Thus conceived as the holder of a great fief, the king had only the

rights of _suzerain_ over the four great baronies and the twelve minor

fiefs of his kingdom. He had not those rights of sovereign which the

Norman kings of England inherited from their Anglo-Saxon predecessors,

or the Capetian kings of France from the Carolings; nor was he able

therefore to come into direct touch with each of his subjects, which

William I., in virtue of his sovereign rights, was able to attain by the

Salisbury oath of 1086. Amalric I. indeed, by his _assise sur la

ligece_, attempted to reach the vassals of his vassals; he admitted

arriere-vassaux to the _haute cour_, and encouraged them to carry their

cases to it in the first instance. But this is the only attempt at that

policy of _immediatisation_ which in contemporary England was carried to

far greater lengths; and even this attempt was unsuccessful. No alliance

was actually formed between the king and the mesne nobility against the

immediate baronage. The body of the tenants-in-chief continued to limit

the power of the crown: their consent was necessary to legislation, and

grants of fiefs could not be made without their permission. Nor was the

crown only limited in this way. The _duties_ of the king towards his

tenants are prominent in the _assises_. The king's oath to his men binds

him to respect and maintain their rights, which are as prominent as are

his duties; and if the men feel that the royal oath has not been kept,

they may lawfully refuse military service (_gager le roi_), and may even

rise in authorized and legal rebellion. The system of military service

and the organization of justice corresponded to the part which the

monarchy was thus constrained to play. The vassal was bound to pay

military service, not, as in western Europe, for a limited period of

forty days, but for the whole year--the Holy Land being, as it were, in

a perpetual state of siege. On the other hand, the vassal was not bound

to render service, unless he were _paid_ for his service; and it was

only famine, or Saracen devastation, which freed the king from the

obligation of paying his men. The king was also bound to insure the

horses of his men by a system called the _restor_: if a vassal lost his

horse otherwise than by his own fault, it must be replaced by the

treasury (which was termed, as it also was in Norman Sicily, the

_secretum_).[22] But the king had another force in addition to the

feudal levy--a paid force of _soudoyers_,[23] holding fiefs, not of

land, but of pay (_fiefs de soudee_). Along with this paid cavalry went

another branch of the army, the Turcopuli, a body of light cavalry,

recruited from the Syrians and Mahommedans, and using the tactics of the

Arabs; while an infantry was found among the Armenians, the best

soldiers of the East, and the Maronites, who furnished the kingdom with

archers. To all these various forces must be added the knights and

native levies of the great orders, whose masters were practically

independent sovereigns like the princes of Antioch and Tripoli;[24] and

with these the total levy of the kingdom may be reckoned at some 25,000

men. But the strength of the kingdom lay less perhaps in the army than

in the magnificent fortresses which the nobility, and especially the two

orders, had built; and the most visible relic of the crusades to-day is

the towering ruins of a fortress like Krak (Kerak) des Chevaliers, the

fortress of the Knights of St John in the principality of Tripoli. These

fortresses, garrisoned not by the king, as in Norman England, but by

their possessors, would only strengthen the power of the feudatories,

and help to dissipate the kingdom into a number of local units.

In the organization of its system of justice the kingdom showed its most

characteristic features. Two great central courts sat in Jerusalem to do

justice--the high court of the nobles, and the court of burgesses for

the rest of the Franks. (1) The high court was the supreme source of

justice for the military class; and in its composition and procedure the

same limitation of the crown, which appears in regard to military

service, is again evident. The high court is not a _curia regis_, but a

_curia baronum_, in which the theory of _judicium parium_ is fully

realized. If the king presides in the court, the motive of its action is

none the less the preservation of the rights of the nobles, and not, as

in England, the extension of the rights of the crown. It is a court of

the king's peers: it tries cases of dispute between the king and his

peers--with regard, for instance, to military service--and it settles

the descent of the title of king. (2) The court of burgesses was almost

equally sovereign within its sphere. While the body of the noblesse

formed the high court, the court of the burgesses was composed of twelve

legists (probably named by the king) under the presidency of the

_vicomte_--a knight also named by the king, who was a great financial as

well as a judicial officer. The province of the court included all acts

and contracts between burgesses, and extended to criminal cases in which

burgesses were involved. Like the high court, the court of burgesses had

also its assizes[25]--a body of unwritten legal custom. The independent

position of the burgesses, who thus assumed a position of equality by

the side of the feudal class, is one of the peculiarities of the kingdom

of Jerusalem. It may be explained by reference to the peculiar

conditions of the kingdom. Burgesses and nobles, however different in

status, were both of the same Frankish stock, and both occupied the same

superior position with regard to the native Syrians. The commercial

motive, again, had been one of the great motives of the crusade; and the

class which was impelled by that motive would be both large and, in view

of the quality of the Eastern goods in which it dealt, exceptionally

prosperous. Finally, when one remembers how, during the First Crusade,

the _pedites_ had marched side by side with the _principes_, and how,

from the beginning of 1099, they had practically risen in revolt against

the selfish ambitions of princes like Count Raymund, it becomes easy to

understand the independent position which the burgesses assumed in the

organization of the kingdom. Burgesses could buy and possess property in

towns, which knights were forbidden to acquire; and though they could

not intermarry with the feudal classes, it was easy and regular for a

burgess to thrive to knighthood. Like the nobles, again, the burgesses

had the right of confirming royal grants and of taking part in

legislation; and they may be said to have formed--socially, politically

and judicially--an independent and powerful estate. Yet (with the

exception of Antioch, Tripoli and Acre in the course of the 13th

century) the Frankish towns never developed a communal government: the

domain of their development was private law and commercial life.

Locally, the consideration of the system of justice administered in the

kingdom involves some account of three things--the organization of the

fiefs, the position of the Italian traders in their quarters, and the

privileges of the Church. Each fief was organized like the kingdom. In

each there was a court for the noblesse, and a court (or courts) for the

bourgeoisie. There were some thirty-seven _cours de bourgeoisie_

(several of the fiefs having more than one), each of which was under the

presidency of a _vicomte_, while all were independent of the court of

burgesses at Jerusalem. Of the feudal courts there were some twenty-two.

Each of these followed the procedure and the law of the high court; but

each was independent of the high court, and formed a sovereign court

without any appeal. On the other hand, the revolution wrought by Amalric

I. in the status of the _arriere-vassaux_, which made them members of

the high court, allowed them to carry their cases to Jerusalem in the

first instance, if they desired. Apart from this, the characteristic of

seignorial justice is its independence and its freedom from the central

court; though, when we reflect that the central court is a court of

seigneurs, this characteristic is seen to be the logical result of the

whole system. Midway between the seignorial _cours de bourgeoisie_ and

the privileged jurisdictions of the Italian quarter, there were two

kinds of courts of a commercial character--the _cours de la fonde_ in

towns where trade was busy, and the _cours de la chaine_ in the

sea-ports. The former courts, under their bailiffs, gradually absorbed

the separate courts which the Syrians had at first been permitted to

enjoy under their own _reis_; and the bailiff with his 6 assessors (4

Syrians and 2 Franks) thus came to judge both commercial cases and cases

in which Syrians were involved. The _cours de la chaine_, whose

institution is assigned to Amalric I. (1162-1174), had a civil

jurisdiction in admiralty cases, and, like the _cours de la fonde_, they

were composed of a bailiff and his assessors. Distinct from all these

courts, if similar in its sphere, is the court which the Italian quarter

generally enjoyed in each town under its own consuls--a court privileged

to try all but the graver cases, like murder, theft and forgery. The

court was part of the general immunity which made these quarters

_imperia in imperio_: their exemptions from tolls and from financial

contributions is parallel to their judicial privileges. Regulated by

their mother-town, both in their trade and their government, these

Italian quarters outlasted the collapse of the kingdom, and continued to

exist under Mahommedan rulers. The Church had its separate courts, as in

the West; but their province was perhaps greater than elsewhere. The

church courts could not indeed decide cases of perjury; but, on the

other hand, they tried all matters in which clerical property was

concerned, and all cases of dispute between husband and wife. In other

spheres the immunities and exemptions of the Church offered a far more

serious problem, and especially in the sphere of finance. Perhaps the

supreme defect of the kingdom of Jerusalem was its want of any financial

basis. It is true that the king had a revenue, collected by the vicomte

and paid into the _secretum_ or treasury--a revenue composed of tolls on

the caravans and customs from the ports, of the profits of monopolies

and the proceeds of justice, of poll-taxes on Jews and Mahommedans, and

of the tributes paid by Mahommedan powers. But his expenditure was

large: he had to pay his feudatories; and he had to provide fiefs in

money and kind to those who had not fiefs of land. The contributions

sent to the Holy Land by the monarchs of western Europe, as commutations

in lieu of personal participation in crusades, might help; the fatal

policy of razzias against the neighbouring Mahommedan powers might

procure temporary resources; but what was really necessary was a wide

measure of native taxation, such as was once, and once only, attempted

in 1183. To any such measure the privileges of the Italian quarters, and

still more those of the Church, were inimical. In spite of provisions

somewhat parallel to those of the English statute of mortmain, the

clergy continued to acquire fresh lands at the same time that they

refused to contribute to the defence of the kingdom, and rigorously

exacted the full quota of tithe from every source which they could tap,

and even from booty captured in war. The richest proprietor in the Holy

Land,[26] but practically immune from any charges on its property, the

Church helped, unconsciously, to ruin the kingdom which it should have

supported above all others. It refused to throw its weight into the

scale, and to strengthen the hands of the king against an over-mighty

nobility. On the other hand, it must be admitted that the Church did

not, after the first struggle between Dagobert and Baldwin I., actively

oppose by any hierarchical pretensions the authority of the crown. The

assizes may speak of patriarch and king as conjoint seigneurs in

Jerusalem; but as a matter of fact the king could secure the nomination

of his own patriarch, and after Dagobert the patriarchs are, with the

temporary exception of Stephen in 1128, the confidants and supporters of

the kings. It was the two great orders of the Templars and the

Hospitallers which were, in reality, most dangerous to the kingdom.

Honeycombed as it was by immunities--of seigneurs, of Italian quarters,

of the clergy--the kingdom was most seriously impaired by these

overweening immunists, who, half-lay and half-clerical, took advantage

of their ambiguous position to escape from the duties of either

character. They built up great estates, especially in the principality

of Tripoli; they quarrelled with one another, until their dissensions

prevented any vigorous action; they struggled against the claims of the

clergy to tithes and to rights of jurisdiction; they negotiated with the

Mahommedans as separate powers; they conducted themselves towards the

kings as independent sovereigns. Yet their aid was as necessary as their

influence was noxious. Continually recruited from the West, they

retained the vigour which the native Franks of Palestine gradually lost;

and their corporate strength gave a weight to their arms which made them

indispensable.

In describing the organization of the kingdom, we have also been

describing the causes of its fall. It fell because it had not the

financial or political strength to survive. "Les vices du gouvernement

avaient ete plus puissants que les vertus des gouvernants." But the

vices were not only vices of the government: they were also vices,

partly inevitable, partly moral, in the governing race itself. The

climate was no doubt responsible for much. The Franks of northern Europe

attempted to live a life that suited a northern climate under a southern

sun. They rode incessantly to battle over burning sands, in full

armour--chain mail, long shield and heavy casque--as if they were on

their native French soil. The ruling population was already spread too

thin for the work which it had to do; and exhausted by its efforts, it

gradually became extinct. A constant immigration from the West, bringing

new blood and recruiting the stock, could alone have maintained its

vigour; and such immigration never came. Little driblets of men might

indeed be added to the numbers of the Franks; but the great bodies of

crusaders either perished in Asia Minor, as in 1101 and 1147, or found

themselves thwarted and distrusted by the native Franks. It was indeed

one of the misfortunes of the kingdom that its inhabitants could never

welcome the reinforcements which came to their aid.[27] The barons

suspected the crusaders of ulterior motives, and of designing to get new

principalities for themselves. In any case the native Frank, accustomed

to commercial intercourse and diplomatic negotiations with the

Mahommedans, could hardly share the unreasoning passion to make a dash

for the "infidel." As with the barons, so with the burgesses: they

profited too much by their intercourse with the Mahommedans to abandon

readily the way of peaceful commerce, and they were far more ready to

hinder than to help any martial enterprise. Left to itself, the native

population lost physical and moral vigour. The barons alternated between

the extravagances of Western chivalry and the attractions of Eastern

luxury: they returned from the field to divans with frescoed walls and

floors of mosaic, Persian rugs and embroidered silk hangings. Their

houses, at any rate those in the towns, had thus the characteristics of

Moorish villas; and in them they lived a Moorish life. Their sideboards

were covered with the copper and silver work of Eastern smiths and the

confectioneries of Damascus. They dressed in flowing robes of silk, and

their women wore oriental gauzes covered with sequins. Into these divans

where figures of this kind moved to the music of Saracen instruments,

there entered an inevitable voluptuousness and corruption of manners.

