When the specifics of the deal were made known, the crusaders were outraged. Charles had taken no part in anything, and had merely swooped in vulture-like to claim the spoils. Few in the army may have shared Louis IX's iron resolve, but they genuinely cared about the health of Outremer. The late French king was beloved – in less than three decades he would be declared a saint – and the specter of Charles, betraying his noble ideals for the sake of money was difficult to take.
Edward I
There was additional anger, because some of the original aims of the crusade might still have been salvaged if Charles had just waited for a few weeks. Just after Charles inked his deal, Edward I Longshanks, the crown prince of the English, arrived with a small army. Edward, who would go on to earn the nickname 'Hammer of the Scots' for his ruthless abilities, was a brilliant campaigner who might have accomplished much, even with a weakened French army. As it was, however, there was nothing more that could be done in Tunis.
Instead of returning immediately to England, Edward decided to sail on to Acre to see what good he could do in Outremer. He found the kingdom on the verge of collapse. The moment Baybars had realized that the crusade was directed at Tunis instead of Egypt, he had renewed his assault on the scattered Christian strongholds. In March he had taken the great Hospitaller fortress of Krak des Chevaliers, perhaps the most formidable medieval castle ever built. Nicknamed 'the bone in the throat of Islam', it had withstood almost two centuries of relentless jihad.
In the early thirteenth century one crusader king had dubbed Krak the 'key' to the Christian presence in the Levant, and its loss was interpreted by both sides as the beginning of the end. Edward saw at once that only a full-scale crusade had any hope of preserving the situation, but he did what he could. With less than a thousand men at his disposal he couldn't possibly confront Baybars, so he convinced the Mongols to step up their raids on Syria.
This policy was successful enough that Baybars needed a free hand to deal with it, so he offered Outremer a ten-year peace. It didn't alter the main danger facing the crusader kingdoms, but at least it was something. In these diminished days such an unexpected truce was celebrated as a great victory. Edward sailed back to England having accomplished more with his three hundred knights than the two previous crusades with all their thousands. He arrived to find his father dead and himself the new king.
With his return, the days of great crusades drew to a close. There was a sense of fatalism about the fall of Outremer, and appeals to help them could no longer inspire the way they once had. Louis' efforts had been the most meticulously planned and well-funded campaigns that Europe had ever launched. They had been led by a skilled commander, who was chivalrous, brave, and completely devoted to the liberation of Jerusalem. And yet, despite this, both had been humiliating failures. If Saint Louis himself couldn't succeed, what hope did anyone else have?
Louis' tremendous piety had masked the fact that the crusading spirit had been waning for years, weakened by overuse. In addition to the eight major crusades, numerous minor ones had been launched against enemies in Spain, the Baltic, and heretics in France.145 It was also increasingly difficult to reconcile the ideals of crusading with the obvious politicization of them. Venice had hijacked one, Frederick II another, and Charles of Anjou had used one to seize Sicily for himself. The growing tendency of the popes to declare crusades against their political enemies only made the problem worse.
In any case, the fate of Outremer was sealed. The pope made one last attempt to help by persuading Charles of Anjou to purchase the crown of Jerusalem in the hope that he would ride to its rescue. Charles, however, couldn't even hold on to what he already had. He treated Sicily as a personal treasury to fund other adventures and by 1282 the long-suffering Sicilians had had enough. A popular uprising known as the Sicilian Vespers successfully expelled him from the island, turning all of his grand ideas to dust. The troops that he had garrisoned in Acre were summoned home in a futile bid to put down the revolt, and Outremer was left even weaker than before.
The Fall of Outremer
The only consolation in those final days was that at least it wouldn't be the terrible Baybars who finally extinguished Outremer. The Mamluk sultan had expired in 1277, allegedly from absentmindedly drinking poison that he had intended for someone else. Various truces were signed by the desperate Christians, but by now the confident Muslims weren't even bothering to keep the agreements they signed. Tripoli was brutally sacked a year after they had signed a peace treaty, as were a string of coastal towns.
