C. MED. HIST. VOL. V. THE EMPIRE AND THE PAPACY
CH. VIII. 20 306 The Military Orders
They were already under the triple vows of chastity, obedience, and poverty, like regular canons, but it was only when Baldwin II in the first year of his reign gave them a dwelling near the Temple of Solomon that they came to be known as the Knights of the Temple. A little later under Raymond du Puy a similar organisation was adopted for the Hospital of St John. The two Orders thus established grew rapidly in wealth and power, and acquired great possessions in Palestine and the West. Already in the reign of Fulk they had begun to be an important element in the military strength of the kingdom, and a generation later the Hospitallers furnished Amaury I with five hundred knights for his Egyptian campaign, and William of Tyre says that in his time the Templars numbered three hundred knights. Wealth and power brought abuses in their train. Even in the twelfth century the pretensions of the two Orders began to be troublesome, and the Templars in particular won an evil name for avarice and arrogance. At a later date the rivalry of the two great Orders became a serious danger. But in their prime they were an efficient military organisation, whilst the wealth, which enabled them to maintain a steady flow of reinforcements from the West, gave them always an advantage over the native lords of the land.
The minor Orders, like the Teutonic Knights, the Knights of St Thomas of Acre, and the Knights of the Holy Ghost, did not grow up till much later.
The success of the early Crusaders was, however, due more to the division of their enemies than to their own valour. It was during the confusion and civil war that followed on the death of the great Seljuq Sultan Malik Shah in 1092, that the First Crusade was launched. No moment could have been more auspicious, and a generation was to pass before the Muslim power was again to be gathered in a single hand. Nevertheless the Frankish conquest was far from complete. Even within the limits of the actual kingdom and its subordinate principalities it was little more than the armed occupation of a land where the old inhabitants still formed the bulk of the population, at all events in the rural districts.
Nor was the occupation, such as it was, ever carried far enough to make the conquest secure; Damascus, Emesa (Hims), Hamah, and Aleppo were still under the rule of Muslim princes, and there was but a small part of the Christian territory that was beyond the reach of a sudden raid. So long, however, as these cities remained under separate lulers, the Franks also might carry their own raids far and wide, and the balance of success rested with them. The man who was to find a remedy by restoring unity amongst the Musulmans was 'Imad-ad-Din Zangi, who became Atabeg of Mosul in 1127. Zangi's first aim was to establish his rule in Muslim Syria, and within three years he made himself master of Hamah and Aleppo. He was more intent upon the consolidation of Musulman power than on active
The Second Crusade 307
conquest from the Franks, and though in 1135-6 he made a successful campaign against Antioch, the conquest of Edessa, which he achieved near the close of his career, does not appear to have been an essential aim of his policy. Joscelin of Edessa had been a restless fighter, whose name was a terror in all Musulman lands. So long as he lived, Edessa was a strong outpost of the Christians in the most dangerous quarter. His death in 1131 coincided with the rise of Zangi. His son Joscelin II, though a valiant soldier when he chose, preferred a life of ease to the hardship of fi'ontier warfare. So he left Edessa to the care of unwarlike Armenians and ill-paid mercenaries, and withdrew to the luxurious comfort of his Syrian lordship at Tell-Bashir. For a time Zangi was busy with the attempted conquest of Damascus, which Mu'In-ad-Din Anar, its ruler, defeated by making common cause with the Franks. When, however, Zangi turned his attention northwards, Edessa fell an easy prey (25 December 1144). To the Muslims it was "the conquest of conquests," and the first step to the destruction of the Franks. Zangi did not long survive his victory; for within two years he was murdered by some of his own ]Mamluks. The work which he had begun was continued by his son Nur- ad-Din, who in 1150 captured Tell-Bashir and in 1154 by the conquest of Damascus brought all the Musulman cities of Syria under a single ruler.
In Western Europe the fall of Edessa was recognised as a disaster which threatened the very existence of the Frankish conquest. St Bernard of Clairvaux came forward as the apostle of the Second Crusade, and at his bidding Conrad of Germany and Louis VI of France both took the Cross. Conrad and Louis started independently on their long journey by land in the spring of 1147. Both met with utter disaster in Asia Minor, and it was by sea that the remnant of their hosts reached Syria a year later, Louis went fii*st to Antioch, where Raymond would fain have diverted him to a war against Nur-ad-Din in the north, which was indeed the most dangerous quarter. Conrad had already reached Acre, and when the whole host was at length assembled it was resolved to make the capture of Damascus the object of the war. A siege was begun with good prospect of success. But between the Syrian Franks and their Western allies there were bitter jealousies of which the Saracen emir was quick to take ad- vantage. By specious argument and perhaps by bribes he worked on the Easterners so effectually that the enterprise was abandoned. Conrad presently went home in disgust, and though Louis stayed a little longer he could effect nothing. To Western Europe the fiasco of the Second Crusade was a keen humiliation. St Bernard found in it "an abyss so deep that I must call him blessed who is not scandalised therebv.'' To the Syrian Franks the Crusade had brought no advantage; it had done little to check the growth of Muslim power, but had rather tended to throw Damascus into the arms of Nur-ad-Dln. Amongst the Christians themselves it had sown the seed of dissension which was to beai' bitter fruit.
CH. VIII. 20 — 2
308 Nur-ad-Din and Amaury I
However, for some years to come Nur-ad-Din was busy with the establishment of his authority in Mushm lands. Meantime the Franks, under the vigorous rule of Baldwin III (1144-1163) and Amaury I (1163-1174), were able to maintain at least the semblance of power. Baldwin III was a boy of thirteen at the time of his father's death, and ruled conjointly with his mother till 1152. The first year of his sole reign was marked by the capture of Ascalon, which for fifty years had been an open sore in the side of the Franks towards Egypt. Four years later he attempted to recover Caesarea on the Orontes, which had been lately taken by Nur-ad-Dln. This enterprise, in which Baldwin was assisted by his brother-in-law Theodoric (Thierry) of Flanders, was likely to have proved successful. But Theodoric and Reginald of Chatillon, whom Constance of Antioch had taken for her second husband, both laid claim to the unconquered town ; their rivalry led to such hot dissension amongst the crusaders that they abandoned the siege altogether. Baldwin III was more than a mere soldier; he had a high repute for his familiarity with the customary law of his realm, and more than a little of that literary culture which seems to have been a common characteristic of the Frankish nobility. He had sought to strengthen his position by a marriage with the sister of Manuel Comnenus, the Emperor of Constantinople, but at his death in 1163 he left no children and was succeeded by his brother Amaury I.
In Syria Nur-ad-Din at Damascus and Amaury at Jerusalem now stood face to face as leaders of the rival races. It was becoming clear that the victory would rest with the one who could make himself master of Egypt. The Fatimite Caliphs at Cairo had sunk to be the puppets of their viziers. In January 1163 the vizier Shawar was expelled by a rival called Dirgham, and fled for aid to Nur-ad-Dln. Dirgham unwisely refused to pay the tribute which for some years past had been rendered by Egypt to the King of Jerusalem. Thereupon Amaury made war and defeated Dirgham in battle ; but, when the vizier flooded Egypt by breaking the dams of the Nile, he was forced to retire on some sort of composition. Nur-ad-Din perceived his opportunity, and in 1164 sent Shawar back to Egypt with an army under Shirkuh, the uncle of Saladin. Too late Dirgham sought a reconciliation with Amaury. Shawar, however, soon found his tutelage irksome, and in his turn called in the Frankish king. Amaury invaded Egypt in 1167, and was so far successful that a treaty was made under which the Saracens withdrew their army. Next year Amaury was persuaded against his own judgment to break the peace and again invade Egypt. As the king had foreseen, this act threw Shawar once more into the arms of Nur-ad-Din, and the return of Shh'kuh forced the Franks to retire from before Cairo. Shirkuh soon found an excuse to put Shawar to death, and became vizier in his place. After only three months he died and was succeeded by Saladin. A renewed attempt by Amaury, with the aid of the Emperor Manuel, to capture Damietta in
Factions among the Franks 309
the autumn of 1169 ended in disaster. Thus was the conquest of Egypt for Nur-ad-Din accomplished by the man who was destined to complete his work in Syria.
