Read God's War: A New History of the Crusades Online
Authors: Christopher Tyerman
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THIRTEENTH-CENTURY OUTREMER
The structure of Christian Outremer in the thirteenth century differed significantly from that of the twelfth. Jerusalem or, more properly, Acre, constituted the sentimental and commercial heart of mainland Outremer. However, Cyprus became an independent principality (1192) and then a kingdom (1197), while retaining a semi-detached relationship, through family and tenurial ties and the recognition of a common judicial inheritance, the laws, customs and precedents from Jerusalem being accepted in Frankish Cypriot courts. Ruled by a cadet branch of Isabella I’s heirs until the crowns were united in 1269, Cyprus remained heavily engaged with the mainland while asserting its own integrity as a kingdom. The fate of the island did not depend on that of the mainland, or, as it proved, vice versa. Latin rule in Cyprus outlasted Christian Acre by nearly three centuries.
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To the north, although Antioch relinquished formal claims of overlordship of Cilician Armenia in 1194, close dynastic and political relations threw the two Christian principalities into a long struggle that only ended in 1219 when the count of Tripoli succeeded in securing his rule in Antioch as Bohemund IV against the Armenian claimant. As has been seen, the opportunity presented by the death of Leo II in 1219 of Armenia being ruled by his son-in-law, John of Brienne, king of Jerusalem, faded when John’s wife, Leo’s daughter Stephanie, and their child died in 1220.
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The Hohenstaufen imperial project briefly offered a prospect of a united Outremer. Cyprus and Armenia had received crowns under the auspices of Henry VI in 1197–8. His son, Frederick II, who married the heiress of Jerusalem in 1225, tried to assert his overlordship in Cyprus in 1228–9. His and later his agents’ failure ensured Outremer’s fissiparous status quo.
One of the most striking features of post-1192 Outremer was the manner in which in legal terms the caesura in ownership in most parts of the restored lands was ignored or sidestepped. Where possible, old lordships or the rights of landowning corporations, such as the church or military orders, were revived. Nobles retained titles even of lands long lost. Many land deeds and charters seemed to have survived the catastrophe of 1187, at least in the archives of ecclesiastical landlords. Lawbooks of the thirteenth century lovingly, if possibly imaginatively, cherished twelfth-century precedents and traditions, not least in
fostering the kingdom’s creation myth of Godfrey of Bouillon and his pious knightly companions.
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While modern observers tend to divide the history of the kingdom sharply in 1187, thirteenth-century residents,
pullani
, preferred to emphasize continuity. In some ways, the rulers at Acre created a virtual kingdom, moving the institutional capital and the headquarters of the great ecclesiastical corporations, such as the military orders and the canons of the Holy Sepulchre, to the new capital while retaining the fiction of a kingdom based around the Holy City. Even when Jerusalem was in Christian hands between 1229 and 1244, the capital remained at Acre.
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The real difference with the pre-1187 kingdom lay in the lack of secure, settled rural territory. The countryside was to an even greater extent than previously a place from which to extract rents and resources rather than to settle immigrants, although there is some evidence of attempts to encourage new settlement after 1191/2. Whether or not any Frankish peasants survived the Ayyubid conquest of 1187–91/2 in situ, some estates, at least near Acre, were recreated as if nothing had happened.
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Further from the Frankish ports and cities such continuities were not possible. Yet the lack of land may not have been a source of disastrous weakness. New settlers in the thirteenth century tended to congregate in the cities, along with internal refugees. An increase in population at Acre was witnessed by the urbanization of the substantial northern suburb of Montmusard, enclosed by walls between 1198 and 1212.
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Acre gave its rulers a source of incalculable benefit. The well-informed, if in this case possibly optimistic, English observer Matthew Paris learnt from Richard of Cornwall after his crusade in 1240–41 that Acre brought in annually £50,000 (sterling), a huge sum comparable with entire royal incomes in western Europe.
