“Oh! yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taint of blood.”
In Memoriam.
The Christian kingdom, reduced after Saladin’s conquest to a strip of land along the coast, with a few strong cities, depended no longer on the annual reinforcement of pilgrims, but on the strength and wealth of the two military orders. Unfortunately these quarrelled, and the whole of Syria became divided, Mohammedans as well as Christians, into partisans of Knights Templars, or of Knights Hospitallers. Henry of Champagne, the titular king, was only anxious to get away, while Bohemond, the Prince of Antioch, was only anxious to extend his own territories. In Germany alone the crusading spirit yet lingered, and a few Germans flocked yearly to the sacred places. Germany did more. The emperor, with forty thousand men, went to Palestine by way of Italy. When he arrived, he found, to his amazement, that the Christians did not want him—the truce concluded with the Mohammedans being not yet broken. The barons and princes had resolved not to break it at all; but rather to seek its renewal. But the Germans had not accomplished their long journey for nothing. They issued from their camp at Acre in arms, and broke the truce by wantonly attacking the Saracens. Reprisals at once followed, as a matter of course. Jaffa was attacked. Henry of Champagne hastened to its defence. There he fell from a high window, and was killed. The arrival of more Crusaders enabled the Christians to meet El Melik el ‘Άdil in open field, and to gain a complete victory. They followed it up by taking the seaboard towns, and the whole coast of Syria was once more in the hands of the Christians. Of Jerusalem no one thought except the common soldiers, with whom the capture of the city remained still a dream. Isabelle, the widow of Henry, was married a fourth time, to Amaury de Lusignan, who had succeeded his brother Guy on the throne of Cyprus, and now became the titular king of Jerusalem, a shadowy title, which was destined never to become a real one, except for a very brief interval.
When the Germans went away, the Christians of Palestine were once more at the mercy of the Saracens, with whom they had broken the treaty. The Bishop of Acre was sent to supplicate help from Europe. He was shipwrecked and drowned almost immediately after leaving port. Other messengers were sent. These also were drowned in a tempest. So for a long time news of the sad condition of the Christians did not reach Europe. But, indeed, it was difficult to raise the crusading spirit again in the West. Like a flame of dry straw it had burned fiercely for a short time, and then expired. Jerusalem was fading from the minds of the people. It was become a city of memories, round which the glories of those myths which gathered about the name of Godfrey and Tancred were already present. Innocent III., a young and ardent pope, wrote letter upon letter. These produced little effect. He sent preachers to promise men remission of sins in return for taking the Cross. But it was a time when men were not thinking much about their sins. Priests imposed the penance of pilgrimage to Palestine; but it does not appear that many pilgrims went; and boxes were placed in all the churches to collect money; but it is not certain that much money was put into them. Then Fulke de Neuilly, the most eloquent priest of the time, was sent to preach a crusade, and succeeded in fanning the embers of the crusading enthusiasm once more into an evanescent and short-lived flame. How little of religious zeal there was in the movement may be judged by the sequel, and we cannot here delay to detail the progress of the Crusade which ended in the conquest of Constantinople. No history can be found more picturesque, more full of incident, and more illustrative of the manners and thoughts of the time; but it does not concern Jerusalem. An old empire fell, and a new one was founded, but Christendom was outraged by the spectacle of an expedition which started full of zeal for the conquest of the Holy Land, and was diverted from its original purposes to serve the ambition of its leaders, and the avarice of a commercial city.
Egypt and Syria, meantime, were kept quiet from war by troubles not caused by man. The Nile ceased for a time to overflow, and a fearful famine, a famine of which the records speak as dreadful beyond all comparison, set in; during this men kept themselves alive by eating the flesh of those who died, while the cities were filled with corpses, and the river bore down on its tide dead bodies as numerous as the lilies which bloom on its surface in spring. And before the famine, which extended over Syria as well, had ceased, an earthquake shook the country from end to end. Damascus, Tyre, Nablous, were heaps of ruins; the walls of Acre and Tripoli fell down; Jerusalem alone seemed spared, and there the Christian and the Mohammedan met together, still trembling with fear, to thank God for their safety. The sums of money which Fulke de Neuilly had raised in his preaching were spent in repairing the walls which had fallen, and the knights sent messengers in all directions to implore the assistance of the West. Amaury, a wise and prudent chief, died, leaving an infant son, who also died a few days after him, and Isabelle was a widow for the fourth time. Pope Innocent III. could find none to go to the Holy Land but those whom he ordered to go by way of penance. Thus, the murderers of Conrad, Bishop of Wurtzburg, were enjoined to bear arms for four years against the Saracens. They were to wear no garments of bright colours; never to assist at public sports; not to marry; to march barefooted, and dressed in woollen; to fast on bread and water two days in the week, and whenever they came to a city to go to the church, with bare backs, a rope round the neck, and rods in the hand, there to receive flagellation. But their penance was not so cruel as that inflicted on the luckless Frotmond, described above (p. 124). Another criminal, one Robert, a knight, went to the pope and confessed that while a captive in Egypt, during the dreadful famine, he had killed his wife and child, and kept himself alive by eating their flesh. The pope ordered him to pass three years in the Holy Land.
The Crown of Jerusalem devolved, by the death of Amaury de Lusignan, on the daughter of Isabelle, by her husband, Conrad of Tyre. The barons, looking for a fit husband to share the throne with her, that is, to become their leader in war, selected John de Brienne. He was recommended by the King of France, “as a man good in arms, safe in war, and provident in business.” And hopes were held out that another crusade would be sent from France. On the strength of this expectation, the Templars, in spite of contrary advice from the Hospitallers, broke the truce which yet existed with the Mahometans, and open war began again. King John de Brienne came with an army of three hundred knights, and no more; fortresses and towns were taken; the Christians began to drop off, and desert the falling country; and the new king soon found himself with no place that he could call his own, except the city of Acre. He sent to the pope for assistance. The pope could not help him, because there was a new and much easier crusade on the point of commencing, that against the Albigeois. And then happened that most wonderful episode in all this tangled story, the Crusade of the Children, “expeditio nugatoria, expeditio derisoria.”
It had long been the deliberate opinion of many ecclesiastics that the misfortunes of the Christian kingdom, and the failure of so many Crusades, were due to the impure lives of the Christian soldiers. Since the First Crusade it had been the constant and laudable aim of the Church to maintain among the croisés a feeling that personal purity was the first requisite in an expedition inspired solely by religious zeal. All their efforts were vain; laws were made, which were broken at once. Shameful punishments were threatened, of which no one took any notice. Even the camp of Saint Louis himself was filled with every kind of immorality; while that of Richard’s Crusade, spite of the strictest laws, became the scene of profligacy the most unbridled. For every one Crusader, in the later expeditions, who was moved by a spirit of piety, there might be found ninety-nine who took the Cross for love of fighting, for the sake of their seigneurs, for sheer desire of change, for a release from serfdom, for getting away from the burden of wife and family, for the chance of plunder and license, and for every other unworthy excuse. Thus it was that the religious wars fostered and promoted vice; and the failure of army after army was looked on as a clear manifestation of God’s wrath against the sins of the camp.