Nur-ad-Din and Amaury both died in the summer of 1174. The sons of both — Baldwin IV at Jerusalem, and Salih at Damascus — were mere boys. It was not long before Saladin displaced his master"'s heir, and with Syria and Egypt in the hands of the same ruler the Franks were between the nether and the upper millstone. In Saladin the Muslims had obtained a great leader, whose single purpose was the recovery of Jerusalem. But amongst the Christians there was no one with enough authority to repress the mutual jealousies which spoiled all their endeavours. It was only after some dispute that Raymond III of Tripolis (1152-1187) was chosen to be guardian of the kingdom, and as long as he held the position he was hampered by the disputes of rival factions. The troubles of the reign were increased by the fact that Baldwin was a leper, whose disease before his death had crippled him altogether. Baldwin had two sisters: Sibylla, who was married in 1176 to William of !Montferrat but lost her first husband within a year; and Isabella, who in 1183 became the wife of Henfrid IV^ of Toron. The prospect of the king's early death made the marriages of Sibylla and Isabella the sport of political intrigue, in which the chief opposing parties were the lords of the land and the soldiers of fortune from the West. These disputes were to be the undoing of the kingdom.
Baldwin IV in early manhood was able to take an active part in the war. A disastrous defeat in 1179 made the Franks welcome a two years' truce. AMien it expired, they had a further brief respite whilst Saladin was busy beyond the Euphrates. Meantime another husband had been found for Sibylla in the person of Guy de Lusignan. Guy was a foreigner, and when in 1183 Baldwin made him his lieutenant the native lords refused to obey one whom they despised as a man "unknown and of little skill in war."" The jealousies were so bitter that an attempt was made to obtain another solution by crowning Sibylla's little son by her first husband as Baldwin V. The native party then obtained the reappointment of Raymond as regent, whilst Guy withdrew in dudgeon to his county of Ascalon. Guy was supported by the aliens or Western adventurers like Reginald of Chatillon (now lord of Karak), and by the Knights of the Temple and the Hospital. With them the one idea of policy was war, but the native lords, who had more at stake and had acquired the habits and ideas of the East, were not unwilling to make terms with their Muslim neighbours. WTieu Baldwin IV died in 1185, Raymond as regent at once concluded a four years' truce with Saladin. But the death of the child-king Baldwin V next year gave his opponents their opportunity.
Gerard de Rideford, a French knight who had recently become Master of the Temple, had a personal feud with Raymond of Tripolis. He now conspired successfully to secure the crown for Sibylla and her husband.
310 The fall of Jerusalem
The opposite party made an attempt to put forward Henfrid of Toron as a rival candidate. But Henfrid was unwilling, and the majority of the Frankish lords then accepted Guy as king. Raymond, however, withdrew to Tripolis, whilst others held aloof, and it was with difficulty that the outbreak of civil war was prevented. Raymond is alleged to have intrigued with Saladin. It is more certain that Reginald of Chatillon provoked war by a flagrant breach of the truce. On 1 May 1187 a Saracen force crossed the Jordan, and taking the Christians by surprise inflicted a disastrous defeat on the Templars and Hospitallers at Nazareth. For a moment all feuds were hushed and Raymond gave Guy his whole support. Under the influence of Gerard de Rideford, Guy nevertheless rejected the cautious advice of Count Raymond, and on 4 July was compelled to give battle at Hittin on unfavourable terms. That day saw the virtual destruction of the kingdom of Jerusalem. Guy, with many other of the leaders, was taken prisoner. Raymond escaped from the battle only to die of despair a few days later. Of the chief lords there was none alive and free save Balian of Ibelin. One after another the towns and fortresses of the kingdom fell into the hands of the Saracens. Jerusalem was taken by Saladin on 2 October 1187, and within a few months Tyre was the only place of importance in the kingdom that remained in the hands of the Christians.
The fall of Jerusalem stirred every heart in Western Europe, and provoked the Third Crusade. All the great princes in turn took the Cross, but the Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, was the first to take the field in May 1189. Marching overland, the German host met with the usual difficulties and delays that attended that route. Frederick himself was accidentally drowned in Cilicia, and it was not till late in 1190 that the remainder of his army reached Syria. Guy de Lusignan had obtained his freedom in July 1188, and during the next few months gathered a little army at Antioch, with which in the spring of 1189 he marched south to Tyre. But Conrad of Montferrat (brother of Sibylla's first husband), who held the city, would not admit him. Guy was, however, gradually reinforced by the arrival of knights and soldiers from the West, and in August felt himself strong enough to undertake the siege of Acre. The crusading army continued to grow in numbers, and secured some successes, but could not establish a complete investment. Presently they were themselves invested by a Saracen army, and though food grew scarce within the town the condition of the Christians in their camp was little better. This double siege had lasted eighteen months before Philip of France arrived, and it was not till 8 June 1191 that Richard of England (who had tarried to conquer Cyprus) appeared. Acre was then on the point of falling, and on 12 July the Christians recovered the city, which had of late years almost supplanted Jerusalem as the royal residence, and was the most important port of Palestine. Quicker progress might liave been made before Acre had it not been for the continued feuds of the crusading leaders. Sibylla had died, leaving
The Third Crusade 311
no children, at the end of 1190. Thereupon the native party induced Isabella to consent to a divorce from Henfrid of Toron and to a marriage with Conrad of Montferrat. Guy on his part was naturally unwilling to resign the crown. He appealed to Richard of England, whilst Conrad obtained the support of Philip Augustus. Eventually, after the fall of Acre a compromise was effected, by which Guy retained the title for life, whilst the succession was secured to Conrad. It was a misfortune for the Christians that their two chief leaders should have taken opposite sides in this quarrel. It helped to revive the national rivalrv of the French and English, at a time when the personal dissensions of Philip and Richard were already threatening to ^^Teck the Crusade. "The two kings and peoples," wrote an English chronicler, "did less together than they would have done apart, and each set but light store by the other.""
Richard was at his best as a Crusader with his whole heart in the war. Philip remained the unscrupulous intriguer intent on his own gain. Soon after the fall of Acre the French king found an excuse to go home, though he left part of his followers behind under Hugh, Duke of Burgundy. Richard had now at all events the advantage that there was no one to dispute his place as the foremost leader of the Crusade. In August he marched south, inflicted a severe defeat on Saladin at Arsuf on 7 September, secured Jaffa, and at the end of the vear advanced to within twelve miles of Jerusalem. But he was forced to fall back to the coast, where he busied himself with the restoration of Ascalon. The old feuds had broken out with new violence. Most of the French left the armv and went back to Acre, where they found open discord between the supporters of Guy and Conrad. The Pisans were in arms for Guy, and the Genoese for Conrad.
The French joined forces with the latter, and the English king was compelled to intervene. Richard consented reluctantly to acknowledge Conrad, whilst he consoled Guy with the gift of Cvprus. A month later, in April 1192, Conrad was murdered, and his party then chose Henry of Champagne as king and husband of the widowed Isabella. HeniT of Champagne had the fortune to be Richard's own nephew, and this choice restored at least the appearance of unity. In the summer the Crusaders again advanced to Bait Niibah, twelve miles from Jerusalem. A bold dash might have recovered the Holy City, but cautious counsels prevailed. Other successes, however, followed, and Saladin began to incline to peace. Richard also was now anxious to return home, and, after a brilliant victory over the Saracens before Jaffa on 5 August, consented to a three years' truce.
Under the truce the Christians secured a narrow strip of coast from Ascalon to Acre with the right of access to the Holy City. Such a result was entirely out of proportion to the greatness of the effort put forward, or to the halo of glory with which romance has invested the Third Crusade. If we would seek the causes of this failure we should find them in the personal enmities of the great princes, the national rivalries of their
312 The Franks in Syria
followers, and the mutual jealousies of the native lords. That the Third Crusade was not in fact and in history such a fiasco as the Second was due mainly to the personal greatness of the two chief actors : to Richard as the whole-hearted champion of the Cross, and to Saladin as the pre-eminently wise and just restorer of Muslim power. " Were each," said Hubert Walter, " endowed with the virtues of the other, the whole world could not furnish such a pair of princes." The great Saladin died within a few months, in February 1193, and Richard returned to a troubled kingdom and an early grave in the West.
The loss of Jerusalem and the failure of the Third Crusade marked the end of the kingdom as an organised state. Here then we may stop to consider briefly the social life of the Franks in Syria. Outwardly, at all events, the Frankish nobles lived much the same life as their contemporaries in the West, with like pursuits and like ideals. The great lords dwelt on their fiefs in their castles, the finest of which, like Karak, Sahyun, Krak des Chevaliers, and Markab (the two last belonged to the Hospitallers), were amongst the most splendid monuments of medieval military architecture. But in later days many of them had also their palaces in such towns as Antioch, Tripolis, and Acre. In the second generation most of the Franks had adopted the luxuries, manners, and even the dress of the East. The dwellers in the land established in the intervals of peace friendly relations with their Musulman neigh- bours, and this association led not only to a change in habits but to a wider culture. This difference of mental attitude contributed almost as much as difference of interest to keep the native lords apart from the Western soldiers and adventurers who had no personal ties in the East. But the aristocracy of knights and nobles did not stand alone ; there was a large class of burgesses, many of them the offspring of marriages with Syrian women and known as Pullani; they, even more than their rulers, had adopted luxurious habits and, with the growth of commercial interests, had lost their zeal for the war.
