1215: The Year of Magna Carta Ebook (27 page)

The politician’s need to peer at least a short distance into the future, in the hope of getting the timing of difficult choices right, meant that few rulers could afford to dismiss astrology. Non-astronomical methods were tried too: Henry II’s chancellor, Thomas Becket, consulted a palm-reader before embarking on an expedition against the Welsh in 1157. But the transfer of Arabic science made astrology the most impressively academic of all methods for telling the future in the twelfth-century West and many rulers turned to astrologers much as politicians today turn to economists. Such useful academics were drawn to court, especially during Henry II’s reign while John was a boy. In the 1180s two of the most distinguished English ‘Arabists’, Daniel of Morley and Roger of Hereford, acted as judges in the king’s courts.

To cast horoscopes it was necessary to know which stars were overhead at any particular moment, and hence to understand latitude and longitude. Since it was well known that the earth was a sphere, it followed that the concept of co-ordinates of latitude and longitude had also been well known to scholars ever since the early Greeks. In practice ascertaining latitude is easy using either a quadrant or an astrolabe, an instrument that makes astronomical measurements, but finding longitude remained difficult without a truly accurate instrument timepiece such as a chronometer. It was known theoretically that longitude could be ascertained by observations of the times of eclipses in different places. Indeed, Roger of Hereford tells us that by observing an eclipse in 1178 he worked out the longitudes of Hereford and Marseille. However, rather than trying it for themselves, most westerners relied on the tables of latitude and longitude that had been calculated by Muslim scholars and translated into Latin during the twelfth century. The ninth-century
Khorazmian Tables
, for example, were translated by Adelard of Bath. He also translated Arabic versions of Euclid’s
Elements of Geometry
and wrote a number of treatises of his own, including one on the astrolabe – all in all an achievement which has led to him being called ‘the first English scientist’.

In his quest for knowledge Adelard travelled far. He dedicated one of his treatises to the bishop of Syracuse in Sicily, and describes being on the bridge at Mamistra – modern Misis – on the way to Antioch when it was shaken by an earthquake. In his treatise on the astrolabe he explained how the earth was a sphere at the centre of a spherical universe. Nearest the earth was the moon, then Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Beyond the planets, the wandering stars, were the fixed stars, so called because they constantly maintained the same relative positions. Beyond the stars was a zone entirely without distinguishing features – or none that could be detected by human senses. This treatise Adelard dedicated to the young Henry II. Its close relationship to astrology made it natural for rulers to be intrigued by astronomy.

The English government clerk, Roger of Howden, copied into his chronicle the texts prophesying hurricanes and plagues after an unusual conjunction of planets predicted for September 1186:

He followed this with a letter, allegedly from Faramella, son of Abdullah of Cordova, to John, bishop of Toledo, correcting ‘the false astrologers of the West’ and concluding, after a similarly detailed analysis of the planets, that there would be a poor grape harvest, a moderate wheat harvest, a lot of bloodshed and many shipwrecks ‘unless God shall ordain otherwise’.

It was for this reason that John of Salisbury thought that astrologers were wasting their time. ‘If the future can be changed, why create a science to understand it, and if it cannot, what is the point of such a science?’ Others were even more dismissive. The Winchester monk Richard of Devizes noted an eclipse of the Sun on 23 June 1191: ‘People marvelled greatly that in the middle of the day the sun’s brightness was dimmed even though it was not all obscured by clouds. Such people do not understand the causes of things. By contrast those who study the way the universe works say that eclipses of the sun and moon tell us nothing about the future.’ Evidently then, as now, different people held varying opinions about the science of forecasting.

When the Lateran Council met in 1215 Europeans knew the world better than they had in 1000 and it was becoming much more accessible. In 1000 a few English merchants travelled as far as north Italy, and some pilgrims visited Rome; only those who were exceptionally adventurous made it as far as Constantinople or Jerusalem. By 1215 much had changed. The most dramatic and bloody signs of this were the crusades. In 1096 several Christian armies set out from the West and, in 1099, captured Jerusalem from the Muslims. This was followed by the settlement of many thousands of westerners in Palestine and Syria, in the land they called ‘Outremer’ – the land beyond the sea – and by the establishment of a Latin kingdom of Jerusalem as well as two other crusader states based on Antioch and Tripoli. This had been made possible by the opening up of the eastern Mediterranean by the fleets of the Italian maritime powers, Venice, Genoa and Pisa. Although the Second Crusade (1147–8) achieved little in Syria, a fleet containing a sizeable English contingent managed to capture Lisbon from the Muslims of Spain. One quirky result of this was that the first bishop of Lisbon was an Englishman, Gilbert of Hastings.

The strategic position of the crusader states, distant outposts of the West in the Middle East, was always vulnerable. The thousands of western settlers were few in number when compared with the millions of Muslims there already. For their reinforcement the crusader states depended on a long supply line stretching back to southern Italy and Sicily. Despite their religious differences, the Greek Orthodox empire of Byzantium, from its capital at Constantinople, proved a powerful ally to the Latins in the East – but Constantinople, too, was far away from Jerusalem, when the enemy was on the doorstep. Only the deep-seated divisions within the Muslim Middle East had allowed both the initial establishment and the later survival of the crusader states.

