King John needed to establish himself in power, while Philip of France had to adjust to the fact that his most formidable opponent had gone, a situation that left him free to contemplate making further inroads into English territory. From Pope Innocent’s perspective, in spite of the poor relations between Rome and the English crown, Richard’s death meant the end of the greatest crusading warrior of the age, a man who struck fear into the hearts of the Muslims and a monarch who could have been a potent figurehead in the effort to reclaim Jerusalem. Innocent’s first and preferred vision for the new crusade had, therefore, proven stillborn.
Philip of France was a very different sort of man from Richard the Lionheart. Eight years younger than his arch-rival, he had come to the throne in 1180 aged only 15. After a difficult decade imposing his authority in France, Philip had taken the cross to fight in the Third Crusade. He was not a particularly enthusiastic warrior and brought a smaller force of knights than Richard to the Levant, yet he played some role in the successful capture of Acre in 1191. After only three months in the East, however, Philip chose to return home. To many—particularly Richard’s propagandists—this was a sign of cowardice and Philip was heavily criticised. Over time he matured into a clever, thoughtful ruler who did much to enhance the economic and administrative structures of the French crown. He was responsible for developing the city of Paris and it was early in his reign that the first college of the University of Paris—the finest university of the medieval period—was founded. Philip also undertook to extend the walls of the city: the existing structure protected just 25 acres; he enclosed 675. He ordered the streets to be paved for the first time and decreed that the abattoirs should be situated downriver from the city. Commercial life flourished: the market at Les Halles was enlarged and important French nobles began to recognise the prestige of Paris and saw that it was important to have a presence there, rather than remaining on their rural estates.
As a man, Philip was said to be earnest, pious, highly strung and fond of wine, food and women. In some ways he hosted a rather austere court, with legislation against swearing (a 20-sous gift to the poor for blasphemy, or a dip in the River Seine for those who refused to pay), and he displayed little interest in the patronage of music or literature. The king was described as a tall, fresh-faced man, balding by his mid-thirties and becoming ruddy with drink. It was his personal life that was to bring him the greatest difficulty, however, one consequence of which—poor relations with Pope Innocent—undoubtedly contributed towards his failure to take part in the Fourth Crusade. Philip’s first marriage took place when he was aged 15 and his bride, Isabella of Hainault, was 10. Seven years later, in 1187, a son, Louis (later King Louis VIII, 1223—6), was born, but Isabella died in childbirth in 1190. After the Third Crusade, Philip decided to marry again and settled upon Princess Ingeborg of Denmark. She offered a large dowry and a good strategic alliance against the German Empire. Eighteen-year-old Ingeborg was said to be ‘a lady of remarkable beauty’, yet during the wedding ceremony on 14 August 1193 the king is reported to have gone deathly pale and started to tremble. He sent his wife away and refused to sleep with her.
There is no clear explanation for this turn of events but, in any case, Philip soon chose another woman, Agnes of Méran, as his preferred partner. Some blamed Agnes for bewitching Philip so that he turned against Ingeborg, which may suggest an existing liaison with Agnes. He soon sought a divorce. The French bishops agreed and nullified the marriage, leaving Philip free to wed Agnes in 1196. Ingeborg resisted and claimed the new marriage to be adulterous, bigamous and incestuous (Agnes and Philip were distantly related); the papacy agreed and urged the king to take his wife back. Philip steadfastly refused, and Ingeborg spent much of the next 20 years as a shadowy figure, confined to prisons, convents and generally out of public view. In 1203 she wrote an anguished letter to Innocent: ‘no one dares visit me, no priest is allowed to comfort my soul. I am deprived of medical aid necessary for my health. I no longer have enough clothes and those that I have are not worthy of a queen ... I am shut in a house and forbidden to go out.’
