CROSSBOWS. – The movement of expansion of the Faith and of the new Romano-Germanic civilization culminated, as the feudal regime disintegrated and the autonomous communes began to arise, toward the end of the 11th century, in the great enterprise—variously prolonged until the 14th century—of the Crusades.
It was a movement of return to origins that impelled the fresh energies of the West toward the places from which the word of the Gospel had spread ten centuries earlier. And it was a movement born of the awareness of the significance that the Muslim occupation of the Holy Places and the spread of Islam throughout the Mediterranean assumed for Christendom. But also reasons of faith, the flourishing of spiritual and material life, increasingly coincided with the will to decide, through a struggle of peoples, the dominion of the Mediterranean and to keep its shores open to commerce, to which the degree of prosperity attained by the states—and particularly by the maritime cities—gave both opportunity and right.
The economic relations of the maritime cities with the Muslim potentates of the coasts of Africa and Asia constituted the strongest obstacle to any continuous understanding and sincere agreement with the only power that no interest could divert from its stance of struggle against the infidels. It was necessary that an impulse of faith should overcome the narrow economic outlook and reveal in a vast politico-religious initiative a higher end of human activity; it was necessary that the papacy itself, in the hour of its greatest earthly power, should resolutely place itself at the head of the movement, illustrate its reasons and aims, and clarify its goals. Finally, it was necessary that favorable circumstances should intervene to resolve, with the possibility of success, the hesitations of the leaders.
Already, especially in Spain, the struggle against the infidels had taken on a mystical fervor through the intervention of Burgundian and Norman knights in defense of the faith; and from the beginning of the century, pilgrimages to the Holy Places by prelates and lords from France, Germany, and Scandinavia had become more frequent and notable, traveling by sea and even by land. At times the bands had swollen to become armies, and to force their way forward, recourse had been had to arms: thus in 1064, twelve thousand German pilgrims, led by Archbishop Siegfried of Mainz, reached Palestine.
But to weaken the already divided structure of the Islamic Empire there came the Turkish invasion and the formation in the Middle East of a vast Seljuk state, which soon absorbed the caliphate of Baghdad and, in Syria and Armenia, came into conflict with the Byzantine Empire: in 1071 the Seljuk Turks conquered Jerusalem and routed the forces of the Empire at Manzikert; five years later Damascus fell into their hands.
Only an authority and a force, assuming an initiative that would have fallen to the Empire, could leverage the energies of the West to drive it to action: the papacy.
At Rome, in 1073, the Emperor of the East, Michael VII, appealed for aid in the face of imminent new assaults, holding out the possibility of a reunion between the Greek and Roman Churches. Gregory VII, barely installed on the papal throne, formulated the grand plan of liberating southern Italy from the Normans and the Holy Land from the infidels. He designated Godfrey of Bouillon and William of Burgundy as leaders of the enterprise, which was to be carried out by the combined forces of the Eastern and Western empires under the patronage of the Holy See. Various difficulties hindered the success of the attempt, and soon the Investiture Controversy absorbed all the pope’s energies.
In March 1095, at the council convoked by Urban II at Piacenza, Byzantine envoys came to plead the cause of their empire and of the Holy Places. Pope Urban issued a warm invitation to those present to hasten to the aid of the threatened Eastern Empire. The idea of the Crusades took shape and gained substance in the papal initiative. After Urban’s passage into France and the convocation, for the end of the year, of a solemn council at Clermont, he proclaimed, in the solemn assembly of 27 November held before a great crowd in the public square, the Christian intervention in the East; to give greater assurance to the princes, he proclaimed the Truce of God, to last until their return, and granted to the departing the most ample indulgences. The freely and publicly made resolve to take part in the enterprise assumed the character of a solemn vow, symbolized by a red cross sewn on the garment, while those departing were assured of the Church’s protection for their families and their goods. Untiring preachers, such as the hermit Peter of Amiens—whom legend would later credit with a role far greater than that he actually played—ensured that the effect of Urban’s words was lasting and fruitful among princes and people.
