God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Ayyub when he was ruling the Jazira in the 1230s. In his efforts to control Syria, the sultan called on their assistance with offers of pay and land. In 1244, a large Khwarazmian force launched a destructive raid from Iraq through Syria to Palestine before joining al-Salih Ayyub’s Egyptian army coming up from the Nile. On the way they attacked Jerusalem on 23 August, easily overcoming the feeble defences, killing any Franks they found and desecrating the Christian Holy Places. Christian rule in the Holy City was ended, not to be revived until the ending of Ottoman rule in December 1917 by a British army. The Franks in Acre summoned their full military forces and elicited the help of their allies the rulers of Damascus and Homs. Together they marched south to confront the combined Egyptian-Khwarazmian force near Gaza. On 17 October, the Egyptians and Khwarazmians annihilated the substantial Franco-Syrian Ayyubid army at La Forbie (Harbiya) near Gaza. Although a military disaster for the Franks from which Outremer never entirely recovered, the battle of La Forbie was as much a contest, as one observer put, of ‘Saracen against Saracen’,² exposing just how peripheral the Franks could appear in the wider regional conflicts. The last thing at stake was religion. The Khwarazmians proved unruly allies and violent employees. After helping al-Salih Ayyub conquer Syria, Damascus falling in 1245, they were dispensable. For some years, the sultan had been building up his personal askar or regiment of trained mamluks, known as the Bahriyya (from their base on the Nile, Bahr al-Nil) or Salihiyya. They provided more efficient military support for the regime. In 1246, the Khwarazmians were destroyed by the Ayyubid emirs of Homs and Aleppo without any Frankish involvement. Meanwhile, most of the Frankish gains of 1240–41 in southern Palestine were lost, Ascalon falling in 1247.³

The disaster in the east threw the survival of the Frankish kingdom into doubt. Pleas for help were despatched to the west. Yet the concerted memory in western Europe attributed the inspiration for a new general relief expedition to a domestic event. In December 1244, Louis IX of France took the cross after surviving a near- fatal illness. It is unclear whether he received the cross for its mystical healing properties, a belief widely held by contemporaries, or as a token of gratitude after hovering between life and death. He may have known of the loss of Jerusalem in August. Pope Innocent IV, in exile at Lyons, had certainly heard of it by the end of December.⁴ However, the driving motive behind the French king’s commitment lay in Louis’s own personality, piety and ambition. Despite apparently strong initial opposition from his domineering mother, Blanche of Castile, and possibly other members of his entourage, Louis stuck to his decision, repeating his vow when in sounder body if not mind and persuading his brothers and court to follow suit.⁵

The public support of the royal family revealed how carefully Louis laid his plans. By the mid-1240s, the conquests of 1203–26 within France by Philip II and Louis VIII had not only extended the royal demesne massively but had left much of provincial France in the hands of cadet members of the dynasty, Louis’s brothers Robert in Artois, Charles in Anjou and Alphonse in Poitou and heir to Toulouse. The kingdom became a family firm. The adherence of his brothers to the crusade scheme was a political prerequisite for the policy to work, not just a sign of cosy family harmony. Louis had taken the cross, possibly from the bishop of Paris, the scholarly academic William of Auvergne, without any apparent prior papal authorization. Beside his ecclesiastical role, Bishop William was an unusually dispassionate expert on branches of Arabic philosophy and had become something of an expert on eastern affairs. If the well-informed gossip Matthew Paris can be credited, this may have lent weight to the doubts Paris claimed William expressed about the wisdom of Louis’s decision.⁶ Yet in the teeth of maternal, episcopal and probably political opposition, Louis pressed ahead in such a determined fashion that it is hard not to subscribe to the idea that his crusade marked a personal and political as well as spiritual rite of passage, an occasion and process of individual emancipation.