The hardships of war and the excesses of peace shortened the lives of

the men; the kingdom of Jerusalem had eleven kings within a century.

While the men died, the women, living in comparative indolence, lived

longer lives. They became regents to their young children; and the

experience of all medieval minorities reiterates the lesson--woe to the

land where the king is a child and the regent a woman. Still worse was

the frequent remarriage of widowed princesses and heiresses. By the

assizes of the high court, the widow, on the death of her husband, took

half of the estate for herself, and half in guardianship for her

children. _Liberae ire cum terra_, widows carried their estates or

titles to three or four husbands; and as in 15th-century England, the

influence of the heiress was fatal to the peace of the country. At

Antioch, for instance, after the death of Bohemund II. in 1130, his

widow Alice headed a party in favour of the marriage of the heiress

Constance to Manuel of Constantinople, and did not scruple to enter into

negotiations with Zengi of Mosul. Her policy failed; and Constance

successively married Raymund of Antioch and Raynald of Chatillon. The

result was the renewed enmity of the Greek empire, while the French

adventurers who won the prize ruined the prospects of the Franks by

their conduct. In the kingdom matters were almost worse. There was

hardly any regular succession to the throne; and Jerusalem, as Stubbs

writes, "suffered from the weakness of hereditary right and the

jealousies of the elective system" at one and the same time. With the

frequent remarriages of the heiresses of the kingdom, relationships grew

confused and family quarrels frequent; and when Sibylla carried the

crown to Guy de Lusignan, a newcomer disliked by all the relatives of

the crown, she sealed the fate of the kingdom.

It may be doubted--though it seems a harsh verdict to pass on a kingdom

founded by religious zeal on holy soil--whether the kingdom possessed

that moral basis which alone can give a right of survival to any

institution or organization. The crusading states had been founded by

adventurers who thirsted for gain; and the primitive appetite did not

lose its edge with the progress of time. We cannot be certain, indeed,

how far the Frankish lords oppressed their Syrian tenants: the stories

of such oppression have been discredited; while if we may trust the

evidence of a Mahommedan traveller, Ibn Jubair, the lot of the

Mahommedan who lived on Frankish manors was better than it had been

under their native lords.[28] But the habits of the Franks were none the

less habits of lawless greed: they swooped down from their castles, as

Raynald of Chatillon did from Krak of the Desert, to capture Saracens

and hold them to ransom or to plunder caravans. The lust of unlawful

gain had infected the Frankish blood, as it seems to have infected

England during the Hundred Years' War; and in either case nemesis

infallibly came. The Moslems might have endured a state of "infidels";

they could not endure a state of brigands.

6. _The History of the Kingdom and the Crusades from the Loss of Edessa

in 1144 to the Fall of Jerusalem in 1187._--The years 1143-1144 are in

many ways the turning point in the history of the Latin East. In 1143

began the reign of the first native king;[29] and about this date may be

placed the final organization of the kingdom, witnessed by the

completion of its body of customary law. At the same date, however, the

decline of the kingdom also begins; the fall of Edessa is the beginning

of the end. In 1143 John Comnenus and Fulk had just died, and Zengi,

seeing his way clear, threw himself on the great Christian outpost,

against which the tides of Mahommedan attack had so often vainly surged,

and finally entered on Christmas Day 1144. Two years later Zengi died;

but he left an able successor in his son, Nureddin, and an attempt to

recover Edessa was successfully repelled in November 1146. Not only so,

but in the spring of 1147 the Franks were unwise enough to allow the

hope of gaining two small towns to induce them to break the vital

alliance with Damascus. Thus, in itself, the position of affairs in the

Holy Land in 1147 was certainly ominous; and the kingdom might well seem

dependent for its safety on such aid as it might receive from the West.

Early in 1145 news had come from Antioch to Eugenius III. of the fall of

Edessa, and at the end of the year he had sent an encyclical to

France--the natural soil, as we have seen, of crusading zeal. The

response was instantaneous: the king of France himself, who bore on his

conscience the burden of an unpunished massacre by his troops at Vitry

in 1142,[30] took the crusading vow on the Christmas day of 1145. But

the greatest success was attained when St Bernard--no great believer in

pilgrimages, and naturally disposed to doubt the policy of a second

Crusade--was induced by the pope to become the preacher of the new

movement. To the crusading king of France St Bernard added the king of

Germany, when, in Christmas week of 1146, he induced Conrad III. to take

the vow by his sermon in the cathedral of Spires. Thus was begun the

Second Crusade,[31] under auspices still more favourable than those

which attended the beginning of the First, seeing that kings now took

the place of knights, while the new crusaders would no longer be

penetrating into the wilds, but would find a friendly basis of

operations ready to their hands in Frankish Syria. But the more

favourable the auspices, the greater proved the failure. Already at the

final meeting at Etampes, in 1147, difficulties arose. Manuel Comnenus

demanded that all conquests made by the crusaders should be his fiefs;

and the question was debated whether the crusaders should follow the

land route through Hungary, along the old road of Charlemagne, or should

go by sea to the Holy Land. In this question the envoys of Manuel and of

Roger of Sicily, who were engaged in hostilities with one another, took

opposite sides. Conrad, related by marriage to Manuel, decided in favour

of the land route, which Manuel desired because it brought the Crusade

more under his direction, and because, if the route by sea were

followed, Roger of Sicily might be able to divert the crusading ships

against Constantinople. As it was, a struggle raged between Roger and

Manuel during the whole progress of the Crusade, which greatly

contributed towards its failure, preventing, as it did, any assistance

from the Eastern empire. Nor was there any real unity among the

crusaders themselves. The crusaders of northern Germany never went to

the Holy Land at all; they were allowed the crusaders' privileges for

attacking the Wends to the east of the Elbe--a fact which at once

attests the cleavage between northern and southern Germany (intensified

of late years by the war of investitures), and anticipates the age of

the Teutonic knights and their long Crusade on the Baltic. The crusaders

of the Low Countries and of England took the sea route, and attacked and

captured Lisbon on their way, thus helping to found the kingdom of

Portugal, and achieving the one real success which was gained by the

Second Crusade.[32] Among the great army of crusaders who actually

marched to Jerusalem there was little real unity. Conrad and Louis VII.

started separately, and at different times, in order to avoid

dissensions between their armies; and when they reached Asia Minor

(after encountering some difficulties in Greek territory) they still

acted separately. Eager to win the first spoils, the German crusaders,

who were in advance of the French, attempted a raid into the sultanate

of Iconium; but after a stern fight at Dorylaeum they were forced to

retreat (October 1147), and for the most part perished by the way. Louis

VII., who now appeared, was induced by this failure to take the long and

circuitous route by the west coast of Asia Minor; but even so he had

lost the majority of his troops when he reached the Holy Land in 1148.

Here he joined Conrad (who had come by sea from Constantinople) and

Baldwin III., and after some deliberation the three sovereigns resolved

to attack Damascus. The attack was impolitic: Damascus was the one ally

which could help the Franks to stem the advance of Nureddin. It proved

as futile as it was impolitic; for the vizier of Damascus,

Muin-eddin-Anar, was able to sow dissension between the native Franks

and the crusaders; and by bribes and promises of tribute he succeeded in

inducing the former to make the siege an absolute failure, at the end of

only four days (July 28th, 1148). The Second Crusade now collapsed.

Conrad returned to Constantinople in the autumn of 1148, and Louis VII.

returned by sea to France in the spring of 1149. The only effects of

this great movement were effects prejudicial to the ends towards which

it was directed. The position of the Franks in the Holy Land was not

improved by the attack on Damascus; while the ignominious failure of a

Crusade led by two kings brought the whole crusading movement into

discredit in western Europe, and it was utterly in vain that Suger and

St Bernard attempted to gather a fresh Crusade in 1150.

The result of the failure of the Second Crusade was the renewal of

Nureddin's attacks. The rest of the county of Edessa, including

Tell-bashir on the west, was now conquered (1150); while Raymund of

Antioch was defeated and killed (in 1149), and several towns in the east

of his principality were captured. Baldwin III. attempted to make head

against these troubles, partly by renewing the old alliance with

Damascus, partly by drawing closer to Manuel of Constantinople. For the

next twenty years, during the reigns of Baldwin and his brother Amalric

I., there is indeed a close connexion between the kingdom of Jerusalem

and the East Roman empire. Baldwin and Amalric both married into the

Comnenian house, while Manuel married Mary of Antioch, the daughter of

Raymund. In the north Manuel enjoyed the homage of Antioch, which his

father had gained in 1137, and the nominal possession of Tell-bashir,

which had been ceded to him by Baldwin III.: in the south he joined with

Amalric I. in the attempt to acquire Egypt (1168-1171). In this way he

acquired a certain ascendancy over the Latin kings: Baldwin III. rode

behind him at Antioch in 1159 without any of the insignia of royalty,

and in an inscription at Bethlehem of 1172 Amalric I. had the name of

the emperor written above his own.[33] The patronage of Constantinople,

to which Jerusalem was thus practically surrendered, contributed to some

slight extent in maintaining the kingdom against Nureddin. But there

were dissensions within, both between Baldwin and his mother, Melisinda,

who sought to protract her regency unduly, and between contending

parties in Antioch, where the hand of Constance, Raymund's widow, was a

desirable prize[34]; while from without the horns of the crescent were

slowly closing in on the kingdom. Nureddin pursued in his policy the

tactics which the Mahommedans used against the Franks in battle: he

sought to envelop their territories on every side. In 1154 fell

Damascus, and the crescent closed perceptibly in the north: the most

valuable ally of the kingdom was lost, and the way seemed clear from

Aleppo (the peculiar seat of Nureddin's power) into Egypt. On the other

hand, in 1153 Baldwin III. had taken Ascalon, which for fifty years had

mocked the efforts of successive kings, and by this stroke he might

appear to have closed for Nureddin the route to Egypt, and to have

opened a path for its conquest by the Franks. For the future, events

hinged on the situation of affairs in Egypt, and in Egypt the fate of

the kingdom of Jerusalem was finally decided (see EGYPT: _History_,

"Mahommedan Period"). There was a race for the possession of the country

between Nureddin's lieutenant Shirguh or Shirkuh and Amalric I., the

brother and successor of Baldwin III.; and in the race Shirkuh proved

the winner.

Since the days of Godfrey and Baldwin I., Egypt had been a goal of

Latin ambition, and the capture of Ascalon must obviously have given

form and strength to the projects for its conquest. Plans of attack were

sketched: routes were traced: distances were measured; and finally in

1163 there came the impulse from within which turned these plans into

action. The Shiite caliphs of Egypt were by this time the playthings of

contending viziers, as the Sunnite caliphs of Bagdad had long been the

puppets of Turkish sultans or amirs; and in 1164 Amalric I. and Nureddin

were fighting in Egypt in support of two rival viziers, Dirgham and

Shawar. For Nureddin the fight meant the acquisition of an heretical

country for the true faith of the Sunnite, and the final enveloping of

the Latin kingdom:[35] for Amalric it meant the escape from Nureddin's

net, and a more direct and lucrative contact with Eastern trade. Into

the vicissitudes of the fight it is not necessary here to enter; but in

the issue Nureddin won, in spite of the support which Manuel gave to

Amalric. Nureddin's Kurdish lieutenant, Shirguh, succeeded in

establishing in power the vizier whom he favoured, and finally in

becoming vizier himself (January 1169); and when he died, his nephew

Saladin (Sala-ed-din) succeeded to his position (March 1169), and made

himself, on the death of the caliph in 1171, sole ruler in Egypt. Thus

the Shiite caliphate became extinct: in the mosques of Cairo the name of

the caliph of Bagdad was now used; and the long-disunited Mahommedans at

last faced the Christians as a solid body. But nevertheless the kingdom

of Jerusalem continued almost unmenaced, and practically undiminished,

for the next sixteen years. If a religious union had been effected

between Egypt and northern Syria, political disunion still remained; and

the Franks were safe as long as it lasted. Saladin acted as the peer of

Nureddin rather than as his subject; and the jealousy between the two

kept both inactive till the death of Nureddin in 1174. Nureddin only

left a minor in his place: Amalric, who died in the same year, left a

son (Baldwin IV.) who was not only a minor but also a leper; and thus

the stage seemed cleared for Saladin. He was confronted, however, by

Raymund, count of Tripoli, the one man of ability among the decadent

Franks, who acted as guardian of the kingdom; while he was also occupied

in trying to win for himself the Syrian possessions of Nureddin. The

task engaged his attention for nine years. Damascus he acquired as early

as 1174; but Raymund supported the heir of Nureddin in his capital at

Aleppo, and it was not until 1183 that Saladin entered the city, and

finally brought Egypt and northern Syria under a single rule.

