God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  Attempts to organize a new crusade did not end in 1270. Preaching and clerical taxes were authorized in 1274 and 1291. Serious strategic thought was pursued, including suggestions (in 1274 and 1291) that the military orders should be amalgamated to exploit military and fiscal economies of scale and unity of purpose. In particular, the Second Council of Lyons appeared to promise a new beginning to efforts to restore Frankish rule in the Holy Land. Gregory X placed the eastern crusade at the heart of his diplomacy. Before leaving Acre after hearing of his election as pope in 1271, Gregory pointedly preached on the text ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning’ (Psalm 137 v.5). On reaching Europe, he summoned a general council to discuss church reform and plans for a new crusade, which he proposed to lead in person. Before the council convened in May 1274 at Lyons, Gregory sought advice from politicians and churchmen professionally involved. A number of treatises were submitted containing advice that varied from a catalogue of ecclesiastical, including crusading, shortcomings by a Franciscan, Gilbert of Tournai, a self-interested call by the bishop of Olmütz on behalf of the king of Bohemia to concentrate on the Baltic and eastern European crusading front to a plea by an Acre Dominican, William of Tripoli, for the conversion, not destruction, of the Muslims.120 The council itself exposed the gap between intent and action. The decree Constitutiones pro zeli fidei (18 May 1274) expanded on its exemplar, Innocent III’s Ad Liberandam of 1215, by instituting a clearer administrative structure for the collection of the proposed sexennial clerical tithe, establishing twenty-six specified collectories.121 A voluntary lay poll tax was suggested. To provide the most favourable diplomatic context, union between the Roman and Greek Orthodox churches was negotiated, in part a response of the Byzantine emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus to his fears of isolation in the face of the aggressive ambitions of the previous papal favourite, Charles of Anjou, who was eyeing the Balkans with unconcealed purpose. Ambassadors from the Mongol khan were received by the council, its leader even undergoing a symbolic form of public Christian baptism.

  However, only one western monarch bothered to attend, the ageing James I of Aragon. Despite his offer of a preliminary garrison force of 500 knights and 2,000 infantry to prepare for a subsequent large expedition, the political will was hardly overwhelming, despite strenuous efforts to excite general support.122 Preaching was authorized by a papal bull of September 1274.123 The clerical tax raised massive amounts in some areas such as Tuscany, testimony to new bureaucratic efficiency rather than overt enthusiasm.124 As in 1215, money-boxes were set up in parish churches. Pope Gregory persuaded Philip III of France, Charles of Anjou and his preferred candidate for the imperial throne, Rudolf of Habsburg, to take the cross in 1275. A departure date was set for April 1277 when the pope and the new emperor would together embark for the east. Plans for a papal flotilla of about twenty ships were put in train. Yet the tepid reaction of delegates at Lyons proved a surer indication of the prospects for the crusade than the administrative, fiscal and diplomatic activity. Bureaucratic neatness was not enough. The lack of vocal support for the proposed expedition from the military orders and the French envoys at Lyons gave its own testimony. Gregory X’s crusade simultaneously revealed how administratively effective papal leadership had become in the later thirteenth century and how politically and emotionally incapable it was to move the hearts of politicians and people. On Gregory’s death in January 1276, the crusade plans were shelved and then abandoned. While the church taxes continued to be raised in places, the proceeds were diverted to papal wars, fought as crusades, in Italy. The Mongol alliance, despite six further embassies to the west between 1276 and 1291, led nowhere.125 The prospect of an anti-Mamluk coalition faded as the westerners’ inaction rendered them useless as allies for the Mongols, who, in turn, would only seriously be considered by western rulers as potential partners in the event of a new crusade which never happened. The union of the Roman and Greek churches was repudiated by the Orthodox faithful. It had in any case failed to curb Angevin aspirations for Balkan conquest at Greek expense. The activity of the 1270s set a pattern for the future, copied with an increasingly predictable monotony of frustration after the council of Vienne (1311–12), in the 1330s and the 1360s: papal or royal enthusiasm, commitment, taxation, distraction and abortion. The disintegration of Gregory’s schemes confirmed the fears of even sympathetic onlookers, such as the well-informed networking Italian Franciscan Salimbene of Adam, that ‘it does not seem to be the Divine Will that the Holy Sepulchre should be recovered’.126

