God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Tyerman, Christopher

  To the French levies were added contributions from Frisia, the Low Countries, Scotland, Aragon, England and Charles of Anjou, now installed as king of Sicily. The participation of James I of Aragon and Edward of England, especially the latter, owed much to the personal diplomacy and moral dynamism of Louis IX himself. Despite the opposition of his father, the ageing Henry III, and Pope Clement IV, Edward took the cross at Northampton in 1268.107 He and his brother Edmund raised a significant force centred on the royal court with which well over half of those known to have been recruited in England possessed close formal links. However much the crusade may have helped unite the English baronage after the trauma of civil war, the enterprise was conceived and remained essentially as a royal and curial affair, as in France. Further sign of the commitment of the English government to the crusade lay in the strenuous and ultimately successful attempts by the court to obtain parliamentary approval for a tax on movables of a twentieth, only finally agreed in 1270. Whatever the tax supplied for the crusade – perhaps £30,000 – this represented a significant development in the newly restored consensual politics after the English civil war and confirmation of the fiscal role of the commons in Parliament, the first lay subsidy granted the English crown since 1237.108

  If central funding and a network of contracts that embraced the English as well as French contingents gave Louis a uniquely influential position in ordering the expedition, this did not translate into control over the coordination of the campaign. In February 1268, Louis fixed his departure for May 1270. Yet, at one end of the scale, the king of Aragon embarked in June 1269, for his fleet to be wrecked by a storm, only a remnant of it actually reaching the Holy Land without the king.109 At the other, Charles of Anjou only took the cross in February 1270 and began to prepare his war fleet the following July. Even Edward of England missed the agreed muster by some months, only embarking in August 1270, while his brother, Edmund, set out in the winter of 1270–71. Numbers who actually participated, as opposed to the contractual estimates, appeared lower than the original rush of crucesignati in 1267–8 may have indicated. The driving force of the whole expedition remained the will and enthusiasm of King Louis. This was emphasized by the long papal interregnum after the death of Clement IV in November 1268. A successor was not elected until September 1271, so through-out its final preparations and the crusade itself, there was no pope. However guilty Louis may have felt over the disasters of 1250, his confessor claimed that the king’s motives were more positive and altruistic, to achieve an act of such penitential severity that God would show mercy on the Holy Land.110 In addition to the administrative and financial direction he gave, despite the extensive national and international response, Louis’s personal decision on the strategy of the campaign, perhaps more than anything, lent the enterprise its particular character, some would say its especial futility.

  While preaching began in 1267–8, led by cardinals who, appropriate to the character of the operation, had formerly been French royal councillors, the situation in the Holy Land deteriorated further, culminating in the fall of Jaffa, Beaufort, and, in a blood bath, Antioch to Baibars in May 1268. Initially Louis seems to have envisaged a repeat of the strategy of 1248–50, with a descent on Egypt as the likely destination of the new campaign. However, at some point in 1268 or 1269, Louis’s attention turned in an entirely different direction, an attack on Tunis. This possessed a number of apparent advantages. All large crusade fleets, embarking from different places at different times, required a muster port. As all large fleets and armies had to await the harvest, embarkation for the east was usually deferred until the late summer or autumn sailing seasons. This in turn demanded a port to be found in which to collect the fleet and spend the winter: Lisbon 1147–8; Messina 1190–91; Zara 1202–3; Acre 1217–18; Limassol 1248–9. Tunis was within easier and safer sailing distance than Cyprus. Conquest of the city and region might assist the political ambitions of the new Sicilian king, Charles of Anjou, as the Hafsid emir Muhammed was harbouring renegade supporters of the ousted Sicilian Hohenstaufen. The emir was also an ally of the king of Aragon, a potential rival to Charles in the western Mediterranean. The possibility of an invasion of Tunisia may have persuaded James of Aragon to avoid integrating his army and fleet with Louis’s. However, Charles’s ambitions were focused eastwards, towards the Balkans and Byzantium. Despite later conjecture, the choice of Tunis as a target rested with Louis, not his brother. In Louis’s eyes, the conquest of Tunis would deprive Egypt of an ally and act as a convenient base for an attack on the Nile in 1271, a geographic myopia of scale common enough in western European circles at the time. More specifically, Louis’s close contacts with the friars may have led him to believe from the Dominicans that Tunis was ripe for conversion, a perception based on perennial missionary optimism and the largely friendly diplomatic contacts between Tunisia and western Christendom.111 Such fantasies of conversion led to a series of ill-fated missions to north Africa in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the willingness to believe that Muslims could be brought to Christ acting as a form of cultural totem similar to modern enthusiasm for exporting western democracy. Friars seemed incapable of separating commercial from religious openness. Perhaps having got wind of Louis’s thinking, the Tunisians sent an embassy to Louis in 1269, which may have furthered encouraged the king’s thinking. While not of itself contradicting the nature of the crusade, the Tunis gambit was sufficiently sensitive to be concealed from followers until after his fleet had embarked. But with muster ports in Sardinia and western Sicily, a north African destination could hardly have come as a surprise. While hindsight condemned the whole idea, Louis’s motives may have been quixotic but they were not without reason.