Five years earlier, in May 1198, Innocent had written to the king to condemn his actions and to threaten ecclesiastical sanctions against France. An interdict, or ban on public prayer, was proclaimed, but Philip resisted it strongly. In fact he lambasted the clergy who obeyed it, saying that they had no heed for the souls of the poor who were deprived of spiritual consolation. Philip made several promises that he would set Agnes aside and bring Ingeborg to his bed, but invariably broke his word. In the autumn of 1201, however, Agnes died and a way forward could be seen. Ingeborg was treated marginally better, although it was not until 1213 that she was restored to court; Philip, meanwhile, sought comfort in the arms of a prostitute from Arras. In short, the tensions caused by the king’s personal life, combined with the enduring conflict with England, meant that the second of Pope Innocent’s original choices to lead a new crusade would not, and could not, countenance taking the cross.
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If the rulers of Europe were unable to fight for the Holy Land, the responsibility fell to the senior nobility. This was less significant than it may seem: the First Crusade had triumphed without the involvement of kings—it was made up of counts and dukes, and of substantial contingents of knights and foot-soldiers.
When a man took the cross and had the clothing on his shoulder marked with Christ’s sign, what was required of him in emotional, physical and financial terms? What questions did the crusaders ask themselves and what effect did their decisions have upon their families?
On the eve of the Fourth Crusade, exactly 100 years had passed since the capture of Jerusalem (July 1099) by the armies of the First Crusade. There was, therefore, a large body of knowledge accumulated from the journeys of previous generations, passed down through families and told and retold in the courts, taverns, squares and households of Europe. Innocent’s crusaders would not be stepping into the unknown in the way that the knights of 1095 had done. Whether an insight into crusading was a positive stimulus to take the cross might, to modern eyes at least, be open to debate. Even in as tough an age as the twelfth century, crusading was a particularly stark and brutal experience that would stretch physical and mental capabilities to extremes.
First of all there was the journey itself. From northern France to the Holy Land was almost 2,500 miles, a distance that had to be covered on horseback or. in part, by sea; or, most likely when one’s horse died of starvation, on foot. While many of the nobility were accustomed to moving around the courts of Europe, few foot-soldiers of peasant stock had ever left the area close to their villages. For nobles and lesser men alike, the crusade represented easily the greatest adventure of their lives.
From the end of the twelfth century seaborne crusading expeditions became more common because they were deemed faster and safer than the land march. Most of the holy warriors had travelled by river because, given the dismal condition of many medieval roads, it afforded a highly effective method of communication. The experience of the deep, open sea was, however, an entirely different matter. Fifty years after the Fourth Crusade, Jean of Joinville, a knight on the first crusade of King (St) Louis IX of France, eloquently expressed the fears of the landlubber when he described the prayers and hymn-singing of his fellow-crusaders:
We saw nothing but sea and sky around us, while each day the wind carried us farther and farther from the land in which we were born. I give you these details so that you may appreciate the temerity of the man who dares, with other people’s property in his possession, or in a state of mortal sin himself, to place himself in such a precarious position. For what can a voyager tell, when he goes to sleep at night, whether he may be lying at the bottom of the sea the next morning?
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The duration of a crusade was another issue for those considering taking part in the holy war. Pope Innocent asked for a two-year commitment, although many previous campaigns, such as the First Crusade, had lasted longer. Aside from royal or noble households, this was before the age of the professional soldier and conscription (although emergency levies might be implemented in times of crisis). Knights were accustomed to the idea of rendering a period of service to their lord, but this tended to be fixed at 40 days per year: the Lord Almighty, however, required a far lengthier commitment. While crusading was, in theory, a strictly voluntary exercise, there is little doubt that if a noble decided to take the cross, then barring old age or physical impediment, his household knights were duty bound to share their master’s enthusiasm.
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The most pressing emotion for the crusaders—as the majority of soldiers throughout history have experienced—was a fear of death or captivity. The mortality rates for earlier expeditions were truly terrible, with losses from illness and starvation compounding those inflicted by enemy forces. Even with the limited amount of information at out disposal we have hard evidence of death rates at around 35 per cent on the First Crusade and up to 50 per cent on the German crossing of Asia Minor during the Second Crusade.
