The History of the Renaissance World: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Reconquest and Failure

  Between 1210 and 1213,

  Pedro the Catholic triumphs in Spain

  and fails in France

  ON THE SPANISH PENINSULA, the Christian kings had fallen out with each other. Thirty years earlier the five kingdoms in the north and the west had presented a united front to the Almohad Muslims of the south. But for decades this unity had been fracturing.

  Portugal and León were at odds; so were Navarre and Castile. Sancho I, son of the founder Afonso Henriques, ruled in Portugal and fought off constant attacks against his northern border from Alfonso IX, king of León. When he wasn’t attacking Portugal, the king of León was helping the king of Navarre—Sancho the Strong, a giant of a man, over seven feet tall—attack Castile. The king of Castile, Alfonso VIII, was Sancho’s first cousin, but this did not protect him from Navarre’s hostilities.

  The fifth kingdom, Aragon, was ruled by Pedro II, great-grandson of Ramiro the Monk. In November of 1204, just after Constantinople’s fall, he had journeyed to Rome to be crowned by the pope. He was the first king of Aragon to receive this honor, and in return he promised Innocent III and his successors a perpetual tithe of 250 gold mazmudins. The mazmudin was a coinage borrowed from the Almohads; the tribute was worth, perhaps, a decade and a half of annual wages for an Aragonese craftsman. Pedro II also promised to defend the faith and persecute heresy and wickedness whenever it reared its head in Aragon, earning him the nickname “Pedro the Catholic.”1

  The Albigensian Crusade put Pedro the Catholic into a difficult position. Raymond of Toulouse was his brother-in-law; Pedro’s older sister Eleanor had married the Count of Toulouse in 1200 (she was his sixth wife; he had outlived three and divorced two), creating an alliance between the two men with bordering lands. Now the Catholic king found his relative and ally falling out with the powerful Simon de Montfort, and (by extension) with the pope himself.

  Pedro did his best to walk in the middle. In 1210, he traveled to his brother-in-law’s lands and met with Montfort himself, proposing a truce with the Crusader general. As part of the treaty, he offered to betroth his own son and heir, three-year-old James, to Montfort’s own young daughter Amicia. This would eventually make Montfort the father-in-law of the queen of Aragon, and Montfort agreed.

  As a sign of goodwill, Pedro sent the toddler to live with his prospective bride’s family. Then he returned home, where another fight awaited him.

  For at least two years, he had been raising funds for a major invasion of the southern Spanish lands. The Almohad caliph Muhammad al-Nasir, grandson of Abu Ya’qub Yusuf, had himself been agitating for war since at least 1207; although he had, as yet, been restrained by the advice of his councillors, who were nervous about the strength of the Christian kingdoms.2

  Now, Pedro II decided, the time had come to break the stalemate. As soon as he arrived back home, he launched a preliminary anti-Almohad campaign by invading the Muslim city-kingdom of Valencia, attacking the Muslim city Adamuz, and folding the Muslim town of Castielfabib into his own kingdom.

  Meanwhile, Raymond of Toulouse drew further away from the Catholic cause.

  He had not yet finished fulfilling all of the penances that had been laid on him by the pope in 1209 as a condition of his reinstatement in the Church’s good favor, and he continued to drag his feet. In early 1211, another letter from Rome arrived for the count, insisting that he make good the penance and join fully in the fight against his heretical vassals. In addition, since his zeal was in question, he was to dismiss his mercenary soldiers, require his knights to dismantle their castles and strongholds, and give the clergy of the orthodox Church supreme authority “in everything they might require.”3

  This was no more or less than a demand that he give up all authority over his realm, and Raymond refused, indignantly. He retreated to Toulouse and his own estates; and there in the summer of 1211, Simon de Montfort laid siege to him, laying waste all of the surrounding countryside.

