CHAPTER X
No two contemporary European rulers have been more different than the Emperor Frederick II and King Louis IX of France. Frederick was an intellectual and a free-thinker. He had little respect for religion; indeed, he spent a good deal of his life under the ban of the Church. He could, on occasion, take a strong line with heretics, particularly if they threatened the peace or security of the Empire; at the same time, having been raised in the court of Palermo among Arabs and Greeks, he had a deep respect and understanding both of Islam and of eastern Orthodoxy, and liked nothing better than to discuss the finer points of theology with scholars of the two faiths. As a statesman he was by no means without principle, but he was also a pragmatist, and he knew full well that if he and his empire were to survive he simply could not afford too delicate a conscience. In appearance he had never been handsome: broad and stocky, with thin reddish hair. Physically he was hard as nails.
King Louis IX, on the other hand, was a saint and looked it. A contemporary friar who saw him just before he left for the Holy Land describes him as ‘thin, slender, lean and tall, with an angelic countenance and a gracious person’. At times his face beneath his fair hair was disfigured by angry-looking patches caused by the erysipelas to which he remained a martyr all his life; nevertheless, goodness seemed to shine out of him. ‘Few human beings,’ writes Sir Steven Runciman, ‘have ever been so consciously and sincerely virtuous.’ Yet, strangely enough, there was no trace of sanctimoniousness; on the contrary, Louis was energetic, brave in battle, when necessary stern and uncompromising. He spent much of his waking life in prayer, often prone on the ground and forgetting himself so completely as to emerge in a daze, uncertain where he was; but, as he himself confessed, he had no tears ‘to water the aridity in his heart’. This may have been one reason for his regular physical mortification with fasts, scourges and hair shirts, and his personal tending of the sick–particularly those with seriously unpleasant diseases. As for sin, he could hardly bear to contemplate its existence. To the heretic and the infidel, however, he was pitiless; never could he have bloodlessly regained the Holy Places, as Frederick did so stylishly.
Desperately ill with malaria at the end of 1244, the thirty-year-old King Louis vowed that if he lived he would lead a Crusade. As always he was as good as his word, and immediately on his recovery he began his preparations. They took three years, but on 25 August 1248, leaving his mother Blanche of Castile95 as regent, he set sail from the specially constructed port of Aigues-Mortes accompanied by his wife, Margaret of Provence,96 and two of his three brothers, Robert of Artois and Charles of Anjou. On 18 September they landed at Limassol in Cyprus, the appointed rendezvous for the Crusading army, and Louis settled down to plan his campaign. Despite the disaster of the Fifth Crusade it had been generally agreed that the objective should once again be Egypt, the richest and at the same time the most exposed province of Saladin’s empire. Unfortunately the year was already too far advanced for operations to be started at once–the hidden sandbanks in the approaches to the Nile delta could be negotiated only in calm weather–so the King was reluctantly persuaded to winter on the island. With the coming of spring there arose another difficulty: an acute shortage of ships. Louis had relied on the Italian maritime republics to furnish the number necessary, but when the moment came Pisa and Genoa were at war and in need of all the vessels they could get, while the Venetians–who disapproved of the whole Crusade–simply refused. Not until the end of May 1249 could the King muster the necessary transport, and even then the first part of the fleet to sail was scattered by a violent storm and was obliged to limp back to Limassol.
After that the situation improved, and at dawn on 5 June, in the teeth of heavy opposition, the Crusaders landed on the sands to the west of the delta. The fighting was long and fierce, but the superior discipline of the French knights won the day; as night fell the Egyptian army withdrew over the permanent bridge of boats to Damietta. On its arrival the order was given for a general evacuation, and all the Muslims obeyed. The Christian Copts who remained sent word that resistance was at an end, and the Crusaders marched triumphantly over the bridge–which had unaccountably remained intact–and into the city. All this made a refreshing contrast to the Fifth Crusade, which had achieved a similar result only after a seventeen-month siege. As in 1219, the great mosque was converted into a cathedral; the three military orders–Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights–were installed in suitable accommodation; the Genoese, Pisans and–rather more surprisingly–the Venetians were each allotted a street and a market; and Damietta became, briefly, the effective capital of Outremer.
All too soon, however, the cracks began to show. The annual flooding of the Nile was imminent. Mindful of the experience of the Fifth Crusade, Louis was determined not to advance until the waters subsided, which in turn meant his army having to sweat it out in forced inactivity through the grilling heat of the delta summer. Food supplies began to run short; dysentery and malaria made their appearance in the Crusader camp. Like his father before him, the Egyptian Sultan al-Ayub–who was himself dying of tuberculosis–proposed from his sickbed an exchange of Damietta for Jerusalem, but his offer was rejected out of hand: King Louis refused to treat with an infidel. Instead, when the Nile went down at the end of October, he gave orders to march on Cairo.