The legend of Louis may distort the picture. The near-death experience, the almost miraculous return to health and the assumption of the ‘life-giving’ cross, as the phrase went, may appear too dramatically neat to be credited. Within weeks, Innocent IV was sending out summonses to a new church council, to be held at Lyons, at which the plight of the Holy Land was to be discussed, although the council’s agenda was dominated by the struggle with Frederick II, the eastern crisis being cited alongside possible campaigns to defend Latin Constantinople and resist the Mongols.⁷ Louis’s decision to hazard life, treasure and reputation on an eastern adventure may not have been as spontaneous as admiring or wondering observers suggested. Buoyed by a strong domestic political position won by victories in 1242–4 over disaffected magnates, including the count of Toulouse, as well as over the king of England (in 1242), such a grand gesture might have seemed timely even without the stimulus of grave illness. The crusade provided an excuse and opportunity to tighten and reform royal administration, extend the king’s judicial and fiscal grasp and increase revenues. As a decade earlier, it could serve as a mechanism to consolidate or impose reconciliation of dissident regional and baronial factions. Command of a new eastern expedition placed a convenient distance between Louis and the embattled emperor without his having to take sides against the Hohenstaufen as the pope’s poodle. The whole scheme enhanced Louis’s moral authority, his particular brand of political puritanism signalled by the use of friars as agents in the reform of government and the collection of clerical taxes. With control of the holy business, Louis could fashion more directly and strongly than in any other way a new cult of holy monarchy with the elevation of France itself as a cradle of holy warriors, conscious of its special, divinely inspired mission, itself a holy land. The single-mindedness with which Louis pursued all these ends might indicate that the decision made in his sick room at Pontoise in December 1244 came at the end of a lengthy process of deliberation. As with most crusaders, while in no way diminishing its sincerity, it is too crudely simple to explain Louis IX’s devotion to the cause in terms of piety alone.

Within two months of Louis taking the cross, the pope had issued a crusade bull and preaching had been authorized, led in France by the legate Odo of Chaa teauroux, cardinal bishop of Tusculum (1244–73), who additionally legitimized regional preachers and collectors of funds.⁸ As before, preaching combined the practical with the persuasive to create an atmosphere or mood to encourage the faithful to take the cross, purchase vow redemptions or provide the more disengaged assistance of donations and prayers. All of these featured in Cardinal Odo’s sermons. While never far from the church’s rhetorical lexicon, the plight of the Holy Land needed to be placed in a suitably moving emotional and cultural frame to attract the sort of active involvement the king sought. So beside the reminders of the spiritual rewards, the religious duty and the Christian obligation of the cross, in one sermon Odo reminded his audience of those ‘nobles of former times who left the kingdom of France, captured Antioch and the land of Jerusalem’.⁹ The enticement of nostalgia may have been easier to effect in lay aristocratic circles because of the popularity and circulation of vernacular adventure poems known today as Crusade Cycles, which had transmuted the events of the First and Third Crusades into epics of chivalry. Nostalgia only works if the images being refurbished retain contemporary resonance. However, stimulating a warm glow of religious, cultural and, in the case of Odo’s preaching, French national pride was insufficient. Odo and other preachers had also to spell out how the faithful could contribute, in person, with money or through prayer.

The preaching campaign of 1245–8 did not run entirely smoothly, hampered less by public indifference or hostility than by official contradictions and institutional bickering. Outside France, preaching was organized in the British Isles, Scandinavia, Germany and the Low Countries. Henry III of England, licking his wounds after his defeat by Louis IX in 1242 in Poitou, was suspicious of getting involved in what from the outset appeared to be a French project, prompting him to bar entry to the bishop of Beirut, who had hoped to visit England to drum up support.¹⁰ In Languedoc, the French government deliberately associated the Holy Land crusade with the suppression of the rebellion of 1242–4 and the eradication of heresy. Rebels, such as Raymond VII of Toulouse or Oliver of Termes, were induced to take the cross as a symbol and shackle of loyalty to the Capetians, while reformed heretics received sentences that insisted on taking the cross for Palestine, although many chose exile instead.¹¹ Elsewhere, the claims of other papal holy wars were simultaneously being pressed on the faithful. After the Council of Lyons (June–July 1245) deposed Frederick II, a crusade against him began to be preached in large parts of Germany. This led directly to conflicts of interest and effort. In July 1246, Cardinal Odo was instructed by Innocent IV to tell Holy Land preachers in Germany to preach the war against Frederick II. Innocent recognized the sensitivity of this order by commanding Odo to keep the instructions secret.¹² This hardly assisted administrative clarity. In Frisia, as in other places, the two preaching campaigns tripped each other up. One preacher began by preaching against Frederick II before being transferred to the Holy Land war. Holy Land recruits in the dioceses of Cambrai, Louvain, Metz, Toul and Verdun were forbidden to swap their vows to fight Frederick, even though the anti-Hohenstaufen crusade was being preached there. Unsurprisingly, this competition for recruits carried over to the raising of vow redemptions, offering unscrupulous operators the chance of illicit profits as control and audit broke down.¹³ In places, the crusade to defend the Latin Empire of Constantinople was promoted. In Provence, while the Holy Land crusade was being preached with mixed success in neighbouring Languedoc, the Dominicans of Provence were bombarded with papal