Текст книги "The Crusades. The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land"

Автор книги: Thomas Asbridge

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Once there, the expedition rapidly lost sight of its ‘sacred’ goal to recapture Jerusalem. After a short-lived military offensive, the existing imperial regime was toppled in July 1203–at only limited cost in Greek blood–and Alexius was proclaimed emperor. But when he proved unable to redeem his lavish promises of financial reward to the Latins, relations soured. In January 1204 Alexius’ grip on power faltered and he was overthrown (and then strangled) by a member of the rival Doukas family, nicknamed Murtzurphlus (or ‘heavy-brow’, on account of his prominent eyebrows). In spite of their own recent estrangement from the late emperor, the crusaders interpreted his deposition as a coup and characterised Murtzurphlus as a tyrannical usurper who must himself be removed from office. Girded by this cause for war, the Latins prepared for a full-scale assault on the great capital of Byzantium.

On 12 April 1204, thousands of western knights broke into the city and, in spite of their crusading vows, subjected its Christian population to a horrific three-day riot of violence, rape and plunder. In the course of this gruesome sack the glory of Constantinople was smashed, the city stripped of its greatest treasures–among them holy relics such as the Crown of Thorns and the head of John the Baptist. Doge Dandalo seized an imposing bronze statue of four horses and shipped it back to Venice, where it was gilded and erected above the entrance of St Mark’s Basilica as a totem of Venetian triumph. It remains within the church to this day.

The Fourth Crusaders never did sail on to Palestine. Instead they stayed in Constantinople, founding a new Latin empire, which they dubbed Romania. Aping Byzantine practice, its first sovereign, Baldwin, count of Flanders, donned the elaborate jewel-encrusted robes of imperial rule on 16 May 1204 and was anointed emperor in the monumental Basilica of St Sophia–the spiritual epicentre of Greek Orthodox Christianity. Across the Bosphorus Strait in Asia Minor, the surviving Greek aristocracy established their own empire in exile at Nicaea, awaiting revenge.

Causes and consequences

Contemporaries and modern commentators alike have been moved to ask what drove the Fourth Crusade to the ancient capital of the Byzantine Empire. It has been suggested that the diversion was the ultimate expression of a festering distrust and antipathy that had been an increasingly prominent characteristic of crusader–Byzantine relations during the twelfth century. After all, elements of the Second Crusade had considered attacking the Greek capital, and the Third Crusade had witnessed the forcible seizure of Cyprus, a Byzantine protectorate. Some have even intimated that the expedition was actually part of a complex anti-Greek conspiracy–that the seizure of Constantinople was the crusade’s deliberate and intended goal from the outset. This is unlikely to have been true–not least because the entire endeavour was characterised by such an evident lack of effective organisation.

In fact, the crusade was set on its course by the poorly framed 1201 treaty with Venice and almost certainly reached the walls of Constantinople through a succession of unplanned, pragmatic decisions and a series of cumulative diversions. There may not have been a grand design at work, but that is not to say that the Latins’ eventual bloody conquest of Constantinople did not suit Venetian interests or further the ambitions of some of the crusade’s leaders.

The expedition also confirmed the abject failure of Innocent III’s grand ‘papal crusade’ project. Events had shown that he was singularly unable to impose his will from Rome. In June 1203, when he first learned of the diversion to Constantinople, the pope had written to the crusade leaders explicitly forbidding any attack on the Christian metropolis, but this prohibition was ignored. Then, sometime before November 1204, Innocent received a letter from the new Latin Emperor Baldwin announcing the Byzantine capital’s capture. Baldwin’s missive evidently offered a heavily sanitised account of events, celebrating the conquest as a great triumph for Christendom and, despite his earlier misgivings, the Pope initially responded with jubilation. It seemed that, through God’s inimitable will, the eastern and western Churches now had gloriously been united under Roman rule, and that with the foundation of the new Latin polity fresh succour might be brought to the Levantine crusader states. Only later did details of the crusaders’ brutish avarice emerge, turning Innocent’s joy to disgust, prompting him to rescind his initial approval and condemn the expedition’s outcome as a disgraceful travesty.⁴