His army had advanced about a third of the way to the capital when it found itself confronted by the Saracen army at Mansurah, a town built only a few years before by the Sultan al-Kamil on the site of his victory over the Fifth Crusade. Then came catastrophe–a catastrophe which was exclusively the fault of Count Robert of Artois. Defying his brother’s strict instructions not to attack until he was ordered to do so, and followed only by the Templars and a small contingent from England, he charged into the Egyptian camp where he took its occupants by surprise, slaughtering a good many and putting the rest to flight. Had he halted there all might have been well, but the camp was about two miles outside Mansurah itself, and in his exhilaration Robert galloped on into the city. This time the Egyptians were ready for him. The gates were wide open, and he and his followers found their way clear right up to the walls of the citadel. Only then did the defenders appear, pouring in on them from the side streets. The gates clanged shut, and the result was a massacre. Robert himself was killed, with most of his knights, and so were virtually all the English; of the 290 Templar knights, only five survived.
This disaster did not quite mark the end of the Crusade. Not until the beginning of April 1250–by which time dysentery and typhoid were doing far more damage than the Egyptians to his men–did Louis decide to return. Now it was he who proposed the exchange of Damietta for Jerusalem, but the Sultan Turanshah–who had succeeded his father al-Ayub some three months before–was not interested. For those still able to ride or walk, the journey back was a nightmare. The King’s own conduct was beyond praise, especially as he too was now seriously ill. At last the commander of his bodyguard, seeing that he could go no further, took him into a nearby house; but he was soon found, captured and taken in chains to Mansurah, where he slowly recovered. His knights and soldiers surrendered en masse and were led away into captivity, but they, alas, were not so lucky. Seeing that they were far too many to be effectively guarded, the Egyptians soon executed all those too weak to march; the remainder they beheaded in the course of the following week, at the rate of 300 a day. They spared only the leading barons–in the hope, it need hardly be said, of a good ransom.
And they got one. As well as the return of Damietta itself, which paid for the freedom of the King, it was agreed that the Egyptians should receive the enormous sum of half a million livres tournois97 for all the rest. It was a hard bargain, and even that would have been impossible but for Queen Margaret. In the last stages of pregnancy, she had remained at Damietta; there her child was safely delivered–with an octogenarian knight as midwife–just three days after she had received reports of the surrender. She named her little son John Tristan, ‘the child of sorrow’. Now there came a double blow: the news that food supplies were running dangerously short, and that the Pisans and Genoese had begun to evacuate the city. Summoning their leaders to her bedside, she begged them to stay, pointing out that she could not hope to hold Damietta without them, and that if it were to fall she would have nothing with which to ransom her husband. Only when she offered to buy up all the food left in the city and make herself responsible for its distribution did they agree to remain. The cost was enormous, but Damietta was saved until the ransom could be arranged. It was eventually handed over on 6 May 1250, while the balance of the funds required was later disgorged, with considerable reluctance, by the Templars. A week later Louis and those of the barons who were still able to walk disembarked at Acre. Those who were too sick or badly wounded to travel were left behind at Damietta on the understanding that they would be properly looked after. Scarcely had the ships left port than the whole lot were massacred.
In the Islamic world, the failed Sixth Crusade caused a major upheaval. Much of the Muslim fighting force was composed of Mamelukes, a vast corps of soldiers, mostly Georgian or Circassian, who had been bought as boy slaves in the Caucasus and trained as crack cavalrymen. Their power and influence had steadily increased during the reign of the Sultan al-Ayub; after his death in November 1249, Turanshah had tried to cut them down to size. It proved a fatal mistake. On 2 May 1250 he gave a banquet for his emirs; just as he rose to depart a band of Mameluke soldiers burst in and attacked him. Badly wounded, he fled and plunged into the Nile, but a leading Mameluke general named Baibars followed him and finished him off. The Ayubid dynasty perished with him.
The Mamelukes were now supreme, but they did not get off to a good start. Their leader, Izzadin Aibek, married the widow of al-Ayub to legitimise his position and proclaimed himself sultan. The marriage, however, was unhappy from the outset, and in April 1257 the Sultana bribed his eunuchs to murder him in his bath–an action she had cause to regret when, just seventeen days later, she herself was clubbed to death. Aibek was succeeded by his fifteen-year-old son, who was in his turn dethroned in 1259 and replaced by one of his father’s colleagues, Saifeddin Qutuz. He too was destined to reign for less than a year, but during that year, as we shall shortly see, he was to win one of the most decisive victories in the whole history of Islam–a victory which may well have saved the Muslim faith from extinction in the eastern Mediterranean.
