God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  Such recruits saw themselves as answering a higher calling. Sympathetic observers described these recruits as pilgrims. Many of them visited the various shrines dotted around Prussia that offered indulgences to visitors. Even though it is difficult to be sure whether or not those who fought with the Teutonic Knights had actually taken the cross in a formal ceremony, traditional language was still applied, one contemporary depicting Henry Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV of England, as going to Prussia in 1390 ‘against the enemies of Christ’s cross’ to ‘avenge the Crucified’.58 Whatever the precise legal niceties, foreign participation in these Baltic campaigns can only be understood in the context of the crusade and its continuing tradition. This did not mean that the displays of piety and chivalry necessarily transformed behaviour. Henry Bolingbroke in 1390–91 spent £69 on gambling debts and only £12 on alms.59 Secular considerations abided. The order was sensitive lest their commercial rights were compromised by foreign infiltration arriving in the wake of foreign armies. Concerted efforts were made to try to break into the Baltic trade in the teeth of opposition from the Hanseatic League and the Teutonic Knights. Fish wars broke out in the North Sea. In 1373, Edward III of England’s government encouraged a York bowyer to establish a bow-making factory in Prussia. The following year, a Norwich vintner was allowed to try to dump vinegar on the Prussian market, fourteen tuns of Spanish plonk that because of ‘its weakness and age… may not be advantageously sold in England’.60 English merchants settled in Danzig and Königsberg. Lord Bourgchier owned a house in Danzig. This did not make for harmonious relations despite all the free military assistance the Teutonic Knights received. By the early years of the fifteenth century, the English exchequer was paying substantial damages to the Prussian authorities to compensate for trading irregularities. The warriors were not immune. Bolingbroke became involved in a dispute over herring traders in 1391. The same year his uncle, the duke of Gloucester, was authorized to negotiate with the Teutonic Knights, probably over the failed trade agreement of 1388, as well as joining the reisa. In the event, bad weather put paid to both.61

  The conflation of the material and the idealistic that patterned the whole tapestry of crusading and holy war could lead to its unravelling. The decades of war in the Baltic had created no lasting advantage to either side. Lithuania had not driven the Germans into the sea; the Teutonic Knights, despite some notable triumphs, failed to restrain the rise of Lithuania or prevent its union with Poland and consequent conversion in 1386. Once their main adversary had abandoned paganism, the raison d’être of the crusades and, some argued, of the Teutonic Knights’ rule in Prussia and Livonia itself was called into question. Despite the rhetoric of holy war against a now non-pagan ‘infidel’, the political battle lacked any obvious religious element, as the order jockeyed for position and control by trying to set Lithuania and Poland against each other. With each, the order achieved some successes in the 1390s, coinciding with a revival of foreign military aid, on occasion with larger armies even than those of the 1360s and 1370s. Dobryzn was briefly annexed in the 1390s and Samogitia occupied between 1398 and 1406. Yet the strategy of divide and rule collapsed when Grand Master Ulrich von Jungingen, almost all the upper hierarchy and 400 brothers were killed at the battle of Tannenberg (or Grünwald) on 15 July 1410 by a much larger Lithuanian-Polish army.62

  The defeat at Tannenberg did not end the Teutonic Knights’ rule in Prussia. Marienberg held out against the Lithuanians and the final territorial losses were minimal. It did not end the Baltic crusade. There had been a significant number of crusaders from across Germany and possibly even a few Frenchmen at the battle, and further reinforcements arrived over the next three years from Germany and Burgundy. But there is no hard evidence that non-Germans campaigned after 1413, perhaps because of the renewal of the Hundred Years War in 1415 following a quarter of a century’s interlude. Already before Tannenberg, there had been a decline in non-German crusades. After, traditional wells of support such as England seemed to have dried completely. From 1423, even the Germans stayed away. It was difficult to persuade onlookers to regard Tannenberg as a Hattin-like defeat for Christendom, not least because it was not. The Council of Constance (1414–18), which healed the great papal schism (1378–1417), witnessed a violent debate between the order’s apologists, eager to gain conciliar approval for a condemnation and crusade against Poland, and the Polish advocate Paul Vladimiri, who with conviction but unsound canon law attempted to cast the Teutonic Knights as unchristian in their wars and alliances and illegitimate as rulers of Prussia.63 Although Vladimiri’s case, including a radical assault on non-Holy Land crusades, gained few adherents, the council effectively conducted a trial of the order’s methods and mission. In 1418, the order escaped censure, but it failed to gain support for a crusade against its enemies. Instead, the rulers of Poland and Lithuania were appointed papal vicars-general in their promised war against the schismatic Russians. Any suggestion that, as some of the order’s more extreme partisans tried to insist, the Poles were unchristian was thereby decisively repudiated. The proceedings at Constance left a stain on the order’s reputation of hypocrisy, tyranny and making war on Christians which proved indelible.

