God's War: A New History of the Crusades (69 page)

They are of varied races and strange ways. Their cause is a great one and they are serious in their enterprise and of prodigious discipline, so much so that, if one of them commits a crime, the only penalty is to have his throat cut like a sheep. I was informed about one of their nobles, that he did wrong to a page of
his and beat him beyond the limit. The priests gathered to give judgement and the case by general decision demanded that his throat be cut. Many petitioned the emperor on his behalf, but he paid no attention and had his throat cut. They have forbidden themselves pleasures even to the extent that, if they hear that anyone has allowed himself any pleasure, they treat him as an outcast and chastise him. All this because of grief for Jerusalem.
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The image of a ‘Christian militia’ fostered by Frederick’s later panegyrists may not simply have been a construct of preachers, observers and historians but, as on the First Crusade, an integral part of the army’s own mechanisms of self-regulation and morale. Chroniclers’ comparisons with the Theban legion and the Maccabees may have seemed appropriate to the troops themselves as they struggled across Asia Minor in the spring of 1190. In letters home in the autumn of 1189, Frederick himself described his followers as ‘the army of the Holy Cross’ or ‘of the life-giving Cross’, in clear association with the central image of the recruiting campaign.
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This sense of identity and destiny underpinned the whole enterprise. The tone for the expedition had been set by the careful orchestration of Frederick’s adoption of the cross in March 1188 and his receiving the scrip and staff of a pilgrim at Hagenau in April 1189. However, throughout the German march, the maintenance of morale and a sense of purpose ran in tandem with Frederick’s careful planning and judicious use of force.

The German contingents for the land route mustered, as arranged, at Regensburg on 23 April 1189. On 11 May, the army or, more realistically, armies, moved off down the Danube, the high command in boats, the rest on shore. Progress was rapid and peaceful, past Vienna to Bratislava (Pressburg), where disciplinary regulations were promulgated. By 4 June the Germans reached Esztergom (Gran) on the Hungarian frontier. They were greeted with lavish hospitality by King Bela III and his wife Margaret. Poised between Byzantium and the west, Hungary’s involvement in crusading reflected an eagerness to be associated with Latin Christendom, not least as a means of ensuring independence. Queen Margaret, daughter of Louis VII of France, Frederick’s companion in arms on the Second Crusade, embodied this policy. More immediately, the Hungarians supplied the crusaders with provisions, equipment and access to plentiful if expensive markets. After what appeared, in retrospect at least, a comfortable passage through Hungary,
the crusaders reached the Byzantine border at Branitz (Brnjica) on 2 July.

Relations with the Byzantine empire were complicated by Isaac II’s uneasy hold on his Balkan provinces, his need to secure his eastern frontier by a treaty with the Seljuk Turks, past tensions with the Germans in Italy, a tradition of hostility with Sicily, now allied with Frederick, and with the west more generally over Italian trading rights and Antioch.
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There persisted a fear, especially among the Constantinopolitan elites, that all western armies held as an ulterior motive the conquest of the Greek empire. On the westerners’ side, the religious schism sharpened the feeling that the Greeks were poor Christians in their apparent indifference to the Holy Land. Isaac Angelus had acquired the throne in 1185 after a coup marked by mob sadism unusual even in Byzantium, the previous emperor Andronicus I Comnenus, himself a murdering usurper, being torn to pieces in the streets of the capital. Isaac balanced his political weakness with petulant diplomatic bluster. Having promised assistance to the Germans, in the summer of 1189 Isaac suddenly threw the German ambassadors he had asked for into prison. He continued to pursue amicable relations with Saladin, whom he kept informed of the German progress.
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Saladin’s envoys were in Constantinople when the German ambassadors arrived and allegedly received the horses of the unfortunate westerners when they were incarcerated. It is hard to divine the immediate advantage for the Greeks in the Ayyubid alliance, a feature of Byzantine foreign policy after 1182. Isaac may have hoped to counteract any agreement Frederick had reached with the Sicilians or the Seljuks or use it as a lever to engineer recognition of suzerainty over Antioch and other former Greek territories that the crusaders conquered. Yet such hopes were fatally undermined by Isaac’s lack of adequate military strength to exert pressure on the crusaders. More immediately damaging was his failure to prevent the German army from being attacked more or less the entire length of their journey from the Danube to the plains of Thrace. The net result of Isaac’s policy, if such a farrago of myopic expedience and folly can be so described, was to provoke Frederick into contemplating precisely what the Greek feared most, an attack on Constantinople.

