God's Armies

by Malcolm Lambert

  In the second battle of Homs in 1281, Kalavun had to face a Mongol army which included Georgians, Turcomen, Armenians and probably some Hospitallers, and in consequence was larger than the army that Baybars and Qutuz had defeated at Ain Jalud. He was outnumbered and weakened by the presence in his army of Mamluks whom he had promoted in preference to the bahriyya. Good generalship, Mongol carelessness and some good luck won Kalavun the victory, but at a cost of heavy losses, which delayed the final showdown with the settler Christians. The honour of destroying them fell instead to one of Kalavun’s sons – no favourite of his – called al-Ashraf Khalil. Kalavun died on the way to the final attack on Acre, which he so much desired, and his son took over, surmounting grave difficulties in deploying a total of ninety siege engines, including the monster trebuchet, a counterweight catapult which needed a hundred carts pulled by teams of oxen so as to provide for assembly on the site of the siege. In bitter weather oxen died of exposure but still the materials for the monster were carried through.

  Jihad brought in volunteers. On the Christian side disputes over kingship faded. It was accepted that Henry II, ruler in Cyprus, was also king of Jerusalem and he came to fight, leaving by sea only when the situation became hopeless. Sea power brought in supplies to the garrison and reinforcements gave the opportunity to make attacks on the besiegers. The great double walls led civilians to seek safety within the city but the throwing-machines inherited from Baybars battered walls and towers and created entry points for Muslim soldiers, while the sewers opened the way for their mines.

  There was a multiplicity of different, often conflicting, forces within Acre; nonetheless, in the last resort the military orders, Templars and Hospitallers, despite past quarrels, all fought on with great courage, matched by the Teutonic Knights, latecomers though they were on the Holy Land scene. After the fall of most of Acre in 18 May 1291, the Grand Master of the Hospital, severely wounded, was carried away against his wishes by his men to Cyprus, whence he wrote ‘in great sadness of heart’. The beautifully illuminated Burdett Psalter, which depicts him in worship before Christ, was thought to have been lost but when it resurfaced in the twentieth century was sold at auction for a record price. A last stand by the Templars at their strongpoint on the extreme south-west side on 28 May ended in a collapse of walls, burying attackers and defenders alike. Al-Ashraf Khalil ordered Acre to be razed to the ground so that crusaders could never return.

  By August all strongpoints and ports were gone. The Templars kept the tiny island of Ruad, 7 miles off Tortosa, as a springboard for a return, but were forced out of it in 1302–3. Cyprus was a refuge and there Lusignans went on ruling into the fifteenth century.

  The Decline of the Mamluks

  Plague in the fourteenth century devastated the Mamluk state and its soldiers, while lasting damage was done to the agriculture of Upper Egypt by greedy and oppressive measures. The Mamluks lost discipline. Enslavement of boys continued as Circassians from the Caucusus replaced Turks, but too many sultans were unsatisfactory.

  Ottomans evolved from Turkish war bands in Anatolia and gained prestige when they captured Constantinople in 1453. They defeated the Mamluks of Egypt in 1517. The legend persists that Ottomans defeated Mamluks because they knew how to use gunpowder while their more hide-bound opponents declined to keep up with the times. Robert Irwin has demonstrated that this is untrue. The curved bow was superior to the handgun for Mamluk cavalry. If the horsemen were well trained, their bows could fire off six shots per minute while handguns of the time could only achieve one to two shots. Handguns were useless to men in the saddle; they might, in contrast, be handed out to low-grade infantry who lacked horsemanship and the training needed to draw back the curved bow. Both sides at various times used cannon and handguns, but they were not in themselves decisive. Ottomans won because Mamluk leadership had grown decadent and because they had developed one military technique, the defensive chained wagon, which the Mamluks never mastered.

