Holy Warriors (43 page)

Frederick arrived back at Brindisi on June 10, 1229. Gregory tried hard to displace him from southern Italy and Sicily to prevent the empire continuing to surround the papal states. The pope raised troops to invade, although he stopped short of calling a crusade against the excommunicate, and his soldiers wore the symbol of the keys of Saint Peter rather than the cross. Imperial forces had resisted strongly and a groundswell of support enabled the emperor to sweep aside his enemies. He also confiscated lands owned by the Templars and Hospitallers in southern Italy as a punishment for their opposition to him in the Holy Land. After months of threats and insults—Gregory, for example, described the emperor as “the disciple
of Muhammad”—agreements in the summer of 1230 brought peace. Frederick managed to preserve his hold on northern Italy, Germany, and Sicily (as he always wished) although he promised the Sicilian Church elections free of interference and to return the properties of the Military Orders. On August 28 the ban of excommunication was lifted and thus Frederick had eventually emerged the victor, although he was careful not to humiliate the pope. At a private dinner at Anagni, Gregory, Frederick, and Hermann of Salza gathered together to plan the way forward for the Christian cause.
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In the short term, peace between Frederick and al-Kamil ensured a period of calm but by the mid-1230s Gregory started to make sure that a new crusade would be ready to set out once the agreement expired.

In 1234 the pope dispatched preachers across Europe. While the response from imperial lands was muted, France and England reacted with vigor to begin what is known as the Barons’ Crusade.
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A swath of the French nobility, headed by Thibaud IV, the count of Champagne and king of Navarre, took the cross. From England, Richard, Earl of Cornwall, brother of Henry III and brother-in-law of Frederick II, led a large contingent. Neither King Louis IX of France nor Henry III joined the expedition, in part out of mutual suspicion. In Louis’s case his youth may also have counted against him (he was only twenty years old) although his later career would show an unmatched devotion to the crusading cause. Henry expressed some interest in the defense of the Holy Land and the settlers continued to target him for support. In the summer of 1247 he was sent a relic of the Holy Blood by the patriarch of Jerusalem and the masters of the Templars and Hospitallers. On October 13 the king personally carried the crystal vase that contained Christ’s blood from Saint Paul’s Cathedral to Westminster Abbey, and after Mass and a sermon it was presented to the clergy. Henry also had rooms at Westminster’s royal palace decorated with stories of the First Crusade, and while he assumed the cross in 1250 he never actually went to the Levant.
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The year after Thibaud took the cross, the papacy received a desperate appeal for help from Baldwin II, the Latin emperor of Constantinople. So alarmist was the tone of this message that Gregory decided to direct
Thibaud to Constantinople instead of the Holy Land. Thus the tragedy of the Fourth Crusade continued to play itself out; the morally questionable circumstances in which the Latin Empire was created, coupled with the fact that Constantinople lacked the spiritual pull and unparalleled status of Jerusalem, caused the count to decline this proposal.
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Gregory tried to withhold papal funding for his campaign but Thibaud was rich enough to crusade from his own resources (although he did mistreat the Jewish communities in his lands to raise cash). If one considers the deviation of the Fourth Crusade to Constantinople, the success of the excommunicate Frederick II in recovering Jerusalem, and now Thibaud’s resistance to attempts to steer him toward the Latin Empire, papal control over crusades can be seen to be in tatters—yet impressive levels of recruitment for the Barons’ Crusade showed that the basic idea of fighting for God in the Holy Land remained strong.

