God's Armies

by Malcolm Lambert

  Venice’s expedition deliberately avoided Outremer. While other crusaders, paying their own way, took advantage of the transport arrangements, still numbers and payments were not enough and the doge insisted they should meet the shortfall with an attack on Zara, a port on the Dalmatian coast which had previously escaped the control of Venice and put itself under the protection of the king of Hungary who had taken the crusader vow. Encamped on the Lido facing the lagoon of Venice, the crusaders were at a major disadvantage as food ran low. On the one side, there was a passionate wish to do something for the cause, having made sacrifices to go crusading; on the other side stood the doge’s demand, but as the king was a declared crusader, an attack on Zara meant a grievous breach of crusading law. Some crusaders, unable to accept the rightfulness of the attack, left for the Holy Land. Struggles with consciences continued. Peter Capuano, the legate representing papal authority, had some qualities as a crusade preacher but very few as a moral adviser. He told crusaders that the pope would prefer to overlook whatever was unbefitting in order to avoid the great crusading pilgrimage disintegrating. It was not so, and Innocent wrote a letter of condemnation after the capture of Zara.

  The Turn to Constantinople

  Pragmatism ruled. The season over, the true objective of Egypt could be resumed in the following year. Venetian naval power had a free hand, for Byzantine naval forces had fallen prey to rot and worm in their vessels and galley oarsmen were no longer being trained. It was part of a massive decline in Byzantine power after Manuel’s defeat by the Seljuq Turks in 1176 at Myriokephalon and his death four years later. Factions struggled in the Empire; fragmentation began and the breakaway provinces defied the emperor. Murder and intrigue wrecked central authority. Isaac Angelus, deposed and blinded by his brother, who reigned as Alexius III, had a son, Alexius Angelus, who escaped from prison, sought help against the usurpation and rescue for his father. Envoys for Alexius Angelus arrived at Zara and made a tempting offer to the encamped crusaders to facilitate their objective, Egypt. Angelus’s case appealed to the crusaders’ sense of honour and the will, so fundamental to medieval aristocracy, of ensuring rightful succession. If they would back him to become true emperor, as he deserved, he would accept obedience to Rome, the schism between two great Christian powers would be ended, just as Gregory VII had wanted, and he would both endow the crusaders with rewards from Byzantine resources and use his forces to make the attack on Egypt which they sought. They succumbed to the offer. It was just the massive addition to the crusading cause of the troops and money needed to turn the key in the lock and recover Jerusalem.

  So the crusaders moved to Constantinople. But Prince Alexius carried no weight and was jeered by crowds. His uncle and rival Alexius III rallied the populace, feeding their patriotism with memories of Western pressures on Byzantium, but made a major tactical error when he retreated behind the walls of the city rather than take on the attackers. Disgraced, he took money and fled. Desperate to fend off attackers, leaders in the city brought out the blinded and mentally frail Isaac Angelus and made Prince Alexius co-emperor, to reign as Alexius IV. For a time this worked. Alexius toured round, while Isaac worked hard melting precious objects from church treasuries to satisfy the crusaders’ desire for payment. But then skirmishes created tension, a Western attack on a mosque led to brawls and the burning of parts of the city; fireships were launched by the defenders against Venetian vessels and skilfully parried; in a coup, Murzuphlus, ‘heavy eyebrows’, from a rival family made himself emperor and killed Alexius IV. Isaac died.

  The end was a violent crusader takeover, much looting, especially of relics, and on the ruins of the old empire the setting up of a Latin successor state, frail and needing support from the West. Nothing more was heard of the move to Egypt. Murzuphlus was captured and killed. Innocent, at first excited by the prospect of healing the schism, was saddened as he learned of the true sequence of events. The crusade was run by a joint-stock enterprise of mainly French nobles, unlucky in the early death of Theobald of Champagne, who had displayed the charismatic qualities of an outstanding leader. No one was quite able to take his place, and the whole crusade was blighted by the absence of a crowned head with the ability to command the resources of a whole state and discipline troops in a tricky maritime expedition. Innocent’s ebullience and subtle lawyer’s skills, valuable for church reform, were not well suited to remote control of often confused crusaders. This left a bitter memory for Greek churchmen.