CONTROLLING THE FIRE

Innocent was appalled by the manner in which the Fourth Crusade spiralled out of control, but before long his innately pragmatic outlook and natural optimism prompted him to renew his interest in harnessing the power of holy war. In the course of the next decade, he repeatedly made attempts to utilise and control crusading. During this period, however, he redirected this weapon of papal policy towards new theatres of conflict and against different enemies. In part this was a response to emerging threats; thus, expeditions were launched against the pagan Livs of the Baltic and the Almohad Moors of Spain. And, despite his deep misgivings about the circumstances of its formation, Innocent also recognised that the newly formed empire of Latin Romania would need protection if it were to play any meaningful role in the wider struggle to recover the Holy Land. Other crusaders, therefore, were encouraged to reinforce Constantinople. The pope also concluded that crusades could play an important and direct role in his drive to purify western Europe itself. In 1209, he launched the so-called Albigensian Crusade against the Cathar heretics in south-eastern France, but the campaigns that followed proved to be shockingly brutal and largely ineffective, being subject to the self-serving acquisitiveness of northern French participants.

A popular outburst of ecstatic piety was witnessed in 1212, when, for reasons that remain uncertain (but may perhaps have been related to the preaching of the Albigensian Crusade), large groups of children and young adults in northern France and Germany spontaneously began to declare their dedication to the cause of the crusades. In the ‘Children’s Crusade’ that followed, two boys, a young French shepherd from Vendôme named Stephen of Cloyes and one Nicholas of Cologne, apparently raised hordes of young followers, promising that God would oversee their journey to the Levant and then lend them the miraculous power to overthrow Islam, recapture Jerusalem and recover the True Cross. As innocents, they claimed, children would be able to fulfil God’s divine purpose in a manner impossible for adults sullied by the taint of sin. Little reliable evidence survives regarding the fate of these ‘crusaders’, but for contemporaries then living in France, Germany and Italy–Innocent III included–their uprising served as a salutary reminder that the call of the cross could still move the hearts and minds of the masses.⁵

By 1213, Innocent realised that widening the focus of holy war had actually served to weaken the Latin East–distracting the West from the plight of the Holy Land–and thus set about a major rethink of policy. Withdrawing the crusading status of the conflicts in Spain, the Baltic and southern France, he rechannelled the full force of crusading enthusiasm towards the reconquest of Jerusalem, proclaiming a new, grand expedition: the Fifth Crusade. At the same time, he made renewed attempts to assert full papal control over the organisation and prosecution of sanctified violence.

He began by making even more strenuous attempts to regularise the preaching of the Fifth Crusade. Innocent appointed hand-picked bands of clergy to spread the call to arms, and regional administrators to oversee recruitment campaigns. He also encouraged the production of preaching manuals that contained model-sermons, and set out specific guidelines on the conduct of preachers. Although the crusade attracted relatively few recruits from France–the traditional heartland of enthusiasm–elsewhere the response was dramatic. Enraptured by masterful orators like the French cleric James of Vitry or the German preacher Oliver of Paderborn–whose sermons were frequently accompanied by ‘miraculous’ events such as the appearance of shining crosses in the sky–thousands of skilled knights from Hungary, Germany, Italy, the Low Countries and England took the cross.

Innocent’s initiatives in the sphere of crusade finance had more problematic consequences. Until now, he had argued consistently that only trained warriors should be permitted to take the cross, believing that this would create a compact and efficient crusading army. In 1213 he performed what appeared to be a volte-face, declaring that as many people as possible should be encouraged to enlist, regardless of their suitability for the holy war. This opening of the floodgates may have been triggered, in part, by the recent Children’s Crusade, which so patently demonstrated the breadth and depth of western crusade enthusiasm. Nonetheless, Innocent’s scheme had a further twist. Years earlier, when he launched the Fourth Crusade, the pope had suggested that financial donations in aid of the holy war might be rewarded with an indulgence. Now, he refined and extended that notion. Innocent hoped many thousands would enrol in his new campaign, but he announced that anyone taking the cross who proved unable to fight in person could readily redeem their crusading vow by making a cash payment and still receive a religious reward. This extraordinary reform may have been well intentioned–designed to bring the crusade both financial and military resources, and to extend the redemptive power of holy war to a wider audience, but it established an extremely dangerous precedent. The idea that spiritual merit could be bought with money spawned the development of a comprehensive system of indulgences, perhaps the most widely criticised feature of later medieval Latin Catholicism and a key factor in the emergence of the Reformation. These looming long-term consequences were not apparent in 1213, but, even so, Innocent’s innovation elicited scandalised criticism among some contemporaries and, in the course of the thirteenth century, led to grave abuses of the crusade movement.

