God's War: A New History of the Crusades (132 page)

The rituals of departure in 1270 exactly copied those of 1248. On 14 March 1270, Louis received the oriflamme and the pilgrim’s scrip and staff at St Denis. The following day, he entered Notre Dame in Paris as a barefoot penitent before walking to Vincennes, where he bade farewell to his wife. The first setback came at Aigues Mortes, where Louis found the promised ships were late, only arriving in late June, by which time sickness had already been incubated in the army. Leaving Aigues Mortes on 2 July, the French fleet reached Cagliari in Sardinia on 4 July, where they waited for other squadrons to assemble. There on 13 July Louis formally announced the destination of Tunis, where the fleet arrived on 17 July, effecting a landing the following day. On 24 July,
the army moved its operations a few miles along the coast to Carthage in search of better terrain for the camp and adequate water. Further advance was delayed while Louis waited for the arrival of his brother Charles, who had only begun to equip his fleet in Sicily a few days earlier. High summer, poor diet and water contaminated by the immobile army soon stoked the outbreak of virulent disease, probably typhus or dysentery. The leadership was hit as well as the ordinary ranks. Louis’s son John Tristan, born at Damietta in the dark spring days of 1250, died. The king and his eldest son, Philip, both fell ill. Lingering bedridden for a month, Louis died on 25 August 1270, just as the first detachments of Charles of Anjou’s fleet were making land. Some said his last words were ‘Jerusalem! Jerusalem!’, although his confessor, who administered the dying king Extreme Unction, signally failed to mention such a neat end.
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With the new Philip III still convalescent, Charles of Anjou assumed command. Evacuation appeared the only option. By 1 November, after a debilitating period of negotiation and desultory skirmishing, Charles and Emir Muhammed agreed terms. In return for the handing over of prisoners, the emir’s agreement to permit Christian worship and proselytizing, and a war indemnity of 210,000 gold ounces (
c.
500,000
l.t.
), Charles agreed to withdraw, appropriating a third of the money. This angered some sections of the Christian army, not least Edward of England, who arrived off Tunis on 10 November, just as the crusaders were packing up to depart. The Christian fleet sailed for Sicily to decide on their next course of action, reaching Trapani on 14 November. Any decision on further campaigning was pre-empted by a storm on 15/16 November, which destroyed large numbers of ships and damaged many more. Perhaps as many as forty vessels were lost, including eighteen large transports, with over 1,000 lives. That effectively ended the crusade, only Edward of England insisting on proceeding to the Holy Land. By the time Philip III returned to his new kingdom, his train resembled a funeral cortège, bearing the bodies of his father, brother, brother-in-law, wife and stillborn son.
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The failure of the 1270 crusade, though dramatic and spectacular, did not mean the end of the crusade as a focus for monarchical aspirations. Some, like Alphonse of Poitiers before his death the following year, kept the flame burning. In 1271, the cardinals elected as pope Tedaldo Visconti, patriarch of Jerusalem, who was actually in Acre
when he was elected as Pope Gregory X. Much of his reign, and those of his immediate successors, was occupied with prospects for a new general crusade to the east and galvanizing the kings of the west to join. Edward of England had done more. Reinforced by a few French nobles, Edward set off for Acre in the spring of 1271, despite attempts to persuade him to return to England, where his father Henry III was gravely ill. Characteristically, he refused, allegedly insisting that he would travel to Acre if necessary only with his groom Fowin for company.
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As it was, his army was small, perhaps only 1,000 strong, carried in a small flotilla of just thirteen ships. Reaching Acre via Cyprus on 9 May 1271, Edward remained in the Holy Land for a year, joined by his brother Edmund in September 1271. He lacked the manpower to achieve any lasting or significant change in the Franks’ position, arriving too late to prevent Baibars’s capture of Crac des Chevaliers in April. Edward contented himself with pursuing the will of the wisps of a Mongol alliance with the il-khan of Persia and internal harmony within Frankish Outremer. He saw some action in defending Acre from Baibars’s attack in December 1271 and launched a couple of military promenades into the surrounding countryside. The truce agreed by Hugh III and Baibars in May 1272 failed to persuade Edward of the futility of continued stay, an obstinacy that may have provoked the famous attempt on his life. Even before his departure in October 1272, some of his followers had begun to leave, including his brother, in May. While achieving almost nothing for Outremer, beyond the establishment of a small English garrison in Acre, Edward’s crusade had proved massively expensive, perhaps over £100,000. During the crusade, he ran up debts of tens of thousands of livres.
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However, in reputation and image, the crusade paid very handsome dividends which he and his eulogists were not slow in exploiting. Amid the increasingly fevered discussion around the courts of western Europe about how to save the Holy Land, Edward stood out as the only crowned head in the west to have actually gone there. In 1287, he even took the cross for a second time and began apparently serious preparations for a new expedition. Even so, as the only tangible assistance to reach Palestine from the great French crusade planned by Louis IX, Edward’s crusade of 1271–2 represented very meagre pickings. In its way, far more potent, for the French monarchy although not for Palestine, was Louis IX’s canonization in 1297. But even that was tinged with disappointment for one of those whose
evidence had helped secure the king’s elevation to sanctity. Joinville regretted Louis had only been gazetted as a confessor and not, as he thought only proper in the light of the king’s acute sufferings on crusade, a martyr.
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THE LOSS OF THE HOLY LAND

For the rest of his life Edward I of England (d. 1307) protested his eagerness to return to the east, usually coupled with his insistence that he was too busy with vital affairs of state at home to leave just yet. While occasionally disingenuous, this excuse expressed the reality of late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century crusading. Louis IX had shown how the full resources of a kingdom allied to ecclesiastical funding could be directed very effectively towards the crusade. However, precisely these newly powerful central governments militated against the fulfilment of another such policy, as regimes became enmeshed in hardening intractable international conflicts and domestic administration. The experience of Louis’s crusade alerted officials to the almost limitless expense of such enterprises, the accounts of Louis’s campaigns being copied and studied by interested but anxious bureaucrats for more than half a century after his death.
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The increasing bulk of works of theoretical planning or practical advice written from the 1270s began to expose very clearly the material difficulties facing any eastern expedition. This greater openness to the difficulties of crusading was summed up by a French diplomat, the crusade veteran Erard of Valéry, at the Second Council of Lyons in 1274, called by Gregory X to attempt to launch a new offensive. It would be like a small puppy yelping at a great mastiff.
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The advice Gregory received before the council exposed how different theatres of the crusade, such as the Baltic, diverted interest and commitment. Even promoters of crusades in Europe against the Hohentaufen, such as the great Dominican preacher and canonist Humbert of Romans, noted how they engendered cynicism if not overt hostility among a wide if not necessarily deep coalition of observers from across western Europe. The Lyons Council authorized more church taxation and preaching of the cross, but the silence of the royal representatives and spokesmen for the military orders at the council when asked to advise on the best course of action spoke loudest.
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Concern with the plight of the Holy Land had
not declined, but action became harder to organize and, in consequence, undermined future commitment, a vicious cycle never thereafter escaped.

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 Olmütz 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.
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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.
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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.
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Preaching was authorized by a papal bull of September 1274.
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The clerical tax raised massive amounts in some areas such as Tuscany, testimony to new bureaucratic efficiency rather than overt enthusiasm.
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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.
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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’.
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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