During the crown-wearing ceremony, Hermann von Salza read out a statement, once in German and then in French, justifying Frederick’s actions surrounding the crusade and attacking his critics. The Jerusalem ritual was to serve purposes far beyond the Holy Land. The scene in the Holy Sepulchre was woven prominently into Frederick’s self-image. When later in 1229 his armies took the field against those of the pope in his successful attempts to regain his kingdom in Italy, sympathetic writers described them as ‘the army of crusaders (crucesignatorum)’.42 As he reputedly said to Fakhr al-Din, his reason for taking Jerusalem was primarily because ‘I simply want to safeguard my reputation with the Christians.’43 Immediately this seemed unlikely. Only the next day the archbishop of Caesarea arrived to impose the patriarch’s interdict on the Holy City. However, the bird had flown, Frederick decamping for Jaffa that day, eager to return to the west to make sure he did not become an emperor with no empire. Yet even while he had been in Jerusalem, some clergy had accompanied him and others, such as the Dominican Walter, who had preached the cross in England in 1227, celebrated mass for crusaders just outside the city walls. Once the emperor had gone, the bishop of Winchester and the military orders began rebuilding the city’s fortifications and, so one jaundiced English observer noted, clerics from grand prelates downwards crowded back into the Holy City, ‘their churches and old possessions restored to them’.44 However controversial, the restoration of Jerusalem to Christian occupation lasted, with one brief interlude, for fifteen years. There is evidence that it benefited economically from a revived pilgrim trade; at least one new holy site was constructed, the Coeniculum on Mt Zion, the reputed site of the Last Supper. A well-funded, staffed and equipped scriptorium seems to have been established in the Holy City and large sums of money expended on its walls. Its loss briefly in 1240 and permanently in 1244 proved the wisdom of those who, since 1191, had argued for the impracticality of trying to defend Jerusalem without a larger militarized hinterland and control of the castles of Transjordan. As it was, after 1229, there was a Muslim military base stationed a few miles away at al-Bira, site of the former Frankish settlement of Magna Mahomeria. Discounted by subsequent events, nonetheless Jerusalem’s recovery in 1229 was a significant actual as well as symbolic achievement in the context of the emotions, blood and treasure so profligately expended on it since 1187.
Frederick’s haste to depart contributed to a further souring of relations with the clergy and local baronage. As in Cyprus in 1228, Frederick wished to impose a subservient regime in the kingdom, clipping the wings of the Ibelins. On his return to Acre he also found ranged against him the Templars, the patriarch and many of the Italian merchants in the city nervous at Damascus’s extremely hostile reaction to the surrender of Jerusalem. Patriarch Gerold was planning a coup with the Templars to wrest Jerusalem from the hands of imperial agents. Frederick’s attempt to instal Thomas of Acrerra as his – or rather his infant son Conrad’s – bailli met fierce resistance. After trying to browbeat the Templars and the patriarch by force, Frederick admitted defeat. He maintained the imperial presence by leaving a garrison in Acre and securing Montfort for the Teutonic Knights as well as endowing them with as much property as his opponents could not legally challenge. But he had to bow to local pressure and appoint two loyal but Syrian barons as his regents. The future of Hohenstaufen control in Jerusalem or Cyprus was to be resolved by war over the next decade and a half; Frederick’s allies lost.45
The politics of Outremer meant that Frederick’s diplomatic success, still more his grand gesture in Jerusalem, was greeted with widespread derision, on both sides of the Ayyubid frontier. A Damascene contemporary drew a neat literary contrast between Frederick’s political and intellectual pretensions and his unprepossessing appearance. Quoting one of the janitors of the Dome of the Rock, Ibn al-Jawzi noted that Frederick was red-faced, balding and myopic: ‘Had he been a slave he would not have been worth two hundred dirham.’46 The Franks of Acre were even less charitable. As Frederick hurried to embark from the city on 1 May 1229, local butchers pelted him with offal.47 Yet the doubters and critics were wrong. Al-Kamil’s victory over Damascus soon after allayed fears in Acre of a threat to their trade with the Syrian capital. Frederick’s own defeat of papal forces in 1229–30 and the subsequent reconciliation with Gregory IX at the Treaties of San Germano and Ceprano in 1230, secured official ecclesiastical acceptance of the Outremer settlement of 1229. Frederick’s crusade had potentially laid the basis for constructive