God's War: A New History of the Crusades (131 page)

Yet of far greater importance than Louis’s personal enthusiasm for prospects for a new general crusade or the survival of Frankish Outremer were events in Italy and Syria. International attention and the resources of the western church were increasingly directed at exterminating the Hohenstaufen. The issues of control over the Sicilian church and the territorial integrity and security of the papal states in central Italy loomed larger in the policies of successive popes than did the Holy Land, for all the lip service paid to beleaguered Outremer. Alongside grants of crusading privileges to those who fought for the papacy against their Italian enemies, the priority was to find a papal champion. After a number of false starts, in 1265 agreement was reached with Louis IX’s
youngest brother, Charles of Anjou. He then proceeded to destroy first Manfred, Frederick’s illegitimate son and ruler of Sicily, in 1266 and then, in 1268, Conradin, Frederick’s grandson and titular king of Jerusalem. Until then, especially as England was only just emerging from a protracted and latterly vicious period of internecine conflict and civil war (1258–65), chances of a large eastern campaign were remote.

However, by the mid-1260s the outlook for mainland Outremer looked bleak. The structure of the kingdom of Jerusalem was slowly disintegrating. While John of Jaffa was composing his great lawbook commemorating a part historical, part imaginary world of legal niceties and juridical precedents, some institutions faced physical and legal annihilation. In 1255, Pope Alexander IV afforded diplomas of the abbey of Our Lady of Josaphat outside Jerusalem, renewing privileges with the same validity as the original grants because part of the abbey’s archives had been destroyed by ‘Saracens’, thus endangering the very legal identity of the corporation.
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Similar threats to the existence of the Latin settlement soon transferred to the level of high politics and diplomacy. The appearance of the Mongols in Syria radically altered the structure of power in the region, to the Franks’ serious disadvantage. In February 1258, Hulegu (d. 1265), brother of the Great Khan Mongke (1251–9), captured Baghdad, killing the last Abbasid caliph, al-Musta ‘sim. Moving on to Syria, the Mongols took Aleppo (January 1260) and Damascus (March 1260), ousting the Ayyubid ruler, al-Nasir Yusuf. Palestine was exposed. Mongols raids reached Ascalon, Jerusalem and the gates of Egypt. A Mongol garrison was placed at Gaza. Sidon was attacked and briefly occupied in August 1260. By then, most of the remaining Ayyubid and other princes left between the Euphrates and the Mediterranean had capitulated.
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The Franks were divided how to respond. Bohemund VI of Antioch-Tripoli, briefly one of Outremer’s most important power brokers, had already accepted Mongol over-lordship, with a Mongol resident and battalion stationed in Antioch itself, where they stayed until the fall of the city to the Mamluks in 1268. The Frankish Antiochenes assisted in the Mongols’ capture of Aleppo, thus in part achieving a very traditional Frankish target, and had received additional lands in reward. By contrast, the Franks of Acre saw no advantage in submission to the Mongols. Equally, they held aloof from outright military alliance with the new Mamluk sultan of Egypt, Qutuz, who was preparing an army to contest the Mongol conquest
of Syria. Although many wanted to enlist in the Egyptian counterattack, the Franks contented themselves with granting Qutuz safe conduct through their lands and supplying him with provisions.
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Given the uncertainty of the outcome, the untrustworthiness of any alliance with Egypt and the universal contempt shown by the Mongols for any other group, such cautious neutrality was probably the least worst decision, far from the catastrophic strategic diplomatic blunder some have thought. This was no great missed opportunity. As Louis IX had discovered, and Bohemund VI was experiencing, there was nothing on their own terms for the Franks in a Mongol alliance. With Hulegu and the bulk of his forces having withdrawn eastwards, at Ain Jalut in southern Galilee on 3 September 1260, the Egyptians routed a smaller Mongol army under Kitbugha Nayan, who was killed. This victory, and Hulegu’s preoccupation with consolidating his hold on Iraq and Iran, allowed the Mamluks to occupy Syria, ejecting the surviving Ayyubid princes. By the end of October, Qutuz had been assassinated by Baibars and the Bahriyya, who feared being passed over in the disposal of the Syrian spoils. Baibars was now installed as ruler of Egypt and Syria, more united than at any time since the death of Saladin in 1193.