  The last foreign crusade to help the Teutonic Knights ended in 1423. The rest of the fifteenth century saw the order’s rule in Prussia pared on two sides, by their own landowners and burghers and by Poland. After a thirteen years’ war (1454–66), these two opponents combined to wreck the integrity of the order’s rule in Prussia. At the Treaty of Thorn in 1466, west Prussia was relinquished, including the order’s seat at Marienberg and most of the earliest conquests dating back to the mid-thirteenth century. The new capital of the eastern rump was fixed at Königsberg; the Grand Masters became Polish clients. Occasionally, Teutonic Knights engaged in holy war. In 1429 a detachment fought the Ottoman Turks on the invitation of their ally and protector Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor and king of Hungary. In Livonia a semblance of the order’s original function remained, in the interminable struggle with the Russians. However, the order seemed no longer able to recruit crusaders for itself and popes, quite willing to issue crusade bulls in wars against Turks and heretics, declined to reintroduce formal crusading into the politics of what was now eastern Latin Christendom. Even when repeatedly begged for a crusade bull to help the Livonia order against the Russians between 1495 and 1502, Alexander VI refused. The Baltic crusade was over, an experiment in holy war that had run its course. In 1525, the Prussian order secularized itself, to be followed by the Livonian convent in 1562.

  In a sense, the decline of the Teutonic Knights and the Baltic crusade came as a consequence of their success. Together, they made the Baltic part of Christendom and thus became redundant. The Baltic crusades played their part in one of the most decisive processes of infra-European colonization since the barbarian invasions of Late Antiquity. While this expansion rode commercial and technological advantages, it adopted, at least into the fourteenth century, a self-consciously religious definition of identity. The crusades did not drive the expansion of German, Danish or Swedish power. Wider cultural, economic, demographic and social forces did that. By articulating these expansionist and aggressive impulses in religious terms, crusading offered a particular vocabulary, at once practical and inspirational, that could service self-referential ideologies and self-righteous policies of domination. Holy war gave Prussia, Livonia, Estonia, even Finland a pedigree as well as a legitimacy to compensate for a lack of history, always a difficulty in conquered lands and new polities. Holy symbols – physical, human, institutional – achieved political, social and legal significance, the Catholic churches and churchmen presiding over the transmission of a distinctive western European culture even where the underlying processes of trade, settlement and land ownership remained resolutely secular. It says something for medieval rationality that at no time was this alliance of the material and religious taken for granted. When its contradictions became too egregious, crusading in the Baltic wa
s abandoned, not necessarily because it was bad business, but because it had degenerated into at best a sham and at worst a lie.

  The Defence of Outremer

  22

  Survival and Decline: the Frankish Holy Land in the Thirteenth Century

  The century after the Treaty of Jaffa in 1192 and Saladin’s death the following year established a wholly new political configuration in the Near East. The twelfth century had been dominated by warring emirs, atabegs, seigneurs and mercenary captains from competing city states in shifting coalitions and alliances that cut across region, race and religion. A hundred years later, the area had become dominated by an empire based on the Nile, incorporating Palestine and Syria, which faced a Mongol successor state of the il-khanate of Persia, which included Iraq, a division of the Fertile Crescent that survived into the sixteenth century.1 To this process, the Christian enclaves on the rim of western Asia were far from passive bystanders.2 The century of renewed Christian occupation of Acre saw the golden age of crusading in terms of the number of significant military expeditions east, as well as the integration of crusading institutions into the lives of the Christian faithful. The so-called second kingdom of Jerusalem lasted longer than the first. Control of the ports of the Syrian and Palestinian littoral allowed the Christian authorities, an often messy and volatile alliance of local nobles, foreign adventurers and competitive Italian businessmen, to exploit international trade routes that found access to the Mediterranean in their territories. Only with the shifting of these trade routes in the wake of the Mongol invasion of the late 1250s, and the consequent economic decline of Syria, did mainland Outremer’s commercial function as well profits decline. This coincided with the emergence of the aggressive Mamluk sultanate of Egypt, which found the Christians of the Levant coast useful whipping boys to establish internal authority and international éclat. Yet this outcome was hardly inevitable.