The hour of peril for the Latin kingdom had now at last struck. It had

done little to prepare itself for that hour. Repeated appeals had been

sent to the West from the beginning of the Egyptian affair (1163)

onwards; while in 1184-1185 a great mission, on which the patriarch of

Jerusalem and the masters of the Templars and the Hospitallers were all

present, came to France and England, and offered the crown of Jerusalem

to Philip Augustus and Henry II. in turn, in order to secure their

presence in the Holy Land.[36] The only result of these appeals was the

rise of a regular system of taxation in France and England, _ad

sustentationem Jerosolimitanae terrae_, which starts about 1185 (though

there had already been isolated taxes in 1147 and 1166), and which has

been described as the beginning of modern taxation. In the East itself,

with the exception of the tax of 1183,[37] nothing was done that was

good, and two things were done which were evil. Sibylla married her

second husband, Guy de Lusignan, in 1180--a marriage destined to be the

cause of many dissensions; for Sibylla, the eldest daughter of Amalric

I., carried to her husband--a French adventurer--a presumptive title to

the crown, which would never be admitted without dispute. In 1186 Guy

eventually became king, after the death of Baldwin V. (Sibylla's son by

her first marriage); but his coronation was in violation of the promise

given to Raymund of Tripoli (that in the event of the death of Baldwin

V. without issue the succession should be determined by the pope, the

emperor and the kings of France and England), and Guy, with a weak

title, was unable to exercise any real control over the kingdom. At this

point another French adventurer, who had already made himself somewhat

of a name in Antioch, gave the final blow to the kingdom. Raynald of

Chatillon, the second husband of Constance of Antioch, after languishing

in captivity from 1159 to 1176, had been granted the seignory of Krak,

to the east and south of the Dead Sea. From this point of vantage he

began depredations on the Red Sea (1182), building a fleet, and seeking

to attack Medina and Mecca--a policy which may be interpreted either as

mere buccaneering, or as a calculated attempt to deal a blow at

Mahommedanism in its very centre. Driven from the Red Sea by Saladin, he

turned from buccaneering to brigandage, and infested the great

trade-route from Damascus to Egypt, which passed close by his seignory.

In 1186 he attacked a caravan in which the sister of Saladin was

travelling, thus violating a four years' truce, which, after some two

years' skirmishing, Saladin and Raymund of Tripoli had made in the

previous year owing to the general prevalence of famine.[38] The

coronation of one French adventurer and the conduct of another, whom the

first was unable to control, meant the ruin of the kingdom; and Saladin

at last delivered in full force his long-deferred attack. The Crusade

was now at last answered by the counter-Crusade--the _jihad_; for though

for many years past Saladin had, in his attempt to acquire all the

inheritance of Nureddin, left Palestine unmenaced and intact, his

ultimate aim was always the holy war and the recovery of Jerusalem. The

acquisition of Aleppo could only make that supreme object more readily

attainable; and so Saladin had spent his time in acquiring Aleppo, but

only in order that he might ultimately "attain the goal of his desires,

and set the mosque of Asha free, to which Allah once led in the night

his servant Mahomet." Thus it was on a kingdom of crusaders who had lost

the crusading spirit that a new Crusade swept down; and Saladin's army

in 1187 had the spirit and the fire of the Latin crusaders of 1099. The

tables were turned; and fighting on their own soil for the recovery of

what was to them too a holy place, the Mahommedans easily carried the

day. At Tiberias a little squadron of the brethren of the two Orders

went down before Saladin's cavalry in May; at Hattin the levy _en masse_

of the kingdom, some 20,000 strong, foolishly marching over a sandy

plain under the heat of a July sun, was utterly defeated; and after a

fortnight's siege Jerusalem capitulated (October 2nd, 1187). In the

kingdom itself nothing was left to the Latins by the end of 1189 except

the city of Tyre; and to the north of the kingdom they only held Antioch

and Tripoli, with the Hospitallers' fortress at Margat. The fingers of

the clock had been pushed back; once more things were as they had been

at the time of the First Crusade; once more the West must arm itself for

the holy war and the recovery of Jerusalem--but now it must face a

united Mahommedan world, where in 1096 it had found political and

religious dissension, and it must attempt its vastly heavier task

without the morning freshness of a new religious impulse, and with

something of the weariness of a hundred years of struggle upon its

shoulders.

7. _The Forty Years' Crusade for the Recovery of Jerusalem,

1189-1229._--The forty years from 1189 to 1229 form a period of

incessant crusading, occupied by Crusades of every kind. There are the

Third, Fifth and Sixth Crusades against the "infidel" Mahommedans

encamped in the Holy Land; there is the Albigensian Crusade against the

heretic Cathars; there is the Fourth Crusade, directed in the issue

against the schismatic Greeks; lastly, there are the Crusades waged by

the papacy against revolted Christians--John of England and Frederick

II. Our concern lies with the first kind of Crusade, and with the other

three only so far as they bear on the first, and as they illustrate the

immense widening which the term "Crusade" now underwent--a widening

accompanied by its inevitable corollary of shallowness of motive and

degradation of impulse.

_The Third Crusade, 1189-1192._--Conrad of Montferrat was, as much as

any one man, responsible for the Third Crusade. Compelled to leave the

court of Constantinople, which he had been serving, he had sailed for

the Holy Land and reached Tyre about three weeks after the battle of

Hattin. He had saved Tyre; and from it he sent his appeals to the West.

Not the least effective of these appeals was a great poster which he had

circulated in Europe, and which represented the Holy Sepulchre denied by

the horses of the Mahommedans. Meanwhile the papacy, as soon as the news

reached Rome, despatched encyclicals throughout Europe; and soon a new

Crusade was in full swing. But the Third Crusade, unlike the First, does

not spring from the papacy, which was passing through one of its epochs

of depression; it springs from the lay power, which, represented by the

three strong monarchies of Germany, England and France, was at this time

dominant in Europe. In Germany it was the solemn national diet of Mainz

(Easter 1188) which "swore the expedition" to the Holy Land; in France

and England the agreement of the two kings decided upon a joint Crusade.

The very means which Philip Augustus and Henry II. took, in order to

further the Crusade, show its lay aspect. A scheme of taxation--the

Saladin tithe--was imposed on all who did not take the cross; and this

taxation, while on the one hand it drove many to take the cross in order

to escape its incidence, on the other hand provided a necessary

financial basis for military operations.[39] The lay basis of the Third

Crusade made it, in one sense, the greatest of all Crusades, in which

all the three great monarchs of western Europe participated; but it also

made it a failure, for the kings of France and England, changing

_caelum_, _non animum_, carried their political rivalries into the

movement, in which it had been agreed that they should be sunk.

Spiritually, therefore, the Third Crusade is inferior to the First,

however imposing it may be in its material aspects. Yet it must be

admitted that the idea of a spiritual regeneration accompanied the

crusading movement of 1188. Europe had sinned in the face of God;

otherwise Jerusalem would never have fallen; and the idea of a spiritual

reform from within, as the necessary corollary and accompaniment of the

expedition of Christianity without, breathes in some of the papal

letters, just as, during the conciliar movement, the _causa

reformationis_ was blended with the _causa unionis_.

We may conceive of the Third Crusade under the figure of a number of

converging lines, all seeking to reach a common centre. That centre is

Acre. The siege of Acre, as arduous and heroic in many of its episodes

as the siege of Troy, had been begun in the summer of 1189 by Guy de

Lusignan, who, captured by Saladin at the battle of Hattin, and released

on parole, had at once broken his word and returned to the attack. The

army which was besieging Acre was soon joined by various contingents;

for Acre, after all, was the vital point, and its capture would open the

way to Jerusalem. Two of these contingents alone concern us here--the

German and the Anglo-French. Frederick I. of Germany, using a diplomacy

which corresponds to the lay character of the Third Crusade, had sought

to prepare his way by embassies to the king of Hungary, the Eastern

emperor and the sultan of Iconium. Starting from Regensburg in May 1189,

the German army marched quietly through Hungary; but difficulties arose,

as they had arisen in 1147, as soon as the frontiers of the Eastern

empire were reached. The emperor Isaac Angelus had not only the old

grudge of all Eastern emperors against the "upstart" emperor of the

West; he had also allied himself with Saladin, in order to acquire for

his empire the patronage of the Holy Places and religious supremacy in

the Levant. The difficulties between Frederick and Isaac Angelus became

acute: in November 1189 Frederick wrote to his son Henry, asking him to

induce the pope to preach a Crusade against the schismatic Greeks. But

terms were at last arranged, and by the end of March 1190 the Germans

had all crossed to the shores of Asia Minor. Taking a route midway

between the eastern route of the crusaders of 1097 and the western route

of Louis VII. in 1148, Frederick marched by Philadelphia and Iconium,

not without dust and heat, until he reached the river Salof, in Armenian

territory. Here, with the burden of the day now past, the fine old

crusader--he had joined before in the Second Crusade, forty years

ago--perished by accident in the river; and of all his fine army only a

thousand men won their way through, under his son, Frederick of Swabia,

to join the ranks before Acre (October 1190). The Anglo-French

detachment achieved a far greater immediate success. War had indeed

disturbed the original agreement of Gisors between Philip Augustus and

Henry II., but a new agreement was made between Henry's successor,

Richard I., and the French king at Nonancourt (December 1189), by which

the two monarchs were to meet at Vezelay next year, and then follow the

sea route to the Holy Land together. They met, and by different routes

they both reached Sicily, where they wintered together (1190-1191). The

enforced inactivity of a whole winter was the mother of disputes and bad

blood; and when Philip sailed for the Holy Land, at the end of March

1191, the failure of the Crusade was already decided. Richard soon

followed; but while Philip sailed straight for Acre, Richard occupied

himself by the way in conquering Cyprus--partly out of knight-errantry,

and in order to avenge an insult offered to his betrothed wife

Berengaria by the despot of the island, partly perhaps out of policy,

and in order to provide a basis of supplies and of operations for the

armies attempting to recover Palestine. In any case, he is the founder

of the Latin kingdom of Cyprus (for he afterwards sold his new

acquisition to Guy de Lusignan, who established a dynasty in the

island); and thereby he made possible the survival of the institutions

and assizes of Jerusalem, which were continued in Cyprus until it was

conquered by the Ottoman Turks. From Cyprus Richard sailed to Acre,

arriving on the 8th of June, and in little more than a month he was

able, in virtue of the large reinforcements he brought, and in spite of

dissensions in the Christian camp which he helped to foment, to bring

the two years' siege to a successful issue (July 12th, 1191). It was

indeed time; the privations of the besiegers during the previous winter

had been terrible; and the position of affairs had only been made worse

by the dissensions between Guy de Lusignan and Conrad of Montferrat, who

had begun to claim the crown in return for his services, and had, on the

death of Sibylla, the wife of Guy, reinforced his claim by a marriage

with her younger sister, Isabella. In these dissensions it was

inevitable that Philip Augustus and Richard I., already discordant,

should take contrary sides; and while Richard naturally sided with Guy

de Lusignan, who came from his own county of Poitou, Philip as naturally

sided with Conrad. At the end of July it was decided that Guy should

remain king for his life, and Conrad should be his successor; but as

three days afterwards Philip Augustus began his return to France

(pleading ill-health, but in reality eager to gain possession of

Flanders), the settlement availed little for the success of the Crusade.