By the third quarter of the thirteenth century the Christians of Outremer showed little enough evidence of that Crusading spirit that had given their kingdom its birth; no longer did many of them think seriously about regaining the Holy Places. But they still controlled nearly all the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, from Gaza in the south to Cilician Armenia in the north. Apart from the so-called Kingdom of Jerusalem itself–its capital now perforce at Acre–there was the Principality of Antioch and the County of Tripoli; all three were protected from the east by a chain of magnificent fortresses, many of which still stand today. Some sixty miles from the coast of Cilicia was the Christian Kingdom of Cyprus. Life in all these lands may have been pleasant enough: they enjoyed a superb climate and rich, fertile soil, while the great harbour of Acre–incomparably better than any other on the coast of Palestine or Syria–guaranteed them a steady commercial income. Everything, however, depended on the maintenance of good relations with their Muslim neighbours, and this was not always easy to achieve. Even if the Christians were prepared to compromise their Crusading ideals, the Muslims understandably resented the presence of aliens and infidels occupying lands they regarded as their own.
Another problem was presented by the Italian sea republics. Without the Venetian, Genoese and Pisan fleets, regular communications with the western Mediterranean would have been almost impossible to maintain, as would the all-important through-trade from the east; but the republics themselves were arrogant, faithless and consistently unreliable, withholding their assistance when it was vitally needed, and even on occasion providing the Muslims with essential war supplies. The Military Orders, too, could frequently prove additional thorns in the government’s side; the Templars in particular, whose banking activities had earned them enormous wealth, were often only too happy to make huge loans to Muslim clients. For these and several other reasons, few dispassionate observers would have allowed Frankish Outremer a very long expectation of life, but its end may, surprisingly enough, have been appreciably delayed by a series of largely unforeseeable events which left all western Asia transformed: the arrival on the Mediterranean coast of the Golden Horde.
When the first of the great Mongol rulers, Jenghiz Khan, died in 1227 he left to his sons an empire extending from the China Sea to the banks of the Dnieper river. By the time of the death of his son Ogodai in 1241, that empire included most of modern Russia and Hungary and reached south into Persia. Just two years later, at the battle of Köse Dag', a Mongol army had inflicted a crushing defeat over the Seljuk Turks, effectively putting an end to the independence of the Seljuk state.98 The rulers of Europe had watched the advance of this formidable people with mounting anxiety. Louis IX went so far as to send an ambassador to the Mongol court at Karakorum; when the envoy arrived there in 1254 he found embassies from the Latin Emperor of Byzantium, from the Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad, from the Seljuk Sultan and from the King of Delhi, as well as from several Russian princes. (Another, from the King of Armenia, was shortly to follow.) The ambassador reported, interestingly enough, that among the Mongols there was absolutely no religious discrimination: the Great Khan–Jenghiz’s son Kublai–though in theory shamanist, regularly attended Christian, Muslim and Buddhist ceremonies. There was, he believed, a single god; how precisely he was worshipped was a matter for the individual worshipper.
But religious toleration did not mean peace. In January 1256 Kublai’s brother Hulagu led a huge army against the sect of the Assassins, whose terrorist activities were making the Persian lands they occupied ungovernable. By the end of 1257 few of its several thousand members were left alive. Hulagu was then free to concentrate on his next victim: al-Mustasim, the Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad. The city fell on 10 February 1258. The Caliph was put to death–after he had personally revealed to Hulagu the secret hiding place in which he had concealed his treasure–and so was the whole Muslim population of the city, probably some 80,000 men, women and children, excepting of course some of the prettier girls and boys who were kept as slaves. Only the Christians, who had taken refuge in their churches, were saved–on the personal initiative of Hulagu’s chief wife Dokuz Khatun, a deeply committed Nestorian.99 The Nestorian Patriarch was actually presented with one of the former royal palaces for use as his church and his official residence.
