Part 23

We may conceive of the Third Crusade under the figure of a number of converging lines, all seeking to reach a common centre. That centre is Acre. The siege of Acre, as arduous and heroic in many of its episodes as the siege of Troy, had been begun in the summer of 1189 by Guy de Lusignan, who, captured by Saladin at the battle of Hattin, and released on parole, had at once broken his word and returned to the attack. The army which was besieging Acre was soon joined by various contingents; for Acre, after all, was the vital point, and its capture would open the way to Jerusalem. Two of these contingents alone concern us here--the German and the Anglo-French. Frederick I. of Germany, using a diplomacy which corresponds to the lay character of the Third Crusade, had sought to prepare his way by embassies to the king of Hungary, the Eastern emperor and the sultan of Iconium. Starting from Regensburg in May 1189, the German army marched quietly through Hungary; but difficulties arose, as they had arisen in 1147, as soon as the frontiers of the Eastern empire were reached. The emperor Isaac Angelus had not only the old grudge of all Eastern emperors against the "upstart" emperor of the West; he had also allied himself with Saladin, in order to acquire for his empire the patronage of the Holy Places and religious supremacy in the Levant. The difficulties between Frederick and Isaac Angelus became acute: in November 1189 Frederick wrote to his son Henry, asking him to induce the pope to preach a Crusade against the schismatic Greeks. But terms were at last arranged, and by the end of March 1190 the Germans had all crossed to the shores of Asia Minor. Taking a route midway between the eastern route of the crusaders of 1097 and the western route of Louis VII. in 1148, Frederick marched by Philadelphia and Iconium, not without dust and heat, until he reached the river Salof, in Armenian territory. Here, with the burden of the day now past, the fine old crusader--he had joined before in the Second Crusade, forty years ago--perished by accident in the river; and of all his fine army only a thousand men won their way through, under his son, Frederick of Swabia, to join the ranks before Acre (October 1190). The Anglo-French detachment achieved a far greater immediate success. War had indeed disturbed the original agreement of Gisors between Philip Augustus and Henry II., but a new agreement was made between Henry's successor, Richard I., and the French king at Nonancourt (December 1189), by which the two monarchs were to meet at Vezelay next year, and then follow the sea route to the Holy Land together. They met, and by different routes they both reached Sicily, where they wintered together (1190-1191). The enforced inactivity of a whole winter was the mother of disputes and bad blood; and when Philip sailed for the Holy Land, at the end of March 1191, the failure of the Crusade was already decided. Richard soon followed; but while Philip sailed straight for Acre, Richard occupied himself by the way in conquering Cyprus--partly out of knight-errantry, and in order to avenge an insult offered to his betrothed wife Berengaria by the despot of the island, partly perhaps out of policy, and in order to provide a basis of supplies and of operations for the armies attempting to recover Palestine. In any case, he is the founder of the Latin kingdom of Cyprus (for he afterwards sold his new acquisition to Guy de Lusignan, who established a dynasty in the island); and thereby he made possible the survival of the institutions and assizes of Jerusalem, which were continued in Cyprus until it was conquered by the Ottoman Turks. From Cyprus Richard sailed to Acre, arriving on the 8th of June, and in little more than a month he was able, in virtue of the large reinforcements he brought, and in spite of dissensions in the Christian camp which he helped to foment, to bring the two years' siege to a successful issue (July 12th, 1191). It was indeed time; the privations of the besiegers during the previous winter had been terrible; and the position of affairs had only been made worse by the dissensions between Guy de Lusignan and Conrad of Montferrat, who had begun to claim the crown in return for his services, and had, on the death of Sibylla, the wife of Guy, reinforced his claim by a marriage with her younger sister, Isabella. In these dissensions it was inevitable that Philip Augustus and Richard I., already discordant, should take contrary sides; and while Richard naturally sided with Guy de Lusignan, who came from his own county of Poitou, Philip as naturally sided with Conrad. At the end of July it was decided that Guy should remain king for his life, and Conrad should be his successor; but as three days afterwards Philip Augustus began his return to France (pleading ill-health, but in reality eager to gain possession of Flanders), the settlement availed little for the success of the Crusade. Richard stayed in the Holy Land for another year, during which he won a battle at Arsuf and refortified Jaffa. But far more important than any hostilities are the negotiations which, for the whole year, Richard conducted with Saladin. They show the lay aspect of the Third Crusade; they anticipate the Crusade of Frederick II.