God's War: A New History of the Crusades

steps towards a crusade also secured legitimate access to church funds, otherwise highly contentious. While Philip’s sincerity should not be dismissed too easily, his death and that of Pope Clement V in 1314, a papal interregnum (1314–16), the collapse of Edward II’s political position after his defeat at Bannockburn (1314), and a European famine (1315–17) effectively ended the Vienne crusade. However, Philip V of France sought lay taxes for a new crusade and his successor, Charles IV, attempted to revive serious planning in 1323, sponsoring a flotilla for the east, although it never embarked.¹⁰

Between 1331 and 1336, Philip VI of France negotiated, planned and prepared for a new Holy Land expedition.¹¹ He took the cross in October 1333, having secured papal appointment as the church’s ‘Rector and Captain-general’ and the desired massive financial subsidy from Pope John XXII the previous July. Philip jointly sponsored an anti-Turkish naval league with Venice, Byzantium and the Hospitallers (1332–4), and briefly toyed with a small preliminary expedition. However, French policy seemed more directed towards a new general passagium on the precedent of 1248 or 1270. While undoubtedly attracting the greatest chance of heavy papal subventions, such a strategy flew in the face of the realities of contemporary international politics. Only if Philip were able to engineer peace on his frontiers and across western Europe could his planned departure in 1336 be achieved. With the dispute between the papacy and the German king, Louis IV, unresolved, Italy at war and the Iberian monarchies disengaged, prospects seemed clouded. More damaging were relations between France, England and Scotland. Although Edward III of England had been involved in crusade diplomacy from at least 1332, the English attempts (1332–5) to subdue Scotland and oust Philip’s ally David Bruce (1329–71) as king of Scots rendered serious cooperation impossible. A new pacific pope, Benedict XII, was reluctant to allow Philip any flexibility in how he spent (or, more properly, diverted or misspent) the crusade taxes. The French king, aware that the English might take advantage of his absence, made his departure for the east dependent on a settlement in Scotland. Raising men, money and materials also proved far more difficult than Philip had anticipated. The crusade project was cancelled in 1336. The fleet intended for the Levant was subsequently directed to the Channel for the early preliminaries of the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453), a conflict that sounded the knell not just for Philip VI’s crusade schemes but for any substantial international campaign in the eastern Mediterranean. Benedict XII’s cancellation of the crusade removed a diplomatic restraint from both parties, which precipitated the outbreak of open hostilities a year later.

It has been argued that the somewhat sclerotic organization for the crusade before 1336 suggested a lukewarm attitude to the venture, especially among certain of the factions that dominated Philip VI’s court, and that the crusade was abandoned because it looked increasingly risky. While the latter is self-evident, the accusation of a lack of commitment underestimates the chances Philip took, not least in expending political capital trying unsuccessfully to extract a lay subsidy in 1335–6. Equally, the crusade helped Philip establish the claim by his new royal dynasty, the Valois, to the authority inherent in the religion of monarchy created by his Capetian predecessors, especially St Louis. The administrative and diplomatic effort had been considerable, and reached beyond France in the embrace of clerical taxation and authorized preaching. What is more, as predicted by one French crusading hopeful, failure or deceit would attract ‘la honte du monde’, disgrace in the eyes of the world.¹² Reactions varying from resigned embarrassment to savage denunciation for hypocrisy echoed around the courts and commentators. Contemporaries accused Philip of using the crusade as a smokescreen behind which he prepared war against the English. Some ascribed his failures in that war to this supposed deceit. Decades later, Philip of Mezieres, a boy in Picardy at the time, recalled clearly the unfortunate consequences of Philip VI’s failure.¹³ The memory was stitched into the narratives of recent events popular around 1400 on both sides of the Channel. The ambition of 1332 and, still more, the decision of 1336 remained to haunt the Valois kings of France.

The last concerted diplomatic effort to arrange a new general passagium directly against the Mamluks had to await the great truce in the Hundred Years War 1360–69. King Peter I of Cyprus (1359–69) was eager to enlist western aid for his ambitious policy to protect Cypriot trade in the Levant by destabilizing the Mamluk regime and its grip over the trade routes that passed through Alexandria.¹⁴ Recent relaxation of papal embargoes on western commerce with Egypt stimulated Peter to bolder action. In 1361, he had taken the southern Turkish port of Adalia. In 1362, tapping the traditional enthusiasms of western chivalry, Peter gave notice of a new campaign to recover the Holy Land, a declaration he followed with a personal visit to the major capitals of Europe, from England, Flanders and France to Poland and Bohemia. He had managed to gain Pope Urban V’s support at a conference at Avignon in March and April 1363 attended by a large and distinguished gathering, including King John II of France, Amadeus count of Savoy, the Master of the Hospitallers and the English Thomas of Beauchamp earl of Warwick. The climax of the conference came with the reception of the cross by these luminaries and the new papal legate Elias of Perigord, Cardinal Talleyrand, a veteran diplomat. New crusade taxes were proposed, preaching authorized and indulgences offered. The protagonists at Avignon became immortalized in Andrea Bonaiuti’s fresco of the Church Militant in St Maria Novella, Florence.¹⁵