Richard stayed in the Holy Land for another year, during which he won a

battle at Arsuf and refortified Jaffa. But far more important than any

hostilities are the negotiations which, for the whole year, Richard

conducted with Saladin. They show the lay aspect of the Third Crusade;

they anticipate the Crusade of Frederick II.--for Richard was attempting

to secure the same concessions which Frederick secured by the same means

which he used. They show again the closer approximation and better

understanding with the Mahommedans, which marks this Crusade. Nothing is

more striking in these respects than Richard's proposal that Saladin's

brother should marry his own sister Johanna and receive Jerusalem and

the contiguous towns on the coast. In the event, a peace was made for

three years (September 2nd, 1192), by which Lydda and Ramlah were to be

equally divided, Ascalon was to be destroyed, and small bodies of

crusaders were to be allowed to visit the Holy Sepulchre. Meanwhile

Conrad of Montferrat, at the very instant when his superior ability had

finally forced Richard to recognize him as king, had been assassinated

(April 1192): Guy de Lusignan had bought Cyprus from Richard, and had

sailed away to establish himself there;[40] and Henry of Champagne,

Richard's nephew, had been called to the throne of Jerusalem, and had

given himself a title by marrying Conrad's widow, Isabella. In this

condition Richard left the Holy Land, when he began his eventful return,

in October 1192. The Crusade had failed--failed because a leaderless

army, torn by political dissensions and fighting on a foreign soil,

could not succeed against forces united by religious zeal under the

banner of a leader like Saladin. Yet it had at any rate saved for the

Christians the principality of Antioch, the county of Tripoli, and some

of the coast towns of the kingdom;[41] and if it had failed to

accomplish its object, it had left behind, none the less, many important

results. The difficulties which had arisen between Isaac Angelus and

Frederick Barbarossa contain the germs of the Fourth Crusade; the

negotiations between Richard and Saladin contain the germs of the Sixth.

National rivalries had been accentuated and national differences brought

into prominence by the meeting of the nations in a common enterprise;

while, on the other hand, Mahommedans and Christians had fraternized as

they had never done before during the progress of a Crusade. But what

the Third Crusade showed most clearly was that the crusading movement

was being lost to the papacy, and becoming part of the demesne of the

secular state--organized by the state on its own basis of taxation, and

conducted by the state according to its own method of negotiation. This

after all is the great change; and even the genius of an Innocent III.

"could not make undone what had once been done." On the contrary, the

thing once done would go further; and the state would take up the name

of Crusade in order to cover, and under such cover to achieve, its own

objects and ambitions, as in the future it was destined again and again

to do.

_The Fourth Crusade, 1202-1204._--The history of the Fourth Crusade is a

history of the predominance of the lay motive, of the attempt of the

papacy to escape from that predominance, and to establish its old

direction of the Crusade, and of the complete failure of its attempt.

Until the accession of Innocent III. in 1198 the lay motive was supreme;

and its representative was Henry VI.--the greatest politician of his

day, and in many ways the greatest emperor since Charlemagne. In 1195

Amalric, the brother of Guy de Lusignan, and his successor in Cyprus,

sought the title of king from Henry and did homage; and at the same time

Leo of Lesser Armenia, in order to escape from dependence on the Eastern

empire, took the same course. Henry thus gained a basis in the Levant;

while the death of Saladin in 1193, followed by a civil war between his

brother, Malik-al-Adil, and his sons for the possession of his

dominions, weakened the position of the Mahommedans. As emperor, Henry

was eager to resume the imperial Crusade which had been stopped by his

father's death; while both as Frederick's successor and as heir to the

Norman kings of Sicily, who had again and again waged war against the

Eastern empire, he had an account to settle with the rulers of

Constantinople. The project of a Crusade and of an attack on

Constantinople wove themselves into a single thread, in a way which very

definitely anticipates the Fourth Crusade of 1202-1204. In 1195 Henry

took the cross; some time before, he had already sent to Isaac Angelus

to demand compensation for the injuries done to Frederick I., along with

the cession of all territories ever conquered by the Norman kings of

Sicily, and a fleet to co-operate with the new Crusade. In the same

year, however, Isaac was dethroned by his brother, Alexius III.; but

Henry married Isaac's daughter Irene to his brother, Philip of Swabia,

and thus attempted to give the Hohenstaufen a new title and a valid

claim against the usurper Alexius. Thus armed he pushed forward the

preparations for the Crusade in Germany--a Crusade whose first object

would have been an attack on Alexius III.; but in the middle of his

preparations he died in Sicily in the autumn of 1197, and the Crusade

collapsed. Some results were, however, achieved by a body of German

crusaders which had sailed in advance of Henry; by its influence Amalric

of Cyprus succeeded Henry of Champagne, who died in 1197, as king of

Jerusalem, and a vassal of the emperor thus became ruler in the Holy

Land; while the Teutonic order, which had begun as a hospital during the

siege of Acre (1190-1191), now received its organization. Some of the

coast towns, too, were recovered by the German crusaders, especially

Beirut; and in 1198 the new king Amalric II. was able to make a truce

with Malik-al-Adil for the next five years.

"The true heir of Henry VI.," Ranke has said, "is Innocent III.," and

nowhere is this more true than in respect of the crusading movement.

Throughout the course of his crowded and magnificent pontificate,

Innocent III. made the Crusade his ultimate object, and attempted to

bring it back to its old religious basis and under its old papal

direction. By the spring of 1200, owing to Innocent's exertions, a new

Crusade was in full progress, especially in France, where Fulk of

Neuilly played the part once played by Peter the Hermit. Like the First

Crusade, the Fourth Crusade also--in its personnel, but not its

direction--was a French enterprise; and its leading members were French

feudatories like Theobald of Champagne (who was chosen leader of the

Crusade), Baldwin of Flanders (the future emperor of Constantinople),

and the count of Blois. The objective, which these three original chiefs

of the Fourth Crusade proposed to themselves, was Egypt.[42] Since 1163

the importance of acquiring Egypt had, as we have seen, been definitely

understood, and in the summer of 1192 Richard I. had been advised by

his counsellors that Cairo and not Jerusalem was the true point of

attack; while in 1200 there was the additional reason for preferring an

attack on Egypt, that the truce in the Holy Land between Amalric II. and

Malik-al-Adil had still three years to run. It is Egypt therefore--to

which, it must be remembered, the centre of Mahommedan power had now

been virtually shifted, and to which motives of trade impelled the

Italian towns (since from it they could easily reach the Red Sea, and

the commerce of the Indian Ocean)--it is Egypt which is henceforth the

normal goal of the Crusades. This is one of the many facts which

differentiate the Crusades of the 13th from those of the preceding

century. But, with Syria in the hands of the Mahommedans, the attack on

Egypt must necessarily be directed by sea; and thus the Crusade

henceforth becomes--what the Third Crusade, here as elsewhere the

turning-point in crusading history, had already in part been--a maritime

enterprise. Accordingly, early in 1201, envoys from each of the three

chiefs of the Fourth Crusade (among whom was Villehardouin, the

historian of the Crusade) came to Venice to negotiate for a passage to

Egypt. An agreement was made between the doge and the envoys, by which

transport and active help were to be given by Venice in return for

85,000 marks and the cession of half of the conquests made by the

crusaders. But the Fourth Crusade was not to be plain sailing to Egypt.

It became involved in a maelstrom of conflicting political motives, by

which it was swept to Constantinople. Here we must distinguish between

cause and occasion. There were three great causes which made for an

attack on Constantinople by the West. There was first of all the old

crusading grudge against the Eastern empire, and its fatal policy of

regarding the whole of the Levant as its lost provinces, to be restored

as soon as conquered, or at any rate held in fee, by the Western

crusaders--a policy which led the Eastern emperors either to give

niggardly aid or to pursue obstructive tactics, and caused them to be

blamed for the failure of the Crusades in 1101, and 1149, and in 1190.

It is significant of the final result of these things that already in

1147 Roger of Sicily, engaged in war with Manuel, had proposed the

sea-route for the Second Crusade, perhaps with some intention of

diverting it against Constantinople; and in the winter of 1189-1190

Barbarossa, as we have seen, had actually thought and spoken of an

attack on Constantinople. In the second place, there was the commercial

grudge of Venice, which had only been given large privileges by the

Eastern empire to desire still larger, and had, moreover, been annoyed

not only by alterations or revocations of those privileges, such as the

usurper Alexius III. had but recently attempted, but also by the

temporary destruction of their colony in Constantinople in 1171. Lastly,

and perhaps most of all, there is the old Norman blood-feud with

Constantinople, as old as the old Norse seeking for Micklegarth, and

keen and deadly ever since the Norman conquest of the Greek themes in

South Italy (1041 onwards). The heirs of the Norman kings were the

Hohenstaufen; and we have already seen Henry VI. planning a Crusade

which would primarily have been directed against Constantinople. It is

this Hohenstaufen policy which becomes the primary occasion of the

diversion of the Fourth Crusade. Philip of Swabia, engaged in a struggle

with the papacy, found Innocent III. planning a Guelph Crusade, which

should be under the direction of the church; and to this Guelph project

he opposed the Ghibelline plan of Henry VI., with such success that he

transmuted the Fourth Crusade into a political expedition against

Constantinople. To such a policy of transmutation he was urged by two

things. On the one hand, the death of the count of Champagne (May 1201)

had induced the crusaders to elect as their leader Boniface of

Montferrat, the brother of Conrad; and Boniface was the cousin of

Philip, and interested in Constantinople, where not only Conrad, but

another brother as well, had served, and suffered for their service at

the hands of their masters. On the other hand Alexius, the son of the

dethroned Isaac Angelus, was related to Philip through his marriage with

Irene; and Alexius had escaped to the German court to urge the

restoration of his father. On Christmas day 1201, Philip, Alexius and

Boniface all met at Hagenau[43] and formulated (one may suppose) a plan

for the diversion of the Crusade. Events played into their hands. When

the crusaders gathered at Venice in the autumn of 1202, it was found

impossible to get together the 85,000 marks promised to Venice. The

Venetians--already, perhaps, indoctrinated in the Hohenstaufen

plan--indicated to the leaders a way of meeting the difficulty: they had

only to lend their services to the republic for certain ends which it

desired to compass, and the debt was settled. The conquest of Zara, a

port on the Adriatic claimed by the Venetians from the king of Hungary,

was the only object overtly mentioned; but the idea of the expedition to

Constantinople was in the air, and the crusaders knew what was

ultimately expected. It took time and effort to bring them round to the

diversion: the pope--naturally enough--set his face sternly against the

project, the more as the usurper, Alexius III., was in negotiation with

him in order to win his support against the Hohenstaufen, and Innocent

hoped to find, as Alexius promised, a support and a reinforcement for

the Crusade in an alliance with the Greek empire. But they came round

none the less, in spite of Innocent's renewed prohibitions. In November

1202 Zara was taken; and at Zara the fatal decision was made. The young

Alexius joined the army; and in spite of the opposition of stern

crusaders like Simon de Montfort, who sailed away ultimately to

Palestine, he succeeded by large promises in inducing the army to follow

in his train to Constantinople. By the middle of July 1203

Constantinople was reached, the usurper was in flight, and Isaac Angelus

was restored to his throne. But when the time came for Alexius to fulfil

his promises, the difficulty which had arisen at Venice in the autumn of

1202 repeated itself. Alexius's resources were insufficient, and he had

to beg the crusaders to wait at Constantinople for a year in order that

he might have time. They waited; but the closer contact of a prolonged

stay only brought into fuller play the essential antipathy of the Greek

and the Latin. Continual friction developed at last into the open fire

of war; and in March 1204 the crusaders resolved to storm

Constantinople, and to divide among themselves the Eastern empire. In

April Constantinople was captured; in May Baldwin of Flanders became the

first Latin emperor of Constantinople. Venice had her own reward; a

Venetian, Thomas Morosini, became patriarch; and the doge of Venice

added "a quarter and a half" of the Eastern empire--chiefly the coasts

and the islands--to the sphere of his sway. If Venetian cupidity had not

originally deflected the Crusade (and it was the view of contemporary

writers that Venice had committed her first treason against Christianity

by diverting the Crusade from Egypt in order to get commercial

concessions from Malik-al-Adil,[44]) yet it had at any rate profited

exceedingly from that deflection; and the Hohenstaufen and their protege

Alexius only reaped dust and ashes. For, however Ghibelline might be the

original intention, the result was not commensurate with the subtlety of

the design, and the power of the pope was rather increased than

diminished by the event of the Crusade. The crusaders appealed to

Innocent to ratify the subjugation of a schismatic people, and the union

of the Eastern and Western Churches; and Innocent, dazzled by the magic

of the _fait accompli_, not unwillingly acquiesced. He might soothe

himself by reflecting that the basis for the Crusade, which he had hoped

to find in Alexius III., was still more securely offered by Baldwin; he

could not but feel with pride that he had become "as it were pope and

apostolicus of a second world." Yet the result of the Fourth Crusade was

on the whole disastrous both for the papacy and for the crusading

movement. The pope had been forced to see the helm of the Crusades

wrenched from his grasp; and the Albigensian Crusade against the

heretics of southern France was soon afterwards to show that the example

could be followed, and that the land-hunger of the north French baronage

could exploit a Crusade as successfully as ever did Hohenstaufen policy

leagued with Venetian cupidity. The Crusade lost its _elan_ when it

became a move in a political game. If the Third Crusade had been

directed by the lay power towards the true spiritual end of all

Crusades, the Fourth was directed by the lay power to its own lay ends;

and the political and commercial motives, winch were deeply implicit

even in the First Crusade, had now become dominantly explicit. In a

simpler and more immediate sense, the capture of Constantinople was

detrimental to the movement from which it sprang. The precarious empire

which had been founded in 1204 drained away all the vigorous adventurers

of the West for its support for many years to come, and the Holy Land

was starved to feed a land less holy, but equally greedy of men.[45] No

basis for the Crusades was ever to be found in the Latin empire of the

East; and Innocent, after vainly hoping for the new Crusade which was to

emerge from Constantinople, was by 1208 compelled to return to the old

idea of a Crusade proceeding simply and immediately from the West to the

East.

