Yet while this bizarre and sordid pantomime of self-interest and desperation whirled towards oblivion, one of its major players, John of Jaffa (c.1216–66), was putting the finishing touches to his great codification of the laws of the kingdom of Jerusalem, Le Livre des Assises (completed between 1264 and 1266).50 This gave no hint of the chaos and weakness around him. Son of John, ‘the Old Lord Beirut’ (d. 1236), John, since 1246 count of Jaffa, cut a grand figure in Frankish Outremer. Joinville was deeply impressed by his large war galley at Damietta, propelled by 300 oarsmen and decorated all over with his heraldic device. In the French crusader’s account of Louis IX’s stay in the Holy Land, John was portrayed as a man of practical but notable piety, of energy and generosity to his followers, whose advice was sought and heeded.51 His Livre des Assises, part original, part a compilation from older materials, purports to describe a legal system of harmony, clarity and efficiency. The taste for legal theory and practice appeared strong in certain quarters of Outremer. John’s great work followed the precedents of the Livre au Roi (c.1200), the early thirteenth-century Assises d’Antioche and the more nearly contemporary Acre Livre des Assises de la cour des Bourgeois, the work of Geoffrey Le Tor, and Philip of Novara’s Livre de forme de plaint (1250–c.1260). The interest in compiling lawbooks was one shared across Latin Christendom in the thirteenth century. Law was not yet everywhere the preserve of professional lawyers (as it had precociously become in England); intellectual nobles who spent their time pleading their rights or sitting as judges unsurprisingly developed an interest in legal codification, if only as an outlet for academic enthusiasm otherwise denied. Most aristocratic laymen had no access to the higher education of the new universities, especially in Outremer, where there were none. Just as tales of chivalry acted as a form of escapism for those conducting unpleasant real warfare, so John’s evocation of a perfect legal system that had descended and developed intact and unimpaired from the legendary foundation of the kingdom stood in similar distorted relation with the actual world in which he wrote and defended his fief on the fraying edge of Christendom. Although most if not all medieval (and modern) law codes express ideals as much as current or even past reality, John’s lawbook was not a work of romance, even if in tone one of some fiction. It dealt with hard law and difficult cases, with principles and precedents. As with that other great legal text of the period, once known as Bracton’s Laws of England, the construction of a lawbook creates law. John’s was still in active use in Cyprus as late as the 1530s.52
The career of John of Jaffa reveals another side to Outremer. His father had built the cool, shaded halls of his grand palace in Beirut. An associate, Philip of Novara, was a chronicler as well as legist. Acre housed an exceptional set of ateliers from which luxury illuminated manuscripts were produced, which bear witness to a distinctive artistic style, synthetical but not derivative of local, Greek and western forms.53 The great buildings of Acre or the massive fortifications of castles and city walls compare with the most impressive in Christendom.54 The particularly intense local eremitic spiritual tradition gave rise to a new religious order, the Carmelites, which soon established itself in the west in a rare example of reverse colonization.55 Frankish Syria was not a society creeping in material and aesthetic penury to a predestined annihilation. Yet, as the political turmoil continued, and the territorial base withered, the finances upon which the culture of Outremer rested began to evaporate. John of Jaffa had been able to reward his knights lavishly from preying on caravans crossing between Egypt and Syria, carrying, for instance, luxury textiles.56 Yet Jaffa fell to Baibars in 1268, just two years after John’s death. With the loss of such bases, profits and income dried. Yet even before this, John himself had been in debt. Increasingly, lay lords were forced to sell out to the military orders for reason of finance not protection. No amount of shuffling of the rapidly diminishing property could mitigate the damage of chronic political dysfunction.