relations with the Ayyubids in the development of a wider condominium in Palestine. When instability returned to the region on the death of al-Kamil in 1238, the territorial and castle base established in 1229 could have formed a platform for further Frankish advances. Frederick retained an almost proprietary interest in the affairs of Outremer and the need to assist the defence of the Holy Land. Yet the rejection by the Outremer nobles of Hohenstaufen control, the fissures in their own polity and the collapse of imperial – papal relations in the west prevented more than a very modest western response when the 1229 truce expired. However, Frederick never forgot his crusade. When his porphyry tomb in Palermo was opened in 1782, the emperor’s body was found to be wearing, on the left shoulder, his crusader’s cross.48
THE CRUSADES OF 1239–41
While the ten-year truce of 1229 focused minds in the west on preparations for a new expedition, political circumstances in the west were hardly conducive to fresh mass recruitment. In England and France, the ending of their kings’ minorities stimulated internal faction and rebellion. In 1230, Henry III of England attempted to recover his ancestral lands in Poitou by force. Relations between Frederick and Gregory IX, chiefly over imperial policy in Italy, slid towards a final parting of the ways in 1239. The monarchs of Iberia were vigorously pursuing their own expansion and consolidation of conquests from the Moors and each other. In eastern Europe, rumours and refugees alerted rulers to a new danger from Mongol advances westwards beyond the Eurasian steppes that culminated in the great campaign (1236–42) by Batu, grandson of Genghis Khan, which brought him first to the marches of Latin Europe then, in 1241–2, to Poland, Hungary and, briefly, the Adriatic coast of Dalmatia. The Latin empire of Constantinople stumbled towards financial and political bankruptcy, despite vigorous leadership from the new co-emperor, the ever available and willing, if now rather shop-soiled, John of Brienne. In the Baltic, the energies of local rulers were engaged in the subjugation of Prussia, the collapse of the Swordbrothers in Livonia (1236) and growing rivalry with Novgorod.
Yet out of this apparently unpropitious setting, a new series of expeditions was fashioned. One collector of heroic tales and good stories, no friend to the emperor, noted that once Pope Gregory ‘realised that Frederick was not going to put forward any plan for freeing the Holy Land from the unbelievers’ he initiated preaching the cross in England and France.49 This was unfair. Frederick continued to take a close interest in plans for a new crusade and, even in 1239, when again excommunicated, retained at least diplomatic hopes of finding a role for himself or his son, Conrad, the absentee king of Jerusalem. However, Gregory saw in the crusade a unique instrument of ecclesiastical and specifically papal authority with wide application. He authorized crusading campaigns against allegedly heretical peasants in the Netherlands and the Lower Weser in the 1220s and early 1230s, and against Bosnians in 1227 and 1234. His commitment to prop up Latin Constantinople produced crusading plans in 1231 and 1236–8. In the Baltic he authorized the Teutonic Knights’ conquest of Prussia and supported them with repeated crusading appeals including, in 1240, war with Novgorod. From 1234, he employed the Dominicans and Franciscans on a regular basis to preach the verbum crucis. Finally in 1239–40 he began the series of crusades against Frederick that marked the start of a thirty-year contest to destroy the Hohenstaufen.50
Yet, in all this holy war, the plight of the Holy Land retained its special resonance.
Any man who will not set off at once
for the land where God
lived and died,
any man who will not take the Holy Land’s cross
will have but little chance of going to heaven.51
Although hardly impartial, these verses of Count Theobald IV of Champagne (1201–53, king of Navarre from 1234) marking his own determination to sail for Syria, such sentiments permeated the literature, liturgy and diplomatic rhetoric of the west. By 1234, prospects appeared at least realistic. In Outremer the War of the Lombards had temporarily died down after the defeat of the imperialists in Cyprus in 1232–3. The pope was involved in efforts to gain acceptance of the imperial administration on the mainland. In the west, after Louis IX of France achieved his majority in 1234, the severe political unrest of the previous years gave way to acceptance of the royal regime. In England a sharp political crisis of 1232–4 appeared over and protracted civil war averted. In both countries, just as during the preaching of the Fifth Crusade, the institution of a new expedition to the Holy Land offered a useful political ritual through which disputes and rivalries could be settled and political consensus restored.
