God's Armies

by Malcolm Lambert

  Then, in a swirl of hopes and fears, under the leadership of the legate the crusade moved towards its disastrous end in 1221. The efficiency of the maritime delivery of warriors and the equally efficient departure mechanism had created much coming-and-going, with crusaders serving for a year to earn the indulgence and then departing, so that the crusade lacked the esprit de corps which came about when warriors served and suffered together continuously, overriding national and personal rivalries. The remaining forces went towards Cairo with their ships and with troops on the eastern bank to attack al-Kamil’s fortified camp at Mansura. In vain John of Brienne urged withdrawal, fearing they would be caught by the flood waters of the Nile; the legate refused to listen. The waters rose; other Muslim forces blocked landward retreat to Damietta; troops seized wine supplies and got drunk. They had to sue for peace, and al-Kamil allowed the remnants to leave without ransom. Prisoners were exchanged, and there was a truce for eight years. Al-Kamil had got what he wanted, the departure of hostile troops from Egypt. The crusade had suffered ignominy.

  The Coming of the Mongols and the Revival of Jihad

  Patterns of power, especially in the Islamic world, underwent profound change under the pressure of these attacks. Behind the story of King David of the Indies lay a muddled awareness of a movement in the depths of Inner Asia under a chieftain of the Mongols (also known as Tartars). A ferocious warrior of the steppes was born about 1167. His father had been murdered by a lesser chieftain when the boy was twelve, leaving him to provide for his mother and younger siblings. Steeled in adversity, he avenged his father and assembled a coalition of tribes, abandoning minor squabbling over pasture rights and sporadic raiding to aim at world power. As he came to maturity, he reigned as Ghengiz Khan (‘universal ruler’) till 1227, assembling under his dictatorship an extraordinary number of horsemen, exploiting the traditional nomad skill and their austerity of life, also benefiting from a period of more humid climate, revealed recently in a study of tree-rings in the Siberian forests in Ghengiz’s epoch, which enriched normally barren pastures and allowed for the breeding of stronger and more resilient mounts.

  The nomads drew in and terrified peoples from the forests and oases in the steppeland, conquered part of China and under Ghengiz set new standards of terror, demanding total submission to the will of the ruler. A vast host of cavalry unencumbered by infantry or equipment had over-whelming mobility and a will to total massacre of all opponents. Human life meant nothing and the stacks of corpses and utter destruction intimidated all victims and led to surrender after surrender. Patterns of power, especially in the Islamic world, underwent profound change under the pressure of these attacks. Booty from the capture of cities was immense and could be used to hire miners to bring down walls and, with tight discipline, to reward warriors or employ Chinese siege engineers. Alternatively, captives were forced into labour.

  Attitudes to this new power in the world fluctuated from indifference to both the Mongols and their Muslim victims to interest in Mongols as a counterweight to Islam or, finally, to seeing them as, at least in part, Christians who would emerge to help the West. Those who began to investigate the Mongol-dominated territories did indeed discover Christians who had long existed unknown to the West, but they were Nestorians who held dissident views on the Incarnation and had been condemned as heretics. Ambassadors or missionaries seeking souls to convert misunderstood Mongol attitudes. They tolerated men of religion and gave them privileges but were primarily interested in the present life, in obtaining longevity for their leaders, better health and fertility for themselves or their stock. They insisted on the observance of their ancient folk religion and its taboos but were generally pluralists, unwilling to accept any religion exclusively, and thus hopes of conversion to Christianity were dashed.

  Long-term, the effect of the Mongol irruption into history was negative for the crusading cause. True, it devastated some Islamic lands, and, as we shall see, a Mongol army ended the Baghdad caliphate; on the other hand, resistance to the Mongol menace brought into play a great force within Islam, the Mamluks, who destroyed Outremer.

  The Sixth Crusade

  One strange episode brought Jerusalem back to the Christians by a diplomatic manoeuvre of the Emperor Frederick II, who entered Jerusalem in 1229. Frederick’s interest in the Holy Land was a sincere one; his original taking of the cross in Innocent’s lifetime was no flash in the pan and its renewal in 1220 on the occasion of his crowning by Pope Honorius III was a continuation of his long-standing commitment. It was reinforced by association with King John of Jerusalem who had come to believe that his position as titular king would be strengthened by association with Hohenstaufen imperial power and accepted a marriage for his daughter Isabella II to Frederick II, which took place in 1225.

  John had imagined that he would continue as regent for his daughter but was outsmarted by Frederick who swept aside his residual claim and thereby created an enemy for life. Isabella died after childbirth, leaving a son, Conrad. John of Brienne campaigned against Frederick in south Italy, while Frederick for his part made extensive grants, assembled troops and made ready for action. For the sake of papal support in Germany and Italy he bound himself by treaty to a time frame for setting out but in 1227 was afflicted by disease. Close to death, he returned to port only to find himself excommunicated for having failed to go on crusade as he had solemnly promised. In Gregory IX he was faced with a more steely personality than Honorius III. Gregory’s real anxiety lay in the perennial papal fear of being stifled in Rome by an imperial power. Frederick’s advantage lay in his inheritance from his Norman predecessors and their international culture in Sicily; he spoke Arabic, had a representative to deal with the sultan al-Kamil and was more in touch than any Western ruler with the realities of diplomatic and military relationships among the Ayyubids, who, he knew, were very much more concerned with their own Islamic world than with Jerusalem and the Holy Land. Al-Kamil, wishing to ward off competition from his rival al-Muazzam and an implicit threat of free-booting Khwarazmian Turks, resurrected his earlier projected deal with the Fifth Crusade leadership.