The French crusaders sailed from Marseilles on the autumn passage of 1239. Once in the Levant they had to decide whether to attack Egypt or Damascus. In the meantime they raided enemy territory in Palestine. In one such episode the count of Brittany gathered rich booty but his success was to have a fatal coda. The sense of competitiveness so indelibly ingrained in the chivalric mentality of western European knights dictated that if one noble achieved great feats in battle, his colleagues should emulate, or exceed, him. A large group of nobles led by the count of Bar and the duke of Burgundy crossed into Egyptian territory near Gaza. They rode through the night and then paused to rest, planning to wait until dawn when the locals brought out their livestock. Foolishly the crusaders had camped in a narrow, sandy valley, factors that would ruin their horses’ ability to maneuver. They settled down to what seems like a picnic: “rich men had cloths spread and sat down to eat, for they had brought plenty of bread, poultry and capons, cooked meat, cheese and fruit, as well as wine in casks and barrels.” This showed fatal disrespect for their enemies. A Christian writer noted in a rather ominous tone: “Then they learned that Our Lord will not be served in this way.”
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Muslim scouts had observed their presence and the Egyptian commander used watch fires to assemble his troops. By first light on November 13 he had placed a large force of crossbowmen, archers, and slingers on the hills around the valley while he stationed cavalry at the exit. A huge crash of drums and a blast of horns announced his intention to attack. The crusaders tried to resist but soon exhausted their supplies of arrows and
crossbow bolts; the enemy closed in and in spite of fierce resistance the Christians succumbed to fatigue and their opponents’ sheer weight of numbers. Many of the knights were taken captive and sent to the major cities of Egypt where they were paraded through the streets and pelted with animal excrement. A victory mosque at Beit-Hanun still marks this Ayyubid triumph. A few months later the garrison of the Tower of David in Jerusalem was ejected too.
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In the spring of 1240, fearful of the strength of his coreligionists in Egypt, the ruler of Damascus sought an alliance with the Franks. Thibaud decided to turn to diplomacy and made a treaty whereby he recovered control of the castles of Beaufort and Sidon and secured recognition of Christian rights to the lands west of the River Jordan, although in reality this territory was still in the hands of the Muslim ruler of Transjordan. Many crusaders were angered by this policy—they could not understand why such a powerful group of knights did not fight. Papal legate Friar William of Cordelle concluded a sermon with the words: “For God’s sake, good people, pray to our Lord, beg him to give the commanders of this host their hearts back, for you can be sure they have lost them through their sins! Such a huge force of Christians ought to be able to attack the unbelievers in any place at all if they had God on their side.”
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Some fighting took place when Thibaud’s men seized Jerusalem to enable the count to make a pilgrimage to the holy city. Another positive development was the recognition of Christian claims to Transjordan by its governor. The count’s moves toward the Damascene axis had, potentially, one flaw: the fate of the prisoners from the Battle of Gaza who remained in Egyptian hands. Thibaud tried to secure their release through a truce with Sultan Ayyub of Egypt, but this was angrily opposed by the Military Orders, who disliked dealing with him. Other western crusaders wanted revenge on the Muslims, regardless of the danger to their captive colleagues. Thibaud realized that he had lost the support of the majority of the army and even, it was said, feared that he would be physically attacked. In September 1240 he slipped away back to France.
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Within weeks the prisoners were freed; in the meantime Richard of Cornwall’s force reached the Holy Land. Perhaps six hundred knights strong, this contingent could have formed the basis for a more aggressive action, but like Thibaud he took a diplomatic approach. Thibaud’s truce was confirmed and Richard also refortified the strategically important castle of Ascalon before he returned to the West in May 1241.
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Even though the Barons’ Crusade saw little in the way of military success, it had managed to exploit the endemic divisions within the Muslim Near East to build upon Frederick II’s achievements and push the kingdom of Jerusalem to its greatest extent since before the Battle of Hattin, over fifty years earlier. Its leaders were frustrated further by factional disunity among the Christians themselves. The poor discipline at Gaza and the issue of the prisoners severely restricted the crusaders’ ability to launch a major assault on Egypt. In any case, the Military Orders were bickering with one another and ongoing troubles between representatives of the Italian city-states, imperial officers, and the local nobility also drained the Christians’ ability to strike against their enemies. This rather weary poem conveys the sense of wasted potential:

