God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  From Branitz, the Germans threaded their way to Nish, which was reached on 27 July. Given the awkward terrain and the length of the crusader marching line, the army was divided into four divisions.37 Despite the persistent harassment from locals acting, many believed, on Isaac’s orders, Frederick was reluctant to throw in his lot with Serbian rebels who met him at Nish. The journey though Bulgaria to Sofia increasingly resembled a fighting march, familiar to eastern tactics and from the First and Second Crusades. At Sofia, on 13 August, the Germans found that the promised markets and currency exchange had been removed on imperial orders and that the route to the Maritsa valley and Thrace had been fortified against them. After battering their way through the mountains, on 24 August the crusaders reached Philippopolis, which had been abandoned by its inhabitants and its defences destroyed on Isaac’s orders by the governor of Thrace, the civil servant and historian Nicetas Choniates. Years later, in the shadow of the loss of Constantinople to the Fourth Crusade in 1204, Nicetas painted an intimate but unflattering portrait of Byzantine confusion, duplicity and impotence at this time.38

  By the time Frederick entered the deserted Philippopolis on 26 August, he had learnt of the arrest of his ambassadors in Constantinople and of Isaac’s demands for German guarantees of good behaviour and a share of future crusade conquests. Despite a growing problem of supplies, Frederick was in no mood to compromise, especially as he held a clear military advantage. Isaac’s diplomatic tactlessness, such as failing to afford Frederick his proper title in correspondence, soured relations further. While angry diplomatic exchanges continued, the release of the German ambassadors without what Frederick regarded as adequate reparations did little to resolve the central issue of Byzantine assistance in transporting the crusaders across into Asia Minor. Having occupied Philippopolis and the surrounding region, securing food and markets, by early November Frederick had decided on a strategy to force Greek cooperation.

  Perhaps mindful of the disastrous crusader advance into Asia Minor in the winter of 1147–8, Frederick, choosing Adrianople as his headquarters, proceeded to occupy Thrace. At the same time, he made contact with provincial rebels in the Balkans and appeared to contemplate an assault on Constantinople. Both the occupation of Thrace and an attack on the Greek capital had been policies proposed to Louis VII in 1147. In mid-November, Frederick wrote to his son and regent, Henry VI, requesting he raise a war fleet from Italian ports to meet the German army in mid-March for an attack on Constantinople. At the same time, signalling that his ultimate goal had not changed, he asked Henry to arrange with his officials and the Venetian banker Bernard the German the transfer of imperial funds to Tyre, ‘since you know that we shall need large amounts because of the unexpected delays facing us’. The money was to come from outstanding sums owing the crown, especially, Frederick mentioned, Ancona, Metz, Bremen and the count of Hanau. Whether this revenue represented unpaid hearth tax, regalian obligations or some other dues is unclear, but Frederick’s demands indicate a substantial financial apparatus and fiscal base for his expedition. How seriously he intended, as he put it, ‘bringing the entire imperial territory under control’ is less certain.39 Five months gave little time in which to hire and equip a war fleet and have it arrive on station. Cities such as Genoa, one of those mentioned by Frederick, were able to supply transport on demand; early in 1190 the Genoese struck a deal to carry Philip II of France’s military entourage the following August. However, German policy in Italy as well as the commercial rivalries between the cities made such alliances difficult. Venice had only recently entered into a new treaty with Byzantium and would refuse to cooperate with Genoa and Pisa. Although unknown to Frederick, at the same moment he wrote to Henry proposing the fleet, one potential maritime ally, William II of Sicily, died, his throne being seized by his anti-Hohenstaufen bastard cousin Tancred of Lecce. Thereafter, Henry VI’s interest in Italy was focused on securing the Sicilian inheritance of his wife Constance, William II’s aunt and heir, rather than supplying ships for his father. Even in Frederick’s instructions of November, the simultaneous arrangements for additional funds to be sent direct to the Holy Land rather than Greece indicates that the proposed conquest of Byzantium was either loud diplomatic sabre-rattling or a sop to the war party within the German high command. By the time envoys from Pisa caught up with Frederick at Gallipoli in March 1190, plans to attack Constantinople had been abandoned.40

