Holy Warriors Read online

  In the decades after Innocent’s pontificate this approach changed when Honorius III (1216–27) brought the Baltic crusades back on a par with the campaigns to the Holy Land, probably a reflection of his interest in the emergent mendicant orders of the Franciscans and the Dominicans.50 Missionary work needed support, and crusades could help to defend both the newly converted and the missionaries themselves. In the 1230s the Teutonic Knights arrived in Prussia. Originally founded during the Third Crusade, this new group of warrior-monks soon established itself as an important institution in the Levant.51 Given its national origins it also became a natural outlet for crusading ideas in the Baltic and Prussia and the papacy provided it with considerable support and freedom of action.52 By 1245 Innocent IV had awarded the Teutonic Knights the right to recruit crusaders at any time, thereby removing the need for him to grant permission for a specific campaign. The war against the pagans became, therefore, a perpetual crusade, a ceaseless struggle against the enemies of the faith. As the experience of the Holy Land showed, taking territory was one thing, but holding it was often a much harder matter. Yet the Teutonic Knights soon became such a powerful and wealthy institution they were capable of doing just this, and the order secured promises from the papacy and the German Empire that it could keep the conquered lands for itself. As we shall see, this was hugely significant because in later centuries it meant the Teutonics became a sovereign power in their own right in northeastern Europe.

  THE FOURTH LATERAN COUNCIL (1215) AND THE CALL FOR THE FIFTH CRUSADE

  With his crusades against Markward of Anweiler, the Cathars of southern France, the Muslims of Spain, as well as the ill-fated Fourth Crusade, we can see Innocent III’s near-obsession with fighting the enemies of the faithful. To this list one might add calls for a crusade against heretics in Milan in 1212–13 and hints that he considered a campaign against King John of England for his persistent disobedience to papal instructions.53 The popular enthusiasm for the Children’s Crusade was a manifestation of continued public support for holy war, and in April 1213 Innocent issued Quia maior, one of the most powerful and forceful crusade appeals of all time.54 Innocent’s sense of passion blazed forth and he demanded action to recover the holy places, “because at this time there is a more compelling urgency than there has ever been before to help the Holy Land in her need.” He argued that God could have saved Jerusalem if he had wished, but because of man’s sins he had created a test of their faith and now offered the people who fought for him a chance of salvation. To the individuals who rejected this opportunity Innocent had a threat: “those who refuse to pay him the servant’s service that they owe him in a crisis of such great urgency will justly deserve to suffer a sentence of damnation on the Last Day of severe Judgement.” The pope castigated ungrateful Christians for rejecting Christ’s “ancient device” that would deliver salvation to them. He sought to arouse their feelings by describing the slavery and suffering of captive Christians and he delivered a scathing denunciation of “the false prophet Muhammad, who has seduced many men from the truth by worldly enticements and the pleasures of the flesh,” a typical attack on the alleged immorality of the Muslims. Innocent even cast the situation in an apocalyptical framework when he reminded his audience that, according to the Revelation of Saint John, the end of the beast, that is, Muhammad, would happen in 666 years, of which almost six hundred had passed.

  Innocent sought to capitalize on the hunger for crusading apparent in the Children’s Crusade by taking the radical step of broadening his appeal beyond the usual warrior classes. He indicated that those who were unsuitable, or unable to go in person, but who paid for a soldier to go in their place would also receive full remission of their sins. He also offered partial remission of sins to those who provided money for other crusaders. Innocent’s vision of Christianity pulling together was restated in his commands that communities should organize processions, prayers, and almsgivings to show their support for the crusade and to gain God’s favor—in other words, events similar to the display in Rome in 1212. Innocent offered some practical ideas too. He urged abbots, bishops, and all the clergy, as well as cities, villages, and castles, to contribute to the crusade. He also asked the Italian mercantile cities to provide vessels for the campaign, which showed the importance of shipping as the method of transportation to the eastern Mediterranean. As noted above, he temporarily suspended the crusades in Spain and southern France on the basis that they were making good progress and the needs of the Holy Land were more urgent.

  To bring the spiritual attention of the Catholic Church into proper focus, Innocent then organized the Fourth Lateran Council, an event advertised years in advance, to give himself a platform to address the largest gathering of churchmen and lay leaders in the medieval period.55 This most dazzling of public ceremonies took place over several days in November 1215 when more than four hundred bishops, archbishops, patriarchs and cardinals, numerous representatives of cathedral chapters and monasteries, as well as envoys from the rulers of France, Germany, Hungary, Jerusalem, Cyprus, and Aragon, plus Count Raymond VI of Toulouse (keen to defend himself against accusations of heresy), gathered to hear Innocent set out his vision for the faithful. This was an astounding display of papal power and undoubtedly the apogee of Innocent’s—and probably any medieval pope’s—pontificate. The new crusade loomed large on the agenda and Innocent added a boost to Quia maior by legislating that the clergy should give one-twentieth of their annual income to the crusade—a very unpopular move among the clerics, but a way to show lay people that the Church (with its obvious wealth) truly supported the expedition. The pope promised that he and the cardinals would make an even bigger donation to the campaign—one-tenth of their income; he also commanded the secular authorities to prevent Jews from charging interest on loans to crusaders.56

