God's War: A New History of the Crusades

This was not apparent in the summer of 1227, when the roads from Germany to Apulia were clogged with crusaders.²⁹ The muster at Brindisi attracted many thousands, although the core comprised a force of over 1,000 knights in the emperor’s pay. The crowding and summer heat took their toll as plague broke out in the crusader camps. As victims mounted, some abandoned the journey. The main German fleet sailed in mid-August, probably including the English bishops. Frederick and the landgrave of Thuringia embarked with Sicilian levies on 8 September. Within days, probably from the effects of plague, the landgrave was dead and Frederick incapacitated, forcing him to put in at Otranto to recuperate. As a token of his continuing commitment, he despatched Hermann von Salza and the patriarch of Jerusalem to Syria with twenty galleys to join the main force, whose command he entrusted to Henry, the new duke of Limburg. What in other circumstances would have seemed an unfortunate but unavoidable setback became the pivot around which the crusade was transformed from an enterprise of Christian solidarity into one of confrontation and division. Despite being told the reasons for this further delay, on 29 September Pope Gregory IX excommunicated Frederick for having broken the terms of the Treaty of San Germano.³⁰

The unreasonable vehemence of Gregory’s condemnation and his refusal to accept Frederick’s subsequent restrained defence suggested that the pope had been waiting for a chance to strike against the emperor. Unlike his predecessor, Honorius III, whom he had succeeded only in March 1227, Gregory was not by nature a conciliator. A nephew of Innocent III, an early patron of the friars, a canon lawyer and papal diplomat of wide and long experience, Gregory had come to mistrust Frederick personally and politically. Fearing an extension of Hohenstaufen power across all Italy and suspicious of Frederick’s imperious attitude to ecclesiastical independence within his kingdom, Gregory presumably hoped excommunication would force Frederick into a new submission or overt disobedience. Frederick thought Gregory’s stance a form of papal monarchic extremism that ran counter to and undermined the traditional just order of Christendom. Within a year, the remarkable spectacle arose of an excommunicated crusader sailing to restore Jerusalem, while the pope was organizing armies, one of which was led by the former king of Jerusalem, to secure the crusader’s political overthrow in the west.

Frederick now needed the crusade more than ever to wrong-foot the pope and reassert his credentials for honesty and Christian leadership. He announced his departure for May 1228, began to raise more troops in Germany and Italy, and imposed a tax of eight gold ounces per fief in the kingdom of Sicily. In April 1228, the imperial marshal Richard Filangieri sailed for Acre with 500 knights to add to the 800 knights already there under the duke of Limburg’s command. Frederick himself followed in June with perhaps seventy ships.³¹ If this figure is accurate, such a fleet could have carried a few thousand men. At Acre, Frederick’s army could only be accommodated in a camp outside the city, at Recordana, behind the coastal sand dunes to the south of the city. One unreliable but knowledgeable source put the number of infantry as high as 10,000.³² If not a mass expedition, Frederick had assembled a significant and cohesive fighting force sufficiently strong to persuade al-Kamil to negotiate and to preside over a substantial refortification programme. The duke of Limburg had begun a rebuilding programme a year earlier. When news of Frederick’s delay caused many immediately to return home, to keep an army intact, Duke Henry marched down the coast to refurbish the defences of Caesaerea and Jaffa. Some of his troops dreamt of an assault on Jerusalem itself. On hearing of the death of al-Mu ‘azzam in November 1227, a separate group of crusaders left in Acre annexed the Muslim-held half of Sidon. During the winter of 1227–8 German crusaders and Teutonic Knights cooperated in constructing a castle on one of the order’s estates at Montfort about twenty miles north-east of Acre in the Galileean hills. This soon became the Teutonic Knights’ headquarters.

The activities of Henry of Limburg and the English bishops in 1227–8 were consciously preliminary to Frederick’s arrival. After an increasingly venomous war of words and despite the risk of leaving his European lands under the threat of papal confiscation, Frederick sailed from Brindisi on 28 June 1228, arriving at Limassol on 21 July. During five stormy weeks in Cyprus, Frederick sought to assert imperial overlordship, attempting to call John of Ibelin to account for his management of the kingdom on behalf of the young King Henry I (1218–53) and install a Cypriot regency more amenable to imperial interests. Only Frederick’s higher purpose prevented an open breach. Both John of Ibelin and King Henry were in the emperor’s entourage when he sailed for Acre on 2 September 1228, arriving five days later. There, for the first time in Outremer, Frederick encountered the inconvenience of excommunication. The pope’s refusal to lift the ban forced the patriarch of Jerusalem into opposition and elicited a rather nervous response to Frederick’s leadership from the Templars and Hospitallers. Frederick had to chart a careful course around Frankish sensibilities, appointing separate nominal commanders of the army’s divisions to avoid pious crusaders having to be seen to obey an excommunicate. The English bishops showed no such qualms and, in practice, the papal ban scarcely restricted Frederick. Even the litigious Jerusalem barons did not try to reject his authority because of the excommunication; they had quite enough to attack him under their existing law code.

