by Dan Jones
Rightly sensing an opportunity, Frederick decided that he could make the most of the discord to regain some of the Christians’ lost territories. He was undermanned and a full-on campaign of conquest against the Ayyubids was unrealistic. Still, a show of unity from across the Latin states might be enough to persuade al-Kamil to make concessions – perhaps even returning Jerusalem itself. From his experiences in Sicily, where Muslim and Christian culture intermingled, Frederick was better acquainted than any previous western crusade leader with the characters and customs of the Muslim world, so much so that scurrilous tales abounded of his ‘enjoyment of living in the manner of the Saracens’, including a predilection for ‘dancing girls who also sang and juggled’. Setting aside his personal tastes, he was confident that a show of force followed by a parlay for peace would be a fruitful strategy.8
The Templars and Hospitallers saw things otherwise. Allied with the acerbic and forceful patriarch of Jerusalem, Gerold of Lausanne, they refused to march with the rest of Frederick’s army, arguing that it would be a disgrace for them to associate with a man who had been excommunicated from the church. Pope Gregory’s words on the matter were clear: ‘We order him to be strictly avoided by all.’ Peter of Montaigu and the new master of the Hospitallers, Bertrand of Thessy,* decided they would carry out their duty to the letter. They agreed to follow the army, but only at a distance of a day’s march – enough to render them honourably present but practically useless.
Frederick was not a man accustomed to being thwarted. In response to the frustration of his wishes he took aim at Château Pèlerin, the Templars’ massive coastal fortress south of Acre. This was one of the Templars’ most spectacular and valuable possessions in Outremer, its importance to the order such that the master and many brothers had returned from Damietta to defend it from al-Mu’azzam during the Fifth Crusade.9 It was also conveniently placed on the road between Acre and Jaffa. Frederick stopped before the castle and demanded that the Templars hand it over to him for occupation by his soldiers – by which he almost certainly meant that he intended to transfer it to the Teutonic Order.
Impasse was swiftly achieved. Frederick was angry with the Templars, but he was in no position to devote precious time and resources to storming a castle built to the highest military specifications by Christian pilgrims. In the opinion of one writer, he was committing a ‘great treason’ merely by entertaining the thought.10 The Templars inside Château Pèlerin barricaded the doors against the emperor’s men and simply waited for them to go away. Frederick backed down, but the rebuff had done enough to ensure his lasting fury. The Templars claimed thereafter that the emperor ‘wished to kill them’ by treachery, while Frederick’s contacts heard that the Templars were plotting to murder the emperor first.
Things were no better in the months that followed, as Frederick reached Jaffa and spent the winter pressing al-Kamil for an agreement by which the city of Jerusalem could be opened up to Christian worshippers once again. The emperor was a bully, but he was no fool, and he had assessed the Ayyubid position precisely. The family struggle over Damascus was al-Kamil’s chief preoccupation, and the sultan saw a peace with the Christians as a considerable advantage to him. Frederick, for his part, had a natural ability to charm those he thought worth charming, and his sympathy with Islamic culture – ‘the emperor lived and dressed totally like a Saracen’, wailed Patriarch Gerold – helped him to secure a peace on more favourable terms than any that had been achieved since the fall of Jerusalem in 1187.11
On 18 February 1229 al-Kamil formally agreed to give up the Holy City and the Holy Sepulchre to Christian governance in exchange for a ten-year truce. Both Christians and Muslims were to be allowed access to the city, and the Christians were to be recognized as the legitimate rulers of Bethlehem, Nazareth, Sidon, Jaffa and Acre. The crusader kingdom, dismembered for more than four decades, was now partially restored. It included once more the entire stretch of coastline from Jaffa to Beirut, going inland in some places as far as the River Jordan. Some reconstruction would be allowed in Jerusalem, although the two sides took differing views as to whether that meant rebuilding the defensive walls the Ayyubids had razed a decade earlier, to prevent a Christian army from holding the city were it ever reconquered. This was not a reversal of all that had been done by Saladin, still less a repeat of the miraculous deeds done in 1099 during the First Crusade. All the same it was an astonishing achievement, which Frederick trumpeted in a letter to his young cousin Henry III, the Plantagenet king of England. ‘In these few days, by a miracle rather than by strength, that business has been brought to a conclusion which... many chiefs and rulers of the world... have never been able till now to accomplish by force,’ he wrote.12 The German poet and crusader Freidank wondered ‘What more can sinners desire, than the Sepulchre and the Holy Cross?’13 Many of Christ’s faithful would have nodded in agreement. Even if the True Cross was not returned – having apparently vanished in Damascus – the Holy City was once again back under Christian occupation. The Templars, however, were unimpressed.