  At the forefront of his message was a total obligation on mankind to obey the divine mandate of the crusade. Once again he castigated those who were unwilling to take the cross: the sense of threat in Innocent’s crusade appeals was something barely apparent in earlier papal bulls and showed his unwavering belief in the necessity and moral right of the cause. His final strictures demanded a four-year peace throughout the Christian world, an attempt to head off another common reason why crusades had struggled; those who broke this order were threatened with excommunication.

  Innocent intended the crusaders to gather at Brindisi in southern Italy in June 1217 and he hoped to send God’s army on its way in person. In the event, he did not live to see his grand plan fulfilled. In April 1216 the pope addressed an enthusiastic crowd of potential crusaders at Orvieto and, in pouring rain, as the throng clamored to take the cross he insisted on fixing the insignia to everyone who had taken their vows. Soon after it was apparent that he had caught a chill, but the pope traveled on to Todi and then to Perugia, where his condition began to weaken considerably and he died on July 16, 1216. By some astonishing error, no one was left to guard his body in the cathedral and the following morning the corpse of the most powerful man in Christendom lay almost naked, stripped of its precious clothes and starting to putrefy: “How brief and how vain is the treacherous glory of the world” as one contemporary observed.57

  His pontificate had been a period of astounding energy, confidence, and challenges for the Church. Innocent truly believed that as the Vicar of Christ he was responsible for the souls of everyone, that all Christians should be subject to his authority, and that the crusade was a means by which he could maintain and extend this guardianship. As we have seen, he made some progress in Iberia and (at the time of his death) against the Cathars, but the Fourth Crusade was a disaster and the Fifth Crusade would struggle to gather momentum against a background of turmoil in the German Empire and the continued warfare between England and France. As the pope himself wrote in one of his treatises: “I have done as well as I could, but not as well as I wished.”58

  “STUPOR MUNDI”—THE WONDER OF THE WORLD

  Frederick II, the Fift
h Crusade, and the Recovery of Jerusalem

  “The emperor, as the custodians [of the Dome of the Rock] recall, had a red skin, and was bald and short-sighted. Had he been a slave he would not have been worth 200 dirham. It was clear from what he said that his Christianity was simply a game to him.”1 This dismissive and derogatory description by a contemporary Damascene writer hardly brings to mind a crusading hero in the mold of Richard the Lionheart—yet it was Frederick II of Germany who recovered Jerusalem, rather than the great warrior-king. The fact that Frederick achieved this while an excommunicate and without striking a single blow signals what an intriguing and controversial personality he was. To his enemies in Christendom he was a heretic, a false crusader, a friend of Muslims and Mongols, a man hostile to the Church; for some, he even represented an apocalyptic figure; the fourth beast in the vision of the prophet Daniel. To his admirers, however, he became known as “stupor mundi” (the wonder of the world); a linguist, a patron of science, a philosopher, a mathematician, an astrologer, the author of the definitive treatise on falconry: an archetype for the renaissance man. He was also a victorious crusader and the most powerful ruler in medieval Christendom.2 Frederick spent the majority of his childhood and adolescence in the cultural and ethnic melting pot of southern Italy where Byzantine, Norman-Sicilian, and Islamic influences overlapped and blended to glorious and, usually, harmonious effect. The royal palaces were modeled on the cool chambers and highly decorated buildings of North Africa; Muslim and Christian officials worked alongside one another and some of the imperial bodyguard were followers of the Prophet too.3 Frederick himself was fluent in Arabic—surely the greatest advantage of all in his dealings with the Muslim world simply because the barrier of language is such a potent cause of fear and mistrust. The emperor was a highly educated, literate man who also spoke the Sicilian dialect, as well as Latin, Greek, French, and German. He engaged in debates and correspondence about issues such as the location of Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell. He also enjoyed entertainments, particularly dancing, although his reported enthusiasm for the performances of female Muslim artistes atop large glass balls formed just one of several charges of immorality laid against him by the papacy. There seems little doubt that the women at his court lived in some form of harem, kept in seclusion and cared for by eunuchs. One must be careful not to paint too rosy a picture of Frederick’s involvement with Arab peoples because in 1224 he savagely attacked a group of Sicilian Muslims who had resisted royal rule. It would, however, be fair to say that he was entirely familiar with the culture of the Muslim Near East and he had a manifest appreciation of what was important to its people.

  THE FIFTH CRUSADE: PREPARATIONS AND PERSONNEL

  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.4 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.5 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.6

  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.”7 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.”8

  PROPHECY AND VISIONS ON THE NILE DELTA

  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 or
ders 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.9 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.”10 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.11