From Branitz, the Germans threaded their way to Nish, which was reached on 27 July. Given the awkward terrain and the length of the crusader marching line, the army was divided into four divisions.
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Despite the persistent harassment from locals acting, many believed, on
Isaac’s orders, Frederick was reluctant to throw in his lot with Serbian rebels who met him at Nish. The journey though Bulgaria to Sofia increasingly resembled a fighting march, familiar to eastern tactics and from the First and Second Crusades. At Sofia, on 13 August, the Germans found that the promised markets and currency exchange had been removed on imperial orders and that the route to the Maritsa valley and Thrace had been fortified against them. After battering their way through the mountains, on 24 August the crusaders reached Philippopolis, which had been abandoned by its inhabitants and its defences destroyed on Isaac’s orders by the governor of Thrace, the civil servant and historian Nicetas Choniates. Years later, in the shadow of the loss of Constantinople to the Fourth Crusade in 1204, Nicetas painted an intimate but unflattering portrait of Byzantine confusion, duplicity and impotence at this time.
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By the time Frederick entered the deserted Philippopolis on 26 August, he had learnt of the arrest of his ambassadors in Constantinople and of Isaac’s demands for German guarantees of good behaviour and a share of future crusade conquests. Despite a growing problem of supplies, Frederick was in no mood to compromise, especially as he held a clear military advantage. Isaac’s diplomatic tactlessness, such as failing to afford Frederick his proper title in correspondence, soured relations further. While angry diplomatic exchanges continued, the release of the German ambassadors without what Frederick regarded as adequate reparations did little to resolve the central issue of Byzantine assistance in transporting the crusaders across into Asia Minor. Having occupied Philippopolis and the surrounding region, securing food and markets, by early November Frederick had decided on a strategy to force Greek cooperation.

