God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Venetians from Tyre. The Genoese Embriaco family, who ruled Jubail, rebelled against their overlord Bohemund VI of Tripoli-Antioch, who was trying to force his vassals to support the Venetians, causing a civil war that guttered until 1282. The War of St Sabas lasted intensely until 1258, then sporadically until almost the end of the kingdom, the Italian rivalry played out on the seas and in the ports of the Levant, spreading in the 1260s to the restored Byzantine empire. A peace of sorts between Venice and Genoa was brokered by Louis IX in 1270, but the Venetians returned to Tyre only in 1277 and a treaty between Genoa and Pisa waited until 1288. The waste of resources, the weakening of Acre as a market and commercial centre, the damage to the cities fought over and the consequent impossibility of planning a united western crusade armada further undermined the chances of the kingdom’s survival.

To add legal absurdity to political tragedy, in 1258 the Jerusalem baronage was persuaded to recognize a child, Hugh II of Cyprus, as regent for the absent child king Conradin/Conrad III. The remaining authority was exercised by Hugh’s mother, Queen Plaisance (d. 1261). The arrangement reflected less constitutional propriety than an elaborate tussle for power involving the Cypriot and Antiochene interest (Plaisance was the daughter of Bohemund V of Antioch as well as the widow of Henry I of Cyprus) and two competing Ibelins, John of Arsuf and his cousin John of Jaffa, whose mistress Plaisance shortly became.⁴⁷ During the 1260s, the complexities of legal and actual authority spun even further from clarity while Sultan Baibars began his systematic destruction of the kingdom. As a sign of the kingdom’s disintegration, individual lords made their own truces with their hostile neighbours: John of Jaffa with the sultan of Damascus in 1255 and 1256, and with Baibars of Egypt in 1261; Philip of Montfort for Tyre in 1266 and 1267; and Isabella of Ibelin, heiress of Beirut, with Baibars in 1269. This had happened before – famously as early as Raymond III of Tripoli’s treaty with Saladin in 1186–7 – but it began a trend that only ended with the kingdom itself in 1291.⁴⁸

The experience of Isabella lady of Beirut showed how far the kingdom had sunk into disarray and become in practical terms a Mamluk dependency. Inheriting Beirut in 1264 from her father, who had also engineered an agreement with Baibars, Isabella had been betrothed to Hugh II of Cyprus when he died in 1267. After securing her own truce with Baibars, in 1271–2, Isabella, after an affair with Julian of Sidon, married Hamo L’Estrange, a wealthy lord from the Welsh Marches. When he died a few years later, to prevent Isabella, clearly a lady of independence, having to accept a new husband chosen for her by King Hugh I, Hamo committed his widow to the protection of Baibars. Extraordinarily, supported of all people by the Templars, Baibars’s protection was upheld in the Jerusalem High Court against King Hugh’s claim of lordship. To ensure compliance with her freedom, Isabella installed a Mamluk guard in Beirut. On Baibars’s death in 1277, Isabella sought and found the protection of two further husbands before her own death in 1282.⁴⁹

Yet while this bizarre and sordid pantomime of self-interest and desperation whirled towards oblivion, one of its major players, John of Jaffa (c.1216–66), was putting the finishing touches to his great codification of the laws of the kingdom of Jerusalem, Le Livre des Assises (completed between 1264 and 1266).⁵⁰ This gave no hint of the chaos and weakness around him. Son of John, ‘the Old Lord Beirut’ (d. 1236), John, since 1246 count of Jaffa, cut a grand figure in Frankish Outremer. Joinville was deeply impressed by his large war galley at Damietta, propelled by 300 oarsmen and decorated all over with his heraldic device. In the French crusader’s account of Louis IX’s stay in the Holy Land, John was portrayed as a man of practical but notable piety, of energy and generosity to his followers, whose advice was sought and heeded.⁵¹ His Livre des Assises, part original, part a compilation from older materials, purports to describe a legal system of harmony, clarity and efficiency. The taste for legal theory and practice appeared strong in certain quarters of Outremer. John’s great work followed the precedents of the Livre au Roi (c.1200), the early thirteenth-century Assises d’Antioche and the more nearly contemporary Acre Livre des Assises de la cour des Bourgeois, the work of Geoffrey Le Tor, and Philip of Novara’s Livre de forme de plaint (1250–c.1260). The interest in compiling lawbooks was one shared across Latin Christendom in the thirteenth century. Law was not yet everywhere the preserve of professional lawyers (as it had precociously become in England); intellectual nobles who spent their time pleading their rights or sitting as judges unsurprisingly developed an interest in legal codification, if only as an outlet for academic enthusiasm otherwise denied. Most aristocratic laymen had no access to the higher education of the new universities, especially in Outremer, where there were none. Just as tales of chivalry acted as a form of escapism for those conducting unpleasant real warfare, so John’s evocation of a perfect legal system that had descended and developed intact and unimpaired from the legendary foundation of the kingdom stood in similar distorted relation with the actual world in which he wrote and defended his fief on the fraying edge of Christendom. Although most if not all medieval (and modern) law codes express ideals as much as current or even past reality, John’s lawbook was not a work of romance, even if in tone one of some fiction. It dealt with hard law and difficult cases, with principles and precedents. As with that other great legal text of the period, once known as Bracton’s Laws of England, the construction of a lawbook creates law. John’s was still in active use in Cyprus as late as the 1530s.⁵²