I. The First Crusade
In the winter between 1095 and 1096, in the countries to which the Pope’s word had most directly gone forth as he traveled and preached (France and Provence), considerable masses gathered among the people for the Crusade. Urban had chosen as his representative the bishop of Le Puy, Adhemar of Monteil; the rendezvous was set for Constantinople; departure was fixed for 15 August 1096. But the excited and undisciplined multitudes would not wait for the princes, who were to lead the expedition with their vassals and their armaments, nor for the movement, born in France, to spread.Led by Peter the Hermit and Walter the Penniless, thousands of men—generally of low condition, many of whom had taken the cross to obtain remission of old crimes or because poor harvests did not assure them of survival—set out for the Bosporus, crossing Germany and Hungary. But here the plundering and sacking to procure the necessities of life, which made them appear more like brigands than pilgrims or warriors, aroused the Hungarians and Bulgarians against them, who decimated them, attacking their individual bands. Only a very modest part managed to flee with Peter and cross the Bosporus, to leave a new bloody tribute in Asia Minor under the blows of the Seljuk Turks.
Meanwhile, the princes moved with their feudal armies. Godfrey of Bouillon, Duke of Lower Lorraine, with his brothers Baldwin and Eustace, followed the route of Peter the Hermit, arriving at Constantinople on Christmas Eve 1096. Hugh of Vermandois, Stephen of Blois, Robert of Normandy, and Robert of Flanders crossed Italy and, via Brindisi and Durazzo, reached their destination several months later. Count Raymond of Toulouse and the papal legate Adhemar, having traversed northern Italy, preferred to follow the Dalmatian coast as far as Durazzo. Last came the Norman princes of southern Italy, Bohemond, son of Robert Guiscard, and his nephew Tancred of Hauteville, who, having sailed from Brindisi to Valona, joined the others in April 1097.
There were many thousands of well-armed men, both horse and foot: each group was gathered around its own lord, and the varied nationalities (northern French and Lorrainers, Provençals and Normans) were reflected in the crusading host. But more decisive for the course of events was the position of the Crusaders in relation to the Byzantine Empire. If, in the lofty papal aim, the Crusade had been seen as the supreme defence of the East against the infidels and as the best instrument for a possible return to religious unity, neither the Pope nor the princes had troubled themselves about the intentions and internal situation of the Byzantine State, ruled as it was by a traditionalist bureaucracy and institutions quite different from the feudal arrangements proper to the West. The greatest difficulty, however, lay in the question of the territories, already imperial, that would be reconquered and which the crusader princes proposed to hold for themselves. The consummate skill of the Byzantines succeeded for the moment in finding a compromise: Emperor Alexios exacted a feudal oath for all future conquests from the crusader princes. Some of these balked at the homage; only the rivalry between Provençals and Normans, between Raymond and Bohemond, artfully exploited, paved the way to agreement, though the Emperor undertook to supply the Crusaders with provisions and to transport them to the Asiatic coast.
Thus, in the spring of 1097, the enterprise began, with the Crusaders crossing into Asia Minor and laying siege to Nicaea; but before the city fell, secret agreements made with Byzantium—which was eager to secure the nearby Islamic stronghold—denied the Crusaders access to it, and only the insinuating diplomacy of the Greeks and the firmness of Bohemond succeeded in averting a mutiny among the disappointed troops.
The great victory of Qilig-Arslan on 10 July opened the way southward. Skirting the Taurus, the Crusaders penetrated into Armenia; two detachments broke away from the main force: one, led by Tancred of Hauteville, pushed into Cilicia, proceeding to occupy Tarsus; the other, under Baldwin of Lorraine, reached Edessa, where Baldwin was adopted as son and heir by Thoros, the city’s lord. In October the Crusaders reached Antioch; they took it by treachery after several months of siege, on 2 June 1098, with the support of a Genoese squadron that had come to reinforce the allies at sea, acting on the direct initiative of Pope Urban. To Bohemond, who had succeeded in entering the city by surprise while a powerful Seljuk army was in sight, the city was granted in lordship against the agreements with Alexios, and supreme command was entrusted to him. In their turn besieged, the Latins, animated by faith, managed on 28 June to defeat the Turkish army.
A grave crisis, caused by the rivalry over the possession of Antioch between Bohemond and Raymond of Toulouse, threatened to bring the Crusade to failure at its outset. But then Raymond, resuming the march toward Jerusalem and laying the foundations along the way of a third crusader lordship, the county of Tripoli, succeeded in persuading Godfrey and the other princes to follow him toward the Holy City, where the Turks were shut in, divided and weakened by the rivalry between the sultans of Aleppo and Damascus.
