with the Mongols, but achieving no permanent results. He returned home at the end of 1272, the last of the western crusaders; and thus all the attempts of St Louis and Charles of Anjou, of James of Aragon and Edward of England left Bibars still in possession of all his conquests.
Two projects of Crusades were started before the final expulsion of the Latins from Syria. In 1274, at the council of Lyons, Gregory X., who had been the companion of Edward in the Holy Land, preached the Crusade to an assembly which contained envoys from the Mongol khan and Michael Palaeologus as well as from many western princes. All the princes of western Europe took the cross; not only so, but Gregory was successful in uniting the Eastern and Western churches for the moment, and in securing for the new Crusade the aid of the Palaeologi, now thoroughly alarmed by the plans of Charles of Anjou. Thus was a papal Crusade begun, backed by an alliance with Constantinople, and thus were the plans of Charles of Anjou temporarily thwarted. But in 1276 Gregory X. died, and all his plans died with him; there was to be no union of the monarchs of the West with the emperor of the East in a common Crusade. Charles was able to resume his plans. In 1277 Mary of Antioch ceded to him her claims, and he was able to establish himself in Acre; in 1278 he took possession of the principality of Achaea. With these bases at his disposal he began to prepare a new Crusade, to be directed primarily (like that of Henry VI. in 1197, and like his own projected Crusade of 1270) against Constantinople. Once more his plans were crossed finally and fatally: the Sicilian Vespers, and the coronation of Peter of Aragon as Sicilian king (1282), gave him troubles at home which occupied him for the rest of his days. This was the last serious attempt at a Crusade on behalf of the dying kingdom of Jerusalem which was made in the West; and its collapse was quickly followed by the final extinction of the kingdom. A precarious peace had reigned in the Holy Land since 1272, when Bibars had granted a truce of ten years; but the fall of the great power of Charles of Anjou set free Kalāʽūn the successor of Bibars’ son (who reigned little more than two years), to complete the work of the great sultan. In 1289 Kalāʽūn took Tripoli, and the county of Tripoli was extinguished; in 1290 he died while preparing to besiege Acre, which was captured after a brave defence by his son and successor Khālil in 1291. Thus the kingdom of Jerusalem came to an end. The Franks evacuated Syria altogether, leaving behind them only the ruins of their castles to bear witness, to this very day, of the Crusades they had waged and the kingdom they had founded and lost.
9. The Ghost of the Crusades.—The loss of Acre failed to stimulate the powers of Europe to any new effort. France, always the natural home of the Crusades, was too fully occupied, first by war with England and then by a struggle with the papacy, to turn her energies towards the East. But it is often the case that theory develops as practice fails; and as the theory of the Holy Roman Empire was never more vigorous than in the days of its decrepitude, so it was with the Crusades. Particularly in the first quarter of the 14th century, writers were busy in explaining the causes of the failures of past Crusades, and in laying down the lines along which a new Crusade must proceed. Several causes are recognized by these writers as accounting for the failure of the Crusades. Some of them lay the blame on the papacy; and it is true that the papacy had contributed towards the decay of the Crusades when it had allowed its own particular interests to overbear the general welfare of Christianity, and had dignified with the name and the benefits of a Crusade its own political war against the Hohenstaufen. Others again find in the princes of Europe the authors of the ruin of the Crusades; they too had preferred their own national or dynastic interests to the cause of a common Christianity. They had indeed, as has been already noticed, done even more; they had used the name of Crusade, from the days of Henry VI. onwards, as a cover and an excuse for secular ambitions of their own; and in this way they had certainly helped, in very large measure, to discourage the old religious zeal for the Holy War. Other writers, again, blame the commercial cupidity of the Italian towns; of what avail, they asked with no little justice, was the Crusade, when Venice and Genoa destroyed the naval bases necessary for its success by their internecine quarrels in the Levant (as in 1257), or—still worse—entered into commercial treaties with the common enemy against whom the Crusades were directed? On the very eve of the Fifth Crusade, Venice had concluded a commercial treaty with Malik-al-Kamil of Egypt; just before the fall of Acre the Genoese, the king of Aragon and the king of Sicily had all concluded advantageous treaties with the sultan Kalāʽūn. A fourth cause, on which many writers dwelt, particularly at the time when the suppression of the Templars was in question, was the dissensions between the two orders of Templars and Hospitallers, and the selfish policy of merely pursuing their own interest which was followed by both in common. But one might enumerate ad infinitum the causes of the failure of the Crusades. It is simplest, as it is truest, to say that the Crusades did not fail—they simply ceased; and they ceased because they were no longer in joint with the times. The moral character of Europe in 1300 was no longer the moral character of Europe in 1100; and the Crusades, which had been the active and objective embodiment of the other worldly Europe of 1100, were alien to the secular, legal, scholastic Europe of 1300. While Edward I. was seeking to found a united kingdom in Great Britain; while the Habsburgs were entrenching themselves in Austria; above all, while Philippe le Bel and his legists were consolidating the French monarchy on an absolutist basis, there could be little thought of the holy war. These were hard-headed men of affairs—men who would not lightly embark on joyous ventures, or seek for an ideal San Grail; nor were the popes, doomed to the Babylonian captivity for seventy long years at Avignon, able to call down the spark from on high which should consume all earthly ambitions in one great act of sacrifice.
But it is long before the death of any institution is recognized; and it was inevitable that men should busy themselves in trying to rekindle the dead embers into new life. Pierre Dubois, in a pamphlet “De recuperatione Sanctae Terrae,” addressed to Edward I. in 1307, advocates a general council of Europe to maintain peace and prevent the dissensions which—as, for instance, in 1192—had helped to cause the failure of past Crusades. Along with this advocacy of internationalism goes a plea for the disendowment of the Church, in order to provide an adequate financial basis for the future Crusade. Other proposals, made by men well acquainted with the East, are more definitely practical and less political in their intention. A blockade of Egypt by an international fleet, an alliance with the Mongols, the union of the two great orders—these are the three staple heads of these proposals. Something, indeed, was attempted, if little was actually done, under each of these three heads. The plan of an international fleet to coerce the Mahommedan is even to this day ineffective; but the Hospitallers, who acquired a new basis by the conquest of Rhodes in 1310, used their fleet to enforce a partial and, on the whole, ineffective blockade of the coast of the Levant. The union of the two orders, already suggested at the council of Lyons in 1245, was nominally achieved by the council of Vienne in 1311; but the so-called “union” was in reality the suppression of the Templars, and the confiscation of all their resources by the cupidity of Philippe le Bel. The alliance with the Mongols remained, from the first to the last, something of a chimera; and the last visionary hope vanished when the Mongols finally embraced Mahommedanism, as, by the end of the 14th century, they had almost universally done.
Isolated enterprises somewhat of the character of a Crusade, but hardly serious enough to be dignified by that name, recur during the 14th century. The French kings are all crusaders—in name—until the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War; but the only crusader who ever carried war in Palestine and sought to shake the hold of the Mamelukes on the Holy Land was Peter I., king of Cyprus from 1359 to 1369. Peter founded the order of the Sword for the delivery of Jerusalem; and instigated by his chancellor, P. de Mézières (one of the last of
