God's War: A New History of the Crusades

ostensibly preparatory to an assault on Jerusalem itself. So as not to appear to be serving under an excommunicated commander, the Templars and Hospitallers followed the main body a day behind. However, on reaching Arsuf they realized the folly of such division and the armies united before reaching Jaffa unopposed. There, supplied by the sea, Frederick completed the refortifications and built up supplies. At the same time, news from the west of papally sponsored invasions of his Italian territories sharpened the emperor’s dilemma. Although he sent for more galleys from Sicily, a winter return passage was hardly feasible for the whole of the emperor’s force.

The stalemate was broken by al-Kamil’s agreement to most of Frederick’s terms. While insisting to his subjects that any territorial concessions could easily be reversed once the crusade army had departed and exaggerating the threat posed by Frederick’s continued stay, al-Kamil’s acceptance of a treaty recognized the priorities of Ayyubid policy.³⁶ Damascus and Transjordan were more important than Judea; peaceful relations with the Frankish masters of the coastal entrepots more crucial to the rulers of the hinterland than stubborn points of principle. A sign of successful diplomacy, each side was able to gloss the details of the treaty to suit their domestic needs, and critics on both sides could condemn the whole deal as unprincipled. Reminiscent of the 1192 agreement between Saladin and Richard I, the Treaty of Jaffa of 18 February 1229 gave both parties what they immediately wanted.³⁷ The Ayyubids’ priorities concerned political strategy; the Christians’ what could be called religious strategy. Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth, the sites of the Crucifixion, Nativity and Annunication, were restored to Christian rule, with territorial corridors linking them to the Frankish-held coastal plain. The whole of Sidon was relinquished to the Franks, as was Toron in western Galilee, although with a stipulation that it should not be fortified, a restriction that, despite al-Kamil’s claim to the contrary, did not apply to Jerusalem or elsewhere. Prisoners of war, always a very sensitive issue, from the Fifth Crusade and since, were to be returned. A truce was established that was to last for ten years. Excluded or ignored by the terms were the castles of the Templars and Hospitallers and the lands of Bohemund IV of Antioch-Tripoli, perhaps in revenge for his refusal to swear fealty to Frederick in the summer of 1228. Within Jerusalem, the Temple Mount, al-Haram al-Sharif, was to remain under the jurisdiction of Islamic religious authorities, the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque to remain Muslim places of worship. Christians were allowed free access to these sites, just as Muslim pilgrims were to be protected in their devotions, with their own resident qadi. Otherwise, the Muslim population was evacuated, being replaced by Franks, who immediately began to refortify the city, even though the political capital effectively remained at Acre.

The Treaty of Jaffa appalled sections of the Muslim world, especially al-Kamil’s enemies in Damascus. Even writers sympathetic to al-Kamil acknowledged the distaste provoked by the surrender of Jerusalem, reversing, as one pointedly commented, ‘one of Saladin’s most notable achievements’.³⁸ On the Christian side, the Templars and Hospitallers had few reasons to rejoice, especially as Frederick had so very obviously favoured the Teutonic Knights during his stay. Few were more vitriolic in their condemnation than Patriarch Gerold of Jerusalem, who lambasted Frederick for his temerity, disobedience, deceit, misbehaviour and pride.³⁹ The restoration of Jerusalem posed an awkward problem for local churchmen and their allies in the baronage and military orders. Recovery of territory offered a return of property that, if opposed, could be in danger of being given to another. Alice of Armenia had to appeal to the High Court to prevent Toron remaining in the hands of the Teutonic Knights, to whom Frederick had given it.⁴⁰ Most pilgrims relished the prospect of fulfilling their vows at the Holy Sepulchre despite not having shed any infidel blood. Denying access to the Holy Places or insisting on violence rather than diplomacy placed churchmen in a tricky situation, especially as some clerics, notably the bishops of Winchester and Exeter, supported Frederick, earning themselves papal censure. Quite quickly, self-interest won over the Templars and Hospitallers to the benefits of reoccupying Jerusalem and the other restored areas. Christian opposition to the 1229 treaty had far more to do with its architect, Frederick, than its content which in essence repeated much of what Richard I had suggested in 1191–2.

