God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  Baibars saw in the eradication of the Frankish kingdom a means to consolidate his power as well as establish his credentials as a worthy Islamic ruler. A veteran of the drama of 1249–50, he rejected the accommodating policies of his Ayyubid and Mamluk predecessors. He rebuffed Frankish attempts at alliance in the early years of his sultanate (1260–77) and from 1265 began the systematic destruction of the kingdom, capturing in short order Caesarea, Arsuf, Toron and Haifa (1265); Saphet, Galilee, Ramla and Lydda (1266).100 The complete loss of the kingdom looked an immediate possibility. Alarm revived half-dormant plans in the west for a new general crusade. The end of the English civil war in 1265 and Charles of Anjou’s victory in Sicily in 1266 encouraged Pope Clement IV to revive plans for an eastern crusade begun under his predecessor Urban IV in 1263. Long-distance financial aid and sponsorship for garrisons, such as Henry III of England’s promised 2,000 marks in 1264 to maintain a company of knights at Acre, were evidently insufficient to stem the Mamluk advance, which proceeded by sophisticated siege technology matched by military brutality. By September 1266, Louis IX had decided to take the cross once more, to lead what he and the pope, a former legal advisor to the French king, hoped would be an international league of recovery. On 25 March 1267, the Feast of the Annunciation, before the relics housed in the Sainte Chapelle, Louis, his three sons, his close family and most of the great nobles of France once more took the cross.101

  Louis IX’s second crusade was notable for its sophisticated methods of recruitment and its almost wholly nugatory results. Much of the process closely followed the precedents of the 1240s. Louis obtained a clerical tenth in France for three years. The collected deposits from legacies and redemptions were placed at the crusaders’ disposal. Normal expenditure was trimmed. Enquêteurs investigated local grievances against royal agents. Towns were tallaged. In some regions, Jewish moneylenders were harried. As before, Genoa and Marseilles supplied ships, although at less exorbitant rates than in 1248.102 However, the rising power of the Catalan ports was recognized in the arrangements of other crusade leaders. More significant, the king’s fleet was commanded not, as in 1248, by Genoese admirals but by a Picard nobleman – with no previous maritime experience – Florent of Varennes. The king again acted as the expedition’s central banker. He subsidized the veteran crusader Hugh IV of Burgundy, now contemplating his third eastern campaign. Clerical funds granted the king were diverted to Alphonse of Poitiers and the counts of Champagne, Brittany and Flanders. In 1269, Louis lent Edward of England 70,000 l.t. with a view to securing substantial English and Gascon involvement: 25,000 l.t. was earmarked for Gaston of Béarn.103 On both sides of the English Channel, crusade leaders assembled their companies by means of formal contracts. In return for a fixed sum from his lord or commander, the contracting crusader was bound to provide a stated number of knights. Occasionally, the crusader would receive additional subsidies in the form of monetary gifts or free food. The contracts were backed by less formal ties of clientage, family and political ties and regional association. In such ways Louis engaged 325 knights and Edward of England 225, yet these only represented the core of, in the French case at least, a much more substantial army.104 Alphonse of Poitiers alone raised perhaps as much as 100,000 l.t. towards his contingent of knights, crossbowmen, provisions and ships, raising the funds from the clerical taxes assigned him by the king, selling assets such as timber and levying a hearth tax on his subjects of the Midi. Judging from the level of noble commitment in France, Louis’s second crusade army cannot, in expectation at least, have been much smaller than that of 1248, perhaps between 10,000 and 15,000 strong. Louis’s second crusade witnessed another striking demonstration of the increasing power of the French state over nobles and regions. To drum up support, the king’s itinerary in 1269 included areas of the kingdom previously free of royal visits.105 In backhanded recognition of this royal authority, Joinville, who had this time refused to sign up, recorded that some French crucesignati felt they only took the cross to keep the king’s favour rather than God’s.106 If so, the near unanimity of the higher nobility in following the king’s lead speaks much for the strength of patronage over pious scruples or the purity of motives.

