Quia Maior and the Fifth Crusade, 1213-1215

Posted on September 21, 2017 by Ruth

The Fifth Crusade left a permanent mark on Roman Christendom, laying the foundation for the Protestant Reformation but even so, altering the way we look at serving in the church, even now.

It was Pope Innocent III’s second attempt to organize and lead a Crusade; he had learned from the Fourth Crusade and believed that the key lesson was not to lose control. And to raise enough money. In 1215, the Pope hosted the Fourth Council to be held at the Lateran Palace in Rome, a general church council like the great old ones at Nicaea and Chalcedon, except that by now, only Rome was involved. He had given participants a long time to plan their journeys, so the council was very well attended. The Catholic Encyclopedia notes the presence of 71 archbishops, 412 bishops, and 900 abbots!

The Council mostly dealt with theological issues like transubstantiation, which it affirmed as a necessary belief. (That’s the literal transmogrification of bread and wine into flesh and blood when the priest blesses it in the Mass.) There were also some interesting details, like the establishment of a 12-month probation period for heretics, during which if they took no action to defend themselves, they were presumed to be admitting to it (and then the secular ruler was obliged to banish the person).  Or, in a very different vein, one canon required every bishop’s seat (cathedral) to establish a school. Differently again, the Council proclaimed no new religious orders; if anyone wanted to start a new thing, he had to choose from an existing template.

The Council also cleaned up some political messes, excommunicating the Kings of both France and Germany, much as the Council of Clermont had done in 1095, and for basically the same reasons. That action had an impact on the upcoming Crusade, of course. It seems likely that royal lobbyists were quietly pointing out that evicting the two richest kings from Christendom’s good graces was a really bad way to launch an international project. But the Council was firm, divorce was not acceptable.

The Council also set up some rules looking forward to the next Crusade, which was being called by a separate Papal Bull known as Quia Maior. The Council stipulated that Jews and Muslims should wear a distinctive of dress, so they could be told apart visually. (I guess it had unnerved them to see how easily a Crusade could slaughter Catholics in Provence?) It also laid an arms and even shipping embargo on the Muslim lands, to prepare the region for war.

But the bull itself, Quia Maior (its opening words), laid out a new vision of how Christendom could participate in the Crusade. In this vision, you could go on Crusade without leaving home. The whole church could become a Crusading machine, as it were. That’s because Pope Innocent III recognized that giving money to the Crusaders was as important as going personally on Crusade.

In the original vision, a penitent sinner showed his wish to be forgiven by going on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. It was a way of acting out repentance: you stop sinning, turn from that life, and take up another life. The only way to earn the forgiveness of sin was to act through the deeds of repentance, making and keeping a vow. The Pope’s proclamations merely stated that this particular act was a sufficient penance for any sin, however large. But if a knight did not make a vow, or did not keep it, then he did not earn forgiveness. He had to go or die trying. (or he could try another kind of penance at home)

After the Fourth Crusade went so tragically off the rails for lack of funding, Pope Innocent III widened the meaning of participation. The penitential action that earned forgiveness now included any sort of help. You could go, or you could for example buy your poverty-stricken neighbor knight a horse, so he could go. You could donate cash to the expedition directly, to be used for whatever need. In fact, just as with charities today, that was the preferred option. Please consider NOT going! Please consider just giving as much money as you can: rest assured, it is sufficient penance, you will be forgiven.

What Pope Innocent III did not realize is that he was setting up a new church custom: buying forgiveness. By the time of Martin Luther, selling “indulgences” was a practiced fundraising operation. The money didn’t need to be used for Crusades, once it was in the church coffers, though doubtless during the run-up to a Crusade, much of it did go there. They say some cathedrals were funded mainly from “butter indulgences,” the purchase of regional forgiveness for eating butter during Lent’s long fast. (In places where olive and walnut oil were plentiful, they didn’t need butter.)

The Pope had an idealistic view of it: he was permitting all men to participate and contribute, even if they could not fight or go. Even if they gave the widow’s mite, their priest could still assure them of forgiveness. The whole of Christendom was thus mobilized to be cleansed of sin while building up the church’s power. Innocent III died soon after the Lateran Council broke up, so he never saw the way his precedent worked out. It’s ironic that the same Pope could lead the Council to forbid monasteries from requiring entrance donations, at the same time that he set up the indulgence-selling precedent. He genuinely did not see the connection.

Innocent’s death was the occasion of showing just how much his parishioners were not…innocent. He was laid out in state in Rome, that is, wearing his robes and jewels. By the next day, when the future Archbishop of Acre came to receive his blessing, he found the Pope’s body stripped of all valuables and most fabric. Next time they say “when in Rome,” just remember that sometimes what the Romans do isn’t worth imitating. (Nothing against Rome really: the poor are the poor, all over the world and through time.)

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Acre in 1215

Posted on September 21, 2017 by Ruth

By the time of the Fifth Crusade, the medieval port of Acre was not only the capital of the “Kingdom of Jerusalem,” it pretty much was the kingdom. But if you had to choose one city to pretend was a whole kingdom, medieval Acre was not a bad choice.

