God's War: A New History of the Crusades

possibly including 1,000 marks King John of England gave his nephew Louis of Blois.²³ Odo of Champlitte and Guy of Thourotte, poet and castellan of Coucy, may have received money collected by Fulk of Neuilly.²⁴ Lesser crusaders resorted to traditional methods of fundraising. Hilduin of Villemoyenne in Champagne, in a series of land sales, received at least 280 livres, 200 of which was paid over by the monks of St Peter of Montier-le-Celle in pennies.²⁵ A ‘fidelis’ of Baldwin of Flanders, Romond, mortgaged property for a six-year loan of 140 livres in Hainault money.²⁶ The problem with all these measures, as on previous campaigns, lay in the inability of crucesignati to budget accurately for future expenses. Hugh of St Pol was not the only one forced into debt by the expenses of the campaign. Finance may have determined the initial structure of the crusading armies but, again in common with earlier crusades, the need to find large sums of money during the expedition itself exerted a no less overwhelming influence on strategy, objectives and outcome.

PREPARATIONS AND THE TREATY OF VENICE 1201

Preaching, recruitment and planning were not sequential processes but ran in parallel. Until late 1199, there is little evidence of the last. However, Innocent’s appeal of August 1198 was not produced in a vacuum. In terms of international strategy, thanks to the German crusade, knowledge of events in the Holy Land was recent and vivid. The following year, the pope elicited a report on the situation in the Holy Land from Patriarch Aymar of Jerusalem.²⁷ One of the striking features of the Fourth Crusade was the acute awareness of the high command of the politics of the Near East and the constant stream of communication between western planners and the Franks of Outremer. Given the Palestine truce of 1198, an expeditionary force to the Holy Land would not have been welcome. This seemed to be of some importance to the crusade high command. In their 1201 treaty with the Venetians to mount an attack on Egypt, they explicitly agreed the fleet would sail direct to Egypt, implying an avoidance of a landfall in mainland Outremer, which would compromise King Aimery’s diplomacy.²⁸ This insistence on deferring to the 1198 truce may partly explain the leadership’s consistent and strident hostility to any who wished to leave the army to sail straight to Palestine. However, even if Egypt had been suggested to or by the pope in 1198–9, no evidence of it emerged, and circumstantially it seems unlikely. The propaganda talked exclusively of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. Even in 1201 the choice of Egypt as a destination was deliberately kept secret. In a sign of the fluidity rather than clarity of strategic planning, the Flemish fleet that sailed into the Mediterranean in the summer of 1202 had no exact idea where they were going to rendezvous with Count Baldwin, still less their ultimate destination. Despite distant orders to the contrary, left to themselves, in the spring of 1203 they proceeded to Acre.²⁹ Countless others who embarked in 1201–2 did the same.

From the start, Innocent cast his diplomatic net wide. He sought to engage the Byzantine emperor Alexius III in his plans more constructively than Henry VI had treated Alexius and his predecessor. Between 1198 and 1202, the pope and the Greek emperor exchanged at least eight embassies and twelve substantial letters.³⁰ At first, Innocent conducted an intensive diplomatic effort to persuade Alexius to accept church union and give material assistance to the crusade, beginning by proposing Greek participation in the expedition in return for crusade indulgences. This offer presupposed Byzantine acceptance of papal authority that Innocent assumed as a sine qua non. Repeated references to the example of Manuel I stood as coded criticism of Greek failure to help the crusade. After some cautious encouragement from Alexius, in the winter of 1199–1200 the negotiations soured. Alexius called for the restoration of Cyprus and restated imperial independence from Rome. This prompted a harder line from the pope, who had also been securing alliances with neighbours of Byzantium: King Emeric of Hungary took the cross, and Kalojan of Bulgaria received coronation from a papal legate. However, Alexius III’s ultimate rejection of Innocent’s approaches failed to persuade the pope that Byzantium merited destruction or conquest. As late as the spring of 1203, with the crusade fleet already under sail for Byzantium, Innocent expressly forbade any attack on Constantinople.³¹

