God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Attempts to organize a new crusade did not end in 1270. Preaching and clerical taxes were authorized in 1274 and 1291. Serious strategic thought was pursued, including suggestions (in 1274 and 1291) that the military orders should be amalgamated to exploit military and fiscal economies of scale and unity of purpose. In particular, the Second Council of Lyons appeared to promise a new beginning to efforts to restore Frankish rule in the Holy Land. Gregory X placed the eastern crusade at the heart of his diplomacy. Before leaving Acre after hearing of his election as pope in 1271, Gregory pointedly preached on the text ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning’ (Psalm 137 v.5). On reaching Europe, he summoned a general council to discuss church reform and plans for a new crusade, which he proposed to lead in person. Before the council convened in May 1274 at Lyons, Gregory sought advice from politicians and churchmen professionally involved. A number of treatises were submitted containing advice that varied from a catalogue of ecclesiastical, including crusading, shortcomings by a Franciscan, Gilbert of Tournai, a self-interested call by the bishop of Olmutz on behalf of the king of Bohemia to concentrate on the Baltic and eastern European crusading front to a plea by an Acre Dominican, William of Tripoli, for the conversion, not destruction, of the Muslims.¹²⁰ The council itself exposed the gap between intent and action. The decree Constitutiones pro zeli fidei (18 May 1274) expanded on its exemplar, Innocent III’s Ad Liberandam of 1215, by instituting a clearer administrative structure for the collection of the proposed sexennial clerical tithe, establishing twenty-six specified collectories.¹²¹ A voluntary lay poll tax was suggested. To provide the most favourable diplomatic context, union between the Roman and Greek Orthodox churches was negotiated, in part a response of the Byzantine emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus to his fears of isolation in the face of the aggressive ambitions of the previous papal favourite, Charles of Anjou, who was eyeing the Balkans with unconcealed purpose. Ambassadors from the Mongol khan were received by the council, its leader even undergoing a symbolic form of public Christian baptism.

However, only one western monarch bothered to attend, the ageing James I of Aragon. Despite his offer of a preliminary garrison force of 500 knights and 2,000 infantry to prepare for a subsequent large expedition, the political will was hardly overwhelming, despite strenuous efforts to excite general support.¹²² Preaching was authorized by a papal bull of September 1274.¹²³ The clerical tax raised massive amounts in some areas such as Tuscany, testimony to new bureaucratic efficiency rather than overt enthusiasm.¹²⁴ As in 1215, money-boxes were set up in parish churches. Pope Gregory persuaded Philip III of France, Charles of Anjou and his preferred candidate for the imperial throne, Rudolf of Habsburg, to take the cross in 1275. A departure date was set for April 1277 when the pope and the new emperor would together embark for the east. Plans for a papal flotilla of about twenty ships were put in train. Yet the tepid reaction of delegates at Lyons proved a surer indication of the prospects for the crusade than the administrative, fiscal and diplomatic activity. Bureaucratic neatness was not enough. The lack of vocal support for the proposed expedition from the military orders and the French envoys at Lyons gave its own testimony. Gregory X’s crusade simultaneously revealed how administratively effective papal leadership had become in the later thirteenth century and how politically and emotionally incapable it was to move the hearts of politicians and people. On Gregory’s death in January 1276, the crusade plans were shelved and then abandoned. While the church taxes continued to be raised in places, the proceeds were diverted to papal wars, fought as crusades, in Italy. The Mongol alliance, despite six further embassies to the west between 1276 and 1291, led nowhere.¹²⁵ The prospect of an anti-Mamluk coalition faded as the westerners’ inaction rendered them useless as allies for the Mongols, who, in turn, would only seriously be considered by western rulers as potential partners in the event of a new crusade which never happened. The union of the Roman and Greek churches was repudiated by the Orthodox faithful. It had in any case failed to curb Angevin aspirations for Balkan conquest at Greek expense. The activity of the 1270s set a pattern for the future, copied with an increasingly predictable monotony of frustration after the council of Vienne (1311–12), in the 1330s and the 1360s: papal or royal enthusiasm, commitment, taxation, distraction and abortion. The disintegration of Gregory’s schemes confirmed the fears of even sympathetic onlookers, such as the well- informed networking Italian Franciscan Salimbene of Adam, that ‘it does not seem to be the Divine Will that the Holy Sepulchre should be recovered’.¹²⁶