At the beginning of June 1099 the crusader army came in sight of Jerusalem. But the final assault was launched on 14 July, once again with the aid of the Genoese under Guglielmo Embriaco, who had landed at Jaffa with siege engines. On 15 July the city was taken and quickly organized for defence. Thus, when a Fatimid army arrived from Egypt, the Crusaders were able to defeat it at Ascalon on 12 August. The liberation of Jerusalem resounded mightily in Europe; all the more enthusiastically because the three-year ordeal had more than once led to fears that the enterprise would be abandoned. Pope Urban, who had already exhorted the faithful to hasten to the East at the Councils of Bari (1098) and Rome (1099), renewed his pressure on monarchs and princes to organize expeditions half a year later. Count Raymond of Toulouse and the papal legate Adhemar, having traversed northern Italy, preferred to follow the Dalmatian coast as far as Durazzo. Last came the Norman princes of southern Italy, Bohemond, son of Robert Guiscard, and
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CRUSADES – Bells of the basilica of the Nativity, from the time of the First Crusade, discovered during excavations at Casa Nova – Bethlehem.
reinforcements. The Crusaders immediately set about consolidating their conquest, which embraced the principalities of Antioch, Edessa, Tripoli and the territory properly called Palestine. A kingdom was established and entrusted to Godfrey of Bouillon, with a feudal organization analogous to that of the Western states; the country was divided into fiefs, and a high court of feudal lords flanked the king, limiting his powers; a standing army was created. The need for a continual influx of men and resources from the West and the failure to fuse with the indigenous element made conditions in the kingdom difficult. A Latin ecclesiastical organization was also created, with a patriarch, archbishops, bishops and powerful Latin monasteries. Gradually the military and religious orders of the Knights of St John and the Templars gained power, independent of the king and the patriarch and subject only to the Pope. Mighty castles were built at the most dangerous points and to defend the ports, so essential for maritime communications.
A further source of weakness was the difficult relations with the Byzantine Empire, rendered particularly acute by the ambitions of the Normans, who had made themselves masters of Antioch, so coveted by the Byzantines; war between them was raging even as Palestine was being conquered.
Attempts to carry the war into the heart of the East, marching on Sebasteia and even Baghdad itself, ended in failure. Instead, the expeditions mounted, beginning from the moment of the conquest of Jerusalem, by the Italian maritime republics—Genoa, Pisa, Venice, Amalfi—achieved their aims. But for their services they sought economic concessions, commercial quarters (which they obtained in all the Syrian cities, in Constantinople itself and in the provinces) and markets.
II. THE SECOND CRUSADE
The crusader states were able to survive so long as division and discord endured in the hostile Turkish and Muslim camp. But they would have to turn to the West for help when the initiative was taken by their adversaries.In 1144 the atabeg (governor) of Mosul took Edessa after a month-long siege: thus the first of the Christian states fell. From Jerusalem an appeal was sent to the West; the bishop of Langres, Godfrey, and King Louis VII of France became its sponsors, and Pope Eugenius III proclaimed a new Crusade, whose enthusiastic preacher and apostle was Bernard of Clairvaux. At the assembly of Vézelay the great French lords took the Cross in obedience to the papal order and following the king’s example; and at Christmas 1146, at the Diet of Speyer, the German feudal lords followed the example of King Conrad III.
Negotiations took place between the kings of France and Germany and the Eastern Emperor, MANUEL I COMNENUS, who, like his father, was engaged in conflict with the Norman enemy, ROGER II. Following the Danube, Conrad set out in late spring across the Balkans amid mistrust and disputes; after crossing the Bosphorus and entering enemy territory, he found himself in difficulties due to a lack of provisions and, harassed by the Turks, was forced to retreat to Nicaea. Meanwhile, Louis VII had arrived by the same route; during his passage through Constantinople, pressure had been exerted on him to ally with ROGER II and thereby overthrow the Greek Emperor to his own advantage. Joined by Savoyard and Lombard Crusaders led by Amadeus III of Savoy and William V of Montferrat, the French king proceeded to Attalia and then to Acre. When Conrad returned and abandoned the plan to reconquer Edessa, Louis VII turned toward Jerusalem, where Conrad joined him and was welcomed by King Baldwin III. Agreed upon was an attack on Damascus, from which the strongest pressure against the Christian state emanated. However, faced with the necessity of a prolonged siege, their spirit of initiative waned, and indeed the mutual ascription of responsibility bred deep discord between the monarchs. Preceded by Conrad, Louis returned from Jerusalem to France after Easter 1149. He had hoped to return and make Constantinople a more concrete base for operations against the infidels, but the plan ultimately fell through.