  The Fifth Crusade: Preparations

  The pope was not going to give up on his grand design. He picked out what he saw as the reasons for the failures of 1203–4: the lack of sufficient finance, the dominance of one maritime power, the lack of a determined, well-equipped single commander and the sins of the West. Patiently from 1213 he set out to remedy these weaknesses for a new expedition. His Bulls Quia maior and Ad liberandam set the conditions for obtaining the crusade indulgence for the rest of the Middle Ages. Central control was key: there was to be one authority to direct preparations in each country and a legate on the ground with sole authority to deploy finances. Finally the crusade was to go to Egypt, without equivocation or secrecy.

  How intimately Innocent linked the progress of reform with crusading victory, averting the wrath of God against the sins of the believers, is shown at the culmination of his rule by the Fourth Lateran Council, of 1216. The greatest council of the Middle Ages, this brought together 400 bishops, 800 abbots and high ecclesiastics, agreeing a series of reforming, pastoral and doctrinal measures.

  The elective monarchy of the Empire was in dispute between two rival dynasties: the Welf and the Hohenstaufen. The pope steered a course between them, eventually accepting as rightful emperor the Hohenstaufen child Frederick II, commended to the pope’s care by his mother, Constance, the widow of Henry VI, before her own death. Contrary to some historians’ views, it was with Innocent’s blessing that Frederick, when he came of age in 1212, took the cross at Aachen, redolent of the memory of Charlemagne and his soldiers’ anti-Muslim campaigning. He was to be the single commander with prestige and finance needed for a new expedition.

  Reform to bring God’s blessing, the raising of more money (especially the direct taxation of the clergy), the setting into action of distinguished preachers for the ‘negotium Jesu Christi’, the business of Jesus Christ, new procedures for action against unsatisfactory bishops, the recognition of grassroots evangelical movements looking to the early Church for inspiration – all were inextricably intermeshed in the pope’s mind. ‘We ought to fight’, he wrote, ‘not so much with physical arms as with spiritual ones.’ The great Council was also a launching point for the crusade itself. Part of the inspiration for the First Crusade had sprung from the institution of the Peace of God: Innocent now instituted a general Peace and in his legate to France, Robert de Courçon, chose a man with skills to persuade quarrelling great men to accept the Peace while still salvaging their honour. Tournaments were forbidden for three years. Finally a date was set in 1217 for the launch of the crusade, and Brindisi in Frederick’s territory of south Italy, was selected as a mustering point.

  Assessment of the achievement of a pope so consumed with the passion for the Sepulchre has to be nuanced for, while he had no doubt about the primacy of Jerusalem, he was uninhibited in encouragement or passive acceptance of non-Jerusalem crusades. He accepted the Baltic crusades against the Slav inhabitants, the indigenous Prussians. The Albigensian crusade which he declared against Cathar heretics and those who supported them in Languedoc gave the crusading indulgence for forty days service to all who enlisted – largely northern Frenchmen. He miscalculated, attributing the murder of an aggressive papal legate to the Count of Toulouse. He exaggerated, probably unjustly, the degree of complicity of the aristocracy of the south in the heresy and lost control of the civil war stirred up by the crusading army under the elder Simon de Montfort. In Spain a defeat by the Moors of the king of Castile at Alarcos in 1195, coming so soon after the fall
of Jerusalem in 1187 to Saladin, began to shake the popes in Rome and the hierarchy in Spain. Innocent did well by staging a fasting procession in Rome dedicated to the victory over the Moors in Spain and putting pressure via legates and archbishops on kings, which quenched their quarrels long enough for them to present a united front in 1212 at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, where a fortunate quirk on the battlefield produced an overwhelming victory which, coupled with their own dissensions, shattered Muslim power in the peninsula.

  Another action, however, was in the long run a damaging one. In 1199 Innocent had become nervous about the intentions of the marshal of Henry VI acting on behalf of the Hohenstaufen and, he had believed, manipulating the position he then occupied as regent to the child Frederick. The perennial fear of popes of being squeezed in Rome and the papal states by a hostile power holding lands and authority in Germany, northern Italy and Sicily, had come into his mind. It led him to select a papal champion against the marshal and to declare that the crusading indulgence would be given to those who fought against this marshal because his actions were ‘impeding’ the crusade for the Sepulchre. Use of Muslim troops by the marshal gave a little colour to this declaration but it was in truth a political crusade: that is, one which in reality only served the secular landed interests of the papacy and not the Jerusalem crusade. ‘Impeding’ was a dangerous doctrine. All fizzled out. The marshal and the papal champion died, the threat faded, but a precedent had been set.