  The death of al-Muazzam in 1227 relieved al-Kamil of one source of anxiety. When Frederick finally sailed to Acre in June 1228, preceded by his marshal, Richard Filangieri, he used his force as a bargaining counter to threaten al-Kamil and press him to surrender Jerusalem. There were local military achievements, despite the tensions which inevitably came with the local baronage and which sprang directly from Frederick’s overbearing personality, revealed when he clashed with John of Ibelin, acting as a regent for the young King Henry I in Cyprus. Nevertheless, after hard bargaining Frederick succeeded and in the Treaty of Jaffa of February 1229 recovered the Holy Places of Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth with corridors for access from the coast, as well as some other strongpoints and a ten-year truce. Jerusalem lay unfortified; Muslims were left free access to their own Holy Places in the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque, but their resident population was evacuated and the Christians left free to occupy the city. The Frankish occupiers of Jerusalem set about rebuilding the fortifications. On 18 March 1229 Frederick crowned himself in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Nervous of his position under attack in south Italy, aware of interdict and excommunication and foiled by a united force of Templars, the patriarch and Italian merchants against his attempt to impose his bailli to rule over the Holy Land in the imperial interest. He slipped away from Acre on 1 May, his entourage pelted with tripe and offal by butchers. He never returned, but did not forget Jerusalem and left instructions for the cross that he had taken in 1215 to be affixed to the covering of his corpse in the great porphyry tomb which still stands in the cathedral of Palermo. A great reader, he picked up Joachimite doctrines and came to believe that he was destined to return as emperor and retake Jerusalem as a final move preceding the Second Coming of Christ. Despite temporary reconciliation, from 1239 under Gregory IX and his aggressive successor, Innocent IV, papacy and empire moved into a lon
g conflict, ending in Frederick’s death in 1250.

  The Seventh Crusade

  The last of the great strategic crusades, the apogee of French commitment to the recovery of Jerusalem led by King Louis IX, was better prepared than any other. It was sparked off by two catastrophic events, the fall of Jerusalem to the Khwarazmian Turks, who desecrated the Sepulchre, and the overwhelming defeat of the field army of the surviving Crusader States. The response to these events of Louis IX was that of a king who represented all the conventional virtues of his age and who commanded for that reason the total loyalty of his fighting men.

  Two minor crusades in 1239–41 led independently by Theobald of Champagne of the well-known crusading dynasty and Richard of Cornwall, brother to Henry III of England, demonstrated that the time for individual, small-scale crusading was definitively at an end. Although Theobald made a treaty recovering Galilee and Richard built a new fortress at the citadel of Ascalon, these achievements were in reality dependent on the will of scions of the crumbling Ayyubid dynasty whose decisions could be predicted by neither the incoming Westerners nor the resident fighting men of Acre and its territories. Jerusalem was occupied over the winter of 1239–40 by al-Nasir of Kerak whose command of the fortress left him dominant in southern Palestine; he withdrew peacefully. The walls had been rebuilt but the insecurity of the city attracted too few Christians. Minor expeditions such as those of 1239–41 did not meet the vital need for a garrison of warriors willing to reside permanently. Richard Filangieri lived on at Tyre representing the imperial interests; Templars and Hospitallers adopted different strategic objectives; the Italian cities had their own preoccupations.

  Meanwhile al-Salih Ayyub emerged as the master of Egypt and the holder of a winning military force, his own slave soldiers, the Mamluks. In 1244 he launched a two-pronged attack, letting loose the bandit Khwarazmian Turks, remnants of a kingdom in Persia and Iraq demolished by the Mongols, assured of pay and land to maraud into the Holy Land while he moved from Egypt with his Mamluks. Christian residents fled from Jerusalem to the coast and were massacred on the way by Muslims: few survived. The fighting garrison staying on in Jerusalem were too few to man the defences, despite the restored walls, and were over-whelmed by the Khwarazmians. The invaders demolished the tombs of the kings, destroying memorials to Godfrey of Bouillon and Baldwin the Conqueror; priests saying Mass in the church of the Holy Sepulchre were beheaded. The Sepulchre was set on fire. An exclusively Muslim occupation was established and lasted until 1917.

  The warriors of the coast determined to fight and allied with Ayyubids opposed to al-Salih Ayyub. With characteristic Latin impetuosity they rejected advice to hold back and thus allow the undisciplined Khwarazmians to break up and leave the field; instead, they attacked al-Salih Ayyub’s combined Khwarazmian and Egyptian army and were almost annihilated in battle at La Forbie, near Gaza, in 1244.