III. THE THIRD CRUSADE
In 1176, Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn (Saladin), already master of Egypt, took possession of Syria as well. The Crusader states were now encircled by the unified strength of a single Islamic state, young and expanding. In a great battle lasting three days at Ḥaṭṭīn, near the Sea of Tiberias, in 1187, Saladin defeated the Latin army led by Guy of Lusignan, King of Jerusalem, who fell into captivity. The road to Jerusalem lay open. After a brief siege, Saladin took the city on 2 October 1187. Only Tyre and the cities of the northern coast remained to resist.The commotion throughout Christendom was immense. Pope Gregory VIII ordered his legates to preach a Crusade even in distant Scandinavian regions, proclaiming a seven-year truce. United by the occasion, the kings of England and France, Henry II and Philip II Augustus, took the Cross, as did the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa.
At the head of the largest army that any Western monarch had yet assembled for a Crusade, he set out in May 1189 by the now customary route through the Balkans. The enterprise, the best prepared and conducted, encountered its first difficulties at the hands of Isaac II Angelus, Emperor of Constantinople, who had made agreements with Saladin; Barbarossa was compelled to impose his passage by force across the strait of Gallipoli (March 1190). After continuing the march and occupying Iconium, during the crossing of the Saleph near Seleucia, on 9 June 1190, Barbarossa met his death. The event dissolved the army: with a few faithful followers, his son and companion, Frederick, reached the Christian camp the following year, bearing his father’s body. The Crusaders from France and England, who had set out in the spring of that year, had established themselves before the walls of St. Jean d’Acre, where Frederick likewise died.
The expedition of the two Western kings, Philip II and Richard the Lionheart, who had succeeded Henry II, dragged on. After crossing France and separating, they reunited at Messina in September 1190 and spent the winter there amid serious disputes with the local population. Deciding to depart for St. Jean d’Acre, which had been besieged for many months by the King of Jerusalem, Richard first chose to make a diversion against Cyprus, which he wrested from the Byzantine Empire. Finally, before the combined forces of the Crusaders at St. Jean d’Acre, the city surrendered on 12 July 1191. Yet at this point, discord between Philip and Richard prevented any active and effective continuation of the war against Saladin. The former returned home, leaving Richard alone to conduct the Crusade. He dispersed its remaining forces, and when an assault on Ascalon failed due to Saladin’s prompt intervention, he entered into protracted negotiations with him while hinting at enterprises against Jerusalem, Damascus, and even—unprecedentedly—Cairo. Finally, after rebuilding Ascalon and concluding peace with Saladin on the promise of free access for Christians to Jerusalem, he returned to Europe in October 1192.
The Crusade had failed in its purpose. A new enterprise, prepared by Henry VI in his newly acquired kingdom of Sicily in agreement with the German forces of the Empire (and preceded by the dispatch in 1195 of a fleet to Palestine and announced in 1197 by the first contingents of Crusaders embarking under the leadership of the Dukes of Lorraine and Champagne), likewise came to nothing owing to Henry’s sudden death.
IV. THE FOURTH CRUSADE
Innocent III revived the plan for a Western intervention in the East, urging the European princes and even the Byzantine Emperor himself in this direction and attempting to finance the enterprise through special levies.Yet the internal strife in Germany and the quarrel between the kings of France and England made a grand renewal of the enterprise impossible; preaching could only appeal to the mystical sense of a few princes, especially French ones.