If diplomacy and gathering intelligence had begun in 1198, no grand scheme could be devised until a crusade army and leadership were in place. At meetings at Soissons and Compiegne in the summer of 1201, the French crusade leaders discussed timing and objectives. The Compiegn meeting of the crusader counts and barons – a parlement according to Villehardouin, who was there³² – provided a foretaste of how the crusade was to be run, by committee and deliberative assembly. Although Theobald of Champagne had provided the initiative for the enterprise and was, in some senses, accepted as its prime mover, in the absence of a royal overlord, command was collegial. The crusaders at Compiegne held a lively debate, chiefly it seems on transport, but possibly also on the destination of the expedition. It was decided to send to Italy six ambassadors, drawn from the affinities of the three dominant figures, the counts of Flanders, Champagne and Blois, to choose and negotiate with a carrier for transport east. Given that Egypt appeared in the agreement reached by this delegation, it is possible that the Compiegne parlement proposed it. At least four of the ambassadors, who were given plenipotentiary powers to seal a treaty binding their principals, were veterans of the Third Crusade: Villehardouin himself and Milo of Brebant (Champagne); Conon of Bethune (Flanders); and John of Friaise (Blois). Egypt had been regarded as the key to the fate of the Holy Land since before the Third Crusade, but Richard I’s campaign had emphasized its importance, a theme of various accounts of the Palestine war of 1191–2 that were already beginning to circulate. It had now become something of an orthodoxy, a convenient one in view of the 1198 Palestine truce.

Despite Innocent’s diplomacy in central Europe, the decision to travel east by sea was inevitable, even if the Nile Delta had not been the objective. It had been proved to be quicker, safer and more conducive to professional control, although requiring more initial capital outlay. Crusading fleets had been sailing from northern European waters to Syria for over a century. They had materially sustained the efforts of the Second Crusade as well as the siege of Acre in 1189–91. Baldwin of Flanders was preparing to send a squadron of his own, as had Richard I in 1190. However, as in 1190, embarkation of the whole expeditionary force from North Sea and Channel ports was precluded by the numbers of crusaders, their political affiliations and geographic locations, the length of the voyage around the Iberian peninsular and a general landlubbers’ fear of the sea and seasickness. The shortest passage with the most experienced carriers was necessary. This meant Italy.

The options facing the ambassadors were limited. Genoa and Pisa had played central roles in the Third Crusade, but were still locked in fierce, hostile competition. Robert of Clari recorded the rumour that the Genoese refused help outright, perhaps in reaction to their possibly less than satisfactory experiences with Philip II. The Pisans apparently balked at the sheer size of the contract. This may have persuaded the ambassadors to try the greater shipbuilding capacity of Venice first. Innocent III had already despatched Cardinal Soffredo of St Praxedis to Venice in 1198 ‘to help the Holy Land’ (‘pro Terrae Sanctae subsidio’), although there is no evidence of Franco-papal collusion.³³ Venice could claim a crusading tradition only little less consistent than her Ligurian and Tuscan rivals. For a century, pilgrims and crusaders had used Venice as a port of embarkation for the Holy Land and Venetians as carriers for their return journeys. For the Venetians, piety and profit were not mutually exclusive but, ideally, complementary. In a demonstration of enthusiasm for the cause of the Holy Land, a significant Venetian fleet had travelled to Palestine in the wake of the First Crusade in 1099–1101, assisting in the capture of Haifa but also acquiring the relic of St Nicholas of Myra. Their crusade of 1122–5 was designed to put pressure on the Byzantines to renew trading privileges.³⁴ It included raids on Adriatic ports and plundering Greek islands for booty and relics. However, the Venetian fleet also fought an Egyptian fleet off southern Palestine and supplied vital assistance in the capture of Tyre in 1124. That this help came at the price of extensive commercial and legal rights in the conquered port did not contradict the material and human cost. Campaigning in the Levant represented a hugely risky venture, individually and civically. The potential rewards were great, but so too were the dangers of ruin. Ships engaged in war were unavailable for trade. The twelfth-century balance sheet of Venetian involvement with the crusades was not exclusively financial.

Nonetheless, any bargain struck between Venice and the crusaders needed to be realistic for both sides. On it depended the fate of the whole enterprise, a significance evidently not lost on the crusade planners at Compiegne or their representatives, still less the doge of Venice, Enrico Dandolo (1192–1205) and his advisors. The French ambassadors arrived in Venice in early February 1201. Weeks of careful negotiation ended in agreement in April. After a highly theatrical ceremony in St Marks’s designed to symbolize the corporate sanction and commitment of the Venetian popolo, a treaty was sworn, signed and sealed. Under it, the Venetians engaged to provide specialist transport vessels (uissiers) for 4,500 horses with 9,000 squires, as well as ships (nes) for 4,500 knights and 20,000 foot sergeants, with provisions for men – water, wine, wheat, flour, fruit, vegetables, etc. – and horses for a year. In return, the