Baibars saw in the eradication of the Frankish kingdom a means to consolidate his power as well as establish his credentials as a worthy Islamic ruler. A veteran of the drama of 1249–50, he rejected the accommodating policies of his Ayyubid and Mamluk predecessors. He rebuffed Frankish attempts at alliance in the early years of his sultanate (1260–77) and from 1265 began the systematic destruction of the kingdom, capturing in short order Caesarea, Arsuf, Toron and Haifa (1265); Saphet, Galilee, Ramla and Lydda (1266).
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The complete loss of the kingdom looked an immediate possibility. Alarm revived half-dormant plans in the west for a new general crusade. The end of the English civil war in 1265 and Charles of Anjou’s victory in Sicily in 1266 encouraged Pope Clement IV to revive plans for an eastern crusade begun under his predecessor Urban IV in 1263. Long-distance financial aid and sponsorship for garrisons, such as Henry III of England’s promised 2,000 marks in 1264 to maintain a company of knights at Acre, were evidently insufficient to stem the Mamluk advance, which proceeded by sophisticated siege technology matched by military brutality. By September 1266, Louis IX had decided to take the cross once more, to lead what he and the pope, a former legal advisor to the French king, hoped would
be an international league of recovery. On 25 March 1267, the Feast of the Annunciation, before the relics housed in the Sainte Chapelle, Louis, his three sons, his close family and most of the great nobles of France once more took the cross.
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Louis IX’s second crusade was notable for its sophisticated methods of recruitment and its almost wholly nugatory results. Much of the process closely followed the precedents of the 1240s. Louis obtained a clerical tenth in France for three years. The collected deposits from legacies and redemptions were placed at the crusaders’ disposal. Normal expenditure was trimmed.
Enquêteurs
investigated local grievances against royal agents. Towns were tallaged. In some regions, Jewish moneylenders were harried. As before, Genoa and Marseilles supplied ships, although at less exorbitant rates than in 1248.
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However, the rising power of the Catalan ports was recognized in the arrangements of other crusade leaders. More significant, the king’s fleet was commanded not, as in 1248, by Genoese admirals but by a Picard nobleman – with no previous maritime experience – Florent of Varennes. The king again acted as the expedition’s central banker. He subsidized the veteran crusader Hugh IV of Burgundy, now contemplating his third eastern campaign. Clerical funds granted the king were diverted to Alphonse of Poitiers and the counts of Champagne, Brittany and Flanders. In 1269, Louis lent Edward of England 70,000
l.t.
with a view to securing substantial English and Gascon involvement: 25,000
l.t.
was earmarked for Gaston of Béarn.
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On both sides of the English Channel, crusade leaders assembled their companies by means of formal contracts. In return for a fixed sum from his lord or commander, the contracting crusader was bound to provide a stated number of knights. Occasionally, the crusader would receive additional subsidies in the form of monetary gifts or free food. The contracts were backed by less formal ties of clientage, family and political ties and regional association. In such ways Louis engaged 325 knights and Edward of England 225, yet these only represented the core of, in the French case at least, a much more substantial army.
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Alphonse of Poitiers alone raised perhaps as much as 100,000
l.t.
towards his contingent of knights, crossbowmen, provisions and ships, raising the funds from the clerical taxes assigned him by the king, selling assets such as timber and levying a hearth tax on his subjects of the Midi. Judging from the level of noble commitment in France, Louis’s
second crusade army cannot, in expectation at least, have been much smaller than that of 1248, perhaps between 10,000 and 15,000 strong. Louis’s second crusade witnessed another striking demonstration of the increasing power of the French state over nobles and regions. To drum up support, the king’s itinerary in 1269 included areas of the kingdom previously free of royal visits.
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In backhanded recognition of this royal authority, Joinville, who had this time refused to sign up, recorded that some French
crucesignati
felt they only took the cross to keep the king’s favour rather than God’s.
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If so, the near unanimity of the higher nobility in following the king’s lead speaks much for the strength of patronage over pious scruples or the purity of motives.