Baibars’s campaigns of 1265–71 had reduced the Frankish holdings in Palestine to a barely sustainable rump of a few castles and coastal cities clinging on to the shore of the Mediterranean with almost no hinterland. Not even Frankish superiority at sea could reverse the tide. By demolishing the places he captured, Baibars denied the prospect of reconquest. There would be no repeat of 1189–92, even though Christians retained bases in Cilicia and Cyprus. Of the campaigns of Baibars and his immediate heirs it has been said that they achieved what their predecessors, Persian, Arab, Turk or Frank, had not, ‘the destruction of the ancient Syro-Palestinian city civilisation’.¹²⁷ The final act was postponed not by Frankish resolve or a new crusade, but by the tangled internal politics of the Mamluk empire and the Mongol threat to Syria, which continued into the early fourteenth century. A Mongol invasion was defeated at Homs in 1281, a new assault the next year only averted by the death of the aggressive il-Khan Abaqa from delirium tremens. His successor, Teguder, was a Muslim convert.¹²⁸ This freed Sultan Kalavun (1279–90) to resume his attack on the Franks. The great northern fortress of Margat fell in 1285; Lattakiah in 1287. Tripoli followed in 1289, after 180 years of uninterrupted Christian rule, the longest of any of the major Frankish conquests. It had been under Genoese control since the death of the last count, Bohemund VII, in 1287, and it was rumoured that the sultan’s attack had been encouraged either by the Venetians or Pisans. Those who failed to escape – mainly non-nobles – were massacred; the city was demolished, a portent for the fate of Acre.¹²⁹

Throughout the 1270s and 1280s, men and money were sent to the Holy Land by popes and western rulers. As the Frankish position in Palestine disintegrated, small companies led by well-connected crusaders appeared at Acre temporarily to stiffen local resistance and the permanent western garrisons funded by concerned, perhaps guilty kings in Europe: Countess Alice of Blois and Count Florent of Holland in 1287; John of Grailly in 1288; the Savoyard intimate of Edward I Othon of Grandson in 1290. None of these did anything to reverse the decline. The politics of western Europe militated against a new crusade just as firmly as the politics of the Near East. The intervention of Charles of Anjou’s attempt to annexe the kingdom of Jerusalem in 1277 briefly seemed to offer a remedy.¹³⁰ Yet his ambition only served to challenge the unity of Outremer and provoke a damaging war in the west, known as the War of the Sicilian Vespers, after Sicily rebelled against Angevin rule in 1282. This pitted Aragon against Charles of Anjou and his French allies, smashing precisely the coalition assembled by Louis IX and sought by Gregory X. In 1285, Philip III of France died on crusade, like his father, but it had been against the Aragonese not the Mamluks. Edward I’s priorities lay in the conquest of Wales (to 1284) shortly to be followed by his involvement in the Scottish succession, which increasingly dominated the last years of his reign (1290–1307). His alliance with France had become a distant memory as relations deteriorated into war over the status of Edward’s French duchy of Gascony (1294). The legacy of the imperial interregnum (1250–73) prevented any unified German contribution. Although the last great Mongol attack on eastern Europe had ended in 1260, because of civil war breaking out in the Far East over the succession to the khanate, attempts to arrange an anti-Muslim alliance proved as elusive as before, while the rulers of eastern Europe occupied themselves with consolidating their own borders. Just as the power of kings promised more effective crusading, it largely precluded any alternative initiatives from their nobles. The gulf between capacity and policy came to match that between idealism and will.

The divisions of the west disrupted Outremer during Charles of Anjou’s attempt to wrest the kingship of Jerusalem from the kings of Cyprus (1277–85). Yet even after Charles’s death in 1285 and the restoration of a single nominal authority under Henry II of Cyprus and I of Jerusalem, no prospect of permanent defence on the mainland was possible without impractically massive outside assistance. As Sultan Kalawun tightened the noose, each Frankish lordship faced its own demise in autonomous desperation, some accepting Mamluk over-lordship or condominium, others, like Tripoli, suffering conquest and butchery. The last act, begun by Kalavun in 1290 against Acre, continued after his death under his successor al-Ashraf Khalil. The siege of Acre lasted from 6 April 1291 until 18 May, when the city fell. The frenzied defence and countless acts of bravery – on both sides – ring in the memory.

Khalil’s assault on Acre was designed to be final. The sultan, following preparations already put in train by his father, gathered troops, engineers and siege machines from across northern Syria, Damascus and Egypt. The well-maintained double walls of Acre presented a formidable obstacle, so the siege was to be a contest of throwing machines. One of