1218 Siege of Damietta - Matthew Paris
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Sources:
Prester John: The Legend and its Sources, compiled and translated by Keagan Brewer. Taylor & Francis, 2019.
Crusade and Christendom: Annotated Documents in Translation from Innocent III to the Fall of Acre, 1187-1291. Edited by Jessalynn Bird, et al. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.
The Fifth Crusade in Context: The Crusading Movement in the Early Thirteenth Century. Edited by E.J. Mylod, et al. Routledge, 2016.
Brownworth, Lars. In Distant Lands: A Short History of the Crusades. Crux Publishing Ltd, 2017.
Cassidy-Welch, Megan. War and Memory at the Time of the Fifth Crusade. Penn State University Press, 2019.
Madden, Thomas F. The New Concise History of the Crusades. Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.
Powell, James M. Anatomy of a Crusade, 1213-1221. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986.
Powell, James M. Innocent III: Vicar of Christ Or Lord of the World? Catholic University of America Press, 1994.
Script:
Today, we leap forward a little. Last time out, it was 1177, and Pope Alexander III was possibly corresponding with our powerful, mysterious, and priestly friend, Prester John, or at least he was writing to him in maybe more of a one-way act of communication. Today, we begin with the papacy of Innocent III, a period that began in 1198 and was going to be a remarkable time for a number of reasons.
In the context of the stories I’m telling on this podcast, it’s worth noting that Innocent’s papacy included the appearance of Francis of Assisi and the founding of the Franciscan Order, the Order of Friars Minor, but that’s not what we’ll be focusing on today.
Today, it’s about the crusades, and Innocent’s time had been known for that too.
There had been the Cathar Crusades, 20 years of at times horribly bloody wars on a Christian heterodoxy in southern France, running from about 1209-1229, but again that’s not quite what this is about.
There had been the cascading blunders of the Fourth Crusade, events that have been covered before on this podcast and which also occurred during the Innocent papacy in the years 1202-1204, really peaking with the fall of Constantinople and the rise of the relatively short-lived, 60-year rule of the Latin Empire of Constantinople. But again, no, this episode is not about that.
Pope Innocent III had initiated yet another crusade. The events of the fourth one had, understandably, not sat entirely well with him because once that ball had actually been in the air, he’d found it extremely difficult to direct it. He’d cajoled, and he’d threatened, and he’d excommunicated, but he had felt it all slip out of his grasp as the assembled forces expended their considerable martial energies with little threat to either Egypt or Jerusalem. Still, he was not done with crusading when Constantinople fell in 1204. Pope Innocent was going to try again. This time, Innocent was insistent, it was going to be different, and indeed it would be. And Prester John would play some part in that difference.
Hello and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the history podcast that traces that medieval word through the stories of its travellers. It is a podcast that is supported by a Patreon, one that you can support at patreon.com/humancircus, where you can enjoy early, extra, and ad-free listening, and I want to thank some of you in particular for doing so most recently. Thank you Carey and thank you Ahmad. Thank you both very much!
And now, let’s get back to the story of Prester John. As you’ll maybe have noticed from the running time, this, like the last one, is a bit of a shorter episode, but that isn’t going to be the new format going forward. As I worked on this episode, it was actually becoming longer and longer, and at a certain point, it just made more sense to split it into two. On a practical and personal level, it also looked increasingly unlikely that I’d have time to record and edit audio for the whole, extra long version before I leave for a bit of camping, and while I have written for the podcast before while camping, editing audio from the tent sounds less appealing. So the plan is to finish and post this half before I leave, and then some Patreon bonus listening and the second half when I get back.
So, all of that being said, this piece is all about the crusades. It’s all about the Fifth Crusade, and I promise that there is actually going to be a strong Prester John connection. It’s just going to take us a little bit to get there. Let’s start in 1213.
In 1213, Innocent set out three documents, three documents generally known, as such things are, by their Latin openings. In the first of these, Quia maior, he outlined the call for a new crusade. “Because there is now greater need than ever before to provide for the needs of the Holy Land,” it began, “and from that assistance it is hoped that greater than ever benefits will result, we cry out to you with a new summons.” “...let us gird ourselves to come to the aid of the Crucified, not hesitating to risk property and life for him who laid down his life and shed his blood for us... .”