_The Fifth Crusade, 1218-1221._--The glow and the glamour of the

Crusades disappear save for the pathetic sunset splendours of St Louis,

as Dandolo dies, and gallant Villehardouin drops his pen. But before St

Louis sailed for Damietta there intervened the miserable failure of one

Crusade, and the secular and diplomatic success of another. The Fifth

Crusade is the last which is started in that pontificate of

Crusades--the pontificate of Innocent III. It owed its origin to his

feverish zeal for the recovery of Jerusalem, rather than to any pressing

need in the Holy Land. Here there reigned, during the forty years of the

loss of Jerusalem, an almost unbroken peace. Malik-al-Adil, the brother

of Saladin, had by 1200 succeeded to his brother's possessions not only

in Egypt but also in Syria, and he granted the Christians a series of

truces (1198-1203, 1204-1210, 1211-1217). While the Holy Land was thus

at peace, crusaders were also being drawn elsewhere by the needs of the

Latin empire of Constantinople, or the attractions of the Albigensian

Crusade.[46] But Innocent could never consent to forget Jerusalem, as

long as his right hand retained its cunning. The pathos of the

Children's Crusade of 1212 only nerved him to fresh efforts. A shepherd

boy named Stephen had appeared in France, and had induced thousands to

follow his guidance: with his boyish army he rode on a wagon southward

to Marseilles, promising to lead his followers dry-shod through the

seas. In Germany a child from Cologne, named Nicolas, gathered some

20,000 young crusaders by the like promises, and led them into Italy.

Stephen's army was kidnapped by slave-dealers and sold into Egypt; while

Nicolas's expedition left nothing behind it but an after-echo in the

legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. But for Innocent these outbursts of

the revivalist element, which always accompanied the Crusades, had their

moral: "the very children put us to shame," he wrote; "while we sleep

they go forth gladly to conquer the Holy Land." In the fourth Lateran

council of 1215 Innocent found his opportunity to rekindle the

flickering fires. Before this great gathering of all Christian Europe he

proclaimed a Crusade for the year 1217, and in common deliberation it

was resolved that a truce of God should reign for the next four years,

while for the same time all trade with the Levant should cease. Here

were two things attempted--neither, indeed, for the first

time[47]--which 14th century pamphleteers on the subject of the Crusades

unanimously advocate as the necessary conditions of success; there was

to be peace in Europe and a commercial war with Egypt. This

statesmanlike beginning of a Crusade, preached, as no Crusade had ever

been preached before, in a general council of all Europe, presaged well

for its success. In Germany (where Frederick II. himself took the cross

in this same year) a large body of crusaders gathered together: in 1217

the south-east sent the duke of Austria and the king of Hungary to the

Holy Land; while in 1218 an army from the north-west joined at Acre the

forces of the previous year. Egypt had already been indicated by

Innocent III. in 1215 as the goal of attack, and it was accordingly

resolved to begin the Crusade by the siege of Damietta, on the eastern

delta of the Nile. The original leader of the Crusade was John of

Brienne, king of Jerusalem (who had succeeded Amalric II., marrying

Maria, the daughter of Amalric's wife Isabella by her former husband,

Conrad of Montferrat); but after the end of 1218 the cardinal legate

Pelagius, fortified by papal letters, claimed the command. In spite of

dissensions between the cardinal and the king, and in spite of the

offers of Malik-al-Kamil (who succeeded Malik-al-Adil at the end of

1218), the crusaders finally carried the siege to a successful

conclusion by the end of 1219. The capture of Damietta was a

considerable feat of arms, but nothing was done to clinch the advantage

which had been won, and the whole of the year 1220 was spent by the

crusaders in Damietta, partly in consolidating their immediate position,

and partly in waiting for the arrival of Frederick II., who had promised

to appear in 1221. In 1221 Hermann of Salza, the master of the Teutonic

order, along with the duke of Bavaria, appeared in the camp before

Damietta; and as it seemed useless to wait any longer for Frederick

II.,[48] the cardinal, in spite of the opposition of King John, gave the

signal for the march on Cairo. The army reached a fortress erected by

the sultan in 1219 (afterwards, from 1221, the town of Mansura), and

encamped there at the end of July. Here the sultan reiterated terms

which he had already offered several times before--the cession of most

of the kingdom of Jerusalem, the surrender of the cross (captured by

Saladin in 1187), and the restoration of all prisoners. King John urged

the acceptance of these terms. The legate insisted on a large indemnity

in addition: the negotiations failed, and the sultan prepared for war.

The crusaders were driven back towards Damietta; and at the end of

August 1221 Pelagius had to make a treaty with Malik-al-Kamil, by which

he gained a free retreat and the surrender of the Holy Cross at the

price of the restoration of Damietta. The treaty was to last for eight

years, and could only be broken on the coming of a king or emperor to

the East. In pursuance of its terms the crusaders evacuated Egypt, and

the Fifth Crusade was at an end. It is difficult to decide whether to

blame the legate or the emperor more for its failure. If Frederick had

only come in person, a single month of his presence might have meant

everything: if Pelagius had only listened to King John, the sultan was

ready to concede practically everything which was at issue. Unhappily

Frederick preferred to put his Sicilian house in order, and the legate

preferred to listen to the Italians, who had their own commercial

reasons for wishing to establish a strong position in Egypt, and to the

Templars and Hospitallers, who did not feel satisfied by the terms

offered by the sultan, because he wished to retain in his hands the two

fortresses of Krak and Monreal.

_The Sixth Crusade_ (1228-1229) succeeded as signally as the Fifth

Crusade had failed; but the circumstances under which it took place and

the means by which it was conducted made its success still more

disastrous than the failure of 1221. The last Crusade had, after all,

been under papal control: if Richard I. had directed the Third Crusade,

and the policy of the Hohenstaufen and the Venetians had directed the

Fourth, it was a papal legate who had steered the Fifth to its ultimate

fate. The Crusade of Frederick II. in 1228-1229 finds its analogy in the

projected Crusade of Henry VI.; it is essentially lay. It is unique in

the annals of the Crusades. Alone of all Crusades (though the Fourth

Crusade offers some analogy) it was not blessed but cursed by the

papacy: alone of all the Crusades it was conducted without a single act

of hostility against the Mahommedan. St Louis, the true type of the

religious crusader, once said that a layman ought only to argue with a

blasphemer against Christian law by running his sword into the bowels of

the blasphemer as far as it would go:[49] Frederick II. talked amicably

with all unbelievers, if one may trust Arabic accounts, and he achieved

by mere negotiation the recovery of Jerusalem, for which men had vainly

striven with the sword for the forty years since 1187. It was in 1215

that the leader of this strange Crusade had first taken the vow; it was

twelve years afterwards when he finally attempted to carry the vow into

effective execution. Again and again he had excused himself to the pope,

and been excused by the pope, because the exigencies of his policy in

Germany or Sicily tied his hands. After the failure of the Fifth

Crusade--for which these delays were in part responsible--Honorius III.

had attempted to bind him more intimately to the Holy Land by arranging

a marriage with Isabella, the daughter of John of Brienne, and the

heiress of the kingdom of Jerusalem. In 1225 Frederick married Isabella,

and immediately after the marriage he assumed the title of king in right

of his wife, and exacted homage from the vassals of the kingdom.[50] It

was thus as king of Jerusalem that Frederick began his Crusade in the

autumn of 1227. Scarcely, however, had he sailed from Brindisi when he

fell sick of a fever which had been raging for some time among the ranks

of his army, while they waited for the crossing. He sailed back to

Otranto in order to recover his health, but the new pope, Gregory IX.,

launched in hot anger the bolt of excommunication, in the belief that

Frederick was malingering once more. None the less the emperor sailed on

his Crusade in the summer of 1228, affording to astonished Europe the

spectacle of an excommunicated crusader, and leaving his territories to

be invaded by papal soldiers, whom Gregory IX. professed to regard as

crusaders against a non-Christian king, and for whom he accordingly

levied a tithe from the churches of Europe. The paradox of Frederick's

Crusade is indeed astonishing. Here was a crusader against whom a

Crusade was proclaimed in his own territories; and when he arrived in

the Holy Land he found little obedience and many insults from all but

his own immediate followers. Yet by adroit use of his powers of

diplomacy, and by playing upon the dissensions which raged between the

descendants of Saladin's brother (Malik-al-Adil), he was able, without

striking a blow, to conclude a treaty with the sultan of Egypt which

gave him all that Richard I. had vainly attempted to secure by arduous

fighting and patient negotiations. By the treaty of the 18th of February

1229, which was to last for ten years, the sultan conceded to Frederick,

in addition to the coast towns already in the possession of the

Christians, Nazareth, Bethlehem and Jerusalem, with a strip of territory

connecting Jerusalem with the port of Acre. As king of Jerusalem

Frederick was now able to enter his capital: as one under

excommunication, he had to see an interdict immediately fall on the

city, and it was with his own hands--for no churchman could perform the

office--that he had to take his crown from the altar of the church of

the Sepulchre, and crown himself king of his new kingdom. He stayed in

the Holy Land little more than a month after his coronation; and leaving

in May he soon overcame the papal armies in Italy, and secured

absolution from Gregory IX. (August 1229). By his treaty with the sultan

he had secured for Christianity the last fifteen years of its possession

of Jerusalem (1229-1244): no man since Frederick II. has ever recovered

the holy places for the religion which holds them most holy. Yet the

church might ask, with some justice, whether the means he had used were

excused by the end which he had attained. After all, there was nothing

of the holy war about the Sixth Crusade: there was simply huckstering,

as in an Eastern bazaar, between a free-thinking, semi-oriental king of

Sicily and an Egyptian sultan. It was indeed in the spirit of a king of

Sicily, and not in the spirit--though it was in the role--of a king of

Jerusalem, that Frederick had acted. It was from his Sicilian

predecessors, who had made trade treaties with Egypt, that he had

learned to make even the Crusade a matter of treaty. The Norman line of

Sicilian kings might be extinct; their policy lived after them in their

Hohenstaufen successors, and that policy, as it had helped to divert the

Fourth Crusade to the old Norman objective of Constantinople, helped

still more to give the Sixth Crusade its secular, diplomatic,

non-religious aspect.

Forty years of struggle ended in fifteen years' possession of Jerusalem.

During those fifteen years the kingdom of Jerusalem was agitated by a

struggle between the native barons, championing the principle that

sovereignty resided in the collective baronage, and taking their stand

on the assizes, and Frederick II., claiming sovereignty for himself, and

opposing to the assizes the feudal law of Sicily. It is a struggle

between the king and the _haute cour_: it is a struggle between the

aristocratic feudalism of the Franks and the monarchical feudalism of

the Normans. Already in Cyprus, in the summer of 1228, Frederick II. had

insisted on the right of wardship which he enjoyed as overlord of the

island,[51] and he had appointed a commission of five barons to exercise

his rights. In 1229 this commission was overthrown by John of Ibelin,

lord of Beirut, against whom it had taken proceedings. John of Beirut,

like many of the Cypriot barons, was also a baron of the kingdom of

Jerusalem; and resistance in the one kingdom could only produce

difficulties in the other. Difficulties quickly arose when Frederick, in

1231, sent Marshal Richard to Syria as his legate. This in itself was a

serious matter; according to the assizes, the barons maintained, the

king must either personally reside in the kingdom, or, in the event of

his absence, be replaced by a regency. The position became more

difficult, when the legate took steps against John of Beirut without any

authorization from the high court. A gild was formed at Acre--the gild

of St Adrian--which, if nominally religious in its origin, soon came to

represent the political opposition to Frederick, as was significantly

proved by its reception of the rebellious John of Beirut as a member

(1232). The opposition was successful: by 1233 Frederick had lost all

hold on Cyprus, and only retained Tyre in his own kingdom of Jerusalem.

