God's Battalions (28 page)
Authors: Rodney Stark,David Drummond
BAIBARS ASSAULTS THE KINGDOMS
One of the Egyptian commanders who helped defeat Saint Louis was a Mamluk named Baibars (Baybars). Ten years later the first Mamluk sultan of Egypt was assassinated, and Baibars seized the throne. He was a very effective, if brutal, ruler.
Mamluk
was not an ethnic or tribal identity. In Arabic, the word means “to be owned.”
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All Mamluks were slaves who were kidnapped or purchased as children—often from villages in the Caucasus, so it was not unusual that Baibars had blue eyes and was very tall. These young Caucasian boys were raised as Muslims and trained as slave warriors dedicated to the sultan.
Having come to power in 1260, Baibars spent the first two years of his reign consolidating his power, reorganizing the army, and building a new navy.
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By 1263 he was ready to venture into the Holy Land. He began by sacking Nazareth and destroying its famous church. Then he led his troops to Acre but found it far too well fortified and defended—the garrison included the knights and infantry endowed by Louis IX—so he settled for sacking the area around the city and then returned to Egypt.
In 1265 he came with a far larger force and with lethal intentions. His first target was the small port town of Caesarea. It fell with little resistance. Next Baibars led his forces up the coast to Haifa. “Those inhabitants that were warned in time fled to boats in the anchorage, abandoning both the town and the citadel, which were destroyed; and the inhabitants that had remained there were massacred.”
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Then Baibars attacked the large Templar castle at Athlit. He was able to burn the village outside the walls but could make no headway against the fortress. So, toward the end of March, he continued south along the coast to the small port town of Arsuf (also Arsur or Apollonia). It was defended by 270 Hospitallers who fought “with superb courage.”
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The lower town fell to Baibars at the end of April, but the citadel continued to hold. Baibars proposed surrender terms allowing all the knights to go free. They surrendered, whereupon Baibars broke his word and enslaved them all. Then, fearing that the crusaders might someday recover this outpost, Baibars had citadel and town razed so completely that the site has never been resettled. Then once again it was Acre’s turn, and once again Baibars found it much too strong and so led his army back to Egypt.
In 1266 Baibars turned his attention to the islands of resistance that remained inland. First, he led his troops to the great castle of Montfort—but saw at once that it was too strong. So he led his troops to the great Templar castle at Safed, in the Galilean uplands. The garrison consisted of some Templars and a substantial number of Syrian mercenaries. With the arrival of Baibars, the Syrians began to desert, and soon it was impossible for the Templars to adequately man the walls. Baibars offered the Templars terms: to hand over the fortress and to withdraw without harm to Acre. The Templars opened the gates and marched out. The Muslims seized them and beheaded each and every one.
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Next, Baibars turned his attention to the Christian village of Qara, massacring all the adults and enslaving the children. That fall he sent an army to attack Antioch, but his generals decided not to make the attempt.
The next spring (1267), Baibars once again paraded his troops before Acre and this time made an attack on the walls, which was turned back in a bloody defeat. Baibars compensated for this by scouring the countryside for Christians, or suspected Christians, and surrounded Acre with their headless bodies. To no avail.
In 1268 Baibars conquered Jaffa and slaughtered the inhabitants. Then in May he launched his army against Antioch. The garrison lacked sufficient numbers to fully man the walls, but they were able to beat back the first attack. The knights knew that Baibars had failed to keep the surrender terms at Safed and Arsuf, so negotiations led nowhere. The second Muslim attack on Antioch burst through the walls. What followed was “the single greatest massacre of the entire crusading era”
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—a massacre that even shocked Muslim chroniclers.
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The gates were closed and guarded, and an orgy of torture, killing, and desecration ensued—fully acting out the descriptions that Pope Urban II has used to arouse the crowd in the meadow at Clermont nearly two centuries earlier. Should there be any doubt, Baibars himself bragged about the massacre of Antioch in detail.
Since Count Bohemond VI, ruler of Antioch, was away when this disaster befell his city, Baibars sent him a letter telling him what he had missed: “You would have seen your knights prostrate beneath the horses’ hooves, your houses stormed by pillagers…You would have seen your Muslim enemy trampling on the place where you celebrate Mass, cutting the throats of monks, priests and deacons upon the altars, bringing sudden death to the Patriarchs and slavery to the royal princes. You would have seen fire running through your palaces, your dead burned in this world before going down to the fires of the next.”