  Pedro II was going to have to choose sides, but he was not immediately in a position to throw his weight either onto Raymond’s side or onto Montfort’s. Muhammad al-Nasir had assembled a vast Almohad army at Rabat, in North Africa, and in May 1211 the Almohad troops had begun to cross the Strait of Gibraltar.4

  Alfonso VIII of Castile hurried to Pedro’s side, but the kings of León, Portugal, and Navarre refused to join the coming fight (in fact, Sancho the Strong contemplated joining with the Muslim forces against his neighbors). Castile and Aragon were braced alone to meet the storm.

  Al-Nasir’s forces swarmed forward across southern Spain, forcing the surrender of the Castilian fortress of Salvatierra. Set in the midst of Muslim lands, Salvatierra had been Castile’s strongest outpost; a symbol of Christian power, nicknamed the “right hand of the Lord of Castile.” Alarmed by the ease of the Muslim advance, Pedro II sent a strategic message to Rome. Al-Nasir, he wrote, had sent him a letter warning, “You have inflicted many damages on us, and you say that this has been ordered by the lord of Rome. Once we have subdued your lands, we will go to Rome and bring misery upon its lord.”5

  The threat of invasion galvanized Innocent III to resort, once more, to his most powerful weapon. In January 1212, he declared another crusade. Once again, those who fought against the enemy—this time the Almohads, on Spanish ground—would receive remission of sin, forgiveness, eternal glory.6

  The well-used strategy once again proved its power. Sancho the Strong of Navarre relinquished his plans to join the infidels, and agreed to ally himself with Castile and Aragon instead. A score of powerful French knights temporarily left the Albigensian Crusade and journeyed east, assembling at Toledo. By June, the new Crusade was ready to begin. The joint Spanish force, reinforced by Crusaders, began its march from Toledo south; and the Almohad troops, assembled at Córdoba, marched north under the personal command of al-Nasir.

  On July 16, the Muslims and Christians met at Las Navas, in the very south of Castile. The Crusader force had divided into three, each wing commanded by one of the Spanish kings. In a pincer move, two wings crushed the Muslim center, while Sancho the Strong (according to battlefield tales told afterwards) burst through the chains of men protecting al-Nasir’s personal tent and raided it himself. Al-Nasir, who had remained at the back of the assault, fled on horseback. His men, routed, retreated in his wake.

  “It was publicly reported, that about 100,000 Saracens fell in the battle,” reports William of Puylaurens, “. . . as the King of the Saracens fled in shame.” The tapestry that had covered the entrance of al-Nasir’s tent was sent to the monastery of Las Huelgas, where it still hangs. Al-Nasir himself backed across the strait into Africa, where he seems to have fallen into a depression; he lingered at Marrakesh, taking no steps to reassure his army, until his death the following year.

  The victory in the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa rested heavily on the Christian side of the balance, and it never righted itself towards the Muslim side again. The Almohad empire, already tottering, soon lost its hold on even the remaining Muslim territories in Spain; and in Africa, al-Nasir’s young successor Yusuf II lost territory after territory, his governors breaking away one at a time to establish their own dynasties.7

  After Las Navas, the kings of León, Castile, and Portugal agreed to a truce. Pedro II spent several months organizing affairs at home, and in January of 1213 rode back across the Pyrenees to the side of his besieged brother-in-law. Fresh from the great victory in Spain, he had every confidence in his ability to solve this problem as well.

  He attempted to negotiate a peace between Raymond of Toulouse and the belligerent Simon de Montfort, even sending to Pope Innocent III and asking him to order Montfort to stand down. But nine months of correspondence, argumentation, threat, and counterthreat drew all of the parties farther apart. Simon de Montfort ignored appeals from both sides; Innocent III, getting contradictory reports from Pedro II and his legates, reversed his own position several times.


  34.1 The Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa

  Meanwhile, the people of Toulouse suffered from hunger and disease, lost crops and slaughtered livestock, burned homes and fields.

