Here Richard had missed an opportunity. Inevitably in Near East conditions his intelligence about the Muslim side was inferior to theirs about him, his followers and rivals. No one informed him of Saladin’s acute dilemma in June 1192, at the time of the second projected attack as the army halted at Bait Nuba: what would happen if Richard bottled him up in the city? He was well aware how much the drive to jihad rested on his personality. If he withdrew from the city and Richard took it, would he then be discredited? If he were captured, on the other hand, his life’s work would be ruined. He spent a night praying in the al-Aqsa mosque with tears and groans, then withdrew in early July. The moment for Richard had been lost.
Richard had moved to Acre to prepare for his departure from the Holy Land when, late in the same month, Saladin descended to snatch Jaffa: in two moves Richard first pushed out the Muslim occupiers, then defended ground taken against wave after wave of cavalry far outnumbering him and intent on recovering town and harbour. He ordered his men to plant their spears in the ground and take post behind, protected by their shields. Archers were placed between each pair of spearmen. As Muslim cavalry charged, they were first disconcerted by pegs in the ground, then baulked by the line of spears. As they faded back, archers stepped forward to fire volleys, retreating before the next cavalry charge, only to shower the cavalry again as they turned around. Finally, as the Muslim horsemen crumbled, Richard, with only fifteen horses, led a charge to push Saladin’s force away and end the attacks. It is widely accepted that it was the greatest feat of arms of his career and recognised by Saladin with the gift of a charger. But alone, it could not redress the Frankish weakness at his campaign’s end. In September he made a treaty, accepting a three-year truce, the right of the settlers to hold Acre and Tyre and the land between – but also, a grievous clause, that the fortifications at Ascalon were to be demolished, undoing much painful and expensive work.
After much resolute soldiering Richard had recovered a coastal state, with a secure all-weather port at Acre and a town and harbour at Jaffa. He had made an agreement for pilgrims to continue to go peacefully to Jerusalem, which, for all it weaknesses, lasted for another century. His galley left Acre on the morning of 9 October; he promised to return and prayed to God for time to do so.
Forced ashore on his way home, Richard paid a penalty for his highhanded treatment of Leopold, Duke of Austria, to whom he had denied a share in booty after the port of Acre fell, despite the Duke’s endeavours during the siege. Trying to reach friendly territory, Richard was captured on the lands of Leopold, who sold him to his enemy, Emperor Henry VI, who in turn exacted an immense ransom before releasing him. Richard returned to England with the intention of settling his realm and returning to Jerusalem. It was not to be. Characteristically admiring a display of courage by a solitary crossbowman shooting at him from the ramparts of the castle at Chalus, near Limoges, while improvising his own defence with a frying pan as a shield, Richard lowered his own shield to applaud his enemy. He raised it again a fraction too late and the bolt embedded itself in his left shoulder; the wound turned septic, causing his death on the evening of 6 April 1199. Saladin had died at dawn on 4 March 1193 in his beloved Damascus, worn out by the campaign. In effect Richard had killed him, albeit not in the manner predicted by Joachim of Fiore.
The immense sums of money raised for his crusading and ransoming were not begrudged in England and in his time the crusading impulse remained as vital as ever it had been and Richard himself a devoted crusader. Richard was deeply flawed, a passionate fighter who could not bear to be beaten even in games and tournaments, subject to fits of rage and capable of spite and partisanship, but a regular attender at Mass, accustomed to walk about the royal chapel telling his clerks to sing with greater vigour. His Latin was distinctly shaky but he was a master of contemporary vernacular poetry. He had a sincere devotion to the Cistercians and he respected holiness and courage in St Hugh of Lincoln, but took substantial revenues from the Church. The passion for Jerusalem was a central point in his life and he did much to transform the way in which Western Christendom viewed it. The naval dimension became important and Cyprus an asset for the future. The First Crusade had never understood how many Muslims there were in the world and succeeded because they did not know how great the obstacles were to their taking the city. Richard’s strategic sense and his long professional campaigning began to change that view. His authority gave new impetus to the search for land in Egypt and was reinforced by the insistence of Saladin on the renewed dismantling of Ascalon’s defences in the final treaty. It was clear just how much the sultan feared an attack on that front. The Western world was becoming aware that the obstacles against capturing and retaining Jerusalem on its waterless plateau were so great that only calling on the source of power in Egypt or providing some kind of counterweight would suffice to win it and keep it. Richard was one of the great commanders of history: it is not always realised what a massive jump was needed from commanding limited forces, skirmishing and castle-breaking in Aquitaine to taking charge of over 200 vessels and a composite force of French royal, German and Anglo-Norman infantry, cavalry and sailors and other ships from varied quarters. If so eminent a commander felt he could not take the city, a new approach was needed.
