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;[1] 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;[2] 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.[3] Since 1163 the importance of acquiring Egypt had, as we have seen, been definitely understood, and
- ↑ The Crusades in their course established a number of new states or kingdoms. The First Crusade established the kingdom of Jerusalem (1100); the Third, the kingdom of Cyprus (1195); the Fourth, the Latin empire of Constantinople (1204); while the long Crusade of the Teutonic knights on the coast of the Baltic led to the rise of a new state east of the Vistula. The kingdom of Lesser Armenia, established in 1195, may also be regarded as a result of the Crusades. The history of the kingdom of Jerusalem is part of the history of the Crusades: the history of the other kingdoms or states touches the history of the Crusades less vitally. But the history of Cyprus is particularly important—and for two reasons. In the first place, Cyprus was a natural and excellent basis of operations; it sent provisions to the crusaders in 1191, and again at the siege of Damietta in 1219, while its advantages as a strategic basis were proved by the exploits of Peter of Cyprus in the 14th century. In the second place, as the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem fell, its institutions and assizes were transplanted bodily to Cyprus, where they survived until the island was conquered by the Ottoman Turks. But the monarchy was stronger in Cyprus than in Jerusalem: the fiefs were distributed by the monarch, and were smaller in extent; while the feudatories had neither the collective powers of the haute cour of Jerusalem, nor the individual privileges (such as jurisdiction over the bourgeoisie), which had been enjoyed by the feudatories of the old kingdom. Till 1489 the kingdom of Cyprus survived as an independent monarchy, and its capital, Famagusta, was an important centre of trade after the loss of the coast-towns in the kingdom of Jerusalem. In 1489 it was acquired by Venice, which claimed the island on the death of the last king, having adopted his widow (a Venetian lady named Catarina Cornaro) as a daughter of the republic. On the history of Cyprus, see Stubbs, Lectures on Medieval and Modern History, 156-208. The history of the kingdom of Armenia is closely connected with that of Cyprus. The Armenians in the south-east of Asia Minor borrowed feudal institutions from the Franks and the feudal vocabulary itself. The kingdom was involved in a struggle with Antioch in the early part of the 13th century. Later, it allied itself with the Mongols and fought against the Mamelukes, to whom, however, it finally succumbed in 1375.
- ↑ The kingdom of Jerusalem is thus from 1192 to its final fall a strip of coast, to which it is the object of kings and crusaders to annex Jerusalem and a line of communication connecting it with the coast. This was practically the aim of Richard I.’s negotiations; and this was what Frederick II. for a time secured.
- ↑ M. Luchaire, in the volume of his biography of Innocent III. called La Question d’Orient, shows how, in spite of the pope, the Fourth Crusade was in its very beginnings a lay enterprise. The crusading barons of France chose their own leader, and determined their own route, without consulting Innocent.