Amongst the knights there was a class of mere adventurers like Reginald of Chatillon, whose predatory instincts made them a bane to the older settlers. But a worse class were the men of lower rank who had gone on the Crusade to escape the consequences of their crimes and in the East reverted to their evil ways. During the whole period of the kingdom these wastrels were a constant source of danger. Far otherwise were the foreign merchants, "a folk very necessary to the Holy Land." It has been remarked before how closely commerce and military enterprise were interwoven in Frankish Syria. The foreign trade was almost entirely in the hands of the Italians, and above all of the Genoese, Pisans, and Venetians. All of them had rendered good service in the early days of the kingdom, and all of them had been rewarded with privileges and their special quarters in the towns; hence they acquired a political influence which was to bear evil fruit. From the first there was much commercial rivalry between them, and from the Third Crusade
The Ecclesiastical hierarchy 313
onwards, when the power of the nobles had become less and the importance of the merchants greater, their dissensions were a potent factor in the final downfall of the kingdom. In these ill-assorted strata of separate classes there was little material for a unified nation, and it must not be forgotten that the great mass of the agricultural population still consisted of the ancient inhabitants. The fatal lack of unity was not the least of the causes which prevented the permanence of the Frank colonies.
Of the ecclesiastical hierarchy nothing has yet been said. Under the two Patriarchs of Jerusalem and Antioch there were eight archbishops and sixteen bishops, with numerous abbeys and priories of the Latin rite. If there was more culture amongst the laymen in the East than amongst their kinsmen in the West, much of the work of actual administration rested in the East as in the West on ecclesiastics. The Patriarch Daimbert, at the time of the election of Baldwin I, put forward pretensions of the loftiest character, which, if they could have been established in their entirety, would have made the kingdom a theocratic state. Except for a brief period under Baldwin II when Stephen of Chartres laid claim to Jaffa and Jerusalem, his successor were content to work in harmony with the king. Nevertheless the Latin Church with its privileged position and immunities, supported by the vast wealth which it possessed not only in Syria but in every country of the West, formed a power which was dangerous to the unity of the kingdom. Jacques de Vitry, who was Bishop of Acre in the thirteenth century, roundly charges the clergy of his time with greed and avarice. But, whatever the faults of some, there were great names amongst the churchmen of the East. AVilliam of Tyre, archbishop, chancellor, and historian, was pre-eminent; whilst, amongst lesser names, an English writer must not omit his countryman, Ralph, Bishop of Bethlehem, who was chancellor under Baldwin III and Amaury.
After the Third Crusade the Kingdom of Jerusalem was little more than a shadow. For the most part it consisted of a narrow strip along the coast, and such strength as it retained rested upon the possession of the important ports from Jaffa to Bey rout, and above all of Acre. Further north the Christians still held a more substantial territory, though Bohemond III of Antioch, the son of Raymond and Constance, was hard pressed by the Christian princes of Armenia. The county of Tripolis gained strength from the presence within its bordere of some of the greatest fortresses of the Military Orders. Raymond III, at his death in 1187, left the county to his godson Raymond, son of Bohemond III. But after the death of Bohemond III in 1201 Raymond resigned Tripolis to his brother Bohemond IV, and henceforward the Princes of Antioch were also Counts of Tripolis.
In the kingdom proper the native lords would have been content to enjoy the small remnant of their former possessions, and it was against their will, when German Crusaders came to Acre in 1197, that the war was renewed. In that same year Henry of Champagne died and his widow
314 John de Brienne and Frederick II
married for her fourth husband Amaury de Lusignan, who had succeeded his brother Guy as King of Cyprus. The Lusignans ruled prosperously in Cyprus for over three centuries, and from this time the fortunes of the kingdom of Jerusalem were linked closely with the island. The reign of Amaury II witnessed some recovery of territory on the mainland, and more might have been accomplished had not the Fourth Crusade been diverted to the conquest of Constantinople, an ill-advised enterprise which did great injury to the Christian cause in the East. Amaury II died in 1205, and his infant son Amaury III a year later. Then the kingdom of Jerusalem passed to Mary, Isabella's daughter by Conrad of Montferrat. For Mary a husband was found in John de Brienne, a French knight, who came to Acre in 1210. John, though a man of modest rank, was a skilful soldier, whose incessant raids on Saracen territory did something to stay the waning fortunes of his kingdom. It was in answer to John's appeal that Innocent III in 1216 proclaimed a new Crusade.
In the autumn of 1217 a great host assembled at Acre. By the advice of King John it was determined to make an expedition to Egypt by sea, and accordingly in May 1218 the Crusaders laid siege to Damietta. There they were joined by further reinforcements from the West, including the four English Earls of Chester, Arundel, Salisbury, and Winchester; Robert de Cour^on, an English cardinal, also came as one of the Pope's representatives, though he died within a few weeks of his arrival. The siege lasted over a year, and it was only on 5 November 1219 that the crusaders fought their way into the city. This success brought the Saracens almost to despair. They offered to surrender most of Palestine, if only Damietta were restored to them. But the crusaders refused, in the vain hope that the Emperor Frederick II would come to aid them in the conquest of all Egypt. After long delay, in the summer of 1221 an advance was made towards Cairo. Soon the crusaders found themselves in a perilous position, from which they were glad to purchase their release at the price of the surrender of Damietta. Well might Philip of France say that the men were daft who for the sake of a town had refused the proffer of a kingdom. John de Brienne had not been responsible for the folly which threw away the fruits of the victory he had planned. In 1222 he went to Europe, where in 1225 he found a husband for his daughter Yolande in the Emperor Frederick II. Frederick soon quarrelled with his father-in-law, and dispossessed him of his kingdom, which he claimed for himself in right of his wife. He was already in the throes of his conflict with the Pope, but in 1228 he paid a visit to the Holy Land, where by negotiations with the Sultan Kamil he obtained a partial surrender of Jerusalem, together with Bethlehem and Nazareth. His enemies the Templars found a new grudge against him, in that their great church at Jerusalem was left to the Muslims, and Pope Gregory denounced the treaty as a concession to Belial. Frederick's brief Crusade added only to his own troubles, and it brought little good to his Eastern subjects. The Saracens soon broke
Dissensions among the Muslims 315
the treaty, and reoccupied Jerusalem. Frederick then sent Richard Filangieri to Palestine as his bailiff; Eichard fell out with the native lords under John of Ibelin, who called in the King of Cyprus to their aid. After some years of strife, in 1236, when Yolande was dead. Queen Alice^ of Cyprus, who was a daughter of Henry of Champagne, persuaded the native party to take her then husband, Ralph of Soissons, as bailiff.
When the Emperor had received the crown of Jerusalem it must have appeared that the kingdom was assured of a powerful protector. But in the issue Frederick"'s rule only embittered the old enmities, whilst his quarrel with the Papacy introduced a new cause of discord. The results might have been even more disastrous had it not been for the unsettled condition of the Musulman state. Saladin's brother 'Adil (Saphadin) was succeeded in 1218 by his son Kamil, whose reign of twenty years was troubled by pressure from the Turks in the north and the Tartars advancing from the east. At Kamil's death in 1238 his sons fell to civil war, so that the moment was not unfavourable for the new Crusade which was launched next year. In this crusade none of the great princes took part. The chief leader was Theobald, King of Navarre. The French nobles, who were his principal followers, persisted in making a series of desultory raids, which ended in most of them being taken prisoners. Earl Richard of Cornwall, who came to Acre in the following year, was able through his great wealth to procure their release; but the quarrels of the Military Orders prevented any prospect of successful war, and the English earl soon went home.