  THIRTEENTH-CENTURY OUTREMER

  The structure of Christian Outremer in the thirteenth century differed significantly from that of the twelfth. Jerusalem or, more properly, Acre, constituted the sentimental and commercial heart of mainland Outremer. However, Cyprus became an independent principality (1192) and then a kingdom (1197), while retaining a semi-detached relationship, through family and tenurial ties and the recognition of a common judicial inheritance, the laws, customs and precedents from Jerusalem being accepted in Frankish Cypriot courts. Ruled by a cadet branch of Isabella I’s heirs until the crowns were united in 1269, Cyprus remained heavily engaged with the mainland while asserting its own integrity as a kingdom. The fate of the island did not depend on that of the mainland, or, as it proved, vice versa. Latin rule in Cyprus outlasted Christian Acre by nearly three centuries.3 To the north, although Antioch relinquished formal claims of overlordship of Cilician Armenia in 1194, close dynastic and political relations threw the two Christian principalities into a long struggle that only ended in 1219 when the count of Tripoli succeeded in securing his rule in Antioch as Bohemund IV against the Armenian claimant. As has been seen, the opportunity presented by the death of Leo II in 1219 of Armenia being ruled by his son-in-law, John of Brienne, king of Jerusalem, faded when John’s wife, Leo’s daughter Stephanie, and their child died in 1220.4 The Hohenstaufen imperial project briefly offered a prospect of a united Outremer. Cyprus and Armenia had received crowns under the auspices of Henry VI in 1197–8. His son, Frederick II, who married the heiress of Jerusalem in 1225, tried to assert his overlordship in Cyprus in 1228–9. His and later his agents’ failure ensured Outremer’s fissiparous status quo.

  One of the most striking features of post-1192 Outremer was the manner in which in legal terms the caesura in ownership in most parts of the restored lands was ignored or sidestepped. Where possible, old lordships or the rights of landowning corporations, such as the church or military orders, were revived. Nobles retained titles even of lands long lost. Many land deeds and charters seemed to have survived the catastrophe of 1187, at least in the archives of ecclesiastical landlords. Lawbooks of the thirteenth century lovingly, if possibly imaginatively, cherished twelfth-century precedents and traditions, not least in fostering the kingdom’s creation myth of Godfrey of Bouillon and his pious knightly companions.5 While modern observers tend to divide the history of the kingdom sharply in 1187, thirteenth-century residents, pullani, preferred to emphasize continuity. In some ways, the rulers at Acre created a virtual kingdom, moving the institutional capital and the headquarters of the great ecclesiastical corporations, such as the military orders and the canons of the Holy Sepulchre, to the new capital while retaining the fiction of a kingdom based around the Holy City. Even when Jerusalem was in Christian hands between 1229 and 1244, the capital remained at Acre.6

  The real difference with the pre-1187 kingdom lay in the lack of secure, settled rural territory. The countryside was to an even greater extent than previously a place from which to extract rents and resources rather than to settle immigrants, although there is some evidence of attempts to encourage new settlement after 1191/2. Whether or not any Frankish peasants survived the Ayyubid conquest of 1187–91/2 in situ, some estates, at least near Acre, were recreated as if nothing had happened.7 Further from the Frankish ports and cities such continuities were not possible. Yet the lack of land may not have been a source of disastrous weakness. New settlers in the thirteenth century tended to congregate in the cities, along with internal refugees. An increase in population at Acre was witnessed by the urbanization of the substantial northern suburb of Montmusard, enclosed by walls between 1198 and 1212.8 Acre gave its rulers a source of incalculable benefit. The well-informed, if in this case possibly optimistic, English observer Matthew Paris learnt from Richard of Cornwall after his crusade in 1240–41 that Acre brought in annually £50,000 (sterling), a huge sum comparable with entire royal incomes in western Europe.9 By law, the crown retained a monopoly on profits of international trade. Acre occupied a pivotal position on the lucrative east–west trade routes. In addition with the exchange of foodstuffs with other Levantine markets, eastern spices, metalware, porcelain, glass, sugar, perfume, wine, jewels and slaves were traded with western textiles, base metals, wood and pilgrims. Niche markets included the Christian taste for salt pork and the Near Eastern demand for Tuscan saffron. Acre’s wealth allowed its thirteenth-century rulers to maintain a military establishment numerically similar to that of the territorially much larger pre-1187 kingdom at least into the 1240s.10 It also threw the city of Acre itself into prominence as a forum in which wider political issues were rehearsed and disputed. In 1231, a group of barons, knights and burgesses established a sworn Commune at Acre that lasted for more than a decade, its members claiming, wishfully and partisanly, to represent the community of the whole realm.11