In 1236 he had to promise to recognize fully the laws of the kingdom:

and when, in 1239, he was again excommunicated by Gregory IX., and a new

quarrel of papacy and empire began, he soon lost the last vestiges of

his power. Till 1243 the party of Frederick had been successful in

retaining Tyre, and the baronial demand for a regency had remained

without effect; but in that year the opposition, headed by the great

family of Ibelin, succeeded, under cover of asserting the rights of

Alice of Cyprus to the regency, in securing possession of Tyre, and the

kingdom of Jerusalem thus fell back into the power of the baronage. The

very next year (1244) Jerusalem was finally and for ever lost. Its loss

was the natural corollary of these dissensions. The treaty of Frederick

with Malik-al-Kamil (d. 1238) had now expired, and new succours and new

measures were needed for the Holy Land. Theobald of Champagne had taken

the cross as early as 1230, and 1239 he sailed to Acre in spite of the

express prohibition of the pope, who, having quarrelled with Frederick

II., was eager to divert any succour from Jerusalem itself, so long as

Jerusalem belonged to his enemy. Theobald was followed (1240-1241) by

Richard of Cornwall, the brother of Henry III., who, like his

predecessor, had to sail in the teeth of papal prohibitions; but neither

of the two achieved any permanent result, except the fortification of

Ascalon. It was, however, by their own folly that the Franks lost

Jerusalem in 1244. They consented to ally themselves with the ruler of

Damascus against the sultan of Egypt; but in the battle of Gaza they

were deserted by their allies and heavily defeated by Bibars, the

Egyptian general and future Mameluke sultan of Egypt. Jerusalem, which

had already been plundered and destroyed earlier in the year by

Chorasmians (Khwarizmians), was the prize of victory, and Ascalon also

fell in 1247.

8. _The Crusades of St Louis._--As the loss of Jerusalem in 1187

produced the Third Crusade, so its loss in 1244 produced the Seventh: as

the preaching of the Fifth Crusade had taken place in the Lateran

council of 1215, so that of the Seventh Crusade began in the council of

Lyons of 1245. But the preaching of the Crusade by Innocent IV. at Lyons

was a curious thing. On the one hand he repeated the provisions of the

Fourth Lateran council on behalf of the Crusade to the Holy Land; on the

other hand he preached a Crusade against Frederick II., and promised to

all who would join the full benefits of absolution and remission of

sins. While the papacy thus bent its energies to the destruction of the

Crusades in their genuine sense, and preferred to use for its own

political objects what was meant for Jerusalem, a layman took up the

derelict cause with all the religious zeal which any pope had ever

displayed. Paradoxically enough, it was now the turn for the papacy to

exploit the name of Crusade for political ends, as the laity had done

before; and it was left to the laity to champion the spiritual meaning

of the Crusade even against the papacy.[52] It was at the end of the

year in which Jerusalem had fallen that St Louis had taken the cross,

and by all the means in his power he attempted to ensure the success of

his projected Crusade. He sought to mediate, though with no success,

between the pope and the emperor; he descended to a whimsical piety, and

took his courtiers by guile in distributing to them, at Christmas,

clothing on which a cross had been secretly stitched. He started in 1248

with a gallant company, which contained his three brothers and the sieur

de Joinville, his biographer; and after wintering in Cyprus he directed

his army in the spring of 1249 against Egypt. The objective was

unexpected: it may have been chosen by St Louis, because he knew how

seriously the power of the sultan was undermined by the Mamelukes, who

were in the very next year to depose the Ayyubite dynasty, which had

reigned since 1171, and to substitute one of their number as sultan.

Damietta was taken without a blow, and the march for Cairo was begun, as

it had been begun by the legate Pelagius in 1221. Again the invading

army halted before Mansura (December 1249); again it had to retreat.

The retreat became a rout. St Louis was captured, and a treaty was made

by which he had to consent to evacuate Damietta and pay a ransom of

800,000 pieces of gold. Eventually St Louis was released on surrendering

Damietta and paying one-half of his ransom, and by the middle of May

1230 he reached Acre, having abandoned the Egyptian expedition. For the

next four years he stayed in the Holy Land, seeking to do what he could

for the establishing of the kingdom of Jerusalem. He was able to do but

little. The struggle of papacy and empire paralysed Europe, and even in

France itself there were few ready to answer the calls for help which St

Louis sent home from Acre. The one answer was the Shepherds' Crusade, or

Crusade of the Pastoureaux--"a religious Jacquerie," as it has been

called by Dean Milman. It had some of the features of the Children's

Crusade of 1212. That, too, had begun with a shepherd boy: the leader of

the Pastoureaux, like the leader of the children, promised to lead his

followers dry-shod through the seas; and tradition even said that this

leader, "the master of Hungary," as he was called, was the Stephen of

the Children's Crusade. But the anti-clerical feeling and action of the

Shepherds was new and ominous; and moved by its enormities the

government suppressed the new movement ruthlessly. None came to the aid

of St Louis; and in 1254, on the death of his mother Blanche, the

regent, he had to return to France.

The final collapse of the kingdom of Jerusalem had been really

determined by the battle of Gaza in 1244, and by the deposition of the

Ayyubite dynasty by the Mamelukes. The Ayyubites had always been, on the

whole, chivalrous and tolerant: Saladin and his successors,

Malik-al-Adil and Malik-al-Kamil, had none of them shown an implacable

enmity to the Christians. The Mamelukes, who are analogous to the

janissaries of the Ottoman Turks, were made of sterner and more

fanatical stuff; and Bibars, the greatest of these Mamelukes, who had

commanded at Gaza in 1244, had been one of the leaders in 1250, and was

destined to become sultan in 1260, was the sternest and most fanatical

of them all. The Christians were, however, able to maintain a footing in

Syria for forty years after St Louis' departure, not by reason of their

own strength, but owing to two powers which checked the advance of the

Mamelukes. The first of these was Damascus. The kingdom of Jerusalem, as

we have seen, had profited by the alliance of Damascus as early as 1130,

when the fear of the atabegs of Mosul had first drawn the two together;

and when Damascus had been acquired by the rule of Mosul, the hostility

between the house of Nureddin in Damascus and Saladin in Egypt had still

for a time preserved the kingdom (from 1171 onwards). Saladin had united

Egypt and Damascus; but after his death dissensions broke out among the

members of his family,[53] which more than once led to wars between

Damascus and Cairo. It has already been noticed that such a war between

the sons of Malik-al-Adil accounts in large measure for the success of

the Sixth Crusade; and it has been seen that the battle of Gaza was an

act in the long drama of strife between Egypt and northern Syria. The

revolution in Egypt in 1250 separated Damascus from Cairo more

trenchantly than they had ever been separated since 1171: while a

Mameluke ruled in Cairo, Malik-al-Nasir of Aleppo was elected as sultan

by the emirs of Damascus. But an entirely new and far more important

factor in the affairs of the Levant was the extension of the empire of

the Mongols during the 13th century. That empire had been founded by

Jenghiz Khan in the first quarter of the century; it stretched from

Peking on the east to the Euphrates and the Dnieper on the west. Two

things gave the Mongols an influence on the history of the Holy Land and

the fate of the Crusades. In the first place, the south-western division

of the empire, comprising Persia and Armenia, and governed about 1250 by

the Khan Hulaku or Hulagu, was inevitably brought into relations, which

were naturally hostile, with the Mahommedan powers of Syria and Egypt.

In the second place, the Mongols of the 13th century were not as yet, in

any great numbers, Mahommedans; the official religion was "Shamanism,"

but in the Mongol army there were many Christians, the results of early

Nestorian missions to the far East. This last fact in particular caused

western Europe to dream of an alliance with the great khan "Prester

John," who should aid in the reconquest of Jerusalem and the final

conversion to Christianity of the whole continent of Asia. The Crusades

thus widen out, towards their close, into a general scheme for the

christianization of all the known world.[54] About 1220 James of Vitry

was already hoping that 4000 knights would, with the assistance of the

Mongols, recover Jerusalem; but it is in 1245 that the first definite

sign of an alliance with the Mongols appears. In that year Innocent IV.

sent a Franciscan friar, Joannes de Piano Carpini, to the Mongols of

southern Russia, and despatched a Dominican mission to Persia. Nothing

came of either of these missions; but through them Europe first began to

know the interior of Asia, for Carpini was conducted by the Mongols as

far as Karakorum, the capital of the great khan, on the borders of

China. Again in 1252 St Louis (who had already begun to negotiate with

the Mongols in the winter of 1248-1249) sent the friar William of

Rubruquis to the court of the great khan; but again nothing came of the

mission save an increase of geographical knowledge. It was in the year

1260 when it first seemed likely that any results definitely affecting

the course of the Crusades would flow from the action of the Mongols. In

that year Hulagu, the khan of Persia, invaded Syria and captured

Damascus. His general, a Christian named Kitboga, marched southwards to

attack the Mamelukes of Egypt, but he was beaten by Bibars (who in the

same year became sultan of Egypt), and Damascus fell into the hands of

the Mamelukes. Once more, in spite of Mongol intervention, Damascus and

Cairo were united, as they had been united in the hands of Saladin; once

more they were united in the hands of a devout Mahommedan, who was

resolved to extirpate the Christians from Syria.

While these things were taking place around them, the Christians of the

kingdom of Jerusalem only hastened their own fall by internal

dissensions which repeated the history of the period preceding 1187. In

part the war of Guelph and Ghibelline fought itself out in the East; and

while one party demanded a regency, as in 1243, another argued for the

recognition of Conrad, the son of Frederick II., as king. In part,

again, a commercial war raged between Venice and Genoa, which attracted

into its orbit all the various feuds and animosities of the Levant

(1257). Beaten in the war, the Genoese avenged themselves for their

defeat by an alliance with the Palaeologi, which led to the loss of

Constantinople by the Latins (1261), and to the collapse of the Latin

empire after sixty years of infirm and precarious existence. On a

kingdom thus divided against itself, and deprived of allies, the arm of

Bibars soon fell with crushing weight. The sultan, who had risen from a

Mongolian slave to become a second Saladin, and who combined the

physique and audacity of a Danton with the tenacity and religiosity of a

Philip II., dealt blow after blow to the Franks of the East. In 1265

fell Caesarea and Arsuf; in 1268 Antioch was taken, and the principality

of Bohemund and Tancred ceased to exist.[55] In the years which followed

on the loss of Antioch several attempts were made in the West to meet

the progress of the new conqueror. In 1269 James the Conqueror of

Aragon, at the bidding of the pope, turned from the long Spanish Crusade

to a Crusade in the East in order to atone for his offences against the

law matrimonial. An opportune storm, however, gave the king an excuse

for returning home, as Frederick II. had done in 1227; and though his

followers reached Acre, they hardly dared venture outside its walls, and

returned home promptly in the beginning of 1270. More serious were the

plans and the attempts of Charles of Anjou and Louis IX., in which the

Crusades may be said to have finally ended, save for sundry disjointed

epilogues in the 14th and 15th centuries.