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Granted, the city had resisted; but since Baibars’s surrender agreements had proved worthless in the past, what option was there?
Sad to say, it is no surprise that the massacre of Antioch is barely reported in many recent Western histories of the Crusades. Steven Runciman gave it eight lines,
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Hans Eberhard Mayer gave it one,
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and Christopher Tyerman, who devoted several pages to lurid details of the massacre of Jerusalem during the First Crusade, dismissed the massacre of Antioch in four words.
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Karen Armstrong devoted twelve words to reporting this massacre, which she then blamed on the crusaders since it was their dire threat that had created a “new Islam” with a “desperate determination to survive.” Armstrong also noted that because Baibars was a patron of the arts, he “was not simply a destroyer…[but also] a great builder.”
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With the fall of Antioch, the Christian kingdoms in the East consisted of only a very narrow fringe surrounding a few ports along the coast: Acre, Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, and Alexandretta, the latter being a tiny coastal enclave in what had been the kingdom of Antioch.
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Baibars chose not to attempt to take these last strongholds, partly because of their imposing fortifications and skillful defenders, and partly because their access to the sea made it impossible to put them under an effective siege. He had an additional worry as well. Word was spreading that Louis IX was organizing another Crusade.
SAINT LOUIS’S BLUES
Now in his fifties and somewhat frail, Saint Louis still longed to save the kingdoms and reconquer Jerusalem. After discussions with Pope Clement IV, in 1267 Louis took the cross once more, as did his three sons and two brothers—Charles of Anjou and Alphonse of Poitiers. But outside France, only King Henry III of England and King James I of Aragon agreed to join him.
This new Crusade was about as carefully planned and organized as its recent predecessor—which is why it took nearly three years to get rolling. It was, of course, another naval Crusade, and Louis chartered a fleet from Genoa to augment the ships available to him in Marseille. Again, the initial target was Egypt, and Cagliari in southern Sardinia was chosen as the assembly point. Louis arrived there in June 1270. But the fleet from Aragon was so badly damaged by a storm that it never arrived, the survivors having returned home to reorganize. In England, Henry III had decided not to go but sent his son Edward in his stead, which delayed the departure of the English fleet until August. So Louis decided to move without the others and led his troops almost due south to the African coast, landing at Tunis on July 18, 1270. The French quickly seized a fortress on the site of ancient Carthage and established a secure camp.
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It has long been debated why Louis sailed to Tunis rather than to Egypt or even Acre. The consensus is that he believed that Muhammad I, the emir of Tunis, was ready to convert to Christianity if he had the protection of a strong Christian army.
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Only after the landing was it discovered that this was a false rumor. Although the city was only weakly defended, Louis decided to avoid stirring up trouble while he waited for the arrival of Aragonese and English crusaders. But what the local Muslim forces were too weak to do, the climate accomplished. “The summer heat beat down on the crusaders and nurtured an outbreak of deadly diseases in the camp. Soldiers began to die in great numbers.”
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Soon Louis fell ill, too. On August 25, 1270, King Louis IX died. His body was returned to France. His magnificent tomb at Saint-Denis was destroyed during the French Wars of Religion, and his remains disappeared.
Soon after Louis died, Prince Edward arrived with his English forces and was stunned to find the French forces preparing to sail home. His force was far too small to attempt an attack on Baibars in Egypt, but rather than simply throw in his hand, the prince sailed on to Acre, where he landed in May 1271 with two to three hundred knights and perhaps six hundred infantry.
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Although the troops available to him were insufficient to reclaim any of the lost territory, they made Acre virtually invulnerable. This allowed Edward to negotiate a ten-year peace treaty with Baibars. Then he went home, to discover his father had died and that he now was King Edward I.
Meanwhile, in 1271 Baibars sent his new navy to attack Cyprus. Even with the advantage of surprise it was no contest: by nightfall there was no Egyptian fleet. At about this same time, Baibars’s forces were able to conquer the huge Hospitaller fortress of Krak des Chevaliers, which gave the Muslims control of the approaches to Tripoli. But then Baibars agreed to the ten-year treaty with Prince Edward, ending his threat to the last Christian strongholds. On July 1, 1277, Baibars died. There are several traditions concerning his cause of death, but it is generally believed that he poisoned the drink of an Ayubite prince and then carelessly drank it himself.