Saladin had risen from obscurity by a mixture of great resolution, diplomacy, tireless manoeuvring and well-chosen acts of violence. He became a master of propaganda: Imad al-Din was sending 70 letters per day to the Muslim world announcing the capture of Jerusalem. As a commander he was not in the same class as Richard and tended to be very cautious. His successes were marked by reasoned tenacity, although there are exceptions. Hattin and the trap he set for the Franks were masterly and he showed great skill in capturing Burzey in the Nusairi mountains in the northern campaign of 1188.
Arabic poetry remained a support throughout his life. It was a curiosity of the contest with Richard that both were masters of the vernacular poetry of their day: Saladin with his memorisation of the Hamasah of Abu Tammam and Richard with his mastery of the chansons de geste. Love of poetry brought Saladin into contact with Usama ibn Munqidh, born in 1095 in the castle of Shaizar, who lived till 1188 and so received the news of Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem.
Usama was a poet of the highest calibre in a genre which has resonances in twentieth-century Welsh poetry, with ancient, rigid structures demanding great ingenuity in its practitioners. He was a prolific author and it is natural to surmise that composition formed a compensation for many years of exile from his beloved home, to which he never managed to return. He eked out a living by giving diplomatic and military services to an incongruous series of masters, proceedings which led him into doubtful acts. He was not a political success but he was a great poet, and Saladin valued contact with him. Saladin gave Usama a pension, consulted him on military tactics and made one of his sons an emir to serve in his army. This would have been gall to Usama. A perceptive modern observer with knowledge of the whole output of Usama has spotted a strange deficiency. He never ever uses the word jihad. He had the blend of qualities befitting an Arab gentleman: mastery of hunting and fighting, deep knowledge of the animal world, a capacity for Arabic poetry and a skill in rhetoric. He had adab, and Saladin did not. For all the friendly contact between the two men, it is clear that Usama belonged to a different world, alien from the uncompromising pursuit of jihad and the ‘thick-fingered Turks and Kurds’ who pressed on with plans to destroy the Christian presence and expel them utterly.
To his faithful supporters, his secretary and his chronicler Saladin was a hero. Some historians, aware of the traditions of Islamic praise-poetry and the tendency for highly partisan history-writing, have been suspicious of their accounts of their master – but surely unjustly. They were aware of his deficiencies in administration, his weakness for his family members and his careless financing, and were ready to criticise him but still manifestly held him in high regard. He could surely not have dissimulated when in such long contact with them. He
was in essence a conventional man, not a broad thinker, a partisan of the Shafite law school rather than an ecumenical Sunni. Still, he changed the Muslim world.
Between 1188 and 1192 crusade came close to defeating jihad for Jerusalem. The capture of Jerusalem unleashed a massive response in the West. Barbarossa led many war-experienced aristocrats and war-chargers and by July 1188 was bringing his army with its battle-winning powers down to Syria. Saladin had too few troops to hold the line against him and in his campaigning in 1188 had been unable to eliminate the County of Tripoli and its port facilities. King Philip and Richard the Lionheart transported their men by sea and Richard’s armada accommodated a major force of war-chargers, kept fed and watered for action. The unexpected deaths of Barbarossa and William II changed this, forcing both Philip and Richard to remain in Sicily in 1190 and miss the sailing season. An earlier arrival in the Holy Land, and one that followed swiftly on the appearance on the scene of Barbarossa, would have presented a grave threat to Saladin. His campaigning in the Frankish north between May and September 1188 was a model of skill and speed, but he became distracted in 1189. His generosity in releasing captives and his habitual caution as a general allowed Guy and his men to build up a formidable attacking position before the walls of Acre. Although it led to the deaths of many crusaders, the siege lost Saladin many men and put strains on his emirs.