Alexandria, Egypt had been the primary Mediterranean trade city for centuries, and of course it remained a key port. But Northern Europeans were more comfortable bringing their products to the Crusader city, where Old French was the official language and it was easy to find speakers of German or Provencal. And so Acre became the primary trading port for about a century.

Northern Europe’s key export was wool. The cold climate encouraged sheep to put on thick coats, and the entire culture was set up to process wool into cloth, from cottage spinsters to water-powered weaving mills. Europe had two other valuable products to trade: amber from the Baltic and saffron, the pollen of the crocus flower. They also exported hunting dogs and falcons.

Everything else that the medieval world valued (and was portable) tended to come from the East: other spices, gemstones, silk, glass, and ceramics. Europeans made their own glass and pottery, but it had little value next to what came from Baghdad or Egypt. Of course you could find these things in Alexandria, but if you were a Northern merchant stocking up after unloading your bolts of wool, you were already in Acre. And so more and more trade went north.

Both Alexandria and Constantinople, the other ancient trade hub, had doubled their profit by manufacturing raw materials. Soda was made locally by burning plants that had grown in salty places, so a glassmaking factory was obvious. Acre now acquired glassmakers. Cities were where the most skilled workmen could find sufficient wealthy customers, so workshops for gold and silver smithing and fine silk weaving also grew up. There was a large scriptorium that produced fine book copies.

Exports from Acre weren’t just high tech or long-range, they also included local products. Farmers brought their animals to Acre’s slaughterhouses, where the animals turned into meat, leather, parchment, and soap. Dates and sugar were also grown locally; Acre had a sugar refinery for a while.

The city became horribly overcrowded and polluted. Windows facing the port had to be kept closed or refuse might blow in. We don’t even want to know what was floating in the water. Blood from slaughterhouses, even fouler refuse from tanneries, and household sewage was all poured raw into the sea.

Trade always has a pacifying effect on a region. The Franks in Acre were highly motivated to promote peaceful travel to and from Damascus and Aleppo, which were still Ayyubid-governed cities. Most of the time, a truce was in effect and life was pretty normal. It’s hard to know how the average person in Acre felt if he heard a new Crusade had been called. Was he glad knowing that trade would spike as newcomers came through, hopeful that regained territory would add to the city’s wealth, or sorry that roads might be closed as truces collapsed? The last seems likeliest, as we see in the history of modern Europe how allowing trade to be the most important consideration set up a Common Market that sponsored Europe’s longest period of internal peace.

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The Orders of Knights, 1209 forward

Posted on September 21, 2017 by Ruth

In 1190, some German merchants set up a field hospital at the siege of Acre. The hospital soon became an Augustinian monastery, then a military order like the Templars. It was called the Order of the Brothers of the German House of Saint Mary in Jerusalem, or for short, the Teutonic (German) Knights. By 1209, it was increasingly a fighting force rather than a hospital. In 1220, the order purchased a castle on the road to Jerusalem, called Montfort or (for German tongues) Starkenburg. Its ruin is now a tourist attraction in an Israeli nature preserve.

The other military orders, the Hospitalers and the Templars, were prospering too. At this time, when the Crusader States were small and weak, the knight orders were correspondingly huge and powerful. Much of the settling and “peacekeeping” of the Holy Land was carried out by these non-governmental orders, who reported directly to the Pope. During this period, the Hospitalers built Krak des Chevaliers into a massive fighting machine that was almost unconquerable.

All three received by will acres of farm and forest land that they didn’t directly live on or rule, but they collected profits from it. The Templars owned so much of France that they became an international banking house. They pioneered the use of a cheque, that is, a certified withdrawal order on paper that could be presented in Acre after money had been deposited in Paris (or anywhere). All of the orders began managing such large tracts of land and sums of money that they were in effect supra-national organizations, floating sovereign states.

In 1211, the Teutonic Knights offered their services to King Andrew of Hungary, who would soon lead the Fifth Crusade. He gave them a province in Transylvania, where they began settling other Germans. They were supposed to help defend the border of Hungary against the Turkic Cumans. But like the other military orders, the German Knights soon grew so rich and powerful that they lost interest in serving the King of Hungary. They asked to be placed directly under the Pope, like the other orders. In 1225, Hungary revoked their land grant, though they did not carry out ethnic cleansing against unarmed Germans.

The Knights also offered to help defend the borders of Poland from the pagan Prussians. In 1226, Emperor Frederick II gave them a land grant to possess and rule any Prussian territory they could conquer. So they set out to do that. It took about 50 years, but they subdued it, both killing and baptizing as they went. By the early 1300s, there were Teutonic Order castles all over Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, and Germany.

In 1230, the Knights declared a new Crusader State in central Europe, later governed from their main Marienburg Castle in Malbork, Poland. It was made of red brick, and it is the largest castle in the world. It’s now a museum, World Heritage Site, and so on.

