Download PDF | (Crusade Texts in Translation) Peter Jackson - The Seventh Crusade, 1244-1254_ Sources and Documents-Routledge (2009).
274 Pages
CRUSADE TEXTS IN TRANSLATION
About the volume:
The Seventh Crusade, led by King Louis IX of France, was the last major expedition for the recovery of the Holy Land actually to reach the Near East. The failure of his invasion of Egypt (1249-50), followed by his four-year stay in Palestine in order to retrieve the disaster, had a profound impact on the Latin West. In addition, Louis’s operations in the Nile delta indirectly precipitated the Mamluk coup d’état, which ended the rule of the Ayyubids, Saladin’s dynasty, in Egypt and began the transfer of power there to a military elite that would prove to be a far more formidable enemy to the Franks of Syria and Palestine.
This volume comprises translations of the principal documents and of extracts from narrative sources — both Muslim and Christian — relating to the crusade, and includes many texts, notably the account of Ibn Wasil, not previously available in English. The themes covered include: the preparations and search for allies; the campaign in the Nile delta; the impact on recruitment of the simultaneous crusade against the emperor Frederick II; the Mamluk coup and its immediate consequences in the Near East; Western reactions to the failure in Egypt; and the popular ‘crusade’ of the Pastoureaux in France (1251), which aimed originally to help the absent king, but which degenerated into violence against the clergy and the Jews and had to be suppressed by force.
About the series:
The crusading movement, which originated in the 11th century and lasted beyond the 16th, bequeathed to its future historians a legacy of sources which are unrivalled in their range and variety. These sources document in fascinating detail the motivations and viewpoints, military efforts and spiritual lives of the participants in the crusades. They also narrate the internal histories of the states and societies which crusaders established or supported in the many regions where they fought, as well as those of their opponents. Some of these sources have been translated in the past but the vast majority have been available only in their original language. The goal of this series is to provide a wide ranging corpus of texts, most of them translated for the first time, which will illuminate the history of the crusades and the crusader-states from every angle, including that of their principal adversaries, the Muslim powers of the Middle East.
About the translator: Peter Jackson is Professor of Medieval History at Keele University, UK.
Preface
This volume has its remote origins in a shorter collection of documents and sources which I began translating in the early 1980s for a Special Subject at Keele University, entitled most recently ‘Crusaders, Muslims and Mongols: St. Louis and the East’. I owe a great deal to successive generations of finalists who have kept alive my enthusiasm and have stimulated me with their ideas and questions. I should further acknowledge at this point the help of my medievalist colleagues in the History Department in closing ranks during 2004-2005, and thereby enabling me to spend the best part of a sabbatical year turning the collection into something fit (I trust) for publication. Thanks are due also to my colleague Andrew Lawrence, of the Keele University Digital Imaging/IIlustration Service, for drafting the maps.
I have accumulated many debts to institutions outside my own university: the Cambridge University Library, the British Library, the libraries of the Warburg Institute and of the Institute of Historical Research in London, the Sydney Jones Library in the University of Liverpool and the John Rylands University Library in Manchester. I am grateful to the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, for supplying me long ago with a microfilm of the unpublished sections of Ibn W4sil’s Mufarrij al-kurtib (ms. arabe 1703) and with a printout of the relevant folios of Ibn ‘Abd al-Rahim’s revised version of that work (ms. arabe 1702). It is likewise many years since the Forschungs- und Landesbibliothek Gotha kindly sent me a microfilm of Qaratay’s Kitab al-Majmi' al-nawddir (now ms. Orient. A 1655), and I am no less indebted to the staff there for furnishing me more recently with a printout of the first volume of al-Jazari’s Hawdadith al-zaman (ms. Orient. A 1559).
Professor Malcolm Barber has earned my gratitude by reading through the entire text and offering suggestions and emendations. I alone am responsible for any errors that remain.
Peter Jackson Keele, September 2006
Proper Names and Dates
I have retained Anglicized forms for the names of familiar places: for instance, Cairo rather than al-Qahira. The names of the majority of Westerners mentioned in the texts appear in their French form (for example, Guillaume de Sonnac), but I have adopted an Anglicized form for a few (thus William of Holland, William of Rubruck).
Dates in the Islamic calendar sometimes present a problem. I have normally given the equivalent according to the Common Era in square brackets. But where a weekday is specified which fails to match that equivalent, I have inserted ‘=’ in square brackets immediately beforehand.
