Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

The most enterprising and ruthless of these merchants came from the powerhouse trading cities of northern Italy: Genoa, Pisa, and Venice.

Finally, there were the military orders, crusading institutions spawned during the first decades of the twelfth century, which famously included the Knights Hospitaller and the Knights Templar. Both of these organizations emerged in Jerusalem in the immediate aftermath of the First Crusade, when they were conceived as sworn brotherhoods of pious knights, whose members agreed to abandon their possessions; live according to a quasi-monastic

monastic rule emphasizing chastity, poverty, and obedience; and devote themselves to the medical treatment of injured or ill pilgrims (Hospitallers) or their defense on the highways (Templars). What set the military orders apart from actual monks was that to fulfill their duties in dangerous lands, they kept up their weapons training so that they were able to use sword and lance to attack Christ’s enemies and serve, if required, as special forces units in Jerusalem’s royal armies.

Bolstered with papal approval, a promising financial basis on which to solicit donations and income, and no shortage of work to do patrolling the Holy Land, the Templars thrived.

Collectively, these military orders became the nucleus of a permanent crusading army in both the Holy Land and the Iberian Peninsula.

As the years went by, the military orders took on ever-more responsibility for the day-to-day business of crusading, until by the fourteenth century it had become almost a private enterprise.

The troubles began in the 1140s, when a Turkish soldier and career politician known as Imad al-Din Zengi attacked the city of Edessa—capital of the smallest and most vulnerable of the crusader states.

Much worse was the sense that nearly half a century on from the victories of 1096–99, God had ceased to smile on them.

Pope Eugene III was not enjoying a peaceful papacy. He was struggling with a continuing schism and attempts to set up antipopes against him. Communards had been rioting in the streets of Rome. Heretic preachers were reported to be stirring up anticlerical feeling in France. This was a worrying set of problems, and, like Urban II before him, Eugene felt he needed a cause around which to build his papacy and rally political support. He found it in the Second Crusade.

It was a generation since Jerusalem had fallen, they argued, and in that time Christians everywhere had drifted from the path of righteousness and self-sacrifice that had once brought about wonderful victories. It was time to get back to basics. Now was the moment for

noblemen and knights across Europe to prove that “the bravery of the fathers will not have proved to be diminished in the sons.”25 The best way they could do that was to repeat their fathers’ deeds—as closely as possible.

And popular enthusiasm spilled over as before into zealotry, bigotry, and anti-Semitic attacks, in which a new generation of Jews in the Rhineland were beaten, robbed, mutilated, blinded, murdered, or hounded until they committed suicide.

Whereas in 1096 Urban had been able to persuade only counts and bishops to lead his armies, in the 1140s Bernard of Clairvaux and Eugene III managed to persuade two of Europe’s greatest kings to take charge.*

And what had been an unlikely journey in the 1090s was now an impossible one. A new Byzantine emperor in Constantinople, Manuel I Komnenos (r. 1143–80), had not summoned crusaders, did not want them on his doorstep, and did only the bare minimum to help them on their way. A new “sultan of Rum”—Qilij Arslan’s son Mas’ud—had an even firmer grip on Asia Minor than his father had enjoyed. Both Conrad’s and Louis’s armies were savaged by Turkish warriors as they stumbled through Asia Minor: in October 1147 Conrad fought the Turks at Dorylaeum. But this time the crusaders were crushed and Conrad lost much of his baggage train. Several months later, in January 1148, Louis VII only narrowly escaped with his life when his own army was ambushed at Mount Cadmus (Honaz).

His place as the driving force behind the unification of Syria had been taken by his brilliant son, Nur al-Din, who had no intention of allowing the crusaders to upset his plans for restoring order to the Muslim near east. So Edessa was a lost cause, and there was little hope of making gains anywhere else either.

In July, they and the king of Jerusalem, Baldwin III (r. 1143–63), attempted to besiege the mighty city of Damascus. It was a fiasco.

By the following year she and Louis were divorced, and Eleanor had married the soon-to-be Plantagenet king of England, Henry II, a union that was disastrous for Louis and brought about a state of sporadic warfare between the English and French that was only settled in 1453.*

The kings of Jerusalem, meanwhile, began to eye expansion into Egypt, where the Shia caliphs and their viziers were presiding over an increasingly corrupt and fragile government in Cairo. Yet for many in western Europe, there were better opportunities to fight for Christ, much closer to home.