To all those who trafficked in arms, iron, and lumber with the Muslims, the letter threatened excommunication. For those who would go on the crusade and pay their own way, it promised a full forgiveness, and for those who would bankroll others but wouldn’t go, or would but needed another to finance them, the same.
That year, the pope’s Pium et sanctum was also sent out, a missive to the clergy across Europe, to an army of preachers that were in turn to recruit an army of crusaders. “We admonish [you],” read one such letter, sent to Mainz, in Germany, “we request, and beseech your devotion in the Lord, commanding you strictly … and enjoining you in the remission of sins, that, on fire with zeal for the Christian faith, you should carry the word of the cross throughout the province of Mainz in heart and body, to avenge the injury of the Crucified.”
With a third letter, Vineam domini, Innocent announced the Fourth Lateran Council, to be held in 1215. That gave them two years, time for plans to be made and for preachers like Jacques de Vitry, Robert of Courçon, and Oliver of Paderborn to whip up support for the coming crusade, and this, what may seem a long run-up to the council, was really necessary because the program was ambitious, combining Innocent’s goals of church reform and reassessing the approach to a crusade, with failure on the latter front not at all far in the rear-view mirror. This council would tackle a wide range of issues, religious, diplomatic, and otherwise, would draw in the Maronite Patriarch and the representative of a king who followed the Armenian Church, and though it’s a bit off-track from the topic at hand, I’ll note here that it would also include the ruling that Jews and Muslims should be required to wear special dress so that they would be distinctive from Christians, never a good development.
As to crusading considerations, historian James M. Powell puts it like this:
“The entire machinery of the crusade — recruitment, preaching, the vow, the indulgence, finance — were reinterpreted in terms of their salvic benefits to the entire Christian community, especially the laity. For the most part, the various elements in this approach were not new; some had roots that reached to the very beginnings of the crusade movement. … Other elements had been tried out during the Third Crusade or by Innocent himself in his planning for the Fourth Crusade. But never before had there been a papal effort to integrate all of these elements into a coherent program linking the crusade to the reform of the church.”
It was a lot. It was ambitious. Convened in November of 1215, It was going to shape the whole endeavour to come, and Pope Innocent III was not actually going to live to see how it all turned out. Innocent would journey to Perugia, where he would die in the summer of 2016, and Jacques de Vitry, who I mentioned earlier as a preacher of the crusade, was very nearly there to see it.
He’d been preaching in Milan, a city he describes as a “cesspool of heretics,” and then he writes this:
“Departing from there, I arrived at Perugia. There I discovered Pope Innocent dead, but not yet buried. During the night some thieves had stripped his body of all the precious vestments with which he was to be interred, and left it there in the church virtually naked and already decaying. I went into the church and saw with utter faith how fleeting and empty is the deceitful glory of this world.”
Aside from this dramatic scene, of the dead pope stripped of his worldly goods, Jacques de Vitry would also be there, just a day after the funeral, to see the elevation of Innocent’s successor, Honorius III, “an elderly and devout man,” by the visitor’s judgement. But he didn’t like everything he saw. As in Milan, there was much that was repugnant to him there in the new pope’s surroundings, people too concerned with worldly affairs, with politics and legal matters, so that they hardly spoke of spiritual things. So Jacques de Vitry left. He left, and he went on to Acre to take up his bishopric there, while behind him, back in Italy, that new pope was taking up the crusading program of his predecessor, Honorius carrying through what Innocent had set in motion.
1217 was to be the target, the year that a truce struck with Ayyubid Sultan al-Adil of Egypt was to conclude, on June 1st to be exact, but not everyone was going to be ready. “Everyone” was never going to be quite ready for this crusade. Despite Innocent’s strenuous efforts to see this conflict or that settled before it all kicked off, to press home, in person if necessary, that petty disagreements between one lord and another should not be allowed to impede the progress of war in the Holy Land, there were still obstructions to that war, problems at home that prevented or at least excused immediate departure.
