God's War: A New History of the Crusades (80 page)

At Bari, as a sign of his commitment and an incentive to recruitment, Henry announced that he would pay for 1,500 knights and 1,500 sergeants for a year; the knights were to receive thirty gold ounces (Troy weight) and provisions for themselves and two servants; the sergeants ten gold ounces. To pay the 5,000 gold pounds (Troy) needed for this,
Henry demanded a tribute from the new Byzantine emperor, Alexius III, who had deposed and blinded his brother, Isaac II, on 8 April 1195. This formed part of Henry’s deliberate bullying of the Byzantine emperor, attempting to extract promises of material assistance for the crusade as well as restitution for Sicilian losses during the wars of the 1180s and, more pertinently, damages for those of Frederick Barbarossa in 1189–90. Henry’s new power gave substance to his diplomatic belligerence. Alexius submitted to the bullying and, after failing to get political support for a general property tax, fell back on appropriating ecclesiastical alms and bullion, apparently amounting to over 7,000 pounds of silver and a much smaller quantity of gold. This highly unpopular levy was known derisively as the ‘Alamanikon’ (i.e. German tax).
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Arrangements for its delivery were in hand when news of Henry’s death from one of his recurrent fevers (28 September 1197) halted payment. However, these negotiations with Byzantium charted a clear western attitude to Byzantium and the eastern crusade. As well as the tax, the Greeks were asked to provide their own help for the Holy Land in conjunction with a western expedition, their past reluctance noted and present hesitation or opposition cited as grounds for a possible future invasion. The assumptions and attitudes of the leaders of next great eastern crusade, in 1202–4, boasted a long pedigree.

Right up to his death, Henry had closely supervised recruitment, helped by papal legates and local bishops authorized by Celestine III in July and August 1195 to preach the cross throughout Germany as well as in France and England.
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At a series of diets at Gelnhausen (October 1195), Worms (December 1195) and Würzburg (March 1196), crusaders enrolled, preparations were put in train and plans agreed. Departure from Germany was set for Christmas 1196 for muster at southern Italian and Sicilian ports, in particular Messina, in time for the next spring or, at the latest, autumn passages to the Levant. To avoid unnecessary conflicts of jurisdiction in the east of the sort that dogged the Third Crusade, as well as demonstrating high imperial prestige, at Gelnhausen Henry agreed with envoys from Cyprus to accept the homage of Aimery of Lusignan, who had succeeded his brother Guy as ruler of the island in 1194, in return for a crown. Beyond natural aspiration, Aimery may have wanted such an alliance to protect him from Byzantine attempts to reconquer his island. Shortly after, a similar deal was struck with Leo II of Cilician Armenia. If in the event unrealized, this extension of German
imperial authority almost to create a new eastern empire possessed wide implications, not least for the cohesion of the Christian states of the Levant and for Byzantium, now increasingly surrounded by Henry’s satellites. Henry’s rhetoric of universal empire was acquiring reality. Within Germany, Henry signalled his control of the enterprise by sitting for hours in Worms cathedral while
crucesignati
took their vows. Whatever the canonical niceties, the initiative and direction of this war of the cross belonged not to the pope but to a secular ruler with extremely elevated ambitions in which leadership of the crusade formed only a part.