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CONCLUSION
The crusading spirit did not die with Saint Louis, but the doubts that had long been building up were greatly encouraged by his failures. If such well-funded and well-organized Crusades, led by a skilled and saintly leader, could not prevail, what could? Moreover, even Louis had faced widespread opposition—especially by the clergy—to the taxes necessary to fund these undertakings. In the wake of Louis’s defeat and death, angry opposition to crusader taxes grew louder, and many prominent people began to condemn the continuing defense of the Holy Land as a useless, misguided, and perhaps wicked “quagmire.”
This nineteenth-century painting of the return home of an elderly crusader is symbolic of the end of the crusading era, which fell victim to the unwillingness of Europeans to continue to pay taxes in support of the crusader kingdom.
©
Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY
S
O LONG AS THE COSTS
of the Crusades were born by the crusaders and their families, there were few who objected to the repeated efforts to free and preserve the Holy Land. But when kings began to lead, the expense of crusading soon was being imposed on everyone, including the clergy and the religious orders, in the form of crusader taxes. Grumbling began at once. The grumbling grew increasingly louder when bloody “crusades” began against “heretics” in Europe: thousands of Cathars, Waldensians, Beghards, and Beguines were condemned by the Church and killed in battle or hunted down and massacred. In the midst of all this, a medieval version of an antiwar movement eventually prevailed; after two centuries of support, the kingdoms in the Holy Land were abandoned.
CRUSADER TAXES
Having been the first king to lead a Crusade, Louis VII of France was the first, in 1146, to impose a tax to fund his venture to the Holy Land. This tax seems to have been levied only on the clergy, especially the monastic orders; in any case, the abbot of Ferrières was the first to complain that the tax was unfair and too severe. His was hardly a lone voice. The abbot of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire protested that he would need to melt down some sacred silver and gold altar furnishings in order to raise the sum demanded.
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The abbot of Mont-Saint-Michel not only complained bitterly that the tax involved “the spoliation” of the church, but “ascribed the failure of the expedition to a divine judgment.”
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It is unknown how much was raised by Louis’s tax, but it was not enough. He also borrowed substantial sums and wrote several times to his head tax collector asking for advances and loans.
Then King Henry II of England and King Philip Augustus of France imposed a far heavier tax in 1166, and this time on the laity as well as the clergy. The rate in England was placed at two pence of each pound sterling of income for the first year, and one penny in each of the next four years. Equivalent rates were charged in France. This may have been the first time in Europe that a tax was imposed on income rather than on property.
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This tax seems to have aroused little antagonism. But that was not the case in 1188, when another income tax was imposed in England and France to support what came to be the Third Crusade. Hence, this tax was known as the Saladin Tithe, and it stirred up intense anger.
The Saladin Tithe was first initiated by Henry II of England and embraced by Philip Augustus. It required a payment of 10 percent (a tithe) on all revenues and movable properties by everyone who was not going to go crusading. What really distressed the king’s subjects was that prior taxes had been left to conscience: a person was assumed to have paid the correct amount. This time a Templar and a Hospitaller were appointed as collectors in each parish, joined by a priest and two parishioners. This collection team was empowered to investigate suspicious cases and to imprison offenders until they paid up.
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Many ecclesiastics predicted that the Crusade would come to a bad end because of this abusive taxation. One French troubadour even sang of “tyrants who have taken up the cross so they may tax clerks, citizens, and soldiers…more have taken the cross out of greed than faith.”
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On July 6, 1189, Henry II died and was succeeded by his son Richard the Lionhearted. Because of the Saladin Tithe, Richard inherited a bursting treasury, containing at least one hundred thousand marks despite the fact that just before his death Henry had given thirty thousand marks to the Templars and Hospitallers to spend on the defense of Tyre.
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Even though Richard turned out to be a prodigious spender, he always had the money to spend.
At the close of the twelfth century the tax burden shifted from the crowns to the papacy: in 1199 Innocent III imposed a tax of 2.5 percent a year on all clerical incomes to support the Fourth Crusade. This led to many incidents of open rebellion and nonpayment.