And of course, the Teutonic Knights also fought in the Fifth Crusade, alongside the other orders. All wore large crosses, but the German knights wore black cross on white, while the Templars wore red cross on white, and the Hospitalers white cross on black.

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The Children’s Crusade, 1212

Posted on September 19, 2017 by Ruth

If the Children’s Crusade took place, the year was 1212. Whatever happened, that was the year. Pope Innocent III had been preaching Crusade, and more Crusade, for years. He was promoting the Spanish Crusade, the Crusade against the Cathars, and of course a new Crusade to the Holy Land (the 5th). Was it any wonder that an unauthorized Crusade might spring up in 1212?

It seems that something happened, but it’s unclear who was involved. Traditional legends say that two boys, one in France, one in Germany, began preaching Crusade to other children. Following their lead, bands of children swelled to crowds, a veritable unarmed army. Sure that their innocence would win where the sins of the adults had failed, they marched to the Mediterranean Sea and waited for it to miraculously open up. Then disaster took them as most were sold into slavery.

Contemporary historians are more cautious. Bands of unauthorized, unarmed (at best poorly armed) people did swarm like that in 1212, coming from France and Germany. But were they children? Or perhaps were they just swarms of paupers and beggars, who were also considered innocent like children? Did the two streams join and suffer one fate? Or were there two or more separate movements from these two places?

It seems most likely that all of these things were mostly true. Europe was becoming over-populated for its current economy, and there were some young men who could not find a good place in society. They were considered adults somewhere between 12 and 16, although in an apprenticing system they were not on their own until they were over 20. So probably we could call them children and adults, depending on how they’re seen. The leaders were shepherds, that is, rural workers in a marginal hill economy, not plowmen or vine-tenders in rich Burgundy. Their followers were probably similarly from poor, rural families that could not afford to settle sons in a town trade and could barely feed themselves. The diet of these European poor was mainly peas porridge, not the rich foods we think of as “European” now.

The young men picked up a religious vision in which they were not useless; in God’s kingdom they had value, and in this Crusade they could work miracles. In spirit, it was probably a lot like the popular movements of the 20th century in which people have gathered for the end of the world (or moved to Guyana). Many of the marchers believed they communicated specially with God or had miraculous powers. Town paupers joined the rural Crusaders as they passed through. They had nothing to lose.

The stream from Germany marched to Genoa, where they expected the sea to part. It did not, and some grew angry and felt cheated. However, many found work in the expanding shipping industry; Genoa was a good place for unemployed men to end up. The leader, Nicholas of Cologne, led a core band to Rome, where they met the Pope. The Pope blessed them but told them to return home. Exhausted by their travel over the Alps, few survived the walk back. Nicholas did not, but his father was held responsible by the furious families of other young men who died en route.

The stream from France first gathered around Paris, where the shepherd Stephan of Cloyes tried to deliver a letter from Jesus to the king. The people said that Stephan was working miracles, but the clerics at the University of Paris told the king to send them home. Stephan continued to preach as he made his way south toward the sea. Large bands of adults and adolescents followed him as far as they were able; the crowd grew and shrank, until finally thousands of them arrived in Marseilles. It’s not clear what happened in Marseilles. Probably many different things happened: some found passage on ships and later realized they were now slaves; some settled in Marseilles, some went home. The traditional story says that definitely they all became slaves; historians now question this conclusion.

Peter Raedts, a history professor in the Netherlands, made a detailed study of the original sources for the 1212 Crusade. In 1977, he published an article in the Journal of Medieval History that showed how thin its contemporary evidence was. Most sources gave a short passage about this Crusade, no more. Many sources that look contemporary to us were actually written 25 years later, so they were based on hearsay or distant memory. Apparently, the later the source, the more likely it is to say that children were involved.

Later sources may also be more likely to play up their being sold into slavery. Stories tend to grow in the telling. A single occurrence becomes a generality, and in the next telling it’s a universal. So in the end, we really don’t know. Europeans were still keeping records on parchment; it was in the next century that paper became widely available and regular people could start keeping journals and writing letters. Until then, if a king was not involved, we probably don’t know much about what happened.

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The Spanish Crusade, 1212

Posted on September 19, 2017 by Ruth

During the Third Crusade’s years, power in Spain swung back in the Muslim direction, but by the time of the Fourth Crusade, the Christians were again ascendant. As in the Middle East, the key to not losing was to stop infighting and join a larger movement. Human nature being what it is, that was always harder than it sounds.

By 1194, there were five important Christian kingdoms: Portugal (based in Lisbon, prize of the Second Crusade), Leon, Castile, Navarre, and Aragon. Navarre was the smallest, but it was also set most securely in the Pyrenees. The language of these kingdoms was halfway between Spanish and French, in fact nearly identical to the language of Provencal, home of the Cathars. There was minimal cultural barrier to French knights riding south to join these kingdoms’ Crusades, and the royal families on both sides of the mountains were tightly intermarried and related. Richard the Lion-Heart’s bride was from Navarre, and one of his sisters married the king of Castile.