With the Barons’ Crusade over, other sources of help would need to take their turn. The chances of Frederick II visiting the Holy Land again seemed remote. His conflict with Rome, in essence over papal claims of superiority in the secular, as well as the religious, sphere continued to ferment during the 1230s. At the end of the decade he was excommunicated again, and in 1245 Pope Innocent IV declared him deposed from the imperial throne.
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Frederick ignored both the decree and an attempt to launch a crusade against him. The emperor seemed to be in a strong position when, in December 1250, he died, just short of his fifty-sixth birthday. Frederick had continued to enjoy, and to advertise, his good relations with Muslim powers. The elephant given to him by al-Kamil carried a wooden tower that flew the imperial standard in European campaigns (the beast lived until 1248), while in 1232 he entertained embassies from Damascus, Cairo, and the Assassins at his court. The Egyptians sent him a marvelous jeweled astronomical tent in which images of the sun and moon were moved by clockwork to tell the time both by day and by night; so valuable was the machine that it had to be kept in the royal treasury. Diplomacy continued at formal banquets where Sicilian bishops shared tables with Egyptian emirs and envoys from the Assassins—a truly remarkable guest list and, again, a testament to
Frederick’s open-minded approach.
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Truces and trade deals with Egypt showed his continued good relationship with al-Kamil, although such arrangements provided easy ammunition for papal attacks on him. Some in the West believed the emperor a man of immorality. One writer placed him in a most rarefied category of villain: “worse than Herod, Judas and Nero,” yet none of the major secular rulers were ever persuaded to oppose him openly. His vilification by the Church helps to explain why, unlike his contemporaries Louis IX of France and Fernando III of Castile and León, he was never canonized. Undeniably, however, he had experienced one of the most tumultuous reigns of the medieval period and his crusade, however unconventional in form, offered a glimpse of a different, and potentially more fruitful, way forward for the Holy Land. As his officials prepared to lay their master to rest they wrapped Frederick in a silk garment embroidered with Arabic texts. He was buried in Palermo Cathedral in a fine porphyry tomb, still to be seen today. His epitaph, secular in tone, reads: “If honesty, intelligence, the grace of manly virtues, wealth and noble birth, could death resist, Frederick who lies within, would not be dead.”
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“TO KILL THE SERPENT, FIRST YOU MUST CRUSH THE HEAD”

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aladin’s triumph at the Battle of Hattin is the most famous Muslim victory over the Franks, yet it was not—by a considerable margin—the most crushing. Fifty-seven years after Hattin, on October 17, 1244, the devastation inflicted upon the Christian army at the Battle of La Forbie marked a far heavier blow to the Frankish cause. In its bloody aftermath came the expedition of King (later Saint) Louis IX of France, the most zealous crusader king in history. His opponents included Baibars, a young Mamluk warrior who, in later decades, pushed the Christian presence in the Holy Land to the brink of extinction.

Events outside the Levant created the circumstances of La Forbie. The Khwarazmians were a group of nomadic Turkish tribesmen driven westward by the Mongol invasion of Persia.
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These Muslim warriors made contact with the sultan of Cairo, who, in the early 1240s, promised them support for an invasion of the Holy Land. In the summer of 1244 the Khwarazmians tore through the Frankish Levant and slaughtered thousands of Christians; as one observer wrote: “these people took no prisoners, all they wanted to do was kill.”
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As they closed in on Jerusalem most of the inhabitants fled in the face of such a terrible danger; no one anticipated that this panic-stricken exodus signaled the end of Christian control over the holy city for more than six centuries. The priests of the Holy Sepulchre refused to abandon their church, a brave decision but one that would precipitate their martyrdom. As the clergy celebrated Mass the Khwarazmians broke into the building and began to butcher them; some were disemboweled
while others were beheaded at the altars. Next, the invaders ripped open the tombs of the kings of Jerusalem and cast out the bones of crusading heroes such as Godfrey of Bouillon and King Baldwin I in their search for treasure. A northern French writer grimly summarized their deeds: “they committed far more acts of shame, filth and destruction against Jesus Christ and the holy places and Christendom than all the unbelievers who had been in the land had ever done in peace or war.”
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