The most important place in Jerusalem to Christians was the Holy Sepulchre, for in that magnificent church lay the tomb of Christ, covered with a thick slab of marble and venerated by every pilgrim who came to the Holy Land. Certainly, regaining Jerusalem was important as a matter of pride; and of course, like any other major city in the eastern Mediterranean, it had commercial benefits for Christian traders. The Sepulchre, though, mattered most. Yet for the Templars there was another very significant site: the place they called the Temple of Solomon, where their order had been created, and where it had been housed between 1119 and 1187. The Temple was their home, from which they had been exiled. Its return was a matter of profound and defining importance to their dignity as an order, but that had not been factored into Frederick’s negotiation.
‘The Franks took over Jerusalem and the Muslims were outraged and thought it monstrous. This caused them to feel such weakness and pain as are beyond description,’ spat the chronicler Ibn al-Athir when he reported the deal struck between Frederick and al-Kamil.14 In truth the loss of the city to the Christian heathens was not total, for it did not include the Temple Mount. To Muslims this was the Haram al-Sharif, containing the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock: the holiest location in Islam after Mecca and Medina. When Saladin had conquered Jerusalem, he had pulled down the Templars’ outbuildings around the mosque and cleansed the whole place with rose-water, restoring Qur’anic inscriptions and installing ‘incomparable marble’, ‘gilded mosaics’, ‘handsome Qur’an copies and fine reading stands’.15 To give back the mosque to the polluting Christians would have been quite unforgivable, which is why one of the key terms in Frederick and al-Kamil’s peace deal was that it should remain under Muslim control, so that pilgrims could worship there unmolested and without charge. There would be no reconstruction of the Templars’ old quarters. The order would have to make do with other, less hallowed dwellings.
Templar holdings elsewhere were also limited by the terms of the treaty. A few properties on the road between Jerusalem and Jaffa were to be given back so that the brothers could oversee a safe, direct route from the sea to the city, but otherwise, in the words of Patriarch Gerold, ‘not one foot of land was to be returned’.16 Château Blanc and Tortosa, two of their larger castles in the county of Tripoli, were to be left ‘in their own state’ – in other words, not to be improved or upgraded.17 By contrast, Hermann of Salza’s Teutonic order was allowed under the treaty to continue building its own massive castle of Montfort, in the hills near Acre, where the German brothers had broken ground in 1227.
In fairness to Frederick, the deal he struck was not wholly a calculated snub to the Templars. The loss of Jerusalem was a serious business and it needed to be made palatable to the sultan. Yet there was enough in the terms of the agreement for the order to feel insulted, and plenty of grounds for suspicion that the emperor had made a truce not for the good of all the Franks of the east, but to secure his crown
and protect his commercial interests, which relied on favourable trading conditions between Sicily and Jerusalem.18 But what could they do? On 17 March 1229 Frederick worshipped at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and, despite being excommunicated, took the crown of Jerusalem from on top of the altar and placed it on his own head. Hermann of Salza justified his patron’s behaviour to the congregation once Frederick had left the building, reminding them that the emperor had achieved a truly historic thing. ‘It is almost impossible to describe the joy of the people,’ he later recalled.19
Certainly it was impossible to describe the joy of the Templars, for there was none. The waspishly anti-imperial chronicler Philip of Novara wrote that far from being the subject of general adulation, ‘the emperor was by now unpopular with all the people of Acre, [and] he was especially disliked by the Templars’.20 It did not take long for that dislike to boil up into open rebellion. Angry and with nothing to lose, the Templars mustered their forces in Acre, where, accompanied by Patriarch Gerold, they prepared to defy Frederick for daring to make such a hollow peace.