In 1194, a truce between Castile and the Almohad king in Morocco expired. King Alfonso of Castile attacked Seville, with the help of the Order of Calatrava (Spain’s answer to the Knights of the Temple). The Almohad king, al-Mansur, brought a force from Africa to defend Muslim holdings, and the armies met at a field on the border of Castile. Alfonso had asked help from Leon and Aragon, but those reinforcements had not yet come. I don’t fully understand how battles were joined at that time; there seems to have been an element of choice, often. Either king could have held back and just stayed out of reach, waiting. In any event, Alfonso did not wait, and in the battle, Castile lost badly. The losses were so severe that they abandoned the castles along their southern border. Toledo, the most important Christian capital of the time, was threatened.

Alfonso of Castile began building a stronger coalition and planning more carefully. Fifteen years passed, during which his southern border was never safe, and at any time, Muslims probably could have taken Toledo. But Alfonso’s luck held; the Almohads would generally rather go home to Morocco (much like the Franks wanting to go home from the Holy Land), so they made no determined effort. Finally the kings of Castile, Leon, Aragon, Navarre and Portugal agreed on a joint effort to drive the Almohads farther south. This was a diplomatic coup, since the Christian kingdoms were themselves often at war. One source says that the King of Portugal arrived at the truce meeting on a dragon, with a Berber in a box. But that’s the internet for you.

In 1211, the Almohads captured Salvatierra Castle, which the Order of Calatrava had just built to replace the castles lost in the 1190s. Interesting bit of trivia about the current Almohad Caliph, whose name was Mohammed al-Nasir: Matthew Paris, the English chronicler, claims that King John sent envoys to Morocco asking for military help in exchange for his own conversion to Islam. It’s a stretch. If John’s envoys actually had some other message, then it’s just interesting that Matthew Paris thought the scuttlebutt he picked up about a conversion offer was plausible enough to report. Just imagine England minus the Magna Carta, plus Almohad-style Islam!

In any case, the Almohad gains were very bad news for the Christian towns along the southern border. To stop the Almohads from going further north, Pope Innocent III (the one in Rome) proclaimed a new Crusade. French knights who had missed the Holy Land voyages or couldn’t stomach fighting French villagers now came to join the combined Christian armies.

The story says that a shepherd helped the Christian armies come through a pass in the Sierra Morena mountains, while the African army was off its guard, thinking the mountains impassable. The pass they used was actually a very ancient road in this region; there are prehistoric cave paintings in the Despeñaperros Canyon. Perhaps the secret lay in knowing enough different paths that a large army could assemble on the other side fairly quickly, instead of trickling in, single file, over the course of a day. In any case, the shepherd marked the road with a cow’s skull and was rewarded with the hereditary title “Cabeza de Vaca” (Cow’s head). His descendant Alvar Nunez made the title famous when he explored the New World.

The surprise attack worked, and the Almohad army was devastated. The Caliph escaped, but his survival in this case did not amount to success. In the next years, all of the Christian kingdoms pressed their advantage by seizing border cities, then farther and farther south. The original Castilian King Alfonso’s grandson Ferdinand took Cordoba in 1236 and Seville in 1248. In 1252, he was preparing to cross the Strait of Gibraltar, taking the battle to Morocco, but when he died these plans were abandoned. Still, talk about momentum! You can also see the Kingdom of Castile pulling ahead in the rivalry with other kingdoms. It was already moving into the position that it held two centuries later, when its Queen Isabella would merge Castile with Aragon for a united Spain.

Here’s a picture of the monument to the battle at Las Navas de Tolosa.

 

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The Cathar Crusade, 1209-1229

Posted on September 7, 2017 by Ruth

The Crusades that took place entirely within Europe aren’t really part of the narrative of the Muslim Empire, and its contacts and conflicts with Europe, that I’m primarily telling. However, it’s worth seeing how the idea of “crusade” developed during that time, and I think it also helps put the remaining Holy Land crusades in context. We have to start with the church’s view that loss of Jerusalem was punishment for group sin; one of the sins was tolerating paganism or heresy, thus weakening Christendom.

Europe’s largest counter-cultural religion at this time was the Cathar religion. It seems to have developed during the Dark Ages in Armenia, diffusing through parts of the Byzantine Empire, especially Bulgaria. In the century before the Crusades, the Byzantines used a group of these believers, called Bogomils (Friends of God), as a frontier population stabilizer in Thrace (north of Greece). Travelers through Thrace brought the new theology to Northern Italy and Southern France, where its adherents became known as Cathars, the Pure Ones.

Catharism had little in common with orthodox Christianity. It posited a dual set of gods, good and evil, one of spirit, the other of the material world. Food and sex were bad, while everything of the spirit was good. Priestly hierarchy and civil authority were both bad; Cathar believers would not take vows, so they could not serve in the army or courts. For the most part, Cathars lived side by side with Roman Catholics, as different sects do in modern times. In the region around Toulouse, there had been Cathar believers for several generations by the time the Pope decided to put a stop to it.

