Holy Warriors (41 page)

The Copts soon gave Pelagius a third treatise, allegedly written by Saint Clement, which recorded the prophecies of Saint Peter himself. The
Book of Clement
predicted the capture of Damietta, and presaged that the decline of Islam and its defeat would be signaled by the meeting in Jerusalem of two kings, one from the East and one from the West, in a year when Easter fell on April 3. The next two occasions such dates would align were 1222 and 1233. Once again Pelagius believed he recognized what was happening. The king from the West was evidently Frederick and his counterpart was King David, about whom the
Relatio de Davide
had just reported such positive progress. For Jerusalem to be in Christian hands by the appointed time the crusade had to get a move on, starting with the capture of Cairo. Coupled with clerical anger at the continued moral decay in the Christian camp, this prophecy, along with the arrival of a group of imperial crusaders led by Duke Louis of Bavaria, jolted the leadership into action.

Pelagius made an impassioned speech in which he called upon the crusaders to march south. The need to depart immediately was compounded by the timing of the annual Nile flood—roughly early or mid-August to mid-November—which gave the Christians an extremely narrow window to operate in; the army set out on July 17, 1221.
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The Muslim world, meanwhile, had responded to al-Kamil’s pleas for support and started to pull together. The rulers of Damascus and Iraq came to help al-Kamil, and his call to resist the infidel, “I have set out on a jihad and it is essential to fulfil this intention,” began to take effect.
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Hundreds of boats began to move up the Nile. They contained 1,200 knights, 400 archers, and many noncombatants; a similar-sized force remained in Damietta. Ibn al-Athir commented on the crusaders’ apparent
self-belief—or their naïveté: “The Franks, because of their overconfidence, had not brought with them sufficient food for a number of days, only imagining that the Muslim armies would not stand against them and the settlements and the hinterland would all be left in their hands, so that they could take from them all the provisions they wanted.”
¹⁹
The Christians placed a heavy reliance on supplies from their fleet, and at first all appeared well; the army and accompanying vessels moved south in tight formation, reminiscent of the textbook advance by Richard the Lionheart’s forces from Acre to Arsuf during the Third Crusade. By July 24, however, ferocious Muslim attacks had slowed their pace; King John advocated a withdrawal but he was shouted down by his colleagues. The further the army moved from Damietta the greater became its dependence on ships coming up the Nile. The Egyptians quickly realized this and exploited their local knowledge to the full. Al-Kamil seized his chance and dispatched boats to a back canal and slipped behind the Christians. The plan worked to perfection; the crusader shipping was blocked and the army’s supplies quickly dwindled. By late August the crusaders accepted they could make no more headway and decided to retreat to Damietta. In contrast to the ordered march toward Cairo, the return journey was an utter fiasco; almost a parody of a military operation. The crusaders set out under the cover of darkness but soon lost any advantage because, having drunk all their remaining wine, they set fire to the camp making their intentions entirely plain. Noisy, inebriated, hampered by many sick and wounded men, plus the fact that by now the Nile was in full flood, they were easy prey for al-Kamil’s troops. The Egyptians opened sluice gates to restrict the Christians’ path even further and by August 28 there was no choice but to surrender. The crusaders had to hand over Damietta—a humiliating contrast to the offer that Pelagius had so haughtily rejected.

Many blamed Pelagius for the defeat. The Frenchman William the Clerk wrote: “Because of the legate who governed and led the Christians, everyone says that we lost that city through folly and sin. . . . For when the clergy take the function of leading knights certainly this is against the law. But the clerk should recite aloud from his Scripture and his psalms and let the knight go to his great battlefields. Let him remain before the altars and pray for the warriors and shrive the sinners. Greatly should Rome be humiliated for the loss of Damietta.”
²⁰

The troubadour Peirol, who had been at Damietta, targeted Frederick:

Still others put the responsibility at the pope’s door, but Honorius regarded Frederick to be at fault and on November 19, 1221, he gave vent to his feelings. A letter phrased in the most disparaging terms claimed the whole Christian world had waited for the emperor’s departure but his failure to crusade had demeaned the sacred offices of both pope and emperor. Ominously, Honorius suggested that he had been too easy on the emperor and from now on he would be far less tolerant. There is no doubt that Frederick’s repeated promises to appear in person had influenced the crusade considerably, but the constant coming and going of the other contingents, the dubious reliance on prophecies, squabbles between Pelagius and King John, and the increased cohesion of the Muslims were more important in denying the expedition any chance of success.