Charles of Anjou had succeeded, as a result of the long "crusade" waged

by the papacy against the Hohenstaufen from the council of Lyons to the

battle of Tagliacozzo (1245-1268), in establishing himself in the

kingdom of Sicily. With the kingdom of Frederick II. and Henry VI. he

also took over their policy--the "forward" policy in the East which had

also been followed by the old Norman kings. On the one hand he aimed at

the conquest of Constantinople as Henry VI. had done before; and by the

treaty of Viterbo of 1267 he secured from the last Latin emperor of the

East, Baldwin II., a right of eventual succession. On the other hand,

like Frederick II., he aimed at uniting the kingdom of Jerusalem with

that of Sicily; and here, too, he was able to provide himself with a

title. On the death of Conradin, Hugh of Cyprus had been recognized in

the East as king of Jerusalem (1269); but his pretensions were opposed

by Mary of Antioch, a granddaughter of Amalric II., who was prepared to

bequeath her claims to Charles of Anjou, and was therefore naturally

supported by him. But the policy of Charles, which thus prepared the way

for a Crusade similar to those of 1197 and 1202, was crossed by that of

his brother Louis IX. Already in 1267 St Louis had taken the cross a

second time, moved by the news of Bibars' conquests; and though the

French baronage, including even Joinville himself, refused to follow the

lead of their king, Prince Edward of England imitated his example. Louis

had been led to think that the bey of Tunis might be converted, and in

that hope he resolved to begin this eighth and last of the Crusades by

an expedition to Tunis. Charles, as anxious to attack Constantinople as

he was reluctant to attack Tunis, with which Sicily had long had

commercial relations, was forced to abandon his own plans and to join in

those of his brother.[56] St Louis had barely landed in Tunis when he

sickened and died, murmuring "Jerusalem, Jerusalem" (August 1270); but

Charles, who appeared immediately after his brother's death, was able to

conduct the Crusade to a successful conclusion. Negotiating in the

spirit of a Frederick II., and acting not as a Crusader but as a king of

Sicily, he not only wrested a large indemnity from the bey for himself

and the new king of France, but also secured a large annual tribute for

his Sicilian exchequer. So ended the Eighth Crusade--much as the Sixth

had done--to the profound disgust of many of the crusaders, including

Prince Edward of England, who only arrived on the eve of the conclusion

of the treaty. Baulked of any opportunity of joining in the main

Crusade, Edward, after wintering in Sicily, conducted a Crusade of his

own to Acre in the spring of 1271. For over a year he stayed in the Holy

Land, making little sallies from Acre, and negotiating with the

Mongols, but achieving no permanent results. He returned home at the end

of 1272, the last of the western crusaders; and thus all the attempts of

St Louis and Charles of Anjou, of James of Aragon and Edward of England

left Bibars still in possession of all his conquests.

Two projects of Crusades were started before the final expulsion of the

Latins from Syria. In 1274, at the council of Lyons, Gregory X., who had

been the companion of Edward in the Holy Land, preached the Crusade to

an assembly which contained envoys from the Mongol khan and Michael

Palaeologus as well as from many western princes. All the princes of

western Europe took the cross; not only so, but Gregory was successful

in uniting the Eastern and Western churches for the moment, and in

securing for the new Crusade the aid of the Palaeologi, now thoroughly

alarmed by the plans of Charles of Anjou. Thus was a papal Crusade

begun, backed by an alliance with Constantinople, and thus were the

plans of Charles of Anjou temporarily thwarted. But in 1276 Gregory X.

died, and all his plans died with him; there was to be no union of the

monarchs of the West with the emperor of the East in a common Crusade.

Charles was able to resume his plans. In 1277 Mary of Antioch ceded to

him her claims, and he was able to establish himself in Acre; in 1278 he

took possession of the principality of Achaea. With these bases at his

disposal he began to prepare a new Crusade, to be directed primarily

(like that of Henry VI. in 1197, and like his own projected Crusade of

1270) against Constantinople. Once more his plans were crossed finally

and fatally: the Sicilian Vespers, and the coronation of Peter of Aragon

as Sicilian king (1282), gave him troubles at home which occupied him

for the rest of his days. This was the last serious attempt at a Crusade

on behalf of the dying kingdom of Jerusalem which was made in the West;

and its collapse was quickly followed by the final extinction of the

kingdom. A precarious peace had reigned in the Holy Land since 1272,

when Bibars had granted a truce of ten years; but the fall of the great

power of Charles of Anjou set free Kala'un the successor of Bibars' son

(who reigned little more than two years), to complete the work of the

great sultan. In 1289 Kala'un took Tripoli, and the county of Tripoli

was extinguished; in 1290 he died while preparing to besiege Acre, which

was captured after a brave defence by his son and successor Khalil in

1291. Thus the kingdom of Jerusalem came to an end. The Franks evacuated

Syria altogether, leaving behind them only the ruins of their castles to

bear witness, to this very day, of the Crusades they had waged and the

kingdom they had founded and lost.

9. _The Ghost of the Crusades._--The loss of Acre failed to stimulate

the powers of Europe to any new effort. France, always the natural home

of the Crusades, was too fully occupied, first by war with England and

then by a struggle with the papacy, to turn her energies towards the

East. But it is often the case that theory develops as practice fails;

and as the theory of the Holy Roman Empire was never more vigorous than

in the days of its decrepitude, so it was with the Crusades.

Particularly in the first quarter of the 14th century, writers were busy

in explaining the causes of the failures of past Crusades, and in laying

down the lines along which a new Crusade must proceed. Several causes

are recognized by these writers as accounting for the failure of the

Crusades. Some of them lay the blame on the papacy; and it is true that

the papacy had contributed towards the decay of the Crusades when it had

allowed its own particular interests to overbear the general welfare of

Christianity, and had dignified with the name and the benefits of a

Crusade its own political war against the Hohenstaufen. Others again

find in the princes of Europe the authors of the ruin of the Crusades;

they too had preferred their own national or dynastic interests to the

cause of a common Christianity. They had indeed, as has been already

noticed, done even more; they had used the name of Crusade, from the

days of Henry VI. onwards, as a cover and an excuse for secular

ambitions of their own; and in this way they had certainly helped, in

very large measure, to discourage the old religious zeal for the Holy

War. Other writers, again, blame the commercial cupidity of the Italian

towns; of what avail, they asked with no little justice, was the

Crusade, when Venice and Genoa destroyed the naval bases necessary for

its success by their internecine quarrels in the Levant (as in 1257),

or--still worse--entered into commercial treaties with the common enemy

against whom the Crusades were directed? On the very eve of the Fifth

Crusade, Venice had concluded a commercial treaty with Malik-al-Kamil of

Egypt; just before the fall of Acre the Genoese, the king of Aragon and

the king of Sicily had all concluded advantageous treaties with the

sultan Kala'un. A fourth cause, on which many writers dwelt,

particularly at the time when the suppression of the Templars was in

question, was the dissensions between the two orders of Templars and

Hospitallers, and the selfish policy of merely pursuing their own

interest which was followed by both in common. But one might enumerate

_ad infinitum_ the causes of the failure of the Crusades. It is

simplest, as it is truest, to say that the Crusades did not fail--they

simply ceased; and they ceased because they were no longer in joint with

the times. The moral character of Europe in 1300 was no longer the moral

character of Europe in 1100; and the Crusades, which had been the active

and objective embodiment of the other worldly Europe of 1100, were alien

to the secular, legal, scholastic Europe of 1300. While Edward I. was

seeking to found a united kingdom in Great Britain; while the Habsburgs

were entrenching themselves in Austria; above all, while Philippe le Bel

and his legists were consolidating the French monarchy on an absolutist

basis, there could be little thought of the holy war. These were

hard-headed men of affairs--men who would not lightly embark on joyous

ventures, or seek for an ideal San Grail; nor were the popes, doomed to

the Babylonian captivity for seventy long years at Avignon, able to call

down the spark from on high which should consume all earthly ambitions

in one great act of sacrifice.

But it is long before the death of any institution is recognized; and it

was inevitable that men should busy themselves in trying to rekindle the

dead embers into new life. Pierre Dubois, in a pamphlet "_De

recuperatione Sanctae Terrae_," addressed to Edward I. in 1307,

advocates a general council of Europe to maintain peace and prevent the

dissensions which--as, for instance, in 1192--had helped to cause the

failure of past Crusades. Along with this advocacy of internationalism

goes a plea for the disendowment of the Church, in order to provide an

adequate financial basis for the future Crusade. Other proposals, made

by men well acquainted with the East, are more definitely practical and

less political in their intention. A blockade of Egypt by an

international fleet, an alliance with the Mongols, the union of the two

great orders--these are the three staple heads of these proposals.

Something, indeed, was attempted, if little was actually done, under

each of these three heads. The plan of an international fleet to coerce

the Mahommedan is even to this day ineffective; but the Hospitallers,

who acquired a new basis by the conquest of Rhodes in 1310, used their

fleet to enforce a partial and, on the whole, ineffective blockade of

the coast of the Levant. The union of the two orders, already suggested

at the council of Lyons in 1245, was nominally achieved by the council

of Vienne in 1311; but the so-called "union" was in reality the

suppression of the Templars, and the confiscation of all their resources

by the cupidity of Philippe le Bel. The alliance with the Mongols

remained, from the first to the last, something of a chimera; and the

last visionary hope vanished when the Mongols finally embraced

Mahommedanism, as, by the end of the 14th century, they had almost

universally done.

Isolated enterprises somewhat of the character of a Crusade, but hardly

serious enough to be dignified by that name, recur during the 14th

century. The French kings are all crusaders--in name--until the

beginning of the Hundred Years' War; but the only crusader who ever

carried war in Palestine and sought to shake the hold of the Mamelukes

on the Holy Land was Peter I., king of Cyprus from 1359 to 1369. Peter

founded the order of the Sword for the delivery of Jerusalem; and

instigated by his chancellor, P. de Mezieres (one of the last of the

theorists who speculated and wrote on the Crusades), he attempted to

revive the old crusading spirit throughout the west of Europe. The

mission which he undertook with his chancellor for this purpose

(1362-1365) only produced a crop of promises or excuses from sovereigns

like Edward III. or the Emperor Charles IV.; and Peter was forced to

begin the Crusade with such volunteers as he could collect for himself.

In the autumn of 1365 he sacked Alexandria; in 1367 he ravaged the coast

of Syria, and inflicted serious damages on the sultan of Egypt. But in

1369 he was assassinated, and the last romantic figure of the Crusades

died, leaving only the legacy of his memory to his chancellor de

Mezieres, who for nearly forty years longer continued to be the preacher

of the Crusades to Europe, advocating--what always continued to be the

"dream of the old pilgrim"--a new order of knights of the Passion of

Christ for the recovery and defence of Jerusalem. De Mezieres was the

last to advocate seriously, as Peter I. was the last to attempt, a

Crusade after the old fashion--an offensive war against Egypt for the

recovery of the Holy Sepulchre.[57] From 1350 onwards the Crusade

assumes a new aspect; it becomes defensive, and it is directed against

the Ottoman Turks, a tribe of Turcomans who had established themselves

in the sultanate of Iconium at the end of the 13th century, during the

confusion and displacement of peoples which attended the Mongol

invasions. As early as 1308 the Ottoman Turks had begun to settle in

Europe; by 1350 they had organized their terrible army of janissaries.

They threatened at once the debris of the old Latin empire in Greece and

the archipelago, and the relics of the Byzantine empire round

Constantinople; they menaced the Hospitallers in Rhodes and the

Lusignans in Cyprus. It was natural that the popes should endeavour to

form a coalition between the various Christian powers which were

threatened by the Turks; and Venice, anxious to preserve her possessions

in the Aegean, zealously seconded their efforts. In 1344 a Crusade, in

which Venice, the Cypriots, and the Hospitallers all joined, ended in

the conquest of Smyrna; in 1345 another Crusade, led by Humbert, dauphin

of Vienne, ended in failure. The Turks continued their progress; in 1363

they captured Philippopolis, and in 1365 they entered Adrianople; the

whole Balkan peninsula was threatened, and even Hungary itself seemed

doomed. Already in 1365 Urban VI. sought to unite the king of Hungary

and the king of Cyprus in a common Crusade against the Turks; but it was

not till 1396 that an attempt was at last made to supplement by a land

Crusade the naval Crusades of 1344 and 1345. Master of Servia and of

Bulgaria, as well as of Asia Minor, the sultan Bayezid was now

threatening Constantinople itself. To arrest his progress, a Crusade,

preached by Boniface IX., led by John the Fearless of Burgundy, and

joined chiefly by French knights, was directed down the valley of the

Danube into the Balkans; but the old faults stigmatized by de Mezieres,

_divisio_ and _propria voluntas_, were the ruin of the crusading army,

and at the battle of Nicopolis it was signally defeated. Not the Western

Crusades but an Eastern rival, Timur (Tamerlane), king of Transoxiana

and conqueror of southern Russia and India, was destined to arrest the

progress of Bayezid; and from the battle of Angora (1402) till the days

of Murad II. (1422) the Ottoman power was paralysed. Under Murad,

however, it rose to its old height. To meet the new danger a new union

of the churches of the East and the West was attempted. As in 1074

Gregory VII. had dreamed of such a union, to be followed by a joint

attack of East and West on the Seljuks, so in 1439, at the council of

Florence, a new union of the two churches was again attempted and

temporarily secured, in order that a united Christendom might face the

new Turkish danger.[58] The logical result of the union was the Crusade

of 1443. An army of cosmopolitan adventurers, led by the Cardinal

Caesarini, joined the forces of Wladislaus of Poland and John Hunyadi

of Transylvania, and succeeded in forcing on Murad II. a truce of ten

years at Szegedin in 1444. But the crusaders broke the truce, to which

Caesarini had never consented; and, attempting to better what was

already good enough, they were defeated at Varna. Here the last Crusade

ended; and nine years afterwards, in 1453, Mahommed II., the successor

of Murad, captured Constantinople. It was in vain that the popes sought

to gather a new Crusade for its recovery; Pius II., who had vowed to

join the crusade in person, only reached Ancona in 1464 to find the

crusaders deserting and to die. Yet the ghost of the Crusades still

lingered. It became a convention of diplomacy, designed to cover any

particularly sharp piece of policy which needed some excuse; and the

treaty of Granada, formed between Louis XII. and Ferdinand of Aragon for

the partition of Naples in 1500, was excused as a thing necessary in the

interests of the Crusades. In a more noble fashion the Crusade survived

in the minds of the navigators; "Vasco da Gama, Christopher Columbus,

Albuquerque, and many others dreamed, and not insincerely, that they

were labouring for the deliverance of the Holy Land, and they bore the

Cross on their breasts."[59] "Don Henrique's scheme," it has been said,

"represents the final effort of the crusading spirit; and the naval

campaigns against the Moslem in the Indian seas, in which it culminated,

forty years after Don Henrique's death, may be described as the last

Crusade."[60]

