Frederick was rewarded by a second excommunication, and the pope placed every town in which he might be under interdict. Then the people of Rome rose in insurrection, and the pope fled.
Frederick went to the Holy Land. If he wished to avoid fighting with his friends, the Saracens, he had certainly succeeded; because the Crusaders, forty thousand in number, on hearing of Frederick’s return to Italy, all re-embarked and went home again. The king, notwithstanding a peremptory order from the pope forbidding him to embark so long as he was under the ban of the Church, set sail with a small fleet of twenty galleys, and six hundred knights. He arrived at Acre. The Knights Templars and Hospitallers received him as their king. Frederick was now married to Yolante, the daughter of John of Brienne, from whom he took the crown of Jerusalem, on the ground that he only held it in right of his wife, whose rights were now descended to her daughter. The clergy refused to meet him, and there came messengers from the pope, by whose command the knights of the orders withdrew their help. Frederick went his own way. He sent Balian, Prince of Tyre, as an ambassador to El Malik el Kamíl, who sent him back with valuable presents, Saracenic robes, singers, and dancing girls, and, above all, Frederick’s old friend Fakhr-ed-dín. Then the Templars wrote to the Sultan proposing the assassination of the Emperor. Kameel quietly sent on the letter to his friend, who read it and said nothing. The negotiations between Frederic and Kameel went on in secrecy; they were so far advanced that the former found himself in a position to disclose to the barons the terms proposed. He sent for the Grand Masters of the two orders, and submitted his proposals to them. They refused to act without the patriarch. Frederick knowing well enough that the patriarch would refuse to act without the pope’s consent, replied that he could do without that prelate. And then the treaty was signed. The Christians were to have Jerusalem, except the Mosque of Omar, where the Mohammedans were to worship freely; the Saracens were to have their own tribunal; the emperor, King of Jerusalem, was to send no succour to any who might attack the sultan; with some minor points. And as soon as the treaty was signed, the Germans set off with Frederick, and the Master of the Teutonic Knights, to the Holy City. The Christians had got back their city. The Church of Christ refused to have it, or to acknowledge, in any way, the treaty. Frederick rode into the city to find the church empty and deserted. With his knights and soldiers he marched up the aisle, took the crown from the altar, and put it on his own head, without oath or religious ceremony of any kind. Nor did he affect any religious zeal or manifest any emotion. “I promised I would come,” he said, “and I am here.” It was his answer to the world, and his defiance of the pope. His vow was fulfilled, in a literal sense; but the Crusade was ruined; he had done more than any other king since Godfrey; he had recovered the city, but without slaughtering the infidel, and subject to the conditions that the Mohammedans were to practise their religion within its walls. What did Frederick care for a religion which he confounded with the gloomy teaching of his ecclesiastical enemies? “I am not here,” he confided to his friend Fakhr-ed-dín, “to deliver the Holy City, but to maintain my own credit.”
And two days after his coronation he went away again, in cynical contempt of the city and its church. He wrote a letter to the pope and sovereigns of Europe, stating that he had, “by miracle,” taken the city, which was henceforth Christian. The pope, in an agony of rage at the way in which his enemy had ignored his excommunication, foamed at the mouth, and called the treaty a treaty of Belial. Moreover, he could not but feel the awful irony of the situation, when Jerusalem itself, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, were forbidden to have the service of the Christian religion performed in them, because their deliverer, a Christian king, was under the interdict of the pope. And here, reluctantly, we must leave the fortunes of Frederick; not, perhaps, a good man, but a better man than the arrogant and implacable monk who opposed him; and, perhaps, from an unecclesiastical point of view, the best man in a high place at that time in all the world.
The treaty was signed in 1229. Frederick in leaving Palestine, left the Christians without a chief, without a head. The Christians in Jerusalem, always dreading an attack from the Saracens, were constantly taking refuge in the tower of David, or the surrounding deserts. The patriarch, who had done most to estrange the emperor, wrote letter after letter, imploring for help. How many such letters had been sent since the Crusades had first commenced? Gregory had concluded some sort of reconciliation with Frederick, and now asked his help in an attempt to get up a new Crusade. It was left to the Franciscan friars—Saint Francis of Assisi had himself been present at the Crusade of King Andrew—to preach this. | 1237.| There were found a large number of barons in France to enrol their names; and by the Council of Tours it was resolved that the Cross should no longer be a pretext for the safety of every sort of criminal. But while the Crusaders were assembling came the news of the downfall of the Latin kingdom of Constantinople, and a discussion begun as to whether it were better to go to the help of that city instead of Jerusalem. And before they had decided, came a message from Frederick urging them to wait for him. While they waited, civil war broke out in Italy. The old animosity between Frederick and the pope was revived; and, worse than this, the treaty which Frederick had made with El Malik el Kamíl, which was for ten years only, expired; and the Saracens from Kerak, marching suddenly upon Jerusalem, took it without the least resistance, and razed the tower of David. The pope had forbidden the Crusaders to leave Europe; but in spite of his prohibition, a small army, under the Duke of Brittany and the Count of Champagne, landed in Acre. After a few ineffective forays, they experienced a defeat which cost them the loss of many of their leaders. So they all went home again, and were replaced by an English prince, Richard of Cornwall, who afterwards called himself Emperor of Germany. The Saracens thought that Richard Lion Heart was coming back again, and awaited his approach with the keenest terror. But he did nothing. Abandoned both by Templars and Hospitallers, he contented himself with ransoming the Christian prisoners, and, after visiting Jerusalem, and worshipping at the Holy Places, Richard returned to Europe, and the turmoil of European wars.