While the Christian communities throughout Asia rejoiced, the news of the fall of Baghdad rocked the whole Muslim world. The Abbasid Caliphate had been in existence for over five centuries, since 747. Its political power was long since gone, but it remained the focus and the uniting force of orthodox Islam. Without it, the faith lost its cohesion and was effectively up for grabs–a prize to be seized by any Muslim leader with sufficient ambition and determination. Hulagu, however, was not a Muslim leader; he now set his sights on Syria. The city of Mayyafaraqin was the first to fall, its captured ruler being forced to eat his own flesh until he died. Aleppo followed. Antioch owed its salvation only to its Prince, Bohemund VI, who travelled out to Hulagu’s camp to pay him homage. Next it was the turn of Damascus, which surrendered without a struggle. The Mongol army under Hulagu’s deputy, another Nestorian Christian named Kitbuqa, entered the city on 1 March, accompanied by Bohemund and his father-in-law the King of Armenia; in the words of Sir Steven Runciman, ‘the citizens of the ancient capital of the Caliphate saw for the first time for six centuries three Christian potentates ride in triumph through their streets.’
To many of the faithful, it must have seemed the death-knell of Islam in Asia, the more so in that the Mongol conquerors–many of whom, like Kitbuqa, were Christians themselves–openly favoured the local Christian communities. With Syria secured, they now turned their gaze towards Palestine. Avoiding Jerusalem, they advanced southward in a broad sweep through to Gaza, leaving Acre untouched but encircled by their own forces and the sea.
The speed of the conquest and the measure of its success had been alike astonishing, but the Mongol lines of communication were already alarmingly extended. Some time in the autumn of 1259 word reached the Mongol camp that the Great Khan had been killed while on campaign in China. The succession–as so often–was disputed, and it soon became plain to Hulagu that if he were to preserve his own position he must return immediately to the east. And so, early in 1260, he set forth with the bulk of his army on the 4,000-mile march to Karakorum, leaving Kitbuqa with a much-reduced force to govern the conquered lands as best he could.
Shortly before his departure Hulagu had sent an embassy to the Mameluke Sultan of Egypt demanding his submission. The Sultan, Saifeddin Qutuz, had not taken it well; he had had the ambassador executed and had at once begun to prepare for a military expedition against Syria. Now, with the sudden dramatic reduction of the Mongol host, he seized his opportunity. On 26 July the Mameluke army under Baibars crossed the frontier, captured Gaza virtually without a struggle and headed north into Palestine. It was some time in September–no one seems sure of the precise date–that the two armies met at Ain Jalud, the Pools of Goliath. The Sultan Qutuz was in overall command; the vanguard, as usual, was led by Baibars. The Mongols were quickly surrounded. They fought magnificently, but now it was they who were outnumbered. Kitbuqa was taken prisoner, bound and brought before the Sultan, who ordered his immediate execution.
This was effectively the end of the battle–today largely forgotten yet arguably one of the most decisive in history, since it saved Islam from the most dangerous threat that it has ever had to face. The three greatest cities of the Muslim world–Baghdad, Aleppo and Damascus–were in the hands of the Mongols; had Kitbuqa been victorious once again and pursued his enemy into Egypt, there would have been no Muslim state worthy of the name to the east of Morocco. The Muslim victory, on the other hand, gave the Mameluke Sultanate of Egypt supremacy in the Near East until the rise of the Ottoman Empire–and it sealed the fate of Outremer.
Within a week after the battle of Ain Jalud, Qutuz was in Damascus; within a month, Muslim forces had regained Aleppo. When the Sultan led his army in triumph back to Egypt, he seemed to be carrying all before him. But he was rapidly losing confidence in his brilliant second-in-command, Baibars, and when Baibars demanded the governorship of Aleppo–a position which would have given him the power to seize control of Syria–Qutuz refused him outright. In doing so, he badly underestimated his man. On 23 October 1260 he decided to spend a day hunting in the delta, taking his senior emirs with him; as soon as they were a safe distance from the camp, Baibars approached him silently from behind and ran him through with his sword. Although he now had the blood of two sultans on his hands, no one dared to question Baibars’s right to succeed. He was to reign for the next seventeen years: physically a giant, cruel and treacherous, devoid of pity or any finer feelings, but by a very long way the ablest of all the Mameluke rulers.
Ain Jalud had not altogether put an end to Mongol power in the area. Hulagu returned to Syria as soon as he could and maintained a strong resistance in the northeast, but he died in 1265, leaving Baibars free to resume his active campaigning against the Christians. They too remained a force to be reckoned with: King Hethoum I of Armenia and Bohemund VI, Prince of Antioch and Count of Tripoli, were particularly dangerous adversaries. But Baibars kept up a relentless pressure. Four times he actually descended on Acre itself and was beaten back, but in 1267 he captured Caesarea and Toron and ravaged Cilicia, dealing the Armenian Kingdom what proved eventually to be its death-blow. The year following saw the fall of Jaffa and–worst of all, on 18 May–Antioch, one of the original patriarchal seats, the first Christian principality of Outremer, the most prosperous and well-endowed of all the Frankish cities. No mercy was shown by the conquerors. The vast accumulated treasures were doled out to the troops, most of the leading citizens and ecclesiastics massacred. The city never recovered. Throughout Eastern Christendom, the psychological effect was catastrophic.