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By law, the crown retained a monopoly on profits of international trade. Acre occupied a pivotal position on the lucrative east–west trade routes. In addition with the exchange of foodstuffs with other Levantine markets, eastern spices, metalware, porcelain, glass, sugar, perfume, wine, jewels and slaves were traded with western textiles, base metals, wood and pilgrims. Niche markets included the Christian taste for salt pork and the Near Eastern demand for Tuscan saffron. Acre’s wealth allowed its thirteenth-century rulers to maintain a military establishment numerically similar to that of the territorially much larger pre-1187 kingdom at least into the 1240s.
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It also threw the city of Acre itself into prominence as a forum
in which wider political issues were rehearsed and disputed. In 1231, a group of barons, knights and burgesses established a sworn Commune at Acre that lasted for more than a decade, its members claiming, wishfully and partisanly, to represent the community of the whole realm.
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Acre’s wealth reflected in its political clout was also on display in its architecture and the new building to accommodate the needs of a capital. This opulence, mirrored in descriptions of the lavish marbled halls of John of Ibelin’s palace at Beirut, adorned by mosaics and elaborate fountains, built between 1197 and 1212, underpinned the survival of the Christian enclaves.
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As part of a wider commercial system involving the Muslim hinterland and trade routes that reached from far Asia to the Atlantic, this economic prosperity reflected and guaranteed generally pacific relations with the Franks’ neighbours until the irruption of the Mongols in the Near East from the 1250s diverted caravans northwards and southwards, away from the Syrian ports. Thereafter, the economic and financial decline mirrored an increasingly bleak outlook for Christian Outremer. This was not lost on alert contemporaries. In the early fourteenth century, the Venetian writer, merchant, diplomat and crusade propagandist Marino Sanudo Torsello (
c.
1270–
c.
1343), who visited Acre in the 1280s, insisted that a successful Christian counter-attack to recover the kingdom of Jerusalem had to be preceded by an economic war against Egypt.
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Trade gave power.
The dependence of the kingdom of Acre-Jerusalem from 1192 on the contrasting supports of defence and commerce propelled into prominence the military orders and the Italian communes, each bent on pursuing their sectional and corporate interests. Increasingly, the few inland and coastal fortresses that remained or came into Christian hands were assigned to the military orders. They had the international resources from their estates in the west to build and maintain them and a constant if modest supply of men to command the garrisons. Even small fortified sites gravitated to the orders.
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The orders’ headquarters were among the most impressive and best-fortified buildings in Acre, as their central role in the defence in May 1291 showed. Of the representatives from the Italian communes, initially Venice was dominant in Tyre and Genoa and Pisa in Acre, until from the 1260s Venice asserted its power in Acre too.
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The Italians provided both the merchant marine, carrying pilgrims as well as goods, and the navy for the kingdom of Jerusalem. Their
trading stations attracted significant home investment. Their local commercial and legal privileges, most of which dated back to the twelfth century, posed awkward problems of politics, customs tax, finance and justice for the local authorities. Yet without their presence and support, Acre, Tyre and the rest would have become untenable. In the absence of strong central government, these powerful military and commercial corporations became the arbiters of state affairs.
Whatever the lurid propaganda circulated in the west, thirteenthcentury mainland Outremer did not experience the perpetual threat of annihilation. An account of the rebuilding of the fortress of Saphet in northern Galilee in 1240 leaves a flavour of the delicate mix of competition, aggression, accommodation and frailty on both sides of the Christian – Muslim frontier. A Christian fortress before its capture by Saladin in 1188, Saphet was returned under the treaty agreed between the visiting crusader Theobald IV of Champagne and the Sultan of Damascus. During the truce, Benedict d’Alignan bishop of Marseilles (1229–67) visited the shrine of St Mary at Saidnaya, an unusual Greek Orthodox pilgrim site north of Damascus venerated by Muslims as well as Latin Christians. The Templars displayed particular interest in the cult. While in Damascus, where he received very civil treatment, the bishop was asked by locals whether the Christians were intending to rebuild Saphet, which, they insisted, would threaten their city’s security. On his return journey to Acre, Bishop Benedict conducted a careful survey of Saphet and its surroundings, unimpeded even though he was in part scouting lands still under Muslim control. He learnt that with a rebuilt Saphet would come control of the whole district. At Acre he bullied a reluctant Master of the Temple to organize the reconstruction of the castle, even though the promise by Count Theobald’s now departed crusaders to pay for it came to nothing. In December 1240, the teams of builders, which included Muslim slaves, began the work, the bishop laying the foundation stone after a suitably exhortatory sermon. More immediately useful, perhaps, he also left a ‘silver gilt jar of money to support subsequent work’.