In 1291, a massive army besieged Acre, and both sides knew the end had finally come. Only now, in the last few days of Outremer's existence, did everyone finally work together. All three grandmasters – Teutonic, Templar, and Hospitaller – were there, and for once there was no quarreling. For over a month they managed to hold out, despite being outnumbered at least seven to one. Then, on May 18, 1291, a hole opened up in one of the defensive walls and the Islamic forces swarmed inside.
A few managed to make it to some ships in the harbor, everyone else was butchered. Thanks to the gallantry of the military orders, who sacrificed themselves to cover the retreat, most of the survivors were women and children.
The fall of Acre ended any hope of Christian political control in the Levant. Since most of the knights of Outremer had perished in the fighting, there was no one left to defend what remained. The slave markets of the East were so glutted with Christian prisoners that the price of a girl fell to a single coin. By the end of the year, the last crusader towns and castles had surrendered, extinguishing Outremer as if it had never been. To ensure that this would remain the case, the Muslims demolished every single fortification along the coast. The great cities of Acre, Tyre, and Tripoli, which had been centers of culture and learning since antiquity, were reduced to smoking ruins, never to rise again.
The Muslim masters of the Holy Land needn't have bothered destroying their own cities. By AD 1300, there was a palpable feeling that the world had changed. The medieval papacy, which had dominated the European stage for the better part of two hundred years was the most visible casualty. The repeated failures and increasing politicization of the crusades had eroded its authority, and within two decades of the fall of Acre, it was no longer in a position to launch great movements. In 1309 the popes left Rome for Avignon in France, where, for the next seventy years they were widely seen as captives of the French king. This was followed by the embarrassment of the Western Schism, where up to three men claimed to be pope at the same time. The Vatican never completely recovered its temporal authority in Western Europe.
The Fate of the Military Orders
The Church's military arm was just as compromised. The great crusading orders, which had been created for the defense of the Holy Land, were deprived of their main purpose by the fall of Outremer. Each of the three had to relocate, and find a rationale for its existence. The Templars reorganized their headquarters in France where they used their vast holdings to become one of the major money-lending organizations of Western Europe. Their immense wealth, tax exempt status, and international connections effectively made them a state within a state, and an armed one to boot. They were resented by those who owed them debts, feared by the governments of the lands they were in, and mistrusted by nearly everyone.
In such a climate they were unsympathetic targets, and barely twenty years after the fall of Acre they fell victim to the resentments of a cash-strapped French king and his tame pope in Avignon. There was no fear of resistance; the king cannily struck while most of the men of the order were away fighting in Spain. Those left in France were old or wounded, veterans living out the few years remaining to them. Under torture they admitted things nearly beyond belief: urinating on the Crucifix, worshiping the devil in the guise of a mummified head, blasphemous secret rites, and plotting to destroy Christians throughout Europe. More arrests and executions followed, culminating in the scandalous execution of Jacques de Molay, the grandmaster himself.
The 70-year-old monk was dragged up to a platform erected on an island in the Seine. There in front of a jeering crowd with the dramatic Gothic sweep of Notre Dame rising up behind him, a papal legate read out a list of the grandmaster’s accused crimes in sordid detail. Molay was then chained to a stake and the piled heaps of brushwood were lit. The last grandmaster of the Templars was roasted alive, still protesting his innocence.146 The Templar order was officially abolished, and the wealth that escaped the grasping French monarch was distributed to the other orders.