Previous church councils had labeled it as wrong, but nothing had been done. Now, Pope Innocent III decided to use the tool of Crusade. He proclaimed forgiveness of sins, and a reward of land, to any French knight taking the Cross against the Cathars.

The knight who stepped forward to lead was an Anglo-Norman who had actually left the Fourth Crusade when he saw it was going to attack fellow Christians. Simon de Montfort had traveled to Hungary instead, and then to Acre. Now he was back on his lands in France, looking for a new Crusade. The French knights of Southern France were very reluctant to actually kill the Cathar believers among them, but Simon de Montfort apparently had no sentimentality about them. It seems likely he was also ambitious to increase the legacy he left to his heirs, and there were some very good estates owned by Cathars.

So in 1209, Montfort met with 10,000 knights and soldiers in Lyon. They besieged the town of Beziers, knowing it had a mixed population of Cathars and Catholics. They told the populace that the Catholics should come out, and the Cathars should surrender. When the city gates were forced open, the Crusaders killed every resident of Beziers and set it on fire. The papal legate who accompanied the troops was untroubled by the deaths of so many Catholic believers too, including priests killed at their churches. It was worth it.

The walled city of Carcassone prepared to defend itself, but after the besiegers cut the water supply, the town surrendered. Here, they were not massacred, but they were expelled. Most other towns surrendered after this, but the town of Minerve didn’t, and was also besieged. Here, when it fell, Simon de Montfort and the papal legate decided to punish Cathar leaders publicly, and their actions set the first precedent for what we’d call, today, an Inquisition. The Cathar leaders who refused to convert to Catholicism were burned at the stake.

For historians, the Cathar Inquisition is a rich source of documentation. For several years, teams of priests questioned locals about Cathar believers or witchcraft, and they often asked details information about the neighbors: who was married to whom, who did what work, who thought what about their neighbors’ beliefs. It was all written down and much of it has survived unscathed, like the walled city of Carcassone, to this day. From the Inquisition documents, it appears that there was no zeal for punishing the people they were questioning and often just gave them penance.

But the military destruction of the region continued for several years, too. In 1211, the Count of Toulouse called on King Peter II of Aragon to help them. Peter was a good Roman Catholic, but his sister had married the Count of Toulouse; they were near neighbors in a time when Southern French and Northern Spanish were essentially the same language. So the grand finale battle of the Cathar Crusade pitted Simon de Montfort against Toulouse and the Aragonese knights. In the Battle of Muret, King Peter was killed. Simon de Montfort was victorious again! The Count of Toulouse fled to England for sanctuary, and the Crusaders occupied most of the Toulouse region. In 1215, the last fortress fell, and Simon de Montfort became, in effect, the Count of Toulouse.

Still the fighting did not stop. It was an ancient, proud, independent region. The Raymonds, father and son, fought back while the King of France started joining on the Crusader side. That’s the tip off that if political conquest hadn’t been the original goal, it surely had become it. The men of Languedoc sometimes won back their land, but the tide was against them. It was now a war of France vs. Toulouse, with religion as a formal excuse. It finally came to an end in 1229 when Queen Blanche offered a truce to Raymond (by now these were both 2nd generation inheritors of the Crusade) in which his daughter married Prince Alphonse of France, and from that time, Toulouse would be a Crown property. Raymond had no option but to accept.

The culture and land of Southern France had been laid waste. Wars tend to get more bitter as they go, and in this one, the “Crusader” forces had begun wantonly burning vineyards and fields all around Toulouse, smashing what they could find. It took years for agriculture to recover, and the arts culture of Provence and Toulouse never recovered. Troubadours who fled the genocide went northward, gladly received in less cultured cities and courts. That’s how the southern troubadour music reached Paris and London, then even cities along the Rhine. And the Cathar religion came to an end, as the Inquisition went on for years in the desecrated region. After that, they were just a region of France.

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Ayyubid Egypt, 1192-1250

Posted on September 5, 2017 by Ruth

Saladin’s empire was split up among four sons, with his brother al-Adil receiving two important castles in Jordan. The oldest son was not a natural ruler. Uncle al-Adil had to broker peace among the brothers several times, until basically he just took over. Adil had been co-ruling with Saladin for years, so he had the most experience and connections. By 1200, Adil was formally the Sultan of Egypt, and his sons inherited after him.

There’s one interesting thing that happened while Saladin’s son was still ruling, before his death in 1198. Al-Aziz was the one Muslim ruler of Egypt who tried to tear down the idolatrous Pyramids! He decided to start with Pharaoh Menkaure, though it seems likely he didn’t know whose it was that he singled out. “Start with that one.” For eight months, a team tried to pull out stones. It seems likely that they were experienced at demolition, since Saladin’s men had destroyed many stone walls in Palestine and Syria. But when they came to Menkaure’s pyramid, they had little luck. It took about a day to remove one stone, and then the stone had to be cut in pieces to remove across the soft sand. When they gave up, they had made a vertical gouge in one side, but had not altered the structural integrity.

