The Fifth Crusade in Context

The Crusading Movement in the Early Thirteenth Century

E.J. Mylod, Guy Perry, Thomas Smith, Jan Vandeburie, E.J. Mylod, Guy Perry, Thomas W. Smith, Jan Vandeburie, Thomas Smith, E.J. Mylod, Guy Perry, Thomas W. Smith, Jan Vandeburie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317160175
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

The Fifth Crusade represented a cardinal event in early thirteenth-century history, occurring during what was probably the most intensive period of crusading in both Europe and the Holy Land. Following the controversial outcome of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, and the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, Pope Innocent III's reform agenda was set to give momentum to a new crusading effort. Despite the untimely death of Innocent III in 1216, the elaborate organisation and firm crusading framework made it possible for Pope Honorius III to launch and oversee the expedition. The Fifth Crusade marked the last time that a medieval pope would succeed in mounting a full-scale, genuinely international crusade for the recovery of the Holy Land, yet, despite its significance, it has largely been neglected in the historiography. The crusade was much more than just a military campaign, and the present book locates it in the contemporary context for the first time. The Fifth Crusade in Context is of crucial importance not only to better understand the organization and execution of the expedition itself, but also to appreciate its place in the longer history of crusading, as well as the significance of its impact on the medieval world.

1The historiography of the Fifth Crusade

Jan Vandeburie

In his prologue to the Historia Orientalis, crusade preacher and Bishop of Acre Jacques de Vitry referred to the weeping Israelites by the rivers of Babylon as an analogy for his boredom and frustration when the crusader army was held up after the capture of Damietta on the Fifth Crusade. Noting that ‘idleness teaches evil’, Jacques used the divine scriptures that he found in the city to keep his mind from vain and useless thoughts. As he desired to learn new things, he wrote how he found several books in the cabinets of the Latins, the Greeks and the Arabs containing the histories of the kings of the East. While seemingly admiring the efforts of the authors who preceded him, Jacques appeared critical of their ‘pompous praising of men’. He regarded the writing of history, at least when it came to the deeds of men, as a humble and virtuous task, and therefore frowned upon too much praise or inflated language.¹ He noted that there was a lack of contemporary accounts on the recent crusading events. He blamed ‘the negligent sloth of the men of his time’ and lamented that ‘in the days that we live only a few men can be found, and none among our men, to apply themselves to write the admirable actions, the battles, and the glorious triumphs of the Eternal King’.²

Fortunately, we are not faced with such a problem for the modern historiography concerning the Fifth Crusade. Although the scholarly attention for the crusades in the thirteenth century, often labelled ‘later crusades’, is dwarfed by the literature dealing with the crusades of the twelfth century, the scholarship on the Fifth Crusade has been rather substantial and touches on a diverse range of topics. While each contribution in this volume discusses the historiographical debate concerning the specific topic addressed in the particular chapter, this chapter aims to provide a general overview of the historiography and to highlight some dominant strands in the research concerning the Fifth Crusade.

The scholarship has benefited from the availability of a rich array of primary sources. Oliver of Paderborn’s account of the siege and capture of Damietta is one of the most detailed and, arguably, one of the most accurate testimonies of a crusade.³ In addition to Oliver’s writings, Jacques de Vitry’s letters, containing detailed reports of the campaign, are an invaluable source of information,⁴ and Jacques’s encyclopaedic Historia Orientalis details the situation in the Latin East on the eve of the Fifth Crusade.⁵ Aside from a number of brief accounts in larger Arabic and Eastern Christian chronicles,⁶ the more elaborate testimony on the siege of Damietta by al-Makrīzī offers a fascinating Islamic perspective on the events of the Fifth Crusade.⁷ An impressive collection of obscure accounts concerning the Fifth Crusade were compiled and edited by Reinhold Röhricht between 1879 and 1882.⁸ These source collections are still highly valuable for scholars today and very few new testimonies have been uncovered since.⁹ Among these minor accounts, the sources dealing with the Frisian participants on the crusade certainly stand out and are little known among scholars outside the Low Countries.¹⁰

Hermann Hoogeweg was the first to publish a comprehensive study dedicated to the Fifth Crusade in 1887 and 1888.¹¹ Shortly afterwards, in 1891, Reinhold Röhricht published his essay on the Fifth Crusade, offering some new insights by making use of the corpus of primary sources he had compiled. A more extensive essay, drawing on recent developments in the scholarship on the crusades in the early thirteenth century, was Thomas C. Van Cleve’s contribution to Setton’s History of the Crusades in 1969.¹² The most comprehensive study of the Fifth Crusade to date, and the only dedicated monograph, is undoubtedly James M. Powell’s seminal book Anatomy of a Crusade published in 1986. Powell’s analysis of the failure of the campaign moved away from the traditional blaming of either Pelagius, John of Brienne or the crusaders, and instead offered evidence for more structural problems that caused shortages of material and manpower. He argued that the decisions taken in Egypt were not to blame for the logistical delays and, ultimately, the failure of the crusade, but rather the lack of effective decision making in Europe. Moreover, rather than portraying the crusade as an entirely papal enterprise, he highlighted the crucial role of the secular leaders in the actual execution of the plans.¹³ Since Powell’s book, a number of smaller studies have dealt with individual aspects of the Fifth Crusade or specific episodes of the campaign,¹⁴ most notably the military side of the siege of Damietta,¹⁵ and the influence of the prophecy involving the mythical Prester John, who was expected to join the war against the Muslims with his armies from the East.¹⁶