The fall of Antioch was followed by a truce–welcome, one would imagine, to both sides and enabling them to take stock of events both in Europe and Asia which would have repercussions in Outremer: the execution of Conradin, for example, which meant the extinction of the legitimate line of the royal house of Jerusalem, and–more disturbing still–reports of the imminent arrival of King Louis of France, on his second and last Crusade.
It was now nearly twenty years since Louis had arrived at Acre after his disaster at Damietta. Awaiting him he had found an urgent appeal from his mother, the Queen Regent Blanche, imploring him to return at once to France, but his conscience had told him that to do so would be tantamount to an admission of defeat. His high ideals had so far achieved nothing; indeed, they had destroyed not only his own army but also virtually the whole fighting force of Outremer. Before he returned home, he felt, the situation must somehow be redeemed. Besides, were not some of his soldiers still imprisoned in Egypt? For their sake too it was clear that he must stay for some time longer in the east.
And so he had stayed, for another four years. Since his arrival in Outremer he had learned much. No longer could he afford to despise the infidels; if he were to recover his position and his prestige, he must treat them as equals, and thanks to the new division in the Muslim world–for Palestine and Syria remained staunchly loyal to the Ayubids–he was able to do so with considerable success. He had treated with the Ayubids and the Mamelukes; he had treated with the Assassins, shortly before their virtual destruction at the hands of Hulagu; and he had of course treated with the Mongols. Technically, as he well knew, he had no right to negotiate at all, for since 1250 the Crusader kingdom had belonged to Frederick’s son Conrad; but Conrad was away in Germany and likely to remain there, and in Outremer Louis was accepted de facto as king. Thanks to him, such Frankish prisoners as had remained in Egypt had eventually been released, and the Mamelukes had promised that once they had occupied Syria and Palestine they would return to the Christians all the old Kingdom of Jerusalem as far east as the river Jordan.
But there could be no question of another military offensive; and when civil war broke out at home following the death of Queen Blanche in November 1252, Louis realised that he could postpone his departure no longer. On 24 April 1254 he set sail from Acre, and early in July landed at Hyères on the south coast of France, a sad and disappointed man. Of all the Crusaders, he was the most honourable, the most upright and by far the most pious, but his intervention in the Holy Land had been little short of catastrophic and had led to the loss of thousands of innocent men, a large proportion of them his own subjects. He was also bewildered; past defeats and reverses suffered by the Crusaders had been ascribed to their sinful lives, yet he–who spent hours a day in prayer and led a life of unimpeachable moral rectitude–had fared no better than they. Could it be that the whole concept of the Crusades was unpleasing in the sight of God?
He could not bring himself to believe so, and continued to dream of one more attempt–of one last journey to the Holy Land that would be crowned with success and wipe the stain of failure from his conscience. For sixteen years domestic troubles kept him occupied in France, but in 1270 he thought he saw his opportunity; though already fifty-six years old and in poor health, he made ready once again to embark for Palestine. Precisely what he meant to do when he got there is far from clear; to have recovered the Holy Places at such a time would have called for nothing less than a miracle. But whatever his intentions may have been, they were effectively set at naught by his brother Charles of Anjou, King of Sicily.
Charles’s defeat of Manfred and his execution of Conradin–thus finally ridding Italy once and for all of the house of Hohenstaufen–had awoken in him even greater ambitions. These now encompassed the domination of all Italy, the reduction of the Pope to the status of a puppet, the reconquest yet again of Constantinople–now once more in Greek hands–its return to the Latin faith and, ultimately, the establishment of a Christian empire that would extend the length and breadth of the Mediterranean. His first thought, therefore, was to persuade Louis to march against Byzantium, but the King refused to consider an attack on his co-religionists, heretical or not, so Charles tried again. The Emir of Tunis, he pointed out, was said to be well disposed towards Christianity and could well be ready for conversion. If that were indeed so, the true faith might be spread all along the north African coast; even if it were not, the advantages of a permanent Christian foothold on that coast were surely not to be ignored.
It is one of the great ironies of history that sanctity is so seldom accompanied by intelligence. Why King Louis believed his brother for a moment–despite the urgent advice of most of his friends and counsellors–is almost impossible to understand. But believe him he did and, accompanied by his three surviving sons, he and his army embarked once again at Aigues-Mortes in the hottest season of the year and sailed for Tunis on 1 July.