Frederick could afford no such doubts. On 17 March, before an interdict could reach him from Patriarch Gerold in Acre, Frederick entered Jersualem. After visiting the Muslim shrines in the company of the local Islamic authorities, the following day he led his followers into the church of the Holy Sepulchre. There, in one of the most memorable pieces of political and religious theatre of thirteenth-century Christendom, Frederick took his crown from the high altar in the great twelfth-century Romanesque nave of the church and placed it on his own head. This was not a Napoleonic self-coronation as king of Jerusalem so much as an imperial crown-wearing, a demonstration of his unique authority, a reminder of his pre-eminent role in the order of the Christian society and, boldest of all, an assertion of his inheritance of the special favour once bestowed by God Himself on King David. One of the most skilled propagandists and self-promoters of his age, Frederick made this very clear in his letter to Henry III of England describing the scene:

we, as being a Catholic emperor… wore the crown, which Almighty God provided for us from the throne of His majesty, when of his especial grace, he exalted us on high among the princes of the world; so that whilst we have supported the honour of this high dignity, which belongs to us by right of sovereignty, it is more and more evident to all that the hand of the Lord hath done all this: and since His mercies are over all His works, let the worshippers of the orthodox faith henceforth know and relate it far and wide throughout the world, that He, who is blessed for ever, has visited and redeemed His people, and has raised up the horn of salvation for us in the house of His servant David.⁴¹

During the crown-wearing ceremony, Hermann von Salza read out a statement, once in German and then in French, justifying Frederick’s actions surrounding the crusade and attacking his critics. The Jerusalem ritual was to serve purposes far beyond the Holy Land. The scene in the Holy Sepulchre was woven prominently into Frederick’s self-image. When later in 1229 his armies took the field against those of the pope in his successful attempts to regain his kingdom in Italy, sympathetic writers described them as ‘the army of crusaders (crucesignatorum)’.⁴² As he reputedly said to Fakhr al-Din, his reason for taking Jerusalem was primarily because ‘I simply want to safeguard my reputation with the Christians.’⁴³ Immediately this seemed unlikely. Only the next day the archbishop of Caesarea arrived to impose the patriarch’s interdict on the Holy City. However, the bird had flown, Frederick decamping for Jaffa that day, eager to return to the west to make sure he did not become an emperor with no empire. Yet even while he had been in Jerusalem, some clergy had accompanied him and others, such as the Dominican Walter, who had preached the cross in England in 1227, celebrated mass for crusaders just outside the city walls. Once the emperor had gone, the bishop of Winchester and the military orders began rebuilding the city’s fortifications and, so one jaundiced English observer noted, clerics from grand prelates downwards crowded back into the Holy City, ‘their churches and old possessions restored to them’.⁴⁴ However controversial, the restoration of Jerusalem to Christian occupation lasted, with one brief interlude, for fifteen years. There is evidence that it benefited economically from a revived pilgrim trade; at least one new holy site was constructed, the Coeniculum on Mt Zion, the reputed site of the Last Supper. A well-funded, staffed and equipped scriptorium seems to have been established in the Holy City and large sums of money expended on its walls. Its loss briefly in 1240 and permanently in 1244 proved the wisdom of those who, since 1191, had argued for the impracticality of trying to defend Jerusalem without a larger militarized hinterland and control of the castles of Transjordan. As it was, after 1229, there was a Muslim military base stationed a few miles away at al-Bira, site of the former Frankish settlement of Magna Mahomeria. Discounted by subsequent events, nonetheless Jerusalem’s recovery in 1229 was a significant actual as well as symbolic achievement in the context of the emotions, blood and treasure so profligately expended on it since 1187.

Frederick’s haste to depart contributed to a further souring of relations with the clergy and local baronage. As in Cyprus in 1228, Frederick wished to impose a subservient regime in the kingdom, clipping the wings of the Ibelins. On his return to Acre he also found ranged against him the Templars, the patriarch and many of the Italian merchants in the city nervous at Damascus’s extremely hostile reaction to the surrender of Jerusalem. Patriarch Gerold was planning a coup with the Templars to wrest Jerusalem from the hands of imperial agents. Frederick’s attempt to instal Thomas of Acrerra as his – or rather his infant son Conrad’s – bailli met fierce resistance. After trying to browbeat the Templars and the patriarch by force, Frederick admitted defeat. He maintained the imperial presence by leaving a garrison in Acre and securing Montfort for the Teutonic Knights as well as endowing them with as much property as his opponents could not legally challenge. But he had to bow to local pressure and appoint two loyal but Syrian barons as his regents. The future of Hohenstaufen control in Jerusalem or Cyprus was to be resolved by war over the next decade and a half; Frederick’s allies lost.⁴⁵

The politics of Outremer meant that Frederick’s diplomatic success, still more his grand gesture in Jerusalem, was greeted with widespread derision, on both sides of the Ayyubid frontier. A Damascene contemporary drew a