The History of the Renaissance World (47 page)

Five out of six citizens had died of starvation and plague. “Not only were the streets full of the dead,” writes Oliver of Paderborn, who was in the Crusader army, “but in the houses, in the bedrooms, and on the beds lay the corpses. . . . Little ones asked for bread and there was none to break it for them, infants hanging at the breasts of their mothers opened their mouths in the embrace of one dead.” Appalled by the scene, the Crusaders—Francis of Assisi and Jacques de Vitry still among them—did not indulge in any of the violence that had marked the conquest of Constantinople. Contemporary accounts agree that they allowed the survivors to leave the city, and even tried to feed (and baptize) the starving children.
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The conquest of Damietta turned out to be the high point of the Fifth Crusade. Al-Kamil, now in full control of the sultanate, had beefed up the Ayyubid army with his brother’s men. Meanwhile, no further Crusader reinforcements arrived. The army in Damietta was too weak to attack Cairo. For the next year, it remained in the city, unwilling to leave, unable to push forward. Francis of Assisi, “making no progress” either in converting the Egyptians or in attaining martyrdom, left to visit Bethlehem and then returned home. Jacques de Vitry occupied himself in writing a comprehensive history of the Crusades. Frederick II did not arrive, although he talked Pope Honorius III into crowning him Holy Roman Emperor, in 1220, by promising to embark on crusade immediately afterwards.
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By June of 1221, the Crusader army was fed up with Damietta. Against the advice of the more experienced soldiers, the senior papal legate accompanying the Crusade, Pelagius, talked the bulk of the army into leaving Damietta and marching towards Cairo.

The long uncomfortable advance was slowed by constant attacks from al-Kamil’s front lines. The Crusader army was relying on boats from Damietta, supplying them with food by way of the Nile, but as they drew closer to Cairo, al-Kamil’s own boats cut this supply line off. By the end of August, the Crusaders were hungry, thirsty, and discouraged. They decided to retreat back towards Damietta, but by this point the Nile was in full flood, and al-Kamil ordered the sluice gates that lined the Crusader path back to Damietta opened. Their way was flooded and impassable, except for one narrow road blocked by al-Kamil’s army. The Crusaders were trapped; and that was the end of the Fifth Crusade.
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Al-Kamil could have slaughtered the pinned army, but he accepted their offer to hand over Damietta in exchange for their lives. To guarantee that Damietta would be surrendered, the Crusaders handed over twenty hostages (including the senior papal legate Pelagius, who was not particularly popular at that moment). They went back to Damietta, collected their belongings, and went home.

Blame for the failed campaign was well distributed. Pelagius came in for his share: such catastrophe is to be expected, wrote the French scholar William the Clerk, “when the clergy take the function of leading knights.” The leaders who had allowed themselves to be convinced by Pelagius were roundly condemned; they in turn blamed the pope; Honorius III blamed Frederick, who had never shown up.
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The single bright spot in the entire bleak picture was the rumor, brought back by Jacques de Vitry on his return, that help against the apparently impregnable Muslim front was on the way. He had heard tales from India, de Vitry explained, that a Christian king from deep in the heart of that unknown land was approaching Baghdad, and would sweep the Muslims away in front of him. He was known, variously, as King David or Prester John, and (as de Vitry wrote in a letter to Honorius III) he was “like unto David, the holy king of Israel . . . crowned by the will of Providence.” King David, ruler of a huge Christian realm hitherto undiscovered, had hundreds of thousands of men. He had already defeated Khwarezm and was even now hurrying towards the Holy Land to rescue its sacred sites.
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But there was no King David, no Christian army from India, no help on the horizon. The reports that had reached Jacques de Vitry were garbled tales of the Mongol advance from the east; and when the Great Khan appeared, it would not be as a rescuer of Christendom.

*
By “Jerusalem,” Roger of Wendover means the remnants of the Kingdom of Jerusalem centered at Acre; increasingly it was known as the kingdom of Acre.

Chapter Forty

From the Golden Bull to the Baltic Crusade

Between 1218 and 1233,
the king of Hungary is forced to acknowledge
the rights of his nobility,
and the Teutonic Knights
embark on the long conquest of Prussia

R
ETURNING HOME
from his perfunctory visit to the Fifth Crusade, Andrew of Hungary found his country in a state of ferment.

It had been bubbling even before his departure for the Holy Land. Andrew, now in his thirteenth year as king, had started his rule under a shadow. Intended to serve as regent to the actual heir, the five-year-old son of his brother King Emeric, Andrew had instead seized the throne for himself. His sister-in-law had taken the child and fled to Austria, where the conflict was resolved when the boy died of illness the following year.

Three weeks later, Andrew had arranged for the Archbishop of Hungary to crown him as rightful king of Hungary. And, by way of shoring up his claim, he started to give away royal lands to his supporters with abandon. Villages, castle lands, fortresses: anything that fell under his authority as a royal domain was fair game.

Andrew himself called his gifts a “new institution”: the
novae institutiones
, the right of the monarch to be as free and generous as he pleased. But his generosity unsettled the country. The lands he gave away had no strings attached; if you were one of Andrew’s partisans and received the gift of a village in exchange for loyalty, you owed the king no further service in return, no tithe of crops or service, no taxes, no obligation to answer to anyone for the welfare of the villagers, who now were subject to your whims.