In geographic extent and aristocratic involvement if not in actual numbers, recruitment matched that in 1188–9. The core contribution came from the imperial household and the emperor’s allies. Such was the dominant appearance of Henry VI that a thirteenth-century Outremer observer imagined he promised to pay the expenses of all the German crusaders.
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When the emperor’s notoriously feeble health and his still uncertain grip on his new southern kingdom persuaded him not to lead the expedition in person, he appointed as commanders the imperial chancellor, Conrad of Querfurt, bishop of Hildesheim, and the imperial marshal, Henry of Kalden, who had led the embassy to Constantinople in 1195. Clerical leadership was provided by Archbishop Conrad of Mainz and Archbishop Hartwig of Bremen, a holy war enthusiast who in 1195 persuaded Celestine III to initiate one against the Livs on the river Dvina. Both their dioceses had previously been centres of crusade support. The leading lay crusaders tended to come from western and southern Germany including Duke Henry of Brabant, Henry the Lion’s son Count Henry of the Rhine Palatinate, Duke Frederick of Austria, the dukes of Dalmatia and Carinthia and the landgrave of Thuringia. Many of them were heirs to family crusading traditions and a significant proportion had only succeeded to their titles in the previous five years or so. They may have felt they had something to prove beyond the customary appeal of the cross or the attraction of doing what their ruler wanted. Other former centres of crusade enthusiasm in the Rhineland or the northern river valleys contributed extensively. Lübeck apparently sent 400 citizens.
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The scale of the operation was reflected in the time and varied routes taken for the muster in Italy and Sicily. Some contingents that had probably travelled from southern Germany by land left for the east as early as March 1197. The duke of Brabant reached the
Holy Land in the late summer, probably August. However, a northern fleet of forty-four vessels carrying possibly many thousands of recruits under Henry of the Palatinate and the bishop of Bremen, only reached Messina in August after its long voyage around the Iberian peninsular. This combined with the emperor’s paid troops to form the main body of the expedition that sailed from Messina for Acre early in September 1197. A distant observer, Arnold of Lübeck, claimed it carried 60,000 crusaders. It may have been a quarter or a fifth that size, but still constituted a substantial force. While a contingent under the bishop of Hildesheim stopped off in Cyprus to crown Aimery, the bulk of the fleet reached Acre on 22 September.

For once, a western crusade appeared in the Holy Land when it was needed. The truce of 1192 had expired and, twelve days before the main German force arrived, Henry of Champagne had died in a bizarre accident when he fell out of an open window while reviewing troops at his palace in Acre. Already the Ayyubid chief, Saladin’s brother al-Adil, was on the move. The death of Saladin in March 1193 prompted a decade of internecine feuding within his family. This was won by al-Adil, who, from his original base in northern Syria and Iraq, managed to supplant his nephews in Damascus (1196), Egypt (1200) and Aleppo (1202). In 1197, al-Adil was quick to respond to a raid into Galilee by the early German arrivals under Henry of Brabant, driving them back to the suburbs of Acre before swinging south to besiege Jaffa. It was the relief force for Jaffa that Henry of Champagne was inspecting when he met his death. Days later the port fell, imperilling the fragile
status quo
established in 1192. However, once the full German expeditionary force had assembled after 22 September, it was agreed to strike northwards to the ruins of Sidon and the Muslim base at Beirut rather than attempt to recover Jaffa immediately. This made immediate strategic sense, taking advantage of the recovery earlier in the year of Jubail further up the coast; cooperation from Bohemund III of Antioch, whose son, the future Bohemund IV, was now also count of Tripoli; and help from the Pisans and Amalric of Cyprus, anxious about the pirates operating out of Beirut. Led by Henry of Brabant, in the absence of a Frankish ruler now in temporary overall control, the Christian forces, after taking possession of the rubble of Sidon, occupied Beirut in late October. The land bridge from Tripoli to Tyre and Acre was restored.

Security for these coastal ports was less certain. Al-Adil’s response to
the earlier German raid into Galilee had demonstrated even Acre’s vulnerability to a hostile hinterland. Before any attempt on Jerusalem, the Germans, on the advice of the local baronage, decided to consolidate the Christian position in western Galilee by attacking the castle at Toron. After initial success, the siege, which began on 28 November 1197, got bogged down. The proximity to Acre and Tyre of the German army both at Toron and before, on the Beirut campaign, may have carried a political dimension. The death of Henry of Champagne had once again opened the question of the succession to the throne of Jerusalem. His widow, Isabella, now had three young daughters, two by Henry; the eldest, Maria, daughter of Conrad of Montferrat, was still only five. Isabella, a veteran of three marriages but still only in her twenties, remained the legitimate queen. Some proposed a marriage to a local nobleman, the seneschal, Ralph of Tiberias, but the Germans, supported by the military orders and the chancellor, Joscias archbishop of Tyre, advocated the recently widowed Aimery of Cyprus. The attraction of a union of Cyprus and Jerusalem was compelling in economic, military and political terms, especially given the tensions between the two since 1192. Personally, Aimery possessed experience, close family connections with the Jerusalem nobility (his late wife’s Ibelin first cousins were Queen Isabella’s half-brothers) and had recently become a client of the German emperor. A united Cypriot–Jerusalem kingdom under German overlordship offered prospects of entrenching Hohenstaufen imperialism across the Mediterranean, thereby providing a permanent conduit of aid for the Holy Land without necessarily compromising the jealously promoted rights of the indigenous nobility, Italian cities or military orders. The presence of a large German army reinforced this optimism. Joscias of Tyre, who successfully negotiated Aimery’s acceptance of Isabella’s hand and the Jerusalem throne in October 1197, may also have reflected on these cross-Mediterranean advantages.
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He had been Jerusalem’s leading ambassador to the west in the desperate days after Hattin.