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Figures for the medieval period obviously lack the precision of modern records, and sources tend to concentrate on the nobility, rather than the ordinary men, although in the case of the latter one may suppose even heavier casualties, given their inferior armour and weaker diet, as well as their minimal value as captives. It is sobering that the authorities who sanctioned the crusades were willing to tolerate such appalling levels of mortality. For a crusader, fear of death was muted by the promise of martyrdom: a guaranteed place in paradise. The brutality of medieval warfare would have been familiar in the West, but the hardships of a crusade—the distance, the climate, the unknown enemy and problems of food supply—would have held additional terrors.
The stories of survivors from previous crusades must have brought this home to those who prepared to take the cross in 1199 and 1200. Fulcher of Chartres’s account of the First Crusade, written around 1106 described the fear in the Christian camp during the Battle of Dorylaeum (in Asia Minor) on 1 July 1097: ‘We were all huddled together like sheep in a fold, trembling and frightened, surrounded on all sides by enemies so that we could not turn in any direction.’
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Another chronicler recorded: ‘the Turks burst into the camp in strength, striking with arrows from their horn bows, killing pilgrim foot-soldiers ... sparing no one on the grounds of age’.
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Raymond of Aguilers was chaplain to Raymond of Saint-Gilles, count of Toulouse, during the First Crusade and his account of a battle at the siege of Antioch (1098) conveys a little of the confusion of battle:
The boldness of the enemy grew ... our men, relying on their favourable and lofty location, fought against the enemy and at the first attack overthrew them; but, forgetful of the threatening battle and intent upon plunder, they [in turn] were most vilely put to flight. For more than one hundred men were suffocated in the gate of the city, and even more horses. Then the Turks who had entered the fortress wanted to go down into the city ... The battle was waged with such force from morning to evening that nothing like it was ever heard of. A certain frightful and as yet unknown calamity befell us, for amidst the hail of arrows and rocks and the constant charge of javelins, and the deaths of so many, our men became unconscious. If you ask for the end of this fight, it was night.
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Almost 50 years later the French contingent on the Second Crusade suffered even more grievously when their forces were slaughtered by the Turks in southern Asia Minor: Odo of Deuil, a participant in the expedition, described the feelings in the camp as survivors slowly straggled back to their comrades and regathered: ‘There was no sleep that night, during which each man either waited for one of his friends who never came, or joyously, and with no regard for material loss, welcomed one who had been despoiled.’
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Alongside the risk of death was the danger of captivity. Ordinary soldiers might be butchered on the battlefield, or else sold in the slave markets of Aleppo, Damascus or Cairo and often condemned to a life of arduous labour. Men of greater standing, if recognised as such, were imprisoned and then, eventually, ransomed. Conditions for prisoners were inevitably poor. Ibn Wasil, an early thirteenth-century Muslim writer, described the prison at Ba‘albek as a pit with no windows: ‘there was no difference between night and day in there’. Ironically, Ba’albek is the same town where the western hostages John McCarthy, Brian Keenan, Terry Waite and Frank Reed were incarcerated during the Lebanese civil war in the 1980s. Another prison is described at the castle of Beth Guvrin where a captive was kept in solitary confinement for a year until the trapdoor was opened and a second prisoner lowered into the cell. In spite of these grim conditions, survival was possible: in the 1160s the ruler of Aleppo freed German prisoners taken captive on the Second Crusade back in 1147—8.
Sometimes, however, important prisoners were not ransomed, as was the case of the unfortunate Gervase of Bazoches, seized by the Damascenes in 1101. King Baldwin I of Jerusalem resisted paying for him and Gervase’s captors urged him to convert to Islam or face death. A contemporary describes Gervase’s fate: ‘Splendidly obdurate, he rejected such criminal behaviour, and was horrified even to hear such a suggestion. This praiseworthy man was immediately seized, tied to a tree in the middle of a field and was torn by arrows from all sides. The crown was then sawn from his head, and the rest was made into the form of a cup, as though to hold drinks for the ruler of Damascus, by whose orders these acts had been done, to frighten our men.’
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