A semblance of constitutional if not political order was restored with the acceptance of Hugh of Antioch-Jerusalem, since 1267 Hugh III of Cyprus, as regent for Conradin/Conrad III in 1268 and his ascent to the throne of Jerusalem as Hugh I the following year after Conradin’s execution in Italy, the first monarch resident in the east since 1225. From his base in Cyprus, Hugh could do little to direct affairs on the mainland. Brief help came with the crusade of Edward of England, the truce of 1272 and the death of Baibars in 1277. Yet, as the case of Isabella of Beirut’s marriage showed, Hugh’s authority was circumscribed, contingent on barons whose jealous guarding of what they perceived as their rights outweighed any sense of impending disaster. Some may have believed their own national myths of the providential status of Outremer. Others, more prosaically, could not imagine the annihilation of their patria. It is misleading to view the last years of Frankish Syria solely through the lens of hindsight or from the perspective of western Europe. The Ibelin family may stand for many. They were probably descended from an Italian immigrant, perhaps from Sardinia or Pisa, who became castellan of Jaffa in the second decade of the twelfth century. Perhaps because of their relatively humble place in the Jerusalem aristocracy, in the twelfth century the Ibelins married within the kingdom, rather than seeking spouses from the west. The family waxed rich and grand in the years around and after 1200, not least by their association and marriage with members of the royal family such as Maria Comnena, although they rarely, even in the thirteenth century, married directly into the royal house of Cyprus or Jerusalem. Men such as John of Jaffa were not colonists, even if they saw themselves as manning an outer bastion of Christendom. They were indigenous Jerusalemites and Cypriots, part of Latin Christendom but as autonomous in law, custom, tradition, history and expectation as any other. From the early twelfth to the late fourteenth centuries, when the male line in Cyprus died out, for the Ibelins Outremer was home, the only one they knew.57 Lacking the hawk-like vision of western observers or modern historians, their political in-fighting may not have seemed myopic, merely business as usual.
This tendency of the Jerusalem baronage to compete and disagree was tested once more before the end. The political mess had thickened still further in 1277, when Maria of Antioch, a granddaughter of Isabella I who had contested the succession in 1268, sold her rights in Jerusalem to Charles of Anjou, brother of Louis IX of France, papal champion in the Italian war against the Hohenstaufen, executioner of Conradin/Conrad III and acquisitive new king of Naples and Sicily. While the Mamluks battered their gates, the Franks contented themselves with recognizing two kings. Acre, Sidon and the Templars opted for Charles of Anjou and his bailli, Roger of San Severino (1277–82); Tyre and Beirut for Hugh I.58 The schism only ended with Charles’s death in 1285. The following year Acre submitted to the new king of Cyprus (since 1285) and Jerusalem, Henry I, Hugh I’s son. The discord at the centre was matched elsewhere as the rump of mainland Outremer confronted internal divisions as dangerous as external attack. In Tripoli, Bohemund VII only concluded a civil war with the Templars and Guy II Embriaco of Jubail (1277–82) by having Guy’s followers blinded and Guy himself, with his brothers and cousins buried in the moat of the castle at Nephin and left to starve to death. Little wonder the surviving Embriacos sought the suzerainty of the Mamluk sultan.59
Ironically, the apparent unity achieved by Henry I, witnessed by his lavish and misleadingly optimistic coronation at Tyre in 1286, coincided with a new Mamluk offensive that negated all shows of solidarity. The series of piecemeal truces agreed by harassed local rulers, such as a condominium deal arranged for Tyre in 1285, availed little. Since the 1260s, such partitions of land or revenues had failed to assuage the Mamluk appetite for conquest. By now the kingdom was beyond repair. Sultan Kalavun of Egypt’s treaty with Acre in 1283 excluded Tyre and Beirut as if they no longer belonged to the same kingdom.60 One by one the last Frankish strongholds succumbed, including Tripoli in 1289. As will be described in Chapter 24, the final crisis came in May 1291 with the fall of Acre itself to Sultan al-Ashraf
Khalil (1290–93) after a grisly six-week siege.61 Further resistance evaporated. No great western fleets hovered just over the horizon. There was no relief. By mid-August 1291 Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, Tortosa and Athlit had capitulated or been evacuated. Peter Embriaco of Jubail negotiated submission to the sultan and held his city as a dependency for a few more years. The Templars clung on to the waterless island of Ruad until 1303. A few individual Franks, released captives, freed or abandoned slaves, lingered in Outremer for more than a generation, stranded, impoverished and debased relics of a lost dominion.