Introduction
The literary sources in Latin and Old French for the first crusade (1248-54) of King Louis LX of France — the ‘Seventh’ in the somewhat unsatisfactory notation that has become entrenched in historiography — were conveniently listed over a century ago by Reinhold Rohricht.' The principal Western narrative sources are all now available in English translation. The best-known, the Vie de Saint Louis of Jean, lord of Joinville, who accompanied the crusade and entered Louis’s service in 1248, has been accessible in various versions for several decades.” A translation of the account given by someone who was probably also a participant, in the so-called ‘Rothelin Chronicle’, which continues William of Tyre’s great history from 1229 down to 1261, was published in this series in 1999.? And the somewhat problematic account of the late thirteenth-century author known as the ‘Minstrel of Reims’ exists in two translations.’ We should also include in this group the late thirteenth-century annalistic account preserved in the ‘Estoire de Eracles’, which was written at Acre.° It is a great pity that the Gestes des Chiprois, generally believed to be the work of an anonymous Templar knight in the early fourteenth century, contains a lacuna at precisely the period covered by the Seventh Crusade, since the information it yielded would surely have been invaluable; though it must be admitted that the fifteenthcentury source known (after a sixteenth-century owner of the manuscript) as the ‘Chronicle of Amadi’, which is otherwise heavily dependent on the Gestes for this period, yields relatively sparse material on the crusade.
In this collection I have given priority to contemporary or near-contemporary letters and documents. The earliest surviving document to cover events in the crusader army once it reached the East is a report from the papal legate, Eudes de Chateauroux, cardinal-bishop of Tusculum, to Pope Innocent IV, written in Cyprus on 31 March 1249, not long prior to the attack on Egypt (doc. 56]. Here Eudes refers to a previous report which he had sent to the Pope but which is now lost. Two letters from King Louis himself have come down to us, one of which is addressed to his subjects in August 1250, following his release from captivity and his arrival in Palestine, and throws light on his plans at this critical juncture [doc. 70]. We know that this letter was also sent to the Pope and to Louis’s fellow-monarchs.’ In October 1251 the Pope learned from Louis that Henry III had written to him to commiserate on the disaster in Egypt and to offer aid;® but neither Henry’s letter nor Louis’s reply has come down to us. The French King’s messengers were again at the Curia in January 1254;° but the letter carried on this occasion has likewise not survived.
The many surviving letters from participants vary in value, depending, perhaps, on the closeness of the writer to the decision-making process at councils of war. Letters from the royal chamberlains, Jean Sarrasin (incorporated in the ‘Rothelin’ account)'°? and Jean de Beaumont (doc. 58], announcing the capture of Damietta in 1249, for instance, or the two letters from Patriarch Robert of Jerusalem, dating from the years 1250-51 [does 68, 115], are highly informative. By contrast, that of Gui, a household knight of the Viscount of Melun [doc. 59}, is likely to be less reliable: the information it supplies, that the crusade was heading for Alexandria but was blown onto the coast at Damietta by chance, doubtless represents the confused perspectives — or the aspirations — of the rank and file. It is clear that other participants wrote back to the West about the progress of the crusade, such as the Teutonic Master, Eberhard, who is cited in the annals of Erfurt [doc. 80].
Papal correspondence is a major source of information on the Seventh Crusade, and I have included here a selection of letters from the register of Innocent IV and from other sources. They deal above all with matters of fundraising, recruitment and the payment of subsidies, though one or two throw light on the Pope’s response to the news of Louis’s failure in Egypt in 1250. Not the least important categories comprise papal letters that aimed to raise reinforcements for King Louis’s depleted force in Palestine between 1250 and 1254 [docs 98-105, 107 and 109-12] and those dealing with other crusades contemporary with Louis’s expedition [docs 35-55], in particular that against the Emperor Frederick II and his supporters in Germany and Italy. It should be noted that the loss of the seventh year of Innocent’s register (June 1249-June 1250) doubtless means that we lack a good many letters from precisely the period when the crusade was in Egypt, though two, from February—March 1250, have survived in the archives of the province of Rouen [docs 18 and 19]. In those cases (the majority) where the prolixity of curial scribes threatens to mask the information that might be gleaned from a particular letter, I have abridged or simply calendared it rather than translating the entire text, in order to save space.
