The Glory of the Crusades
Page 15
314 Estimate of strength from France, Victory in the East, 136. For the army’s taking three days to pass a single point, Tyerman, God’s War, 418.
315 Kenneth M. Setton, ed., A History of the Crusades, vol. II, eds. Robert L. Wolff and Harry W. Hazard (Philadelphia: 1962), 113, in Carroll, The Glory of Christendom, 123.
316 Tyerman, God’s War, 427.
317 317. Helen Nicholson, “The Third Crusade—A Campaign of Europe’s Elite,” in Crusades—The Illustrated History, ed. Madden, 84.
318 Ibn al-Athir. Chronicles of the Crusades—Nine Crusades and Two Hundred Years of Bitter Conflict for the Holy Land Brought to Life Through the Words of Those Who Were Actually There, ed. Elizabeth Hallam (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), 174.
319 E.N. Johnson, “The Crusades of Frederick Barbarossa and Henry VI” in K.M. Setton, gen. ed., A History of the Crusades (Madison, WI: 1969–1989), vol. 2, 87–122, in Housley, Fighting for the Cross, 97.
320 Pernoud, The Crusaders, 235.
321 Tyerman, God’s War, 389–390.
322 Ibid., 451.
323 Ibid., 378.
324 Riley-Smith, The Crusades, 141.
325 Ibid., 444.
326 Pernoud, The Crusaders, 237.
327 Ibid.
328 Ibid., 446.
329 Baha’ al-Din Ibn Shaddad, The Rare and Excellent History of Saladin, trans. D.S. Richards (Aldershot: 2001), 143, in Housley, Fighting for the Cross, 158.
330 Thomas Gregor Wagner and Piers D. Mitchell, “The Illnesses of King Richard and King Philippe on the Third Crusade: An Understanding of Arnaldia and Leonardie,” Crusades, vol. 10, The Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2011), 26.
331 Helen Nicholson, “The Third Crusade—A Campaign of Europe’s Elite,” in Crusades—The Illustrated History, ed. Madden, 87.
332 Tyerman, God’s War, 453.
333 Edbury, Conquest of Jerusalem, 179–180, in Tyerman, God’s War, 456.
334 Tyerman, God’s War, 457.
335 Ibid., 456.
336 Ibid., 454.
337 Ibid., 455.
338 Nicolle, The Third Crusade, 37.
339 Ibid., 38.
340 Itinerarium in K. Fenwick, The Third Crusade (London: 1958), 247–248, in Nicolle, The Third Crusade, 75.
341 Nicolle, The Third Crusade, 81.
342 Tyerman, God’s War, 466.
343 Ibid., 464.
344 Möhring, 87.
345 John Gillingham, Richard the Lionheart (New York: 1947), 226–230, 233–239, in Carroll, The Glory of Christendom, 140.
346 Ibn Shaddad, Saladin, 28–29, in Tyerman, God’s War, 353.
347 Tyerman, God’s War, 350.
348 Möhring, 91–92.
349 Paul M. Cobb, “Introduction: The World of Saladin,” in Möhring, xxiii.
350 Carroll, The Glory of Christendom, 148.
351 J.B. Gillingham, Richard I (New Haven: 1999), 323–325, in Jonathan Phillips, The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 10.
352 John’s legacy was so tainted that no future monarch ever used his name.
6
Fiasco of the Fourth Crusade
Our Lord commands and tells us all to go forth and liberate the Sepulchre and the cross. Let him who wishes to be in his fellowship die for his sake, if he would remain alive in paradise, and let him do all in his power to cross the sea.
Raimbaut of Vaqueiras353
You are now engaged on the greatest and most dangerous enterprise that any people up to this day have ever undertaken; it is therefore important for us to act wisely and prudently.
Doge Dandolo of Venice354
The French noble was a man a principle. Like his peers, he had taken the cross in 1199 amidst much fanfare and dreamed of serving Christ in his army. Confident of his mission and desirous of the spiritual benefits promised to the participants, he left his wife and children and marched to Venice to embark the ships bound for the Holy Land. When insufficient men arrived in the city of St. Mark to pay for the contracted transport, the Crusade plans were altered to attack a Christian city once under Venetian control.