The results of Peter I’s grand tour of Europe in 1362–5 fell short of the extravagant hopes of the Avignon conference. John II and Cardinal Talleyrand both died in 1364. Crusade management devolved on to Peter I, and his advisors, the new crusade legate Pierre de Thomas (d. 1366), already legate in the east, and his chancellor, Philip of Mezieeres. Money from Pope Urban paid for a significant body of hired troops, including English mercenaries, possibly from the English Free Company based at Pisa. Leaving Venice in June 1365, Peter made his rendezvous with Cypriot and Hospitaller reinforcements in August, the combined fleet perhaps numbering 165 ships, capable of carrying a substantial body of men – as many as 10,000 has been suggested – and their horses. Recruits came from as far as Scotland, France, Geneva and England. The English mercenary contingent was commanded by an English noble, possibly the earl of Hereford.¹⁶ However, the polyglot nature of the forces at King Peter’s disposal did not tend to cohesion or unity of purpose, tactics or strategy. While the decision to attack Egypt’s main port, Alexandria, was the king’s, even on the first day of fighting one group of barons almost immediately suggested a withdrawal to avoid pointless casualties, implying that they thought the whole enterprise futile.

The campaign comprised a stunning victory, an embarrassing retreat and a huge, if tainted, profit. Against all expectations, Alexandria, one of the best-defended ports in the Mediterranean, fell by storm on the first day of fighting, 10 October 1365. Once inside the city, the Christians spent the following week massacring thousands of civilians in rapidly securing vast quantities of booty from one of the richest entreputs in the world then known to Europeans. It was not a pretty sight; but it appeared, not least to Egyptian eyewitnesses, thoroughly effective, even if the parallels lay less with Constantinople in 1204 than with Damietta in 1249. Sudden success prompted an immediate row. Later apologists depicted King Peter, Pierre de Thomas and Mezieres arguing for the retention of Alexandria as a lever to secure the return of Jerusalem. Others, equally well versed in crusade history, insisted the military position of the crusaders was untenable. Better to cut and run with the enormous booty than insist on a futile sacrificial gesture. Prudence prevailed, the Christians evacuating Alexandria on 16 October.

Peter possibly agreed with this analysis. He would have understood that without a promise of a massive relief force, the road from Alexandria led nowhere. Cypriot interests lay in disrupting Alexandrian trade to favour their own ports. By presenting the west with such a dramatic, startling and lucrative victory, the first on such a scale since 1249, Peter may also have hoped to provide impetus for fresh anti-Mamluk commitment at a time when popes and princes were increasingly distracted by the Turks further north. The novelty of Peter’s crusade scheme of 1362–5 lay in the active leadership by an eastern Latin ruler of a western crusade, a coalition as obvious as it was rare. If Peter hoped to create a sensation, he succeeded. Encomiasts, such as Mezieres, and the fashionable French poet and musician Guillaume de Machaut, in his verse epic La Prise d’Alexandre left vivid – if politically and morally pointed – accounts.¹⁷ The English monastic chronicler Thomas Walsingham recorded that not only did the cost of spices rise as a consequence of the sack of Alexandria but many English and Gascons returned from Egypt with ‘cloth of gold, silks and splendid exotic jewels in witness of such a victory achieved there’.¹⁸ Despite criticism of the evacuation and the easily caricatured greed of the troops, the capture of Alexandria retained its lustre as a campaign honour whose renown Geoffrey Chaucer, who knew many of the real veterans, was careful to borrow for his Knight in the Canterbury Tales.¹⁹

Yet Peter I’s strategy, whether of conquest or trade war, failed utterly. The 1365 crusade disintegrated with the evacuation; the next western crusading venture was conducted by the count of Savoy in 1366–7 in the Dardenelles and Black Sea. A few further Cypriot raids on the Levantine coast over the next few years and another extensive western progress by King Peter in 1367–8 achieved nothing. Peter himself was assassinated in 1369, a victim of Cypriot feuding that rarely declined from the vicious. In fact, he had begun negotiations with the Mamluks