  To the French levies were added contributions from Frisia, the Low Countries, Scotland, Aragon, England and Charles of Anjou, now installed as king of Sicily. The participation of James I of Aragon and Edward of England, especially the latter, owed much to the personal diplomacy and moral dynamism of Louis IX himself. Despite the opposition of his father, the ageing Henry III, and Pope Clement IV, Edward took the cross at Northampton in 1268.107 He and his brother Edmund raised a significant force centred on the royal court with which well over half of those known to have been recruited in England possessed close formal links. However much the crusade may have helped unite the English baronage after the trauma of civil war, the enterprise was conceived and remained essentially as a royal and curial affair, as in France. Further sign of the commitment of the English government to the crusade lay in the strenuous and ultimately successful attempts by the court to obtain parliamentary approval for a tax on movables of a twentieth, only finally agreed in 1270. Whatever the tax supplied for the crusade – perhaps £30,000 – this represented a significant development in the newly restored consensual politics after the English civil war and confirmation of the fiscal role of the commons in Parliament, the first lay subsidy granted the English crown since 1237.108

  If central funding and a network of contracts that embraced the English as well as French contingents gave Louis a uniquely influential position in ordering the expedition, this did not translate into control over the coordination of the campaign. In February 1268, Louis fixed his departure for May 1270. Yet, at one end of the scale, the king of Aragon embarked in June 1269, for his fleet to be wrecked by a storm, only a remnant of it actually reaching the Holy Land without the king.109 At the other, Charles of Anjou only took the cross in February 1270 and began to prepare his war fleet the following July. Even Edward of England missed the agreed muster by some months, only embarking in August 1270, while his brother, Edmund, set out in the winter of 1270–71. Numbers who actually participated, as opposed to the contractual estimates, appeared lower than the original rush of crucesignati in 1267–8 may have indicated. The driving force of the whole expedition remained the will and enthusiasm of King Louis. This was emphasized by the long papal interregnum after the death of Clement IV in November 1268. A successor was not elected until September 1271, so through-out its final preparations and the crusade itself, there was no pope. However guilty Louis may have felt over the disasters of 1250, his confessor claimed that the king’s motives were more positive and altruistic, to achieve an act of such penitential severity that God would show mercy on the Holy Land.110 In addition to the administrative and financial direction he gave, despite the extensive national and international response, Louis’s personal decision on the strategy of the campaign, perhaps more than anything, lent the enterprise its particular character, some would say its especial futility.

  While preaching began in 1267–8, led by cardinals who, appropriate to the character of the operation, had formerly been French royal councillors, the situation in the Holy Land deteriorated further, culminating in the fall of Jaffa, Beaufort, and, in a blood bath, Antioch to Baibars in May 1268. Initially Louis seems to have envisaged a repeat of the strategy of 1248–50, with a descent on Egypt as the likely destination of the new campaign. However, at some point in 1268 or 1269, Louis’s attention turned in an entirely different direction, an attack on Tunis. This possessed a number of apparent advantages. All large crusade fleets, embarking from different places at different times, required a muster port. As all large fleets and armies had to await the harvest, embarkation for the east was usually deferred until the late summer or autumn sailing seasons. This in turn demanded a port to be found in which to collect the fleet and spend the winter: Lisbon 1147–8; Messina 1190–91; Zara 1202–3; Acre 1217–18; Limassol 1248–9
. Tunis was within easier and safer sailing distance than Cyprus. Conquest of the city and region might assist the political ambitions of the new Sicilian king, Charles of Anjou, as the Hafsid emir Muhammed was harbouring renegade supporters of the ousted Sicilian Hohenstaufen. The emir was also an ally of the king of Aragon, a potential rival to Charles in the western Mediterranean. The possibility of an invasion of Tunisia may have persuaded James of Aragon to avoid integrating his army and fleet with Louis’s. However, Charles’s ambitions were focused eastwards, towards the Balkans and Byzantium. Despite later conjecture, the choice of Tunis as a target rested with Louis, not his brother. In Louis’s eyes, the conquest of Tunis would deprive Egypt of an ally and act as a convenient base for an attack on the Nile in 1271, a geographic myopia of scale common enough in western European circles at the time. More specifically, Louis’s close contacts with the friars may have led him to believe from the Dominicans that Tunis was ripe for conversion, a perception based on perennial missionary optimism and the largely friendly diplomatic contacts between Tunisia and western Christendom.111 Such fantasies of conversion led to a series of ill-fated missions to north Africa in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the willingness to believe that Muslims could be brought to Christ acting as a form of cultural totem similar to modern enthusiasm for exporting western democracy. Friars seemed incapable of separating commercial from religious openness. Perhaps having got wind of Louis’s thinking, the Tunisians sent an embassy to Louis in 1269, which may have furthered encouraged the king’s thinking. While not of itself contradicting the nature of the crusade, the Tunis gambit was sufficiently sensitive to be concealed from followers until after his fleet had embarked. But with muster ports in Sardinia and western Sicily, a north African destination could hardly have come as a surprise. While hindsight condemned the whole idea, Louis’s motives may have been quixotic but they were not without reason.

