In geographic extent and aristocratic involvement if not in actual numbers, recruitment matched that in 1188–9. The core contribution came from the imperial household and the emperor’s allies. Such was the dominant appearance of Henry VI that a thirteenth-century Outremer observer imagined he promised to pay the expenses of all the German crusaders.31 When the emperor’s notoriously feeble health and his still uncertain grip on his new southern kingdom persuaded him not to lead the expedition in person, he appointed as commanders the imperial chancellor, Conrad of Querfurt, bishop of Hildesheim, and the imperial marshal, Henry of Kalden, who had led the embassy to Constantinople in 1195. Clerical leadership was provided by Archbishop Conrad of Mainz and Archbishop Hartwig of Bremen, a holy war enthusiast who in 1195 persuaded Celestine III to initiate one against the Livs on the river Dvina. Both their dioceses had previously been centres of crusade support. The leading lay crusaders tended to come from western and southern Germany including Duke Henry of Brabant, Henry the Lion’s son Count Henry of the Rhine Palatinate, Duke Frederick of Austria, the dukes of Dalmatia and Carinthia and the landgrave of Thuringia. Many of them were heirs to family crusading traditions and a significant proportion had only succeeded to their titles in the previous five years or so. They may have felt they had something to prove beyond the customary appeal of the cross or the attraction of doing what their ruler wanted. Other former centres of crusade enthusiasm in the Rhineland or the northern river valleys contributed extensively. Lübeck apparently sent 400 citizens.32 The scale of the operation was reflected in the time and varied routes taken for the muster in Italy and Sicily. Some contingents that had probably travelled from southern Germany by land left for the east as early as March 1197. The duke of Brabant reached the Holy Land in the late summer, probably August. However, a northern fleet of forty-four vessels carrying possibly many thousands of recruits under Henry of the Palatinate and the bishop of Bremen, only reached Messina in August after its long voyage around the Iberian peninsular. This combined with the emperor’s paid troops to form the main body of the expedition that sailed from Messina for Acre early in September 1197. A distant observer, Arnold of Lübeck, claimed it carried 60,000 crusaders. It may have been a quarter or a fifth that size, but still constituted a substantial force. While a contingent under the bishop of Hildesheim stopped off in Cyprus to crown Aimery, the bulk of the fleet reached Acre on 22 September.
For once, a western crusade appeared in the Holy Land when it was needed. The truce of 1192 had expired and, twelve days before the main German force arrived, Henry of Champagne had died in a bizarre accident when he fell out of an open window while reviewing troops at his palace in Acre. Already the Ayyubid chief, Saladin’s brother al-Adil, was on the move. The death of Saladin in March 1193 prompted a decade of internecine feuding within his family. This was won by al-Adil, who, from his original base in northern Syria and Iraq, managed to supplant his nephews in Damascus (1196), Egypt (1200) and Aleppo (1202). In 1197, al-Adil was quick to respond to a raid into Galilee by the early German arrivals under Henry of Brabant, driving them back to the suburbs of Acre before swinging south to besiege Jaffa. It was the relief force for Jaffa that Henry of Champagne was inspecting when he met his death. Days later the port fell, imperilling the fragile status quo established in 1192. However, once the full German expeditionary force had assembled after 22 September, it was agreed to strike northwards to the ruins of Sidon and the Muslim base at Beirut rather than attempt to recover Jaffa immediately. This made immediate strategic sense, taking advantage of the recovery earlier in the year of Jubail further up the coast; cooperation from Bohemund III of Antioch, whose son, the future Bohemund IV, was now also count of Tripoli; and help from the Pisans and Amalric of Cyprus, anxious about the pirates operating out of Beirut. Led by Henry of Brabant, in the absence of a Frankish ruler now in temporary overall control, the Christian forces, after taking possession of the rubble of Sidon, occupied Beirut in late October. The land bridge from Tripoli to Tyre and Acre was restored.