It was in fact the zeal of one of the Crusade’s preachers, Fulk of Neuilly, that on 28 November 1199 induced certain feudal lords gathered in Champagne for a tournament to take a solemn vow in his hands. To the first, Theobald of Champagne and Louis of Blois, were added Baldwin, Eustace, and Henry of Flanders. This time it was decided to act in concert with the maritime republics against the Ayyubids of Egypt. After Theobald, designated leader of the expedition, died and was replaced by Marquis Boniface of Montferrat, brother of Conrad, an agreement with Venice—undertaking to provide the fleet and military cooperation with the Crusaders—seemed to open the way to execution of the plan. Yet when the Crusaders gathered on the Venetian lagoon between July and August 1202, their number proved far smaller than expected, and the agreed payment to the Republic could not be made. It was then that the Crusaders massed on the shore became themselves a bargaining chip between the emperors of the East and Venice, and the enterprise deviated from its intended course.
The year before, Alexander Angelus, son of the deposed Emperor Isaac II (who had been thrown from the throne and blinded by his brother Alexius III in 1195), had fortuitously arrived in Rome. He came to seek the Pope’s aid for himself and his father, offering in return the union of the Churches; but Innocent III, who was pursuing that very union, did not trust the fugitive. Alexander then turned to Philip of Swabia, husband of his sister Irene, and through him sought to strike a deal with the Crusaders left waiting in humiliating fashion in Venice. Playing on the ambitions of Boniface of Montferrat, whose family’s former power had declined, he proposed diverting the enterprise toward Constantinople. Rejected by the Pope, who opposed any deviation that threatened to provoke war among Christians rather than against the infidels, the Venetians—already favorable to the plan—exploited the Crusaders’ inaction to their immediate advantage by proposing an expedition against Zara, held by the King of Hungary.
Indeed, the Venetian fleet carrying the Crusaders arrived on 10 November 1202 before Zara; it was commanded by Doge Enrico Dandolo himself. On 15 November Zara was taken and sacked. Then, while awaiting Boniface of Montferrat, who was detained in Rome by Innocent III’s prohibitions, the army wintered in Dalmatia. But when the marquis reached the Crusaders and the Pope’s hesitations became apparent, the conviction spread through the camp that Innocent would yield before the fait accompli. Meanwhile envoys of Philip of Swabia arrived, bearing proposals from Alexios Komnenos, who, in return for the restoration of his father, offered 200,000 silver marks, the reunion of the Churches under the Pope, a large auxiliary force, and a permanent Byzantine garrison in the Holy Land.
Many, both before and after the capture of Zara—among them one of the ablest, Simon of Montfort—chose to make their own way to the East. The main body of the Crusading host re-embarked at Zara on 20 April 1203 for a further stage at Corfu. Here the agreements with Alexios were finalized and the enterprise against Constantinople was announced. Putting to sea again, on 24 June the fleet appeared before the city. The Crusaders landed on the opposite Asian shore, beginning their attack with extreme caution; it was pressed from several points, and on 6 July they succeeded in entering the Golden Horn. Yet only in the night of 17–18 July, after resistance from the walls had repelled the assaults, did a revolt drive out the usurper Alexios III and restore Isaac Angelos to the throne. The entry of the Crusading host could then take place peacefully, and on 19 August the coronation of Alexios Angelos—associated on the throne by his father—was witnessed. A letter from Innocent III dated 20 June, urging the Crusaders to desist from any interference in the Byzantine question, to break off relations with the Venetians, and to keep faith with their original commitments, reached the army at this moment of triumph; it was easy to reply by showing the Pope that it would be unwise to let the course of events slip from his grasp.
But the agreement between the Crusaders and the Empire rested on a pledge that the grave economic crisis then afflicting Byzantium was soon to reveal as impossible to fulfill: the payment of the huge sum promised at Zara. No more than half could be collected, and meanwhile a popular upheaval in the Empire replaced the Angeloi with a kinsman, Alexios V Dukas. The Latins, for their part, in their quarter at Pera, angered by the change, turned to acts of war and execution aimed at the conquest of Constantinople; special agreements were struck between Boniface of Montferrat, the other leaders, and the Doge of Venice: three-quarters of the booty would go to the Venetians, only one quarter to the Crusaders; the Emperor was to be chosen from among the princes and would receive a quarter of the Empire, the rest being divided among the Crusaders and the Venetians, who would retain all their former privileges without swearing any oath of fealty. By now the Crusade had changed its character: the religious aim, in all who remained, had been swept away by the lure of conquest.