Crusade taxes peaked during the reign of Saint Louis. It has been calculated that from 1247 to 1257, Louis spent 1.5 million livres on crusading, or more than six times his royal revenues. The difference was made up by “gifts” and special taxes. As for “gifts,” in 1248, eighty-two towns in northern France were ordered to “give” large sums “to help the overseas journey.”
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They gave about 275,000 livres. In addition, huge sums came from taxes on the churches: the “French clergy offered a tenth over five years,” which may have added up to almost a million livres.
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Even so, many of the leading nobles paid their own way as well as that of their contingents; crusading was hugely expensive.
GRUMBLES
From the start, some Christian theologians had condemned the doctrine that crusading earned forgiveness for sins and was the moral equivalent of taking monastic vows. These criticisms increased as the Crusades failed to accomplish their goals, encouraging claims that God did not sanction these wars. Worse yet, “many Christians began to blaspheme,”
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claiming that God was favoring the Muslims. A well-known troubadour asked, “God, why did you bring this misfortune upon our French king…It is with good reason that we cease to believe in God and worship Muhammad.”
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Even more damaging was a poem by a Knight Templar, written in despair after the massacre or enslavement of the knights at Arsuf by Baibars:
My heart is so full of grief that it would take little more to make me kill myself at once or tear off this cross which I took in honor of Him who was crucified. For neither cross nor my faith protects and guides against the cursed Turks. Rather it seems, as anyone can see, that to our hurt God wishes to protect them…Thus he is mad who seeks to fight the Turks since Jesus Christ does not deny them anything.
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To counter such objections, leading churchmen argued that God permitted these defeats because of the sins of the crusaders.
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The crusaders themselves often adopted this explanation and staged many elaborate displays of contrition; recall the three-day fast and then the barefoot march around the walls of Jerusalem in 1099. Of course, contrition had its limits, and the whores were never banished from the encampments.
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In any event, claims that God did not support the Crusades grew increasingly loud and popular—especially among those paying the most in taxes.
Finally, when the Church held a council at Lyon in 1274, the pope asked the esteemed Humbert of Romans, Master General of the Dominican order, to report on current opposition to crusading. It was a masterful summing-up.
Humbert began by noting how the Muslims had provoked the Crusades. For more than six hundred years they had been attacking Christendom. Once the whole of North Africa had been a flourishing Christian region; now only one Christian bishopric remained, in Morocco. They had invaded Spain, Sicily, and Italy. Worst of all, they had taken and profaned the Holy Land. Without question the Crusades were a Christian duty. Why then did so many shirk from going?
Some failed to go because they were sunk into sin and self-indulgence. More failed to go because they were afraid. And afraid not merely of combat: many otherwise brave knights were terrified of going to sea. (It was common knowledge that many battle-hardened veterans backed out of their vow to take the cross when it came time to board a ship.) Others failed to go because they were too concerned about their own affairs. Still others because of family obligations; women had often been very vocal opponents of crusading, albeit some had ridden east with their husbands, sons, and lovers.
But the truly important reason that an increasing number would not go crusading was the attacks being heaped on it by so many critics. Some of these were pacifists who held it to be a sin to kill anyone. Some objected that it made more sense to leave the Muslims in peace unless they invaded Europe: “[w]hen we conquer and kill them we send them to hell, which is contrary to Christian charity.”
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Others condemned the Crusades for wasting the lives and energy of the best and brightest. Many asked how much more useful Louis IX could have been had he remained in France and lived to an old age. Some of the most persuasive critics attacked crusading as futile: there were too many Muslims, and Palestine was too far away. And always it came back to taxes. Crusading was too expensive.
It also was becoming too disruptive. Some of the most vociferous critics of crusading were equally vociferous in criticizing the Catholic Church on other grounds as well. The Cathars (Albigensians) condemned all killing, including capital punishment, and aimed specific condemnations against the Crusades. The Waldensians likewise opposed killing and extended this to condemnations of all crusading. These views probably helped kindle opposition to both groups, but the launching of military attacks on both—these also justified as “Crusades” by the Church—played a far more important role in generating opposition to all crusading. The campaigns against the Cathars and the Waldensians were brutal wars of extermination that devastated parts of Europe, damaged the economy, and led to great bitterness in many European communities.