But in 1169 al-Malik al-Nasir Salah ed-Din Yusuf, known in the West as Saladin, became Sultan of Egypt. He understood the value of
jihad
, the holy war against unbelievers, as a powerful religious force capable of uniting the otherwise deeply fragmented Muslim world. In 1176 he brought Syria under his control. This meant he could now attack the kingdom of Jerusalem simultaneously on two fronts. In that same year the crusaders’ greatest ally and protector, the Emperor of Constantinople, suffered defeat at the hands of the Muslims of Anatolia in the battle of Myriocephalon. From now on the crusader states were in a parlous position, faced by an opponent with the political understanding and diplomatic skill to bring together forces vastly superior to their own. The king of Jerusalem, Baldwin IV, was a courageous leader and warrior, but he was also a leper, increasingly suffering paralysis and blindness, unlikely to live much longer; his heir was his eight-year-old nephew. Without the strong rule of a fit, adult king, the outlook for the Christians of Outremer was bleak. They sent appeal after desperate appeal for help to the West. In 1185 Heraclius, patriarch of Jerusalem, came in person to plead with the rulers of western Europe.

Henry II met him at Reading. Heraclius prostrated himself at the king’s feet and begged for help. An eyewitness, Roger of Howden, reported his words.

Heraclius had some grounds for hope. In penance for his part in Becket’s murder Henry had promised to mount a crusade of his own, and he had been transferring money to Jerusalem since 1172. The kings of Jerusalem were his cousins, descendants of his grandfather Count Fulk of Anjou who had become king of Jerusalem in 1127. Protecting Jerusalem was, therefore, his responsibility not just as a Christian king but also as head of the family. Henry said he would consider the matter and summoned a great assembly to meet at Clerkenwell in March 1185.

Here, in the presence of the kings, barons and prelates of both England and Scotland, Patriarch Heraclius received his reply. Henry would send more money but he would not go himself. To go, he said, would expose his dominions to attack from barbarians – the Irish, Scots and Welsh – as well as from the French. Heraclius was dismayed: ‘We don’t need more money, we need a leader,’ he insisted. Doubtless he knew that if a king went to Jerusalem even more money and men would follow. But Henry would not budge. Heraclius then asked if the king would at least send one of his sons, so that the Jerusalem branch of the Angevin dynasty could be revitalised by a cutting taken from the main stock. This was John’s cue. He fell at his father’s feet and begged to be allowed to go to Jerusalem. But Henry refused permission. Bitterly disappointed, Heraclius sailed from Dover on 16 April 1185.

What he and many others had foreseen very rapidly came to pass. The leper-king died on 15 April, the day before Heraclius left England. The child-king, Baldwin V, died in 1186. Next year the kingdom collapsed. On 4 July 1187 the army of Jerusalem was annihilated in the battle of Hattin. Immediately afterwards Saladin executed captured Templars and Hospitallers; as the élite troops of Outremer, these monk-knights could not be allowed to live to fight another day. On 2 October 1187 Saladin’s army marched into the Holy City, and the al-Aqsa mosque was restored to Islam. Ever since 1099 the Christians had treated Jerusalem as though it had belonged to them alone and it is symptomatic of the greater tolerance of the Muslims that they allowed the Jewish community to return and permitted four Christian priests to hold services in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. When Saladin offered to spare their lives many garrisons surrendered quickly; Christians knew from experience that they could rely on him to keep his word. By the end of 1187 only a handful of castles and three coastal towns, Antioch, Tripoli and Tyre, were left in Christian hands.

The West was shocked by the fall of Jerusalem. Public pressure was such that even kings such as Henry II and Philip Augustus who had both rejected the patriarch’s appeal in 1185 now had no choice but to reconsider. They met in conference in January 1188, listened to an impassioned sermon from the archbishop of Tyre and took the cross. It was agreed that the followers of the king of England should wear white crosses, of the king of France red, and of the count of Flanders green.

But one man had not waited for the kings. In the previous autumn John’s elder brother Richard had become the first prince north of the Alps to take the cross, and he did so without asking his father’s permission. When he heard this, Henry refused to see anyone for several days. But however disconcerted his father may have been, most contemporary commentators praised Richard’s example. Whatever we, in the twenty-first century, might think of the morality of the crusading movement, in the twelfth-century West it was universally regarded as right and proper that the land they called the Holy Land, the ‘patrimony of Christ’, should be held by Christians. If it was lost it was the duty of every responsible ruler to assist in its recovery. In that sense, by the values of the time, the crusade was as morally justified as the war against Hitler’s Germany was reckoned to be in the twentieth century. The crusade was indeed portrayed at the time as a world war, an intercontinental struggle: Europe against the combined forces of Asia and Africa. Those who went on crusade were thought to be playing their part in the great events of world history. Those who stayed at home were hard put to justify what seemed like cowardly inaction.

Although Richard was one of the first to take the cross, he was one of the last to set out. He and Philip Augustus finally left 4 July 1190, three years to the day since the battle of Hattin. By this time Henry II was dead and Richard had been crowned at Westminster in September 1189. The two kings wintered in Sicily, and Richard did not arrive in the Holy Land until the early summer of 1191. Fortunately for the Christian cause, other crusaders had moved much faster. Since 1189 a Christian army had been entrenched around the great harbour-fortress of Acre and its Muslim garrison. The besiegers were themselves besieged, hemmed in by Saladin’s field army. For the last two years all eyes in both the Muslim and Christian worlds had focused on this great struggle. It was when describing Richard’s first glimpse of the beleaguered city of Acre and the surrounding hills covered with the tents and pavilions of Saladin’s soldiers that Ambroise, author of the
Estoire de la Guerre Sainte
and himself an eyewitness, gave him that name by which he is known: Coeur de Lion. The arrival of the two kings sealed Acre’s fate. On 12 July 1191 the heroic garrison surrendered.