Frederick’s challenge was threefold: to insist on his rights as king of Jerusalem; to keep his army together; and to secure the projected treaty with al-Kamil. In the first his position had seriously been weakened by the death of his teenage wife Isabella II, in May 1228 after childbirth. Technically, Frederick could thereafter only wield power in the kingdom of Jerusalem as regent for his and Isabella’s infant son Conrad IV/II, compromising his insistence on exercising regalian rights. More awkwardly, with the removal of al-Mu ‘azzam, al-Kamil had no need to honour his earlier promises over Jerusalem as he and al-Ashraf began military action against Damascus to remove their young nephew, al-Nasir Dawud. Al-Kamil had agreed with al-Ashraf to partition al-Nasir’s territories, keeping Transjordan and Palestine for himself. Any concessions to the Franks might appear superfluous if not risky. However, for Frederick a satisfactory diplomatic outcome was essential, and, with rumours of papal armies attacking his lands in Italy, a speedy one at that. In the footsteps, at times literally, of Richard I three and a half decades earlier, permanent dialogue backed by a show of force was the only option available. However, unlike Richard’s, Frederick’s army was palpably incapable of conquering inland Palestine, still less conducting an effective siege or defence of Jerusalem. The most pressure that Frederick could exert over the Egyptian sultan was as a nuisance in the path of the new Ayyubid settlement.

As soon as he landed Frederick reopened negotiations with al-Kamil. After an initial friendly but empty exchange of gifts, talks proceeded between Frederick and Fakhr al-Din. During these exchanges, Frederick showed himself in his element, skilfully exploiting his cosmopolitan culture to charm the Ayyubid negotiators and persuade them of his sincerity and good intentions. The widespread but largely false accusations by his opponents in the west of his sympathy for Islam and general irreligious scepticism finds a rather more approving parallel in Arabic observers, who liked to depict him as a man of reason and faith, tolerant if not sympathetic to Islam. Frederick enjoyed showing off, from elaborate royal ceremonial to swapping esoteric academic arguments. Accompanied in Palestine by his Arabic logic tutor, with whom he was apparently reading Aristotle, Frederick sent al-Kamil a list of detailed questions on philosophy, geometry and mathematics.³³ This kind of intellectual showing off reflected Frederick’s Sicilian education, as did his refusal to engage in crude anti-Islamic posturing once Jerusalem had been restored. He was critical of decisions by the local Jerusalem qadi to suspend the call of the muezzin. While preventing Christian priests insulting Muslim sensibilities by carrying copies of the Bible into holy places in the Haram al-Sharif to which the treaty specified joint access, he allowed his Muslim bodyguards from Sicily to say their midday prayers there. While such behaviour left Arabic commentators favourably impressed, it allowed Latin critics to attack what they perceived as decadence or, worse, a lack of sincere faith. The Patriarch Gerold, uncomfortably placed on the spot but loyal to the papal ban, accused Frederick of enjoying the sultan’s gifts of not just mathematical solutions but ‘singing girls and jugglers, persons who were not only of ill repute but unworthy even to be mentioned by Christians’ (although naturally that did not stop the patriarch doing precisely that). There were stories that Frederick reciprocated by providing his Muslim guests with Christian dancing girls.³⁴ Alleged miscegenation was almost guaranteed to summon the interest if not blood of watching monastic commentators in the west.

However cosy their social relations, Frederick and al-Kamil’s negotiators had no easy task. Al-Kamil felt he needed a settlement with Frederick to free his hands in Syria but was nervous at the price in prestige of a peaceful settlement or surrender, as his opponents would say. He could not be seen as giving too much too freely. On the other hand Frederick, although desperate for a treaty to restore his reputation in Christendom and allow him to return to defend his Italian territories, could not appear as a suppliant. Both had to be cautious but persistent. One member of Frederick’s forces, the poet Freidank, likened the process to watching two misers trying to divide evenly three gold pieces.³⁵ In November 1228, with negotiations deadlocked, al-Kamil moved to southern Palestine. Frederick followed in a show of force, almost a copy of Richard I’s march of September 1191, leading a coalition of local barons, the military orders and the western crusaders down the coast road to Caesarea and Jaffa,