The Hospitallers fared better, learning from the Templar's fate to stay on the right side of public opinion. They carefully maintained hospitals, established schools, and distributed large amounts of money and food to the poor. Of all the military orders, they had the most colorful afterlife, eventually fleeing to Rhodes when Outremer collapsed. There they carried on their mission to protect Christendom against the advancing might of Islam. They resisted countless attacks until 1522, when a massive Turkish invasion drove them out. They spent the next eight years wandering in search of another home, ultimately settling on the island of Malta, which the Spanish king – thanks to their charitable work – allowed them to rent for the cost of one Maltese falcon per year. Their reputation was burnished a few years later when seven hundred knights made a gallant defense of the island against more than forty thousand invading Turks, and somehow won. Although politically disbanded by Napoleon, they remain on Malta to this day as a humanitarian organization.
The Teutonic Knights avoided persecution or harassment from Islam by founding a state in the eastern Baltic where they focused on the Christianization of medieval Lithuania. Within a few years they had established themselves as a major power, and began to act as a traditional state. After a checkered history of political maneuvering, they were effectively broken by a combined Polish and Lithuanian army. A few years later during the Reformation, their grandmaster converted to Lutheranism and the order lost most of its remaining land. It was outlawed by both Napoleon and Adolf Hitler, but survives today as a charitable institution with both Protestant and Catholic branches.
Although both the Teutonic Knights and the Hospitallers survived the crusades, they were increasingly seen as quaint relics. Even the Hospitallers, who gallantly continued the fight against Islam, did so in a purely defensive manner. However much their stands against the Muslims might be applauded in western courts, the truth was that by 1300 Europe had lost interest in regaining distant Jerusalem, and was fully absorbed in affairs closer to home. Sporadic attempts were made by individuals to aid the Christian populations left behind, but the west never roused itself to send another major crusade.
The dream of Outremer, a shining Christian oasis in the Holy Land that would usher in the second coming, was over. All that was left were a few ruined castles and the stories.
Epilogue: Aftermath
"We perish sleeping one and all,
The wolf has come into the stall..."
– Sebastien Brant, Ship of Fools, 1494
The crusades left a tangled legacy that is, for the most part, deeply misunderstood. It's a common assumption today that they poisoned relations between east and west, weaponizing Islam, and leading to centuries of mistrust and bitterness; that their cardinal sin – apart from being a monstrous exercise in hypocrisy – was the destruction of the enlightened age of Islam, forcing it to harden and turn inward, driving the religion toward a violent embrace of jihad. The crusades, in other words, planted the bitter seeds of modern day terrorism.
This view is unfortunately as persistent as it is wrong. Far from being devastated by the crusades, the Islamic world considered them irrelevant and – aside from place names and a few folk tales – promptly forgot about them. There was no Arabic word for 'crusader' until the second half of the nineteenth century, and the first Arabic history of the crusades didn't arrive until the verge of the twentieth.147 This was both because Islam drew no distinction between 'crusaders' and any other infidels, and the fact that, in terms of reversing the advance of Islam, the crusades were a miserable failure. They were no more worth remembering than any other unsuccessful infidel who had tried to stop the inevitable triumph of the Faith.
In the short term of course, the crusades did have some tactical success. They managed to keep Jerusalem for almost a century, and forced the Islamic world to focus its resources on the Holy Land instead of new conquests. But once Jerusalem fell again, the relentless advance continued.
The first four centuries of jihad had resulted in the conquest of most of the Christian world, and after the interruption of the Crusades, Muslim armies resumed the march to claim the rest. Under the leadership of the Ottoman Turks, a dynamic Asiatic people named after their eponymous founder, the sword of Islam was directed against Byzantium, the only Christian power left in Asia. By 1331, Nicaea, the empire's last major city in Anatolia had fallen, driving the Byzantine Empire out of a land it had held for more than a thousand years. In 1348 the invasion of Europe began, as the Ottomans quickly swallowed Greece, Macedonia, and a large chunk of the Balkans, reducing the once mighty Eastern Roman Empire to little more than the city of Constantinople.
