God's War: A New History of the Crusades

contingent under the bishop of Hildesheim stopped off in Cyprus to crown Aimery, the bulk of the fleet reached Acre on 22 September.

For once, a western crusade appeared in the Holy Land when it was needed. The truce of 1192 had expired and, twelve days before the main German force arrived, Henry of Champagne had died in a bizarre accident when he fell out of an open window while reviewing troops at his palace in Acre. Already the Ayyubid chief, Saladin’s brother al-Adil, was on the move. The death of Saladin in March 1193 prompted a decade of internecine feuding within his family. This was won by al-Adil, who, from his original base in northern Syria and Iraq, managed to supplant his nephews in Damascus (1196), Egypt (1200) and Aleppo (1202). In 1197, al-Adil was quick to respond to a raid into Galilee by the early German arrivals under Henry of Brabant, driving them back to the suburbs of Acre before swinging south to besiege Jaffa. It was the relief force for Jaffa that Henry of Champagne was inspecting when he met his death. Days later the port fell, imperilling the fragile status quo established in 1192. However, once the full German expeditionary force had assembled after 22 September, it was agreed to strike northwards to the ruins of Sidon and the Muslim base at Beirut rather than attempt to recover Jaffa immediately. This made immediate strategic sense, taking advantage of the recovery earlier in the year of Jubail further up the coast; cooperation from Bohemund III of Antioch, whose son, the future Bohemund IV, was now also count of Tripoli; and help from the Pisans and Amalric of Cyprus, anxious about the pirates operating out of Beirut. Led by Henry of Brabant, in the absence of a Frankish ruler now in temporary overall control, the Christian forces, after taking possession of the rubble of Sidon, occupied Beirut in late October. The land bridge from Tripoli to Tyre and Acre was restored.

Security for these coastal ports was less certain. Al-Adil’s response to the earlier German raid into Galilee had demonstrated even Acre’s vulnerability to a hostile hinterland. Before any attempt on Jerusalem, the Germans, on the advice of the local baronage, decided to consolidate the Christian position in western Galilee by attacking the castle at Toron. After initial success, the siege, which began on 28 November 1197, got bogged down. The proximity to Acre and Tyre of the German army both at Toron and before, on the Beirut campaign, may have carried a political dimension. The death of Henry of Champagne had once again opened the question of the succession to the throne of Jerusalem. His widow, Isabella, now had three young daughters, two by Henry; the eldest, Maria, daughter of Conrad of Montferrat, was still only five. Isabella, a veteran of three marriages but still only in her twenties, remained the legitimate queen. Some proposed a marriage to a local nobleman, the seneschal, Ralph of Tiberias, but the Germans, supported by the military orders and the chancellor, Joscias archbishop of Tyre, advocated the recently widowed Aimery of Cyprus. The attraction of a union of Cyprus and Jerusalem was compelling in economic, military and political terms, especially given the tensions between the two since 1192. Personally, Aimery possessed experience, close family connections with the Jerusalem nobility (his late wife’s Ibelin first cousins were Queen Isabella’s half-brothers) and had recently become a client of the German emperor. A united Cypriot–Jerusalem kingdom under German overlordship offered prospects of entrenching Hohenstaufen imperialism across the Mediterranean, thereby providing a permanent conduit of aid for the Holy Land without necessarily compromising the jealously promoted rights of the indigenous nobility, Italian cities or military orders. The presence of a large German army reinforced this optimism. Joscias of Tyre, who successfully negotiated Aimery’s acceptance of Isabella’s hand and the Jerusalem throne in October 1197, may also have reflected on these cross-Mediterranean advantages.³³ He had been Jerusalem’s leading ambassador to the west in the desperate days after Hattin.