In Spain and Portugal the Reconquista continued at pace. In 1147 a band of English and Frisian crusaders traveling by ship to join the French and Germans on the Second Crusade had stopped during their long journey to conquer Lisbon from its Muslim rulers—a major milestone on the conquest of western Iberia and the creation of a kingdom of Portugal. What was more, the Almoravids who had swept through al-Andalus in the eleventh century were now in a state of protracted collapse; they were deposed in a revolution in Morocco and replaced by an even more puritanical Muslim sect known as the Almohads. This instability made the Iberian Peninsula a ripe field for warfare, and warriors who traveled there to do battle in the name of Christ were explicitly granted crusader status (and the attendant forgiveness of sins) by Pope Eugene III.

Although the Wendish crusade was small and sparsely attended when compared with the royal-led mission to Syria or the battles of the Reconquista, its categorization as a crusade was a critical event in medieval history, which framed colonization and conversion in northeast Europe as holy war.

In 1171, Saladin effected a palace coup that deposed the last Fatimid caliph. Egypt’s political allegiance was transferred to Nur al-Din in Syria. Religious obedience was switched to the Sunni Abbasid caliph in Baghdad. This on its own was a massive accomplishment (and one that has earned Saladin eternal opprobrium in the Shia world).

By the late 1180s he had pieced together a realm in which much of Syria and all of Egypt were joined under his personal rule. The Abbasid caliph recognized him as a sultan. His family took plum positions in government. And as he grew in stature, Saladin began to present himself as the savior of Islam itself: a jihadi warrior who was fighting not for personal gain but for the benefit of Muslims everywhere. In large part this was to distract from the fact that Saladin actually spent many years of his life fighting and killing fellow Muslims.

The reckoning came on July 3–4, when Saladin lured the hapless and widely disliked king Guy I of Jerusalem, and an army comprising almost the entire military force of Guy’s kingdom, out to the twin peaks of an extinct volcano known as the Horns of Hattin, near the Sea of Galilee. Once there Saladin’s men cut off Guy’s army from any water source, set fire to the brush and scrub of the hot, parched landscape, and then rode them down. In the course of a cataclysmic battle, the crusader army was annihilated, Guy was captured, and the True Cross—the most precious relic in the Christian world—was confiscated, never to be seen again.

In the ensuing months, Saladin took almost every crusader city on the Levantine coast, including the most important trading port of Acre. In October, he besieged Jerusalem itself, which was mostly defended by women and youths, because the garrison had been among the army that was wiped out at Hattin. After some token resistance, it surrendered. Saladin ostentatiously refused to allow his troops the pleasure of a massacre. But the shock still reverberated around the western world. And it prompted the last really serious crusade to the Latin kingdom: the Third Crusade. Preached with an urgency that stemmed from abject humiliation verging on existential crisis, it was led by a new generation of warrior kings: Philip II of France and Richard the Lionheart.

But this time there was no compulsion to follow slavishly in the footsteps of old crusaders. The German ruler and Holy Roman emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, who did attempt an overland route, was drowned en route while bathing in a river in Asia Minor. Richard and Philip, meanwhile, sailed to the east, stopping at Sicily and Cyprus, bickering as they went but in no doubt as to the importance of their mission.

expedition that lasted two years, they retook Acre, before Richard led a large army down the Levantine coast, massacring prisoners, skirmishing with Saladin’s troops, and recapturing cities as he went. But even Richard—the greatest general of his age—came up short when he contemplated the city of Jerusalem. Twice he approached it, and twice he turned back, daunted by the scale of the siege it would require. The closest he came to taking Jerusalem was when he tried to negotiate a remarkably progressive two-state solution for Palestine at large, under which the state would be ruled jointly by his sister Joanna and Saladin’s brother al-Adil (also known as Saphadin). This stalled when the couple could not agree to religious terms on which to marry, and eventually the project—and the crusade—petered out. So Jerusalem stayed in Saladin’s hands. And the crusaders, as they always did, either settled down or departed.*

But the age of mass crusades to Syria and Palestine was over. A significant shift in the crusading movement was underway. As the twelfth century passed into the thirteenth, Christian holy war was about to be turned in extraordinary new directions.