  By fall, Pedro and Raymond had decided to mount a direct attack on Montfort’s most central fortification, the castle at Muret: “a garrison,” writes William of Puylaurens, “which was causing great difficulties for the city of Toulouse.” They were joined by a “great many men” from the neighboring territories. Simon de Montfort’s violent and unceasing campaigning had increasingly seemed less for the church than for himself, and the local nobility wanted him gone, crusade or no crusade.8

  On September 12, a sizable army of knights from Aragon and Toulouse attacked Muret. With only fifteen hundred men at his disposal, the badly outnumbered Simon de Montfort managed to rout them. The king of Aragon was “so severely wounded,” says the anonymous conclusion to William of Tudela’s account, “that his blood spilled out on the ground and he fell his full length dead.” His men scattered, many of them drowning as they tried to flee back across the Garonne.

  Raymond too was forced to flee. Simon de Montfort marched into Toulouse and claimed it as his own. He had won control now of all of Languedoc; and Pedro II, victor over the Muslim enemy, had fallen at the hands of his Christian brothers.9

  Young James, his heir, was still in the hands of Montfort. The people of Aragon pled with Innocent III to order his release, and Montfort reluctantly obeyed. But with a five-year-old king on the throne, Aragon remained in chaos. “Happy would Pedro have been,” a Castilian account lamented, “had he concluded his life immediately after the noble triumph in the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa.”10

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  From Bouvines to Magna Carta

  Between 1213 and 1217,

  John of England fails to regain his French lands,

  forfeits control of England,

  and loses his life

  AT THE BEGINNING OF 1213, Innocent III decided that the interdict on England was clearly not going to resolve the quarrel over Stephen Langton’s appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury.

  Once again, he reached for his weapon.

  “Being deeply grieved,” writes Roger of Wendover, “he decreed that John king of England should be deposed from the throne of that kingdom.” And then he went one step further.

  [He] wrote to the most potent Philip, king of the French, ordering him, in remission of all his faults, to undertake this business, and declaring that, after he had expelled the English king . . . he and his successors should hold possession of the kingdom of England for ever. Besides this, he wrote to all the noble knights, and other warlike men throughout the different countries, ordering them to assume the sign of the cross and to follow the king of the French as their leader, to dethrone the English king, and thus to revenge the insult which had been cast on the universal church.

  Anyone who provided either money or his own sword to help overthrow John, promised Innocent, would receive the benefits of crusade, exactly “like those who went to visit the Lord’s sepulchre.”1

  The ideal of crusade had become so diffused that it had lost any form or definition. Now crusade could be declared against a Christian king who held to the Nicene Creed: a king who ruled an ancient part of Christendom and was himself the son and brother of Crusaders.

  Philip was not one to turn down such an opportunity. He immediately put his oldest son Louis—now twenty-five—at the head of an invasion force, promising him the crown of England should the war succeed (and also extracting from him a series of oaths promising that he would govern England only under his father’s direction). A number of the Western Frankish nobles joined him, with the notable exception of the Count of Flanders, who had fallen out with Philip and refused to be part of the campaign.

  At this, John (not unlike Raymond of Toulouse, four years earlier) decided that it was time to get right with God. In May, before Philip could launch his fleet from the French coast, John was “roused to repentance.” He met with the pope’s legate in London, agreed to Stephen Langton’s appointment, and publicly acknowledged the pope as his spiritual head (accompanied, to sweeten the deal, with a thousand pounds of silver as tribute to Rome). The legate then went straight to Paris and forbade Philip to attack his newly restored brother in Christ.2

  Philip was greatly put out. He had, he complained, already spent sixty thousand pounds putting his invasion force together, in obedience to the pope’s command, and he had been counting on “the remission of his sins.” But both the legate and Innocent III were unmoved. If Philip attacked John, he would now find himself on the wrong side of crusade.