From 12 to 13 April 1204 the general assault on the city was launched: in the furious fighting whole quarters were burned, hideous massacres were carried out, and systematic sacking took place. Only one voice counselled moderation and mercy: that of the marquis of Montferrat. In the conquered and humiliated metropolis a secret struggle now unfolded among the factions for the imperial election: the Venetian and French electors combined against Boniface; he was placated with Crete and the newly created kingdom of Thessalonica, and the Venetians were granted the right to nominate the patriarch of Constantinople. Baldwin of Flanders was elected and crowned emperor in Hagia Sophia.
Yet the Latin Empire of the East was not viable: the Greek element, though overpowered in the capital, resisted in the provinces and remained in a posture of antagonism that would breed a resurgence and deepen, perpetuating, the religious schism. Among the Crusader leaders, who everywhere replaced Byzantine governors with institutions of Western type, enmity soon prevailed; far from forming a bond, the Venetians—true masters by virtue of their ships and wealth—became a state within a state. When to the reasons for rapid internal collapse is added the mounting Bulgarian peril, against which in 1205 the forces of Emperor Baldwin were annihilated, and the coalescence of external enemies with the Greek rebels at Nicaea, Trebizond, the Peloponnese, and Epirus—who vaunted the claims of the last deposed emperors—one has a picture of the concrete outcome of the Fourth Crusade’s deviation from its purpose. The disappearance of the sole bulwark against the Turks in the East brought about the final collapse of Christian positions in the Holy Land. Only Venice, through the political genius of Enrico Dandolo, achieved its goal, and from its commercial hegemony in the Levant drew, with its splendor, that link between East and West which was to be, between the Middle Ages and the modern era, its historic role.
V. The Fifth Crusade
Innocent III reaffirmed at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) the need for a new Crusade. Popular preachers had already stirred the religious sentiment of the rural masses in France and Germany; clear signs were the movements of the “Pastorelli” and the so-called “Children’s Crusade” of 1212. In 1215 Innocent proclaimed the Crusade, the Truce of God, and the prohibition of all commercial dealings with the Muslims. His protégé Frederick II solemnly took the Cross at Aachen on 25 July. But after the Pope’s death in 1216, Frederick postponed the enterprise, which had been set for June 1217.At the urging of Honorius III that year, bands of Scandinavian, Baltic, and Hungarian Crusaders set out by various routes: some first went to lend support in Portugal against the Moors, others embarked at Venice. From Spalato King Andrew of Hungary set out. At Acre in September the forces assembled, and the Hungarian king found himself with John of Brienne, king of Cyprus and Jerusalem, and Leopold, duke of Austria. There was no plan: energies were dissipated in fruitless attempts to force a way to Jerusalem, and many, including King Andrew of Hungary, weary and disheartened, departed. The king of Cyprus and the duke of Austria then diverted the objective of the Crusade toward Egypt, whose conquest would strike at Muslim positions in Syria and cut off any initiative against the West. In May 1218 the Crusaders landed before Damietta; the siege lasted more than a year, until in November 1219 the city fell. The march was to be resumed on Cairo, but Brienne’s idea prevailed to await the promised arrival of Frederick II, and the winter was spent at Damietta. German reinforcements under Ludwig of Bavaria gave heart for a renewal of the struggle. In late July 1221, as the Crusaders approached al-Manṣūra, a formidable bulwark on the road to Cairo, the sultan made peace proposals, offering the return of Jerusalem; but the legate, Cardinal Pelagius, rejected all negotiation. A violent battle followed: defeated, the Crusaders had to retreat, and Brienne, having reached Damietta on 30 August, made peace with Egypt.