--for Richard was attempting to secure the same concessions which Frederick secured by the same means which he used. They show again the closer approximation and better understanding with the Mahommedans, which marks this Crusade. Nothing is more striking in these respects than Richard's proposal that Saladin's brother should marry his own sister Johanna and receive Jerusalem and the contiguous towns on the coast. In the event, a peace was made for three years (September 2nd, 1192), by which Lydda and Ramlah were to be equally divided, Ascalon was to be destroyed, and small bodies of crusaders were to be allowed to visit the Holy Sepulchre. Meanwhile Conrad of Montferrat, at the very instant when his superior ability had finally forced Richard to recognize him as king, had been assassinated (April 1192): Guy de Lusignan had bought Cyprus from Richard, and had sailed away to establish himself there;[40] and Henry of Champagne, Richard's nephew, had been called to the throne of Jerusalem, and had given himself a title by marrying Conrad's widow, Isabella. In this condition Richard left the Holy Land, when he began his eventful return, in October 1192. The Crusade had failed--failed because a leaderless army, torn by political dissensions and fighting on a foreign soil, could not succeed against forces united by religious zeal under the banner of a leader like Saladin. Yet it had at any rate saved for the Christians the principality of Antioch, the county of Tripoli, and some of the coast towns of the kingdom;[41] and if it had failed to accomplish its object, it had left behind, none the less, many important results. The difficulties which had arisen between Isaac Angelus and Frederick Barbarossa contain the germs of the Fourth Crusade; the negotiations between Richard and Saladin contain the germs of the Sixth. National rivalries had been accentuated and national differences brought into prominence by the meeting of the nations in a common enterprise; while, on the other hand, Mahommedans and Christians had fraternized as they had never done before during the progress of a Crusade. But what the Third Crusade showed most clearly was that the crusading movement was being lost to the papacy, and becoming part of the demesne of the secular state--organized by the state on its own basis of taxation, and conducted by the state according to its own method of negotiation. This after all is the great change; and even the genius of an Innocent III. "could not make undone what had once been done." On the contrary, the thing once done would go further; and the state would take up the name of Crusade in order to cover, and under such cover to achieve, its own objects and ambitions, as in the future it was destined again and again to do.

_The Fourth Crusade, 1202-1204._--The history of the Fourth Crusade is a history of the predominance of the lay motive, of the attempt of the papacy to escape from that predominance, and to establish its old direction of the Crusade, and of the complete failure of its attempt. Until the accession of Innocent III. in 1198 the lay motive was supreme; and its representative was Henry VI.--the greatest politician of his day, and in many ways the greatest emperor since Charlemagne. In 1195 Amalric, the brother of Guy de Lusignan, and his successor in Cyprus, sought the title of king from Henry and did homage; and at the same time Leo of Lesser Armenia, in order to escape from dependence on the Eastern empire, took the same course. Henry thus gained a basis in the Levant; while the death of Saladin in 1193, followed by a civil war between his brother, Malik-al-Adil, and his sons for the possession of his dominions, weakened the position of the Mahommedans. As emperor, Henry was eager to resume the imperial Crusade which had been stopped by his father's death; while both as Frederick's successor and as heir to the Norman kings of Sicily, who had again and again waged war against the Eastern empire, he had an account to settle with the rulers of Constantinople. The project of a Crusade and of an attack on Constantinople wove themselves into a single thread, in a way which very definitely anticipates the Fourth Crusade of 1202-1204. In 1195 Henry took the cross; some time before, he had already sent to Isaac Angelus to demand compensation for the injuries done to Frederick I., along with the cession of all territories ever conquered by the Norman kings of Sicily, and a fleet to co-operate with the new Crusade. In the same year, however, Isaac was dethroned by his brother, Alexius III.; but Henry married Isaac's daughter Irene to his brother, Philip of Swabia, and thus attempted to give the Hohenstaufen a new title and a valid claim against the usurper Alexius. Thus armed he pushed forward the preparations for the Crusade in Germany--a Crusade whose first object would have been an attack on Alexius III.; but in the middle of his preparations he died in Sicily in the autumn of 1197, and the Crusade collapsed. Some results were, however, achieved by a body of German crusaders which had sailed in advance of Henry; by its influence Amalric of Cyprus succeeded Henry of Champagne, who died in 1197, as king of Jerusalem, and a vassal of the emperor thus became ruler in the Holy Land; while the Teutonic order, which had begun as a hospital during the siege of Acre (1190-1191), now received its organization. Some of the coast towns, too, were recovered by the German crusaders, especially Beirut; and in 1198 the new king Amalric II. was able to make a truce with Malik-al-Adil for the next five years.

