God's War: A New History of the Crusades (70 page)

Despite their weakened state and unrelenting Turkish attacks, the Germans cut their way through to Iconium, protected by military discipline, weight of numbers and lack of alternatives. The encounters with the enemy grew in size and intensity as the Christians closed on the Seljuk capital, which Frederick insisted on capturing rather than leave as an enemy base at his rear. On 18 March, outside Iconium, the Germans encountered Qutb al-Din’s main army in a pitched battle. By dividing his forces into two, with Duke Frederick leading an assault on the city itself while the old emperor faced the Turkish field army, Frederick seems to have wrong-footed his opponents. The city fell easily, suggesting it had been denuded of defenders. After desperate fighting involving the emperor himself, the Turks outside the city were defeated, apparently against the numerical odds, leaving Iconium at the mercy of German pillaging and looting.

The victory at Iconium saved the crusade militarily and restocked it with food, supplies and money. His strategy in ruins, Qutb al-Din was
replaced by his father, who resumed his pacific policy by coming to terms with the Germans. After a brief rest, the re-equipped German army left the region of Iconium on 23 May, with important Turkish hostages to guarantee the safety of their march. On 30 May the vanguard reached Karaman on the border with Christian Cilicia. Frederick Barbarossa had achieved what the crusaders of 1101 and Second Crusade could not. In two months since crossing to Asia, he had brought his vast army, depleted but intact, in the face of sustained Turkish hostility, difficult terrain, heavy casualties and shortages of supplies, to welcoming Christian territory. On its own terms, this compared with the most remarkable achievements of the whole Third Crusade. A generation later a writer in Outremer reckoned that Saladin had been so frightened of Frederick’s approach that he dismantled the walls of Syrian ports lest they were captured and used against him by the Germans.
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But Frederick’s effort proved to no purpose. Pressing forward to Antioch, now only a very few weeks ahead, as the German army negotiated the crossing of the river Saleph, Frederick somehow slipped, fell or was thrown from his horse into the river. He may have fallen in because of a heart attack or, having fallen, the shock of the cold water brought one on. Alternatively, and less credibly, he drowned after going for a cooling swim. The sources disagree, some insisting that Frederick survived his ducking only to die some days later. What is certain is that the emperor died on Sunday 10 June 1190 as a consequence of fording the river Saleph and that his death, through heart failure, drowning or other injury, was connected in some way with immersion in the river.
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Practically and symbolically, the shock of Frederick’s death was profound. It cast doubt on his cause. Even in retrospect it was impossible to recast him as a new Moses deprived of the Promised Land, as there was to be no ultimate victory for his people. At the time, his sudden death in such circumstances snapped the army’s morale and unity. Freed from the imminent threat of attack from hostile locals, the great army that had held together for over a year in the face of all vicissitudes began to disintegrate. Elements peeled off to return home from the ports of Cilicia or, later, Syria. Others left the main force to sail from Tarsus for Tyre. The rest continued to Antioch, by land and, with Frederick of Swabia and the funeral cortège of his father, by sea. Duke Frederick reached Antioch on 21 June 1190, where he was joined by his depleted land army. There, disease ravaged the survivors, including a number
of significant figures in the high command and royal administration. Frederick Barbarossa’s body was boiled and filleted. The flesh was buried in the cathedral of St Peter in Antioch. The separated bones, now elevated to the status of relics, were destined for the Holy Sepulchre, although they ended in the church of St Mary in Tyre. This scarcely compensated for the lack of his personality and leadership.

His son, while possessing both bravery and military skill, lacked his father’s authority, drive and determination. With diminished resources, Duke Frederick toyed with the idea of establishing himself as a power in northern Syria, being offered by Bohemund III, or, in other accounts, insisting upon control of Antioch.
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This made some strategic sense, as military pressure in the north played on the relative weakness of Saladin’s hold over parts of the region and had the effect of forcing the sultan to divert even more troops from Acre. The Christians’ recovery from the defeat outside Acre of 25 July and the ease with which Henry of Champagne subsequently established himself may have been fruits of Duke Frederick’s Antioch policy. However, Duke Frederick, perhaps because of his diminishing armed force, decided against a northern campaign. Leaving Antioch on 29 August, he led his troops south, picking their way down the coast to Tripoli and Tyre, sustaining further losses to Turkish attacks on the way. Having made contact with Conrad of Montferrat at Tyre, Frederick, with a meagre and bruised rump of the great German host, finally reached the Christian camp at Acre on 7 October 1190.