Adil’s son al-Kamil and two grandsons al-Adil II and as-Salih were the rest of the Ayyubid dynasty. By 1250, their rule had ended. Ayyubid extended family members were appointed to many regional ruling positions, and in turn they appointed friends and relatives to rule land grants called iqtas. I wonder if their structure was modeled after the Frankish feudal one, or if that structure was just common sense in the time.

Saladin set out to make Egypt into a Sunni land again. He promoted Sunni institutions, but he also fired a large layer of Christians and Jews who had been working in government under the Fatimids. A lot of these were Armenians, promoted by Armenian viziers. But keeping Christians out of government was a bad long-term strategy, since a higher percentage of people who knew how to track the Nile’s flood cycle were Coptic (native Egyptian) Christians. So after Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem made his power secure, his government rehired Christian and Jewish scribes and officials.

Al-Kamil was long remembered by Copts as a good ruler. He ruled as a governor even before he became Sultan, so he got to know Egypt well. He chose to live permanently in Cairo and govern in a hands-on way. He became friends with priests and monks, too.

Wealthy Copts were secure enough to commission art and literature during al-Kamil’s reign. A team of painters created a large set of murals around the walls of the Chapel of St. Anthony, inside a monastery. Scholars wrote books to keep the Coptic language alive; it’s one of the few times when a very old language was being replaced but with time and interest in documenting it. They wrote dictionaries and grammars, and one book even had a rhyming story to teach Arabic speakers some Coptic words. Coptic was still spoken in the farming areas, but not in the cities outside of church.

During an easy time, there were conversions between Christianity and Islam in both directions. Egypt had two periods when harsh repression of Christians caused waves of mass conversion to Islam, but the Ayyubid period was not like that. Interestingly, one of the documented reasons to convert to Islam at this time was quite personal. A Christian monk had sworn to celibacy: if he slipped into sexual sin, one way out was to become a Muslim, who merely preferred that he marry the woman. But these converts had a hard time feeling good about what they’d done, and some converted back. This sort of case went before the Islamic Qadi (judge), and frequently they were given the death penalty, but not always. They always expected it and made their decision knowing what it meant.

One big issue for the Christian churches was that they had to get their appointments approved by the Muslim government. It was hard enough sometimes to agree on a Pope among themselves. During the first half of Ayyubid rule, there was a stalemate, and the church had no Pope. When Pope Cyril III was finally elected and approved by al-Kamil, many church offices had fallen vacant. Cyril sold some of the appointments for donations, a practice called “simony” and specifically forbidden. Cyril’s defense is that he was himself forced to pay a large fee (1000 silver dinars) to the Sultan to buy approval, and he was trying to make up that sum. Cyril was able to appeal to the Sultan (by then Kamil’s son) to preside over his trial, and the Sultan influenced the vote to be in his favor. It was always tempting for Christians, divided by sectarian allegiance (Armenians, Syrians, Greeks, Copts) or concerned about each other’s doctrine, to appeal to the Muslim ruler. And the Muslim rulers always stayed involved in church affairs this way.

Christians in Egypt always suffered when European Crusaders attacked Egyptian ports and fortresses. In our time, Muslims are all held responsible for terrorist attacks by radical Muslims; in that time, all Christians, especially the ones who answered to Constantinople, but also the native Copts, were held responsible for whatever the Franks did. In Syria, during the First Crusade, Christian Armenians had often helped deliver their cities to the Crusaders. In Egypt, during the later Crusades, they were very afraid that Christians would do the same. So during those times, the army more often tore down nearby churches to make fortifications. During those times, Christians were more likely to be fired from government jobs that required a 13th century security clearance.  There had already been a painful rift between Rome and Alexandria in the 6th century; now Egyptian Christians found themselves turning more and more anti-Rome (and anti-Constantinople) to prove that they had no sympathy with these invasions.

Al-Kamil’s sons were nothing like him, and their misrule ended the dynasty’s future. The longer-ruling one, Salih, invested in new buildings, particularly a new palace on Rawda Island in the Nile. In order to build this palace, he had to demolish a historic church that had only recently been repaired from flood damage under his father’s rule. He was a forbidding, severe man. Salih made up for losing support at home by importing more slave soldiers, with one key mistake: he brought in mostly Turkish mamluks, and this disturbed a previous balance of Turks and Kurds among their ranks. The Ayyubid family was mostly Kurdish. In theory, mamluks were loyal to whoever paid them, but in reality, Turkish mamluks were less inclined to support a Kurdish Sultan.

The Ayyubids will still be part of the next few Crusades, until 1250.