Simon de Montfort was livid. He had not left home and family to attack fellow Christians. His objections were rebuffed, though, and the attack commenced. Simon refused to participate in the siege; he stayed away from the Crusader camp and ultimately left the army. Conscious of his vow, however, he traveled to the Holy Land separately and then returned to France while the remaining Crusader army was sidetracked by the promises of a Byzantine political upstart. Simon became a powerful lord with land holdings in France and England and died prosecuting the Albigensian Crusade355 against heretics in southern France.
Simon’s virtue preserved him from partaking in the fourth and most notorious Crusade, which today continues to be a source of scandal and significantly contributes to modernity’s negative impression of the entire movement. Voltaire summarized this flawed and naïve position when he wrote, “The only fruit of the Christians on their barbarous Crusades was to exterminate other Christians.”356
Innocent III and Crusading
Lothar of Segni was made a cardinal at the relatively young age of twenty-nine and pope at a very young thirty-seven. When he was elected at the beginning of 1198, the cardinals knew he was exactly what the Church needed at that moment in history. Lothar’s eighteen-year reign as Pope Innocent III was the most important papacy of the medieval period and one that significantly shaped the Crusading movement. No other pope called as many Crusades as Innocent III or spent as much time focused on the goal of liberating the Holy City. Although he never personally took the cross, Innocent III can rightly be known as the Crusading Pope. A contemporary account of Innocent’s life indicates the intense focus he placed on the Crusades: “In the midst of all his work, he quite fervently longed for the relief and recovery of the Holy Land and anxiously mulled over how he could achieve this more effectively.”357 At the very beginning of his pontificate, in a letter to the patriarch of Jerusalem announcing his election, he proclaimed his intention of calling a new Crusade to accomplish the liberation of Jerusalem.358 The Crusade for Innocent III was the negotium crucis, “the business of the cross.”359
Innocent III’s focus on the Crusades is exemplified not only by the number of Crusades he called (seven in total) but also by the innovations he brought to the Crusading movement.360 In his 1213 bull Quia Maior, Innocent made Crusading a moral imperative. He linked Crusading to eternal salvation, writing of those who failed to go: “To those men who refuse to take part, if indeed there be by chance any man so ungrateful to the Lord our God, we firmly state on behalf of the apostle Peter that they … will have to answer to us on this matter in the presence of the Dreadful Judge on the Last Day of Severe Judgment.”361
Innocent envisioned armed pilgrimages managed and administered by the Church, an innovation that was needed but, as events illustrated, impractical to enforce. Money was always an issue during the Crusades, and Innocent tried to address that concern by taxing the Church and its clergy to finance the armed pilgrimages. Previously, married men needed permission from their wives to take the cross; by Innocent’s pontificate, men were using that stipulation as an excuse to not go on Crusade. So he abrogated the requirement.
Innocent increased access to the spiritual benefits accorded to Crusaders by granting indulgences not only to those who fought in person, but also for those who paid for proxies to fight in their place, to the proxies themselves, and even to those who provided donations to Crusaders. Furthermore, the Crusading vow had always assumed duration of indeterminate length but Innocent changed that by granting indulgences to men who vowed forty days a year of combat service.362
The Calling of the Fourth Crusade
Innocent III called for a new Crusade on August 15, 1198. It was six years after the end of the Third Crusade and 102 years to the day after the departure of the Fi
rst. This Fourth Crusade would go down in history as “an episode colored by brutality and determination, depravity and avarice, political intrigue and religious zeal.”363
The notoriety of the Fourth Crusade comes from its (originally) unintended conquest of Constantinople. It was the Crusade in which Christians fought Christians, to the horror of Innocent III and the scandal of modern-day Catholics. The sack of the Queen of Cities was a momentous event, the memory of which reverberates through the centuries to the modern day. Pope John Paul II recalled it when Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I visited Rome in the summer of 2004. The story of how the Fourth Crusade came to Constantinople and how a Flemish knight became the Roman emperor is one of the most intriguing and fantastic in the entire history of the Crusades.