Nonetheless, the pope would not be turned from his purpose. The call for a new crusade to the Holy Land was broadcast again in 1215 at a massive ecclesiastical council (the Fourth Lateran) convened by Innocent to discuss the state of Christendom. This spectacular assembly–then the largest of its kind–affirmed the elevation of papal power achieved during Innocent’s pontificate. Ever obsessed with the drive to raise funds for the holy war, he renewed the deeply unpopular Church tax, this time at the even more scything rate of one-twentieth for three years, and appointed commissioners to ensure its careful collection.

Less than a year later, on 16 July 1216, Pope Innocent III died of a fever–one probably contracted while preaching the cross in the rain near Perugia (in central Italy)–even before the Fifth Crusade could begin.⁶ Throughout his pontificate he had embraced holy war and, although the campaigns waged at his behest achieved only limited success, Innocent’s willingness to support and amend the crusading movement did much to reinvigorate a cause that might otherwise have faltered. In many respects he shaped crusading into a form it would hold through the coming century and beyond. It is also true, however, that Innocent’s monumental ambitions far outstripped the reality of papal authority and that his attempts to assert direct ecclesiastical control over crusading expeditions were ill conceived and unrealistic.

OUTREMER IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY

During the early thirteenth century, as the papacy sought to shape and to harness the might of crusading, the balance of power in the Near East underwent a series of convulsive changes. In the wake of the Third Crusade and the death of Saladin, Franks and Muslims alike were weakened and distracted by the eruption of convoluted succession crises in Palestine, Syria and Egypt. The Latin Christians struggling to survive in the Levant–nursing hopes of reconquest and expansion–had to embrace new approaches to Outremer’s defence and to their interaction with Islam.

In the summer of 1216, the French churchman James of Vitry had urgent business to conduct in central Italy. Perhaps in his early fifties, James was an erudite cleric and ardent reformer, with a natural oratorical flair. He had already earned renown as a preacher of the Albigensian campaigns and the Fifth Crusade–his sermons may also have helped to stir into life the so-called Children’s Crusade. James would go on to author an extremely valuable corpus of written material relating to the crusades, ranging from letters and historical accounts to collections of ‘model’ sermons. But in 1216 he had been elected as the new bishop of Acre and, before he could travel to the Levant, needed papal confirmation and consecration. James was expecting to meet with Pope Innocent III, but he arrived at Perugia on 17 July, the day after the pontiff’s death. Entering the church in which Innocent’s body had been laid in state before burial, James discovered that, overnight, looters had stripped the great pope’s corpse of its lavish vestments; all that remained was a half-naked, decomposing cadaver, already stinking in the midsummer heat. ‘How brief and vain is the deceptive glory of this world’, James observed when describing the spectacle.

The next day Pope Honorius III was elected as Innocent’s successor and James eventually received his confirmation. That autumn the bishop took ship from Genoa to the East–a perilous five-week journey, during which he endured severe late autumn storms that left the passengers on board able ‘[neither to] eat nor drink for the fear of death’. He arrived in Acre in early November 1216 and, in the months that followed, carried out an extensive preaching tour of Outremer, hoping to rejuvenate the spiritual fervour of its Christian populace in advance of the Fifth Crusade. The Near Eastern world he encountered was one of chronic political instability, in which old rivalries simmered on, even as new powers were emerging.⁷

The Crusader States in the Early Thirteenth Century

The balance of power in the Frankish East

In territorial terms the crusader states were barely a shadow of their former selves. Jerusalem and the inland regions of Palestine were in Muslim hands, and the Latin kingdom of ‘Jerusalem’ could now more accurately be termed the kingdom of Acre, its lands confined to a narrow coastal strip stretching from Jaffa in the south to Beirut in the north–the latter having been recovered with the aid of a party of German crusaders in 1197. Indeed, by the time James of Vitry arrived in the East, the Jerusalemite monarchy had adopted Acre as their new capital. Up the coast, the county of Tripoli retained a foothold in Lebanon, while a number of Templar and Hospitaller strongholds extended Frankish dominion some way to the north, but because the Muslims continued to control the region around Latakia there was no land connection to the principality of Antioch, and that once formidable polity had been reduced to a tiny parcel of land centred on Antioch itself.