Perhaps mindful of the disastrous crusader advance into Asia Minor in the winter of 1147–8, Frederick, choosing Adrianople as his headquarters, proceeded to occupy Thrace. At the same time, he made contact with provincial rebels in the Balkans and appeared to contemplate an assault on Constantinople. Both the occupation of Thrace and an attack on the Greek capital had been policies proposed to Louis VII in 1147. In mid-November, Frederick wrote to his son and regent, Henry VI, requesting he raise a war fleet from Italian ports to meet the German army in mid-March for an attack on Constantinople. At the same time, signalling that his ultimate goal had not changed, he asked Henry to
arrange with his officials and the Venetian banker Bernard the German the transfer of imperial funds to Tyre, ‘since you know that we shall need large amounts because of the unexpected delays facing us’. The money was to come from outstanding sums owing the crown, especially, Frederick mentioned, Ancona, Metz, Bremen and the count of Hanau. Whether this revenue represented unpaid hearth tax, regalian obligations or some other dues is unclear, but Frederick’s demands indicate a substantial financial apparatus and fiscal base for his expedition. How seriously he intended, as he put it, ‘bringing the entire imperial territory under control’ is less certain.
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Five months gave little time in which to hire and equip a war fleet and have it arrive on station. Cities such as Genoa, one of those mentioned by Frederick, were able to supply transport on demand; early in 1190 the Genoese struck a deal to carry Philip II of France’s military entourage the following August. However, German policy in Italy as well as the commercial rivalries between the cities made such alliances difficult. Venice had only recently entered into a new treaty with Byzantium and would refuse to cooperate with Genoa and Pisa. Although unknown to Frederick, at the same moment he wrote to Henry proposing the fleet, one potential maritime ally, William II of Sicily, died, his throne being seized by his anti-Hohenstaufen bastard cousin Tancred of Lecce. Thereafter, Henry VI’s interest in Italy was focused on securing the Sicilian inheritance of his wife Constance, William II’s aunt and heir, rather than supplying ships for his father. Even in Frederick’s instructions of November, the simultaneous arrangements for additional funds to be sent direct to the Holy Land rather than Greece indicates that the proposed conquest of Byzantium was either loud diplomatic sabre-rattling or a sop to the war party within the German high command. By the time envoys from Pisa caught up with Frederick at Gallipoli in March 1190, plans to attack Constantinople had been abandoned.
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Whatever his intentions, Fredrick maintained the pressure on the Greeks by openly negotiating with Serb and Vlach delegations towards an anti-Byzantine alliance. Relations with the Greeks deteriorated as the Germans tightened their hold on Thrace, even where they suspected the local wine, which was not to their taste, of being poisoned as opposed to being merely nauseating. The Byzantine armed forces made no impression on the German garrisons and foragers, undermining whatever credibility Isaac’s regime retained. Seriously alarmed, Isaac reopened
negotiations only to break them off on Christmas Eve 1189 just as agreement appeared imminent. Diplomatic inconsistency and military feebleness caused Greek policy to implode. Nicetas Choniates disdainfully recorded Isaac’s flailing vacillation. Without the military capacity to unsettle the Germans, in the end Isaac was forced to capitulate. On 14 February, a treaty was solemnized in the church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople which repeated the essence of the agreement of Nuremberg of December 1188. As well as various clauses resolving immediate issues of contention that had arisen since August 1189, the treaty guaranteed the crusaders free passage through imperial territory, ships to carry them across the Hellespont at Gallipoli and access to markets at reasonable exchange rates. In return, Frederick promised to avoid Constantinople and refrain from indiscriminate foraging while in Byzantine lands. The whole tortuous episode had delayed the Germans for over six months. Although this may have fortuitously forestalled a winter campaign in Asia Minor, it allowed Saladin, well informed by Isaac, to marshal his defences in northern Syria. For Byzantium rebels and opponents as well as the watching western powers, Isaac’s erratic behaviour exposed his inability to control events. In Nicetas’s hostile view, a profligate sybarite of negligible political acumen, for all his thrashing about and bravado, Isaac had merely accelerated the disintegration of his own empire.
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The Germans crossed the Hellespont between 22 and 28 March, either side of Easter (25 March), before setting out towards Philadelphia, Hierapolis and the Seljuk border. Once again avoiding the errors of 1147, Frederick’s orderly divisions remained in ostensibly friendly Byzantine territory for as long as possible. However, again echoing the crusaders’ experience forty-two years earlier, the locals proved hostile and resentful, reluctant to open their markets and granaries to the westerners just as the hungry months of spring were upon them. At Philadelphia, after four weeks’ march from the Hellespont, the mixture of brawling and banditry spilt into connected violence, a major armed confrontation being only narrowly avoided. Leaving Greek territory in the last days of April, the German host followed the main road via Philomelium (Akshehir) to Iconium (Konya), the Seljuk capital. The march proved a mirror image of the journey across the Byzantine empire, only more strenuous and more deadly.

For more than a year, most recently before the Germans left
Adrianople, amicable diplomatic exchanges with the Seljuk rulers of the sultanate of Rum, Kilij Arslan II and his son Qutb al-Din, had produced promises of friendship, unopposed passage and open markets for the crusaders. As in Byzantium, internal tensions, particularly between Kilij Arslan and his son, contradicted any formal agreements. Qutb al-Din was Saladin’s son-in-law. Having effectively usurped his father’s position, he encouraged local Turkish opposition and prepared to confront the advancing Germans. Moreover, Asia Minor swarmed with nomad Turcoman raiders who had been operating in the region since 1185 independent of any Seljuk political authority but eager to profit from the well-equipped if poorly provisioned Christian army as it lumbered through the Anatolian hills. In a sharp encounter near Philomelium on 7 May, Duke Frederick of Swabia’s division repulsed a dangerous ambush, inflicting heavy casualties. Duke Frederick lost some front teeth, knocked out by a stone.
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By now the persistent attacks of the Turks, some prominent casualties, such as the minnesinger (i.e. poet and minstrel) Frederick von Hausen, and the shortage of food and water were beginning to tell. As conditions worsened and losses mounted, some deserted; others merely gave up, collapsing at the side of the march to await death or captivity. Horses and mules killed in the fighting reduced the military effectiveness of the army but were eagerly consumed by ravenous troops.