The historiography of the Fifth Crusade has predominantly consisted of histories of significant individuals in the events. Joseph P. Donovan’s study of the papal legate Pelagius’s role in the Fifth Crusade, published in 1950, is the prime example of an investigation that sheds light on the Fifth Crusade by focusing on one of its leaders.¹⁷ Donovan disagreed with previous scholars by arguing that Pelagius alone was not to blame for the failure of the crusade.¹⁸ Highlighting the opinions of Pelagius’s contemporaries, he noted the delayed participation of Frederick II, the early withdrawal of John of Brienne, king of Jerusalem, and his forces, and the leisurely behaviour of the crusader forces at Damietta. The scholarship on the secular leadership of the crusade, personified in the figure of John of Brienne, has also been substantial. The views offered in a number of earlier studies have been reconsidered in Guy Perry’s recent monograph.¹⁹ Despite Frederick II’s absence on the Fifth Crusade, the Holy Roman Emperor’s anticipated arrival certainly influenced the crusade leaders’ decisions and the course of events. Most of the biographical works on Frederick II and the scholarship on his crusade in 1227–29 also deal with the influence of the emperor on the Fifth Crusade, albeit often briefly.²⁰ Marcello Pacifico’s recent monograph is the first to give Frederick II’s role in the Fifth Crusade the attention it deserves.²¹

Although, surprisingly, the Fifth Crusade is hardly mentioned in Setton’s The Papacy and the Levant,²² the role played by the popes has been of particular interest in recent scholarship. Pope Innocent III’s novel approach to crusading, the new legal framework he implemented and the unprecedented planning of the campaign at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 have proven fertile ground for historians.²³ With Innocent III’s untimely death, Pope Honorius III was left with the execution of the crusade plans of his predecessor. Honorius’s views on the crusade compared to those of Innocent III have been well explored in recent scholarship. Powell was the first to focus on Honorius’s involvement in the Fifth Crusade and, recently, Thomas W. Smith has attributed an active role to Honorius in the decisions made on the crusade.²⁴

Innocent III also spearheaded a new approach to the preaching and recruitment for the crusade, and a number of general studies as well as case studies have focused on the crusade preachers involved in the Fifth Crusade.²⁵ In particular, the increased use of papal legates for the recruitment and organization of the crusade has been an important topic of discussion.²⁶ Since Benjamin Kedar’s seminal study on crusade and mission published in 1984,²⁷ the preaching among non-Christians has also been increasingly investigated and especially the activities of Jacques de Vitry and Oliver of Paderborn have received considerable scholarly interest.²⁸

Perhaps the most explored topic in the historiography concerning the Fifth Crusade has been St Francis of Assisi’s presence at Damietta and his daring yet futile attempt at converting Sultan al-Kāmil in the enemy’s camp. The popularity of St Francis and the vast corpus of scholarship as well as the fascination for this direct religious confrontation has contributed to an impressive amount of writings dealing with this rather minor moment in the course of the campaign.²⁹

In comparison with the historiography of other crusades, only a small number of studies on the Fifth Crusade have approached the topic from a regional or local perspective.³⁰ Within this strand, the Dutch historiography focusing on the role of the Frisians in the capture of Damietta, based on the rich Frisian source material mentioned above, has been rather substantial. A large part of this scholarship is encouraged by the anachronistic appropriation in the sixteenth century by the city of Haarlem, whose inhabitants identified themselves with the Frisian contingents at Damietta and constructed a civic identity based on events that supposedly involved crusaders from Haarlem.³¹

This brief historiographical outline has not considered other theatres of religious war, such as the siege of Alcácer do Sal in southern Portugal between August and October 1217 or the German crusades in Livonia. Joseph F. O’Callaghan’s monograph offers an excellent outline of events in the Iberian Peninsula at the time of the Fifth Crusade,³² while José Manuel Rodríguez García’s recent study of the crusade in thirteenth-century Castile makes use of the most recent scholarship concerning the Reconquista.³³ For the Baltic Crusades, Sven Ekdahl has provided a detailed overview of the historiography,³⁴ while Iben Fonnesberg-Schmidt contributed a focused discussion of the historiography concerning the papacy and the Baltic Crusades in the second half of the twelfth and first half of the thirteenth centuries.³⁵

Notes

1Jacques de Vitry, Prologus, in Jean Donnadieu, ‘L’historia orientalis de Jacques de Vitry: Tradition manuscrite et histoire du texte’, Sacris erudiri, 45 (2006), pp. 379–456 (p. 453).

2Ibid., pp. 453–54: ‘Ex nostris autem diebus istis novissimis pauci vel nulli inventi sunt qui regis eterni prelia et triumphos gloriosos, et mirabilia gesta describere et scripto mandare studuissent, ad laudem et gloriam illius qui solus laudabilis est et gloriosus in secula.’

3Oliverus Scholasticus, Die Schriften des kölner Domscholasters, späteren Bischofs von Paderborn und Kardinal-Bischofs von S. Sabina, ed. Hermann Hoogeweg (Tübingen, 1894). For an English translation, see Oliver of Paderborn, The Capture of Damietta, trans. John J. Gavignan (Philadelphia, 1948). See also Marie-Geneviève Grossel, ‘L’Historia Damiatina. La Cinquième Croisade vue par Olivie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Tables and maps
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The historiography of the Fifth Crusade
• Part I Papal and imperial influence
• Part II Preaching and propaganda
• Part III Egypt and the Holy Land
• Part IV Textual traditions
• Part V The Fifth Crusade in Europe
• Index