  Innocent never lived to see his work fulfilled. Choosing to act as the supreme authority for preaching the cross in Italy, in April 1216 he exhorted a gathering in Orvieto, where he stood after his sermon in torrential rain, personally pinning crosses on the clothing of all men who made their vows. He caught a chill; fever followed; he died the following July in Perugia.

  The papacy as Innocent left would hardly have been recognised by Gregory VII and Urban II as it had become an institution with a formidable bureaucracy, an underpinning of canon law and a wealthy body, due largely to the rise of crusading taxes. But for all his great talents, his quick and subtle mind and his shrewd assessment of character, the task Innocent had set for his papacy as the decisive reforming power in the Church was too much and failures outran successes, above all in his relationship with rulers. Perhaps Innocent’s most important legacies for the future were his recognition of St Francis and his poor companions, who sought with a Rule largely based on Scriptural texts a fierce poverty that seemed beyond men’s powers and the support which he gave to the Castilian St Dominic and his Order of Preachers. Both orders of friars were to become major forces.

  The Expeditions and Their Fate

  Two expeditions set out: one to the Holy Land in 1217–18 and the other in 1218–21 to Damietta in the Nile delta. Both were preceded by the strange affair of the Children’s Crusade of 1212, in which adolescent apprentices – the pueri of the sources, not in fact children – joined with poor peasants, girls and old men in processions for the sake of the Holy Land. They got nowhere but they were an indication of dissatisfaction with the progress of the warrior class in the task of taking Jerusalem. Forces under the duke of Austria and the king of Hungary led troops in a foray to Acre, encouraged by John of Brienne, titular king of Jerusalem, who supported crusading to Egypt. He believed Acre could be in danger of a sudden coup by Muslims in the light of al-Muazzam’s fortification of Mount Tabor in western Galilee in 1213, menacing Acre and insulting the Christians by occupying one of their most sacred sites. The troops brought supplies to mitigate the famine which had devastated Syria and boosted the morale of the garrison. The military orders played a decisive role as castle builders, suppliers of dedicated and trained fighters and bankers. Innocent enlarged their numbers by recognising the Teutonic Knights, who originated caring for sick and wounded Germans at the siege of Acre during the Third Crusade. But the military orders quarrelled and the baronage became a byword for anarchy and instability. The arrival of crusaders in the autumn of 1217 had its achievements and revealed in a flash the weakness of al-Adil, the leading Ayyubid, for as the crusaders marched over the Jordan and around the Sea of Galilee he kept out of the way, knowing his forces were too widely dispersed to make it feasible to challenge the incomers. All co-operated in re-fortifying important staging posts on the route to the south at Athlit (Château Pèlerin), near Haifa and Caesarea. Athlit was a Templar fortress and the strengthening of the castle with the latest concentric wall plan and ingenious use of water defences to obviate mining made it a masterwork. It was never conquered.

  For the Egyptian target, the crusaders selected Damietta, at a key point on the eastern estuary of the Nile. It was a very well-fortified strongpoint with a massive population which, once conquered, would give a safe baseline for the advance to Cairo some 100 miles south on the Nile, while riverlanes to Damietta provided easy access for vessels. It was a great wilderness of sandbanks, islands, marshes and mud, home territory to part of the audience of the preacher Oliver of Paderborn, the true hero of the Damietta crusade. He talked to Frisians, men from the Netherlands and South Germans, some of whom were used to marshlands and canals and were at home in the desolate landscapes of the delta.

  Army and ships arrived in May 1218. There followed a long sequence of fighting over access to river passages towards Cairo, shifting camp sites, scuttling vessels in the river channel by Muslims and fresh dredging of an old canal by the Christians. A peak of achievement was reached in August 1218, when Oliver of Paderborn, by devising a floating fortress with a drawbridge, enabled troops to seize the Chain Tower, a garrisoned strong-point on an island controlling iron chains which prevented vessels sailing towards Cairo. It was followed by the death of al-Adil, and more insecurity in the Ayyubid camp as al-Kamil succeeded his father as sultan. He knew how the crusaders had suffered through winter storms and scurvy caused by food shortages but was nervous of rivals in the fluid Ayyubid world. To ensure the Christians left Egypt, he presented a deal in the summer of 1219 in effect exchanging Jerusalem for Damietta and offered to pay tribute in return for keeping the castles of Kerak and Montréal, vital to safeguard his route to Damascus.