  The rituals of departure in 1270 exactly copied those of 1248. On 14 March 1270, Louis received the oriflamme and the pilgrim’s scrip and staff at St Denis. The following day, he entered Notre Dame in Paris as a barefoot penitent before walking to Vincennes, where he bade farewell to his wife. The first setback came at Aigues Mortes, where Louis found the promised ships were late, only arriving in late June, by which time sickness had already been incubated in the army. Leaving Aigues Mortes on 2 July, the French fleet reached Cagliari in Sardinia on 4 July, where they waited for other squadrons to assemble. There on 13 July Louis formally announced the destination of Tunis, where the fleet arrived on 17 July, effecting a landing the following day. On 24 July, the army moved its operations a few miles along the coast to Carthage in search of better terrain for the camp and adequate water. Further advance was delayed while Louis waited for the arrival of his brother Charles, who had only begun to equip his fleet in Sicily a few days earlier. High summer, poor diet and water contaminated by the immobile army soon stoked the outbreak of virulent disease, probably typhus or dysentery. The leadership was hit as well as the ordinary ranks. Louis’s son John Tristan, born at Damietta in the dark spring days of 1250, died. The king and his eldest son, Philip, both fell ill. Lingering bedridden for a month, Louis died on 25 August 1270, just as the first detachments of Charles of Anjou’s fleet were making land. Some said his last words were ‘Jerusalem! Jerusalem!’, although his confessor, who administered the dying king Extreme Unction, signally failed to mention such a neat end.112

  With the new Philip III still convalescent, Charles of Anjou assumed command. Evacuation appeared the only option. By 1 November, after a debilitating period of negotiation and desultory skirmishing, Charles and Emir Muhammed agreed terms. In return for the handing over of prisoners, the emir’s agreement to permit Christian worship and proselytizing, and a war indemnity of 210,000 gold ounces (c.500,000 l.t.), Charles agreed to withdraw, appropriating a third of the money. This angered some sections of the Christian army, not least Edward of England, who arrived off Tunis on 10 November, just as the crusaders were packing up to depart. The Christian fleet sailed for Sicily to decide on their next course of action, reaching Trapani on 14 November. Any decision on further campaigning was pre-empted by a storm on
15/16 November, which destroyed large numbers of ships and damaged many more. Perhaps as many as forty vessels were lost, including eighteen large transports, with over 1,000 lives. That effectively ended the crusade, only Edward of England insisting on proceeding to the Holy Land. By the time Philip III returned to his new kingdom, his train resembled a funeral cortège, bearing the bodies of his father, brother, brother-in-law, wife and stillborn son.113

