God's War: A New History of the Crusades

king of Naples and Sicily. While the Mamluks battered their gates, the Franks contented themselves with recognizing two kings. Acre, Sidon and the Templars opted for Charles of Anjou and his bailli, Roger of San Severino (1277–82); Tyre and Beirut for Hugh I.⁵⁸ The schism only ended with Charles’s death in 1285. The following year Acre submitted to the new king of Cyprus (since 1285) and Jerusalem, Henry I, Hugh I’s son. The discord at the centre was matched elsewhere as the rump of mainland Outremer confronted internal divisions as dangerous as external attack. In Tripoli, Bohemund VII only concluded a civil war with the Templars and Guy II Embriaco of Jubail (1277–82) by having Guy’s followers blinded and Guy himself, with his brothers and cousins buried in the moat of the castle at Nephin and left to starve to death. Little wonder the surviving Embriacos sought the suzerainty of the Mamluk sultan.⁵⁹

Ironically, the apparent unity achieved by Henry I, witnessed by his lavish and misleadingly optimistic coronation at Tyre in 1286, coincided with a new Mamluk offensive that negated all shows of solidarity. The series of piecemeal truces agreed by harassed local rulers, such as a condominium deal arranged for Tyre in 1285, availed little. Since the 1260s, such partitions of land or revenues had failed to assuage the Mamluk appetite for conquest. By now the kingdom was beyond repair. Sultan Kalavun of Egypt’s treaty with Acre in 1283 excluded Tyre and Beirut as if they no longer belonged to the same kingdom.⁶⁰ One by one the last Frankish strongholds succumbed, including Tripoli in 1289. As will be described in Chapter 24, the final crisis came in May 1291 with the fall of Acre itself to Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil (1290–93) after a grisly six-week siege.⁶¹ Further resistance evaporated. No great western fleets hovered just over the horizon. There was no relief. By mid-August 1291 Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, Tortosa and Athlit had capitulated or been evacuated. Peter Embriaco of Jubail negotiated submission to the sultan and held his city as a dependency for a few more years. The Templars clung on to the waterless island of Ruad until 1303. A few individual Franks, released captives, freed or abandoned slaves, lingered in Outremer for more than a generation, stranded, impoverished and debased relics of a lost dominion.

Almost half a century later, two old men encountered by a German pilgrim by the Dead Sea turned out to be French Templars captured at Acre in 1291. They had worked for the sultan, married and had children, living in the southern Judean hills, entirely isolated and ignorant of events in the west. They now became minor celebrities. They and their families were shipped back to Europe and received with honour at the papal court at Avignon before retiring on pensions to end their days in peace. What they, their wives, children or new neighbours made of this turn of fortune is unknown. Yet their fate stood as a suitably confusing epitaph for Frankish Outremer: glamour, courage, strain, wishful thinking, strenuous endeavour, the international stage and unmistakable domesticity.⁶²

