Frederick’s contemporaries merely rolled their eyes at the emperor’s sudden illness.* But Honorius’s successor, an Italian cardinal who had been elected Pope Gregory IX, promptly excommunicated the emperor for failure to keep his vow. Brand-new to the papacy, Gregory IX was afraid that he would “seem like a dog unable to bark.” He was no paper pope, and he wanted the world to know it; he published news of the excommunication to every ruler in Europe.3
So began two decades of a violent wrestling match between the emperor and the papacy. Hostilities were at their height, as crackling and wire tight as they had been all the way back in the day of Frederick’s great predecessor Henry V. Frederick had every intention of exercising every bit of royal prerogative he could clutch between his fingers. His defiance of the pope was so blatant that he was widely believed to be the Antichrist. The thirteenth-century Franciscan priest Salimbene tells of a “certain abbot of the Order of Fiore, an old and holy man,” who had hidden away all of his books lest Frederick lay waste the countryside: “For he believed that in the Emperor Frederick all the mysteries of iniquity should be fulfilled, because Frederick had such great discord with the Church.”4
Frederick seized every right that had been the subject of negotiation over the past centuries. He “appointed bishops and archbishops and other prelates,” the Italian chronicler Giovanni Villani explains, “driving away those sent by the Pope, and raising imposts and taxes from the clergy.” He claimed the right to rule Italy directly. And instead of negotiating with Gregory IX, he wrote to all the Christian kings and princes in Europe, accusing the Roman church of avarice. The letters, Roger of Wendover says, warned that the pope would continue to disinherit “emperors, kings, and princes” in order to seize their tribute: “And at the conclusion of his letter he advised all the princes of the world to guard against such iniquitous avarice in these words, ‘Give heed when neighbouring houses burn, / For next perhaps may be your turn.’”5
Meanwhile, Yolande had apparently taken up the full duties of a wife. At barely fifteen, she gave birth to her first child, a daughter; the little girl died at the age of nine months. Yolande was already pregnant again. Her son was born at the end of April 1228. The delivery killed her. She was buried, not long after her seventeenth birthday, in the southern Italian cathedral of Andria.
Her death threw Frederick’s claim to be king of Jerusalem into doubt. As the heiress’s widower, he had no more claim to the throne than the heiress’s father. But his newborn son Conrad was clearly the next claimant to the crown; and Frederick, not John, was his guardian.6
Now, at last, Frederick had good reason to go to Jerusalem.
In early September 1228, the emperor landed at Acre with only six hundred knights. This was the beginning of the Sixth Crusade. Unfortunately, as Frederick II was excommunicated, the church could hardly take credit for it, which annoyed Gregory IX so much that he excommunicated Frederick II for a second time. Frederick’s tiny army, he snapped, looked more like a pirate band than a king’s force.7
Unbothered, Frederick commenced his work. He had an unorthodox crusading strategy all planned, and he didn’t need an enormous military force to carry it out.
Al-Kamil, down in Egypt, had fallen out with his brother al-Mu’azzam, governor of his Syrian lands, and the Syrian realms had revolted. Frederick II had already negotiated a plan with al-Kamil. In exchange for Jerusalem, he would commit German and Italian forces to help al-Kamil get Syria back. But by the time he arrived, the situation had shifted. The Arab diplomat and historian Ibn Wasil, who served under al-Kamil, records the dilemma:
When the Emperor reached Acre, al-Malik al-Kamil found him an embarrassment, for his brother al-Malik al-Mu’azzam, who was the reason why he had asked Frederick for help, had died, and al-Kamil had no further need of the Emperor. Nor was it possible to turn him away and attack him because of the terms of the earlier agreement, and because this would have led him to lose the goals on which his heart was set at the time. He therefore made a treaty with Frederick and treated him with great friendship. What followed will be told later, God willing. . . . The Emperor settled at Acre and messengers came and went between him and al-Malik al-Kamil until the end of the year.8