  Acre’s wealth reflected in its political clout was also on display in its architecture and the new building to accommodate the needs of a capital. This opulence, mirrored in descriptions of the lavish marbled halls of John of Ibelin’s palace at Beirut, adorned by mosaics and elaborate fountains, built between 1197 and 1212, underpinned the survival of the Christian enclaves.12 As part of a wider commercial system involving the Muslim hinterland and trade routes that reached from far Asia to the Atlantic, this economic prosperity reflected and guaranteed generally pacific relations with the Franks’ neighbours until the irruption of the Mongols in the Near East from the 1250s diverted caravans northwards and southwards, away from the Syrian ports. Thereafter, the economic and financial decline mirrored an increasingly bleak outlook for Christian Outremer. This was not lost on alert contemporaries. In the early fourteenth century, the Venetian writer, merchant, diplomat and crusade propagandist Marino Sanudo Torsello (c.1270–c.1343), who visited Acre in the 1280s, insisted that a successful Christian counter-attack to recover the kingdom of Jerusalem had to be preceded by an economic war against Egypt.13 Trade gave power.

  The dependence of the kingdom of Acre-Jerusalem from 1192 on the contrasting supports of defence and c
ommerce propelled into prominence the military orders and the Italian communes, each bent on pursuing their sectional and corporate interests. Increasingly, the few inland and coastal fortresses that remained or came into Christian hands were assigned to the military orders. They had the international resources from their estates in the west to build and maintain them and a constant if modest supply of men to command the garrisons. Even small fortified sites gravitated to the orders.14 The orders’ headquarters were among the most impressive and best-fortified buildings in Acre, as their central role in the defence in May 1291 showed. Of the representatives from the Italian communes, initially Venice was dominant in Tyre and Genoa and Pisa in Acre, until from the 1260s Venice asserted its power in Acre too.15 The Italians provided both the merchant marine, carrying pilgrims as well as goods, and the navy for the kingdom of Jerusalem. Their trading stations attracted significant home investment. Their local commercial and legal privileges, most of which dated back to the twelfth century, posed awkward problems of politics, customs tax, finance and justice for the local authorities. Yet without their presence and support, Acre, Tyre and the rest would have become untenable. In the absence of strong central government, these powerful military and commercial corporations became the arbiters of state affairs.

  Whatever the lurid propaganda circulated in the west, thirteenthcentury mainland Outremer did not experience the perpetual threat of annihilation. An account of the rebuilding of the fortress of Saphet in northern Galilee in 1240 leaves a flavour of the delicate mix of competition, aggression, accommodation and frailty on both sides of the Christian – Muslim frontier. A Christian fortress before its capture by Saladin in 1188, Saphet was returned under the treaty agreed between the visiting crusader Theobald IV of Champagne and the Sultan of Damascus. During the truce, Benedict d’Alignan bishop of Marseilles (1229–67) visited the shrine of St Mary at Saidnaya, an unusual Greek Orthodox pilgrim site north of Damascus venerated by Muslims as well as Latin Christians. The Templars displayed particular interest in the cult. While in Damascus, where he received very civil treatment, the bishop was asked by locals whether the Christians were intending to rebuild Saphet, which, they insisted, would threaten their city’s security. On his return journey to Acre, Bishop Benedict conducted a careful survey of Saphet and its surroundings, unimpeded even though he was in part scouting lands still under Muslim control. He learnt that with a rebuilt Saphet would come control of the whole district. At Acre he bullied a reluctant Master of the Temple to organize the reconstruction of the castle, even though the promise by Count Theobald’s now departed crusaders to pay for it came to nothing. In December 1240, the teams of builders, which included Muslim slaves, began the work, the bishop laying the foundation stone after a suitably exhortatory sermon. More immediately useful, perhaps, he also left a ‘silver gilt jar of money to support subsequent work’.16 The cost of rebuilding Saphet was enormous, 1,100,000 bezants over two and a half years. The garrison’s daily complement included mercenaries and as many (fifty) Turcopoles, probably local Christians, and Templar Knights. The reliance on slave labour, local levies and mercenaries indicates how the shrunken Frankish elite had become adept at manipulating the widest social resources from its subject communities. When Bishop Benedict revisited the site twenty years later, still in Christian hands the castle presented an impressive picture of strength and power; through it the Templars wielded control of the rich surrounding area and its resources, apparently up to 260 villages. Six years later it fell to the Egyptians.