21. Syria in the Thirteenth Century

22. Palestine and Egypt in the Thirteenth Century

23

The Defence of the Holy Land 1221–44

The failure of the Damietta campaign did not end the great crusading enterprise Innocent III had initiated in 1213. Eleven days after the city was returned to Ayyubid control, Peter des Roches bishop of Winchester was taking the cross in England.¹ The summer of 1221 saw Cardinal Ugolino methodically recruiting crusaders and mercenaries from the lords of northern Italy, using church funds as incentives.² As far as Honorius III was concerned, Frederick II’s obligations still stood. They formed a central practical as well as symbolic element in papal – imperial negotiations, a process of preparation and a guarantee of sincerity. Frederick reiterated his commitment in 1223 and 1225. Philip II of France bequeathed 150,000 livres to the project in 1223, perhaps out of a guilty conscience. The crusade continued to be used as a means of resolving political disputes, as in Marseilles in 1224, as well as an expression of private devotion.³ A Parisian couple, Renard and Jeanne Crest, crucesignatus and crucesignata, made their pious and financial dispositions in 1224–5 before departure.⁴ Stories of the Egyptian debacle of 1218–21 by witnesses such as James of Vitry and Oliver of Paderborn were circulated widely. The messy legal ramifications surrounding absent, deceased or presumed dead crusaders’ property kept the reality of crusading painfully alive by engaging the energies of their squabbling neighbours, relatives and local law courts in some cases for over fifteen years.⁵ Contributions were still forthcoming. In England in 1222 a tax was levied on behalf of the kingdom of Jerusalem, proceeds of which were supposed to subsidize crusaders to the east. John of Brienne, king of Jerusalem visited the west in 1223, trying to drum up aid. Papal legates and local bishops continued to preach and round up crucesignati; Master Hubert, recruiting in England in 1227, kept a written register of those who had taken the cross.⁶ For the first time the new preaching order of the Dominican friars was employed in England under the patronage of Peter des Roches.⁷ Within a few years they and the Franciscans came to dominate the verbum crucis, the word of the cross.

More generally, the decades after 1221 saw the ‘business of the Holy Land’ embedded into the religious culture of western Christendom. Away from specific campaign appeals, the special prayers, liturgy, bell-ringing, processions and invitations to donate alms that had been established since 1187 assumed habitual places in the devotional round of the faithful laity. The democratization of penance after the Fourth Lateran Council through oral confession, the improvement in the educational standards of the clergy and the extra-parochial presence of friars and, for the prosperous, private confessors was matched and reflected by a growing prominence of lay spirituality expressed in religious confraternities, which sprang up across Europe, most obviously in towns, and in the personal lives of lay devots. Stress on the spiritual life and moral behaviour of individuals recognized the validity and value of personal and collective lay religious observance. The crusade epitomized just this sort of secular commitment, a number of contemporary observers likening crucesignati to converts or even a religious order, a religio.⁸

Crusading perceptions and practices altered in the thirteenth century. Taking the cross signalled inner spiritual commitment not limited to specific military endeavour alone. The crusade became braided with personal religious identity in a system of practical spirituality channelled through regular devotional exercises; confession, penance, alms-giving, prayer and conduct. Louis VII of France had been a pious monarch and crusader, but the role crusading played in his spiritual life, as far as external appearances are any guide, pales beside its importance to his great-grandson Louis IX. For the younger Louis, the crusade occupied a central place in his life, a means to achieve personal and spiritual emancipation, self-expression and fulfilment. Similar prominence of the crusade in a broader spiritual life of puritanical seriousness was demonstrated by another leading thirteenth-century devot, Simon of Montfort the Younger. Son of the leader of the Albigensian crusades, himself a crucesignatus and campaigner in the east in 1240–41, it was entirely in character that in the great crisis of his life, the civil wars in England of 1263–5, Simon called on the images of crusading to sustain his cause.⁹ Even for a lukewarm crusader such as Simon’s opponent, Henry III, the cross became an accepted way of displaying religious credentials, almost regardless of whether he embarked. Henry took the cross on at least three occasions (1216, 1250 and 1271). Neither the first or last occasion represented a serious decision to campaign. The first signalled the newly crowned boy-king’s renewal of the papal protection vital to the survival of his dynasty. Fifty-five years later, the old ailing king’s gesture spoke of rededication of a soul mindful of salvation and troubled by the unfulfilled commitment of two decades before. For Henry’s uncle, Richard I, crusading had been a much more specific ambition, no less intense perhaps, but less central to his regular spiritual life or religious observances. A century on, the crusade had become, as F. M. Powicke remarked, inseparable from the air men breathed.¹⁰

In the years after the evacuation of Damietta, the flow of crucesignati to the Levant never entirely ran dry, even if the 40,000 names allegedly on Master Hubert’s roll of 1227 cannot be credited. No less telling of this diffuse commitment, the stock figures of the armchair crusader, nicknamed ‘ashie’ because he