  In December 1244 Louis took the cross when recovering from a near-death experience as a result of a fever. His mother and advisers wished him to abandon his plan because of the dangers from baronial revolts threatening the kingdom during a long absence and from conflict with Henry III of England. He insisted. His mother, Blanche of Castile, had ruled as regent after the early death of his father and his own succession at the age of twelve. He was thirty when he took the cross and there is little doubt that an undeclared factor in his decision to go crusading was the will to escape from this capable but overpowering woman. He took with him his devoted wife and three brothers.

  No crusade had ever been planned so carefully, with awareness of past sources of failure. Louis’s grandfather Philip Augustus had built up the resources of the kingdom and he drew on immense sums to finance the expedition. Both in France and in England crusade levies were the basis for heavy taxation. He took a minor shallow-water base at Aigues-Mortes in the Rhone delta and at great expense turned it into a deep-water port, with a mole to embark horses and a pure water supply so as to be independent of existing cities which would strike bargains for the use of their facilities. He assembled a large fleet with entry points in vessels below the water line caulked over on embarkation to contain his horses, and he put together an enormous mass of provisions, stockpiled in advance on Cyprus. The preparation of his kingdom spiritually to earn God’s favour included the unprecedented appointment of enquêteurs-reformateurs, peripatetic inquirers into abuses of tax collectors. Military preparations were also meticulous, restricting his crusaders to capable professionals and including a strong body of crossbowmen.

  There was never any doubt of his total control of events and preparations and the first day in Egypt began with a resounding success when he chose, like the Fifth Crusade, to assault Damietta. Louis and his cavalry took the risk of crossing the Nile to the shore in front of the city: horsemen facing them were deterred by lances thrust into the ground and slithered on the rough terrain. Panic and rumour of the death of their sultan led to evacuation of the city. On 5 June, Louis had achieved more in a day than the Fifth Crusade had in seventeen months. He was not prepared for this and delayed. The enemy harassed his army, and they became restive. Only in November, when Alphonse of Poitiers arrived with more troops, did he begin to move up the Nile but he fell foul of the intricacies of the waterways. The attempt to build a causeway over the Ashmun Tannah delayed his army as his men were subjected to a storm of missiles. Ships’ timbers were used to build high wooden walls manned by his crossbowmen, but attrition of his troops continued.

  Stage by stage Louis’s army diminished, for he had to leave a garrison at Damietta; skirmishing during his earlier delay there lost more, and the battle over the waterway led to heavy casualties. Then, bribing a Bedouin revealed the existence of a ford higher up the Ashmun Tannah and enabled a cavalry force to wade across and move directly to attack the enemy outside Mansura. Louis’s brother Robert of Artois charged but over-excited at surprising the enemy, he took his own men, the Templars and William Longsword, the cousin of Henry III and leader of an English contingent, on into Mansura. It was fatal.

  Since the Fifth Crusade Mansura had become much more than a camp. It was an inhabited town, with winding narrow streets and houses and there the enemy’s Mamluks held all the advantages, showering the cavalry with missiles from all sides as well as from the tops of the houses. Nearly all were lost. Louis was in trouble. Relying on his naval superiority, he had sustained supplies to his army with ships travelling up the Nile but had left no caches of provisions for his men as they marched up the bank. Neatly, the enemy had segments of boats carried overland on the backs of camels, and, once reassembled, these blocked the way upstream for Louis’s ships. Under blockade the army began to starve and were afflicted by dysentery and scurvy. Against heavy counterattack, they held out in an improvised defensive camp in front of Mansura, then retreated across the river successfully. Louis’s courage and tenacity never left him, but the situation deteriorated and became a struggle for survival as the enemy killed wholesale, sparing only those who looked wealthy enough to be ransomed. Retreat degenerated into massacre. A pontoon bridge, left unguarded after the crusaders had retreated, enabled their enemies to cross and harass the fleeing Christian remnants. Earlier there had been opportunity to strike a bargain, offering total withdrawal in return for ceding of Jerusalem to the Christians. That moment had passed. Thus, when Louis was ready to seek terms, he had no bargaining power left and in consequence found that his enemies made impossible conditions. He no longer had a viable force and early in April 1250 was forced to surrender.

  Left in Damietta, Louis’s queen, Margaret of Provence, played a heroic role, using the money she had for her ransom to induce the Pisan and Genoese merchants to stay with their vessels, allowing for escape and provisioning. She made the elderly knight who guarded her promise to kill her if she was in danger of being taken by the Muslims. An immense ransom was demanded for Louis, imprisoned in harsh circumstances and threatened with torture.

  Jean de Joinville, close to the king, observe
d all his actions and recalled them at the end of his life. He never wavered in his appreciation of the king’s heroic virtue, his prayers, his austerities and his flagellation. But he tells us also that Louis had no gifts as a battlefield commander. His personal courage commended him to his followers, just as the Lionheart’s had done, but he lacked Richard’s skill as a diplomat and his ability to anticipate the enemy’s moves. He could not read a battle; above all, he lacked the sense of timing crucial in war.