By capturing Cyprus, Richard added a naval dimension to crusading. His tenacious campaigning in 1191–2, although it did not recover Jerusalem, created a coastal kingdom based on Acre with continued opportunities for the coming of crusaders and pilgrims by sea. Damaged by his deficiencies in administration and failure to keep financial reserves, Saladin nevertheless hung on with grim determination. For good or ill, he had become the one vital figure for sustaining jihad, and he continued to avoid being killed or captured, however often defeated, and being drawn into the decisive battle which Richard desired. He saw off Richard, who needed to return home but who in turn left a legacy to all future crusaders – the belief that to recapture Jerusalem it was vital to win power in Egypt or find some counterweight to Muslims outside Jerusalem itself. Saladin indeed had won, but could fairly have expressed the same sentiment as the Duke of Wellington after Waterloo, that it was a damned close-run thing.
8
STRATEGIC CRUSADES
AND THE COMING OF
THE MONGOLS
Jerusalem and the Ayyubids
Saladin’s legacy crumbled. He had intended to leave behind him a confederacy with territories apportioned between his sons and his brother, al-Adil. But in the years after Saladin’s death in 1193 the coldly calculating al-Adil through his superior diplomatic talents, outmanoeuvred the sons and by 1202 had made himself master of the Ayyubid world. Even he lacked security though, for he had enemies among the Seljuqs, in Mesopotamia, in Christian Georgia and in Armenia and troops under his command in Syria and Palestine were widely dispersed. As sultan in 1202, he set about apportioning territory: to his son al-Muazzam, Damascus, and to his son al-Kamil, Cairo. This resulted in weak successor states eyeing each other with suspicion and jockeying for supporters and strongpoints, none being in a sufficiently secure position to carry Saladin’s jihad to its conclusion and expel the surviving Franks from the Holy Land.
Titular kings of Jerusalem continued but resided in Acre, the true capital of the Crusader States, the monarchy descending through Isabella, Queen Sibylla’s half-sister. In 1197 her third husband, the capable warrior Henry of Champagne, fell to his death from the balcony of his palace in Acre with his pet dwarf beside him. She then married Aimery of Lusignan, ruler of Cyprus and brother to the deceased king, Guy, thus uniting Cyprus to the Holy Land in a way advantageous to both. By 1205 both were dead.
Maria, Isabella’s daughter by her marriage to Conrad of Montferrat, succeeded and John of Ibelin, lord of Beirut and holder of wide territories in the Holy Land, became regent. Maria came of age unmarried, as she was not a great catch because the state was now so frail. Finally John of Brienne, a Champagne knight of good crusading lineage but limited resources, came forward and they married in 1210. After two years Maria died, having given her husband a daughter, known as Isabella II or Yolande. Thus John continued as king of Jerusalem, regent to an infant daughter.
The Ayyubids, with their economic links to the remnant kingdom, had another reason for not wishing to pursue jihad. Acre boomed, benefiting from a growing Western interest in exotic luxuries from the Levant. A network of commercial links from the city as far as the well-established colonies of Western merchants in Alexandria benefited from intimate connections between Muslim-occupied lands which supplied raw materials to craftsmen and fuelled the traditional spice trade between East and West. Peaceful contacts brought advantages in dues to Ayyubids, especially al-Adil, and favoured stability.
The weakness of the Ayyubids coincided with a lack of confidence within the crusading movement. A new breed of crusader not only looked for some means of unlocking the riches of the Nile delta and altering the balance within the Muslim world so that Jerusalem would fall back easily into Christian hands but also sought some counterweight to Muslim power. Mission could make little progress where Muslims were concerned, but it might draw other hitherto neutral powers onto the Christian side. Novel approaches to crusading coincided with the reign of Innocent III, who in a dynamic pontificate developed the indulgence system further to raise money for the Jerusalem crusade and gave new impetus to non-Jerusalem crusading. They were heady days.