Innocent III could not have chosen a worse time to call a Crusade. The political climate of Christendom was marked by conflict and confusion. Two men contested for the crown of the Holy Roman Empire in Germany and each claimed important allies. Philip of Swabia was allied with France and Otto of Brunswick counted the English in his court. The conflict in Germany prevented a strong ruler from that realm embracing Innocent’s call to Crusade. The boy-king Frederick with his mother Constance as regent ruled the Kingdom of Sicily. The important Italian maritime powers of Genoa and Pisa were locked in war, as were the kings of England and France. Recognizing the importance of the English monarch and Third Crusade veteran to his Crusading effort, Innocent sent his legate Cardinal Capuano to negotiate a truce to the war between Richard and Philip. The cardinal successfully negotiated a five-year truce between the warring monarchs, which gave Innocent hope that his Crusade would finally materialize; so the muster date for warriors was set for the spring of 1199. However, King Richard the Lion-Hearted’s death in April cast doubt once again that the Crusade would ever form, let alone actually travel to the Holy Land.
The Council of Barons
The Fourth Crusade seemed in doubt until Count Thibaut III of Champagne decided to take the cross. A young man in his twenties, he seemed to have it all. His lands were “one of the largest, richest, and most prestigious lordships in western Europe.”364 He was politically well connected as the nephew of both King Richard and Philip. Thibaut came from illustrious stock that viewed participation in the Crusades as a family obligation. His father, Count Henry I, visited the Holy Land twice, the first time as a participant in the Second Crusade. His older brother was Henry II of Champagne who reigned as ruler of Jerusalem after the death of King Guy de Lusignan. Thibaut’s grandparents were the famous King Louis VII, leader of the Second Crusade, and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Thibaut vowed to go on Crusade while at a major tournament he hosted at Ecry-sur-Aisne on an Advent Sunday in 1199. Thibaut’s decision at such a large public gathering influenced many others, finally providing the spark needed to light the Crusade—fifteen months after Innocent’s call.
Joining Thibaut in taking the cross was the aged Geoffrey of Villehardouin, his chief military advisor. Geoffrey was a veteran of the Third Crusade who had been captured at the siege of Acre on November 4, 1190 and spent four years in a Muslim prison. Despite this negative experience and his age (he was in his fifties) the Crusading zeal burned brightly enough for Villehardouin to go once more unto the breach.
Count Thibaut and the other major French Crusaders met to discuss operational plans for the expedition. The Crusaders discussed the timetable and goals for the Crusade and set their initial objective as Alexandria, with the follow-on goal of liberating Jerusalem. The decision to go to Egypt first was kept hidden from the rank and file because the goal of any Crusade for the average soldier was always Jerusalem. Recruitment of the necessary infantry and support personnel might suffer if word of Egypt as the objective leaked out. The meeting of barons also produced the decision to travel by sea rather than over land since a sea journey was substantially faster than a land march. The nobles agreed to pursue the sea route but (since none of them had a fleet) their decision required the assistance of allies.
Mission to Venice
The barons chose six men to travel to Italy and negotiate a contract for transport to Egypt. Genoa and Pisa were engaged in war, so the ambassadors decided to go to Venice, where they knew they would receive a warm welcome and an attentive disposition. Venice’s ruler (also known as the doge) was the aged, brilliant, and politically astute Enrico Dandolo (r. 1195–1205).
Dandolo was “benevolent, eloquent, and universally respected. He possessed a great and penetrating sense of politics. He was also an ingenious and skilled diplomat and an equally skilled strategist and tactician. He was one of those men whose qualities make others turn naturally to them for leadership.”365 His leadership skills would be put to the test mightily during the events of the Fourth Crusade.
He came from a family that lived well beyond the median life expectancy for the time. It is believed he was eighty-five when elected doge and ninety-four when the Crusader ambassadors arrived in Venice.366 Despite his advanced age, Dandolo was in excellent health—except for his blindness, which had resulted from an accident involving a blow to the head.