On the second matter, that of the hierarchy of western power, Innocent had become a wholehearted believer in the political theory of the sun and moon, an astronomical allegory that asserted papal supremacy in all Christian realms. In this view, the pope was the sun, emitting light; royal rulers (particularly the Holy Roman emperor) were like the moon, merely reflecting it. They were not equals. In 1198, right at the start of his papacy, Innocent wrote, “Just as God, founder of the universe, has constituted two large luminaries in the firmament of Heaven, a major one to dominate the day and a minor one to dominate the night, so he has established in the firmament of the Universal Church, which is signified by the name of Heaven, two great dignities, a major one to preside . . . over the days of the souls, and a minor one to preside over the nights of the bodies. They are the Pontifical authority and the royal power.”35 This was not a new idea: by the time of Innocent’s elevation to the papacy, popes had been tussling with kings for preeminence for almost four hundred years. But Innocent went further than almost any other pope in history toward turning high philosophy into political reality. His papacy, which lasted from 1198 until his death in 1216, was a tour de force of legalistic papal statesmanship, in which Innocent tried to impress the power of Rome over everyone and everything, with some extraordinary results. In crusading terms, the immediate background to Innocent’...

Just as Urban and Eugene III before him had done, Innocent understood how useful the crusade could be as a bolster for the power of the papacy. But whereas his predecessors had largely aimed the weapon against enemies outside the Christian world, Innocent decided to turn it inward as well. Besides using crusading to hound Muslims and pagans, he would deploy it (or allow it to be deployed) against heretics and dissenters within the Christian world. This was a momentous turn of events. Thanks to Innocent, the thirteenth century would see an explosion in crusade preaching throughout the western world. Yet—partly as a result of Innocent’s reimagining of what the crusade was for—it would also see the decline and ultimately the demise of the crusader states of the near east.

This Fourth Crusade would be a daring amphibious assault, in which a huge fleet of warships would strike at Alexandria, on the west of Egypt’s Nile delta. There they would disgorge an army that could fight its way up into Palestine and liberate Jerusalem from the south, rather than the north. It was a bold, even visionary plan. However, it required around two hundred war galleys and a fleet of transporter ships with full crews, as well as an army of around thirty thousand men to do the fighting. This logistical obstacle would prove the Fourth Crusade’s undoing.

Unfortunately, the French counts then let him—and everyone else—down. In the early summer of 1202 they were supposed to have supplied thirty thousand men and eighty-five thousand silver marks, to fill and pay for the ships. But when early summer

came, it was clear that the French had neither. They had mustered less than one third of the promised army and barely half the funds. This was not just a diplomatic disaster—it threatened to bankrupt the city of Venice. In response, Enrico Dandolo took a fateful decision. Rather than stepping back, he stepped up—effectively taking command of the crusade himself.

The brother was now in power and the nineteen-year old Prince Alexios was after revenge. No promise was too outlandish for him to make, and so it was with a straight face that he had approached the leaders of the Fourth Crusade with an offer to pay them two hundred thousand silver marks, provide a permanent garrison of five hundred knights to the kingdom of Jerusalem, and bind over the city of Constantinople to the religious authority of the pope in Rome—if they would just place him on the throne from which his father had been toppled.

But by December 1203 the money had again dried up, and the ancient Venetian doge had threatened the young emperor with deposition.

On April 9 they began to bombard the city from the sea. Three days later they landed men on the ramparts with flying bridges from their ships’ masts. With the walls breached, the whole might of the crusading army rushed in and began a dreadful sack. Homes, churches, and offices were looted.

As he smashed to pieces on the ground, so the Byzantine Empire died a sort of death. No Greek was raised up in his place: instead the crusader Baldwin Count of Flanders was hailed as a Latin emperor of Constantinople.

The Fourth Crusade was one of the most disgraceful and notorious escapades in the whole of the Middle Ages, and Innocent III raged and complained about it bitterly. Yet for all its horrors and corruptions, the Venetians had also shown what was possible under the banner of crusading. And for all his bluster in the aftermath of Constantinople’s sack and fall, Innocent would make full use of the insight.

In Spain and Portugal, Innocent urged the Christian kings of the region to band together and fight against the Almohads. They duly did so, and in 1212, reinforced by members of the Templars and Hospitallers, as well as other crusaders from across the Pyrenees, they crushed the Almohad caliph al-Nasir at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa—a milestone in the Reconquista that began a rapid drive southward by the Christian powers, who pushed the Almohads steadily back toward the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, far away in northern Europe, Innocent was also wholeheartedly encouraging Danish, German, and other Scandinavian lords to attack pagans in the unconverted northeast of Europe—a campaign known as the Livonian Crusade, in which all Christian warriors, including the newly formed Teutonic Knights, could claim forgiveness for their sins in return for colonizing new lands around the Baltic.