Although the Jerusalem agreement of 1229 was supposed to cool tensions between Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land for ten years, it had one glaring flaw. It was at root a contract between the emperor and the sultan, which could be read as a personal vouchsafe rather than something binding on all the princes and nobles of their shared faiths. It was no secret that both Frederick and al-Kamil were only passing through Palestine, and that both men soon planned to leave. He may have been the newly crowned king, but Frederick also had to mind his affairs in Germany and Italy, while al-Kamil had his own business in Cairo. And although al-Kamil had agreed to a truce, there was no indication that his relatives were prepared to sit back and embrace their Christian neighbours. Without the men who made it, the peace would mean nothing.
To highlight this point, the patriarch and Templars began raising troops to march first against Damascus and subsequently against Jerusalem, which they planned officially to claim in the name of the pope. Plainly this was an absurd idea, born out of venom and distrust rather than any sound military strategy; but personal animus had now set in and could not easily be put aside. The patriarch took to denouncing the emperor as a violent, fraudulent antichrist, claiming that ‘from the sole of his foot to the top of his head no common sense would be found in him’.21 The emperor simply got angry.
Arriving in Acre shortly before Easter 1229, Frederick confronted the patriarch and told him to call off the Templars and the army he was raising. Gerold told the emperor that he did not do the bidding of excommunicates. In response an irate Frederick ordered the town criers of Acre to call together the population so that he could speak to them en masse. Then he laid out his case. ‘He addressed them and stated that which he desired: and in his address he complained much of the Temple,’ wrote Philip of Novara.22 According to the patriarch’s account, Frederick went rather further:
He began to complain bitterly of us, by heaping up false accusations. Then turning his remarks to the venerable Master of the Temple, he publicly attempted to tarnish the reputation of the latter, by various vain speeches, seeking thus to throw upon others the responsibility for his own faults which were now manifest and adding at last that we were maintaining troops with the purpose of injuring him.
Frederick ordered the Templars to leave Acre and announced that crossbowmen would be placed on the gatehouses so that once the brothers had departed, they would not be allowed back in. ‘Next he fortified with crossbows the churches and other elevated positions and especially those which commanded the communications between the Templars and ourselves,’ railed Gerold. ‘And you may be sure that he never showed as much animosity and hatred against the Saracens.’23
As good as his word, the emperor now filled Acre with troops; to relieve his anger he also had a few friars whipped through the streets. The Templar house in Acre was placed under siege, imperial soldiers blockaded the patriarch’s palace and for five days Acre was turned into a war zone. Frederick was already excommunicated, but for good measure the patriarch threatened to extend the punishment to anyone who ‘should aid the emperor with their advice or services against the Church, the Templars, the other monks of the holy land or the pilgrims’.24
Frederick was now left with two options: to escalate or to retire. He chose the latter. News had reached him that his troubles in Sicily were beginning to outweigh those he was experiencing in Acre. The return of Jerusalem was his legacy to the Holy Land. It was time to go home.
As quickly as he was able, Frederick prepared to leave. He removed all the weapons he could from the armouries of Acre and destroyed what could not be shipped, so that the Templars could not seize them for their own advantage. Imperial soldiers were stationed in the garrison and the Teutonic Order overlooked the city from their slowly expanding castle of Montfort. Frederick appointed deputies known as baillis to run the kingdoms of Jerusalem and Cyprus, to which he had also attempted to stake a claim during his visit. He wrote letters back to his most illustrious contacts in the west putting across his side of events. Then on 1 May 1229, he hurried down to Acre’s docks to take ship for Italy.