Security for these coastal ports was less certain. Al-Adil’s response to the earlier German raid into Galilee had demonstrated even Acre’s vulnerability to a hostile hinterland. Before any attempt on Jerusalem, the Germans, on the advice of the local baronage, decided to consolidate the Christian position in western Galilee by attacking the castle at Toron. After initial success, the siege, which began on 28 November 1197, got bogged down. The proximity to Acre and Tyre of the German army both at Toron and before, on the Beirut campaign, may have carried a political dimension. The death of Henry of Champagne had once again opened the question of the succession to the throne of Jerusalem. His widow, Isabella, now had three young daughters, two by Henry; the eldest, Maria, daughter of Conrad of Montferrat, was still only five. Isabella, a veteran of three marriages but still only in her twenties, remained the legitimate queen. Some proposed a marriage to a local nobleman, the seneschal, Ralph of Tiberias, but the Germans, supported by the military orders and the chancellor, Joscias archbishop of Tyre, advocated the recently widowed Aimery of Cyprus. The attraction of a union of Cyprus and Jerusalem was compelling in economic, military and political terms, especially given the tensions between the two since 1192. Personally, Aimery possessed experience, close family connections with the Jerusalem nobility (his late wife’s Ibelin first cousins were Queen Isabella’s half-brothers) and had recently become a client of the German emperor. A united Cypriot–Jerusalem kingdom under German overlordship offered prospects of entrenching Hohenstaufen imperialism across the Mediterranean, thereby providing a permanent conduit of aid for the Holy Land without necessarily compromising the jealously promoted rights of the indigenous nobility, Italian cities or military orders. The presence of a large German army reinforced this optimism. Joscias of Tyre, who successfully negotiated Aimery’s acceptance of Isabella’s hand and the Jerusalem throne in October 1197, may also have reflected on these cross-Mediterranean advantages.33 He had been Jerusalem’s leading ambassador to the west in the desperate days after Hattin.
In January 1198, Aimery married Isabella and was crowned king of Jerusalem. The same month, the archbishop of Mainz crowned Leo II in Cilician Armenia. Yet the Hohenstaufen grand design was already defunct. The sickly Henry VI had died at Messina on 28 September 1197, leaving only an infant son, Frederick, not yet three years old, and a restless, fissile and violent inheritance from the Baltic to the Tyrrhenian Sea. Another casualty of Henry’s death was his crusade. On hearing the news, and faced by the prospect of a Muslim counter-attack, the Germans raised the siege of Toron on 2 February, effectively ending the German crusade. The Franks of Outremer with their new monarch preferred accommodation with al-Adil to any further provocation or grand gestures. Beirut gave them a useful bargaining chip, as well as an important compensation for the loss of Jaffa. Aimery secured a renewal of the truce in July 1198 until 1204. The conquests of 1197 were to stand on each side, al-Adil with Jaffa; the Franks with Beirut, which was given to Aimery’s new brother-in-law, John of Ibelin, later known as the ‘Old Lord of Beirut’. Impotent in the Holy Land, the leaders of the German army were anxious to return home to cope with the new political uncertainties. Apart from the capture of Beirut, which remained in Christian hands until 1291, the installation of Aimery as king of Cyprus and then king of Jerusalem, and of Leo II as king of Armenia, the German crusade flattered to deceive. Even the opportunity created by Ayyubid division proved counter-productive, as al-Adil increased his reputation as the strong man of the region who faced down the western infidels. Henry VI may have hoped his patronage of the fledgling military order of Teutonic Knights, for whom he obtained papal privileges in 1196, would provide a permanent magnet for German support for the Holy Land, but the failure of the crusade prevented any major expansion of its position for a generation.
The immediate future of Outremer, at least until the expiry of the 1198 truce, seemed to rest with diplomacy, internal consolidation and only tactical military excursions agains
t hostile neighbours rather than general confrontation. In the west, the chances for a new mass crusade to the Holy Land faced serious impediments as the political balance promised by Henry VI’s imperialism collapsed. Germany slid into civil war over a disputed succession. Italy resumed its fractured insecurity. The Spanish kings were fully occupied with the insurgent Almohads, while the kings of France and England continued a twenty-years’ war (1194–1214) over the Angevin inheritance. The election of Innocent III in January 1198 did not obviously alter these political realities. However, the new pope preferred to set, not follow, the patterns of Christendom’s public and private lives.
