The Glory of the Crusades (31 page)

The dramatic interaction between the Catholic saint and the Muslim sultan did not produce the hoped-for fruit of conversion, nor did it end the Fifth Crusade, but it was an episode that illustrated the spiritual purpose of Crusading. It was a bold and daring move worthy of remembrance, and it almost worked. St. Francis, although not a vowed Crusader, was nonetheless an authentic Crusader for he “embodied both the poor man and the knight, the two forces that had set out together in olden times along the road to the Holy Land and had retaken Jerusalem.”
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After his return to Italy, St. Francis revised the Rule of the Order of Friars Minor to reflect his experience. An entire chapter of the Rule was now dedicated to relations with Islam, and how the friars could spread the gospel among the Muslims. In the Rule of 1221, Francis stressed the need for friars working in Muslim lands to live an authentic Christian witness, to proclaim the Word of God, and to be prepared for martyrdom, which occurred even during the lifetime of the saint.
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Francis’s mission to convert al-Kamil proved unsuccessful, but its potential success constitutes another one of the great “what ifs” of the history of the Crusades.

The Fall of Damietta

Eighteen months after the first Crusaders arrived at Damietta, the city fell. A group of Crusaders noticed one of the defensive towers on the wall was not manned, and they stormed it. From this foothold they were able to gain control of the wall and open the gate for the main body. The city was taken without a fight—an unexpected development—but the Crusaders soon discovered why the final assault was so easy.

Once inside the city, the Western warriors were appalled to discover corpses everywhere. Eighteen months of blockade and siege had dwindled the food supplies within Damietta to dangerous levels, resulting in the starvation of 50,000 people.
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Oliver Paderborn described the macabre scene that greeted the Crusaders: “As we were entering [Damietta], there met us an intolerable odor, a wretched sight. The dead killed the living.”
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News of the fall of Damietta reached al-Kamil who once again reached out to the Crusaders in an attempt to find a diplomatic solution. He offered the same terms as before, but this time sweetened the deal by promising restoral of the True Cross, captured by Saladin at the Battle of Hattin in 1187. Cardinal Pelagius once again refused.

The hindsight of history produces the analysis that “four years of Crusade had been wasted through the arrogant folly of a prince of the Church.”
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However, the situation at the time gives legitimacy to the decision of Pelagius to reject al-Kamil’s second diplomatic advance. The Crusaders had just captured Damietta, without significant loss of combat strength, and the Muslim army was not threatening offensive action. Pelagius had every reason to believe the situation was favorable to the Crusaders, dictating a militant rather than diplomatic posture.

As summer approached, the troops were idle and restless and in need of a campaign, so Pelagius ordered the army to move out in a combat operation to capture al-Kamil’s stronghold of Mansourah, which was halfway between Damietta and Cairo. The army approached Mansourah and halted its advance in a precarious defensive position opposite the city and between the Nile and the al-Bahr-as-Saghir canal that linked the Nile to Lake Manzalah. The choice of encampment placed the army in a position that was surrounded by three waterways and provided a prime opportunity for an astute enemy to cut off their supply line, which is exactly the plan followed by the Muslim army. The Crusaders were faced with the dilemma of attempting a difficult advance on Mansourah separated from their line of supplies, digging in and waiting for reinforcements, or a tactical withdrawal. Since the army only had provisions for twenty days, Pelagius made the decision to withdraw to Damietta. The retreat from Mansourah placed the Crusade in jeopardy as the campaigning season came to a close, and the army’s strength was not enough to launch another operation against Cairo.

The failed expedition to Mansourah had dangerously drained the effective fighting force of the Crusaders. This situation, coupled with the prospect of a long stalemate and uncertainty about when or if Frederick II’s German army would arrive, forced Cardinal Pelagius to realize the only viable solution was diplomacy, so he sued for peace. Terms were reached on August 29, 1221: If the Crusaders would surrender Damietta and leave Egypt, al-Kamil offered an eight-year truce, a prisoner exchange, and a promise to return the True Cross. Pelagius agreed to the terms and the army left in September.