Frederick restated his determination to fulfill his vow and, over the next few years, he made further preparations. He showed a willingness to learn from the troubles of the Fifth Crusade by commissioning shallow-drafted ships for use in the Nile.
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In spite of his personal enthusiasm, the German nobility was indifferent and this caused another postponement; the papacy dispatched more preachers to try to rouse greater levels of support. Although the curia recognized there were good reasons for these delays, its patience was about to expire and a parallel dispute with Frederick over Church rights in Sicily gave an extra edge to Pope Honorius’s demands. At the Treaty of San Germano in June 1225—ten years after he had first taken the cross—the emperor submitted to an outrageous and demanding series of conditions that bound him to go on crusade or face the severest penalties. He agreed to depart on August 15, 1227, and promised to fight in the East for two years; during this time he was to pay for the maintenance of one thousand
knights. He would provide fifty fully equipped galleys and one hundred transport ships capable of carrying a total of two thousand armed men with three horses each, plus ancillary personnel. He also consented to give 100,000 ounces of gold in five installments into the custody of the patriarch of Jerusalem, King John, and the master of the Teutonic Knights, Hermann of Salza. The gold would be returned to him at Acre, but if he did not reach the Levant it could be spent in defense of the Latin East. Lastly, Frederick accepted that if he failed to crusade then he would be placed under a ban of excommunication, the harshest penalty the Church could impose on a person, casting them out from the community of the faithful and placing their soul in danger of perpetual torment.

Frederick’s involvement in the Holy Land had increased in April 1223 when it was decided that he should marry Isabella, the heiress to the kingdom of Jerusalem. In August 1225 the emperor sent a fleet of galleys to bring back his fiancée to Sicily, although a curious ceremony took place at Acre where Isabella received her wedding ring and a bishop performed the marriage with Frederick in absentia. The queen reached Brindisi in November where she met her husband and the marriage was celebrated properly.

In theory, Frederick was supposed to wait until he arrived in the Levant to assume the title of king of Jerusalem from Isabella’s father, John of Brienne, whose own claim to the crown had rested upon his marriage to Isabella’s dead mother, Marie. Frederick was far more ambitious, however; he disregarded assurances from his own envoys that John could hold the kingdom for life and seized the title for himself. John was outraged and sought support from Honorius; the pope duly condemned the emperor’s actions as “no less prejudicial to your own reputation than to the interests of the Holy Land,” but could do little else.
²³
At this stage of his career Frederick had assembled a stupendous array of honors and the addition of the kingship of Jerusalem to his imperial title and the crown of Sicily meant his power far exceeded anyone else’s in Christendom. While becoming the ruler of Jerusalem certainly pulled Frederick toward a campaign in the East, it also meant that the Holy Land became just one element among his portfolio of dominions and his actions in the Levant would always be to some extent influenced, or potentially complicated, by affairs elsewhere in the empire. Frederick’s new title also sparked an increased German presence in the kingdom, most particularly through the Teutonic Knights, who had gained
considerable prestige during the recent campaign in Egypt. Like the Templars and the Hospitallers they combined martial activity with the care of pilgrims and, as the recipients of generous gifts of lands, became highly important in the affairs of the Latin East.
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Back in Europe recruitment for the crusade gathered momentum and a good number of northern Germans took the cross, as well as a strong contingent from England. In the summer of 1227, as required by the pope, they moved over the Alps and began to gather at Brindisi. Ironically, given the earlier lack of manpower, the problem now became one of overcrowding and a lack of food. In the intense heat of an Apulian summer disease broke out. Fearful of breaching his promise to the pope, Frederick ordered a first group of ships to set sail ahead of him. Several members of the imperial court fell ill, then the emperor himself was laid low. He moved along to Otranto but it became impossible to continue and he went to the thermal town of Pozzuoli to recover. Common sense dictated that the new pope, Gregory IX (1227–41), should waive the strict application of the Treaty of San Germano; an illness was hardly something Frederick could control. Yet Gregory would not even receive the imperial ambassador; he had to act now, “or seem like a dog unable to bark,” as one contemporary wrote. Frederick’s ban of excommunication was invoked—no one in the Christian community was to have any contact with him.
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Gregory’s letter to the emperor pulsed with anger and disgust. He recounted how Innocent III had protected the young man: “see if there is any grief like that of the apostolic see, your mother, who has been so often and so cruelly deceived in the son, whom she suckled, in whom she placed confidence that he would carry out this matter, and on whom she has heaped such abundant benefits.” He emphasized that Frederick had now broken four oaths to help the Holy Land and was henceforth subject to the excommunication he had voluntarily submitted to. Gregory censured the emperor directly for the failure of the Fifth Crusade and claimed that it was his prevarication that had caused the loss of Damietta. He also blamed him for the death of many crusaders in the summer of 1227 because his delays had trapped them in the unhealthy ports of southern Italy.