Gregory IX launched his new enterprise in letters to the English (4 September 1234) and French (6 November 1234).52 The plan he devised was a sophisticated if logical development from the experience of 1213–21 and 1227–9. In addition to the crusaders themselves, Gregory proposed the creation of a ten-year garrison (or ‘militia’) funded by lay tax contributions earning non-plenary remission of sins.53 To subsidize the crusaders, the clergy were taxed and the pope instituted a campaign to attract vow redemptions and offered indulgences for material contributions. While the preaching was committed largely to the friars, the moneys raised were held in diocesan depositories from which sums were released by direct papal command or the instructions from a papal legate. The funds were given to the regional commanders of the crusade for their own expenses, those of their followers and for mercenaries. Some recruits, such as Count Amaury of Montfort, had their debts settled, while for others, including the count of Champagne, such subsidies made involvement possible.54 The leading English recruit, Henry III’s brother, Richard earl of Cornwall, stood in a different category. From Cornwall he received huge revenues from the growing tin industry, making him one of the richest men in Europe. Nonetheless, he was eager to supplement his resources to pay for the equipping, maintenance and transport of a small army to the Holy Land. Earl Richard received 3,000 marks levied from the increasingly hard-pressed English Jewish community in 1237. The next year, the pope assigned to him legacies bequeathed for the Holy Land and cash vow redemptions, to be handed over once the earl reached Outremer. In fact, the elaborate funding system encountered severe administrative difficulties. Collection of Earl Richard’s grant of redemptions proved glacial, lasting into the 1250s, but lucrative. As late as 1247, when efforts to settle the account were revived by Pope Innocent IV, one archdeaconry was alleged to have raised 600 pounds. Yet by this time, as critics observed, it was evident that little of the money had been used on the actual crusade. Just as some expressed distaste at preachers’ emphasis on fund raising, so others saw the incongruity of supplying the fabulously wealthy earl with a form of regular pension derived from the payments of the pious, the halt, the lame and the poor.55 In France, bureaucratic confusion led to the same funds from the diocese of Poitiers being assigned simultaneously to two different crusaders, Geoffrey of Argentan and the duke of Brittany, while proceeds from three dioceses in the province of Lyons were directed to the duke of Burgundy, having previously been allocated to Count John of Mâcon.56
In addition to these papally organized levies, crusaders resorted to traditional means to raise capital, chiefly from their own property and their lords’ generosity. Richard of Cornwall cut down and sold off his woods after taking the cross in 1236.57 His brother-in-law and fellow crucesignatus, Simon of Montfort, Amaury’s younger brother and earl of Leicester, received 1,000 pounds from the sale of his wood at Leicester.58 Others were supported by the king, especially the entourage of Richard of Cornwall. The earl’s ‘chief of staff’, the prior of the English Hospitallers, Thierry of Nussa, was lent 1,000 pounds. Royal officials who had taken the cross received advances on their salaries or outright gifts. Other crucesignati were able to obtain mortgages from the crown, Across the English Channel, Louis IX was encouraged by the pope to provide funds for the expedition in 1237.59 The stimulus given to the land market by departing crusaders’ need to raise cash on their landed assets is unquantifiable but everywhere apparent.
Although some contemporaries noted, perhaps formally rather than arithmetically, the participation of large numbers of the ‘mediocrium’ or ‘menu peuple’, the commons or ‘ordinary’ people60 – and there is evidence of involvement by some non-noble or knightly freeholders – the core of the crusade comprised the subsidized entourages of earls, counts and dukes, around whom gathered political and dynastic affinities. Superficially, the French crusaders fell into certain broad groups – royal baronial officials, such as Amaury of Montfort, the constable and the butler Robert of Courtenay – and circles of nobles associated by blood or allegiance with a few great lords who had taken the cross: Duke Hugh IV of Burgundy, Theobald of Champagne and Count Peter of Brittany. The muster, from all parts of the kingdom except the south, represented the most extensive commitment of French nobles since the Fourth Crusade, including the counts of Bar, Mâcon, Joigny, Sancerre, Soissons, Grandpré and Nevers. Yet this conceals the most striking feature of the recruitment. Each of these lords, as well as many of their crusading followers such as the counts of Bar, Châlons and Nevers, had been central to the largely anti-royalist disturbances of the late 1220s and early 1230s. Taking the cross formed part of a process of reconciliation with Louis IX and his mother, the powerful regent Blanche of Castile. It is perhaps significant that in the end the most loyalist baron who took the cross, Humbert of Beaujeu, actually went to defend Constantinople and did not accompany his former adversaries to the Holy Land. Taking the cross afforded former rebels protection and served as a guarantee of future conduct as well as presenting a respectable opportunity for political losers to absent themselves from the kingdom. The government could feel secure and the ex-rebels escape further harassment. A key role of the crusade in secular politics was to assist the process of achieving political consensus, the absence of which rendered any medieval polity ungovernable.