INNOCENT III AND THE NEW CRUSADE
In letters sent across Christendom dated 15 August 1198, Innocent III called for a new crusade to the Holy Land. Specifically, he cited the withdrawal of the Germans after the capture of Beirut and the fears of a Muslim counter-attack. As if to signal a more energetic papal regime, Innocent combined heightened rhetoric, an awareness of past failings and a desire to control organization. The communal endeavour was emphasized by appealing to nobles and cities to provide enough armed men. The troops were to serve for two years on the eastern campaign. Preaching was instituted.34 One papal legate, Peter Capuano, was to try to impose a five-year truce in the war between Richard I and Philip II, which had been continuing ever since Richard’s release from Henry VI’s prison in 1194. Another, Soffredo, cardinal priest of St Praxedis, was to travel to Venice to investigate transport. The plenary nature of the indulgences, offered through the mercy of God, was more explicit. Its clarity found its mark in the memory of at least one who answered the call, Geoffrey of Villehardouin, marshal of Champagne, who described it simply as ‘remission of any sins they have committed, provided they have confessed them’.35 The only element of obviously wishful thought in Innocent’s appeal lay in the proposed deadline for muster and departure, set for March 1199. However, from its inception to its ragged and bitter conclusion in 1205, most things that could go wrong for Innocent’s crusade did. The Fourth Crusade, as it is now known, became the most controversial of them all, provoking Steven Runciman’s famous Philippic: ‘there was never a greater crime against humanity than the Fourth Crusade’.36
The reason for the notoriety of the Fourth Crusade lay and lies in its outcome, the conquest of large tracts of the Christian Byzantine empire after its capital Constantinople had been sacked by the crusaders in April 1204. Yet Innocent’s intention had been to reverse the hung verdict of the Third Crusade and the disappointment of the German expedition in Palestine, not revive Henry VI’s threats to the Greeks of 1195–6. Byzantium inevitably figured in Innocent’s calculations, as it had to in those of all planners of major eastern crusades since 1095. However a hostile assault on Constantinople formed no part of the original papal scheme. Innocent’s motives, as revealed in his bull of August 1198, in so far that they embraced considerations beyond the need to recover all of the Holy Land, concerned his promotion of papal authority, in the operation of the crusade itself and in his interference in secular politics to achieve it. There was no mention of Byzantium in the 1198 or subsequent bulls for the enterprise. The controversy surrounding the Fourth Crusade revolves centrally around the issue of intent. If the violent capture and barbaric pillage of Constantinople and the subsequent dispossession of the Greeks were crimes, were they the result of deliberate malice, conspiracy or a series of accidental decisions that led to unforeseen although consciously embraced consequences? Was the destruction of Byzantium murder, manslaughter or even self-defence?
Immediately, crusade recruitment proved another damp squib. It is sometimes argued that Innocent III wished to exclude reigning monarchs from commanding his crusade. The bickering during the Third Crusade presented a clear warning of potential difficulties, while Henry VI’s crusade appeared to contest papal authority itself. Yet Innocent’s eagerness to resolve the political conflict between Philip II and Richard I, prominent in the bull of August 1198, indicated an understanding that the financial and political resources of rulers offered the best chance for a successful crusade. It was less the success of papal planning than the failure of papal diplomacy and continuing international instability that threw the burden of military leadership on counts, not kings. Peter Capuano’s mission to France served to irritate rather than pacify. By turns tactless, ingratiating and sanctimonious, Cardinal Peter, a notably effective preacher, seems to have combined the Gladstonian manner of addressing individuals as if they were public meetings and the Disraelian habit of laying on emotion with a trowel. In December 1198, when Peter suggested to Richard I that the king might agree to a truce with Philip II, Richard was so infuriated at being lectured at that he threatened the legate with castration.37 Richard’s unexpected death in April 1199, from a crossbow bolt wound suffered while besieging a rebel castle at Chalus in the Limousin, and the subsequent succession crisis in the Angevin lands that lasted until Philip II’s treaty with King John at Le Goulet in May 1200, further precluded royal involvement. The only benefit the crusade derived from this long crisis lay with those lords who found themselves on the wrong side of events and were thus open to recruitment for a conveniently good cause 2,500 miles away.