Were any enquiries made before his departure as to the truth of Charles’s claim? Was there a shred of evidence, however circumstantial, to suggest that the Emir had ever considered abandoning the faith of his fathers? Even if he had, did Louis honestly believe that an armed attack was the best way to make him do so? In fact, when the army landed on 18 July, it was immediately clear that nothing was further from the Emir’s mind. He was already rallying his men, strengthening his city’s defences and preparing to fight.
Fortunately for him, he did not need to lift a finger. The north African summer did it all for him. Hardly had the Crusading army pitched camp when its soldiers began to sicken and die; within a week disease was raging uncontrolled. King Louis was among the first of the victims. For the first few days he would struggle determinedly to his feet to hear Mass, but soon this became impossible and before long only a faint movement of his lips showed that he was still able to follow the ceremony. When, on 25 August, Charles of Anjou arrived with his army, he was told that his brother had died just a few hours before. The King’s heir, his eldest son Philip, was also lying dangerously ill; he, however, survived, and was to reign as Philip III (‘the Bold’) for the next fifteen years. Louis’s younger son, the twenty-one-year-old John Tristan who had been born at Damietta during the earlier campaign, was not so lucky.
Charles fought on for a few more weeks, finally coming to an arrangement with the Emir by which, in return for a considerable indemnity, he agreed to return with what was left of the army to Italy. Honour was saved, but very little else. The final nail had been hammered into the coffin of the Crusades, since–apart from what the Encyclopedia Britannica refers to as ‘sundry disjointed epilogues’–those of St Louis were effectively the last. The great contest that had lasted for nearly two centuries between the Cross and the Crescent was finally over, and the Crescent was the victor.
It took, inevitably, a little time for the princes of Europe to accept the fact. One who notably failed to do so was Prince Edward, son and heir of King Henry III of England. Henry himself had formerly taken the Cross, but the civil wars that blighted his reign had allowed him no opportunity to fulfil his vow. Edward, at the age of thirty-two, had no such impediment, and reports of the fall of Antioch decided him to go, with about 1,000 men, in his father’s place. The early stages of his journey had not been happy. Originally intending to join Louis at Aigues-Mortes, he had arrived there to find that the King had already left; when he followed him to Tunis it was to be informed that Louis was dead. In May 1271 he eventually arrived at Acre, where he was horrified. Morale everywhere was abysmally low. The Venetians and Genoese were hand in glove with the Sultan, trading most profitably in everything from weapons to slaves; no one, it seemed, had stomach for a fight. Allying himself with the Mongols, Edward scored a few minor successes against Mameluke garrisons, but certainly caused Baibars no sleepless nights. He was, on the other hand, just enough of an irritation to be worth eliminating, and the Sultan therefore arranged for a local Christian assassin to enter his chamber and stab him with a poisoned dagger. Edward made short work of his assailant, but not before sustaining an ugly wound in his arm, which soon turned dangerously septic. Thanks to primitive and painful surgery he survived,100 took ship from Acre in September 1272 and returned to England to find himself King Edward I.
Five years later, if persistent rumours are to be believed, Baibars was involved in another attempt at assassination which went more calamitously wrong. It was said that he had prepared a bowl of poisoned kumiss–that fermented mare’s milk so unaccountably popular with Turks and Mongols alike–for an enemy, and had then thoughtlessly drunk from it himself. He did not live to see the end of Outremer; Franks were still to be found in plenty in most of the principal cities. In his seventeen-year reign, however, he had eliminated most of the Christian dominions around the coast. The days of the survivors, as they themselves well knew, were numbered.
Then, halfway across the Mediterranean on Easter Monday 1282, there occurred a totally unexpected event which was to have an immense impact on virtually the whole of the Middle Sea. It has always been known, somewhat poetically, as the War of the Sicilian Vespers.
If Charles of Anjou was to accomplish his grand design, he needed a suitably subservient Pope. On the death of Clement IV in 1268 he had therefore used his considerable influence in the curia to keep the papal throne unoccupied for three years (conveniently covering the time when he was away on his brother’s Crusade); the vacancy had ended only when the authorities at Viterbo–where the conclave was being held–actually removed the roof from the palace in which the cardinals were deliberating. Their hasty choice had then fallen on Gregory X, who proved distinctly unhelpful, thwarting Charles’s attempts to have his nephew Philip III of France elected Holy Roman Emperor and allying himself with Byzantium to the extent of actually effecting, at the Council of Lyons in 1274, a temporary reunion of the Eastern and Western Churches. Only in 1281, with the election of another Frenchman, Martin IV, did Charles get his way at last. Already master of Provence and the greater part of Italy, titular King of Jerusalem101 and by a long way the most powerful–and dangerous–man in Europe, he was now free to realise his greatest ambition by marching against Constantinople, whose Emperor, Michael VIII Palaeologus, Pope Martin had obligingly redeclared schismatic. It was only twenty years since the Greeks had recovered their capital from the Franks; as 1282 opened, their chances of keeping it looked slim indeed.