10. _Results of the Crusades._--In one vital respect the result of the

Crusades may be written down as failure. They ended, not in the

occupation of the East by the Christian West, but in the conquest of the

West by the Mahommedan East. The Crusades began with the Seljukian Turk

planted at Nicaea; they ended with the Ottoman Turk entrenched by the

Danube. Nothing is more striking in history than the recession of

Christianity in the East after the 13th century. In the 13th century the

whole of Europe was Christian; part of Asia Minor still belonged to

Greek Christianity, and there was a Christian kingdom in Palestine. Nor

was this all. A wide missionary activity had begun in the 13th

century--an activity which was the product of the Crusades and the

contact with the Moslem which they brought, but which yet helped to

check the Crusades, substituting as it did peaceful and spiritual

conquests of souls for the violence and materialism of even a Holy War.

The Eastern mission had been begun by St Francis, who had visited and

attempted to convert the sultan of Egypt during the Fifth Crusade

(1220); within a hundred years the little seed had grown into a great

tree. A great field for missionary enterprise opened itself in the

Mongol empire, in which, as has already been mentioned, there were many

Christians to be found; and by 1350 this field had been so well worked

that Christian missions and Christian bishops were established from

Persia to Peking, and from the Dnieper to Tibet itself. But a Mahommedan

reaction came, thanks in large measure to the zeal of Timur; and central

Asia was lost to Christianity. Everywhere in the 15th century, in Europe

and in Asia, the crescent was victorious over the cross; and Crusade and

mission, whether one regards them as complementary or inimical, perished

together.[61]

But the history of the Crusades must be viewed rather as a chapter in

the history of civilization in the West itself, than as an extension of

Western dominion or religion to the East. It is a chapter very difficult

to write, for while on the one hand an ingenious and speculative

historian may refer to the influence of the Crusades almost everything

which was thought or done between 1100 and 1300, a cautious writer who

seeks to find documentary evidence for every assertion may be rather

inclined to attribute to that influence little or nothing.[62] The

dissolution of feudalism, the development of towns, the growth of

scholasticism, all these and much more have been ascribed to the

Crusades, when in truth they were concomitants rather than results, or

at any rate, if in part the results of the Crusades, were in far larger

part the results of other things. At most, therefore, it may be admitted

that the Crusades _contributed_ to the dissolution of feudalism by

putting property on the market and disturbing the validity of titles;

that they aided the development of towns by vastly increasing the volume

of trade; and that they furthered the growth of scholasticism by

bringing the West into contact with the mind of the East. If we seek the

peculiar and definite results of the Crusades, we must turn to narrower

issues. In the first place, the Crusades represent the attempt of a

feudal system, bound under the law of primogeniture to dispose of its

younger sons. They are attempts at feudal colonization; and as such they

resulted in a number of colonies--the kingdom of Jerusalem, the kingdom

of Cyprus, the Latin empire of Constantinople. They resulted too in a

number of "chartered companies"--that is to say, the three military

orders, which, beginning as charitable societies, developed into

military clubs, and developed again from military clubs into chartered

companies, possessed of banks, navies and considerable territories. In

the second place, as has already been noticed, the Crusades represent

the attempt of Western commerce to find new and more easy routes to the

wealth of the East; and in this respect they led to various results. On

the one hand they led to the establishment of emporia in the East--for

instance, Acre, and after the fall of Acre Famagusta, both in their day

great centres of Levantine trade. On the other hand, the commodities

which poured into Venice and Genoa from the East had to find a route for

their diffusion through Europe. The great route was that which led from

Venice over the Brenner and up the Rhine to Bruges; and this route

became the long red line of municipal development, along which--in

Lombardy, Germany and Flanders--the great towns of the middle ages

sprang to life. Partly as a result of this trade, ever pushing its way

farther east, and partly as a result of the Asiatic missions, which were

themselves an accompaniment and effect of the Crusades, a third great

result of the Crusades came to light in the 13th century--the discovery

of the interior of Asia, and an immense accession to the sphere of

geography. When one remembers that missionaries like Piano Carpini, and

traders like the Venetian Polos, either penetrated by land from Acre to

Peking, or circumnavigated southern Asia from Basra to Canton, one

realizes that there was, about 1300, a discovery of Asia as new and

tremendous as the discovery of America by Columbus two centuries later.

At the same time the old knowledge of nearer Asia was immensely

deepened. It has already been noticed how military reconnaissances of

the routes to Egypt came to be made; but more important were the

guide-books, of which a great number were written to guide the pilgrims

from one sacred spot of Bible history to another. 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 and to bathe in Jordan, to gather palms,

and to see the miracle of fire at the Sepulchre.

Colonization, trade, geography--these then are three things closely

connected with the history of the Crusades. The development of the art

of war, and the growth of a systematic taxation, are two debts which

medieval Europe also owed to the Crusades. Partly by contact with the

Byzantines, partly by conflict with the Mahommedans, the Franks learned

new methods both of building and of attacking fortifications. The

concentric castle, with its rings of walls, began to displace the old

keep and bailey with their single wall, as the crusaders brought back

news from the East.[63] The art of the sapper and miner, the use of

siege instruments like the mangonel, and the employment of various

"fires" as missiles, were all known among the Mahommedans; and in all

these respects the Franks learned from their enemies. The common use of

armorial bearings, and the practice of the tournament, may be Oriental

in their origin; the latter has its affinities with the equestrian

exercises of the Jerid, and the former, though of prehistoric antiquity,

may have received a new impulse from contact with the Arabs. The

military development which sprang from the Crusades is thus largely a

matter of borrowing; the financial development is independent and

indigenous in the West. As early as 1147 Louis VII. had imposed a tax in

the interests of the Crusades; and that tax had been repeated by Louis,

and imitated by Henry II. in 1166, while it had been still further

extended in the Saladin tithe of 1188. The taxation of 1166 is important

as the first to fall on "moveables"; the whole scheme of taxation may be

regarded as the beginning of a modern system of taxation. But it was not

only to the lay power that the Crusades gave an excuse for taxation; the

papacy also profited. Tithes for the Crusades were first imposed on the

clergy by Innocent III. at the Lateran council of 1215; and clerical

taxation was thus part of the whole statesmanlike project of the Fifth

Crusade as it was sketched by the great pope. Henceforth tithes for the

Crusades are regular; under Gregory IX. they become a great part of the

papal resources in the Crusade against the Hohenstaufen; and in the 16th

century they are still a normal part of the government of the Church.

[Illustration: Map of Syria in the 12th cetury, before the conquests of

Saladin.]

In many other ways the Europe over which the Crusades had passed was

different from the Europe of the 11th century. In the first place, many

political changes had been wrought, largely under its influence. Always

in large part French, the Crusades had on the whole contributed to exalt

the prestige of France, until it stood at the end of the 13th century

the most considerable power in Europe. It was France which had colonized

the Levant; it was the French tongue which was used in the Levant; and

the results of the ancient and continuous connexion with the East are

still to be traced to-day. Of the other great powers of Europe, England

and Germany had been little changed by the Crusades, save that Germany

had been extended towards the East by the conquests of the Teutonic

Order; but the Eastern empire had been profoundly modified, and the

papacy had suffered a great change. The Eastern empire had been for a

time annihilated by the movement which in 1095 it had helped to evoke;

and if it rose from its ashes in 1261 for two centuries of renewed life,

it was never more than the shadow of its old self, with little hold on

Asia Minor and less on Greece and the Archipelago, which the Latins

still continued to occupy until they were finally conquered by the

Ottoman Turks. The papacy, on the other hand, had grown as a result of

the Crusades. Popes had preached them; popes had financed them; popes

had sent their legates to lead them. Through them the popes had deposed

the emperors of the West from their headship of the world, partly

because through the Crusades the popes were able to direct the common

Christianity of Europe in a foreign policy of their own without

consultation with the emperor, partly because in the 13th century they

were ultimately able to direct the Crusade itself against the empire.

Yet while they had magnified, the Crusades had also corrupted the

papacy. They became an instrument in its hands which it used to its own

undoing. It cried Crusade when there was no Crusade; and the long

Crusade against the Hohenstaufen, if it gave the papacy an apparent

victory, only served in the long run to lower its prestige in the eyes

of Europe. When we turn from the sphere of politics to the history of

civilization and culture, we find the effects of the Crusades as deeply

impressed, if not so definitely marked. The Crusades had sprung from the

policy of a theocratic government counting on the motive of

otherworldliness; they had helped in their course to overthrow that

motive, and with it the government which it had made possible. In part

they had provided a field in which the layman could prove that he too

was a priest; in part they had brought the West into a living and

continuous contact with a new faith and a new civilization. They had

torn men loose from the ancestral custom of home to walk in new ways and

see new things and hear new thoughts; and some broadening of view, some

lessening in the intensity of the old one-sidedness, was the inevitable

result. It is not so much that the West came into contact with a

particular civilization in the East, or borrowed from that civilization;

it is simply that the West came into contact with something unlike

itself, yet in many ways as high as, if not higher than, itself. The

spirit of _Nathan der Weise_ may not have been exactly the spirit

engendered by the Crusades; and yet it is not without reason that

Lessing stages the fable which teaches toleration in the Latin kingdom

of Jerusalem. In any case the accusations made against the Templars at

the time of their suppression prove that there was, at any rate in the

ranks of those who knew the East, too little of absolute orthodoxy.

While a new spirit which compares and tolerates thus sprang from the

Crusades, the large sphere of new knowledge and experience which they

gave brought new material at once for scientific thought and poetic

imagination. Not only was geography more studied; the Crusades gave a

great impulse to the writing of history, and produced, besides

innumerable other works, the greatest historical work of the middle

ages--the _Historia transmarina_ of William of Tyre. Mathematics

received an impulse, largely, it is true, from the Arabs of Spain, but

also from the East; Leonardo Fibonacci, the first Christian algebraist,

had travelled in Syria and Egypt. The study of Oriental languages began

in connexion with the Christian missions of the East; Raymond Lull, the

indefatigable missionary, induced the council of Vienne to decide on the

creation of six schools of Oriental languages in Europe (1311). But the

new field of poetic literature afforded by the Crusades is still more

striking than this development of science. New poems in abundance dealt

with the history of the Crusades, either in a faithful narrative, like

that of the _Chanson_ of Ambroise, which narrates the Third Crusade, or

in a free and poetical spirit, such as breathes in the _Chanson

d'Antioche_. Nor was this all. The Crusades afforded new details which

might be inserted into old matters, and a new spirit which might be

infused into old subjects; and a crusading complexion thus came to be

put upon old tales like those of Arthur and Charlemagne. By the side of

these greater things it may seem little, and yet, just because it is

little, it is all the more significant that the Crusades should have

familiarized Europe with new plants, new fruits, new manufactures, new

colours, and new fashions in dress. Sugar and maize; lemons, apricots

and melons; cotton, muslin and damask; lilac and purple (azure and gules

are words derived from the Arabic); the use of powder and of glass

mirrors, and also of the rosary itself--all these things came to Europe

from the East and as a result of the Crusades. To this day there are

many Arabic words in the vocabulary of the languages of western Europe

which are a standing witness of the Crusades--words relating to trade

and seafaring, like tariff and corvette, or words for musical

instruments, like lute or the Elizabethan word "naker."