The career of John of Jaffa reveals another side to Outremer. His father had built the cool, shaded halls of his grand palace in Beirut. An associate, Philip of Novara, was a chronicler as well as legist. Acre housed an exceptional set of ateliers from which luxury illuminated manuscripts were produced, which bear witness to a distinctive artistic style, synthetical but not derivative of local, Greek and western forms.⁵³ The great buildings of Acre or the massive fortifications of castles and city walls compare with the most impressive in Christendom.⁵⁴ The particularly intense local eremitic spiritual tradition gave rise to a new religious order, the Carmelites, which soon established itself in the west in a rare example of reverse colonization.⁵⁵ Frankish Syria was not a society creeping in material and aesthetic penury to a predestined annihilation. Yet, as the political turmoil continued, and the territorial base withered, the finances upon which the culture of Outremer rested began to evaporate. John of Jaffa had been able to reward his knights lavishly from preying on caravans crossing between Egypt and Syria, carrying, for instance, luxury textiles.⁵⁶ Yet Jaffa fell to Baibars in 1268, just two years after John’s death. With the loss of such bases, profits and income dried. Yet even before this, John himself had been in debt. Increasingly, lay lords were forced to sell out to the military orders for reason of finance not protection. No amount of shuffling of the rapidly diminishing property could mitigate the damage of chronic political dysfunction.

A semblance of constitutional if not political order was restored with the acceptance of Hugh of Antioch- Jerusalem, since 1267 Hugh III of Cyprus, as regent for Conradin/Conrad III in 1268 and his ascent to the throne of Jerusalem as Hugh I the following year after Conradin’s execution in Italy, the first monarch resident in the east since 1225. From his base in Cyprus, Hugh could do little to direct affairs on the mainland. Brief help came with the crusade of Edward of England, the truce of 1272 and the death of Baibars in 1277. Yet, as the case of Isabella of Beirut’s marriage showed, Hugh’s authority was circumscribed, contingent on barons whose jealous guarding of what they perceived as their rights outweighed any sense of impending disaster. Some may have believed their own national myths of the providential status of Outremer. Others, more prosaically, could not imagine the annihilation of their patria. It is misleading to view the last years of Frankish Syria solely through the lens of hindsight or from the perspective of western Europe. The Ibelin family may stand for many. They were probably descended from an Italian immigrant, perhaps from Sardinia or Pisa, who became castellan of Jaffa in the second decade of the twelfth century. Perhaps because of their relatively humble place in the Jerusalem aristocracy, in the twelfth century the Ibelins married within the kingdom, rather than seeking spouses from the west. The family waxed rich and grand in the years around and after 1200, not least by their association and marriage with members of the royal family such as Maria Comnena, although they rarely, even in the thirteenth century, married directly into the royal house of Cyprus or Jerusalem. Men such as John of Jaffa were not colonists, even if they saw themselves as manning an outer bastion of Christendom. They were indigenous Jerusalemites and Cypriots, part of Latin Christendom but as autonomous in law, custom, tradition, history and expectation as any other. From the early twelfth to the late fourteenth centuries, when the male line in Cyprus died out, for the Ibelins Outremer was home, the only one they knew.⁵⁷ Lacking the hawk-like vision of western observers or modern historians, their political in-fighting may not have seemed myopic, merely business as usual.

This tendency of the Jerusalem baronage to compete and disagree was tested once more before the end. The political mess had thickened still further in 1277, when Maria of Antioch, a granddaughter of Isabella I who had contested the succession in 1268, sold her rights in Jerusalem to Charles of Anjou, brother of Louis IX of France, papal champion in the Italian war against the Hohenstaufen, executioner of Conradin/Conrad III and acquisitive new