They were saved by the people of Palermo. The French were already hated throughout the Regno, both for the severity of their taxation and for the arrogance of their conduct, and when, on the evening of 30 March, a drunken French sergeant began importuning a Sicilian woman outside the Church of Santo Spirito just as the bells were ringing for vespers, her countrymen’s anger boiled over. The sergeant was set upon by her husband and killed; the murder led to a riot, the riot to a massacre. Two thousand Frenchmen were dead by morning. Palermo, and soon afterwards Messina also, was in rebel hands. The rising could not have been better timed. In its later stages it was led by a Salernitan nobleman named John of Procida, a friend of Frederick II and of Manfred. John had recently spent some time at the court of Peter III of Aragon, husband of Manfred’s daughter Constance, and while there had encouraged Peter to make good his somewhat shadowy claim to the Sicilian crown. Here was the ideal opportunity to do so. Peter reached Palermo in September, and by the following month had captured Messina, where the French had made their last stand.
For Charles of Anjou, surrounded by his court in Naples, the loss of Sicily spelt disaster. He naturally refused to recognise his defeat, even going so far as to propose deciding the fate of Sicily by single combat with Peter, to take place under English protection at Bordeaux–several weeks’ journey away. Peter rather surprisingly accepted, though in subsequent negotiations it was decided that since Charles was already fifty-five–an old man by the standards of the time–and Peter only forty, it would be fairer if each monarch were accompanied by 100 carefully chosen knights to fight beside him. The date for the great contest was fixed for Tuesday 1 June 1283; unfortunately–or perhaps fortunately–the precise hour was not specified. King Peter and his knights arrived early in the morning, to find no sign of Charles; after his heralds had duly proclaimed his presence, Peter accordingly left the field and on his return announced that his was the victory, his cowardly opponent having failed to put in an appearance. Charles arrived a few hours later and did exactly the same. The two never met. The cost to both, in time as well as money, was considerable, but honour was saved on both sides.
And so the Regno was split down the middle, Charles reigning (as Charles I) in Naples and Peter in Sicily, each determined to expel the other and to reunify the country. But Charles’s reputation was gone. His Mediterranean empire was seen to have been built on sand. He had ceased to be a world power. There could no longer be any question of an expedition against Byzantium. In Outremer his principal supporters, the Templars and the Venetians, fell away; soon he recalled his viceroy from Acre, leaving only a relatively junior officer in his place. Three years later–on 7 January 1285–he died at Foggia. For twenty years he had dominated the Mediterranean, possessed by both an insatiable ambition and a driving energy that allowed him no rest. He was genuinely pious, but his piety brought him no humility, since he had always seen himself as God’s chosen instrument. Nor did it bring him humanity, or mercy; his execution of the sixteen-year-old Conradin had shocked all Europe, and was held against him all his life. He might on occasion have been admired; never could he be loved.
The War of the Sicilian Vespers–for which Charles was largely responsible–was to continue well into the next century. It was not only Philip III ‘the Bold’ of France, and his son and successor Philip IV ‘the Fair’ after him, who were bound for reasons of family honour to recover the island so rudely wrenched away. There was also the fact that Sicily and the Regno had been granted to Charles by the Pope, so the Papacy too had to look to its prestige. Pope Martin IV had promptly proclaimed a Crusade against the Aragonese; King Philip, for his part, had begun to raise an army. But it took more than these two powers to overawe the house of Aragon and its faithful ally, the Republic of Genoa. From both sides of the dispute diplomatic missions criss-crossed Europe, until almost all the Mediterranean nations were to a greater or lesser degree involved.