To the French levies were added contributions from Frisia, the Low Countries, Scotland, Aragon, England and Charles of Anjou, now installed as king of Sicily. The participation of James I of Aragon and Edward of England, especially the latter, owed much to the personal diplomacy and moral dynamism of Louis IX himself. Despite the opposition of his father, the ageing Henry III, and Pope Clement IV, Edward took the cross at Northampton in 1268.
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He and his brother Edmund raised a significant force centred on the royal court with which well over half of those known to have been recruited in England possessed close formal links. However much the crusade may have helped unite the English baronage after the trauma of civil war, the enterprise was conceived and remained essentially as a royal and curial affair, as in France. Further sign of the commitment of the English government to the crusade lay in the strenuous and ultimately successful attempts by the court to obtain parliamentary approval for a tax on movables of a twentieth, only finally agreed in 1270. Whatever the tax supplied for the crusade – perhaps £30,000 – this represented a significant development in the newly restored consensual politics after the English civil war and confirmation of the fiscal role of the commons in Parliament, the first lay subsidy granted the English crown since 1237.
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If central funding and a network of contracts that embraced the English as well as French contingents gave Louis a uniquely influential position in ordering the expedition, this did not translate into control over the coordination of the campaign. In February 1268, Louis fixed his departure for May 1270. Yet, at one end of the scale, the king of Aragon embarked in June 1269, for his fleet to be wrecked by a storm, only a remnant of it actually reaching the Holy Land without the king.
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At the other, Charles of Anjou only took the cross in February 1270 and began to prepare his war fleet the following July. Even Edward of England missed the agreed muster by some months, only embarking in August 1270, while his brother, Edmund, set out in the winter of 1270–71. Numbers who actually participated, as opposed to the contractual estimates, appeared lower than the original rush of
crucesignati
in 1267–8 may have indicated. The driving force of the whole expedition remained the will and enthusiasm of King Louis. This was emphasized by the long papal interregnum after the death of Clement IV in November 1268. A successor was not elected until September 1271, so through-out its final preparations and the crusade itself, there was no pope. However guilty Louis may have felt over the disasters of 1250, his confessor claimed that the king’s motives were more positive and altruistic, to achieve an act of such penitential severity that God would show mercy on the Holy Land.
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In addition to the administrative and financial direction he gave, despite the extensive national and international response, Louis’s personal decision on the strategy of the campaign, perhaps more than anything, lent the enterprise its particular character, some would say its especial futility.

While preaching began in 1267–8, led by cardinals who, appropriate to the character of the operation, had formerly been French royal councillors, the situation in the Holy Land deteriorated further, culminating in the fall of Jaffa, Beaufort, and, in a blood bath, Antioch to Baibars in May 1268. Initially Louis seems to have envisaged a repeat of the strategy of 1248–50, with a descent on Egypt as the likely destination of the new campaign. However, at some point in 1268 or 1269, Louis’s attention turned in an entirely different direction, an attack on Tunis. This possessed a number of apparent advantages. All large crusade fleets, embarking from different places at different times, required a muster port. As all large fleets and armies had to await the harvest, embarkation for the east was usually deferred until the late summer or autumn sailing seasons. This in turn demanded a port to be found in which to collect the fleet and spend the winter: Lisbon 1147–8; Messina 1190–91; Zara 1202–3; Acre 1217–18; Limassol 1248–9. Tunis was within easier and safer sailing distance than Cyprus. Conquest of the city and region might assist the political ambitions of the new Sicilian king, Charles of Anjou, as the Hafsid emir Muhammed was harbouring renegade supporters of the ousted Sicilian Hohenstaufen. The emir was also an ally of the king
of Aragon, a potential rival to Charles in the western Mediterranean. The possibility of an invasion of Tunisia may have persuaded James of Aragon to avoid integrating his army and fleet with Louis’s. However, Charles’s ambitions were focused eastwards, towards the Balkans and Byzantium. Despite later conjecture, the choice of Tunis as a target rested with Louis, not his brother. In Louis’s eyes, the conquest of Tunis would deprive Egypt of an ally and act as a convenient base for an attack on the Nile in 1271, a geographic myopia of scale common enough in western European circles at the time. More specifically, Louis’s close contacts with the friars may have led him to believe from the Dominicans that Tunis was ripe for conversion, a perception based on perennial missionary optimism and the largely friendly diplomatic contacts between Tunisia and western Christendom.
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Such fantasies of conversion led to a series of ill-fated missions to north Africa in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the willingness to believe that Muslims could be brought to Christ acting as a form of cultural totem similar to modern enthusiasm for exporting western democracy. Friars seemed incapable of separating commercial from religious openness. Perhaps having got wind of Louis’s thinking, the Tunisians sent an embassy to Louis in 1269, which may have furthered encouraged the king’s thinking. While not of itself contradicting the nature of the crusade, the Tunis gambit was sufficiently sensitive to be concealed from followers until after his fleet had embarked. But with muster ports in Sardinia and western Sicily, a north African destination could hardly have come as a surprise. While hindsight condemned the whole idea, Louis’s motives may have been quixotic but they were not without reason.