The vulnerability of each of the surviving crusader states was compounded by a series of acrimonious succession disputes. Henry of Champagne, the ruler of Frankish Palestine appointed at the end of the Third Crusade, survived until 1197, when he died in an unfortunate accident–falling out of a palace window in Acre when its railings gave way. The sole surviving member of the royal bloodline, Isabella (Henry’s widow), was married to Aimery, a member of the Lusignan dynasty, who then ruled until 1205, when he too died–this time from eating too much fish. Isabella followed him to the grave soon after. From this point onwards, the royal title fell to Isabella’s child by her earlier marriage to Conrad of Montferrat, and the Jerusalemite succession spiralled into a bewilderingly complex web of marriages, minorities and regencies that persisted through most of the thirteenth century–a situation that bequeathed a great deal of power and authority to the Frankish barons. In the early decades two leading figures emerged from this turmoil.

Jean of Ibelin (Balian of Ibelin’s son) served as regent for the royal heiress Maria between 1205 and 1210 and became the most important Latin baron in Palestine. Despite having lost their ancestral lands at Ibelin and Ramla to the Muslims, the Ibelin dynasty’s fortunes prospered in this period. Jean was endowed with the valuable lordship of Beirut, and his family enjoyed a prominent connection to Frankish Cyprus.

Ibelin influence was challenged by the newcomer John of Brienne, a French knight from Champagne of middling aristocratic birth. John married Maria in 1210, and then, when she died in 1212, served as regent and effective ruler for their infant daughter Isabella II. Probably around forty years old, John was an experienced military campaigner with a crusade pedigree, but he lacked wealth and royal connections in the West. He spent much of his career seeking to assert his right to the Jerusalemite crown–styling himself as king despite the objections of the local nobility. John also made a further play for prominence in the north in 1214, marrying Princess Stephanie, heiress to the Armenian Christian kingdom of Cilicia.

Under the shrewd guidance of its latest Roupenid ruler King Leon I (ruling as Prince Leon II between 1187 and 1198, and then as king between 1198 and 1218), the eastern Christian realm of Cilicia became a dominant force in the politics of northern Syria and Asia Minor during the thirteenth century. Through a mixture of military confrontation and intermarriage Leon’s Roupenid dynasty became intimately integrated into the history of Latin Antioch and Tripoli. Following Count Raymond III of Tripoli’s death in 1187, the lines of succession in the county and principality became entwined, and a power struggle featuring Frankish and Armenian claimants (even more labyrinthine than that witnessed in Palestine) rumbled on until 1219, when Bohemond IV secured control of both Antioch and Tripoli.⁸

These protracted internecine conflicts enfeebled and distracted the Christians of Outremer in the early decades of the new century, severely curtailing any moves towards reconquest (and, in fact, similar problems would recur throughout the century). But the damage wrought by these petty squabbles was mitigated, at least in some measure, by the discord that likewise was afflicting Islam.

The fate of the Ayyubid Empire

After Saladin’s death in 1193, the Ayyubid realm that he had constructed over two decades fragmented almost overnight. The sultan had intended the bulk of his territory to be divided between three of his sons in a form of confederacy, with the eldest, al-Afdal, holding Damascus and overall authority over Ayyubid lands. Al-Zahir was to command Aleppo and Uthman to rule Egypt from Cairo. In fact, the balance of power soon shifted in favour of Saladin’s astute brother al-Adil. He had been left in control of the Jazira (north-western Mesopotamia), but his diplomatic guile and skill as a political and military strategist enabled him to outmanoeuvre his nephews. Al-Adil’s rise was also facilitated by al-Afdal’s incompetence in Damascus. There, al-Afdal quickly alienated many of this father’s most trusted advisers and by 1196 was in no position to rule Syria. Acting, officially at least, as Uthman’s representative, al-Adil seized power in Damascus that year–leaving al-Afdal to go into impotent exile in the Jazira. When Uthman died in 1198, al-Adil assumed full control of Egypt and, by 1202, al-Zahir had acknowledged his uncle’s supremacy.