This was bad enough, but the gifts were also distributed in uneven clumps. Taxes and military service now fell unevenly onto the shoulders of the Hungarian dukes and counts who were not in the king’s inner circles. And Andrew hit a long-festering pocket of resentment by favoring, in vast numbers, German knights who had settled in Hungary.
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These had come at the time of his marriage to his first wife, Gertrude, daughter of the Count of Bavaria and direct descendant of Charlemagne himself. Andrew had made the match in 1205, as part of his effort to position himself for the Hungarian throne; and while connection to German nobility provided him with additional allies, it had also brought numerous aristocratic retainers and relatives from Germany into Hungary. In the early years of Andrew’s reign, these German knights became, in unpopular numbers, the lords of Hungarian castles and the lawmakers of Hungarian villages.

Another massive wave of German knights had arrived in Hungary in 1211. The Teutonic Knights, a military order made up of Germanic Crusaders, had been granted papal recognition around 1200. Their original purpose had been to protect the pilgrim hospital St. Mary’s of the Germans, in the city of Jerusalem; but the hospital had been destroyed by Saladin in 1187, and the Teutonic Knights had been set adrift from their purpose. Andrew invited them into Hungary to help protect his borders from the invasions of the Cumans, a wandering tribal alliance of Turkish, Mongol, and northern Chinese peoples who had migrated slowly farther and farther to the west. In exchange, he awarded them a home in the eastern reaches of Hungary, in a thickly wooded part of his kingdom known as
Erdő-elve
: “through the woods,” or, in Latin, Transylvania. There the Teutonic Knights were permitted to live, govern themselves, and crusade against the Cumans; they were expected to remain loyal to Andrew, but were exempt from both taxes and tribute.
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In 1219, the year after his return from the Fifth Crusade, Andrew announced that all lands gifted by the crown would remain permanently in the hands of their receivers, to be passed down as hereditary estates from father to son into eternity. This would have carved Hungary up into an unrecognizable set of principalities, many of them under German control, and it was one step too far for the Hungarian knights and counts. With the encouragement of Honorius III (who believed that Andrew was not zealous enough in promoting the interests of the Church within his realm), they drew up a charter protecting their own rights, as well as the rights of the Christian priests under Andrew II’s rule.

Threatened with a mass uprising, as well as by the possibility that his noblemen might decide to enthrone his teenaged son Béla in his place, Andrew was forced to yield. On Saint George’s Day, 1222, he agreed to sign the offered charter. Called the Golden Bull (after the golden seal that dangled from the scroll), the charter began with a pointed condemnation: “The liberties of the nobility, as well as others of these realms,” it announced, “. . . have suffered great detriment and curtailment by the violence of certain kings who are impelled by their own evil propensities [and] by the cravings of their insatiable cupidity.”
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The Golden Bull, like the Magna Carta, protected the rights of the wealthy and powerful; it was not a charter for the common man. The Hungarian nobility could not be taxed arbitrarily. The noblemen could not be forced to fight in foreign wars; nor could the king create new nobility by giving away his lands.

But the Golden Bull did carve out a space where even a peasant could safely stand. “No man shall be either accused or arrested, sentenced or punished for a crime,” the second statute read, “unless he receive a legal summons, and until a judicial inquiry into his case shall have taken place.” And, like the Magna Carta, the Golden Bull made very clear that the instrument itself was greater than the king. Should Andrew refuse to abide by it, “the bishops as well as the other barons and nobles of the realm, singularly and in common . . . [may] resist and speak against us and our successors without incurring the charge of high treason.”
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Two years after the signing of the Golden Bull, the Teutonic Knights—assuming, perhaps, that the Hungarian king had lost so much support that he was vulnerable—made a play to turn their Transylvanian territories into an independent state. They sent a petition to Honorius III, asking that they be put directly under the authority of Rome, answerable only to the pope—a request that would have exempted them from obedience to earthly kings.

Honorius happily granted the request, but the petition was a clear attempt to abscond with the granted Hungarian land and create an independent state. King Andrew was indignant. The Teutonic Knights, says one of his court chroniclers, had become “to the king like a fire in the breast, a mouse in the wallet and a viper in the bosom, which repay their hosts badly.” He assembled an army, marched into Transylvania, and drove the Teutonic Knights out.
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Deprived of their Hungarian roosting place, the Teutonic Knights were at loose ends. But their venture had confirmed a new purpose for the order: domestic crusade, fighting against pagans and infidels at home. Their renewed calling came at the right time. Honorius III, following in the footsteps of Innocent III, was proving to be more willing than any pope before him to recognize wars against non-Muslims as worthy of the designation (and rewards attached to)
crusade
.

North of the Hungarian border, west of the Rus’, lived a people who had as yet played almost no part in the larger power struggles of the surrounding nations. The Polans were a Western Slavic tribe who had, for two centuries, occupied the river-crossed lands between the Carpathian Mountains and the Baltic Sea. Their existence had first been chronicled in the anonymous
Gesta Principum Polonorum
, written around 1115; they were, says the
Gesta
, ruled by a dynasty called the Piast, who had converted to Christianity sometime in the tenth century. In 992, the Piast prince Boleslaw had crowned himself the first king of the Polans, but the title brought no unity. Cousins of the Piast fought with each other for the crown, and local tribal leaders resisted the victors. By the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Polans were divided into a series of dukedoms, discrete but fairly prosperous and orderly: Little Poland, Mazovia, Kujawy, Greater Poland, Silesia.
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