In January 1198, Aimery married Isabella and was crowned king of Jerusalem. The same month, the archbishop of Mainz crowned Leo II in Cilician Armenia. Yet the Hohenstaufen grand design was already defunct. The sickly Henry VI had died at Messina on 28 September 1197, leaving only an infant son, Frederick, not yet three years old, and a restless, fissile and violent inheritance from the Baltic to the Tyrrhenian Sea. Another casualty of Henry’s death was his crusade. On hearing the news, and faced by the prospect of a Muslim counter-attack, the Germans raised the siege of Toron on 2 February, effectively ending the German crusade. The Franks of Outremer with their new monarch preferred accommodation with al-Adil to any further provocation or grand gestures. Beirut gave them a useful bargaining chip, as well as an important compensation for the loss of Jaffa. Aimery secured a renewal of the truce in July 1198 until 1204. The conquests of 1197 were to stand on each side, al-Adil with Jaffa; the Franks with Beirut, which was given to Aimery’s new brother-in-law, John of Ibelin, later known as the ‘Old Lord of Beirut’. Impotent in the Holy Land, the leaders of the German army were anxious to return home to cope with the new political uncertainties. Apart from the capture of Beirut, which remained in Christian hands until 1291, the installation of Aimery as king of Cyprus and then king of Jerusalem, and of Leo II as king of Armenia, the German crusade flattered to deceive. Even the opportunity created by Ayyubid division proved counter-productive, as al-Adil increased his reputation as the strong man of the region who faced down the western infidels. Henry VI may have hoped his patronage of the fledgling military order of Teutonic Knights, for whom he obtained papal privileges in 1196, would provide a permanent magnet for German support for the Holy Land, but the failure of the crusade prevented any major expansion of its position for a generation.

The immediate future of Outremer, at least until the expiry of the 1198 truce, seemed to rest with diplomacy, internal consolidation and only tactical military excursions against hostile neighbours rather than general confrontation. In the west, the chances for a new mass crusade to the Holy Land faced serious impediments as the political balance promised by Henry VI’s imperialism collapsed. Germany slid into civil war over a disputed succession. Italy resumed its fractured insecurity. The Spanish kings were fully occupied with the insurgent Almohads, while the kings of France and England continued a twenty-years’ war (1194–1214) over the Angevin inheritance. The election of Innocent III in January 1198 did not obviously alter these political realities. However, the new pope preferred to set, not follow, the patterns of Christendom’s public and private lives.

INNOCENT III AND THE NEW CRUSADE

In letters sent across Christendom dated 15 August 1198, Innocent III called for a new crusade to the Holy Land. Specifically, he cited the withdrawal of the Germans after the capture of Beirut and the fears of a Muslim counter-attack. As if to signal a more energetic papal regime, Innocent combined heightened rhetoric, an awareness of past failings and a desire to control organization. The communal endeavour was emphasized by appealing to nobles and cities to provide enough armed men. The troops were to serve for two years on the eastern campaign. Preaching was instituted.³⁴ One papal legate, Peter Capuano, was to try to impose a five-year truce in the war between Richard I and Philip II, which had been continuing ever since Richard’s release from Henry VI’s prison in 1194. Another, Soffredo, cardinal priest of St Praxedis, was to travel to Venice to investigate transport. The plenary nature of the indulgences, offered through the mercy of God, was more explicit. Its clarity found its mark in the memory of at least one who answered the call, Geoffrey of Villehardouin, marshal of Champagne, who described it simply as ‘remission of any sins they have committed, provided they have confessed them’.³⁵ The only element of obviously wishful thought in Innocent’s appeal lay in the proposed deadline for muster and departure, set for March 1199. However, from its inception to its ragged and bitter conclusion in 1205, most things that could go wrong for Innocent’s crusade did. The Fourth Crusade, as it is now known, became the most controversial of them all, provoking Steven Runciman’s famous Philippic: ‘there was never a greater crime against humanity than the Fourth Crusade’.³⁶

The reason for the notoriety of the Fourth Crusade lay and lies in its outcome, the conquest of large tracts of the Christian Byzantine empire after its capital Constantinople had been sacked by the crusaders in April 1204. Yet Innocent’s intention had been to reverse the hung verdict of the Third Crusade and the disappointment of the German expedition in Palestine, not revive Henry VI’s threats to the Greeks of 1195–6. Byzantium inevitably figured in Innocent’s calculations, as it had to in those of all planners of major eastern crusades since 1095. However a hostile assault on Constantinople formed no part of the original papal scheme. Innocent’s motives, as revealed in his bull of August 1198, in so far that they embraced considerations beyond the need to recover all of the Holy Land, concerned his promotion of papal authority, in the operation of the crusade itself and in his interference in secular politics to achieve it. There was no mention of Byzantium in the 1198 or subsequent bulls for the enterprise. The controversy surrounding the Fourth Crusade revolves centrally around the issue of intent. If the violent capture and barbaric pillage of Constantinople and the subsequent dispossession of the Greeks were crimes, were they the result of deliberate malice, conspiracy or a series of accidental decisions that led to unforeseen although consciously embraced consequences? Was the destruction of Byzantium murder, manslaughter or even self- defence?

Immediately, crusade recruitment proved another damp squib. It is sometimes argued that Innocent III