The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (21 page)

On 5 June the King set sail from Famagusta, taking Isaac Comnenus with him and leaving him a prisoner in the great fortress of Margat (now Qalaat Marqab in Syria)–the blackest, grimmest and most sombre of all the Crusader castles–which had been acquired by the Knights of St John five years before. He then continued southward along the coast to Acre, being fortunate enough on the way to encounter and destroy a Saracen ship flying the French colours and bent on penetrating the Frankish blockade. (According to a widespread rumour among the Franks, this vessel was found to be carrying a cargo of some 200 particularly venomous snakes, which were destined for release in the Christian camp.) On their arrival he and his fleet were given a predictably warm welcome, but Richard immediately found himself embroiled in a diplomatic crisis that seriously threatened what remained of the Christian alliance.

Eleven months after the battle of Hattin, Guy of Lusignan had been released by Saladin on condition that he would take no further part in the fighting. Guy had agreed, but everyone knew that promises made to infidels could be safely ignored–particularly since it now emerged that he was henceforth going to have something more than just the Holy Places to fight for: his own throne was at stake. During his imprisonment a new leader had appeared: a certain Conrad of Montferrat, who had heroically defended Tyre against a Saracen attack and was now holding on to the city despite the fact that it was an integral part of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Guy, deprived of Tyre, determined to show his mettle and, desperate for a city to rule from, had marched down with hardly more than a handful of men to Acre, where he started a siege. He was not, it was generally agreed, over-endowed with intelligence, but here was an act bordering on the insane. Acre was the largest town in the kingdom, larger even than Jerusalem; Guy’s army was pathetically small; there was nothing to stop Saladin bringing up a relief force and surrounding him in his turn–which indeed he did. Yet somehow Guy maintained his position until the arrival of Richard Coeur-de-Lion in the early summer of 1191.

On 12 July of that same year the Muslim garrison in Acre capitulated, and the Crusaders took possession of the city. Six weeks later Richard gave orders for the massacre of all his Saracen prisoners–2,700 of them, together with their wives and children–before leaving Acre in the hands of Guy of Lusignan. Guy’s difficulties should then have been over–but for Conrad of Montferrat, whose eyes were now firmly on the throne of Jerusalem. Guy had succeeded to it only through his wife, Sibylla, but Sibylla and her two little daughters had died of an epidemic in the autumn of 1190; did her husband still have a valid claim? Whatever the legal position might be, most of the surviving barons of Outremer saw the perfect opportunity for getting rid of a weak and generally unreliable ruler. Their own candidate for the throne was Conrad. Admittedly he had no legal title to it, but to this problem there was a simple solution: marriage to the Princess Isabella, daughter of King Amalric I. It was perhaps a minor disadvantage that she was already married, to Humphrey, Lord of Toron; but Humphrey, though a man of considerable culture and an impressive Arabic scholar, was also famously homosexual. With every semblance of relief, he unhesitatingly agreed to a divorce. On 24 November 1190 Conrad and Isabella were pronounced man and wife.

A royal marriage, however, is not a coronation; the rivalry between Guy of Lusignan and Conrad of Montferrat dragged on for another eighteen months, and might well have continued for substantially longer had not King Richard–whose power and prestige in the Holy Land were far greater than theirs–received news from England that persuaded him to return at once if his own crown were to be saved. Before his departure he called a council of all the knights and barons of Outremer and told them that the question of the kingship must now be decided once and for all; whom would they choose to rule over them, Guy or Conrad? Unanimously, they chose Conrad. Guy was sent by Richard to Cyprus where–for a consideration–he was allowed to rule the island as he liked. He assumed the title of king and founded a dynasty that was to reign in Cyprus for nearly three hundred years.

On 10 June 1190, after a long and exhausting journey through the Taurus mountains in southern Anatolia, Frederick Barbarossa led his troops out on to the flat coastal plain. The heat was savage, and the little river Calycadnus (nowadays known, rather less euphoniously, as the Göksu) that ran past Seleucia (the modern Silifke) to the sea must have been a welcome sight. Frederick, who was riding alone a short distance ahead of his army, spurred his horse towards it. He was never seen alive again. Whether he dismounted to drink and was swept off his feet by the current, whether his horse slipped in the mud and threw him, whether the shock of falling into the icy mountain water was too much for his tired old body–he was nearing seventy–we shall never know. He was rescued, but too late. Most of his followers reached the river to find their Emperor lying dead on the bank.