  Baibars’s campaigns of 1265–71 had reduced the Frankish holdings in Palestine to a barely sustainable rump of a few castles and coastal cities clinging on to the shore of the Mediterranean with almost no hinterland. Not even Frankish superiority at sea could reverse the tide. By demolishing the places he captured, Baibars denied the prospect of reconquest. There would be no repeat of 1189–92, even though Christians retained bases in Cilicia and Cyprus. Of the campaigns of Baibars and his immediate heirs it has been said that they achieved what their predecessors, Persian, Arab, Turk or Frank, had not, ‘the destruction of the ancient Syro-Palestinian city civilisation’.127 The final act was postponed not by Frankish resolve or a new crusade, but by the tangled internal politics of the Mamluk empire and the Mongol threat to Syria, which continued into the early fourteenth century. A Mongol invasion was defeated at Homs in 1281, a new assault the next year only averted by the death of the aggressive il-Khan Abaqa from delirium tremens. His successor, Teguder, was a Muslim convert.128 This freed Sultan Kalavun (1279–90) to resume his attack on the Franks. The great northern fortress of Margat fell in 1285; Lattakiah in 1287. Tripoli followed in 1289, after 180 years of uninterrupted Christian rule, the longest of any of the major Frankish conquests. It had been under Genoese control since the death of the last count, Bohemund VII, in 1287, and it was rumoured that the sultan’s attack had been encouraged either by the Venetians or Pisans. Those who failed to escape – mainly non-nobles – were massacred; the city was demolished, a portent for the fate of Acre.129

  Throughout the 1270s and 1280s, men and money were sent to the Holy Land by popes and western rulers. As the Frankish position in Palestine disintegrated, small companies led by well-connected crusaders appeared at Acre temporarily to stiffen local resistance and the permanent western garrisons funded by concerned, perhaps guilty kings in Europe: Countess Alice of Blois and Count Florent of Holland in 1287; John of Grailly in 1288; the Savoyard intimate of Edward I Othon of Grandson in 1290. None of these did anything to reverse the decline. The politics of western Europe militated against a new crusade just as firmly as the politics of the Near East. The intervention of Charles of Anjou’s attempt to annexe the kingdom of Jerusalem in 1277 briefly seemed to offer a remedy.130 Yet his ambition only served to challenge the unity of Outremer and provoke a damaging war in the west, known as the War of the Sicilian Vespers, after Sicily rebelled against Angevin rule in 1282. This pitted Aragon against Charles of Anjou and his French allies, smashing precisely the coalition assembled by Louis IX and sought by Gregory X. In 1285, Philip III of France died on crusade, like his father, but it had been against the Aragonese not the Mamluks. Edward I’s priorities lay in the conquest of Wales (to 1284) shortly to be followed by his involvement in the Scottish succession, which increasingly dominated the last years of his reign (1290–1307). His alliance with France had become a distant memory as relations deteriorated into war over the status of Edward’s French duchy of Gascony (1294). The legacy of the imperial interregnum (1250–73) prevented any unified German contribution. Although the last great Mongol attack on eastern Europe had ended in 1260, because of civil war breaking out in the Far East over the succession to the khanate, attempts to arrange an anti-Muslim alliance proved as elusive as before, while the rulers of eastern Europe occupied themselves with consolidating their own borders. Just as the power of kings promised more effective crusading, it largely precluded any alternative initiatives from thei
r nobles. The gulf between capacity and policy came to match that between idealism and will.

  The divisions of the west disrupted Outremer during Charles of Anjou’s attempt to wrest the kingship of Jerusalem from the kings of Cyprus (1277–85). Yet even after Charles’s death in 1285 and the restoration of a single nominal authority under Henry II of Cyprus and I of Jerusalem, no prospect of permanent defence on the mainland was possible without impractically massive outside assistance. As Sultan Kalawun tightened the noose, each Frankish lordship faced its own demise in autonomous desperation, some accepting Mamluk over-lordship or condominium, others, like Tripoli, suffering conquest and butchery. The last act, begun by Kalavun in 1290 against Acre, continued after his death under his successor al-Ashraf Khalil. The siege of Acre lasted from 6 April 1291 until 18 May, when the city fell. The frenzied defence and countless acts of bravery – on both sides – ring in the memory.

  Khalil’s assault on Acre was designed to be final. The sultan, following preparations already put in train by his father, gathered troops, engineers and siege machines from across northern Syria, Damascus and Egypt. The well-maintained double walls of Acre presented a formidable obstacle, so the siege was to be a contest of throwing machines. One of

  23. Acre in 1291

  them, a great mangonel brought by the army of Hamah on the middle Orontes from Hisn al-Akrad, the magnificent fortress of Crac des Chevaliers captured by Baibars in 1271, was transported in a hundred carts and took a month to be hauled the 125 miles or so to Acre. As the Franks by this stage had no field army, Khalil’s passage and investment of the city were unopposed. His combined forces were large enough to surround Acre completely on the landward side. His strategy was simple: pound the walls to rubble, create breaches and then use his superiority of numbers to overwhelm the defenders. The Muslim army probably numbered more than the total civilian population of Acre, which may have stood at around 30–40,000. Some wild estimates claimed the attackers had over 200,000 troops. However large, numbers were the key.