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al-Jazari’s Book of Ingenious Devices, 1206

Posted on September 5, 2017 by Ruth

In 1206, an engineer named Ismail al-Jazari published a book about inventions. It was a Do It Yourself manual, showing 100 things he had built, with diagrams for how to build them yourself.

al-Jazari was the chief engineer in the Artuklu Palace, in modern southeastern Turkey, where the Artuqid dynasty ruled. The Artuklu Palace had gardens and baths, which all required water systems. It also had clocks and other devices to keep it going. The Palace became a prison in the 1500s and then fell apart; it’s now a mound that’s been excavated. Much of what we know about the Artuklu Palace at its height comes from al-Jazari’s book.

al-Jazari makes very clear that he has only given descriptions and diagrams of things that he built, himself. It’s a little hard to tell what he invented outright, as opposed to what he built on existing models and just tinkered with. He did a little of both. The book’s greatest importance is that it documents the use of some mechanical devices not yet in use in Europe, such as:

–camshaft

–crankshaft

–segmental gear

–escapement mechanism to control rotation speed of a wheel

Many or most of his machines moved water or used it for power. Water clocks were the high technology of the time: gravity is constant, so if an aperture controlled the volume of falling water, they could accurately keep track of time. Of course, water had to be moved in order to become a power source. There were moving buckets and pumps to carry water up so that it might fall down. al-Jazari may have written the first description of a suction pump, saying he based it on the Byzantine device for shooting Greek fire at ships.

Perhaps the most advanced mechanical device he illustrated was how to convert rotary motion to reciprocal motion, using a crankshaft. In one single pump, he demonstrated this crankshaft, a double-acting cylinder in which fluid worked on both sides of the piston, and suction of water up a pipe by partial vacuum on the other side.

The book was copied many times and exists today in many manuscripts. That shows that it was a popular work for book sellers to carry. It seems likely that it came to Europe with less delay than older Arabic books had done, now that Europeans were all over the Near East. Europe was in the middle of a relatively slow but profound transition from hand tools to mechanical devices worked by water and wind. By the close of the Middle Ages, mills using many of al-Jazari’s devices were powering tools for nearly every trade.

 

 

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Empires you’ve never heard of, 1204-1261

Posted on September 5, 2017 by Ruth

After the Fourth  Crusaders destroyed Constantinople in 1204, they set up a new government. It is known as the Latin Empire of Constantinople, but in Latin, it was Imperium Romaniae, so we could translate it as the Empire of Romania.  The Crusaders elected Baldwin Count of Flanders to become the new Emperor.

According to the treaty signed by all the Crusade leaders, the new Emperor Baldwin only controlled a quarter of the city. Venice controlled another 3/8, a section that included Hagia Sophia Basilica. The remaining 3/8 went to other Crusade leaders. Venice also gained control of 3/8 of the Empire, on paper.

In reality, Venice took over Crete and some other islands. The Crusaders divided Greek territory into states for vassal princes: a King of Thessalonica, Prince of Achaea (Greece), Duke of Athens, and Duke of the Archipelago. Boniface, who had met the Byzantine Prince in Germany, became King of Thessalonica. A knight named William of Champlitte became Prince of Achaea; he had to conquer it, but the only resistance was local. A knight named Otto de la Roche became Duke of Athens. You can see where the energy of the Fourth Crusade went; carving up their new territory in ways that had nothing to do with a Crusade.

Thessalonica as a Crusader kingdom didn’t last beyond 1224. The Crusader states of Achaea and Athens lasted a surprising century. They weren’t reconquered by Greeks until about 1308. Through the 1300s, the titles were still passed down, along with some Italian ones like Prince of Taranto, as the minor royalty families merged and kept holding onto hope.

The Greek nobles who had been ruling Constantinople established Empires in exile and kept struggling to retake territory. One family set up in nearby Nicaea, another in Epirus, another in Trebizond. These are known as the “Empires” of those three cities; all three rulers claimed the title.

Until 1261, when the Emperor in Nicaea finally reconquered the city, there were many battles and alliances as the Latins tried to hold on. Their new dynasty didn’t work out, and they never developed a loyal power base. Having to fight on two fronts, against Bulgaria and rebels in Greece, as well as the rival Greek Emperors around Turkey, they were spread too thin.

Surprisingly, some of the Latin rulers in Greece hung on for a long time. For example:

Venice ruled the Ionian Islands until 1864, when they joined the modern state of Greece. It ruled Crete until 1669.

A Latin Count of Salona hung onto power long enough to sell his county to the Knights of the Hospital, who lost it to the Turks in 1410.

The Duchy of Athens was conquered by a group of Catalan mercenaries paid by the Greek Emperor (now back in Constantinople, post 1261), but it became owned by a family in Florence, who ruled it until 1456, when Turks took it.

It’s a mixed history, sometimes with places conquered by Normans in Sicily blurring into the places taken by the Fourth Crusade. If you’re interested, research “Frankokratia” or “Latinokratia.”

Constantinople never really recovered. With so much of its heartland Greek territory lost to Latins, and its eastern border constantly eaten away by Turks, it was ghost of its former strength when besieged by Ottoman Turks in 1453.

 

 

 

 

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the Fourth Crusade Fiasco, 1203-4

Posted on September 4, 2017 by Ruth

The Fourth Crusade’s sudden diversion to attacking Constantinople took the city completely by surprise. Byzantine in-fighting had used many plot twists, but this was the first time a deposed prince had found a full army to rent instantly, waiting nearby. The city normally kept most of its soldiers stationed around its shrinking empire, although there was a permanent garrison. The Emperor had the Varangian Guard, too; these were Norwegians and Swedes who stayed behind after the Norwegian Crusade a century earlier.