Standing out among these cases was always going to be that of Frederick II, grandson of the Frederick Barbarossa who has come up already here in the Pester John episodes. This Frederick would also be Holy Roman Emperor, King of Germany, King of Italy, King of Sicily, and, after something of a diplomatic coup carried out while excommunicated by Pope Gregory IX, King of Jerusalem. He would be written of by a contemporary as the stupor mundi, the wonder of the world, and his Sicilian court at Palermo was a thriving hub of art, poetry, translation, and science. But right now, right now in 1217, Frederick was busy. He had issues to deal with closer to home, with Otto of Brunswick, and he’d come later, maybe, when and if he was able to.
The army of the Fifth Crusade didn’t go all at once. It wasn’t really one army at all. Throughout the long campaign ahead, leaders would arrive, put in their time, and take their troops home with them, having put in what they saw as a reasonable shift or called back by other matters. Those who did actually manage to depart in 1217 had been asked to gather in Brindisi and Messina, but that was not the route most took, and few actually left from those ports.
Frisian, Dutch, and Flemish fighters were making their way south by sea, stopping in Portugal, where some of them became entangled, and then heading east into the Mediterranean. It would take them a little while still to join the campaign. Others, such as Duke Leopold VI of Austria would be quicker, as would King Andrew II of Hungary, their forces reaching Croatia and then embarking from there into the Adriatic Sea, the latter only after he had made arrangements with Venice for further transport first. There was a plan to muster on Cyprus and discuss strategy though the meeting seems not to have occurred. But Bohemond IV of Antioch and King Hugh of Cyprus would meet them at their destination, as well as John of Brienne, the King of Jerusalem, though not the king in Jerusalem. That had been taken by Salah ad-din and not taken back, so John had to make do with Acre, the city where Jacques de Vitry was settling in.
Jacques de Vitry was writing there. He was setting down what could be or what might have been. “I often look back with tears at the sea,” he wrote, “and await the arrival of pilgrims with great longing.” If only 4,000 men of arms were to arrive, if only God’s favour was on their side, then “[they] would not be able to find anyone strong enough to resist [them].” He also wrote of preaching, not, quote, “in the land of the Saracens,” but at its edges, and he wrote of the varieties among those who were called Christians but, he felt, erred in their belief, of Syrians, Nestorians, Maronites, and Jacobites. And in 1217, he wrote of Prester John and the people of his land. Those people had become Jacobites, he wrote. He knew it from “a certain merchant who had recently come from [their land]... .”
There was no apparent thought that these people were of any great importance to Jacques, no indication that they might measurably involve themselves in the politics and warfare of the crusade, but there was at least this fairly casual allusion to their existence. Something to build on though, a familiarity.
The crusaders arrived in Acre, those “pilgrims” Jacques had been waiting for, and Leopold and Andrew’s forces were among them. But maybe it would have been better if they had managed to connect in Cyprus for a little pre-game planning because at first things seem to have been rather aimless. There was thought of striking first at Egypt, but also the consideration that they should maybe wait for Frederick before they tried that. What should they do?
What they did that autumn of 1217 was raid and skirmish along the coast and inland near Acre and make plans to then besiege Damietta, the port city on the branch of the Nile, and that, that was enough for some of them. Andrew, even under threat of excommunication, and Bohemond and Hugh decided that their crusading vows had already been fulfilled. They had come, and they had fought in the Holy Land, and they were headed home. The Fifth Crusade was like that. People came, and people went. Sometimes, Oliver of Paderborn would note, divisions of “lazy and cowardly pilgrims … lying down, consumed the abundance of temporal thing.” That was how it apparently was for some who stayed in Acre.
In 1218 though, more people did indeed come, with ships from Genoa and Pisa along with the Frisians and Germans that Oliver had mustered, and the crusading contingent still at Acre, Knights Templar and Hospitaller among them and their numbers now swollen by these new arrivals, turned their attention to Damietta. In May, 2018, they established themselves on the opposite bank of the Nile, staring at the imposing tower which stood between them and their target. It was there on an island, with a great chain strung out from it so that ships could not approach the city it guarded.