The scene he found would have inspired little confidence. The siege was locked in a violent stalemate that cost lives and achieved little. Even wives of crusaders joined in the menial tasks of siege warfare, such as filling the city ditch so that siege engines could approach the walls. One of these, mortally wounded by a Turkish arrow, begged her husband to bury her in the trench she was helping to fill.
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The remnants of the German crusade inspired some concerted action against both the city and the surrounding Muslim forces, but they failed to make a difference. Morale was hardly raised by the departure of Louis of Thuringia shortly after Duke Frederick’s arrival. National rivalries simmered dangerously, exacerbated by fresh reinforcements. At about the same time as Duke Frederick, the advance guard of the English royal army landed at Acre, led by Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury, the recently dismissed justiciar, Ranulf Glanvill, and his nephew, soon the rising star of Angevin
government, Hubert Walter bishop of Salisbury. They had left Richard I at Marseilles in August 1190, taking two months to reach Palestine. The English helped with manning the front lines and leading forays against the enemy, but their presence also reinforced a growing political division within the Christian camp in which they were pitted against the Germans.

Some time in October 1190, the disease that appears to have become endemic in the fetid conditions of the Christian camp, carrying off many of the recent arrivals, claimed Queen Sybil of Jerusalem and her two daughters. This threw the Jerusalem succession once more into doubt, as Guy was only king by virtue of being Sybil’s husband. Guy’s enemies among the Outremer baronage, led by Balian of Ibelin and his wife Maria Comnena, mother of the new heiress to the kingdom, Isabella, promoted the proven military success, Conrad of Montferrat, to replace the man who lost Jerusalem.
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To achieve this they needed Isabella to divorce her existing husband, the Arabic-speaking and allegedly effeminate Humphrey III of Toron, and marry Conrad. The childlessness of Isabella and Humphrey made the scheme easier to contemplate. The uncomfortable fact that Conrad already had a wife living in Constantinople, and possibly another in Italy, seemed to have been brushed aside. The Germans, the papal legate, the archbishop of Pisa and the French vassals of Philip II lined up behind Conrad and his marriage to Isabella. Ranged against them were the Patriarch Heraclius, now too ill to act, and the Angevins under Archbishop Baldwin, who supported Guy. Baldwin proved an awkward opponent, and even the docile Humphrey of Toron seems to have briefed Ralph of Tiberias, a noted advocate, to plead his case. However, Baldwin died suddenly on 19 November, and five days later, after Humphrey had been exposed to enormous political and personal pressure and scarcely veiled physical threats, Isabella’s first marriage was annulled and she was summarily married to Conrad by Philip II’s cousin, the bishop of Beauvais, with the approval of the papal legate. To some, the crown of Jerusalem now lay with a couple united only by politics and bigamy. To others, it seemed the most sensible outcome, especially as they produced a child the following year. For the army at Acre, it risked schism, as Guy still insisted he was king. Only the withdrawal of the couple to Tyre and the intensification of the epidemic in the camp calmed emotions.