The notable exception was, of course, the Mamelukes of Egypt. They had little interest in Sicily; their eyes were fixed on the lands of Outremer and the destruction of the Crusader states. Those states might have been saved, at least temporarily, if the Christian nations of the west had forgotten their other preoccupations and marched to the defence of their beleaguered co-religionists; but they did not do so. The first alarm was sounded, surprisingly enough, by the Mongols; in 1287 the Great Khan–now Hulagu’s grandson Arghun–sent to the west a Christian ambassador, a certain Rabban Sauma. He first visited Constantinople, then went on to Naples, Genoa, Paris and Bordeaux, where King Edward I of England was in residence in his mainland capital.102 He returned via Rome. Everywhere he was accorded a royal reception. In Paris, Philip IV personally showed him round the Sainte-Chapelle to admire the sacred relics that his grandfather St Louis had purchased from the Byzantine Emperor; in Bordeaux, Edward–who was after all an old Crusader himself–invited him to celebrate Mass with his court; in Rome, he received the sacrament from the hands of the newly elected Pope Nicholas IV. Everywhere he stressed the urgent necessity of an expedition to recover the Holy Places and to save Outremer. Everywhere he received a sympathetic hearing, but never once was he given a firm undertaking or a definite date. The old Crusading spirit was gone. It would not return.
The Great Khan found this difficult to believe. In the early summer of 1289 he despatched to Europe another ambassador, a Genoese by the name of Buscarel, with letters to the Pope and the French and English kings. (Their impact must have been somewhat reduced by the fact that they were written in Mongolian, but Buscarel was presumably able to translate.) This time Arghun went so far as to propose an alliance. He himself, he wrote, intended to lead an army of 20–30,000 horsemen that would reach Damascus in mid-February 1291. If the two kings were prepared to send armies of their own and the Holy Places were consequently recovered, he would be happy to hand them over. Alas, this initiative was no more successful than its predecessor. The Great Khan made one more attempt, but it too proved a failure, and by the time his envoys returned he was dead.
By this time, as if to confirm Arghun’s worst fears, the Mameluke Sultan Qalawun had moved his entire army into Syria. His pretext was to prevent the Genoese from taking over the County of Tripoli, as they were admittedly threatening to do, though there seems little doubt that his long-term objective was more sinister. Towards the end of March 1289 he drew up his troops beneath the walls of Tripoli and on 26 April they swarmed into the city. Every Christian man they found was put to death, every woman and child carried off into slavery, every building burned to the ground. Now at last the west began to take notice. Thanks to the urgings of Pope Nicholas, the Venetians–who had been delighted to see the Genoese deprived of Tripoli but had now begun to fear for their own interests in Acre–sent twenty war galleys, which were joined by five from King James of Aragon. Unfortunately, however, this fleet was accompanied by a rabble of peasants and smalltime adventurers from north Italy, all of them out for what they could get; from the day of their arrival in Acre they proved drunken and irresponsible, and one sweltering day in August 1290 they went on the rampage, charging through the streets and killing every Muslim they encountered.
Following the fall of Tripoli, Qalawun had agreed to a truce with the Christians; had all gone well, they might have been able to enjoy a few more years of independence. But after the massacre at Acre the truce had clearly ceased to exist, and there was no doubt left in the Sultan’s mind: the Franks must be eliminated. On 6 March 1291, under his son and successor al-Ashraf Khalil, the great army once again set forth. Its size was given as 60,000 cavalry and a 160,000 infantry: a wild exaggeration, perhaps, but there could be little doubt that the Christians of Acre–with a total population of fewer than 40,000, some 800 knights and some 14,000 foot-soldiers, including Venetians, Pisans and the three Military Orders–would find themselves outnumbered many times over.
The siege began on 6 April. The defenders fought bravely, with both the Templars and the Hospitallers making sorties–alas unsuccessful–into the enemy camp. They still had command of the sea, so they were not short of food; but they lacked armaments, and above all the manpower adequately to protect the length of the landward wall, which extended for well over a mile. Morale received a considerable boost when King Henry II of Jerusalem,103 twenty years old and an epileptic, arrived from Cyprus on 4 May with forty ships, 100 horse-men and 2,000 infantry; but, welcome as they were, these numbers could not hope to make much difference. It was only a fortnight later that the Sultan ordered the general assault.
A full account of the fall of Acre makes horrifying reading.104 There was no surrender; the Sultan in any case would never have accepted it. All that the people could do was to die fighting, or to try to escape by sea. A few, including King Henry and his brother Amalric, succeeded in getting back to Cyprus, and a number of the women and children ended up in the harems or slave markets; but the vast majority perished. Meanwhile, Acre itself was systematically destroyed, and the remaining Frankish settlements–Tyre, Sidon, Tortosa and Beirut, together with a number of castles–soon suffered a similar fate. It was the end. Crusader Outremer had lasted for 192 years. From its beginnings a monument to intolerance and territorial ambition, its story had been one of steady physical and moral decline and monumental incompetence. There were few people in western Europe who shed tears over its passing, or were sorry to see it go.