  Whatever his intentions, Fredrick maintained the pressure on the Greeks by openly negotiating with Serb and Vlach delegations towards an anti-Byzantine alliance. Relations with the Greeks deteriorated as the Germans tightened their hold on Thrace, even where they suspected the local wine, which was not to their taste, of being poisoned as opposed to being merely nauseating. The Byzantine armed forces made no impression on the German garrisons and foragers, undermining whatever credibility Isaac’s regime retained. Seriously alarmed, Isaac reopened negotiations only to break them off on Christmas Eve 1189 just as agreement appeared imminent. Diplomatic inconsistency and military feebleness caused Greek policy to implode. Nicetas Choniates disdainfully recorded Isaac’s flailing vacillation. Without the military capacity to unsettle the Germans, in the end Isaac was forced to capitulate. On 14 February, a treaty was solemnized in the church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople which repeated the essence of the agreement of Nuremberg of December 1188. As well as various clauses resolving immediate issues of contention that had arisen since August 1189, the treaty guaranteed the crusaders free passage through imperial territory, ships to carry them across the Hellespont at Gallipoli and access to markets at reasonable exchange rates. In return, Frederick promised to avoid Constantinople and refrain from indiscriminate foraging while in Byzantine lands. The whole tortuous episode had delayed the Germans for over six months. Although this may have fortuitously forestalled a winter campaign in Asia Minor, it allowed Saladin, well informed by Isaac, to marshal his defences in northern Syria. For Byzantium rebels and opponents as well as the watching western powers, Isaac’s erratic behaviour exposed his inability to control events. In Nicetas’s hostile view, a profligate sybarite of negligible political acumen, for all his thrashing about and bravado, Isaac had merely accelerated the disintegration of his own empire.41

  The Germans crossed the Hellespont between 22 and 28 March, either side of Easter (25 March), before setting out towards Philadelphia, Hierapolis and the Seljuk border. Once again avoiding the errors of 1147, Frederick’s orderly divisions remained in ostensibly friendly Byzantine territory for as long as possible. However, again echoing the crusaders’ experience forty-two years earlier, the locals proved hostile and resentful, reluctant to open their markets and granaries to the westerners just as the hungry months of spring were upon them. At Philadelphia, after four weeks’ march from the Hellespont, the mixture of brawling and banditry spilt into connected violence, a major armed confrontation being only narrowly avoided. Leaving Greek territory in the last days of April, the German host followed the main road via Philomelium (Akshehir) to Iconium (Konya), the Seljuk capital. The march proved a mirror image of the journey across the Byzantine empire, only more strenuous and more deadly.

  For more than a year, most recently before the Germans left Adrianople, amicable diplomatic exchanges with the Seljuk rulers of the sultanate of Rum, Kilij Arslan II and his son Qutb al-Din, had produced promises of friendship, unopposed passage and open markets for the crusaders. As in Byzantium, internal tensions, particularly between Kilij Arslan and his son, contradicted any formal agreements. Qutb al-Din was Saladin’s son-in-law. Having effectively usurped his father’s position, he encouraged local Turkish opposition and prepared to confront the advancing Germans. Moreover, Asia Minor swarmed with nomad Turcoman raiders who had been operating in the region since 1185 independent of any Seljuk political authority but eager to profit from the well-equipped if poorly provisioned Christian army as it lumbered through the Anatolian hills. In a sharp encounter near Philomelium on 7 May, Duke Frederick of Sw
abia’s division repulsed a dangerous ambush, inflicting heavy casualties. Duke Frederick lost some front teeth, knocked out by a stone.42 By now the persistent attacks of the Turks, some prominent casualties, such as the minnesinger (i.e. poet and minstrel) Frederick von Hausen, and the shortage of food and water were beginning to tell. As conditions worsened and losses mounted, some deserted; others merely gave up, collapsing at the side of the march to await death or captivity. Horses and mules killed in the fighting reduced the military effectiveness of the army but were eagerly consumed by ravenous troops.

  Despite their weakened state and unrelenting Turkish attacks, the Germans cut their way through to Iconium, protected by military discipline, weight of numbers and lack of alternatives. The encounters with the enemy grew in size and intensity as the Christians closed on the Seljuk capital, which Frederick insisted on capturing rather than leave as an enemy base at his rear. On 18 March, outside Iconium, the Germans encountered Qutb al-Din’s main army in a pitched battle. By dividing his forces into two, with Duke Frederick leading an assault on the city itself while the old emperor faced the Turkish field army, Frederick seems to have wrong-footed his opponents. The city fell easily, suggesting it had been denuded of defenders. After desperate fighting involving the emperor himself, the Turks outside the city were defeated, apparently against the numerical odds, leaving Iconium at the mercy of German pillaging and looting.