The Templars and Hospitallers continued to dispute as to the relative advantages of alliance with Damascus or Egypt. In the end the former prevailed, and in 1244, by a treaty with Isma'Il of Damascus, the Franks secured the whole land west of Jordan. There was a brief period of rejoicing in Christendom that all the holy places had at last been recovered. Then Ayyub, the Sultan of Egypt, called to his aid the predatory horde of the Khwarazmian Turks, who fell upon Jerusalem and massacred its inhabitants (23 August 1244). The Muslims of Hamah and Damascus united with the Franks to meet this common danger, but their joint army was utterly defeated by the Khwarazmians and Egyptians under the Mamliik emir, Baibars Bun-duqdarl, at Gaza on 17 October 1244. This was the greatest disaster that had befallen the Franks since Hittln, and swept away nearly all that had been so painfully recovered in the last fifty years.
The destruction of Jerusalem and the disaster of Gaza led directly to the first Crusade of Louis IX. Frederick, who should have been the natural protector of his distant kingdom, was too deeply involved in his own troubles, and Louis was the only one of the great princes of the West who had both the will and the power to help. Though he took the Cross early in 1245, it was not till the end of 1248 that he reached Cyprus, where he spent six months. The ill-omened precedent of thirty
' Alice had married Hugh de Lusignan, King of Cyprus 1205-18.
316 St Louis in Palestine
years before was followed for the plan of campaign with remarkably similar results. Damietta fell on this occasion, almost without a blow. Then there followed a long delay in waiting for reinforcements, amongst whom there came a small body of English under William Longespee, Earl of Salisbury. When at the end of November 1249 the Crusaders began their advance on Cairo, they soon found themselves entangled in the difficulties of the Egyptian Delta. A rash attack on Mansurah on 8 February 1250 ended disastrously. The Crusaders could not advance, and when, a few weeks later, sickness and lack of food compelled them to retreat, they found the way blocked by their enemies. In the end Louis and his army were obliged to surrender, and then to purchase their freedom at the price of Damietta and a huge ransom in money. Louis with the remnant of the Crusaders reached Acre about the end of May. He spent nearly four years in the Holy Land, and, though not able to attempt any great enterprise, did something to strengthen the Franks by repairing the fortifications of the seaports, and especially of Jaffa, Caesarea, and Sidon. Frederick II had died in 1250. During his twenty-five years' reign the royal power had been virtually in abeyance, or exercised by bailiffs whose authority was disputed by those whom they were supposed to rule.
The conflict of interests, political, military, and commercial, amongst the Franks in Syria had thus, through the lack of control, free scope to develope. The native lords, strengthened by their association with the prosperous island kingdom of Cyprus, grew more impatient of an outside authority. The jealousies of the Military Orders, enormously increased in wealth and power and opposed to one another in policy, became more acute. The Italian merchants, on whose commerce the prosperity of the seaport towns, and therefore of the kingdom, depended, gained greater importance and added political disputes to their com- mercial rivalry. The dislike of the native lords for the rule of the Emperor's bailiff had led to bitter strife in 1236, and the rivalry of the two Military Orders went much deeper than the conflict of policies which had crippled the crusades of Theobald of Navarre and Richard of Cornwall. In 1249 there was actually open warfare for a month between the Pisans and Genoese at Acre. The greatest service which Louis IX rendered during his four years' sojourn in Palestine was that the weight of his authority did something to check dispute. But on his departure the old feuds soon broke out once more. The trouble began with a quarrel between the Venetians and Genoese in 1256, in which all other parties were soon involved. Four years of civil war exhausted the Latin communities at a time when all should have been united to build up the falling state.
The title of Frederick to the Kingdom of Jerusalem passed ultimately to his grandson Conradin, at whose death in 1268 the line of Yolande came to an end. Up to that time the royal authority had been exercised
Last days of the Kingdom of Jerusalem 317
nominally by bailiffs. On Conradin's death the succession was disputed between Hugh III of Cyprus and Mary of Antioch. Both claimed to represent Isabella, daughter of Amaury I, the former through Alice, daughter of Henry of Champagne, and the latter thi'ough Melisend, daughter of Amaury de Lusignan. The Hospitallers and the Genoese, who had supported Conradin, favoured Hugh, who was actually crowned King of Jerusalem at Tyre in 1269 and maintained some shew of authority till 1276, when he was forced by the opposition of the Templars to leave Acre. The jealousies of the Italian merchants of Genoa, Pisa, and Venice, and the rivalry of the two great Military Orders, thus again pre- vented any unity among the Franks at the time when it was most needed.
In 1259 the Tartars had appeared in Syria and threatened Muslim and Christian alike. They were defeated next year by Qutuz, the Sultan of Egypt, who on his return home was murdered by his Mamluks. This double event really sealed the fate of the Franks in Palestine. Baibars Bunduqdarl, the victor of Gaza, who now became Sultan, was to prove the most relentless foe that the Christians had had to encounter since the death of Saladin. As soon as he had established his authority in Syria, he set himself to destroy the remnant of Frankish rule. In 1265 Caesarea and Arsuf were taken, and other captures of less importance followed, till in 1268 first Jaffa and then Antioch fell into his hands.
The fall of Antioch was the occasion for the last great Crusade under Louis IX of France and Edward of England. Louis turned aside to attack Tunis, where he died, whilst Edward, thus left to himself, only reached Acre in the spring of 1271. He came in the nick of time to save the city from a threatened attack, but, though during an eighteen months' stay he achieved a series of minor successes, his Crusade brought only a transient relief. Before he left Palestine Edward procured for the Christians a ten years'" truce, which on its expiration was again renewed by the then Sultan, Qala'un, for a like period. The Franks made but an ill use of this breathing space, and their domestic feuds continued with all the former persistence. Qala'un was at first disposed to peace, but in 1285, provoked by an attack which the Hospitallers made on a caravan, besieged and captured their great fortress at Markab.
In 1289, on a pretext that the treaty had expired, Qala'un appeared before Tripolis. After a month's siege that great city, which was so rich and populous that four thousand weavers are said to have found employment in its factories, was taken and sacked with all the horrors of war. Those who escaped aboard ship took refuge at Acre, as many from other towns and places had done before. Thus, in the expressive words of an English chronicler: "There were gathered in Acre not as of old holy and devout men, but wantons and wastrels out of every country in Christendom who flowed into that sacred city as it were into a sink of pollution."
Though some minor places like Sidon still remained to the Franks,
318 The fall of Acre
Acre stood out as their chief stronghold, and it was clear that Acre must soon share the fortune of Tripolis, unless some great deliverance came to it from the West. There was, however, little practical enthusiasm for a new crusade. Pope Nicholas IV and most of the greater princes were more intent on schemes of aggrandisement nearer home, and though Edward of England had never lost his interest in the East he was too deeply engaged in his own affairs to take the Cross once more. The Pope, it is true, sent a force of 1600 mercenaries, for whom the republic of Venice provided shipping. But these mercenaries did more harm than good, and the most effectual assistance was perhaps that which Edward sent by his trusty knight, Sir Otto de Grandison, who, however, brought more money than men.
In the tragedy of Acre all the main causes that had led to the downfall of the kingdom were brought, as it were, to a focus. In Acre during its last days, the legate of the Pope and the bailiffs of the Kings of England, France, and Cyprus, all exercised their authority in inde- pendence ; whilst the lords of the land, the Military Orders, and the traders of the Italian towns had all their strong towers and quarters fortified, not against the common foe so much as in hostility to their Christian rivals. Thus within the walls of one city there were seventeen separate and distinct communities ; " whence," wrote Villani, " there sprang no small confusion."
Nevertheless the manifest peril of Acre after the fall of Tripolis restored for the moment some unity of purpose, and all joined in accepting the leadership of Henry of Cyprus, who was also titular King of Jerusalem. Henry made it his first care to conclude a two years' truce. But the old feuds soon broke out again, and when the papal mercenaries arrived they fell through lack of discipline to plundering the Saracen villages. Provoked by this breach of the truce, Qala'un's son Khalll, who had but lately succeeded as Sultan, took the field early in 1291. Had there been any unity of command in Acre it is just possible that the city might have been saved. But from the first the defence was hampered by the bitterness of the ancient jealousies. The rival parties each fought bravely enough in their own quarter, but would give no help to one another. So when, after a six weeks' siege, the Saracens began their assault, many, like the King of Cyprus, sailed away in despair. For four terrible days those who remained fought stubbornly, though even in such a crisis the Knights of the Hospital and the Temple could not lay aside their mutual enmity. Acre was finally stormed and taken on 18 May, though the Templars with Otto de Grandison held out for ten days longer in their castle by the waterside. Some of the Christians made good their escape by sea, but many were di'owned in the attempt, and a far greater number perished by the sword or were carried into captivity.