Even after the disaster, Frederick II did not move, nor did he in 1225. According to a new plan presented to the Pope, it was only in 1227, at the urging of Gregory IX, that he prepared to depart, but an epidemic forced him to desist: the Pope excommunicated him. The following year, after negotiations with the Sultan of Egypt, he set sail for the Holy Land, subduing the island of Cyprus along the way. He soon landed at St. John of Acre and succeeded in obtaining from Malik-al-Kāmil, Sultan of Egypt, through the Treaty of Jaffa (1229), possession of Jerusalem and the Holy Places, with access from the sea for pilgrims, and both parties agreed to a ten-year truce; the Mosque of Omar remained in Muslim hands. Following this agreement, Frederick II entered Jerusalem on 17 March 1229 and was crowned in the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre on the 18th, then departing again from St. John of Acre for Italy. However, his reopening of the path to Jerusalem did not suffice to restore the Emperor to the Church’s good graces, which condemned and declared the treaty null. Yet the Peace of San Germano helped to bring about a sense of relaxation and to secure recognition of the fait accompli by the Pope (1230).
treaty. Yet the Peace of San Germano helped to bring about a sense of relaxation and to secure recognition of the fait accompli by the Pope (1230).
When the truce established by Frederick expired, the attempt by Christian princes to take up arms again failed for lack of strength. Indeed, the Muslims of Damascus were victorious at Gaza and entered Jerusalem.
To remove all grounds for dispute, and also the plan for an understanding between the Latins and the Sultan of Damascus, a large contingent of knights from Turkestan in the pay of Egypt intervened and in 1244 took and horribly sacked Jerusalem.
VI. THE SIXTH CRUSADE
Christian conscience in the West could not abandon the idea of liberating the East. Moreover, Innocent III himself had, at a certain point, set the repression of heresy in Provence as the goal of the Crusade, and Gregory IX had followed his example.The renewed proclamation of the Crusade at the Council of Lyon in 1245, by Innocent IV, found only Louis IX, King of France, ready to take the cross. In June 1248 he left Marseille for Cyprus, whence, a year later, resuming the plan to attack Egypt, he landed and occupied Damietta (1249). But the march on Cairo was again shattered at al-Mansurah, where the king himself was taken prisoner on 6 April 1250. After being ransomed and transferring with the survivors of his army to St. John of Acre, his requests for aid and those of the Pope for a resumption of the struggle met not only with general indifference but with the outright hostility of monarchs such as the King of England. And Louis IX could do no more than return to his homeland (1254) upon receiving news of his mother’s death and her regency of the throne.
VII. THE SEVENTH CRUSADE
With the Christian threat posed by Louis IX removed during his six-year stay in the East, the Ayyubids of Egypt were left free to act in Syria, and the Latin centers of the Holy Land, lacking forces and divided, could offer no effective resistance.A Mongol invasion delayed the Egyptian offensive: “The Egyptian offer…”
When the truce established by Frederick expired, the attempt by Christian princes to take up arms again failed for lack of strength. Indeed, the Muslims of Damascus were victorious at Gaza and entered Jerusalem.
To remove all grounds for dispute, and also the plan for an understanding between the Latins and the Sultan of Damascus, a large contingent of knights from Turkestan in the pay of Egypt intervened and in 1244 took and horribly sacked Jerusalem.
VI. THE SIXTH CRUSADE
Christian conscience in the West could not abandon the idea of liberating the East. Moreover, Innocent III himself had, at a certain point, set the repression of heresy in Provence as the goal of the Crusade, and Gregory IX had followed his example.The renewed proclamation of the Crusade at the Council of Lyon in 1245, by Innocent IV, found only Louis IX, King of France, ready to take the cross. In June 1248 he left Marseille for Cyprus, whence, a year later, resuming the plan to attack Egypt, he landed and occupied Damietta (1249). But the march on Cairo was again shattered at al-Mansurah, where the king himself was taken prisoner on 6 April 1250. After being ransomed and transferring with the survivors of his army to St. John of Acre, his requests for aid and those of the Pope for a resumption of the struggle met not only with general indifference but with the outright hostility of monarchs such as the King of England. And Louis IX could do no more than return to his homeland (1254).