Another of Gregory’s letters concentrated on the emperor’s alleged misdemeanors: his abuse of Church rights in Sicily, his use of Muslim soldiers in his army and hostility to the Templars and Hospitallers. The first of these points in particular suggested that Gregory saw the excommunication as an
opportunity to advance long-standing papal claims against imperial power in Sicily, rather than dealing solely with the matter of the crusade. He also argued that Frederick took “more account of the servants of Muhammad than those of Christ,” an early sign that the emperor’s contact with Muslims was a target for papal ire.
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The belief that Frederick’s actions had impeded the crusade had some broader currency as well. Roger of Wendover, a contemporary English writer, noted a widely reported vision in which Christ appeared in the sky, suspended on the cross, pierced with nails and sprinkled with blood, “as if laying a complaint before each and every Christian of the injury inflicted upon him by the emperor.”
²⁷

Meanwhile the Germans who had sailed ahead to the Latin East helped to establish the castle of Montfort as the headquarters of the Teutonic Knights; they also took control of Sidon and fortified Jaffa and Caesarea. Once recovered, Frederick still wanted to fulfill his vows—in part to try to clear his name, but also to enforce his title to Jerusalem and to assist the Christian cause. At this moment fortune finally presented him with an opportunity to accomplish all three of those aims.

The rulers of Egypt, Sultan al-Kamil, and Damascus, Sultan al-Mu’azzam, were fierce rivals and in 1226 the former sent his vizier, Fakhr al-Din, on a mission to Sicily. The envoy offered to return Jerusalem to the Christians if the emperor would join him in an attack on Damascus. Almost forty years earlier, Richard the Lionheart had enjoyed a good relationship with Saphadin during the Third Crusade but Frederick, above all other western rulers during the age of the crusades, was particularly open to the idea of diplomatic engagement with the Muslims, in part on account of his own multicultural upbringing. The emperor sent an embassy to al-Kamil that bore splendid gifts, including a favorite horse with a jewel-encrusted saddle of gold. Just to cover all possible options, however, the imperial envoys also visited Damascus to sound out al-Mu’azzam. The response was exceptionally direct: “I have nothing for your master but my sword.” Nevertheless, Frederick’s approach to the Damascenes worried al-Kamil sufficiently for him to send Fakhr al-Din to Sicily again where it is likely that he was knighted by the emperor—a neat twist in the developing concept of chivalry as a broad-minded westerner bestowed the prime manifestation of his own warrior code on a Muslim.