1 See for a full narrative. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 3rd Series, in, 134-150.
End of the Latin Kingdom 319
The fall of Acre was the death-knell of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, One after another, the remaining strongholds of the Franks were abandoned or surrendered, amongst the last to go being Sidon and Beyrout about the middle of July. Pope Nicholas IV', whose schemes for the conquest of Sicily had made him half-hearted whilst there was yet time, was stirred by such a disaster to make a vain effort to revive the crusading spirit. But the old enthusiasm lingered only in the visionary ideals of men like Philip de Mezieres, and it was a mockery of fate that for centuries to come the phantom title of King of Jerusalem was claimed by princes whose predecessors had failed to defend its reality.
320 VOL. V. CHAPTER IX.
THE EFFECTS OF THE CRUSADES UPON WESTERN EUROPE.
That eastward adventure of united Christendom which we call the Crusades, the common endeavour of all Europe to recapture the home of its religion and to subdue the rival faith of Mahomet, has naturally exercised a strong fascination over the minds of later ages. With the rediscovery of the Middle Ages in the nineteenth century, with the realisation that, after all, what the rationalism of the eighteenth century had been inclined to regard as a period of static misery was in fact a time of steady and fruitful growth, the Crusading movement began to be studied with renewed interest, and the marked development of European civilisation during the two centuries from a.d. 1100 to 1300 was, on the principle of "post hoc, ergo propter hoc," assigned to its influence. So Michelet and Heeren attribute to it all those changes in Western Europe which make its condition in 1300 so marked a contrast to that of two hundred years before. The rise of the French monarchy, the growth of towns all over Europe, the great increase in international trade, the development of the Universities, the decline of feudalism, the opening up of Asia, the thirteenth-century Renaissance in literature, philosophy, and art — all this was regarded as due to the stir and movement introduced by the Crusades into a sleeping Europe. If such a view is too facile and enthusiastic, it is perhaps no less difficult to accept the more cynical estimate of the Crusades which would regard them as marauding expeditions disguised by a profession of piety, momentarily successful, but incapable, by their very nature, of leaving a permanent mark upon the West.
The Crusades were initiated by the Papacy, and from the moment of Urban IIs appeal to the Council of Clermont down to the fall of Acre — and indeed for long after — they remained one of the first preoccupations of every Pope. Describing the policy of the Curia of so late a date as the middle of the fourteenth century, Viollet remarks that "Rome ne cessait guere, dans l'interet general de la Chretiente, d'entretenir de grands mais steriles projets de Croisade; c'est pour elle un imperissable honneur." And what was true of the French Papacy of Avignon was far more true of the Popes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries at the height of their power. It were strange if this continuous direction for two hundred years of the armed forces of Europe in the campaign against the infidel should have left no mark upon the Papacy itself.
The Papacy and the Crusades 321
When Nicholas II, in 1059, issued the decree regulating the election of future Popes, the great effort of the Church to emancipate itself from the secularisation involved in its acceptance of a feudal constitution began. The long struggle with the Empire, which opens between Hildebrand and Henry IV, and which continued relentlessly throughout the period of the Crusades, was an attempt — successful in the main — to organise the Church as a "societas perfecta," to use a phrase of later controversy, independent of the secular power within its own sphere, and only dependent upon that power in so far as it needed the sword of material force to carry out the sentences of spiritual judgment. In all other respects the Divine Society was to be as superior to the secular as its very nature demanded. The attempt to attain this ideal, with all its tremendous implications, involved the Popes not only in continual warfare with successive Emperors but also in decisive conflict with the Kings of England and France, and, in an increasing degree, it involved the secularisation of the Papacy itself. To be successful its occupants must be statesmen first and men of God second; to carry on war they must raise men and money, and resort to shifts of all kinds to do so; to seize every advantage, to shape policy to fit every change of circumstance, they must be prepared to use diplomatic dissimulation and, if necessary, to lie with hardihood. That this process of degradation, from the lofty heights of spiritual control to the lowest levels of political expediency, set in, is not difficult of proof; it suffices to compare Gregory VII with Innocent IV or the enthusiastic response with which the call to the First Crusade was met, with the indifference and even hostility which greeted such appeals in the later thirteenth century. The wheel had gone full circle, and the attempt to free the members of the Church from secular control ended in a more subtle secularisation of its very heart — the Papacy itself.
In that process the Crusades played an important part. They were one of the main sources of Papal strength throughout the twelfth century, for they provided the Popes with the moral support of Europe, and placed the Papacy in a position of acknowledged leadership which was of the greatest value in the struggle with the secular powers. The literal mind of the Middle Ages found it more easy to understand the task of succouring the earthly Jerusalem by force of arms than that of gaining the heavenly Jerusalem by the practice of the Christian virtues, and in this case the natural man could at once find an outlet for his martial energies and also, by virtue of the indulgence attached to the Crusade, make certain of attaining the heavenly reward. Every motive of self-sacrifice or self-interest, every desire for glory or for gain, was appealed to by the call to the Crusade. The noble could hope to carve out a principality in the East; the merchant to make gain by transporting the Crusading armies and supplying their necessities; the peasant to escape from the crushing burdens of his servile status. But foremost in the minds of all, at least in the early days, was the unselfish desire to
C. MED. H. VOL. V. CH. IX. 21
322 Extension of Papal influence
regain for Christ the city made sacred by His life and death, and, inspired by this common aim, men of every class and country of Europe flocked to take the Cross at the instigation of the one authority acknowledged by them all — Christ's earthly Vicar. Here for the first time Christian Europe gave expression to a common mind and will, and it is of the highest significance that this mind and will had been formed and educated by the [Roman] Church and was now placed at the service of the Church's head.
There can be little doubt that this moral enthusiasm of Europe proved in the twelfth century an almost incalculable assistance to the Papacy in its struggle with the Empire. To this force of a united Christendom behind them the successors of that Gregory VII who died in exile owed much of the great advance which they were able to make in the century after his death. For the Crusades were a living parable of the doctrine of the superiority of the spiritual sword. They were organised by the Popes and directed by their legates, and, what was more, all those who took the Cross became by that act the subjects of the Papacy in a new and special sense. Their goods during their absence, themselves before they departed and until they returned with their vows fulfilled, were removed from secular and placed under ecclesiastical jurisdiction.
The Kings of France or England, of Hungary or Naples, the very Emperors themselves were, as Crusaders, at the orders of the Pope, and the value of the moral compulsion of public opinion upon which the Popes could rely in forcing reluctant monarchs to take the Cross is clearly evidenced by the example of Henry II in his extreme old age, or of Philip Augustus, or of Frederick II. It is difficult indeed, except by this explanation, to account for the amazing difference between the position of the Papacy at the accession of Urban II, staggering under the defeat of Gregory VII and the schism which followed, faced too with a Church as yet but half-hearted in support of the reforming policy, and the position of almost undisputed supremacy occupied by Innocent III. After making all allowances for the ability of Alexander III and the persistence with which the "Hildebrandine" policy was pursued, after taking into account all the circumstances which were favourable to Innocent III's own assertion of his claims — the folly of John, the death of Henry VI, and the youth of Frederick II — there remains the fact that in an age when emotional religion was becoming steadily more powerful, the Pope, as leader of the conflict with the infidel, was enabled to command to an unprecedented degree the devotion of the faithful.
Yet, in the thirteenth century, much of this prestige and much of this popular devotion were lost. It was not merely that the Holy Land little by little fell into the hands of the Saracen and that the respect given to success was withdrawn when failure followed. The Papacy might have retained undiminished reverence had it failed, as St Louis failed, with clean hands and for no lack of high courage. But the very success which
The Crusades as a source of revenue 323
had attended the Crusading appeal proved too strong a temptation to the Popes, and the appeal to take the Cross not only ceased to attract but definitely alienated the faithful when it was used as a weapon in the struggle against the Hohenstaufen. The list of so-called Crusades in the thirteenth century, not directed against the Saracen, makes sad reading. No good Christian, indeed, was likely to be shocked by an appeal to take the Cross against the infidels of Provence, though a full Holy Land indulgence for forty days' service might seem almost too easily won when "the greater part of the faithful returned home after the forty days were over; but since the expedition of Prince Louis against the English king was announced as a crusade, since the Papal feud with the Hohenstaufen, so obviously maintained to safeguard the Papal States from danger, was provided with religious sanctions, it is not improbable that Matthew Paris represents a genuine popular reaction, and not merely his own opinion, when he writes of the "crusade" of 1255: "When the faithful heard this, they marvelled that he should promise them reward for shedding the blood of Christian men that was in former time promised for the shedding of infidel blood."