And now a new enemy appeared in the field. The people of Kh’árezm, driven westwards by the Tartars, came into Syria, a wild and ferocious band, with their wives and children, sparing neither Mohammedans nor Christians. Had the forces in Syria been united, a successful stand might have been made against them. But the Mohammedans were divided amongst themselves, and the Sultan of Cairo offered the Kharezmians Palestine for their own, if they would conquer it. They accepted the offer with joy, and marched twenty thousand strong upon Jerusalem. All the people in the city abandoned it hastily, except the helpless poor and infirm. These the Kharezmians found in their beds, and after killing them, thirsting for more blood, they inveigled back the Christians by hoisting the flags of the Cross. The flying Christians, looking round from time to time, caught sight at last of the banner of victory. Satisfied that God had delivered the city by a special miracle, and hearing, moreover, the bell ring for prayer, they trooped back to the city. Directly they were within the gates, the Kharezmians, who had only withdrawn a short distance, returned and surrounded them. In the depth of night the unhappy Christians endeavoured to fly. They were all cut to pieces. None were spared. And the barbarians then turned their wrath upon the very tombs, and tore up the coffins of Godfrey and Baldwin, which they burned with all the sacred relics they could find.
The Templars at Acre called on the Saracen princes of Damascus, Emessa, and Kerak, to make common cause against their common enemy. They came to Acre, headed by the valiant El Melik el Mensúr, Prince of Emessa, whose entrance into the city was greeted with shouts of applause. The allied armies met the Kharezmians on the plain of Philistia, the battlefield of so many periods and so many peoples. A curious incident is told, which took place before the battle. The Count of Jaffa, an excommunicated man, asked the patriarch, who was there with his wood of the Cross, as usual, for absolution. He refused it. Again he asked, to be again refused. But then the Bishop of Bama, impatient of his superior’s obstinacy, cried out, “Never mind. The patriarch is wrong, and I absolve you myself.” Of course one priest’s absolution is as good as another’s, and the count went into battle, to be killed with a light heart. They fought all that day, and all the next day, with a ferocity which nothing could equal. But then the Mohammedans gave way, and the victory remained with the Kharezmians. Of the allies thirty thousand lay dead on the field, while of the Christian knights, there returned to Acre only the Prince of Tyre, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, with his wood, thirty-three Templars, twenty-six Knights of St. John, and three Teutonic knights. The Kharezmians came before Jaffa. They tied Walter de Brienne, who was their prisoner, to a cross, and told him that unless he exhorted the besieged to submission they would put him to death. He called on the garrison to defend themselves to the last extremity, and was sent to Cairo, where he was murdered by the mob. Palestine was relieved of the presence of the Kharezmians by the Sultan of Cairo, who sent them to Damascus, which they took and plundered. They then demanded the fulfilment of his promise as regarded the lands of Palestine. But the Sultan prevaricated, and refused, sending an army of Egyptians against them; they were defeated in ten battles, and perish out of history altogether, having only appeared for the brief space of three or four years.
The Kharezmians were gone; but the Christians, who had suffered most of any at their hands, were in a condition of terrible weakness. So threatening was the state of affairs, that they once more forced their claims on the pope, and showed how, without help, they were all undone. The pope renewed all the privileges accorded by his predecessor to those who took the Cross. And then followed the Crusades of Saint Louis. Of his expedition to Egypt, the siege of Damietta, the calamities which befel his army, his own captivity, his ransom and freedom, we cannot here speak. They belong to the special history of the Crusades.
It was in 1250, after his return, that Saint Louis visited Acre. He had with him a small number of knights, all in rags, and deprived of everything. A pestilence broke out in the city. Louis remained, endeavouring to ransom the twelve thousand Christian captives from the Sultan of Cairo. Meantime he was urgently wanted at home, where that most singular movement, known as the revolt of the Pastoureaux, was distracting his country. And all efforts failed to raise bands of new Crusaders. Some, however, went to join the king. Among them was a Norwegian knight, named “Alenar de Selingan,” according to Joinville, who, with his companions, beguiled the time till they should be fighting the Saracens by slaying the lions in the desert. The Sheikh of the Assassins also sent an embassy with presents to Louis, asking for his friendship, and offering to remain as firmly allied to him “as the fingers on the hand or the shirt to the body.” Ives, a monk who could speak Arabic, was sent back on the part of the king with a present of gold and silver cups and scarlet mantles. He brought back a confused and wondrous story of the religion of this sect (see p. 322). He described them, oddly, as having a wonderful veneration for Peter, whom they maintained to be still alive. And he told how a mournful silence reigned round the castle of the Sheikh, and how, when he appeared in public, a herald went before, crying out, “Whoever you are, fear to appear before him who holds in his hand the life and death of kings.”
Louis, meantime, was repairing the fortifications of Cæsarea and Jaffa, and making severe laws against the dissolute morals of the Christians in the East and of his own men. His knights went on pilgrimages to Jerusalem, whither he refused himself to go. But he went to Nazareth, to Mount Tabor, and other sacred places.
After a little fighting, the news of his mother’s death determined him to go home. He sailed in 1254, having been four years engaged in his disastrous expedition, which only had the effect of making the Mohammedans cautious how far they attacked the Christian settlements, and mindful of the exasperation into which their fall might throw the West of Europe. The subsequent efforts to raise a Crusade all failed. The poets as well as the priests did their best, but with no success. It is remarkable, however, that there is not a word about crusading in the whole of the Romance of the Rose, except a reference or two to the palm of the pilgrim. Neither of its writers, certainly, was at all likely to be touched by the crusading enthusiasm. Rutebeuf however, throws himself into the projected Crusade with extraordinary vigour. “Ha! roi de France!” he cries—