  The victory at Iconium saved the crusade militarily and restocked it with food, supplies and money. His strategy in ruins, Qutb al-Din was replaced by his father, who resumed his pacific policy by coming to terms with the Germans. After a brief rest, the re-equipped German army left the region of Iconium on 23 May, with important Turkish hostages to guarantee the safety of their march. On 30 May the vanguard reached Karaman on the border with Christian Cilicia. Frederick Barbarossa had achieved what the crusaders of 1101 and Second Crusade could not. In two months since crossing to Asia, he had brought his vast army, depleted but intact, in the face of sustained Turkish hostility, difficult terrain, heavy casualties and shortages of supplies, to welcoming Christian territory. On its own terms, this compared with the most remarkable achievements of the whole Third Crusade. A generation later a writer in Outremer reckoned that Saladin had been so frightened of Frederick’s approach that he dismantled the walls of Syrian ports lest they were captured and used against him by the Germans.43 But Frederick’s effort proved to no purpose. Pressing forward to Antioch, now only a very few weeks ahead, as the German army negotiated the crossing of the river Saleph, Frederick somehow slipped, fell or was thrown from his horse into the river. He may have fallen in because of a heart attack or, having fallen, the shock of the cold water brought one on. Alternatively, and less credibly, he drowned after going for a cooling swim. The sources disagree, some insisting that Frederick survived his ducking only to die some days later. What is certain is that the emperor died on Sunday 10 June 1190 as a consequence of fording the river Saleph and that his death, through heart failure, drowning or other injury, was connected in some way with immersion in the river.44

  Practically and symbolically, the shock of Frederick’s death was profound. It cast doubt on his cause. Even in retrospect it was impossible to recast him as a new Moses deprived of the Promised Land, as there was to be no ultimate victory for his people. At the time, his sudden death in such circumstances snapped the army’s morale and unity. Freed from the imminent threat of attack from hostile locals, the great army that had held together for over a year in the face of all vicissitudes began to disintegrate. Elements peeled off to return home from the ports of Cilicia or, later, Syria. Others left the main force to sail from Tarsus for Tyre. The rest continued to Antioch, by land and, with Frederick of Swabia and the funeral cortège of his father, by sea. Duke Frederick reached Antioch on 21 June 1190, where he was joined by his depleted land army. There, disease ravaged the survivors, including a number of significant figures in the high command and royal administration. Frederick Barbarossa’s body was boiled and filleted. The flesh was buried in the cathedral of St Peter in Antioch. The separated bones, now elevated to the status of relics, were destined for the Holy Sepulchre, although they ended in the church of St Mary in Tyre. This scarcely compensated for the lack of his personality and leadership.

  His son, while possessing both bravery and military skill, lacked his father’s authority, drive and determination. With diminished resources, Duke Frederick toyed with the idea of establishing himself as a power in northern Syria, being offered by Bohemund III, or, in other accounts, insisting upon control of Antioch.45 This made some strategic sense, as military pressure in the north played on the relative weakness of Saladin’s hold over parts of the region and had the effect of forcing the sultan to divert even more troops from Acre. The Christians’ recovery from the defeat outside Acre of 25 July and the ease with which Henry of Champagne subsequently established himself may have been fruits of Duke Frederick’s Antioch policy. However, Duke Frederick, perhaps because of his diminishing armed force, decided against a northern campaign. Leaving Antioch on 29 August, he led his troops south, picking their way down the coast to Tripoli and Tyre, sustaining further losses to Turkish attacks on the way. Having made contact with Conrad of Montferrat at Tyre, Frederick, with a meagre and bruised rump of the great German host, finally reached the Christian camp at Acre on 7 October 1190.

