commercial reasons for wishing to establish a strong position in Egypt, and to the Templars and Hospitallers, who did not feel satisfied by the terms offered by the sultan, because he wished to retain in his hands the two fortresses of Krak and Monreal.
The Sixth Crusade (1228–1229) succeeded as signally as the Fifth Crusade had failed; but the circumstances under which it took place and the means by which it was conducted made its success still more disastrous than the failure of 1221. The last Crusade had, after all, been under papal control: if Richard I. had directed the Third Crusade, and the policy of the Hohenstaufen and the Venetians had directed the Fourth, it was a papal legate who had steered the Fifth to its ultimate fate. The Crusade of Frederick II. in 1228–1229 finds its analogy in the projected Crusade of Henry VI.; it is essentially lay. It is unique in the annals of the Crusades. Alone of all Crusades (though the Fourth Crusade offers some analogy) it was not blessed but cursed by the papacy: alone of all the Crusades it was conducted without a single act of hostility against the Mahommedan. St Louis, the true type of the religious crusader, once said that a layman ought only to argue with a blasphemer against Christian law by running his sword into the bowels of the blasphemer as far as it would go:[1] Frederick II. talked amicably with all unbelievers, if one may trust Arabic accounts, and he achieved by mere negotiation the recovery of Jerusalem, for which men had vainly striven with the sword for the forty years since 1187. It was in 1215 that the leader of this strange Crusade had first taken the vow; it was twelve years afterwards when he finally attempted to carry the vow into effective execution. Again and again he had excused himself to the pope, and been excused by the pope, because the exigencies of his policy in Germany or Sicily tied his hands. After the failure of the Fifth Crusade—for which these delays were in part responsible—Honorius III. had attempted to bind him more intimately to the Holy Land by arranging a marriage with Isabella, the daughter of John of Brienne, and the heiress of the kingdom of Jerusalem. In 1225 Frederick married Isabella, and immediately after the marriage he assumed the title of king in right of his wife, and exacted homage from the vassals of the kingdom.[2] It was thus as king of Jerusalem that Frederick began his Crusade in the autumn of 1227. Scarcely, however, had he sailed from Brindisi when he fell sick of a fever which had been raging for some time among the ranks of his army, while they waited for the crossing. He sailed back to Otranto in order to recover his health, but the new pope, Gregory IX., launched in hot anger the bolt of excommunication, in the belief that Frederick was malingering once more. None the less the emperor sailed on his Crusade in the summer of 1228, affording to astonished Europe the spectacle of an excommunicated crusader, and leaving his territories to be invaded by papal soldiers, whom Gregory IX. professed to regard as crusaders against a non-Christian king, and for whom he accordingly levied a tithe from the churches of Europe. The paradox of Frederick’s Crusade is indeed astonishing. Here was a crusader against whom a Crusade was proclaimed in his own territories; and when he arrived in the Holy Land he found little obedience and many insults from all but his own immediate followers. Yet by adroit use of his powers of diplomacy, and by playing upon the dissensions which raged between the descendants of Saladin’s brother (Malik-al-Adil), he was able, without striking a blow, to conclude a treaty with the sultan of Egypt which gave him all that Richard I. had vainly attempted to secure by arduous fighting and patient negotiations. By the treaty of the 18th of February 1229, which was to last for ten years, the sultan conceded to Frederick, in addition to the coast towns already in the possession of the Christians, Nazareth, Bethlehem and Jerusalem, with a strip of territory connecting Jerusalem with the port of Acre. As king of Jerusalem Frederick was now able to enter his capital: as one under excommunication, he had to see an interdict immediately fall on the city, and it was with his own hands—for no churchman could perform the office—that he had to take his crown from the altar of the church of the Sepulchre, and crown himself king of his new kingdom. He stayed in the Holy Land little more than a month after his coronation; and leaving in May he soon overcame the papal armies in Italy, and secured absolution from Gregory IX. (August 1229). By his treaty with the sultan he had secured for Christianity the last fifteen years of its possession of Jerusalem (1229–1244): no man since Frederick II. has ever recovered the holy places for the religion which holds them most holy. Yet the church might ask, with some justice, whether the means he had used were excused by the end which he had attained. After all, there was nothing of the holy war about the Sixth Crusade: there was simply huckstering, as in an Eastern bazaar, between a free-thinking, semi-oriental king of Sicily and an Egyptian sultan. It was indeed in the spirit of a king of Sicily, and not in the spirit—though it was in the rôle—of a king of Jerusalem, that Frederick had acted. It was from his Sicilian predecessors, who had made trade treaties with Egypt, that he had learned to make even the Crusade a matter of treaty. The Norman line of Sicilian kings might be extinct; their policy lived after them in their Hohenstaufen successors, and that policy, as it had helped to divert the Fourth Crusade to the old Norman objective of Constantinople, helped still more to give the Sixth Crusade its secular, diplomatic, non-religious aspect.
Forty years of struggle ended in fifteen years’ possession of Jerusalem. During those fifteen years the kingdom of Jerusalem was agitated by a struggle between the native barons, championing the principle that sovereignty resided in the collective baronage, and taking their stand on the assizes, and Frederick II., claiming sovereignty for himself, and opposing to the assizes the feudal law of Sicily. It is a struggle between the king and the haute cour: it is a struggle between the aristocratic feudalism of the Franks and the monarchical feudalism of the Normans. Already in Cyprus, in the summer of 1228, Frederick II. had insisted on the right of wardship which he enjoyed as overlord of the island,[3] and he had appointed a commission of five barons to exercise his rights. In 1229 this commission was overthrown by John of Ibelin, lord of Beirut, against whom it had taken proceedings. John of Beirut, like many of the Cypriot barons, was also a baron of the kingdom of Jerusalem; and resistance in the one kingdom could only produce difficulties in the other. Difficulties quickly arose when Frederick, in 1231, sent Marshal Richard to Syria as his legate. This in itself was a serious matter; according to the assizes, the barons maintained, the king must either personally reside in the kingdom, or, in the event of his absence, be replaced by a regency. The position became more difficult, when the legate took steps against John of Beirut without any authorization from the high court. A gild was formed at Acre—the gild of St Adrian—which, if nominally religious in its origin, soon came to represent the political opposition to Frederick, as was significantly proved by its reception of the rebellious John of Beirut as a member (1232). The opposition was successful: by 1233 Frederick had lost all hold on Cyprus, and only retained Tyre in his own kingdom of Jerusalem. In 1236 he had to promise to recognize fully the laws of the kingdom: and when, in 1239, he was again excommunicated by Gregory IX., and a new quarrel of papacy and empire began, he soon lost the last vestiges of his power. Till 1243 the party of Frederick had been successful in retaining Tyre, and the baronial demand for a regency had remained without effect; but in that year the opposition, headed by the great family of Ibelin, succeeded, under cover of asserting the rights of Alice of Cyprus to the regency, in securing possession of Tyre, and the kingdom of Jerusalem thus fell back into the power of the baronage. The very next year (1244) Jerusalem was finally and for ever lost. Its loss was the natural corollary of these dissensions. The
- ↑ Joinville, ch. x.
- ↑ John of Brienne had only ruled in right of his wife Mary. On her death (1212) John might be regarded as only ruling “by the courtesy of the kingdom” until her daughter Isabella was married, when the husband would succeed. That, at any rate, was the view Frederick II. took.
- ↑ Amalric I. of Cyprus had done homage to Henry VI., from whom he had received the title of king (1195).