Almost half a century later, two old men encountered by a German pilgrim by the Dead Sea turned out to be French Templars captured at Acre in 1291. They had worked for the sultan, married and had children, living in the southern Judean hills, entirely isolated and ignorant of events in the west. They now became minor celebrities. They and their families were shipped back to Europe and received with honour at the papal court at Avignon before retiring on pensions to end their days in peace. What they, their wives, children or new neighbours made of this turn of fortune is unknown. Yet their fate stood as a suitably confusing epitaph for Frankish Outremer: glamour, courage, strain, wishful thinking, strenuous endeavour, the international stage and unmistakable domesticity.62
21. Syria in the Thirteenth Century
22. Palestine and Egypt in the Thirteenth Century
23
The Defence of the Holy Land 1221–44
The failure of the Damietta campaign did not end the great crusading enterprise Innocent III had initiated in 1213. Eleven days after the city was returned to Ayyubid control, Peter des Roches bishop of Winchester was taking the cross in England.1 The summer of 1221 saw Cardinal Ugolino methodically recruiting crusaders and mercenaries from the lords of northern Italy, using church funds as incentives.2 As far as Honorius III was concerned, Frederick II’s obligations still stood. They formed a central practical as well as symbolic element in papal – imperial negotiations, a process of preparation and a guarantee of sincerity. Frederick reiterated his commitment in 1223 and 1225. Philip II of France bequeathed 150,000 livres to the project in 1223, perhaps out of a guilty conscience. The crusade continued to be used as a means of resolving political disputes, as in Marseilles in 1224, as well as an expression of private devotion.3 A Parisian couple, Renard and Jeanne Crest, crucesignatus and crucesignata, made their pious and financial dispositions in 1224–5 before departure.4 Stories of the Egyptian debacle of 1218–21 by witnesses such as James of Vitry and Oliver of Paderborn were circulated widely. The messy legal ramifications surrounding absent, deceased or presumed dead crusaders’ property kept the reality of crusading painfully alive by engaging the energies of their squabbling neighbours, relatives and local law courts in some cases for over fifteen years.5 Contributions were still forthcoming. In England in 1222 a tax was levied on behalf of the kingdom of Jerusalem, proceeds of which were supposed to subsidize crusaders to the east. John of Brienne, king of Jerusalem visited the west in 1223, trying to drum up aid. Papal legates and local bishops continued to preach and round up crucesignati; Master Hubert, recruiting in England in 1227, kept a written register of those who had taken the cross.6 For the first time the new preaching order of the Dominican friars was employed in England under the patronage of Peter des Roches.7 Within a few years they and the Franciscans came to dominate the verbum crucis, the word of the cross.
More generally, the decades after 1221 saw the ‘business of the Holy Land’ embedded into the religious culture of western Christendom. Away from specific campaign appeals, the special prayers, liturgy, bell-ringing, processions and invitations to donate alms that had been established since 1187 assumed habitual places in the devotional round of the faithful laity. The democratization of penance after the Fourth Lateran Council through oral confession, the improvement in the educational standards of the clergy and the extra-parochial presence of friars and, for the prosperous, private confessors was matched and reflected by a growing prominence of lay spirituality expressed in religious confraternities, which sprang up across Europe, most obviously in towns, and in the personal lives of lay dévots. Stress on the spiritual life and moral behaviour of individuals recognized the validity and value of personal and collective lay religious observance. The crusade epitomized just this sort of secular commitment, a number of contemporary observers likening crucesignati to converts or even a religious order, a religio.8
Crusading perceptions and practices altered in the thirteenth century. Taking the cross signalled inner spiritual commitment not limited to specific military endeavour alone. The crusade became braided with personal religious identity in a system of practical spirituality channelled through regular devotional exercises; confession, penance, alms-giving, prayer and conduct. Louis VII of France had been a pious monarch and crusader, but the role crusading played in his spiritual life, as far as external appearances are any guide, pales beside its importance to his great-grandson Louis IX. For the younger Louis, the crusade occupied a central place in his life, a means to achieve personal and spiritual emancipation, self-expression and fulfilment. Similar prominence of the crusade in a broader spiritual life of puritanical seriousness was demonstrated by another leading thirteenth-century dévot, Simon of Montfort the Younger. Son of the leader of the Albigensian crusades, himself a crucesignatus and campaigner in the east in 1240–41, it was entirely in character that in the great crisis of his life, the civil wars in England of 1263–5, Simon called on the images of crusading to sustain his cause.9 Even for a lukewarm crusader such as Simon’s opponent, Henry III, the cross became an accepted way of displaying religious credentials, almost regardless of whether he embarked. Henry took the cross on at least three occasions (1216, 1250 and 1271). Neither the first or last occasion represented a serious decision to campaign. The first signalled the newly crowned boy-king’s renewal of the papal protection vital to the survival of his dynasty. Fifty-five years later, the old ailing king’s gesture spoke of rededication of a soul mindful of salvation and troubled by the unfulfilled commitment of two decades before. For Henry’s uncle, Richard I, crusading had been a much more specific ambition, no less intense perhaps, but less central to his regular spiritual life or religious observances. A century on, the crusade had become, as F. M. Powicke remarked, inseparable from the air men breathed.10