  Fortunately for John, Philip found another object of wrath: the Count of Flanders, who had broken his vassal’s oaths by refusing to attack England. French ships and soldiers had already assembled for crusade; Philip decided to use them to firm up his control over Flanders. He ordered the fleet to sail out of the mouth of the Seine and turn east, making its way along the coast to the Flanders coastline, while he invaded from the south of the county.

  The count, “much alarmed at this attack,” immediately sent word to his two most natural allies: John of England, who was Philip’s enemy; and the Holy Roman Emperor, Otto IV.

  Otto, who had struggled with Philip of Germany for the right to be called emperor, had finally gained the title when his rival was murdered in 1208, by a distant half-drunk cousin who had some personal grievance with him. (The cousin was then decapitated, so a full explanation was never gotten.) He was crowned in 1209 and promptly fell out both with Philip of France, his rival for power on the continent, and with Innocent III, who excommunicated him the year after his coronation, when Otto refused to hand over the control of Italian lands to the papacy.3

  John, meanwhile, could not turn down the chance to recover Normandy from France. He too agreed to join the fight. Tens of thousands of soldiers*—German, Flemish, Dutch, Frankish, and English—assembled at Valenciennes, under the personal command of Otto IV. John himself, no battlefield general, stayed in Poitou, but sent his bastard brother William Longsword to command the English archers.

  Philip II of France, grateful now that he was not in Languedoc fighting heretics, called his own royal forces to muster at Tournai. With him stood another pretender to the German throne: Frederick, king of Sicily, who hoped to seize both the German throne and the title of emperor.

  On July 27, 1214, as Philip was leading his troops towards Lille—intending to find advantageous territory on which to fight—the English and German allies intercepted the French army on the river plain near the bridge of Bouvines. It was Sunday, a day on which Christian kings were not supposed to wage war, and Otto IV was inclined to delay the inevitable battle. It seemed to him, says Roger of Wendover, “improper . . . to profane such a day by slaughter and the effusion of human blood.” But after consultation with the English barons, he decided to seize the opportunity.4

  Seeing that the enemy was preparing to fight, Philip drew up his own troops, their backs to the river, and ordered the bridge itself at the rear broken down so that, should they decide to flee, they would be able to do so only through the opposing line. Even more usefully, he assured them that the war against the excommunicated Otto and his allies fell firmly into the category of crusade. He took steps to play this drama out: first arming himself, and then taking the time to celebrate Mass at a nearby chapel with his own barons. When they emerged from the chapel, they carried with them the oriflamme, the red silk banner that represented the presence of Saint Denis, patron saint of France, and thus of divine favor.5

  In the blinding heat of the July afternoon, the French began the fight with a cavalry charge against the Flemish mounted knights. Violent fighting followed, but ultimately the greater experience (and better equipment) of the French soldiers began to pay off. The English and German allies were slowly driven back, until the lines broke. The English baron Hugues de Boves, who had insisted on the Sunday engagement
s, fled with his men. Several Flemish dukes followed him. Otto IV continued to fight, remounting three times after his horses were killed beneath him. But soon it became clear that the battle was lost, and he fled, leaving his imperial banner behind him.

  Young Frederick drove Otto back to his family lands and claimed his title; he was crowned Frederick II, king of the Germans (although not yet emperor), in Aachen on July 25. The Count of Flanders and William Longsword, both taken prisoner during the battle, were hauled to Paris. Philip agreed to exchange William for a French nobleman taken captive by the English, but the Count of Flanders was not so lucky. He was imprisoned in the Louvre, where he remained for the next twelve years.6

  When news of the defeat reached John, he exclaimed, “Since I became reconciled to God, woe is me; nothing has gone prosperously with me!”

  35.1 The World of the Magna Carta

  ON SEPTEMBER 18, at the great castle of Chinon in the Loire river valley, John and Philip agreed to a five-year truce that confirmed Philip’s control over all the lands lost in 1206. After the humiliating treaty was signed, John retreated over the English Channel. He would never leave England again.