  The scene he found would have inspired little confidence. The siege was locked in a violent stalemate that cost lives and achieved little. Even wives of crusaders joined in the menial tasks of siege warfare, such as filling the city ditch so that siege engines could approach the walls. One of these, mortally wounded by a Turkish arrow, begged her husband to bury her in the trench she was helping to fill.46 The remnants of the German crusade inspired some concerted action against both the city and the surrounding Muslim forces, but they failed to make a difference. Morale was hardly raised by the departure of Louis of Thuringia shortly after Duke Frederick’s arrival. National rivalries simmered dangerously, exacerbated by fresh reinforcements. At about the same time as Duke Frederick, the advance guard of the English royal army landed at Acre, led by Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury, the recently dismissed justiciar, Ranulf Glanvill, and his nephew, soon the rising star of Angevin government, Hubert Walter bishop of Salisbury. They had left Richard I at Marseilles in August 1190, taking two months to reach Palestine. The English helped with manning the front lines and leading forays against the enemy, but their presence also reinforced a growing political division within the Christian camp in which they were pitted against the Germans.

  Some time in October 1190, the disease that appears to have become endemic in the fetid conditions of the Christian camp, carrying off many of the recent arrivals, claimed Queen Sybil of Jerusalem and her two daughters. This threw the Jerusalem succession once more into doubt, as Guy was only king by virtue of being Sybil’s husband. Guy’s enemies among the Outremer baronage, led by Balian of Ibelin and his wife Maria Comnena, mother of the new heiress to the kingdom, Isabella, promoted the proven military success, Conrad of Montferrat, to replace the man who lost Jerusalem.47 To achieve this they needed Isabella to divorce her existing husband, the Arabic-speaking and allegedly effeminate Humphrey III of Toron, and marry Conrad. The childlessness of Isabella and Humphrey made the scheme easier to contemplate. The uncomfortable fact that Conrad already had a wife living in Constantinople, and possibly another in Italy, seemed to have been brushed aside. The Germans, the papal legate, the archbishop of Pisa and the French vassals of Philip II lined up behind Conrad and his marriage to Isabella. Ranged against them were the Patriarch Heraclius, now too ill to act, and the Angevins under Archbishop Baldwin, who supported Guy. Baldwin proved an awkward opponent, and even the docile Humphrey of Toron seems to have briefed Ralph of Tiberias, a noted advocate, to plead his case. However, Baldwin died suddenly on 19 November, and five days later, after Humphrey had been exposed to enormous political and personal pressure and
scarcely veiled physical threats, Isabella’s first marriage was annulled and she was summarily married to Conrad by Philip II’s cousin, the bishop of Beauvais, with the approval of the papal legate. To some, the crown of Jerusalem now lay with a couple united only by politics and bigamy. To others, it seemed the most sensible outcome, especially as they produced a child the following year. For the army at Acre, it risked schism, as Guy still insisted he was king. Only the withdrawal of the couple to Tyre and the intensification of the epidemic in the camp calmed emotions.

  The coup of Conrad’s marriage represented a final achievement for Frederick of Swabia. Within weeks he had been struck down by illness, dying on 20 January 1191. He was buried in the cemetery of the field hospital established at Acre earlier in 1190 by citizens from Bremen and Lübeck.48 It had been dedicated to St Mary’s, Jerusalem, a reference to the German hospital in the Holy City before 1187. By 1196, this community caring for the sick had been organized as a religious hospitaller order on which, in 1198, was imposed the duty to fight the infidel. The Teutonic Order of St Mary’s Hospital in Jerusalem, the military order of the Teutonic Knights, thus constituted the most important and lasting legacy of the German involvement in the Third Crusade. Ironically, it owed nothing to the initiative and efforts of Frederick Barbarossa. The collapse of the German expedition constitutes one of the great ‘what ifs’ of crusading, indeed of medieval history. If Frederick had brought his army, still tens of thousands strong despite the heavy losses, to Acre in the summer of 1190, the city might have fallen a year earlier than it did. Saladin confessed to serious alarm at the danger. His authority would have been severely weakened long before the arrival of the kings of France and England. In turn their forces would not have been deflected by the need to take Acre. The political rivalries would not have diminished. Frederick was old and imperious. Neither Richard I nor Philip II would have been over-eager to bow the knee to him. However, a joint campaign by such large forces from an already secured base at Acre in 1191 might have placed Jerusalem within Christian reach. As it was, the last great western European land attack on the eastern Mediterranean ended in frustration and almost complete failure.