VII. THE SEVENTH CRUSADE
With the Christian threat posed by Louis IX removed during his six-year stay in the East, the Ayyubids of Egypt were left free to act in Syria, and the Latin centers of the Holy Land, lacking forces and divided, could offer no effective resistance.A Mongol invasion delayed the Egyptian offensive; “The Egyptian offer…”
Christian liberations of Syria. Yet, although new expeditions and enterprises continued to be planned, in reality the pre-humanist intellectualism that prioritized theory over action prevented a return to the old ideals of the Crusade. Although the Crusade was linked to the new needs of European expansion, it remained a typical, if vast and solemn, expression of medieval thought; its characteristics could not be detached from that world in which mysticism gave it its direct impulse and chivalry its forms. Its continuation, through the agency of the Italian maritime republics and individual princes, in fact diverted it from its original aims, behind initiatives of colonial conquest or political force that revealed the imprint of the nation-state now emerging. And when the European political game began to intertwine, with Dandolo and then Frederick II, with the Eastern game and the diversity of faith, which in itself alone was enough to fuel the struggle and blur sufficient boundaries, then the historical cycle of the Crusades was forever concluded, and more contingent interests took precedence over religious enthusiasm and interest.
It is therefore a voluntary illusion, motivated from time to time by various reasons, that in the 14th and 15th centuries saw the revival, in the ancient sense, of Crusade proposals and initiatives, while, preceded by the debates of publicists (Ramon Llull, Marino Sanudo, Pierre Dubois, William of Nogaret, the Brocard), a new phase of the so-called Eastern Question and the Holy Land began; interest shifted toward the Ottoman Empire, which sought to reunite under strong control the Balkan and Asian regions of the former Byzantine Empire.
It was, as was logical, the popes who marked the suture between the two phases, striving by every means to channel forces toward the East against the infidels. Clement V renewed, but in vain, the prohibition of trade with Muslims and became the protector of the Knights of Jerusalem in their tenacious guerrilla warfare against Arab and Turkish ships. Against Muslim pirates, John XXII and later Clement VI promoted a league to which Venice and Genoa adhered and which, in 1344, led to the temporary occupation of Smyrna. Then came the turn of individual princes: Peter of Lusignan, King of Cyprus, vainly sought aid from the West for his enterprise at Attaleia and the subsequent bold series of raids on Alexandria, Tripoli, Tortosa, and Laodicea. Amadeus VI of Savoy recovered Gallipoli for the Byzantine Empire, again threatened by the Bulgarians, in 1366.
But it is the Turkish advance into the Balkans that, from the end of the fourteenth century, aroused European anxieties. In 1396, in aid of Sigismund of Hungary, JOHN THE FEARLESS arrived with a small Franco-Burgundian force. In 1399 and 1405, Marshal Boucicaut, at the head of a Genoese fleet, penetrated the Dardanelles and attempted a diversion on the Tunisian coast. Yet always without success, and in no way containing the irresistible march of the Turks. Great hopes were aroused in 1443 by the crusade of Cardinal Cesarini against Sultan Murad, who was forced to evacuate Sofia: hopes that were dashed at Varna by a bloody defeat of the Crusaders. The following years saw Hungarian heroism asserting itself in the defense of Belgrade; to the struggle were linked the names of JOHN HUNYADI and JOHN OF CAPISTRANO. But then Constantinople fell under the impetus of Mehmed II, and the metropolis became the center of an empire which the Latins had failed to maintain and the Bulgarians to conquer. All the exhortations and efforts of the aged Pope NICHOLAS V had availed nothing; and even the grand design of a crusade, warmly supported by his successor, Pius II, foundered on the rocks of political reality, cold selfishness, and the passage of time, and at the congress of Ancona for the expedition that the Pope himself would have led, no one appeared. In vain did PAUL II, SIXTUS IV, and LEO X attempt to revive the design. In 1518, when Muslim power had reached its zenith with the conquest by Selim I of Egypt and Syria, all seemed ready for the solemnly preached expedition; but then the imperial throne disputes absorbed and distracted attention. Decades later, a great collective enterprise to relieve the Muslim pressure would come at Lepanto, but that would be the naval prelude to the Western effort, pursued until the mid-seventeenth century, to break the threat at the heart of Europe. Yet no one would give further thought to the recovery of the Holy Places or to the armed expansion of the faith: by the early sixteenth century, there were those who thought it would be more opportune for the Church to withdraw into itself to purify itself of the dross of worldliness and renew itself; just as a new world was opening to the activity even of the clergy, and soon, inspired by the Council of Trent, the missions would arise to renew in a more modern form the expansion of the faith. In Europe, the struggles for predominance had now begun; somewhat removed from the Western states, absorbed in their internal problems, the strong structure of the new Turkish Empire would represent a purely political problem, stripped of any religious content.