The Fourth Crusade: The Role of Dandolo
Over ninety and blind, Doge Dandolo of Venice led with shrewd tenacity and crusading zeal what was, in effect, an independent republic and the greatest sea power in the medieval world. ‘In the name of God and profit’ was a phrase commonplace on the flyleaves of merchants’ account books, and for Venice and Dandolo it meant just what it said. The Venetians had been at pains to obtain papal permission to continue trade with Muslim powers; they had their churches and their patron, St Mark – they were crusaders in their own way. Not only did Dandolo build war galleys but, at great financial risk, he also commissioned a set of fifty expensive specialist galleys, huissiers, craft for transporting horses, with stern-posts for embarking and disembarking on beaches where there were no port facilities. Sailing ships with massive holds were more efficient, but the horses had to be disembarked in ports using smaller boats. Dandolo wanted to take the master-arm of Western crusading – the war-charger – combine it with trained men, navigate the Nile delta, fight off local resistance and at a stroke capture the lucrative spice trade of Egypt. The wealth and power of Egypt would recover Jerusalem and they would also give Venice an overwhelming advantage over rival Italian cities. It met the prevailing sentiment that Egypt held the key to Jerusalem; it needed only capable Western cavalrymen to ride the chargers and demolish Muslim resistance. The way forward for Venice was made easier as the other great Italian powers, Pisa and Genoa, were in conflict.
Innocent III (1198–1216), the youngest of the cardinals in the conclave, succeeded at the age of thirty-seven, having lived through the shock of Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem and the disappointment in the West at the failure of both Barbarossa and the Lionheart to recapture the city. He adapted and renewed the crusading indulgence to attract more men, allowing non-combatants to take the cross and commute their vows for money. So much did he care for the crusade to Jerusalem that he first thought he would lead it himself. But step by step, disaster unfolded. He was unable to check the disputes over land and rights within the kingdom of France; death removed the Lionheart; Philip was no crusader; the emperor Henry VI, who had imprisoned the Lionheart, had collected a fighting force, co-ordinating his action with Jerusalem, before Innocent came on the scene but he had died of malaria. The pope would have wanted leadership from crowned heads, with their financial and regal powers, but could not get them; instead, it was his powerful actions and preaching over the winter of 1199–1200 which provided the nucleus of
a new crusade.
Penitential seasons were the setting for well-connected, rich aristocrats with impressive crusading pedigrees and devoted vassals. On Advent Sunday in November 1199 a tournament at Ecry-sur-Aisne, near Rheims, brought together the counts of Blois and Champagne for a solemn, collective taking of the cross and a similar action was staged at Bruges by the wealthy Baldwin, count of Flanders, in February 1200 on Ash Wednesday. Six plenipotentiaries went from the aristocratic group to negotiate terms with Venice. The landward route was discredited. It was natural for them to look to Venice as the master-transporter for horses and men and to aim for Egypt; the difficulty, they felt, was that the appeal would be blunted if they revealed their true objective, as the magic of the name Jerusalem still reigned supreme for rank-and-file volunteers and they dared not disregard it. The agreement to sail for Egypt was kept secret by the leaders: it was the beginning of troubles.
The Treaty with Venice and the First Diversion
The fatal contract with Venice, which was agreed in April 1201 in a solemn gathering at St Mark’s and accepted by plenipotentiaries for the committee of aristocrats, made massive demands on both parties – the crusader leaders and the doge himself. Dandolo would provide fodder for the horses, food for the men, sailing ships and the stern-post vessels, the huissiers for horses plus war galleys, while on their side the Christian leaders agreed that they would provide astonishing numbers of troops: 800 knights and their horses, 9,000 squires and 20,000 foot soldiers. Departure was scheduled for June 1202 – an ideal month, allowing for arrival in early July, before the Nile began to flood and while prevailing winds were favourable. Crusader commanders suffered from the perennial optimism affecting medieval leaders. Their numbers for the appointed rendezvous fell short of those scheduled in the treaty and thereafter they were in the hands of the doge: he expected and needed half-shares in conquest and booty to meet the massive shipbuilding outlay for his galleys and specialist vessels. Moreover, while he built his huissiers, ordinary commercial activity was much hindered and he sought compensation. The official prospectus claiming that the crusade was setting out for Jerusalem had awkward consequences. Crusaders using their own resources arrived in the Holy Land and asked the titular king of Jerusalem if they could fulfil their vows and attack Muslims. King Aimery, who had made a truce with the Ayyubids, did not want them.
God's Armies Page 20