God's War: A New History of the Crusades

The cost of rebuilding Saphet was enormous, 1,100,000 bezants over two and a half years. The garrison’s daily complement included mercenaries and as many (fifty) Turcopoles, probably local Christians, and Templar Knights. The reliance on slave labour, local levies and mercenaries indicates how the shrunken Frankish elite had become adept at manipulating the widest social resources from its subject communities. When Bishop Benedict revisited the site twenty years later, still in Christian hands the castle presented an impressive picture of strength and power; through it the Templars wielded control of the rich surrounding area and its resources, apparently up to 260 villages. Six years later it fell to the Egyptians.

This story reveals contact, exploitation and understanding by each side of the other’s interests and opportunities, as well as of the narrow terrain in contention. Residents of Outremer remained dependent and closely linked to their neighbours and opponents. Occasionally, fraternization turned sour. The assassin who attacked Edward of England during his stay at Acre in 1271–2 was a recent local convert from Islam retained by Edward as a spy.¹⁷ While Edward, not being a pullanus, needed an interpreter, many locals were more linguistically adept. The knowledge of Arabic by some Outremer nobles proved useful during the crusade on the Nile in 1250.¹⁸ The author of the fullest eyewitness account of the last days of Christian Acre, known misleadingly as ‘The Templar of Tyre’ (in fact probably a Cypriot by birth and certainly not a Templar) read and spoke Arabic, being closely involved in the network of espionage run by the Master of the Temple, William of Beaujeu (1273–91) linking the Frankish ports of Syria to the Mamluk court in Egypt.¹⁹

THE THREAT TO OUTREMER

By then, of course, prospects for the Franks were grim. Yet this had not always been the case. Neighbouring Muslim rulers were repeatedly willing to enter into agreements to avoid conflict, some of them including the return of territory lost in 1187. Truces with Jerusalem-Acre covered seventy of the ninety-nine years between Richard I’s Treaty of Jaffa in 1192 and the final loss of Acre in 1291. The later Ayyubids seemed to accept the Christian enclaves, their extinction desirable but not a determining political necessity. Only with the advent of the new rulers of Egypt, the Mamluks, in 1250 did a harder Muslim ideology emphasizing the commitment to jihad return to the rhetoric and politics of Outremer’s enemies.²⁰ In thirteenth-century Syria, the aggressive, more militant Mamluks overrode the undemanding convivencia of the later Ayyubids in a manner reminiscent of, but more successful than, the Moroccan fundamentalist Almoravids and Almohads in Spain challenging Christian power by displacing the accommodating indigenous Muslim rulers of al-Andalus.

Western awareness of events in the Holy Land existed on many levels. Innocent III had requested information from the patriarch of Jerusalem before the Fourth Crusade.²¹ In the century that followed, newsletters and diplomatic correspondence were circulated to courts and through the networks of the preaching mendicants and monastic orders. Such material found its way into the works of chroniclers such as Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris in the English abbey of St Alban’s. Matthew Paris also tapped returning crusaders and passing travellers for his information.²² Personal appeals for aid, for example from the bishop of Beirut in 1245, provided a focus for renewed commitment.²³ Gregory X, in planning a new crusade in the 1270s, asked for memoranda on the whole range of crusade issues including the state of the Holy Land and the ways it could be defended.²⁴ Beyond this elite circulation, repeated preaching disseminated news of the successive crises to a wider audience primed by the new crusading liturgies and the embrace of crusade taxation. The engagement of alert and critical public opinion was confirmed by the French popular movement known as the Shepherds’ Crusade of 1251.²⁵

The image of Outremer presented in the west was largely one of challenge, crisis and threat. The reality in the Holy Land was somewhat different. Exploiting Ayyubid divisions, through a mixture of local action, alert diplomacy, superior sea-power and western military assistance, by the early 1240s the Franks had re-established control of sorts over the coastal plain from Tortosa to Ascalon; Jerusalem and Bethlehem had been restored by treaty in 1229. After further agreements in 1240 and 1241, while Samaria, Hebron and Transjordan remained in Muslim hands, the coastal plain and Galilee were reabsorbed and a number of key inland fortresses reoccupied, such as Saphet and Beaufort, or refortified, such as Crac des Chevaliers.²⁶ In the north Antioch remained apparently secure within a rump of a principality based on the lower Orontes valley, since 1219 united dynastically, if separate geographically, with Tripoli.