But, apart from the direct effect upon public opinion of this misuse of the Crusade for party ends, there emerged from the Crusading movement two financial weapons of lasting importance to the Papal armoury — the indulgence and the tithe.
It would, indeed, be untrue to assert that indulgences originated in the Crusades, but there can be no doubt that the indulgence as a financial expedient is a direct outcome of them. More than this, the practice had been instituted by Gregory vI of granting absolution from their sins to those who, in particular localities, fought on the Pope's side in a holy cause .1 Urban II applied this to the whole of Christendom by his assurance that "those who die there in true penitence will without doubt receive indulgence of their sins and the fruits of the reward hereafter." The plenary indulgence to Crusaders marks an epoch in the development of the system.
It is not, however, till the end of the twelfth century and the begin- ning of the thirteenth that the indulgence began to be used as a source of revenue. In 1184 those who cannot themselves take the Cross are bidden to give alms to support the Crusade and, in return for these contributions and for a threefold repetition of the Paternoster, are promised a partial indulgence. In 1195 Celestine III writes to Hubert of Canterbury as his English legate that "those who send of their goods in aid of the Holy Land shall receive pardon of their sins from their bishop on the terms that he shall prescribe." In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council goes a step farther and promises a plenary indulgence to those who shall contribute to the crusading funds in proportion to their means. With that step the downward path was begun, and in the thirteenth century
1 Gregorii VII, Reg. II, 54, vii, 12a ad fin., viii, 6.
CH. IX. 21 — 2 324 Indulgences and Clerical tithes
the process of degeneration went steadily on. The demand for exemptions from actual service — at first the pretext for a monetary transaction — ceased to be more than a form, and the oratory of the Mendicants stirred the ignorant to buy what they at least thought to be a certificate of admittance to Paradise. The Pardoner became a characteristic figure of medieval life, and the abuse of indulgences, after rousing the protests of Wyclif and of Hus, increased steadily till it provoked the avenging wrath of Luther.
If the Crusading Indulgence formed a lucrative and welcome addition to the Papal revenues, the Clerical Tithe, another crusading device, proved even more profitable. Before the Crusades Papal taxation in the strict sense did not exist. Romescot was a gift and not a tribute, and the Popes had not yet developed the system of annates and first-fruits which later provided them with a large part of their revenues. In 1146, however, the necessities of the Second Crusade led Louis VII of France to impose a tax upon all clerics under his jurisdiction of a tithe of their moveables, and this innovation was taken over by Richard I and Philip Augustus in the "Saladin Tithe" of 1188.
The secular princes had here taken the initiative, and the tithe may be regarded as of first-rate importance in the general history of taxation as almost the first recorded step in the substitution of national taxes based on property values for the ruder and less profitable feudal taxation. But, important as the tithe may be in the history of secular [taxation], it is still more important in the history of ecclesiastical taxation. The Popes could not afford to allow ecclesiastical property to become the basis of national revenues, A tithe for a Crusade might soon become a tax for foreign aggression, and when Louis VII in 1163 repeated his fruitful experiment, the Council of Tours of that year forbade bishops to pay tithe under penalty of deposition. The position was further defined by the Third Lateran Council of 1179, which allowed tithes to be levied by princes, subject to the consent of the clergy; but Innocent III thought this concession too great, and de- sired to monopolise the new invention as far as clerical property was concerned.
The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 decreed, therefore, that bishops should never pay tithe without first applying to Rome for the Pope's consent, whilst Innocent at the same time definitely adopted the system of tithe as a source of Papal revenue by imposing a half-tithe on all the clergy of Christendom for the Crusade. From that year onwards the new weapon was constantly in use, and the list of tithes imposed during the thirteenth century is too long to reproduce. But that the Crusades provided first a reason and later an ever-ready excuse for the enormous extension in the thirteenth century of Papal control over all ecclesiastical revenues is certain, and but for the Crusades the position adopted by Boniface VIII might never have been reached, "The Apostolic See has the absolute power of administering (the ecclesiastical property). It can dispose of it without the consent of anyone. It can exact, as it sees
Peaceful Crusaders : Missionary work 326
fit, the hundredth, the tenth, or any other part of this property." The absolutist theory of Hildebrand may have contained this doctrine implicitly: it was the needs of the Crusades which made possible its practical application.
One further result of the Crusading movement on the life of the Western Church was more obviously consonant with its Founder's teaching than those already mentioned. Before the date at which our period closes — the fall of Acre — the most truly religious minds of the West had begun to turn from the propagation of the Kingdom of Heaven by force to the project of converting the heathen by persuasion, from militant Crusades to peaceful Missions. St Francis of Assisi, after two unsuccessful attempts, reached Egypt in 1219 and preached before the Sultan ; and his followers, as well as those of St Dominic, continued during the first half of the thirteenth century their attempts to convert the Muslim world. St Louis, for whom the Crusade in every form was the passion of his life, gave a new turn to missionary effort when in 1252 he sent the Franciscan William of Rubruquis to the Great Khan in Central Asia, in the hope that the new Mongolian Empire, once converted to Christianity, might descend upon the rear of the Turks and render the recovery of Palestine easy of accomplishment.
At his instance, too, Innocent IV formed in 1253 the first " Missionary Society " since the conversion of the West — the " Peregrinantes propter Christum " — who were, for the most part, Franciscans and Dominicans. But the foremost figure in the development of the policy of the peaceful "Crusade "^ of persuasion was Raymond Lull, who devoted his life to the organisation of missionary work, and found a martyr's death in attempting to execute his projects. A Spaniard himself, the conversion of the Arab invader was his first concern, and in 1276 he persuaded the King of Majorca to found the College of the Holy Trinity of Miraraar. Here Lull, who had learnt Arabic himself, trained the brothers for their work as true followers of Christ and His apostles, whose only weapons for conquest of the heathen had been " love, prayers, and the outpouring of tears." After ten years of this work of preparation, he began a career of incessant activity amongst the Tartars and Armenians of the East and the Muslims of North Africa, only interrupted by his efforts, constantly renewed, to persuade Popes and kings to engage their energies in missionary enterprise. To his efforts the decision of the Council of Vienne in 1311 to establish six schools of oriental languages in Europe must be attributed, and only his death by martyrdom, in 1314, put an end to his strenuous attempts to persuade Western Europe that the way to recover the Holy Places was to convert the heathen into whose hands they had fallen.
The missionary effort thus begun as a reaction from the methods of the Crusades, as well as a result of the interest in the East created by them, continued throughout the Middle Ages. In particular it was
326 Increase of geographical knowledge
successful in Asia. Here Buddhism was an enemy less energetic and less directly hostile to Christianity than the faith of the Prophet. Political conditions, too, were favourable during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and bishoprics were set up not only in Armenia, Persia, and the Kipchak in Western Asia, but right across China to the Pacific coast. The twenty-six years' journey of Orderic of Pordenone between the years 1304 and 1330 shews that at that time there was Christian missionary work in active progress in Persia, India, China, and Tibet; and for a time, in the fourteenth century, it must have seemed possible that the dreams of Raymond Lull were about to be fulfilled, and that the West, having converted the Mongol Empire to the faith of Christ, would be able to recover the Holy Land by a concerted movement of West and East upon the centre of Christian devotion. But Asia was not yet to be converted. The slackening of the activities of the Western Church produced by the Babylonish Captivity and the Great Schism was felt in the failure to give adequate support to the eastern missions; in the latter half of the fourteenth century the constituent portions of the Mongol Empire were rapidly converted to Islam, and with the rise of Timur and his dreams of a reconstitution of the Caliphate the opportunity of converting Asia had definitely passed. But if ultimate failure descended upon the missionary side of Crusading activity, as it had fallen earlier upon the Christian states set up and maintained by force of arms in Syria, the effort was not all lost.