And around the same time, in 1209, he preached a crusade against a heretical Christian sect in southern France known as the Cathars. This campaign, usually called the Albigensian Crusade, because some of the activity took place around the southern French city of Albi, would last for twenty years.

Cathars, who were the unlucky targets of Innocent’s Albigensian Crusade, had been known in Europe since at least the 1170s, when a grand assembly of Church leaders known as the Third Lateran Council declared the Cathars’ beliefs “a loathsome heresy.” And it was true that these were unorthodox people, who took the tradition of Christian asceticism far beyond what had been developed even by Bernard of Clairvaux’s Cistercians. Their first principles were uncontroversial: Cathars regarded human flesh as by its nature sinful and detestable—a view that, as we have seen, Innocent had once professed wholeheartedly to share. They thought the only route to escape from mortal corruption was by living according to a strict doctrine of self-denial: sexual abstinence, vegetarianism, and simplicity of life. In this they were not very different from, say, the orders of mendicant friars who were emerging in Europe at roughly the same time. However, Cathars crossed from Christian asceticism into heresy by rejecting the hierarchy of the western Church in favor of their own private priesthood, and refusing the Eucharist, baptism, and other Church rites. This put them quite beyond the pale—especially

especially for a pope like Innocent, so firmly fixated on imposing command-and-control authority on the Church at large.

But Innocent found he could not stamp out Catharism with poison-pen letters. Catharism was offbeat and extreme, but it inspired great devotion and loyalty in its adherents.

In 1208 the pope had his casus belli when one of his leading diplomats, Peter of Castelnau, was murdered following a fruitless meeting to discuss Catharism with Raymond of Toulouse. Within weeks Peter had been declared a martyr.

Although calling a crusade on Christian soil was a drastic and unprecedented step, it found rapid favor with the king and northern French nobility. The South of France was to them an almost foreign realm. Hot and sensuous, and linguistically different from the north with its Occitan dialect, it had for a long time been distant from the reach of royal government. This was highly displeasing to Philip Augustus, whose goal throughout his reign was to establish his crown’s authority over a greater portion of the kingdom than had recently been the case.* Philip had no great wish to go crusading himself—his experience on the Third Crusade as a younger man had been quite enough excitement—but he still lent his tacit support to the crusade against the Cathars within his realm, calculating that it would be useful means of breaking the autonomy of men like the Count of Toulouse. Command of the anti-Cathar army was entrusted to an experienced crusader: Simon de Montfort, a veteran of the Fourth Crusade and a tireless, stiff-necked zealot, whose life’s driving passion was slaughtering infidels wherever he could find them.* In the Albigensian Crusade he found the perfect outlet for his bloodlust. From June 1209 for a full two years, Simon de Montfort and his fellow crusaders cut a swath through the French south, besieging towns suspected of harboring Cathars, and burning, slicing, or torturing people to death. De Montfort hunted heretics in places like Béziers and Carcassonne, Minerve ...

The crusaders torched and bombarded their way around Cathar country, massacring citizens in the thousands to ensure no heretic would escape their punishment.

By late 1212 he was in charge of a considerable portion of southern France, which he governed according to a set of strict and divisive laws called the Statutes of Pamiers.

No matter; on September 12, 1213, de Montfort drew Pedro into battle at Muret, not far from Toulouse, crushed his army, and killed the Aragonese king. Whatever danger Catharism had threatened to the unity of the church, no Cathars had been responsible for slaughtering crusader monarchs. It was de Montfort who now seemed to represent the greatest threat to order in the French south.

The pope had now begun to plan a Fifth Crusade, which was to be announced at a Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, with its target the Nile delta city of Damietta. And while de Montfort was certainly a distracting presence during the preparations for this mission, he was not distracting enough to convince Innocent of the need to call a halt to persecuting Christ’s enemies. So the pope allowed the persecutions to continue, and de Montfort was still alive and active in June 1216 when Innocent fell sick and died at Perugia, at around the age of fifty-five. De Montfort continued to enjoy his role as scourge of the Cathars for another two years, before he too died, killed while besieging the city of Toulouse, where he was struck by a rock hurled from a catapult operated by a group of the city’s women.

Louis continued the war on southern heretics until the end of the 1220s, by which time he had successfully stripped away the county of Toulouse of any last vestiges of independence.

So whatever the Albigensian Crusade had achieved in terms of political reorganization, it had not been able to crush the spirit of the heretics themselves.*