Frederick refused to leave, and al-Kamil had no wish to start a war. Finally, the two men negotiated the surrender of Jerusalem. The city was a waste; its walls had been razed by al-Mu’azzam during the Syrian revolt, and most of the population had fled. It had no garrison, only a scattering of soldiers, a few officials who would rather have been elsewhere, and a handful of die-hard families. Al-Kamil handed it over to Frederick with a slew of conditions: he was not to rebuild the walls, the nearby villages would remain Muslim, the Temple Mount (including the Dome of the Rock) was to stay in Muslim hands, with the Christians only given visiting rights, and Muslim worship was to continue there uninterrupted.9
Without striking a blow, Frederick had attained the goal of all of the Crusades since 1100, and he had done so as an unrepentant excommunicate. It was hard for Rome to rejoice in this. In fact, no one was pleased with the treaty. “This year,” lamented the Arab historian Ibn al-Athir, “the Franks (God curse them) took over Jerusalem by treaty. May God restore it to Islam quickly!” “The news spread swiftly throughout the Muslim world,” writes Ibn Wasil, “which lamented the loss of Jerusalem, and disapproved strongly of . . . al-Kamil’s action as a most dishonorable deed.” The Christian reaction was almost as strong; Frederick II had entered into a binding and sacred agreement with an infidel, and this was no way for a Christian emperor to act. (Gregory IX, who had a talent for one-liners, snapped that a covenant had been arranged “between Christ and Belial.”)10
Ignoring the outcry, Frederick journeyed south to his new possession and entered Jerusalem on March 18 of 1229. Since he was still excommunicated, the patriarch of Jerusalem tried to forbid him to enter the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; but Frederick brushed him aside. “We reverently visited the Tomb of the Living God, like a Catholic Emperor,” he wrote in his own dispatches. “On the next day, Sunday, we wore the Crown there, to the honour of the Most Highest.” He merely meant that he had entered the church as Holy Roman Emperor, but the indignant patriarch accused him of usurping his infant son’s title and crowning himself king of Jerusalem with his own unholy hands, and the rumor spread.
Frederick had never intended to stay in Jerusalem permanently; he appointed two Syrians of Frankish descent, Balian of Sidon and Garnier l’Aleman, as regents in Jerusalem and went back to Acre. On May 1, he headed down towards the harbor, ready to board his ship and set off for home. He had regained the Holy City for Christendom, but he didn’t get a hero’s send-off. The rumors had reached Acre, and its people were so incensed by his supposed self-coronation that they hurled pig guts and offal at him as he made his way out of the city.11
* * *
*Yolande’s dead mother had been the granddaughter of Amalric, king of Jerusalem from 1163 to 1174, and the great-granddaughter of Fulk of Jerusalem, former count of Anjou and father of Henry Plantagenet; Yolande’s father, John of Brienne, was a Frenchman, second son of the Count of Brienne (in Champagne).
*The genuineness of Frederick’s complaint continues to be a matter of debate. David Abulafia, one of Frederick’s most accomplished biographers, points out that one of his companions, the Landgrave of Thuringia, also sickened and actually died at sea (Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor, pp. 165–166). However, Gregory IX certainly didn’t believe in Frederick’s illness, and his opinion seems to have been shared by many.
Chapter Forty-Three
The Tran Dynasty
Between 1224 and 1257,
a new royal family rules the Dai Viet,
a new nation breaks away from the Khmer,
and the Cham try to dominate the south
THE KING OF THE DAI VIET was not well.
Hue Tong of the Ly dynasty had been on the throne for fourteen years. His road to the throne had been a rutted and difficult one; before he
was fifteen, his father, King Cao Tong, had been driven from the throne by a palace revolt. The royal family had fled to Nam Dinh Province, where they took refuge with the wealthiest family on the coast: the Tran, made prosperous by generations of skillful fishing. In exile, Crown Prince Hue Tong had married the young daughter of the house. This brought the entire Tran clan firmly over to his side, and with the help of his new wife’s father and brothers, the crown prince and the king were able to return to their capital city of Thang Long.
In 1210, at Cao Tong’s death, Hue Tong had assumed the throne of the Dai Viet. Still only seventeen years old, dependent on his in-laws for support and direction, Hue Tong had promoted his wife’s male relatives into higher and higher positions at court. Now thirty years old, the king had Tran generals, Tran ministers, Tran noblemen, Tran interests surrounding him on all sides.
What he did not have was a son.