In January 1198, Aimery married Isabella and was crowned king of Jerusalem. The same month, the archbishop of Mainz crowned Leo II in Cilician Armenia. Yet the Hohenstaufen grand design was already defunct. The sickly Henry VI had died at Messina on 28 September 1197, leaving only an infant son, Frederick, not yet three years old, and a restless, fissile and violent inheritance from the Baltic to the Tyrrhenian
Sea. Another casualty of Henry’s death was his crusade. On hearing the news, and faced by the prospect of a Muslim counter-attack, the Germans raised the siege of Toron on 2 February, effectively ending the German crusade. The Franks of Outremer with their new monarch preferred accommodation with al-Adil to any further provocation or grand gestures. Beirut gave them a useful bargaining chip, as well as an important compensation for the loss of Jaffa. Aimery secured a renewal of the truce in July 1198 until 1204. The conquests of 1197 were to stand on each side, al-Adil with Jaffa; the Franks with Beirut, which was given to Aimery’s new brother-in-law, John of Ibelin, later known as the ‘Old Lord of Beirut’. Impotent in the Holy Land, the leaders of the German army were anxious to return home to cope with the new political uncertainties. Apart from the capture of Beirut, which remained in Christian hands until 1291, the installation of Aimery as king of Cyprus and then king of Jerusalem, and of Leo II as king of Armenia, the German crusade flattered to deceive. Even the opportunity created by Ayyubid division proved counter-productive, as al-Adil increased his reputation as the strong man of the region who faced down the western infidels. Henry VI may have hoped his patronage of the fledgling military order of Teutonic Knights, for whom he obtained papal privileges in 1196, would provide a permanent magnet for German support for the Holy Land, but the failure of the crusade prevented any major expansion of its position for a generation.

The immediate future of Outremer, at least until the expiry of the 1198 truce, seemed to rest with diplomacy, internal consolidation and only tactical military excursions against hostile neighbours rather than general confrontation. In the west, the chances for a new mass crusade to the Holy Land faced serious impediments as the political balance promised by Henry VI’s imperialism collapsed. Germany slid into civil war over a disputed succession. Italy resumed its fractured insecurity. The Spanish kings were fully occupied with the insurgent Almohads, while the kings of France and England continued a twenty-years’ war (1194–1214) over the Angevin inheritance. The election of Innocent III in January 1198 did not obviously alter these political realities. However, the new pope preferred to set, not follow, the patterns of Christendom’s public and private lives.

INNOCENT III AND THE NEW CRUSADE

In letters sent across Christendom dated 15 August 1198, Innocent III called for a new crusade to the Holy Land. Specifically, he cited the withdrawal of the Germans after the capture of Beirut and the fears of a Muslim counter-attack. As if to signal a more energetic papal regime, Innocent combined heightened rhetoric, an awareness of past failings and a desire to control organization. The communal endeavour was emphasized by appealing to nobles and cities to provide enough armed men. The troops were to serve for two years on the eastern campaign. Preaching was instituted.
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One papal legate, Peter Capuano, was to try to impose a five-year truce in the war between Richard I and Philip II, which had been continuing ever since Richard’s release from Henry VI’s prison in 1194. Another, Soffredo, cardinal priest of St Praxedis, was to travel to Venice to investigate transport. The plenary nature of the indulgences, offered through the mercy of God, was more explicit. Its clarity found its mark in the memory of at least one who answered the call, Geoffrey of Villehardouin, marshal of Champagne, who described it simply as ‘remission of any sins they have committed, provided they have confessed them’.
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The only element of obviously wishful thought in Innocent’s appeal lay in the proposed deadline for muster and departure, set for March 1199. However, from its inception to its ragged and bitter conclusion in 1205, most things that could go wrong for Innocent’s crusade did. The Fourth Crusade, as it is now known, became the most controversial of them all, provoking Steven Runciman’s famous Philippic: ‘there was never a greater crime against humanity than the Fourth Crusade’.
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