The result of all these factors was that after Edward I sailed back to England in 1272, no more large crusading groups ever came to the Holy Land—although several very small contingents did appear, including one led by Countess Alice of Blois in 1287 and another under Odo of Grandson in 1290.
THE KINGDOM FALLS
In February 1289 Saif al-Din Qalawun (or Kalavun), the Mamluk sultan of Egypt, marched a huge army north and laid siege to Tripoli, one of the five remaining crusader ports in the Holy Land. When warned by the Templars that the Egyptians were coming, at first no one in Tripoli believed it. And, confident of the immense strength of their fortifications, they made no special preparations until the enemy was literally at the gates. Much to their surprise, not only was the Muslim army much larger than anyone in Tripoli had thought possible; this Muslim force brought immense siege engines able to smash the city’s walls. As the bombardment ensued, members of the Venetian merchant community within Tripoli decided that the city could not be held and sailed away with their most precious possessions. This alarmed the Genoese merchants, and so they, too, scrambled aboard their ships and left. This threw the city into disorder just as the Muslims launched a general assault on the breaches in the walls. As hordes of Egyptian troopers swarmed into the city, some Christians were able to flee to the last boats in the harbor. As for the rest, the men were slaughtered, and the women and children were marched away to the slave markets. Then “Qalawun had the city razed to the ground, lest the Franks, with their command of the sea, might try to recapture it.”
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He also founded new Tripoli a few miles inland, where it could not be reached by sea.
That left Acre, Tyre, Beirut, and Haifa.
On his deathbed, Qalawun had his son and heir, al-Ashraf, swear he would conquer Acre. So in April 1291, al-Ashraf arrived at Acre with an even larger army than his father had marched to Tripoli and with even more powerful siege machines. The defenders fought bravely and with great skill; several times they sallied out the gates and attacked the Muslim camp. But all the while their fortifications were being reduced to rubble by the huge stones hurled by the siege engines, although supplies continued to arrive by sea from Cyprus and some civilians were evacuated on the return voyages. In May, a month after the siege began, reinforcements consisting of one hundred mounted knights and two thousand infantry came from Cyprus. But they were too few.
Soon the battle was being fought in the streets, and many civilians were crowding aboard rowboats to reach the galleys out in the harbor. But most people were unable to leave, and “[s]oon the Moslem soldiers penetrated right through the city, slaying everyone, old men, women and children alike.”
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By May 8, all of Acre was in Muslim hands except for the castle of the Templars, which jutted out into the sea. Boats from Cyprus continued to board refugees from the castle while the Templars, joined by other surviving fighting men, held the walls. At this point al-Ashraf offered favorable terms of surrender, the Templars accepted, and a contingent of Mamluks was admitted to supervise the handover. Unfortunately, they got out of hand. As the Muslim chronicler Abu’l-Mahasin admitted, the Mamluk contingent “began to pillage and to lay hands on the women and children.”
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Furious, the Templars killed them all and got ready to fight on. The next day, fully aware of what had gone wrong, al-Ashraf offered the same favorable terms once again. The commander of the Templars and some companions accepted a safe-conduct to arrange the surrender, but when they reached the sultan’s tent they were seized and beheaded. Seeing that from the walls, the remaining Templars decided to fight to the death. And they did.
Less than a month later this huge Muslim army arrived at Tyre. The garrison was far too small to attempt a defense and sailed away to Cyprus without a fight. Next, the Muslims marched to Beirut. Here, too, resistance was beyond the means of the garrison, and they, too, sailed to Cyprus. Haifa also fell without opposition; the monks on Mount Carmel were slaughtered and their monasteries burned. The last Christian enclave was now the Templars’ fortress island of Ruad, two miles off the coast. The Templars held out there until 1303, leaving then only because of the suppression of their order by the king of France and the pope. After the fall of Acre, the Hospitallers gathered on Cyprus and then, in 1310, seized the island of Rhodes from the Byzantines. There they built a superior navy and played an important role in defending Western shipping in the East.
And so it ended. It should be kept in mind that the kingdoms had survived, at least along the coast, for nearly as long as the United States has been a nation.