  One harsh military dictatorship based on slave soldiers, the Janissaries, succeeded a previous such dictatorship, to the detriment of Islam. The breakdown of Iraq’s irrigation system ruined the civilisation based on it. Baghdad ended as a dull provincial town, shorn of intellectual life. It is true that the cultural life of the Mamluks can be underestimated. They were willing to use a great historian, Ibn Khaldun, as a tutor to a boy sultan. They were ultimately responsible for a wide range of Arabic writing and were patrons for one work of world literature, the Thousand and One Nights. They left their mark on Jerusalem, and architecturally it was a good one. Christian sites were not demolished because they brought in pilgrim traffic and Islamic ones were cherished. Sultan Qaitbay, who reigned from 1468 to 1496, was responsible for a masterpiece of intricate stonework, the ablutions tower placed west of the Dome of the Rock, which still fascinates tourist and pilgrim.

  Yet military success was purchased at a high price, and in this respect Mamluk and Ottoman dictatorships were alike in that they were similarly systems of arbitrary rule, stifling any developments in the heartlands of Islam similar to the effects in England of counsel and consent on kingship, and the emergence of bargaining power on the side of the Commons to mitigate the power of kings. The message of Mamluk and Ottoman alike was that only despotism paid, to the great detriment of Muslims down to modern times.

  * A masterly analysis of the site and sequence of events is in P. Herde, Gesammelte Abhandlungen und Aufsätze vol. 2, pt 1 (Stuttgart, 2002), Chapter 14, with map. I am indebted to Professor Herde for information from his work, both on Hattin and on Ain Jalud.

  10

  THE LONG AFTERMATH

  Response to the Loss of Acre

  The fall of Acre in 1291 moved the West. The reaction was not as strong as that which followed Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem in 1187 but it was noteworthy just the same in that it influenced the most committed advocates of mission to Muslims to think again about the need for crusade to rescue the Holy Land. The reason lies in disappointment that God had deserted His people and given victory to the Mamluks. A sense of divine purpose had run through crusading history, and now almost every foothold had been lost in the Holy Land and the associated states. Other strongpoints had already gone, but Acre was the very last of importance, being well known due to its size, its massive walls, its burgeoning population and its commercial and industrial life.

  Appeals for money and warriors in the West had largely gone unheeded because of the growth of nation-states, their conflicts and the immense costs of up-to-date warfare. Edward I of England, before he came to the throne, was a notably committed crusader; when he became king, however, he was too preoccupied with problems at home to consider going to the Holy Land.

  The New Force: Philip the Fair (1285–1314)

  Popes in the late thirteenth century were terrified of a renewal of the Hohenstaufen threat to exert power and to put intolerable pressure on the independence of the papacy in Rome through co-ordinated action from Germany, northern Italy and Sicily. One French pope decided to back a safe ally, Charles of Anjou, brother of King Louis, to take south Italy and Sicily and destroy the last of the Hohenstaufen ‘brood of vipers’. This Charles proceeded to do, killing Frederick II’s bastard son Manfred in battle and ruthlessly executing Frederick’s sixteen-year-old grandson in Naples but his dictatorial attitude angered rebels in Sicily, who called in the maritime power of Aragon against him. Peter III of Aragon, married to Manfred’s daughter, took up the Hohenstaufen claim and was accused of ‘impeding’ the Holy Land crusade, in the phrase once deployed by Innocent III at the start of his pontificate. A French army, equipped with the crusading indulgence under King Philip III of France, embarked on a disastrous venture overland against Aragon, only to find its supplies ruined by Peter’s fleet. Beset by hunger and disease, the French were forced into a humiliating retreat over the Pyrenees. Philip III, who had to be carried in a litter, succumbed to illness at Perpignan in 1285. His son Philip, called the Fair because of his good lo
oks, had accompanied him in his humiliation and in consequence bore a deep hostility towards the political crusading of the popes. Despite being the grandson of St Louis, he only played with the notion of a Holy Land crusade and his reign damaged both the papacy and the traditional crusading ideal.