Both from the Crusades proper and from the missionary activity which resulted from and succeeded them the peoples of Europe learned much of the world which they had not known before. One of the first-fruits of the Crusades is to be seen in the numberless itineraries written by those who had taken part in them for the benefit of future Crusaders or pilgrims. Such writings appeared, indeed, before the Crusades began, but their number very greatly increased afterwards and, as Dr Barker says, " there were medieval Baedekers in abundance for the use of the annual flow of tourists who were carried every Easter by the vessels of the Italian towns or of the Orders to visit the Holy Land." Naturally these " Itineraria " are mainly concerned with Europe and Syria ; the different routes to and from the Holy Sepulchre are their obvious sub- ject, and in the latter half of the thirteenth century so intelligent a man as de Joinville could exhibit the grossest ignorance about the countries beyond the Crusading area, could speak of the Nile as rising in the earthly paradise from which " ginger, rhubarb, wood of aloes, and cinnamon " floated down the stream to enrich the happy fishermen who cast their nets in its upper waters. Of the route from India to Egypt, indeed of the existence of India, he plainly had no conception. Such a combination of knowledge and ignorance is characteristic of the Middle Ages, and it would be easy to exaggerate the number of those who shared the new knowledge of the world which was brought back to
The Crusades and economic life 327
the West by Crusaders. For example, the traders of the Italian cities undoubtedly increased their knowledge of Mediterranean geography enormously during the Crusading period, and examples of accurate and detailed charts for the use of their navigators can be found dating from the late thirteenth century at least. But that such knowledge was very far from being universally shared is shewn plainly enough by a monastic map like the famous Mappa Mundi of Hereford, to which the date 1280 is assigned, and in which even Europe appears as an almost incompre- hensible maze. Further knowledge of the East was provided by the story in which William de Rubruquis narrated the adventures of his mission for the benefit of his royal patron St Louis. But it was not until the fourteenth century, w hen the book of Marco Polo began to be widely read, and when the Christian missions had spread throughout the vast Mongol Empire, that the conception of the vastness of Asia began to take hold upon the consciousness of the West. Moreover it is at least doubtful whether this new knowledge can be regarded as directly a fruit of the Crusades. The Polos were traders not Crusaders, and it was Marco Polo's story far more than any other which captured the imagination and attention of Europe. Even so it was Mediterranean Europe, and in particular the seafarers of the Italian towns, who were interested. Europe north of the Alps had other things to think of in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries when England and France were at grips in the Hundred Years' War. Even the Church lost its interest in the East after the overthrow of the missions in the late fourteenth century, and was more absorbed in the struggles of the Schism and in the settlement of its internal difficulties in the Councils than in the affairs of Asia. The knowledge of the East accumulated by its missionaries lay unused in the Papal archives, and it was left to the discoverers and merchant adventurers of Portugal and Spain in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to prove the value of Marco Polo's stories, and to renew the direct contact of the West with the riches of India and China.
The effects of the Crusades on the economic and social life of Western Europe are, in the nature of the case, almost impossible to disentangle from the general process of growth of which these effects are but a part. To attribute to the Crusades the rise of the cities of Italy in particular, or of Western Europe as a whole, is to ignore the fact that the towns of the West had been steadily recovering for centuries before the Crusades began, and, even if that movement had never taken place, there is good reason to suppose that they would still have won their emancipation from feudalism, have created their organs of local self- government, and developed their trade with its system of internal organisation. Gibbon writes : " The estates of the barons were dissipated and their race often extinguished in these costly and perilous expeditions. Their poverty extorted from their pride those charters of freedom which unlocked the fetters of the slave, secured the farm of the
328 Development of the towns
peasant and the shop of the artificer, and gradually restored a substance and soul to the most numerous and useful part of the community. The conflagration which destroyed the tall and barren trees of the forest gave air and scope to the vegetation of the smaller and nutritive plants of the soil." The rhetorical method of writing history is a pleasant one, but we are no longer permitted the untroubled serenity of the classical historian.
It is, indeed, impossible to set down any general effects which the Crusades had upon feudal society as a whole. Many of the " tall and barren trees of the forest " were destroyed in the East, and much of the martial energies of the nobles of the West found an outlet in crusading less destructive of civil peace than they could have found at home. By so much the task of kingship, especially in France, was lightened, the growth of the central power at the expense of feudalism made easier. The Counts of Toulouse, of whom four in less than fifty years died in the East, provide an example of the failure of a house to consolidate its fiefs because of a too passionate love of Crusading. So also the lands of the house of Bouillon passed into the female line for a similar reason, to be absorbed by marriage into other fiefs. Yet the total extinction of a noble house was not a common event, and the most striking example of the union of a great fief with the royal demesne in twelfth- century France — a union which, in the event, was only temporary — was solely due to the failure of male heirs to the house of Aquitaine and had nothing to do with the Crusades. The charters of liberties obtained by the French and English towns cannot, for the most part, be attributed to the Crusades, though exception should be made for Richard Coeur-de-Lion's great auction of liberties before his departure to the Holy Land. Yet, at the most, such charters were only ante-dated by the necessities of their grantors. They could not exist had not towns been quietly growing during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, had not groups of merchants, or of tenants acquiring a mercantile character, formed themselves to purchase exemption from feudal dues. The Crusades in some cases certainly provided opportunities for the towns ; they did not create the civic demand for " liberties."
So too, in the general question of the relation of the Crusades to the development of European commerce, it is impossible to make the progress of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries depend upon them. The case is best illustrated with reference to the Italian cities, in particular to Venice, Genoa, and Pisa. It has been very clearly shewn, as for example by Heyd, that before the Crusades began the products of the East, silk, sugar, and spices especially, were reaching Europe not only by land from what is now Russia but even more by way of Italy. Here, before the First Crusade, Amalfi and Venice were the two chief agents in supplying Western Europe with the Eastern luxuries which her developing civilisation led her to desire. Amalfi fell out of the race with
The Conquests of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa 329
the Norman Conquest of South Italy and the attempt of the Norman rulers to regulate commerce too rigidly in the interests of politics. Venice therefore was left, at the period when the Crusades began, as the chief agent of the Levantine trade in Italy, and her position was rendered the more advantageous by the large concessions in Constantinople and the Eastern Empire granted in 1082 by Alexius Comnenus when Araalfi had fallen under the power of Robert Guiscard. But this position was not to remain unchallenged. The Crusaders, as they poured into Italy for the journey to Palestine, sought transport and maritime assistance not onlv from Venice but from Genoa and Pisa as well, while these two cities were not slow to perceive in the needs of the crusading hosts a source of profit to themselves, and in the conquests that might be made in Syria a means to obtain secure access to the trade between East and West. In the first three Crusades, and in the intervening years between them, Venice, Genoa, and Pisa all took an active part, not merely in trans-shipping Crusaders but in the actual work of conquest. The Genoese were largely responsible for the capture of Arsuf, Caesarea, and Acre, the Pisans for that of Laodicea, the Venetians for that of Sidon and Tyre. Moreover, the diversion of the crusading effort to capture these towns, strategically sound as it was for defensive purposes, was dictated mainly by trading interests. All three cities received wide privileges •i both in the seaports and inland towns of all the Crusading states of Syria, and they all benefited equally in one respect — that they had for almost a hundred years secure markets for their Eastern trade.
Further, the Crusaders who had settled in Palestine depended upon the west for vital necessities, for armour, for horses and ships, for wine and woollen goods, and, above all, for reinforcements to maintain their position. Pilgrims flocked to see in security the newly-recovered Holv City, and a very large proportion of all the canying-trade for this How of people to and from Palestine was in the hands of the Italian cities. More shipping Mas required and was built ; every year Venice sent two fleets to Syria ; Genoa and Pisa did the same. The rivalry of the Eastern Empire, the necessity for dependence upon Constantinople as a market, was almost removed, and there can be no question but that the Cioisades brought to all three cities in the twelfth century a steady increase of prosperity and wealth. Statistics, unhappily, do not exist bv which this increase can be measured, but one event stands out as evidence of the height of power and success to which the events of the twelfth century had brought Venice.
The Fourth Crusade could not have been planned by the Venetians of 1100 with any hope of success. Yet in 1204 they were able to provide the naval equipment for a force consisting of "4500 horses, 9000 squires, ...4500 knights, and 20,000 sergeants on foot," to pay the expenses of the whole, and to overturn the Empire which it had been the primary object of the First, as it was professedly the object of the Fourth Crusade
330 Nationality and the Crusades
to protect. In the division of the spoils which followed the capture of Constantinople Venice received her reward. One-third of the great city itself fell beneath her sovereignty, and all the ports and islands of the Eastern Empire were secured for her commerce to the exclusion of her rivals. It is true that Venice was unable to retain her monopoly intact, for the Genoese and Pisans intrigued with the representatives of the deposed Emperors at Nicaea and received concessions in the ports which remained under their control; but this did not prevent the Venetians from reaping a rich harvest from their new dominions during the thirteenth century. Venice took then a position of superiority over the other Italian cities which she never lost, even when the Latin Empire had fallen and the Kingdom of Jerusalem had perished with the fall of Acre. And, as the prosperity of Venice depended on the development in north-western Europe of markets for the products of the East which she supplied, the Crusades must be regarded as an important cause of the development of the chain of commercial republics along the Rhine Valley into Flanders, as also of the increased prosperity of Marseilles and the towns of southern France. Undoubtedly the more constant intercourse with the East aroused a new demand for the luxuries which it alone could supply, and the silks, sugar, and spices which flowed through Damascus and Egypt became the indispensable necessities of the nobles and their ladies, to say nothing of the rich bourgeois, of France, Germany, and England. On the other hand it is impossible to claim that the Crusades introduced these Eastern products to the West; nor must it be forgotten that the development of creative manufacture in the towns of Western Europe had begun before the Crusades started, and that, without the wealth produced in steadily increasing quantities by the gildsmen of the West, Europe would have had no means of purchasing the Eastern wares to satisfy the craving which the experience of Crusades and pilgrims taught.
