his native Anagni, where he was putting the finishing touches to a bull releasing Philip’s subjects from their allegiance, and took him prisoner. Three days later a popular reaction in his favour obliged them to withdraw, but their mission had not been in vain. The old Pope’s pride had suffered a mortal blow. His friends the Orsini escorted him back to Rome and there, a month later, he died.

  Boniface and Philip were arch-enemies, but it was their combined efforts that finally broke the morale of the medieval Papacy and destroyed what was left of its prestige in Italy. When in 1305 another Frenchman was elected as Clement V, he had himself crowned at Lyons; there he was joined by his curia, and for the next seventy-two years there was no Pope in Rome. This was the period dubbed by Petrarch ‘the Babylonian Captivity’, but the phrase is misleading: the Popes were in no sense captive. Clement had gone to Lyons of his own free will and had no intention of becoming a cat’s-paw of the French king. Four years later, after a quarrel with Philip, he even moved his court to Avignon, precisely because the city was not then in France but just inside the Provençal dominions of the Kingdom of Naples, where papal independence could be more easily preserved. Nor did he and his successors ever voluntarily loosen their hold on Italian affairs, or ever look upon Avignon as anything but a temporary residence until such time as they could safely–and comfortably–return to Italy.

  For Italy had become not only unpleasant but dangerous. There had been no crowned Holy Roman Emperor since Frederick II in 1250, and the cities of Lombardy and Tuscany, untroubled by imperial incursions, had been left to develop in their own way. In most of them their hard-won communal government had given place to despotism, as one mighty family or another–the Visconti and Della Torre in Milan, the Montecchi (Shakespeare’s Montagues) and later the Scaligeri i
n Verona, the Gonzaga in Mantua–asserted its domination. This mass of petty but absolute dictatorships, superimposed on a tradition of internecine strife and undermined by the hostility of a commercially-minded bourgeoisie, led to a deep unrest which permeated all aspects of north Italian life. Sometimes, admittedly, it provided a stimulus for the new spirit of artistic enquiry which was already heralding the Renaissance–Giotto was born in the year Manfred died–but more often the story is one of tyranny and unremitting bloodshed. Of the great northern sea republics, Genoa and Pisa continued at each other’s throats until Genoa’s decisive victory off Meloria in 1284; only Venice remained relatively untouched by the prevailing chaos, thanks to her sea-girt isolation, her carefully preserved oligarchy, her freedom from faction and that delicate system of political checks and balances which was to make the government of the Most Serene Republic the wonder–and the terror–of Europe.