The preaching campaign promised to be more efficient. A chain of authority reached from the pope to legates, local ecclesiastical hierarchies and specially appointed preachers with the powers to conscript deputies, including monks and canons. The problem lay not in the message but the promotion and reception. In November 1198, Innocent pulled off a public relations coup by enlisting the charismatic French evangelist Fulk of Neuilly, who already enjoyed a large popular following for his brand of austere moral rearmament.38 A parish priest of imposing bearing, a notorious gourmand, Fulk had honed his rhetorical skills during a stay at the sophisticated theological schools in Paris, where the pope as young man may have encountered him. Despite this elite training, Fulk affected the common touch in his career as an itinerant holy man. He made his reputation in the late 1190s preaching a return to apostolic virtue, the practice of simplicity and poverty and a rejection of outward signs of corruption such as usury, luxury and sexual licence. He attracted stories of miracles based on those found in the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles: healing the sick; curing the blind, dumb and lame; exorcism; reforming prostitutes; and escaping from chains and prison. Although covertly something of an establishment figure himself, Fulk – and his admirers – cultivated the figure of the prophet apart, John the Baptist or even Peter the Hermit. This carefully fashioned image of plain-talking fearless pursuit of the truth and redemption, so useful for a professional evangelist, was greatly enhanced by his well-publicized encounter with Richard I. He accused the king to his face of pride, avarice and sensuality, drawing Richard’s neat riposte: ‘I give my pride to the Templars; my avarice to the Cistercians; and my sensuality to the Benedictines.’39 Fulk lacked shyness; in mock humility and floods of tears he told an audience of Cistercians in 1201 that he had personally signed up 200,000 crusaders, a preposterous claim, but one that reflected a possibly necessary self-belief. In the words of his contemporary eulogist and fellow preacher, James of Vitry, Fulk was a star (‘stellam in medio nebule’).40
As such, Innocent was evidently keen to harness his fame, popularity and promotional ability to the crusade. Fulk embodied Innocent’s attempt to integrate the war of the cross into the wider reform movement, loosely described as Apostolic Poverty. Fulk’s appointment as a preacher of the cross in November 1198 allowed him free rein, not least in choosing his own evangelizing lieutenants. His crusade preaching took him to Flanders, Normandy and Brittany as well as his home region of the Ile de France.41 A measure of his impact is the indelible impression his preaching left in the memories of contemporaries. Two crucesignati who wrote accounts of their experiences, the grand Geoffrey of Villehardouin, and a Picard knight of modest means, Robert of Clari, both opened their histories of the Fourth Crusade with Fulk’s preaching. To emphasize the importance of Abbot Mar
tin of Pairis near Basel in preaching the cross, his panegyrist Gunther took pains to associate him with Fulk’s mission. Yet the tangible results of Fulk’s preaching were elusive, at least in regard to enrolling lords and property owners on whom the success of any expedition depended. No important recruits came forward for another year, by which time Fulk’s appeal may have faded.
Despite Innocent III’s theology of redemption and the Lord’s War, aspects of the alliance of Apostolic Poverty with crusading jarred. Robert of Clari noted that, as well as preaching the cross, Fulk had collected ‘much wealth to be carried to the Holy Land overseas’, presumably in the form of alms and donations, as encouraged by the papacy. James of Vitry’s account is less innocuous and more revealing.
[Fulk] began amassing a great sum of money from the alms of the faithful which he had undertaken to pay out to poor men who took the cross, both soldiers and others. But through avarice or other base motive, he did not make these payments, and from that time, by God’s hidden judgement, the power and influence of his preaching swiftly declined. His wealth grew, but the fear and respect he had commanded fell away.42
According to James, following these charges of embezzlement, his reputation shot to pieces, Fulk slunk away into retirement and death. In fact he continued to play an important, if only iconic, role, at least in observers’ memories.
He was not the last evangelist to find preaching and the crusade a corrosive mix. In the sermons of many of the Paris-trained moralists who promoted Innocent III’s crusades, the concentration lay as much, occasionally more, with the redemptive and reforming dimensions of the message than with the military or material. One of those Fulk recruited to preach the cross, Eustace abbot of St Gemer de Flay, after preaching tours of England in 1200 and 1201 was remembered for his vitriolic attacks on illicit trading and breaches of the Sabbath rather than for his urging of holy war.43 Fulk’s difficulty lay in a series of potential conflicts and contradictions between his usual stance against usury and the requirements of the crusade. Insistence on the rejection of usury (i.e. credit) and the abandonment of wealth in favour of the rigorous vita apostolica presented aspirant crusade contributors and participants with material and moral quandaries. Fulk found himself preaching poverty and the evils of money, which he was simultaneously salting away. Whether he was actually corrupt hardly mattered: as always, there were fellow clerics eager to cast the first stone. Fulk had built his name on perceptions; he lost it the same way. Yet, despite the whiff of scandal, his efforts were remembered as seminal. It may have been no coincidence that some of the areas he toured in northern France, including Flanders, produced large contingents of crusaders. Both the Champenois Villehardouin and Picard Robert of Clari stressed Fulk’s probity; perhaps they had heard the stories of embezzlement. Despite the rumours, Fulk remained attached to the crusade venture until his death in May 1202, attending on the crusade leaders at Soissons in May 1201 and addressing the General Chapter of the Cistercians, an order heavily involved in the preaching campaign, in September the same year.
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