  The rituals of departure in 1270 exactly copied those of 1248. On 14 March 1270, Louis received the oriflamme and the pilgrim’s scrip and staff at St Denis. The following day, he entered Notre Dame in Paris as a barefoot penitent before walking to Vincennes, where he bade farewell to his wife. The first setback came at Aigues Mortes, where Louis found the promised ships were late, only arriving in late June, by which time sickness had already been incubated in the army. Leaving Aigues Mortes on 2 July, the French fleet reached Cagliari in Sardinia on 4 July, where they waited for other squadrons to assemble. There on 13 July Louis formally announced the destination of Tunis, where the fleet arrived on 17 July, effecting a landing the following day. On 24 July, the army moved its operations a few miles along the coast to Carthage in search of better terrain for the camp and adequate water. Further advance was delayed while Louis waited for the arrival of his brother Charles, who had only begun to equip his fleet in Sicily a few days earlier. High summer, poor diet and water contaminated by the immobile army soon stoked the outbreak of virulent disease, probably typhus or dysentery. The leadership was hit as well as the ordinary ranks. Louis’s son John Tristan, born at Damietta in the dark spring days of 1250, died. The king and his eldest son, Philip, both fell ill. Lingering bedridden for a month, Louis died on 25 August 1270, just as the first detachments of Charles of Anjou’s fleet were making land. Some said his last words were ‘Jerusalem! Jerusalem!’, although his confessor, who administered the dying king Extreme Unction, signally failed to mention such a neat end.112

  With the new Philip III still convalescent, Charles of Anjou assumed command. Evacuation appeared the only option. By 1 November, after a debilitating period of negotiation and desultory skirmishing, Charles and Emir Muhammed agreed terms. In return for the handing over of prisoners, the emir’s agreement to permit Christian worship and proselytizing, and a war indemnity of 210,000 gold ounces (c.500,000 l.t.), Charles agreed to withdraw, appropriating a third of the money. This angered some sections of the Christian army, not least Edward of England, who arrived off Tunis on 10 November, just as the crusaders were packing up to depart. The Christian fleet sailed for Sicily to decide on their next course of action, reaching Trapani on 14 November. Any decision on further campaigning was pre-empted by a storm on 15/16 November, which destroyed large numbers of ships and damaged many more. Perhaps as many as forty vessels were lost, including eighteen large transports, with over 1,000 lives. That effectively ended the crusade, only Edward of England insisting on proceeding to the Holy Land. By the time Philip III returned to his new kingdom, his train resembled a funeral cortège, bearing the bodies of his father, brother, brother-in-law, wife and stillborn son.113