  The failure of the 1270 crusade, though dramatic and spectacular, did not mean the end of the crusade as a focus for monarchical aspirations. Some, like Alphonse of Poitiers before his death the following year, kept the flame burning. In 1271, the cardinals elected as pope Tedaldo Visconti, patriarch of Jerusalem, who was actually in Acre when he was elected as Pope Gregory X. Much of his reign, and those of his immediate successors, was occupied with prospects for a new general crusade to the east and galvanizing the kings of the west to join. Edward of England had done more. Reinforced by a few French nobles, Edward set off for Acre in the spring of 1271, despite attempts to persuade him to return to England, where his father Henry III was gravely ill. Characteristically, he refused, allegedly insisting that he would travel to Acre if necessary only with his groom Fowin for company.114 As it was, his army was small, perhaps only 1,000 strong, carried in a small flotilla of just thirteen ships. Reaching Acre via Cyprus on 9 May 1271, Edward remained in the Holy Land for a year, joined by his brother Edmund in September 1271. He lacked the manpower to achieve any lasting or significant change in the Franks’ position, arriving too late to prevent Baibars’s capture of Crac des Chevaliers in April. Edward contented himself with pursuing the will of the wisps of a Mongol alliance with the il-khan of Persia and internal harmony within Frankish Outremer. He saw some action in defending Acre from Baibars’s attack in December 1271 and launched a couple of military promenades into the surrounding countryside. The truce agreed by Hugh III and Baibars in May 1272 failed to persuade Edward of the futility of continued stay, an obstinacy that may have provoked the famous attempt on his life. Even before his departure in October 1272, some of his followers had begun to leave, including his brother, in May. While achieving almost nothing for Outremer, beyond the establishment of a small English garrison in Acre, Edward’s crusade had proved massively expensive, perhaps over £100,000. During the crusade, he ran up debts of tens of thousands of livres.115 However, in reputation and image, the crusade paid very handsome dividends which he and his eulogists were not slow in exploiting. Amid the increasingly fevered discussion around the courts of western Europe about how to save the Holy Land, Edward stood out as the only crowned head in the west to have actually gone there. In 1287, he even took the cross for a second time and began apparently serious preparations for a new expedition. Even so, as the only tangible assistance to reach Palestine from the great French crusade planned by Louis IX, Edward’s crusade of 1271–2 represented very meagre pickings. In its way, far more potent, for the French monarchy although not for Palestine, was Louis IX’s canonization in 1297. But even that was tinged with disappointment for one of those whose evidence had helped secure the king’s elevation to sanctity. Joinville regretted Louis had only been gazetted as a confessor and not, as he thought only proper in the light of the king’s acute sufferings on crusade, a martyr.116

  THE LOSS OF THE HOLY LAND

  For the rest of his life Edward I of England (d. 1307) protested his eagerness to return to the east, usually coupled with his insistence that he was too busy with vital affairs of state at home to leave just yet. While occasionally disingenuous, this excuse expressed the reality of late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century crusading. Louis IX had shown how the full resources of a kingdom allied to ecclesiastical funding could be directed very effectively towards the crusade. However, precisely these newly powerful central governments militated against the fulfilment of another such policy, as regimes became enmeshed in hardening intractable international conflicts and domestic administration. The experience of Louis’s crusade alerted officials to the almost limitless expense of such enterprises, the accounts of Louis’s campaigns being copied and studied by interested but anxious bureaucrats for more than half a century after his death.117 The increasing bulk of works of theoretical planning or practical advice written from the 1270s began to expose very clearly the material difficulties facing any eastern expedition. This greater openness to the difficulties of crusading was summed up by a French diplomat, the crusade veteran Erard of Valéry, at the Second Council of Lyons in 1274, called by Gregory X to attempt to launch a new offensive. It would be like a small puppy yelping at a great mastiff.118 The advice Gregory received before the council exposed how different theatres of the crusade, such as the Baltic, diverted interest and commitment. Even promoters of crusades in Europe against the Hohentaufen, such as the great Dominican preacher and canonist Humbert of Romans, noted how they engendered cynicism if not overt hostility among a wide if not necessarily deep coalition of observers from across western Europe. The Lyons Council authorized more church taxation and preaching of the cross, but the silence of the royal representatives and spokesmen for the military orders at the council when asked to advise on the best course of action spoke loudest.119 Concern with the plight of the Holy Land had not declined, but action became harder to organize and, in consequence, undermined future commitment, a vicious cycle never thereafter escaped.

  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