The Crusade ambassadors arrived in Venice in March of 1201 and were granted a meeting with Dandolo. They requested that the Venetians provide transport for 4,500 horses, 4,500 knights, 9,000 squires and 20,000 infantry, or a combined force totaling 33,500 men. Such a large request demanded a large payment; Dandolo proposed a total cost of 94,000 marks of Cologne for the requested transport. The rate, although high, was not exorbitant for the time period.367 The Crusaders considered the offer and countered with a rate of four marks per horse and two marks per man for a total of 85,000 marks, which was the equivalent of 60,000 pounds sterling or twice the annual income of the kings of England and France.368
Such a large request demanded consultation and discussion. Dandolo informed the Crusaders that he needed to seek the acceptance of the Great Council, an oversight group of forty, and the Venetian people. This consultation was needed because “he would be asking his people to embark upon the most ambitious step in their commercial history.”369 A modern comparison of the immense request the Crusaders were seeking of Venice is a “major international airline ceasing flights for a year to prepare its planes for one particular client, and then to serve that client exclusively for a further period afterwards.”370
The significant payment was enough of a financial incentive for the Great Council’s immediate acceptance of the Crusader’s offer, and so all that remained for approval of the treaty was the consent of the people. Dandolo called a popular assembly of 10,000 citizens to participate in a Mass of the Holy Spirit for discernment of the Crusaders’ request. After the Mass, Crusader ambassadors were given the opportunity to address the crowd. The oration so moved the people that they cried out, “We consent! We consent!”371
The Treaty of Venice was a momentous arrangement for both parties. The Crusaders needed to deliver the large number of troops upon which the cost of the expedition was calculated. For the Venetians, it was the largest enterprise in their history and “the largest state project in western Europe since the time of the Romans.”372 The size of the army expected by the Crusaders required 450 transport ships with a crew of 14,000 men. In order to construct the ships within the stipulated timeframe (ready by the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul: June 29, 1202) Dandolo suspended all commerce for eighteen months—a large risk to the economy of Venice.373
The Flaw in the Treaty
The Fourth Crusade would ultimately deviate from its objective primarily due to the fundamental flaw in the treaty the Crusader ambassadors signed with Venice, specifically the calculation of payment based on the number of potential troops. “The terms of the treaty acted as a vice from which the Crusaders were unable to escape for the simple reason that the fundamental calculation on which the agreement was based proved spectacularly wrong.”374 The envoys based the treaty on a future unknown number of potential recruits, not on the known number of warriors at the time of negotiations. They
seemed to ignore the reality that warriors not under vassalage to the French barons were not obligated to travel from Venice and could make their own travel arrangements to Outrémer. The fundamental miscalculation of the number of expected troops shaped the later decisions of the Crusade leadership—and guaranteed their failure.
The treaty was sent to Rome for confirmation from Pope Innocent III. He approved it in early May of 1201, with the clear caveat that the Crusaders “should not harm Christians unless they wrongfully impeded the passage of the Crusade or another just or necessary cause should occur.”375
Leadership of the Crusade
The Crusade faced an immediate crisis when Count Thibaut died unexpectedly on May 24, 1201. Thibaut’s burial inscription illustrates his great desire to participate in the Crusade: “Intent upon redeeming the Cross and the land of the Crucified, he paved a way with expenses, an army, a fleet. Seeking the terrestrial city, he finds the heavenly one; while pursuing his goal far away, he finds it at home.”376
Thibaut’s death once more placed the Crusade in jeopardy, as the barons struggled to find a replacement. Faced with the prospect of launching a major expedition without a significant nobleman in command, Villehardouin suggested the nobles seek out the support of Boniface of Montferrat in northern Italy. He was an older man in his fifties and one of the best-known military commanders of the day. It was a controversial suggestion, for the French nobles did not know Boniface personally, but only by reputation. Boniface did not speak French, and his lack of personal commitment to the Crusade became an issue during the expedition.
Arrival in Venice
As the Crusaders made their way to Venice in the summer of 1202, it soon became obvious that the numbers were substantially lower than the Crusade ambassadors had estimated. Ultimately, only 13,000, or a third of the expected 33,500 warriors, assembled in Venice.377