"The true heir of Henry VI.," Ranke has said, "is Innocent III.," and nowhere is this more true than in respect of the crusading movement. Throughout the course of his crowded and magnificent pontificate, Innocent III. made the Crusade his ultimate object, and attempted to bring it back to its old religious basis and under its old papal direction. By the spring of 1200, owing to Innocent's exertions, a new Crusade was in full progress, especially in France, where Fulk of Neuilly played the part once played by Peter the Hermit. Like the First Crusade, the Fourth Crusade also--in its personnel, but not its direction--was a French enterprise; and its leading members were French feudatories like Theobald of Champagne (who was chosen leader of the Crusade), Baldwin of Flanders (the future emperor of Constantinople), and the count of Blois. The objective, which these three original chiefs of the Fourth Crusade proposed to themselves, was Egypt.[42] Since 1163 the importance of acquiring Egypt had, as we have seen, been definitely understood, and in the summer of 1192 Richard I. had been advised by his counsellors that Cairo and not Jerusalem was the true point of attack; while in 1200 there was the additional reason for preferring an attack on Egypt, that the truce in the Holy Land between Amalric II. and Malik-al-Adil had still three years to run. It is Egypt therefore--to which, it must be remembered, the centre of Mahommedan power had now been virtually shifted, and to which motives of trade impelled the Italian towns (since from it they could easily reach the Red Sea, and the commerce of the Indian Ocean)--it is Egypt which is henceforth the normal goal of the Crusades. This is one of the many facts which differentiate the Crusades of the 13th from those of the preceding century. But, with Syria in the hands of the Mahommedans, the attack on Egypt must necessarily be directed by sea; and thus the Crusade henceforth becomes--what the Third Crusade, here as elsewhere the turning-point in crusading history, had already in part been--a maritime enterprise. Accordingly, early in 1201, envoys from each of the three chiefs of the Fourth Crusade (among whom was Villehardouin, the historian of the Crusade) came to Venice to negotiate for a passage to Egypt. An agreement was made between the doge and the envoys, by which transport and active help were to be given by Venice in return for 85,000 marks and the cession of half of the conquests made by the crusaders. But the Fourth Crusade was not to be plain sailing to Egypt. It became involved in a maelstrom of conflicting political motives, by which it was swept to Constantinople. Here we must distinguish between cause and occasion. There were three great causes which made for an attack on Constantinople by the West. There was first of all the old crusading grudge against the Eastern empire, and its fatal policy of regarding the whole of the Levant as its lost provinces, to be restored as soon as conquered, or at any rate held in fee, by the Western crusaders--a policy which led the Eastern emperors either to give niggardly aid or to pursue obstructive tactics, and caused them to be blamed for the failure of the Crusades in 1101, and 1149, and in 1190. It is significant of the final result of these things that already in 1147 Roger of Sicily, engaged in war with Manuel, had proposed the sea-route for the Second Crusade, perhaps with some intention of diverting it against Constantinople; and in the winter of 1189-1190 Barbarossa, as we have seen, had actually thought and spoken of an attack on Constantinople. In the second place, there was the commercial grudge of Venice, which had only been given large privileges by the Eastern empire to desire still larger, and had, moreover, been annoyed not only by alterations or revocations of those privileges, such as the usurper Alexius III. had but recently attempted, but also by the temporary destruction of their colony in Constantinople in 1171. Lastly, and perhaps most of all, there is the old Norman blood-feud with Constantinople, as old as the old Norse seeking for Micklegarth, and keen and deadly ever since the Norman conquest of the Greek themes in South Italy (1041 onwards). The heirs of the Norman kings were the Hohenstaufen; and we have already seen Henry VI. planning a Crusade which would primarily have been directed against Constantinople. It is this Hohenstaufen policy which becomes the primary occasion of the diversion of the Fourth Crusade. Philip of Swabia, engaged in a struggle with the papacy, found Innocent III. planning a Guelph Crusade, which should be under the direction of the church; and to this Guelph project he opposed the Ghibelline plan of Henry VI., with such success that he transmuted the Fourth Crusade into a political expedition against Constantinople. To such a policy of transmutation he was urged by two things. On the one hand, the death of the count of Champagne (May 1201) had induced the crusaders to elect as their leader Boniface of Montferrat, the brother of Conrad; and Boniface was the cousin of Philip, and interested in Constantinople, where not only Conrad, but another brother as well, had served, and suffered for their service at the hands of their masters. On the other hand Alexius, the son of the dethroned Isaac Angelus, was related to Philip through his marriage