Almost immediately his army began to disintegrate. Many of the German princelings returned to Europe; others took ship for Tyre, then the only major port in Outremer still in Christian hands; the rump, carrying the Emperor’s body preserved–not very successfully–in vinegar, marched grimly on, though it lost many more of its men in an ambush as it entered Syria. The survivors who finally limped into Antioch had no more fight left in them. By this time, too, what was left of Frederick had gone the same way as his army; his rapidly decomposing remains were hastily buried in the cathedral, where they were to rest for another seventy-eight years–until a Mameluke army under the Sultan Baibars
⁷⁶
burned the whole building, together with most of the city, to the ground.

Fortunately for Outremer, Richard and Philip Augustus arrived with their armies essentially intact; it was thanks to them that the Third Crusade–although, since it failed to recover Jerusalem, it can hardly be accounted a success–was at least somewhat less humiliating than the Second. Acre became the capital of the kingdom; but that kingdom, now reduced to the short coastal strip between Tyre and Jaffa, was a pale shadow of what Crusader Palestine had once been. It would struggle on for another century, and when it finally fell to Baibars in 1291 the only surprise was that it had lasted so long.

In all the history of Christendom, there is no more unedifying chapter than that which relates the story of the Crusades. The First, though militarily successful, was marked by a degree of barbarity and brutality which even by medieval standards has seldom been surpassed; the Second was a fiasco, due in large measure to the idiocy of its leadership; the Third, though somewhat less shaming than its predecessor, was a lacklustre affair that also failed hopelessly in its object. None of the three, however, apart from the amount of pointless bloodshed they involved, had much long-term historical impact; arguably by the end of the twelfth century and unquestionably by the end of the thirteenth, the Muslim Near East was little different from what it had been when Pope Urban sounded his great rallying cry at Clermont. The Fourth Crusade was to be quite unlike these. Its participants virtually destroyed the one mighty Christian bastion that they should have given their lives to uphold, Europe’s only strong defence against the Muslim tide. In doing so they changed the course of history.

The end of the twelfth century found Europe in confusion. On 8 April 1195, the Byzantine Emperor Isaac II Angelus had fallen victim to a coup engineered by his brother Alexius, who deposed and blinded him and had himself declared emperor in his stead. Isaac had indeed been a disaster; it could only be said that Alexius was a good deal worse. Then, on 28 September 1197, just as he was preparing a new Crusade, the Western Emperor Henry VI died of a fever at Messina. Germany was torn apart by civil war over the imperial succession, and both England and France were similarly–though less violently–occupied with inheritance problems following the death of Richard Coeur-de-Lion in 1199. Norman Sicily was gone, never to return. Of all the luminaries of Christendom, one only was firmly in control: Pope Innocent III.

Under Innocent, the medieval Papacy attained the height of its power and prestige. He had ascended the papal throne in 1198, and during the nineteen years of his pontificate he presided over two separate Crusades. One of them–if we are to be strictly chronological, it was in fact the later–was of relatively little international importance, being largely confined to southwestern France. Its objective was to stamp out the Albigensian heretics, otherwise known as the Cathars, who professed the Manichaean belief that the two opposing principles of good and evil are constantly struggling for supremacy. The material world is evil; man’s task is to free his spirit, which is by its nature good, and to restore it to communion with God. This could be achieved only by a life of extreme austerity, avoiding all worldliness and corruption as exemplified by the Catholic Church.

Clearly, such a doctrine struck right to the heart of orthodox Christianity and of the political and pastoral institutions of Christendom, and Innocent moved vigorously against it. In 1209 he ordered the Cistercians to preach a Crusade. It continued throughout the century, though the Cathars never recovered from the capture in 1244 of their great stronghold of Montségur in the foothills of the Pyrenees, after which they were forced underground. By the time the heresy was at last stamped out, Provence, the Languedoc and much of the southwest had been ravaged, many of the inhabitants massacred in cold blood, and the brilliant Provençal civilisation of the troubadours destroyed.

