Holy Warriors (40 page)

Frederick’s crusading career began with the disastrous Fifth Crusade of 1217–21. As we saw in the
previous chapter
, Pope Innocent III had prioritized the recovery of the Holy Land above all else. Preparations for a new campaign to the East were well underway at the time of his death in July 1216; a year earlier, however, as preaching for the expedition reached its highest pitch, it gathered a surprise recruit. During Frederick of Hohenstaufen’s coronation ceremony the young man astounded onlookers in the magnificent octagonal marbled church at Aachen when he took the cross, a commitment of enormous magnitude for the young monarch. Since the death of his parents in 1197 and 1198, Frederick had, in effect, been a ward of the papacy. Innocent III had carefully preserved his rights to the German throne and, in return, anticipated a close and fruitful relationship between the leading secular and ecclesiastical powers of Christendom. In the short term the papacy paid little heed to Frederick’s actions at Aachen because it wanted to steer the crusade for itself; the harsh lessons of the Fourth Crusade’s diversion to Constantinople were still painfully apparent. Innocent’s
successor, the aged Honorius III, chose only to involve the king after the expedition had actually set out—yet once Frederick became actively engaged in the crusade, the fate of the Holy Land came to overshadow his life for well over a decade and his career in the Levant did much to accelerate the secular powers’ removal of crusading from papal hands.

The Fifth Crusade was an odd campaign; it lacked a dominant leader and was marked by a bitter rivalry between the papal legate, Pelagius of Albano, and King John of Jerusalem; it was also unique for the enormous influence of visions and prophecy; finally, as a distant backdrop to events in the Levant, Europe began to sense the first destructive tremors of the Mongol invasions of the Near East.
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In the autumn of 1217 armies led by Duke Leopold VI of Austria and King Andrew II of Hungary reached Acre. Their forces fought the Muslims near Mount Tabor and then settled down to construct the enormous castle of Athlit for the Knights Templar. With walls over thirty meters high and eight meters thick it dwarfed any previous fortification in the Levant; by way of comparison, most castles of the early twelfth century had walls around two to three meters thick.
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This reliance on huge defensive sites, in part a consequence of the small Frankish field army, coupled with advances in building technology, typified the settlers’ strategy during the thirteenth century and leaves us with some of the most impressive visual reminders of their presence.

In May 1218 the nobles of Jerusalem and the knights of the Military Orders were joined by the Austrians, as well as new arrivals from Frisia, the Rhineland, and the Italian trading cities; a truculent Andrew of Hungary had already departed for home. The crusaders prepared to attack Egypt—the strategy favored, although never implemented, by both Richard the Lionheart and the Fourth Crusade. Their first target was the port of Damietta on the northern Egyptian coast at the end of a branch of the Nile. A formidable obstacle immediately blocked the crusaders’ bid to move up the river—a huge chain suspended between the city and, on the opposite bank, an immense tower. For weeks and months the crusaders pressed around Damietta and its stubborn satellite. A concerted assault finally caused the tower to surrender in August 1218. Yet the crusaders could not exploit this propitious moment because by now the Nile was in full flood and, in any case, some of the German and Frisian crusaders had chosen to return west by the autumn sailing. In their place, contingents of English, French, and Italian crusaders arrived, including the papal legate, Pelagius of Albano.
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Within days Saphadin, the aged and infirm Sultan al-Adil, died on August 31, 1218, and Egypt, Syria, and Iraq fragmented into a series of regional powers; Sultan al-Kamil took power in Cairo and it was he who led the defense of Damietta. To block the Nile he ordered the sinking of a series of boats across the river. To overcome this barrier the crusaders fixed upon a particularly ingenious solution, namely, to enlarge a nearby canal that connected the Nile to the Mediterranean. The presence of men from the Low Countries, a region familiar with complex hydrography through the reclamation of large areas of land from the North Sea, provided the necessary engineering skills to deepen the old canal and bypass the barrier. Local laborers and prisoners of war were pressed to help and a two-mile stretch of water was sufficiently modified to permit ships to pass. The completion of this scheme allowed the siege to tighten further although Damietta’s defenders remained resolute.