  It was during this period that the crusaders received unexpected visitors: St Francis of Assisi and one of his fellow friars who had come to preach to them, fulfilling the commands of Jesus in the Sending of the Seventy, who dispatched His followers to go two by two to preach the coming of the kingdom of God with a greeting of peace. They were to be defenceless ‘as lambs among wolves’. Francis exhorted the crusaders in words available to all, ‘virtues and vices, heaven and hell’. There would have been no dogmatic preaching, which was reserved to the priesthood. With his companion and dressed in a dusty habit with holes in it, the sign of his vocation to live as the poorest did, he crossed the lines to preach to the Muslims as well. The risks were great. Brothers who had preached in Morocco had been executed. ‘Now I have five true brothers’ was Francis’s reply when he heard the news. They were brought to the open-minded al-Kamil who, unusually for a caliph, was happy to sit in on a debate between Muslims and the Coptic patriarch at a later date. He received Francis courteously, heard him speak and had him escorted back to the Christian side, seeing Francis as a Christian version of the poor, wandering Sufis he knew.

  It is hard to find a precedent for Francis’s actions: it was a parable for peace, forming part of a strand in thinking about Muslims and crusades that grew in importance in the thirteenth century. Force was not wholly abandoned. Francis, himself once a knight errant in his romantic youth, referred to Roland and his doomed expedition as ‘martyrs’ and, during his stay in the crusader camp, tried to deter Spanish fighters from an attack, not because he thought it was wrong but because, with his gift of prophecy, he knew it would fail. Nonetheless, Francis’s simple action for peace was potent, a forerunner of new and more humane personal attitudes to the Muslim enemy.

  As a preacher, James of Vitry had affinities with Francis for he shared a calling to an evangelical, spiritual way o
f life, inspired by a women’s movement led by Marie of Oignies – who as a woman could not preach, but who found in James a man who could. James toured preaching with a relic of Marie, a finger bone, round his neck and on the strength of his preaching power was invited to be bishop of Acre. He was an unyielding supporter of the rightfulness of crusading, but he had preached in the Holy Land to the Saracens, and begged at Damietta to receive Muslim orphans, who were normally sold into slavery and baptised them before finding volunteers to instruct and nurture them. It was another straw in the wind – for mission to convert Muslims and not simply attack them. James nonetheless was not a Francis to risk martyrdom: he only preached to the Saracens when he had an armed escort.

  The offer of al-Kamil to exchange Jerusalem for Damietta divided the crusaders. Their expedition was a joint enterprise of individuals and contingents making communal decisions leading to the same problems which had beset the Fourth Crusade. John of Brienne, as titular king and resourceful warrior, soon emerged as leader. But he had been thought of only as a stopgap till the arrival of Emperor Frederick II with imperial troops, who would dramatically alter the balance of power. He wanted to accept terms, but the legate expected the arrival of the emperor and was not prepared to do so. Frederick would have wished to take the lead but was preoccupied with the pressing needs of his own territories. While the crusader leaders debated, al-Muazzam made his own deductions from the weak state of the Ayyubids, and over 1219–20 dismantled fortifications at Jerusalem, Mount Tabor and other strongpoints, believing that the Christian forces would be less likely to intervene if their targets were unprotected and correspondingly unattractive. After al-Kamil made a last attempt to relieve Damietta, the city, its inhabitants and garrison destroyed by starvation, fell easily, and al-Kamil retreated up the Nile. There was panic in Cairo. Rich booty was collected in Damietta, and again John of Brienne and the legate clashed. Who was to hold the city? John of Brienne claimed it as the king’s; the legate claimed it for the Church. The army remained immobile for an extraordinary length of time, staying in Damietta debating their next move. John of Brienne went off on other ventures while the legate was beguiled by omens and prophecies passed off as ancient texts, leading him to wait for help from mysterious Christian forces in Africa and India. In Africa, the existence of a Prester John drew its origins from the ancient Christian Coptic kingdom of Abyssinia, also called Ethiopia; his citing of a ‘King David of the Indies’ had some basis in the belief that Thomas the Apostle had in early days brought Christianity to India. Preaching from such apocryphal works consoled the crusaders. The legate was the more able to hold sway because of the extensive finances he had at his disposal and he continued to reject all offers made by al-Kamil.