One key to the Frankish revival had been a deliberate policy of tactical rebuilding of castles and the refortification of important coastal sites. This became a particular role for visiting crusades: in 1217–18 at Athlit and Caesarea; Caesarea, Sidon and Jaffa in 1227–9; Ascalon in 1240–41; Caesarea in 1250–54; Acre in 1271–2. Even the rebuilding of Saphet in 1240 was stimulated by western visitors and an unfulfilled promise of crusader money. Control of territory meant ownership of strongholds and lordship, not physical occupation and settlement of the countryside. In this respect, even more than in the twelfth century, the Franks were falling into line with successive Muslim overlords in Syria at least from the Seljuks onwards. This strategy only unravelled in the face of Sultan Baibars’s systematic destruction of Frankish strongholds in the 1260s. Before this, parts of the coastal plain, western and northern Galilee and many castles in the interior remained in Christian hands.²⁷

The collapse of the Ayyubid sultanate in Egypt in 1250, the eradication of the Ayyubids of Syria by the Mongols in 1260 and their subsequent defeat by the Mamluks and withdrawal from the region presented the Franks with a more tenacious and aggressive threat. The Mongol challenge to Mamluk control of Syria persisted for the next four decades, punctuated by border warfare and occasional invasions.²⁸ The eradication of any potential allies of the Mongols became a Mamluk priority as it had not been for the Ayyubids. The Franks were thrown on to constant defence, the truces with the Mamluks increasingly desperate and disadvantageous. After the crusade of Louis IX of France (1248–54), western assistance comprised small crusades and the despatch of professional armed contingents. The French were especially wedded to this form of support. Louis IX had left the commander of his bodyguard, Geoffrey of Sergines, as commander of a garrison of 100 knights in 1254. In 1259, Geoffrey rose to become bailli, effectively regent. On his death in 1269, the French regiment was led by Oliver of Termes, the former Cathar sympathizer and veteran of Louis’s first crusade.²⁹ It was later estimated that between 1254 and 1270 the French crown had spent an average of 4,000 livres tournois a year on men and subsidies for the Holy Land.³⁰ Others contributed, notably Pope Gregory X, who had learnt of his election as pope when visiting Acre in the winter of 1271–2. One of his first acts was to send a contingent of 500 troops.³¹ Edward of England left a paid garrison at Acre in 1272; in 1278 he made over the defence of a tower he had built at Acre to an otherwise ephemeral Order of St Edward.³² The funds of the three great international military orders still flowed east, where, at Acre, each still maintained its headquarters. Such cross-Mediterranean assistance, puny as it was, provided a sketch for what could have been effective military and material support. However, no substantial military assistance was forthcoming. The anguished west largely consigned Outremer to its own fate.

THE POLITICS OF OUTREMER

The internal politics of the kingdom of Jerusalem in the thirteenth century presents the observer with an almost impenetrably dense pointillist picture of confusion, competition and conflict. The military vulnerability of mainland Outremer was compounded by perennial political and dynastic bickering. While hardly responsible for the collapse of Outremer, the enervating effect of the labyrinthine rivalries scarcely encouraged consistent planning or political direction. Occasionally, as in the late 1220s and 1230s, it prevented full advantage being taken of favourable opportunities to consolidate gains. Not all the dissension was home grown. To customary jealousies within a nobility jostling for preferment in a very small pool of patronage were added the attempted annexation of Jerusalem by Frederick II and the Hohenstaufen as well as the clashing interests of the Italian communities and the three great military orders. The absence of a significant rural dimension to Frankish settlement in the thirteenth century and the insistence in the regular truces of free passage and intercommunal tolerance limited inter-faith tensions in Jerusalem-Acre. However, in Antioch during the succession struggle 1201–19 Frankish supporters of Bohemund IV were pitted against the Frankish and Armenian adherents of his nephew Raymond Roupen, son of Bohemund IV’s elder brother, with the large Greek community in the middle, by turns flattered and bullied for their favour.³³

No medieval monarchy could have flourished under the genetic handicaps and physical accidents of the house