  The pontificate of the eccentric Celestine V, who resigned after nine months, was followed by that of a highly capable administrator and canonist, Boniface VIII (1294–1303). He brought about a workable solution to the long Sicilian crisis and called a Jubilee in Rome with attached indulgences and improved papal finances; but he had his dark side, manipulating a land deal for his family, the Caetani, and calling an expedition against their traditional enemies, the Colonna, a crusade. Coarse and self-willed, Boniface’s casual remarks were damaging to the papacy’s reputation and were ruthlessly exploited by Philip the Fair’s ministers to discredit him and put pressure on his successors. A jurisdictional and financial conflict in France escalated dramatically as Boniface used papal powers to excommunicate one of Philip’s ministers, William of Nogaret, and issued the Bull Unam Sanctam, with the most extreme claims for papal powers ever made. William, with Sciarra Colonna, personally attacked Boniface, bursting into his private family palace in the hill town of Anagni, intending to arrest the pope and transport him by force to France to answer trumped up charges of corruption, simony, blasphemy and heresy. The pope met them with dignity and was liberated by his faithful townspeople but he had been profoundly humiliated and died within a month, probably from a stroke.

  This was far from the end of Philip’s campaign to subject the papacy to his will. He and his servants knew inquisition procedures well and were ready, it was clear, to exhume Boniface, put him on trial, convict him and burn his body as a heretic. The potential damage to the reputation of the papacy was one no pope could ignore.

  Events split the cardinals. Some wanted to see a settlement with Philip; others supported the papacy and were unwilling to make a deal. After the short pontificate of a Dominican friar, an eleven-month interregnum followed with such deadlock that the only way to resolve the long crisis appeared to be to elect an outsider and so the Sacred College found a candidate in a Gascon, technically the subject of Edward I of England, Bertrand of Got, Archbishop of Bordeaux. Suffering from cancer, he was unable to work continuously, being overwhelmed repeatedly with incapacitating pains. He had intended to be crowned in Rome as Clement V but was not well enough to go there and instead was crowned at Lyon; thereafter he and his curia moved restlessly between Lyon, Poitiers and Bordeaux before finally settling in the small town of Avignon in 1309. Allegiances within the Sacred College were finally settled as he appointed Gascons as cardinals. The papacy came to be seen as French and every pope after Clement was French until the Great Schism in 1378. The papacy in consequence lost its international calibre.

  James of Molay and the Fate of the Templars

  James of Molay, last Grand Master of the Templars, a shrewd, straightforward military man and a good organiser, was elected after the death of his predecessor in Acre. He stemmed losses in finance and personnel, took up residence in Cyprus and combined with the Grand Master of the Hospitallers and the brother of King Henry of Cyprus to launch the last of the true Holy Land crusades, bringing into play the Christian enclave of Cilician Armenia and the Islamic convert and enemy of the Mamluks, Ghazan, Mongol Ilkahn of Persia. The deal was to recover Jerusalem and split territory between Christian settlers and the Mongol power using Armenia and the Mongols to expel the Mamluk garrisons. In an initial action in the winter of 1300–01, Cypriots, Templars and Hospitallers landed on the mainland at Tortosa from the island of Ruad and for some twenty-five days ravaged and took Muslims to be sold into slavery. The crusade project failed only when Ghazan, although he had taken Aleppo and all of Damascus bar the citadel, called off his attack, having grown uneasy about Mamluk strength and the lack of fodder for his horses. Templars retired to Ruad, holding themselves ready for another assault, but were overwhelmed by a Mamluk counterattack in 1302–3. It was the last Holy Land crusade to set foot on the mainland. Although Peter I of Cyprus contrived to take a substantial force in 1365 to capture Alexandria, he could not hold it and never got to Jerusalem.

  Summoned by Pope Clement V to join with the Hospitaller Grand Master to discuss reform, economies and the merger of the two Orders, James left Cyprus in 1306. As a traditionalist, he feared that the Hospitallers would dominate the Templars and was wary of the potentially deadly hostile force of Philip the Fair. Clement had to put off seeing him for many months. It was at Poitiers that James of Molay approached Philip with his unease about rumours of accusations against his order and it was there that he spoke with Clement, who in September launched an inquiry of his own. Trapped in France by Clement’s illness, James was lured to Paris by Philip on 12 October 1307 to act as pall-bearer at the funeral of Philip’s sister-in-law. But all was swept aside in Philip’s next, catastrophic move on Friday 13 October – a date it was said, so inscribed in folk memory as to make Friday the 13th in any month ill omened – when James and all the French Templars were arrested simultaneously in the early hours.