  Facing the sultan, the Franks in Acre were not without some advantages. Although the military establishment was comparatively modest, it was still substantial, perhaps 1,000 knights and sergeants with another 14,000 infantry. Reinforced by a few western crusaders, such as Othon of Grandson and his English regiment and a division from Cyprus, the Acre garrison was led and dominated by the military orders, whose discipline, resourcefulness and courage prevented the defence from descending into chaos or panic. Able-bodied civilians were enlisted, and the Venetians and Pisans played a full part, the Venetians manning an especially effective catapult. Accurately assessing the odds, many women, children and the elderly had been evacuated before the siege began, reducing the drain on food and emotion, but many, not least the poorest, remained. The one great advantage the Franks possessed was control of the sea. This allowed supplies to reach the beleaguered city, and King Henry of Cyprus-Jerusalem to arrive with last-minute, if limited, reinforcement on 4 May. The sea also provided a means of attacking the Muslim camps on land, as armoured ships carrying archers, crossbowmen and, in at least one case, a large mangonel, bombarded the flanks of the besiegers’ positions where they came down to the shore. However, these attacks inflicted bloody but only superficial damage on the enemy; the mangonel soon broke up in heavy seas.

  While the Franks could resist in reasonable security using the twelve towers that studded the outer walls of the city, without a massive infusion of new troops and in the absence of a land force they were doomed to wait for a seemingly inevitable end. Their only realistic chance of survival lay in disrupting the Muslims by inflicting unexpected or unacceptable casualties, thereby opening up the very real fissures in the political high command around the sultan (who was to be assassinated by members of his own government in Egypt only two years later). The spy network run by William of Beaujeu, Master of the Temple, was almost certainly well apprised of such tensions. The only military means to expose any Muslim rivalries was stubborn defence and repeated forays, sometimes at night, into the Muslim camps. These were vividly remembered by veterans such as Ismai ‘il Abu’l-Fida, an Ayyubid princeling from Hamah, even if his sharpest memory concerned a botched night attack in which Frankish soldiers tripped over guy-ropes and one fell into an emir’s latrine, where he was finished off.131

  In reality, only a large western fleet (which did not exist) or a miracle could save Acre. As casualties grew, anxieties over the defenders’ ability to man the whole length of the walls put a stop to the attacks on the Muslim camp. In desperation, soon after King Henry’s arrival an attempt was made to negotiate with the sultan that only served to clarify that Khalil was determined on conquest not accommodation. As the weary days of May passed, Muslim sappers began to have increasing success in undermining the bastions and towers of the outer wall, all the time supported by a hail of missiles, including jars of explosive material, and arrows. By 16 May, the outer enceinte between the walls was abandoned.

  The final Muslim assault on the now depleted, hungry and exhausted Frankish defenders came on 18 May, to the accompaniment of a blizzard of arrows and missiles and the encouragement of the usual military drums, cymbals and trumpets. The defences were soon penetrated and fierce street-by-street, hand-to-hand fighting ensued. Few escaped wounds; hundreds if not thousands were killed before the Christians broke for the port. There, ghastly scenes of mayhem, panic, confusion and despair marked the ragged evacuation of survivors. Too few boats caused overcrowding, capsizing and a nasty trade in selling places on the larger vessels. A Catalan Templar captain, Roger Flor, later famous as a freebooter across the Near East, allegedly made a fortune on money extorted from fleeing Frankish noblewomen. Western accounts are lit by stories of heroism and stoicism, none more moving than that displayed by the mortally wounded William of Beaujeu, and tales of rape and violent atrocities. Many of the leaders, including King Henry, managed to escape. Those that stayed were either slaughtered or captured to spend the rest of their lives as slaves or prisoners, the usual sequel to such military disasters. By the evening of 18 May, most of Acre was in Khalil’s hands. The fortified Templar quarter, jutting out into the sea at the south-west angle of the city, managed to hold out for another ten days. An attempted parley ended in bloodshed, as Egyptian troops attempted to seize the women and boys sheltering in the Temple complex, and the Templars who had agreed terms with the sultan were summarily executed. Only the halt and the lame remained in the Templar buildings when the final moments came on 28 May. The only consolation afforded the last defenders of Frankish Acre – or perhaps the admiring but absent chronicler who described it – may have been that, as the sultan’s troops advanced into the compound, its walls, which had been sapped for over a week, finally collapsed, burying victors and vanquished, perhaps appropriately, in a shared grave.

  Once the final resistance had been cleared by the end of May, it became apparent that no immediate counter-attack or succour were possible. The sultan, according to one of his officers, after massacring all surviving defenders, commanded that the city of Acre be ‘demolished and razed to the ground’.132 There was to be no possibility of a repeat of the Third Crusade. By August all the remaining mainland bases had been surrendered or evacuated: Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, Tortosa and Athlit. One eyewitness of the final siege escaped the fall of Acre, an Arabic-speaking Frankish Cypriot who had served on the mainland for over twenty years, ending as the Master of the Temple’s secretary and occasional secret agent. He recounted with hammer-blow clarity the heroic death of his employer and the last days of Frankish Acre. This man, whose only home was Outremer, put the events of 1291 in perspective: ‘Thus was all of Syria lost… This time everything was lost so that altogether the Christians held not so much as a palm’s breadth of land in Syria.’133