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The cost of rebuilding Saphet was enormous, 1,100,000 bezants over two and a half years. The garrison’s daily complement included mercenaries and as many (fifty) Turcopoles, probably local Christians, and Templar Knights. The reliance on slave labour, local levies and mercenaries indicates how the shrunken Frankish elite had become adept at manipulating the widest social resources from its subject
communities. When Bishop Benedict revisited the site twenty years later, still in Christian hands the castle presented an impressive picture of strength and power; through it the Templars wielded control of the rich surrounding area and its resources, apparently up to 260 villages. Six years later it fell to the Egyptians.
This story reveals contact, exploitation and understanding by each side of the other’s interests and opportunities, as well as of the narrow terrain in contention. Residents of Outremer remained dependent and closely linked to their neighbours and opponents. Occasionally, fraternization turned sour. The assassin who attacked Edward of England during his stay at Acre in 1271–2 was a recent local convert from Islam retained by Edward as a spy.
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While Edward, not being a
pullanus
, needed an interpreter, many locals were more linguistically adept. The knowledge of Arabic by some Outremer nobles proved useful during the crusade on the Nile in 1250.
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The author of the fullest eyewitness account of the last days of Christian Acre, known misleadingly as ‘The Templar of Tyre’ (in fact probably a Cypriot by birth and certainly not a Templar) read and spoke Arabic, being closely involved in the network of espionage run by the Master of the Temple, William of Beaujeu (1273–91) linking the Frankish ports of Syria to the Mamluk court in Egypt.
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THE THREAT TO OUTREMER
By then, of course, prospects for the Franks were grim. Yet this had not always been the case. Neighbouring Muslim rulers were repeatedly willing to enter into agreements to avoid conflict, some of them including the return of territory lost in 1187. Truces with Jerusalem-Acre covered seventy of the ninety-nine years between Richard I’s Treaty of Jaffa in 1192 and the final loss of Acre in 1291. The later Ayyubids seemed to accept the Christian enclaves, their extinction desirable but not a determining political necessity. Only with the advent of the new rulers of Egypt, the Mamluks, in 1250 did a harder Muslim ideology emphasizing the commitment to
jihad
return to the rhetoric and politics of Outremer’s enemies.
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In thirteenth-century Syria, the aggressive, more militant Mamluks overrode the undemanding
convivencia
of the later Ayyubids in a manner reminiscent of, but more successful than, the
Moroccan fundamentalist Almoravids and Almohads in Spain challenging Christian power by displacing the accommodating indigenous Muslim rulers of al-Andalus.
Western awareness of events in the Holy Land existed on many levels. Innocent III had requested information from the patriarch of Jerusalem before the Fourth Crusade.
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In the century that followed, newsletters and diplomatic correspondence were circulated to courts and through the networks of the preaching mendicants and monastic orders. Such material found its way into the works of chroniclers such as Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris in the English abbey of St Alban’s. Matthew Paris also tapped returning crusaders and passing travellers for his information.
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Personal appeals for aid, for example from the bishop of Beirut in 1245, provided a focus for renewed commitment.
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Gregory X, in planning a new crusade in the 1270s, asked for memoranda on the whole range of crusade issues including the state of the Holy Land and the ways it could be defended.
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Beyond this elite circulation, repeated preaching disseminated news of the successive crises to a wider audience primed by the new crusading liturgies and the embrace of crusade taxation. The engagement of alert and critical public opinion was confirmed by the French popular movement known as the Shepherds’ Crusade of 1251.
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