Already inclined to melancholy, Hue Tong retreated further and further into a fog of despair. His mental state is recorded not in the official court histories of the Dai Viet kings, but instead in palace rumors that became often-told tales. “Sick and faint-hearted,” one story begins, “the King Ly Hue Tong abdicated, and retired into the country.” In his place, he left his seven-year-old daughter, Chieu Hoang.1
Little Chieu Hoang had no say in court; her Tran mother and in-laws acted as her regents, so Hue Tong’s abdication in 1224 effectively handed the country over to the Tran. The chief of the royal guard, the young queen’s uncle Tran Thu Do, arranged for the child to marry her first cousin Tran Canh, the eight-year-old son of another Tran uncle. And after the marriage was celebrated, Chieu Hoang obediently handed her right to rule over to her small husband. In December of 1225, Tran Canh was proclaimed emperor of the Dai Viet.2
Just months later, Hue Tong was dead in his Buddhist monastery. The stories say that Tran Thu Do visited him and suggested that his daughter’s reign would be peaceful only if Hue Tong removed the possibility of a revolt in favor of the Ly dynasty. “A few days after his conversation,” the tale concludes, “King Ly was found hanged on the boughs of a rose-wood tree.”3
The circumstances imply that Tran Thu Do did a little more than simply suggest suicide. But however it happened, Hue Tong’s death brought an end to over two hundred years of Ly rule. Tran Canh was child king of the Dai Viet; and his uncle Tran Thu Do immediately appointed himself to the office of Grand Chancellor.
Tran Thu Do was a vigorous man of thirty-one, and until his death in 1264, remained de facto ruler of the country, uncrowned king of the Dai Viet and the true founder of the Tran dynasty. He schemed to eliminate the remaining members of the Ly family; according to one contemporary chronicler, he built a temple over a huge pit, invited the Ly clan to come honor their ancestors in it, and then pushed the entire temple with all inside into the pit and buried them alive. Another history, the thirteenth-century Dai Viet su ky, explains that Tran Thu Do sent out geomancers to scour the entire Dai Viet kingdom for sites on which a future king of the Dai Viet might be born. When those places were located (apparently, they held a concentration of vital forces that could be detected only by those trained to detect the earth’s energy flows), Tran Thu Do ordered them razed, built over, or ruined.4
Under the direction of Tran Thu Do and the (usually) compliant Tran Canh,* the Dai Viet government got a complete overhaul. The countryside was divided into twelve administrative provinces; new taxes were introduced to help pay for a larger standing army and a series of dike projects; an accurate census was carried out; a Chinese-style academy, the National College, was founded to train scholars and future officials in the knowledge of the classic Chinese writings. But the Tran clan, while paying homage to the importance of Confucian education, remained thoroughly Dai Viet in their ways. “Our forefathers,” wrote a later Tran emperor, “since the very beginning of the Dynasty, established their own system of law and did not follow the Song laws and institutions.”5
The young king himself realized early on that he was more or less superfluous. In 1236, he attempted to leave his throne and enter a monastery, but Tran Thu Do intercepted his flight and forced him back to the palace. Trapped on his throne, Tran Canh devoted himself to composing treatises on Buddhist philosophical topics. The man who does not devote himself to the rigorous pursuit of self-knowledge, he wrote, is
always wandering in life, like a man full of vicissitude
he strays miles and miles further from his native village. . . .
No need to go a long way!
One can come home.6
The birth of a son in 1240 gave Tran Canh the hope that, one day, he too might be able to abdicate to the sanctuary of a Buddhist cloister. But that longed-for retreat was still almost two decades away.
Instead, he did his duty by his country, which included leading, in 1252, an attack on his southern neighbors.
KHMER, once the greatest enemy of the Dai Viet, had exhausted itself. The kings who had followed the conqueror Suryavarman had watched the outer edges of his empire flake slowly away. In 1238, the shrunken Khmer shed another chunk of land, this one in the fertile western valley of the Chao Phraya river, laced with smaller rivers and cut through by mountains. The people who lived there were known to the Khmer and Champa as the Syam; on the bas-relief scenes of battle carved at Angkor Wat, the Syam march with the armies of the Khmer king, but they march apart, wearing their own battle dress.7
For a time, the Khmer ruler Indravarman II—an obscure king almost unknown to the chroniclers—had managed to keep the Syam in the upper valley loyal by granting one of their chiefs a royal title and a princess for his wife. But in 1238 this chief, Pha Muong, made an alliance with another Syam clan leader who had never fallen under Khmer domination. Together, the two men led a short sharp attack on the Khmer officials in Sukhothai, the largest city in the valley, and drove them out.