Constantinople had been the high-tech “First World” city when Charlemagne ruled in a wooden “palace” in rough Aachen, but now his descendants had fully caught up in war technology. They too had the Greek fire recipe, and Europeans had studied Byzantine armor and weapons. The Fourth Crusade’s knights were superior fighting machines. In a skirmish outside the city, 80 knights defeated 500 Imperial soldiers. When Venetian ships landed the main force on the Anatolian side of the Strait, the knights charged. They expected the city to welcome back its rightful king!

The city actually didn’t care; Alexios’ family had just deposed the previous family, so what was another change in nominal kingship? The Crusaders set up a siege, although they could not actually encircle the huge city. The Varangian Guard bore most of the defense, beating back knights on land and a sea attack on the sea walls. Venetian sailors set a fire as they retreated, which burned 120 acres of city buildings. Prince Alexios’s uncle, the Emperor, led a sortie against the Crusaders, but his courage failed and he retreated. He slipped out of the city in shame, while the city elders deposed him and restored the blind, aging Isaac II from prison to the throne.

The casus belli was thus taken away from the Crusaders. Prince Alexios’s father was Emperor again, not himself. The Crusaders insisted on the prince’s cause, so his blind father had him co-crowned. And then the trouble started.

It turned out that now-Emperor Alexios IV could not find the sums of gold he had promised them. His deposed uncle had taken 1000 pounds of gold with him into exile, but there probably was just not as much money in Constantinople as the young prince thought. He ordered ICONS to be melted down to extract the gold and silver leaf! This move was unthinkable, and the news quickly spread through the city. It was the worst thing a new ruler could have done; previous new Emperors had paid treasury money to householders to buy support, but this one was melting down the icons their grandparents had endowed to pay foreigners!

Alexios IV begged the Crusaders not to leave him yet; he would come up with the full payment if only they’d stay for six months longer, until spring 1204. Then he took a large Crusader army to Adrianople, to try to stamp out the deposed Emperor’s (his uncle’s) foothold of power. When the Crusader army was reduced this way, the city began to riot in earnest. Constantinople’s Latin Quarter was the target, and some Latin residents died. Crusaders and Venetians attacked a mosque in retaliation, and as fighting widened, they set the city on fire again. This time, the fire burned for three days and leveled most of the city.

Things were relatively quiet for a few months after that. The Crusaders policed the city for Alexios IV, and 1204 came around, when they were to leave in April. The old blind Emperor died, and suddenly things changed rapidly. The Byzantine Senate refused to endorse the younger Emperor, electing another man instead. They arrested Alexios IV, and he quickly met his end in a dungeon, like many Emperors before him. A new Alexios V Doukas was crowned, and he took rapid, firm anti-Crusader steps of fortification.

The Crusaders began to use their siege engines on the city, and the city’s catapult battery answered back. It was now April, when the Crusaders had planned to move on to the Holy Land, and on April 9, they recognized that their assault had been defeated. Now what? And here, the local Latin bishops stepped in. They did not want the Fourth Crusade to give up, but Pope Innocent III had again ordered them to stop attacking fellow Christians. This papal order was kept quiet. Instead, the Latin priests told the Crusaders that the Greeks were murderers and traitors, and God wanted them to stay and finish the Greeks off.

The Crusaders and Venetians began another full-scale assault, and this time they succeeded. Ships got close to the walls, and some walls were pulled down. Another fire ravaged the parts of the city still standing. On April 13, the city gates were opened.

This second time the Fourth Crusaders entered Constantinople, they were not there to put Prince Alexios on the throne, so they acted as complete enemies. They also had had months to look the city over, so they knew where to loot. They felt they were owed at least 100,000 silver marks and helped themselves. Some historians estimate that they probably took nine times that much, mostly from churches and private homes.

During this Sack of Constantinople, many priceless works of art went missing. Venetians generally took things back to Venice, but the Northern Europeans tended to just smash things. Venice also kidnapped many artisans who had trade secrets they could use. Venice’s pre-eminence in glassmaking dates from the Fourth Crusade; they installed the captured artisans on an island and kept it closely guarded. It became a sort of prison-workshop.

When the Crusader rampage was over, the city was in ruins. Much of it had burnt in the three Crusader fires, and many citizens had died in the riots and looting. The mother church of Hagia Sophia was deliberately desecrated. They smashed its art, ruined its books, seated a prostitute on the Patriarch’s Throne, and got drunk using the silver chalices as cups.

The Pope was beside himself with grief and fury at how his beloved Fourth Crusade had turned out. He rebuked and excommunicated, but the Vatican also accepted gifts from the Venetians, things they had looted from Constantinople. Pope Innocent recognized that the Crusaders had just put an end, forever, to hopes that the Western and Eastern churches could reunite.

And now they had a burnt, ruined city full of corpses that needed to be governed.

 

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