In England, the pattern was similar. The symbolic taking of the cross by the most important political recruits in 1236 represented an attempt to reconcile dissidents with the royal court after the near civil war of 1233–4, in which the king and his foreign advisors, led by the former crusader Peter des Roches, were challenged by a baronial coalition under Richard and Gilbert Marshal. Between 1236 and 1239, the cross was taken by a range of former allies and opponents. By taking the cross together, the alliance between Richard of Cornwall and his brother-in-law Gilbert Marshal was consolidated. The crusade encompassed complex currents of personal and factional hostility, including the outlaw Richard Siward, a longstanding enemy of Earl Richard, and the man who engineered his arrest in 1236, Simon of Montfort. At Northampton in 1239, the crucesignati swore an oath not to be deflected from the Holy Land as the goal of the expedition. They included former dissidents such as Siward and Gilbert Marshal as well as royal captains instrumental in combating the Marshals, such as Henry of Turbeville.61 Those who embarked in 1240 ranged from close allies, servants and relatives of the king to previously fierce opponents such as Robert Tweng or Philip Basset.
Yet although the vows of prominent political figures in England and France, the main areas for recruitment, may have been sworn in the context of the political in-fighting of the 1230s, the structure of the crusading armies that embarked scarcely reflected the urge to unity that their original commitment apparently symbolized. The great English and French lords had mostly taken the cross by the end of 1236. Yet, despite the enterprise being conceived by Gregory IX and even Frederick II as a single operation, there appeared only partia
l coordination of effort. The main French wave left in 1239. The English contribution was divided into three distinct armies, under Richard of Cornwall, who set off in June 1240 and sailed via Marseilles; Simon of Montfort who left independently and travelled via Brindisi; and William of Forz, who left in 1241. Each attracted a distinctive constituency of followers. With Richard went his own extended familia, courtiers and close relatives and allies such as his cousin William Longspee and half-brother Eudo. Simon of Montfort led a mixed Anglo-French retinue, while William of Forz seems to have been followed by his fellow expatriate Poitevins. Each group retained independence of structure, policy and action once in the east.62 As one of the more bizarre, yet suggestive features of the 1239–41 crusading effort, Richard of Cornwall timed his arrival at Acre just weeks after Theobald had left the city for home.
Yet the French armies were no more unified. After delaying their departure until 1239 out of deference to Frederick II’s opposition to a precipitate breaking of the ten-year 1229 truce, a delay possibly secured by the emperor’s promise to provide Theobald of Champagne with funds once he reached the Holy Land, the French crusaders displayed little cohesion.63 Although most sailed from Marseilles, others used the ports of Apulia. Both before embarkation and in the Holy Land, an apparent primacy was afforded Theobald of Champagne, perhaps in deference to his grand crusading pedigree rather than his diminished wealth or conspicuous lack of political talent. Although Theobald had abandoned the 1226 Albigensian crusade at the siege of Avignon, his father (d. 1201) had been the lost leader of the Fourth Crusade; his uncle, Henry, had ruled Jerusalem 1192–7, and his predecessors and county had been central to crusade enthusiasm since the 1090s. However, on campaign in Palestine, he appeared unable to impose unity within the crusade force despite being recognized as commander of the crusade at an assembly of crusaders and Franks on arrival at Acre. At different times, Peter of Brittany, Hugh of Burgundy and Henry of Bar pursued their own separate tactics. The duke of Burgundy operated throughout as a semi-detached ally, remaining in the east a year after Theobald and most of the French had departed in 1240. When a private raid of Peter of Brittany’s managed to seize a considerable haul of booty, livestock and meat were distributed to other commanders and ‘the poor’, but only as gifts, arousing jealousy and resentment. The duke of Burgundy and the counts of Bar and Montfort decided, disastrously, to forage and plunder for themselves because ‘they were just as powerful as the count of Brittany’ and they would be shamed if they failed to follow his example.64 Attempts by Count Theobald to stop them, even his appeal to the fealty they had sworn him at Acre as leader of the army, failed. Such divisions reflected funding as much as the politics and personalities of the French operation. There was no central fund in the hands of a unified leadership. Each noble had funded himself and his followers and had received individual grants from the ecclesiastical depositories. None of the great lords depended financially on another. No pay; no discipline. One commentator remarked that by the end of his stay in Outremer, in the late summer of 1240, Theobald of Champagne lamented how members of his army disliked him so much that ‘they did not obey his orders, as they had promised to do at the beginning when he landed in Syria’.65
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