God's War: A New History of the Crusades (122 page)

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 neat literary contrast between Frederick’s political and intellectual pretensions and his unprepossessing appearance. Quoting one of the janitors of the Dome of the Rock, Ibn al-Jawzi noted that
Frederick was red-faced, balding and myopic: ‘Had he been a slave he would not have been worth two hundred
dirham
.’
⁴⁶
The Franks of Acre were even less charitable. As Frederick hurried to embark from the city on 1 May 1229, local butchers pelted him with offal.
⁴⁷
Yet the doubters and critics were wrong. Al-Kamil’s victory over Damascus soon after allayed fears in Acre of a threat to their trade with the Syrian capital. Frederick’s own defeat of papal forces in 1229–30 and the subsequent reconciliation with Gregory IX at the Treaties of San Germano and Ceprano in 1230, secured official ecclesiastical acceptance of the Outremer settlement of 1229. Frederick’s crusade had potentially laid the basis for constructive relations with the Ayyubids in the development of a wider condominium in Palestine. When instability returned to the region on the death of al-Kamil in 1238, the territorial and castle base established in 1229 could have formed a platform for further Frankish advances. Frederick retained an almost proprietary interest in the affairs of Outremer and the need to assist the defence of the Holy Land. Yet the rejection by the Outremer nobles of Hohenstaufen control, the fissures in their own polity and the collapse of imperial – papal relations in the west prevented more than a very modest western response when the 1229 truce expired. However, Frederick never forgot his crusade. When his porphyry tomb in Palermo was opened in 1782, the emperor’s body was found to be wearing, on the left shoulder, his crusader’s cross.
⁴⁸

THE CRUSADES OF 1239–41

While the ten-year truce of 1229 focused minds in the west on preparations for a new expedition, political circumstances in the west were hardly conducive to fresh mass recruitment. In England and France, the ending of their kings’ minorities stimulated internal faction and rebellion. In 1230, Henry III of England attempted to recover his ancestral lands in Poitou by force. Relations between Frederick and Gregory IX, chiefly over imperial policy in Italy, slid towards a final parting of the ways in 1239. The monarchs of Iberia were vigorously pursuing their own expansion and consolidation of conquests from the Moors and each other. In eastern Europe, rumours and refugees alerted rulers to a new danger from Mongol advances westwards beyond the
Eurasian steppes that culminated in the great campaign (1236–42) by Batu, grandson of Genghis Khan, which brought him first to the marches of Latin Europe then, in 1241–2, to Poland, Hungary and, briefly, the Adriatic coast of Dalmatia. The Latin empire of Constantinople stumbled towards financial and political bankruptcy, despite vigorous leadership from the new co-emperor, the ever available and willing, if now rather shop-soiled, John of Brienne. In the Baltic, the energies of local rulers were engaged in the subjugation of Prussia, the collapse of the Swordbrothers in Livonia (1236) and growing rivalry with Novgorod.

Yet out of this apparently unpropitious setting, a new series of expeditions was fashioned. One collector of heroic tales and good stories, no friend to the emperor, noted that once Pope Gregory ‘realised that Frederick was not going to put forward any plan for freeing the Holy Land from the unbelievers’ he initiated preaching the cross in England and France.
⁴⁹
This was unfair. Frederick continued to take a close interest in plans for a new crusade and, even in 1239, when again excommunicated, retained at least diplomatic hopes of finding a role for himself or his son, Conrad, the absentee king of Jerusalem. However, Gregory saw in the crusade a unique instrument of ecclesiastical and specifically papal authority with wide application. He authorized crusading campaigns against allegedly heretical peasants in the Netherlands and the Lower Weser in the 1220s and early 1230s, and against Bosnians in 1227 and 1234. His commitment to prop up Latin Constantinople produced crusading plans in 1231 and 1236–8. In the Baltic he authorized the Teutonic Knights’ conquest of Prussia and supported them with repeated crusading appeals including, in 1240, war with Novgorod. From 1234, he employed the Dominicans and Franciscans on a regular basis to preach the
verbum crucis
. Finally in 1239–40 he began the series of crusades against Frederick that marked the start of a thirty-year contest to destroy the Hohenstaufen.
⁵⁰

Yet, in all this holy war, the plight of the Holy Land retained its special resonance.

Any man who will not set off at once
for the land where God lived and died,
any man who will not take the Holy Land’s cross
will have but little chance of going to heaven.
⁵¹

Although hardly impartial, these verses of Count Theobald IV of Champagne (1201–53, king of Navarre from 1234) marking his own determination to sail for Syria, such sentiments permeated the literature, liturgy and diplomatic rhetoric of the west. By 1234, prospects appeared at least realistic. In Outremer the War of the Lombards had temporarily died down after the defeat of the imperialists in Cyprus in 1232–3. The pope was involved in efforts to gain acceptance of the imperial administration on the mainland. In the west, after Louis IX of France achieved his majority in 1234, the severe political unrest of the previous years gave way to acceptance of the royal regime. In England a sharp political crisis of 1232–4 appeared over and protracted civil war averted. In both countries, just as during the preaching of the Fifth Crusade, the institution of a new expedition to the Holy Land offered a useful political ritual through which disputes and rivalries could be settled and political consensus restored.

Gregory IX launched his new enterprise in letters to the English (4 September 1234) and French (6 November 1234).
⁵²
The plan he devised was a sophisticated if logical development from the experience of 1213–21 and 1227–9. In addition to the crusaders themselves, Gregory proposed the creation of a ten-year garrison (or ‘militia’) funded by lay tax contributions earning non-plenary remission of sins.
⁵³
To subsidize the crusaders, the clergy were taxed and the pope instituted a campaign to attract vow redemptions and offered indulgences for material contributions. While the preaching was committed largely to the friars, the moneys raised were held in diocesan depositories from which sums were released by direct papal command or the instructions from a papal legate. The funds were given to the regional commanders of the crusade for their own expenses, those of their followers and for mercenaries. Some recruits, such as Count Amaury of Montfort, had their debts settled, while for others, including the count of Champagne, such subsidies made involvement possible.
⁵⁴
The leading English recruit, Henry III’s brother, Richard earl of Cornwall, stood in a different category. From Cornwall he received huge revenues from the growing tin industry, making him one of the richest men in Europe. Nonetheless, he was eager to supplement his resources to pay for the equipping, maintenance and transport of a small army to the Holy Land. Earl Richard received 3,000 marks levied from the increasingly hard-pressed English Jewish community in 1237. The next year, the pope assigned to
him legacies bequeathed for the Holy Land and cash vow redemptions, to be handed over once the earl reached Outremer. In fact, the elaborate funding system encountered severe administrative difficulties. Collection of Earl Richard’s grant of redemptions proved glacial, lasting into the 1250s, but lucrative. As late as 1247, when efforts to settle the account were revived by Pope Innocent IV, one archdeaconry was alleged to have raised 600 pounds. Yet by this time, as critics observed, it was evident that little of the money had been used on the actual crusade. Just as some expressed distaste at preachers’ emphasis on fund raising, so others saw the incongruity of supplying the fabulously wealthy earl with a form of regular pension derived from the payments of the pious, the halt, the lame and the poor.
⁵⁵
In France, bureaucratic confusion led to the same funds from the diocese of Poitiers being assigned simultaneously to two different crusaders, Geoffrey of Argentan and the duke of Brittany, while proceeds from three dioceses in the province of Lyons were directed to the duke of Burgundy, having previously been allocated to Count John of Mâcon.
⁵⁶