Through the first half of the thirteenth century, the lion’s share of the Ayyubid world thus lay in the hands of al-Adil and his direct descendants, while al-Zahir and his line retained control of Aleppo. Al-Adil governed as sultan, installing three of his own sons as regional emirs: al-Kamil in Egypt, al-Mu‘azzam in Damascus and al-Ashraf in the Jazira. Jerusalem played only a minor role in Ayyubid affairs and certainly did not function as any sort of capital. Despite its spiritual significance, Jerusalem’s isolated position in the Judean hills meant that its political, economic and strategic value was limited. Although al-Adil and his successors made intermittent efforts to maintain and beautify the Holy Places, the city generally was neglected. Similarly, the notion of waging jihad against the Franks fell into abeyance, even though the Ayyubids still laid claim to titles imbued with the rhetoric of holy war.

In fact, al-Adil adopted a highly pragmatic approach to his dealings with Outremer, partly because of the more urgent threats posed by other rivals: the Zangid Muslims of Mesopotamia and Seljuq Turks of Anatolia; and the eastern Christians of Armenia and Georgia. Once in power, al-Adil agreed a series of truces with the Franks that ran almost unbroken through the early years of the thirteenth century (1198–1204, 1204–10, 1211–17) and were widely upheld. As sultan, al-Adil also forged ever closer commercial links with the trading powers of Venice and Pisa.

In spite of the relatively temperate nature of Muslim–Latin relations, the Ayyubids probably would have looked to achieve further territorial gains at Outremer’s expense had it not been for a number of additional considerations underpinning the history of the crusader states and the wider Near East.⁹

The Military Orders

In the course of the thirteenth century, the religious movements that combined the professions of knighthood and monasticism–the Military Orders–assumed increasingly dominant and essential roles in Outremer’s history. The problems that had beset the crusader states from their inception, those of isolation from the West and shortages of human and material resources, only deepened after the Third Crusade. The extension of the crusading ideal into the likes of Iberia and the Baltic, the holy wars against papal enemies and heretics, and the diversion of assets to defend the newly formed polity of Latin Romania all served to exacerbate the predicament of the Frankish Levant. So too did the endemic political factionalism within the surviving crusader states.

Against this background, the Templars and Hospitallers came into their own; and these two well-established orders were joined by a third major group–the Teutonic Knights. This movement was founded during the Third Crusade, when German crusaders set up a field hospital outside Acre around 1190. In 1199 Pope Innocent III confirmed their status as a new knightly order and they enjoyed a particularly close association with the Hohenstaufen dynasty and Germany. In the years that followed, the Teutonic Knights, like the Templars and Hospitallers before them, embraced an increasingly militarised role. By this point it had become customary for Templars to wear a white mantle emblazoned with a red cross, while the Hospitallers bore a white cross on a black background. Teutonic Knights, by contrast, adopted a white mantle with a black cross.

As a result of their increasing military, political and economic power, these three orders became the essential bedrocks of the Latin East, and their fundamental contribution to Outremer’s continued survival was already apparent when James of Vitry arrived in Acre. The influence enjoyed by each of the orders was closely related to the papal support they continued to receive, because this preserved their independence from local ecclesiastical and political jurisdiction, as well as their exemption from tithes. The orders also possessed an incredible capacity to attract charitable donations from the nobles of Christian Europe, acquiring great swathes of land in the West. All three orders also accrued land on the island of Cyprus.

Their popularity and supranational status had long enabled the Military Orders to recruit new members (and thus supply Outremer with manpower) and to channel wealth from the West to the war for the Holy Land–with a levy, or ‘responsion’, of one-third on their income being sent east. By the late twelfth century, the orders had developed such an elaborate and secure international system of financial administration that they effectively became the bankers of Europe and of the crusading movement. In what was essentially the first use of a cheque, it became possible to deposit money in the West and receive a credit note that could then be cashed in the Holy Land.