  Philip made use of the inquisitor of France who had authority to investigate heresy and sorcery, while deploying his own men, often civil lawyers, propagandising against the Templars and using torture. A farrago of accusations emerged, corresponding to all the fears and tensions unleashed by the fall of Acre and lurking in a society under strain. Renegades, men with grievances, rogues set the ball rolling, and what followed was illogical and incongruous as well as gross exaggeration by scheming interrogators probing the suggestion that the Templars had betrayed Christendom to the Muslims.

  Nonplussed by events, old by medieval standards, perhaps promised release if he confessed, James of Molay made a fatal mistake on 24 October, when he admitted sinful behaviour – probably no more than masculine horseplay – at an initiation ritual which got out of hand at his reception into the Order forty-two years earlier, and urged others to confess as he had.

  The Chinon Parchment, recently discovered in the Vatican Archives, shows Clement’s efforts over three days in August 1308 to rescue the reputation of James of Molay and leading Templars imprisoned in the castle of Chinon and thus free them from Philip’s clutches. Contriving to infiltrate three of his cardinals into the prison to carry out a secret interrogation, he established the true nature of the initiation ceremony and acquitted James and the others of heresy. But Clement was too alarmed at the prospect of the exhumation of Boniface and the danger of the schism in the Church to make known the acquittal and absolution of James and the others. It stayed secret and the victims were left to their fate.

  There followed a long wrestling match between Philip and Clement, who attempted to preserve his own control over proceedings and prevent Philip from exhuming and burning Boniface. Philip’s motive was plain. He needed money: Templars were rich bankers, and Philip had engaged in expensive warfare compelling him to debase the coinage. Kings outside France where torture was not used, found the accusations unconvincing but did not feel able to intervene.

  In the midst of the struggles Clement, a sincere crusader, attempted to maintain the call to rescue the Holy Land and summoned a General Council at Vienne, in Dauphiné, which sat between 1311 and 1312 in order to bring about church reform and launch a full-scale expedition. Popes before him had engaged too often in political crusading and the Council did not believe in Clement’s motives, thinking his intentions mercenary. Some new thinking about crusades for Jerusalem emerged in Clement’s time. Marino Sanudo Torsello, a member of the Venetian aristocracy, wrote the most thorough and expert analysis of the means required to destroy Egypt’s economic power in preparation for a general crusade but it fell foul both of the unwillingness to cut off trade and of the preoccupations of Clement’s successor, John XXII, who was devoted to restoring papal power in Italy.

  Some Templars made a last heroic stand for their Order. In May 1310 fifty-four Templar
s in France withdrew their confessions and were promptly burned alive as relapsed heretics outside Paris by the Archbishop of Sens, an associate of Philip. That led the surviving Knights to accept guilt and receive pensions. Finally in 1314, James of Molay and Geoffrey of Charnay, former Preceptor of Normandy, also withdrew their confessions. In a rage and without authority Philip had them publicly burned alive for relapse on an island in the Seine. Their courage moved onlookers. But by that time Philip had won. In his attack on the Templars he was targeting rich bankers, smearing them and forcing Clement to suppress them, which the pope did at Vienne on the grounds that their reputation had been destroyed. Their possessions were transferred to the Hospitallers, from whom Philip extracted the money by charging massive ‘expenses’.

  Philip’s actions caused major damage. By destroying the Templars he took away devoted manpower committed to the crusade and his ruthless propaganda discredited the papacy and created an atmosphere of fear of the Muslim world and of the inroads of Satan into Christendom. Political crusading was a morass which undermined popes and Philip made everything worse. The effects of his reign lasted long after his death in 1314. The public still cared about crusade and had a long tradition of popular agitation going back to the Pastoureaux working to rescue St Louis but a society lacking means of interpretation of natural disasters looked to conspiracy explanations and the general bête noire of the Muslims.

  In 1321 in the south of France another alleged conspiracy was uncovered between Jews, lepers and Muslims said to be bent on poisoning water supplies used by Christians. Secret meetings had been held, it was alleged, and letters and magic powder sent by the Muslim kings of Granada and Tunis. The new king of France, Philip V, susceptible to such rumours, listened and Bernard Gui the inquisitor investigated. There were pogroms and burnings of lepers.