Chapter X: Front Matter (10)

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.