The coup of Conrad’s marriage represented a final achievement for
Frederick of Swabia. Within weeks he had been struck down by illness, dying on 20 January 1191. He was buried in the cemetery of the field hospital established at Acre earlier in 1190 by citizens from Bremen and Lübeck.
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It had been dedicated to St Mary’s, Jerusalem, a reference to the German hospital in the Holy City before 1187. By 1196, this community caring for the sick had been organized as a religious hospitaller order on which, in 1198, was imposed the duty to fight the infidel. The Teutonic Order of St Mary’s Hospital in Jerusalem, the military order of the Teutonic Knights, thus constituted the most important and lasting legacy of the German involvement in the Third Crusade. Ironically, it owed nothing to the initiative and efforts of Frederick Barbarossa. The collapse of the German expedition constitutes one of the great ‘what ifs’ of crusading, indeed of medieval history. If Frederick had brought his army, still tens of thousands strong despite the heavy losses, to Acre in the summer of 1190, the city might have fallen a year earlier than it did. Saladin confessed to serious alarm at the danger. His authority would have been severely weakened long before the arrival of the kings of France and England. In turn their forces would not have been deflected by the need to take Acre. The political rivalries would not have diminished. Frederick was old and imperious. Neither Richard I nor Philip II would have been over-eager to bow the knee to him. However, a joint campaign by such large forces from an already secured base at Acre in 1191 might have placed Jerusalem within Christian reach. As it was, the last great western European land attack on the eastern Mediterranean ended in frustration and almost complete failure.

All that was left for the demoralized crusaders at Acre, as Hubert Walter wrote anxiously from there in the early weeks of 1191 to the mandarin English bureaucrat, Richard FitzNeal bishop of London, was to ‘maintain their efforts and withstand the discomforts of the siege until the coming of our kings’. He hoped they would arrive at Easter (14 April). Perhaps he expected them to. Without them, Hubert prophesied, ‘the hope of worldly consolation will die away’.
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All eyes, Christian and Muslim, were strained westwards, awaiting the appearance of the kings of France and England.

THE ANGLO-FRENCH EXPEDITION 1190–91

The delay in the arrival of the kings of France and England at the siege of Acre constituted one of the scandals of the age, evidence of Satan at work.
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Frederick Barbarossa was dead before his fellow monarchs had even set out. Chroniclers, chanteurs and clerics united in condemnation of the unseemly politics that enveloped royal preparations in France and England after Henry II and Philip II had taken the cross together at Gisors in January 1188. By the end of March, both monarchs had issued instructions for the Saladin Tithe and details of how crusaders’ privileges would operate. However, unrest, rebellion and war in Richard of Poitou’s lands in Aquitaine distracted attention from the crusade and drew Philip II and Henry II into another round of military thrust and parry. As 1188 wore on, Philip successfully managed to entice Richard into an alliance against his father by suggesting that the old king was planning to disinherit him in favour of his youngest son, John. As John had conspicuously not taken the cross, and so was available to rule the Angevin lands in the absence of Henry and Richard, the idea seemed plausible. Despite repeated attempts at negotiation, tension over the Angevin succession, heightened by Henry’s ill-health in the winter and spring of 1188–9, turned to open warfare between the old king on one side and Philip and Richard on the other. Yet pressure for the crusade continued. At a peace conference on 4 July 1189, the three protagonists, among other things, agreed to muster for the crusade at Vézelay in late February, mid-Lent, 1190. Three days later, Henry II died.
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Given the upheavals and arrangements consequent on a new reign in Angevin lands in France as well as in England, the remarkable feature of the crusade preparations was not delay but their acceleration on both sides of the Channel. Although twice, in November 1189 and in March 1190, the date for departure was postponed, first to 1 April, then to 24 June, both kings set about preparing their realms administratively and politically for their absence and arranging for their transport east. Remarkably, even the deaths in childbirth on 15 March 1190 of Philip’s queen and the twins she was carrying scarcely deflected the king’s resolve. The French succession now rested on a three-year-old child,
Prince Louis. Not only Philip, but also possible claimants such as Count Robert II of Dreux, a first cousin, left for the east. Their participation in the crusade echoed that of heir-less Louis VII and his brother Robert I of Dreux in 1147 by imperilling Capetian dynastic security, the rock on which the royal house’s fortunes had rested for two centuries. As for Richard he was unmarried and childless, with a younger brother and nephew who inevitably would (and after 1199 did) compete for his inheritance. In such circumstances, embarkation a year after Henry II’s death was not unduly dilatory. Much criticism of Henry, Philip and Richard appears polemical or wishful. There would have been no participation by the French and English kings of any kind without the resolution of outstanding disagreements over the succession to Angevin lands in France and the honouring of past treaties. More widely, critics underestimated the extent of non-royal crusade activity, especially in France.