The other Crusade was that which we know as the Fourth. The lack of crowned heads to lead it worried the Pope not a jot; previous experience had shown that kings and princes, stirring up as they invariably did national rivalries and endless questions of precedence and protocol, tended to be more trouble than they were worth. Far more serious were the problems of logistics. Coeur-de-Lion, before leaving Palestine, had given it as his opinion that the weakest point of the Muslim east was Egypt, to which any future expeditions should therefore be directed. It followed that the new army would have to travel by sea, and would need transport in a quantity that could be obtained from one source only: the Republic of Venice.

Thus it was that during the first week of Lent in the year 1201, a party of six knights led by Geoffrey de Villehardouin, Marshal of Champagne, arrived in Venice. They made their request at a special meeting of the
Maggior Consiglio
, and a week later received their answer. The Republic would provide transport for 4,500 knights with their horses, 9,000 squires and 20,000 infantry, with food for nine months. In addition Venice would provide fifty fully-equipped galleys at her own expense, on condition that she received one-half of the territories conquered. The price would be 84,000 silver marks.

This reply was conveyed to Geoffrey and his colleagues by the Doge, Enrico Dandolo. In all Venetian history there is no more astonishing figure. We cannot be sure of his age when, on 1 January 1193, he was raised to the ducal throne; the story goes that he was eighty-five and already stone-blind, though this seems hardly credible when we read of his energy–indeed, his heroism–a decade later on the walls of Constantinople. But even if he was only in his middle seventies, at the time of the Fourth Crusade he would have been an octogenarian of several years’ standing. He carefully glossed over the fact that his ambassadors were at that very moment in Cairo negotiating a highly profitable trade agreement, as part of which they had almost certainly undertaken not to be party to any attack on Egyptian territory; it was agreed simply that the Crusaders should meet in Venice on the feast of St John, 24 June 1202, when the fleet would be ready for them.

On that day, the number gathered on the Lido under their new leader, the Marquis Boniface of Montferrat, numbered less than a third of what had been expected. In some, their enthusiasm for the cause had simply evaporated; others, doubtless, had yielded to family pressures; yet others had heard of the true destination of the Crusade and, seeing Jerusalem as the only legitimate goal, had declined to waste their time anywhere else. With their numbers so drastically reduced, the Crusaders could not hope to pay the Venetians the money they had promised. They did what they could, but there was a shortfall of 34,000 marks. As soon as Dandolo had satisfied himself that there was no more to be got, he came forward with an offer. Zara (the modern Zadar, on the Dalmatian coast) had recently fallen into the hands of the King of Hungary. If the Crusaders would help Venice to recapture it, settlement of the debt might be postponed.

And so, on 8 November 1202, the army of the Fourth Crusade set sail from Venice–480 ships, led by the galley of the Doge himself, which, according to the French Crusader and chronicler Rober of Clary, was ‘painted vermilion, with a silken vermilion awning spread above, cymbals clashing and four trumpeters sounding from the bows’. A week later, Zara was taken and sacked. Fighting broke out almost at once between the Franks and the Venetians over the division of the spoils, and when order was finally restored the two groups settled in different quarters of the city for the winter. Before long news of what had happened reached the Pope; outraged, he excommunicated the entire expedition.

Worse was to follow. Early in the new year a messenger arrived with a letter to Boniface from Philip of Swabia, youngest son of Frederick Barbarossa. Philip had married the daughter of the unfortunate Emperor Isaac, who had been dethroned by Alexius III. Isaac’s young son, however–confusingly, he was also called Alexius–had escaped from the prison in which he and his father were being held and had taken refuge with Philip. Philip’s proposal was simple enough: if the Crusade would escort the young Alexius to Constantinople and enthrone him there in the place of his usurper uncle, Alexius for his part would finance the subsequent conquest of Egypt, supplying in addition 10,000 soldiers of his own and afterwards maintaining 500 knights in the Holy Land at his own expense. He would also submit the Church of Constantinople to the authority of Rome.