The failure of the Fifth Crusade was especially disheartening since it had been so close to succeeding. Unlike the failure of previous Crusades, however, which demoralized Christendom and negatively impacted the Crusading movement, the disappointment of the Fifth Crusade provided a learning experience that the Church and secular rulers took to heart. They learned “the lesson that their efforts needed to be more sharply focused in terms of logistic preparations, military organization, and religious commitments. The Fifth Crusade met military defeat for itself while securing institutional success for its cause.”
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The Crusade of Frederick II

One of the factors that significantly contributed to the failure of the Fifth Crusade was the absence of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II’s army. Christendom and the warriors of the Fifth Crusade eagerly awaited the fulfillment of Frederick’s vow, first taken in 1215. When these warriors returned home, the wait for Frederick II continued.

The son of Henry VI (d. 1197) and Constance of Sicily (d. 1198) was something of a spectacle. Described as a “polymath, intellectual, linguist, scholar, falconry expert, and politician of imagination, arrogance, ambition, and energy,” Frederick had been raised as a ward of the Church after his parents died when he was four years old. Innocent III was his guardian.
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Frederick’s curious affinity for Islam and insatiable personal aspirations prompted contemporaries to refer to him as
stupor mundi
, the “wonder of the world.” Indeed, his political policies, individualistic demeanor, and spurious religious convictions were ahead of their time in the medieval period. His upbringing in Sicily exposed him to Islamic culture, and he seemed to find himself more at ease in the company of Muslims than Christians. He spoke and wrote Arabic and traveled with a Muslim bodyguard.
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After the death of his second wife, Isabella II, he instituted a harem stocked with Muslim women.

In 1221, Frederick met with his former tutor, Cencio Savelli, who had been elected pope five years before, taking the name Honorius III. He once again renewed his Crusader vow and set a departure date of the Feast of St. John the Baptist, June 24, 1225. Frederick was a “serial
crucesignati
” whose first vow was taken in 1215 during his coronation as King of the Germans at Aachen.
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His second vow came five years later during his coronation as holy Roman emperor in Rome. His meeting with Honorius III came after the Fifth Crusade’s retreat from Egypt, and he later publicly promised to go to the Holy Land in 1225 and 1227.

In the summer of 1225, as the departure date approached, Frederick was concerned by the lack of response from the German nobility. He asked Honorius to grant him another extension. The pope agreed to one final delay, but it came with stipulations. This time Frederick agreed to leave on the Feast of the Assumption, August 15, 1227, twelve years after his first Crusade vow. He also agreed to pay to maintain one thousand knights in the Holy Land for two years and provide earnest money of 100,000 ounces of gold that would be returned to him upon his arrival in Acre. Frederick acknowledged, too, that failure to keep these promises would lead to excommunication. Honorius was willing to grant leniency to Frederick due to their longstanding relationship, but his successor was not as patient with the emperor.

Pope Gregory IX

In the spring of 1227, Honorius III died and the fifty-seven-year-old Ugolino Cardinal Conti was elected as his successor, taking the name Gregory IX. He was the grandnephew of Pope Innocent III and a personal friend and supporter of Francis of Assisi. Gregory was a canon lawyer, Scripture scholar, and diplomat who reigned for fourteen years as “one of the greatest popes in the history of the Church, though curiously neglected by posterity (particularly post-medieval posterity).”
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Like his great uncle, Gregory IX was intensely supportive of the Crusading movement. While a cardinal in Italy he spent time preaching the Fifth Crusade, viewing the Crusades as a “unique instrument of ecclesiastical and specifically papal authority with wide application.”
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Consequently, he did not have the patience to wait for a preeminent Crusader like Frederick II to delay fulfillment of his vow, a point he mentioned to the emperor in his first letter to him. Their relationship was stormy and bitter and has been described as “one of the most dramatic stories of all time.”
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The “Crusader without Faith”
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As Frederick II made preparations to embark on his journey to Outrémer, al-Kamil sent an envoy, Emir Fakhr al-Din, to the emperor in 1226 bearing rich gifts. Al-Din was tasked by al-Kamil to offer Frederick a peace treaty that included relinquishing Jerusalem in exchange for Frederick’s military aid in the war against al-Kamil’s brother in Damascus.