Pha Muong, perhaps realizing that his willingness to violate his oath of loyalty to the Khmer king had weakened his authority, then led the way in proclaiming his ally, Bang Klang T’ao, king of the valley. This was the first independent kingdom of the Syam, the root of the Thai nation.8
To the east, the downtrodden Champa had also shaken off the Khmer yoke. The country was a faint shadow of its own self, but under Jaya Paramesvaravarman II was making a comeback.
He had inherited the rule of Champa in 1227 and had immediately begun an extensive rebuilding program: temples and palaces, dams and ships. Champa ships began to raid the Dai Viet coast, carrying off both goods and slaves. “He reinstalled all the lingas of the south . . . and the lingas of the north,” read the inscriptions from his reign; he was reasserting his own rule as Hindu monarch over his country, wiping out the claims of the Khmer god-king who had overwhelmed it.9
43.1 The Four Kingdoms of Southeast Asia
For a time, Champa seemed poised to tip the balance towards itself, becoming the most prosperous nation in the southeast. Cham ships took aloewood, elephant tusks, and rhinoceros horns north to Chinese ports and brought back silk and porcelain. Jaya Paramesvaravarman himself laid in stores of jewels and gold, flaunting them in his royal costume to show his power.10
Around 1252, Jaya Paramesvaravarman demanded that the Dai Viet return three provinces between the two countries, seized long ago by the Ly dynasty. The provinces were a sore point between the two thrones, and together Tran Canh and his uncle took the opportunity to strike back. A Dai Viet army stormed into the north of Champa; in the battle that followed, Jaya Paramesvaravarman fell and his daughter, the crown princess Bo Dala, was taken captive back to Thang Long.
The kingdoms of the southeast now lay in an uneasy four-way truce. Champa’s aggression had been checked, and Tran Canh’s son was growing towards adulthood. Retirement was almost within his grasp. But before the crown prince could reach his eighteenth year, all four kingdoms were shaken by the approach of a threat greater than any of them.
The Mongols were approaching.
* * *
*Tran Canh is more often known by his posthumous royal name, Thai Tong.
Chapter Forty-Four
Young Kings
Between 1227 and 1242,
Louis IX of France fights off Henry III of England,
and the kings of León-Castile and Aragon
almost finish the reconquest of Spain
THE WESTERN KINGDOMS were in the hands of the young.
In France, twelve-year-old Louis IX and his regent, his mother Blanche of Castile, faced a front of French barons who were tired of eclipse. Louis’s grandfather, Philip Augustus, had taken a loose collection of almost-independent noble estates in Western Francia and turned them into France, a country united under a strong-handed king. France was more prosperous, stronger, larger than Western Francia had ever been.
The price: the power of France’s nobility.
Philip Augustus’s son Louis VIII, an experienced soldier, had died of dysentery in 1226 after a brief three-year reign. His untimely death gave the French aristocrats a chance to push back. “Since the barons of France saw the King a child,” writes Louis’s friend and biographer, the Crusader knight Jean de Joinville, “and the Queen his mother a foreign woman, they made the Count of Boulogne, the uncle of the King, their chief, and held him likewise to be their lord. After the King was crowned, there were barons among them who demanded of the Queen that she should give them great fiefs; and since she would do none of this, all the barons assembled at Corbeil.”1
Corbeil was just south of Paris. At that moment, young Louis IX himself was on his way back to Paris; he had been on a coronation tour, so that his subjects could see him and pay their respects, and had halted at Montlhéry, a few miles west of Corbeil. The frustrated barons apparently planned to kidnap the young king, but word of the plot got to Blanche. She surrounded the royal party with armed men, and they made their way back to Paris as quickly as possible.2
The History of the Renaissance World: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople Page 30