They tried to take the chain tower, a necessary step but not, at first, possible. They would take only losses until a little creativity brought them success. It was apparently Oliver of Paderborn himself who developed the idea: two ships joined together with rope and beam, four masts and sail yards, a network of poles at the summit, and all of it wrapped round in Greek fire resistant animal skins. The result, a floating siege tower that they could bring to bear and bring their siege weapons to its peak. On August 24th, the chain tower that had blocked their approach to Damietta was theirs, and shortly after that, Sultan al-Adil was dead, of grief, it was sometimes said, at the distressing news. That didn’t mean Damietta had fallen though, not by quite some distance. Chain towers aside, this was still a tremendously well-fortified location, one that Oliver described as “the key to all Egypt.” The crusaders were at this moment mere months into a year and a half effort. Reinforcements arrived, from Spain, England, France, and elsewhere. Others left. That effort went on, and on.
The issue of the tower and its chain had, it was true, been dealt with, but then al-Adil’s son al-Kamil had blocked up the approach with sunken ships, a move to which the crusaders responded by digging out a canal. At times the number of departures seriously endangered the besieging force, the flight of “betrayers of Christianity” as Oliver would have it, “pilgrims whose love of themselves was greater than their compassion for their brethren,” but always that force was replenished. The siege saw the momentous meeting of Saint Francis and Sultan al-Kamil, momentous in the way it caught people’s imaginations, the saint and sultan, but probably rather less momentous from the sultan’s perspective. He, after all, did not immediately drop everything and accept Francis’s suggestion that he convert. He did allow him to safely return to the crusader camp though. The siege dragged on.
If it was hard on those outside the walls, it was absolutely punishing for those within Damietta. Oliver writes of extreme hunger and rampant disease, dire circumstances that, no matter what the defenders did to conceal them from their attackers, were revealed whenever someone from inside fled out over the walls, their unfed bodies all too obvious. The city was “greviously afflicted by the long siege, by sword, famine, and pestilence, even more than can be written, [and it] placed its hope solely in the peace which the sultan had promised the citizens.”
For his part, al-Kamil did make every effort to provide that peace. He actually offered Jerusalem and its territory at one point, along with 30 years of truce, if only the crusaders would just be on their way and out of Egypt, and there were some among the crusader leadership who were keen to accept, for if claiming Jerusalem—and with a 30 year guarantee—was that not the entire reason they were there, then what actually did they want from the whole thing? Conquest in Egypt had always been about facilitating that claim, not an end goal in itself. But the crusaders did not accept the offer, not even after the True Cross that had been captured by Salah ad-Din was added to the deal. There were those among them who felt that such truces were much too easily broken for that part of the offer to be relied on, and that Jerusalem, without the accompanying protection of the Transjordan fortresses that were not part of the deal, would be too easily again snatched away from them. Its defences had actually already been stripped away in anticipation that they might take it. And as for the True Cross, there was some doubt as to whether al-Kamil even had it. They pressed on, until the end came.
On November 4th, it was noticed by the crusaders that a tower was unguarded, and it was quickly discovered that the city’s defences as a whole were virtually abandoned. It was, according to Oliver of Paderborn, horrible.
Quote:
“As we were entering it, there met us an intolerable odour, a wretched sight. The dead killed the living. Man and wife, father and son, master and slave, killed each other by their odour. Not only were the streets full of the dead, but in the houses, in the bedrooms, and on the beds lay the corpses. When a husband had perished, a woman, powerless to rise and lacking the help of one to support her, died, not being able to bear the odour; a son near his father or vice versa, a handmaid beside her mistress or vice versa, wasted away with illness and lay dead.”
Reduced by violent deprivation to a city of the dead, Damietta was theirs.
And what were they to do now? Al-Kamil had withdrawn to block their path to Cairo, but where were they to go next? Was it to be Cairo? Jerusalem? Ought they just wait it out for a bit until Frederick got there? What did any of this have to do with Prester John? Next episode, we’ll find out.
I'll be back with that next episode very soon, and I’ll talk to you then.