In the years after the evacuation of Damietta, the flow of crucesignati to the Levant never entirely ran dry, even if the 40,000 names allegedly on Master Hubert’s roll of 1227 cannot be credited. No less telling of this diffuse commitment, the stock figures of the armchair crusader, nicknamed ‘ashie’ because he stayed by his hearth, and the décroisié, the man who had redeemed or abandoned his vow, entered literary vocabulary and convention.11 This pattern of constant, often low-key activity of raising men, awareness and funds set the pattern of western engagement for the rest of the century and beyond. Periodically, the involvement of one of the great lords of western Christendom lent focus to such efforts, leading to the organization of large crusading expeditions, in 1227–9, 1239–41, 1248–50 and 1269–71. Some enterprises, as in 1248 and 1269, were ostensibly sparked by a crisis, the loss of Jerusalem or Antioch. Others owed more to the political moods or demands in western Europe rather than any threat to Outremer. Contact with the east was maintained at a number of different levels, trade, pilgrimage, even diplomacy. Both Frederick II and Henry III of England maintained diplomatic relations with Ayyubid rulers, the English king using as his ambassador a Genoese entrepreneur one of whose lines was to supply the English court with crossbows.12
THE CRUSADE OF FREDERICK II, 1227–9
The crusade that coalesced around Frederick II in the late 1220s has tended to be dismissed as a sideshow, a self-indulgent and politically inept expression of the hubris of a ruler scarcely bothered by the motives that drove most crusaders, an expedition contradictory in genesis and barren in result. This view distorts. Polymath, intellectual, linguist, scholar, falconry expert and pol
itician of imagination, arrogance, ambition and energy, Frederick II was no less sincere in his crusading ambition than Richard I. The cause took a central place in Frederick’s policies for almost a decade and a half, its implementation risking disaster at home and defeat abroad. Only in the hindsight of the decline of the kingdom of Jerusalem after the 1240s and the simultaneous parting of the ways between papacy and empire in the west did the events of 1227–9 come to appear futile, eccentric or irrelevant. At the time, for all his political jockeying, Frederick’s actions exposed an ambition inexplicable without a conventional religious purpose.13
Although attracting large numbers of recruits, the organization, leadership and military core of Frederick’s expedition depended on the tight control imposed by central finance in the form of royal or ecclesiastical subsidies to individual leaders as well as lay and clerical taxation. As such, it probably constituted the most professional expedition to the Holy Land to date in the sense that many, perhaps most of the troops involved were paid as well as transported by their employers. Although conceived as an exercise in papal–imperial cooperation, Frederick’s failure to depart as promised in 1227 caused the new pope, Gregory IX, to excommunicate him, even though the reason for delay, illness, was genuine. Frederick’s determination to proceed regardless in 1228 in turn placed the pope in a false position as his ban failed to deter thousands of crusaders and had minimal impact in Outremer. The scene of the Christian emperor wearing his crown in the church of the Holy Sepulchre in March 1229 while hotly pursued by clerics eager to place the Holy City itself under an interdict was hardly edifying. Neither were papal efforts to prevent a church crusade tax being raised in Frederick’s lands, which papal armies were invading. However, Jerusalem was restored by treaty, without bloodshed. What Richard I had failed to win by force and the Fifth Crusade had rejected as unworthy or unworkable, Frederick achieved through dogged negotiation, in the teeth of the pope’s enmity. The three holiest sites, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth, were restored to Christian hands; the kingdom of Jerusalem given a new viability with increased territory and strengthened fortifications in cities and castles. If Frederick’s campaign marked the culmination of Innocent III’s crusade, it also marked the greatest challenge to Innocent’s vision of papal monarchy. At least in the emperor’s eyes, it seemed to vindicate the independent imperialism of a Hohenstaufen empire that Frederick had bullyingly tried to impose on the states of Outremer. Frederick’s campaign possessed a Janus-like quality, harking back to crusading precedent while offering fresh diplomatic, political and logistic solutions. One of the expedition’s more bizarre consequences certainly caught echoes of Innocent’s crusade while casting auguries for the future. At the moment of Frederick’s triumphal appearance in Jerusalem, his southern Italian lands were being attacked by papal forces under the joint command of John of Brienne and Cardinal Pelagius.14 In the event, the reunion of these two sparring partners of the Fifth Crusade in an attempt to dismember the power of a current crusader was no more successful than their previous association.
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