Two serious attempts were made to save it. In 1396, King Sigismund of Hungary, whose kingdom was next on the menu if Constantinople fell, organized a 'crusade' of similarly threatened eastern European states. They met the Ottoman army at the Greek city of Nicopolis, present-day Preveza, near the spot where fourteen centuries earlier the emperor Augustus had defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra. The city's name, which means 'City of Victory', proved cruelly ironic. Most of the Christians were slaughtered, with a few escaping into the nearby woods. Those who had the misfortune to be captured alive were dragged naked before the sultan, forced to their knees and beheaded. What remained of Bulgaria was gobbled up by the Turks by the end of the year.
The second and final attempt to stop the advance took place in 1444. A collection of threatened states led by Transylvania, a medieval kingdom in the center of present-day Romania, attempted to protect Hungary by attacking Ottoman territory, but were crushed as they crossed through Bulgaria. Those who were captured were either killed or sold into slavery.148
The defeat broke the back of Christian Eastern Europe and sealed the fate of Byzantium. On May 29, 1453, the end finally came for the two thousand year-old Roman state, when, in a blaze of cannon smoke, Islamic forces burst through the broken defensive walls of Constantinople, walls that had rebuffed attacks for a thousand years. The Hagia Sophia, Christendom's most splendid church was converted to a mosque, and the capital of Orthodox Christianity became the center of a rising Islamic power.
The response by Western Europe to all of this was shock. Despite the centuries of aggression, they continued to believe that some miracle would occur, or that things couldn't possibly be as bad as reported. Constantinople was always on the brink of disaster. It had withstood countless waves of attackers and it could surely resist one more. In any case, the threat was far away.
Except that it no longer was. Ottoman armies swept into Albania and Bosnia, annihilating the armies sent against them. The sultan who conquered Constantinople now controlled Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Constantinople – four of the five great cities of Christendom – and he made no secret of the fact that he was coming for Rome next. In 1480, the sultan's armies landed in southern Italy and overran the city of Otranto. Eight hundred of its citizens refused to convert to Islam and were beheaded, the rest were sold into slavery.
Ripples of panic swept the peninsula and calls for a new crusade were frantically issued, but nothing seemed able to shake the rest of Europe from its lethargy. A contemporary German writer summed up the mood perfectly in a satirical poem called the 'Ship of Fools'. "We perish sleeping one and all, the wolf has come into the stall..." After listing the four great cities that were currently under the Islamic yoke, he finished with a dark prediction that seemed all but certain to come true. "But they've been forfeited and sacked,
and soon the head will be attacked."
The fortuitous death of the sultan prevented the Ottomans from taking advantage of their Italian foothold, but the conquests in Eastern Europe continued apace. In 1521 the last Serbian resistance collapsed, and the Islamic army entered Hungary. The next year they drove the Hospitallers from Rhodes and began the conquest of the eastern Mediterranean. Before the end of the decade they had swallowed Hungary and entered Austrian territory. By 1529 they were at the gates of Vienna, poised to enter central Europe.
What ultimately saved Europe – ironically enough – were its western crusades. The seven-hundred year struggle to free the Iberian peninsula from the Islamic grip, better known as the Reconquista, reached its conclusion just as eastern Europe was beginning to succumb to the Ottoman advance. In 1492, Granada, the last Islamic emirate in the peninsula, surrendered, enabling the newly united Spanish crown to finance the voyage of Christopher Columbus. The resulting wealth, combined with the explosive growth of scientific and economic advances spawned by the Renaissance, catapulted Europe into the modern world. Within a hundred years of Columbus' voyage, the King of Spain ruled over a domain that dwarfed the sultanate, and the stagnating Ottomans were well on the way to becoming the 'sick man of Europe'.
Although Christopher Columbus himself prayed in 1492 that any riches he found would be used to liberate Jerusalem, he was the last of a dying breed. The new rational Europe of the Enlightenment had little time for memories of the crusades. They had committed the sin of being driven by faith, and were the ultimate example of the kind of superstition that drove men like Voltaire to demand 'Ecrasez L'Infame' – crush the infamous thing – referring to the Catholic Church.
In Distant Lands Page 24