Frederick needed time to consider the offer, so he sent al-Din back to al-Kamil with a noncommittal reply. While the negotiations were ongoing, Frederick and his army made preparations for their promised departure in August of 1227. Frederick planned his campaign to be limited in scope. The army was not large and the focus of the expedition had more to do with asserting Frederick’s royal and imperial rights by exploiting the diplomatic opportunity presented by al-Kamil while at the same time fulfilling his political obligations to the papacy.
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As the troops assembled in Brindisi, the heat of the summer and squalid conditions in the camp produced a disease that ravaged the Crusader force. Many warriors died, including the husband of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, Louis IV of Thuringia.

Frederick arrived in the camp and was dismayed by the outbreak of the illness, yet he finalized preparations to depart. After setting sail on the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, September 8, 1227, the emperor and his retinue soon became ill. The fleet was directed to stop at Otranto on the Adriatic only fifty-four miles away. There the sick emperor decided to cancel his journey to Outrémer.

But, as with Philip II Augustus during the Third Crusade, illness was not an acceptable reason for failure to fulfill one’s Crusade vow. This latest failure of Frederick II to fulfill his vow, now twelve years old, prompted Pope Gregory IX to issue the promised excommunication.

Frederick was undeterred by the ecclesiastical censure, and made preparations to travel east once healthy. Gregory IX then used the excommunication to engage in an armed contest to wrest control of Frederick’s Italian land holdings. The situation was a “remarkable spectacle” wherein Christendom witnessed “an excommunicated Crusader sailing to restore Jerusalem, while the pope was organizing armies, one of which was led by the former king of Jerusalem [John of Brienne], to secure the Crusader’s political overthrow in the west.”
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In June of 1228 the excommunicated emperor left Italy despite the warnings of Pope Gregory IX. The “Crusader without faith” arrived in the Holy Land in September. Technically, this journey was not a Crusade since one who was excommunicated was not allowed to participate in Crusading but, true to form, Frederick II did not care what others imposed upon him.

Once in Outrémer, Frederick II was in a difficult situation. He insisted on taking the throne of the kingdom although he was only regent for his son Conrad, and al-Kamil’s previous offer, although still on the table, was less palatable to the Muslim ruler since his brother, al-Mu ‘azzam, the ruler of Damascus, had died in November 1227. Al-Kamil’s need for Frederick had ceased, but the presence of Frederick in the Holy Land led both men to find a face-saving arrangement. Al-Kamil needed to settle with Frederick in order to free up his forces for use elsewhere, but he could not look weak in fulfilling his promises. Appearing to surrender to an inferior foe would place al-Kamil in a perilous political situation. The excommunicated emperor could not return west empty-handed, and he needed to avoid the appearance of being a supplicant to al-Kamil. The precarious position of both men provided for a delicate political process that Freidank, a poet and member of Frederick’s army described as “watching two misers trying to divide evenly three gold pieces.”
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On February 8, 1229, Fredrick and al-Kamil agreed to the division of the “gold pieces” and entered into the compromise Treaty of Jaffa. The ten year truce called for the return of warriors from the Fifth Crusade languishing in Muslim prisons and gave Frederick the Holy City in exchange for Frederick’s military aid to al-Kamil. Frederick agreed to not support any Christian war against al-Kamil, and even to assist him should Christian forces break the treaty. Jerusalem was recognized as a holy city for both faiths, though Christians were given control of most of it. The temple area, including the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque, remained in Muslim control, although Christians were allowed access. Bethlehem and Nazareth were also given to Frederick so that all the major Christian holy cities were once more in the hands of the followers of Christ.