As he went, said Philip of Novara, delighting in the opportunity to demean the emperor whom he loathed, ‘the butchers and the old people of the street, who were most ill disposed, ran alongside him and pelted him with tripe and bits of meat’.25 Frederick II Hohenstaufen, who had come to the Holy Land with kisses raining upon his knees, departed it with offal hanging from his shoulders. It was a miserable way to go.
*
Frederick II’s crusade may have been fraught with ill-feeling among the crusaders, and may have left behind a lingering factional divide between the emperor’s supporters and a baronial party led by the noble Ibelin family and the Templars, but the deal struck with the sultan resulted in a period of overall security for the Latin states which long outlasted the emperor’s departure. The restoration of Christian territories, begun with the Third Crusade, had been moved forward significantly by the emperor’s brief visit. The existential danger posed by Saladin three decades earlier had now long receded.
From Jaffa in the south, a long stretch of the Levantine coast was once again under Frankish control – with the unbroken run of Christian holdings extending through Acre and Tyre as far north as Tortosa and Margat in the county of Tripoli. Beyond that the principality of Antioch, although much reduced from its twelfth-century peak, was still a viable political entity, while Cyprus was ruled by kings of the Lusignan family, despite Frederick’s attempts to sideline them and take the island for himself.
At the end of the 1230s further waves of foreign crusaders arrived in the Holy Land, led by Richard, earl of Cornwall, the brother of Henry III of England, and Theobald of Champagne, the poet-king of Navarre.26 These missions, known collectively as the Barons’ Crusade, built on Frederick’s territorial gains, wrestling back former Christian holdings including the castles of Beaufort, Belvoir, Safad and Tiberias in the north, and Ascalon in the south. They even paved the way for the Christians to take further control in Jerusalem: in 1241 Muslim access to the city was restricted and Christians were readmitted to the Temple Mount, a situation that lasted for three years until the arrival of marauding Khwarizmian Turks in August 1244. This was a particularly miraculous achievement, described with pride in one newsletter from Templar high command to the preceptor in England:
All those holy places where the name of God has not been invoked for fifty-six years have been restored and purified and, praise be to the Lord, the divine offices are celebrated there every day. These holy places are now accessible and safe for all visitors.27
In that sense if no other, Frederick Hohenstaufen had laid the ground for a settlement more favourable to the Franks than anything since the battle of Hattin in 1187.
Weighed against all this was the perpetual infighting that Frederick had left behind. Plenty of land and castles had been restored, to be sure – but there was very little coher
ent leadership across the Latin states as a whole. The Hohenstaufen dynasty claimed the crown of Jerusalem, but neither Frederick nor his son Conrad had the slightest intention of being personally present to exercise office. Bitter feuding separated the supporters of the emperor and his policies of peace towards the Ayyubid sultans in Egypt from those who detested his overbearing influence and looked in turn to ally themselves with an anti-Egyptian sultan in Damascus. The military orders were divided along these lines, with the Hospitallers supporting the imperial party and the Templars on the other side.
This fractured state of affairs might in other times have presented a soft underbelly for the Ayyubids to attack, but during the 1230s and early 1240s they were themselves riven by squabbling and jostling for position. The Saracen empire was still grand in scope – stretching from Egypt on one side of the Red Sea to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in the Hijaz on the other, north through the Jordan valley through Palestine and Syria, all the way to the Jazira. In reality, however, rule was spread very thin across this vast expanse. Cairo and Damascus were often at odds, and preferred to seek Christian allies against one another, choosing to accommodate the Latins rather than unite to destroy them. No Ayyubid sultan after Saladin managed to project his personality or his presence forcibly enough to draw these disparate territories back into true union. The result was that, for a time at least, a form of messy equilibrium was achieved between two faith groups who were each in as much disarray as the other.