An atmosphere of gloom pervaded the winter of 1218–19; a flood devastated the crusader camp and an outbreak of scurvy took a heavy toll as well. One crusader described the position thus: “What are we doing here, dearest companions? It is better for us to die in battle than to live like captives in a foreign land.”
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In the summer of 1219 Duke Leopold of Austria left for home and morale in the camp fell further. Men were bored, their minds paralyzed by the unendingly dull vista of sea and sand; food was often in short supply and the Christians remained pinned between Damietta and a large Muslim army. The hot Egyptian summer sapped the energy of both sides and stalemate ensued. James of Vitry, the bishop of Acre, wrote that “we were in the grip of despair.”
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In the course of the crusaders’ stay outside Damietta one arrival was of particular interest: Francis of Assisi, the man who founded one of the greatest orders of friars in Christendom. The Franciscan vocation was to spread the faith to all and, for that reason, the fearless cleric decided to try to convert Sultan al-Kamil. The saint’s biographers praised his boldness in visiting the sultan.
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Al-Kamil treated him with proper respect but, unsurprisingly, was not swayed from Islam. The emergence of conversion as a theme in Europe’s dealings with the wider world is one of the most striking developments
of religious and cultural life of the thirteenth century, and the close, if paradoxical, relationship between crusading warfare and the Church’s efforts to convince others of the need to become a Christian formed a central part of that.

The concept of reaching out beyond the bounds of Latin Christendom also applied to contact with the Eastern Christian Churches. It is estimated that almost 20 percent of the Egyptian population were Copts—a Monophysite Christian group who believed in the divinity, but not the humanity, of Christ and were thus theologically divided from the Catholic Church. Some in the papal court hoped for a grand Christian alliance against the forces of Islam: James of Vitry wrote from Acre in 1217 that “The Christians of the Orient, as far away as Prester John, have many kings, who, when they hear that the crusade has arrived, will come to its aid and wage war on the Saracens.”
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Prester John was a quasi-mythical figure who had existed on the fringes of Europe’s imagination for decades. He was thought to rule a Christian empire to the east, a notion based upon the memory of preaching in India by the apostle Thomas.
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Once the invasion of Egypt was underway the crusaders made contact with the Copts and in mid-1219 a prophecy, written in Arabic, was given to Pelagius.
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The legate was told its meaning and he became intrigued; it updated a ninth-century Nestorian tract to include Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem. This was followed by the prediction that an army from the West, led by a tall man with a lean face, would take Damietta and Egypt. Furthermore, a king would come from over the mountains and conquer Damascus while the king of the Abissi would destroy Mecca. The Abissi meant the Abyssinians, in other words, the powerful Christian kingdom of Ethiopia. Pelagius—in what, to a modern reader, seems a moment of alarming hubris—believed that he was the tall man with the thin face. He had the document translated into Latin and sent it back to western Europe where it was widely circulated.

In the meantime, the position inside Damietta had become desperate and in the autumn of 1219 Sultan al-Kamil suggested terms that included the return of the True Cross, the city of Jerusalem and other former Christian lands, and all prisoners. In return he wanted to keep Damietta and the strategically valuable castles of Kerak and Shaubak in Transjordan. On the surface this seemed immensely advantageous to the Christians, yet it provoked a furious debate in the crusader camp—Pelagius, the clergy, the Templars,
the Hospitallers, and the Italian merchant communities were against it because they felt victory was imminent; with Damietta taken, the remainder of Egypt would fall and lead to a permanent reconquest of the Holy Land. On the other hand, King John of Jerusalem, most of the northern European crusaders, and the Teutonic Knights preferred the certainty of having possession of Jerusalem. Pelagius won the argument and al-Kamil’s proposal was rejected.