  The failure of the 1270 crusade, though dramatic and spectacular, did not mean the end of the crusade as a focus for monarchical aspirations. Some, like Alphonse of Poitiers before his death the following year, kept the flame burning. In 1271, the cardinals elected as pope Tedaldo Visconti, patriarch of Jerusalem, who was actually in Acre when he was elected as Pope Gregory X. Much of his reign, and those of his immediate successors, was occupied with prospects for a new general crusade to the east and galvanizing the kings of the west to join. Edward of England had done more. Reinforced by a few French nobles, Edward set off for Acre in the spring of 1271, despite attempts to persuade him to return to England, where his father Henry III was gravely ill. Characteristically, he refused, allegedly insisting that he would travel to Acre if necessary only with his groom Fowin for company.114 As it was, his army was small, perhaps only 1,000 strong, carried in a small flotilla of just thirteen ships. Reaching Acre via Cyprus on 9 May 1271, Edward remained in the Holy Land for a year, joined by his brother Edmund in September 1271. He lacked the manpower to achieve any lasting or significant change in the Franks’ position, arriving too late to prevent Baibars’s capture of Crac des Chevaliers in April. Edward contented himself with pursuing the will of the wisps of a Mongol alliance with the il-khan of Persia and internal harmony within Frankish Outremer. He saw some action in defending Acre from Baibars’s attack in December 1271 and launched a couple of military promenades into the surrounding countryside. The truce agreed by Hugh III and Baibars in May 1272 failed to persuade Edward of the futility of continued stay, an obstinacy that may have provoked the famous attempt on his life. Even before his departure in October 1272, some of his followers had begun to leave, including his brother, in May. While achieving almost nothing for Outremer, beyond the establishment of a small English garrison in Acre, Edward’s crusade had proved massively expensive, perhaps over £100,000. During the crusade, he ran up debts of tens of thousands of livres.115 However, in reputation and image, the crusade paid very handsome dividends which he and his eulogists were not slow in exploiting. Amid the increasingly fevered discussion around the courts of western Europe about how to save the Holy Land, Edward stood out as the only crowned head in the west to have actually gone there. In 1287, he even took the cross for a second time and began apparently serious preparations for a new expedition. Even so, as the only tangible assistance to reach Palestine from the great French crusade planned by Louis IX, Edward’s crusade of 1271–2 represented very meagre pickings. In its way, far more potent, for the French monarchy although not for Palestine, was Louis IX’s canonization in 1297. But even that was tinged with disappointment for one of those whose evidence had helped secure the king’s elevation to sanctity. Joinville regretted Louis had only been gazetted as a confessor and not, as he thought only proper in the light of the king’s acute sufferings on crusade, a martyr.116

  THE LOSS OF THE HOLY LAND

  For the rest of his life Edward I of England (d. 1307) protested his eagerness to return to the east, usually coupled with his insistence that he was too busy with vital affairs of state at home to leave just yet. While occasionally disingenuous, this excuse expressed the reality of late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century crusading. Louis IX had shown how the full resources of a kingdom allied to ecclesiastical funding could be directed very effectively towards the crusade. However, precisely these newly powerful c
entral governments militated against the fulfilment of another such policy, as regimes became enmeshed in hardening intractable international conflicts and domestic administration. The experience of Louis’s crusade alerted officials to the almost limitless expense of such enterprises, the accounts of Louis’s campaigns being copied and studied by interested but anxious bureaucrats for more than half a century after his death.117 The increasing bulk of works of theoretical planning or practical advice written from the 1270s began to expose very clearly the material difficulties facing any eastern expedition. This greater openness to the difficulties of crusading was summed up by a French diplomat, the crusade veteran Erard of Valéry, at the Second Council of Lyons in 1274, called by Gregory X to attempt to launch a new offensive. It would be like a small puppy yelping at a great mastiff.118 The advice Gregory received before the council exposed how different theatres of the crusade, such as the Baltic, diverted interest and commitment. Even promoters of crusades in Europe against the Hohentaufen, such as the great Dominican preacher and canonist Humbert of Romans, noted how they engendered cynicism if not overt hostility among a wide if not necessarily deep coalition of observers from across western Europe. The Lyons Council authorized more church taxation and preaching of the cross, but the silence of the royal representatives and spokesmen for the military orders at the council when asked to advise on the best course of action spoke loudest.119 Concern with the plight of the Holy Land had not declined, but action became harder to organize and, in consequence, undermined future commitment, a vicious cycle never thereafter escaped.