with Irene; and Alexius had escaped to the German court to urge the restoration of his father. On Christmas day 1201, Philip, Alexius and Boniface all met at Hagenau[43] and formulated (one may suppose) a plan for the diversion of the Crusade. Events played into their hands. When the crusaders gathered at Venice in the autumn of 1202, it was found impossible to get together the 85,000 marks promised to Venice. The Venetians--already, perhaps, indoctrinated in the Hohenstaufen plan--indicated to the leaders a way of meeting the difficulty: they had only to lend their services to the republic for certain ends which it desired to compass, and the debt was settled. The conquest of Zara, a port on the Adriatic claimed by the Venetians from the king of Hungary, was the only object overtly mentioned; but the idea of the expedition to Constantinople was in the air, and the crusaders knew what was ultimately expected. It took time and effort to bring them round to the diversion: the pope--naturally enough--set his face sternly against the project, the more as the usurper, Alexius III., was in negotiation with him in order to win his support against the Hohenstaufen, and Innocent hoped to find, as Alexius promised, a support and a reinforcement for the Crusade in an alliance with the Greek empire. But they came round none the less, in spite of Innocent's renewed prohibitions. In November 1202 Zara was taken; and at Zara the fatal decision was made. The young Alexius joined the army; and in spite of the opposition of stern crusaders like Simon de Montfort, who sailed away ultimately to Palestine, he succeeded by large promises in inducing the army to follow in his train to Constantinople. By the middle of July 1203 Constantinople was reached, the usurper was in flight, and Isaac Angelus was restored to his throne. But when the time came for Alexius to fulfil his promises, the difficulty which had arisen at Venice in the autumn of 1202 repeated itself. Alexius's resources were insufficient, and he had to beg the crusaders to wait at Constantinople for a year in order that he might have time. They waited; but the closer contact of a prolonged stay only brought into fuller play the essential antipathy of the Greek and the Latin. Continual friction developed at last into the open fire of war; and in March 1204 the crusaders resolved to storm Constantinople, and to divide among themselves the Eastern empire. In April Constantinople was captured; in May Baldwin of Flanders became the first Latin emperor of Constantinople. Venice had her own reward; a Venetian, Thomas Morosini, became patriarch; and the doge of Venice added "a quarter and a half" of the Eastern empire--chiefly the coasts and the islands--to the sphere of his sway. If Venetian cupidity had not originally deflected the Crusade (and it was the view of contemporary writers that Venice had committed her first treason against Christianity by diverting the Crusade from Egypt in order to get commercial concessions from Malik-al-Adil,[44]) yet it had at any rate profited exceedingly from that deflection; and the Hohenstaufen and their protege Alexius only reaped dust and ashes. For, however Ghibelline might be the original intention, the result was not commensurate with the subtlety of the design, and the power of the pope was rather increased than diminished by the event of the Crusade. The crusaders appealed to Innocent to ratify the subjugation of a schismatic people, and the union of the Eastern and Western Churches; and Innocent, dazzled by the magic of the _fait accompli_, not unwillingly acquiesced. He might soothe himself by reflecting that the basis for the Crusade, which he had hoped to find in Alexius III., was still more securely offered by Baldwin; he could not but feel with pride that he had become "as it were pope and apostolicus of a second world." Yet the result of the Fourth Crusade was on the whole disastrous both for the papacy and for the crusading movement. The pope had been forced to see the helm of the Crusades wrenched from his grasp; and the Albigensian Crusade against the heretics of southern France was soon afterwards to show that the example could be followed, and that the land-hunger of the north French baronage could exploit a Crusade as successfully as ever did Hohenstaufen policy leagued with Venetian cupidity. The Crusade lost its _elan_ when it became a move in a political game. If the Third Crusade had been directed by the lay power towards the true spiritual end of all Crusades, the Fourth was directed by the lay power to its own lay ends; and the political and commercial motives, winch were deeply implicit even in the First Crusade, had now become dominantly explicit. In a simpler and more immediate sense, the capture of Constantinople was detrimental to the movement from which it sprang. The precarious empire which had been founded in 1204 drained away all the vigorous adventurers of the West for its support for many years to come, and the Holy Land was starved to feed a land less holy, but equally greedy of men.[45] No basis for the Crusades was ever to be found in the Latin empire of the East; and Innocent, after vainly hoping for the new Crusade which was to emerge from Constantinople, was by 1208 compelled to return to the old idea of a Crusade proceeding simply and immediately from the West to the East.