Within a few days, on November 5, 1219, Damietta capitulated. Al-Kamil had tried time and again to bring relief to his coreligionists but to no avail; it seemed as if the legate was right to turn down the sultan’s offer. Inside Damietta the crusaders found a city filled with the dead and the dying, but also containing immense riches. King John was entrusted with control of Damietta and it became part of the kingdom of Jerusalem. John minted coins bearing the legend “Iohannes rex” and “Damietta” to demonstrate the permanent nature of the conquest and his place as its ruler.
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Yet the need for reinforcements remained acute and the leadership issued a desperate appeal to the pope for more money and manpower; most particularly they wanted Frederick to fulfill his vow. Pelagius’s control over the income sent by the papacy (the result of levies in the West) meant his influence increased considerably. While other leaders simply ran out of money and went home, and John of Brienne could not fund large numbers of troops himself, Pelagius’s treasure chest allowed him to dictate the direction of the crusade.

Over the next few months the expedition stalled as contingents from the West came and went—a revolving-door effect that meant there was little continuity. John and Pelagius quarreled over strategy while the king also had to return to his territories in the Levant to face attacks from Damascus. The crusader army stayed encamped outside Damietta; any sense of advantage from its capture soon evaporated. In the summer of 1220 an imperial fleet reached Damietta bearing the news that Frederick planned to join the campaign later in the year. In the event he had to postpone his plans because of troubles in Sicily. The arrival of the emperor himself, presumably accompanied by a massive army, would, in theory, do much to secure victory. In the meantime, the crusaders remained pinned on the coast and, as with any military force that lies idle, discipline in the army degenerated and prostitution and gambling became rife. From the Muslim perspective this was a vital period of calm. The fall of Damietta had been a considerable
blow; Ibn al-Athir, a contemporary Aleppan writer, claimed, “thus all the lands in Egypt and Syria were on the point of being overcome and all the people were fearful of them [the Franks] and had come to expect disaster any morning or evening. The population of Egypt wanted to evacuate their land for fear of the enemy, but it was not a time to escape, for the enemy had encompassed them on every side.”
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While al-Kamil issued desperate pleas for help to his brothers in Syria he also began to consolidate his own resources and to harass the Christian camp.

As the tedious, torpid months of 1220 and 1221 wore on, the clergy began to pay even greater attention to a number of new prophecies. More than almost anything else from the medieval period, the idea of trusting a prophecy seems peculiarly alien to the present day—a real whiff of superstition before the age of reason took over—yet the senior churchmen of the time were ideologically predisposed to recognize the biblical provenance of such ideas and to have faith in them. In any case, several of the predictions appeared to have come true: for example, Hannan’s prophecy had indeed foretold the Christian capture of Damietta in 1219.

In the spring of 1221 a text known as the
Relatio de Davide
reached James of Vitry. He considered this work so important that he dispatched numerous copies to the West where the recipients included the pope and the chancellor of Paris University.
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The letter described how David, the great-grandson of Prester John, had attacked Persia and taken cities such as Bukhara, Samarkand, and Khurasan. The story was “confirmed” by the amazing adventures of a group of Frankish prisoners who had been captured in Egypt and dispatched by al-Kamil to the caliph of Baghdad to try to convince him to help. The caliph sent them on to “David” (in reality a Mongol warlord), who, realizing that these men were fighting the same Muslims as he was, ordered them back to Frankish Antioch and thence they returned to Damietta! Given the Christians’ almost complete ignorance of the Mongols’ existence, plus the men’s obvious linguistic limitations, it is not surprising they had failed to appreciate the true identity of their captors. On the other hand, because the latter seemed hostile to Islam and ruled the areas said to be governed by Prester John, it appeared reasonable to suppose that this was indeed King David bringing the fight to Islam from the east. The reality, for both Christianity and Islam, was incalculably more sinister because this was an early report of the most westward foray to date of Chinggis Khan, emperor of the Mongols and arguably the most terrifying
warlord in history; by c. 1240 the Mongol military machine would conquer lands from the China Sea to Hungary—the greatest land empire of all time.
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The fact that the
Relatio de Davide
mentioned the Mongol destruction of the Christian kingdom of Georgia was one inconsistency the clerics failed to take due note of, but in essence James and Pelagius were so receptive to the prophecies that they accepted the bulk of these works as fact.