If an indeterminate answer must be given to the question "What effects had the Crusades on the economic life of Western Europe?" it is equally difficult to define their relation either to the growth of a sense of nationality in the Western nations or to the great development of Western thought which took place during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The term "nationality"" is not easy to define, but, by the end of the period with which this volume deals, "Frenchmen" had a feeling of their difference from "Englishmen," " Germans," or " Italians," more acute than at the beginning of the Crusades. That, like other international movements, the Crusades accentuated the sense of national unity and even of a natural hostility between nations is, a priori, likely enough and, so early as 1146, evidence of this can be found in the account of the Second Crusade written by Odo of Deuil, who certainly nourished a hearty dislike for both Greeks and Germans as such. His dislike for the Greeks may have been stimulated by their heretical opinions, though it is rather their excessive flattery and their guile that appear to have aroused him ; at
Revived study of Greek 331
any rate no such explanation will account for his hard sayings about the Germans, "Nostris etiam erant importabiles Alemanni," he says, and goes on to give instances of the trouble created by King Conrad's host for the French who followed after, and of the direct affronts offered to the French by German soldiers, finishing his complaint by saying, "Thus the Germans,going before us,disturbed everything; so that the Greeks fled from our peaceful army."^ Further evidence tending in the same direction may be seen in the national name and character of the Teutonic Order, founded in 1190, which are in striking contrast to those of the older international Orders of the Hospitallers or Templars. Yet it is not often that this note of national separateness and rivalry is sounded in the chronicles of the Crusades, and the development of "nationality" can only be in part attributed to the rivalries which arose in the mixed hosts of Christendom travelling towards or engaged in the Holy War.
The coincidence of the thirteenth-century "Renaissance" with the period of the Crusades is striking, and it would be rash to deny any share in the outburst of intellectual energy which marks the thirteenth century to the new ideas and broadened outlook of those who, having gone on Crusade, had seen the world of men and things in a way to which the society of the tenth and eleventh centuries was unaccustomed. But it must be admitted that a man may travel much and yet see little, may preserve intact the narrowness of vision with which he set out. St Louis, as Joinville shews him to us, or Joinville himself, was not intellectually changed by his Crusading. And when we examine the great motive force of the thirteenth century "Revival of Leaming"" it is Aristotle from whom the impulse proceeded, and Aristotle first brought back to the West by way of Spain and the Moorish versions of his works. It is true that, so early as 1128, James of Venice translated into Latin some of the works of
Aristotle, but the greater impulse to the absorption of Greek philosophy by the Western Church came from the study and translation of the Arabic versions of the Aristotelian writings and the commentaries upon those writings made by the scholars of Musulman Spain, in particular by Avicenna and Averroes, In the thirteenth century, however, the conquest of the Eastern Empire by the Crusaders of 1204, and the discontent felt by Western scholars with the versions of Aristotle which had come to them at second hand, led to the direct translation of Aristotle's works from the Greek, as well as to Latin versions of other Greek writings. Thus Robert Grosseteste translated the Analytica Posteriora and is said to have written a commentary upon the Nicomachean Ethics, while later in the century St Thomas Aquinas, refusing to rely upon the faulty Arabic versions, was able to find in William of Moerbeke, Archbishop of Corinth from 1275 to 1286, a Greek scholar capable of translating the whole of Aristotle's writings from the original Greek into tortured Latin. In this task William of Moerbeke may have received some assistance from another
^ MPL. cLxxxv, ^. Bernardi Clarae-Vallends opera, iv, col. 1217.
332 Military Results: Check to Turkish advance
member of the Dominican order, Henry of Brabant, and, in view of the enormous influence exerted by the theological writings of St Thomas, it is at least interesting to be able to point to these translations as the source upon which he relied in the task of incorporating the thought of Aristotle in his great Summa Theologiae. Yet in general the course of the great movement of medieval thought which began soon after the year 1000 gives little evidence of having been affected by the Crusades. To them indeed we owe the work of the greatest medieval historian, William of Tyre, and, on the purely literary side with which we cannot here deal, their influence was profound in the development of vernacular romances. But the growth of an articulated system of philosophy, theology, and politics began before the Crusades, and went on steadily throughout their course with no more assistance from that movement than was given by such improvements in the Aristotelian texts as we have already mentioned.
It remains to consider the military results of the Crusades upon the West. Their influence on the improvement of the art of war and military architecture must be left to be described in special chapters in a future volume. With regard, however, to the ever- wavering frontier of East and West, it is clear that the foundation of the Latin States of Syria during the First Crusade and the course of the twelfth century checked for the moment the Muslim advance upon Constantinople which had threatened its very existence. But against the assistance rendered to the Eastern Empire in the First Crusade must be set its overthrow in the Fourth — a blow from which, despite its revival at the end of the thirteenth century, it never wholly recovered. Whether therefore it is fair to attribute to the Crusades the delay of nearly three hundred years in the Turkish advance into the Balkan lands is a problem perhaps incapable of decision, though the diversion of Muslim effort to the Holy Land probably outweighs by much the disintegrating effect of the Fourth Crusade and the foundation and fall of the Latin Empire. And on this view the Crusades must be given credit for providing Western Europe with time to consolidate itself into centralised national States, far better able than those of the eleventh century to defend themselves against the renewed Muslim advance when it came in the sixteenth century. Nor, in that renewed struggle between East and West, must the gallant defence of Rhodes and Cyprus, and later of Malta, by the Crusading Knights of St John, be forgotten.
It was however another and younger order of Crusading Knights which left the deepest mark upon the history of Europe. Founded in 1190, during the Third Crusade, by certain citizens of Bremen and Lubeck as a hospital, and raised in 1198 to the rank of an order of Knights, the Teutonic Order under its great Master, Hermann von Salza, transferred its energies from the Holy Land to the forcible conversion of infidels nearer home. Already in East Prussia the Knights of the Sword of
The Teutonic Knights 333
Livonia were engaged in the difficult task of converting the mixed heathen population of Letts, Slavs, and Wends to Christianity, and the Teutonic Knights, after absorbing this order in 1237, carried on the same work with great energy and striking success for the next eighty years. They founded Thorn, Konigsberg, Marienberg — to which in 1309 they transferred their headquarters — and finally, in 1311, they captured Dantzig. They allied themselves with the Hanseatic League, and sought by every means to develop trade in the dominions won by their swords. To their activities in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries is due the Germanisation of East Prussia, as to their weakness in the fifteenth century, to their defeat at Tannenberg and the recovery of Dantzig and the mouth of the Vistula by the Polish kingdom, is due the problem of giving Poland access to the sea which has cost so much anxiety since the Treaty of Versailles. The junction of the lands of the Teutonic Order with those of the Hohenzollem house at the Reformation brought Prussia into the affairs of Western Europe.
Yet, despite the tangible conquests of the Teutonic Order in north-eastern Germany and, what should not be forgotten, the assistance given by such Orders as those of Calatrava, Santiago, and Alcantara to the Christian monarchs who reconquered Spain from the Moors, it is perhaps in the realm of ideas that we must seek for the most permanent influence of the crusading movement. Just as it was itself the product of a Christendom that at the outset of the struggle felt itself morally united, so it has in turn been the exemplar in later times of many movements undertaken on a smaller scale indeed, and using the weapons of reason rather than of war. Never since the fall of Acre has "Christendom" acted as a united whole; for never since has it enjoyed unity. Yet the memory of the failure in which the Crusades ended has only served to heighten the value of the ideal which created them and won, especially in the First Crusade, all their success. Our modern use of the word "Crusade" is in fact a testimony of our belief in the effectiveness of action possible where large groups of men share a common ideal, and the grounds of that belief are to be found in the events narrated in this volume.