The Military Orders’ martial role also became ever more embedded. The Templars and Hospitallers could each field around 300 knights in the Levant, plus perhaps 2,000 sergeants (lower-status members). Simply in numerical terms this meant that they often contributed half or more of the total Frankish fighting force in times of war. Their highly trained, well-equipped troops were also willing and able to serve throughout the year and not just for limited periods as with an army raised through a normal feudal levy. Surviving copies of the ‘Rules’ (or written regulations) governing the lives of members indicate just how much emphasis was placed upon strict and absolute military discipline in the field. The Templar Rule, for example, provided detailed guidance on everything from marching to setting up camp and foraging, always with a strong emphasis on rigid obedience to a chain of command and unity of action–the critical prerequisites for success and survival among heavily armoured troops. Transgressions were punished harshly. Offenders might be temporarily deprived of their habit and thrown in irons, or even ejected from the order.

Alongside the undoubted strengths of the three main Military Orders, there were some difficulties and dangers to be faced in the course of the thirteenth century. With the weakening of royal and princely authority in the likes of Acre and Antioch, the capacity for the orders to pursue their own distinct goals and objectives increased, as did the potential for damaging rivalry between the three movements–the Templars and Hospitallers, for example, backed different parties during the dispute regarding the Antiochene succession. The orders’ wider roles in other theatres of conflict, including the Teutonic Knights’ extensive commitments on the Baltic frontier, also acted as a drain on the Levantine war effort.

Over time, groups like the Templars also experienced a gradual decline in the flow of donations from Latin patrons, partly related to shifts in attitudes towards religious life and the waning of interest in Outremer’s fate. Because they stood in the front line of the holy war and were, over the decades, the recipients of such extraordinary largesse on the part of Latin Christendom’s populace, the Military Orders also had to face significant, even swingeing, criticism when setbacks in the struggle against Islam were suffered. On the whole, these latter considerations only came into play after around 1250, and even then the Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights still retained access to massive reserves of manpower and wealth.¹⁰

Crusader castles

Through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Military Orders became intimately associated with the great ‘crusader’ strongholds of the Near East because by 1200 they were the only Latin powers in the Levant who could afford the exorbitant costs associated with building and maintaining castles, and who also had the men needed to garrison these fortresses. With the massive haemorrhage of territory suffered after 1187, castles came to play an ever more vital role in defending the fragmented and exposed remnants of the crusader states. And dwindling numbers of Frankish settlers in the Levant further increased the reliance upon the physical defences offered by fortifications.

No medieval castle was entirely impregnable, nor could a fortress stop an invading army in its tracks. But strongholds did help the Military Orders to dominate portions of territory and defend frontiers; they also served as relatively secure outposts from which to launch raids and offensives, and functioned as administrative centres. In the thirteenth century, however, with far less land under their control than before, the Christians had to depend upon fewer fortresses that either were positioned near the sea (so as to facilitate support) or possessed highly evolved systems of defence. Under these conditions, only the Military Orders could develop and hold castles of sufficient size and strength.

Through the first half of the thirteenth century all three of the major orders devoted vast amounts of money and energy either to modifying and extending existing castles, or, in the case of the mighty Teutonic fortress of Montfort (inland from Acre), to designing and building new fortresses from scratch. From the 1160s, the Franks had begun to construct strongholds with more than one set of battlements–so-called ‘concentric castles’–but this approach reached new heights after 1200. Huge advances were also made in stone-cutting techniques, the ability to erect the sturdier (but architecturally more complex) rounded forms of defensive tower and the employment of sloping walls to prevent sapping. In addition, improvements in the designs of vaulted ceilings enabled the Latins to construct massive storerooms and stables–essential for supplying large garrisons. During this golden age of castle building, the Military Orders constructed some of the most advanced fortifications of the medieval era.*

After arriving in the Levant, James of Vitry, the new bishop of Acre, toured many of these fortresses in early 1217 and described his visits in a letter written that spring. The most impressive fortress included in James’ itinerary was Krak des Chevaliers, on the southern edge of the Ansariyah Mountains, overlooking the Bouqia valley. A Hospitaller possession since 1144, Krak had long been regarded as a formidable stronghold, not least because of its natural defences–being positioned on the end of a steeply sloping ridge. Saladin made no attempt to besiege the site after his victory at Hattin. In the early thirteenth century, the Hospitallers undertook a massive rebuilding programme (probably ongoing when James visited), and, when these alterations and improvements were completed, Krak had been shaped into a near-perfect fortress, capable of housing a garrison of 2,000 men.