From the fact that the English Franciscan Adam Marsh mentions having acquired a copy of Louis’s letter of August 1250, together with a (no longer extant) letter from the Legate Eudes," it is clear that some of these documents circulated widely. One English author who gained access to a great many of them is the English Benedictine Matthew Paris (d. c. 1259), whose Chronica Majora turns repeatedly to the crusade and events in the East. In the additamenta, or supplementary collection of documents, which he compiled to accompany the chronicle, Matthew transmits a letter from Louis’s brother, Count Robert of Artois, to his mother, Queen Blanche (doc. 57], and a number of letters from lesser participants. The Chronica Majora is a problematic work, given the author’s tendency to doctor his material for various purposes: to show the Emperor Frederick II in a favourable light, for example, and to denigrate the Pope and the Military Orders. It is possible, on occasions, to detect phrases or passages that have been inserted in an original.'* Two letters written by nonparticipants, Benedict of Alignano, Bishop of Marseilles (doc. 66], and the Templar Nicholas de la Hyde [doc. 65], are of considerable interest inasmuch as they reflect the way in which rumours of totally spurious triumphs reached Western Europe and buoyed up enthusiasm. Regrettably, the two English translations of the Chronica Majora are both incomplete: the modern one by Professor Richard Vaughan covers only the years 1247-51,'> and even the more comprehensive nineteenth-century translation by Giles'‘ lacks some of the documents from the additamenta. All the relevant documents assembled by Matthew are therefore included here.
A number of chronicles composed in France during the last decades of the thirteenth century and the early fourteenth survey the events of the Seventh Crusade. The great historical encyclopaedia Speculum Historiale (c. 1253) of the Dominican Vincent de Beauvais furnishes us with the earliest narrative account.'> Although Vincent did not accompany the King to the East, his proximity to the Capetian dynasty gave him access to letters and reports, which he summarized. He incorporated in the Speculum Historiale the contents of Eudes’s report of 1249 and of the King’s letter of August 1250, in each case largely verbatim, and apparently also used Robert of Artois’s above-mentioned letter to Queen Blanche and her own letter to Henry III of England [doc. 62], or perhaps a letter from Louis to his mother on which it was based.'* He appears to have had access to other documents which no longer survive, and the data derived from these are therefore included here [doc. 72).
Unfortunately, Vincent’s work goes down no further than the return of Louis’s brothers to France in August 1250. It served as the basis for all subsequent accounts produced in or around the French court, notably the Gesta sanctae memoriae Ludovici of Guillaume de Nangis (c. 1300) and the survey of Louis IX’s reign found in the Grandes Chroniques de France which is in turn borrowed from Guillaume.” But for the period after August 1250 these later accounts had to rely on the Latin text composed by Primat. This, designed as a continuation of Vincent’s work,'® has reached us only in the French version of Jean du Vignay, and covers Louis’s stay in Palestine in far less depth. Significantly, for this later period authors like Guillaume de Nangis are much less informative; they were otherwise almost entirely dependent on Geoffrey de Beaulieu, Louis’s confessor and the author of the earliest of the ‘lives’ of Louis written with a view to his canonization.
Most of the surviving evidence from the canonization process relates merely to miracles witnessed at the King’s tomb.'? The only documentation that provides any information about the Seventh Crusade is a fragment of the submission made by King Louis’s brother, Charles of Anjou [doc. 71], which speaks of the disaster in Egypt and its immediate aftermath. This eyewitness testimony is important, not least because it pre-dates Joinville’s account by over two decades. I have omitted from this collection the various lives of Louis the Saint, since what they add to our knowledge of the events of the Seventh Crusade is meagre: the information given by Geoffrey de Beaulieu (c. 1272), for instance, that the Sultan had the captive King carefully tended and cured by his own doctors and that Louis made the pilgrimage to Nazareth (probably in 1251).”°
Authors writing within the Islamic world do not significantly enhance our knowledge of the course of the crusade. What they provide instead, of course, is a good deal of information on contemporary events within Egypt in the last months of Sultan al-Salih Ayyiib (d. 1249), during the brief reign of his son and successor, alMu‘azzam Tiran Shah (1249-50) and in the wake of the latter’s murder by members of his father’s household slave (mamluk) guard. The writers whom historians usually cite for this period, namely Ibn al-Furat (d. 1405) and al-Maqrizi (d. 1442), wrote compilations, based in large measure on earlier works which they had usually abridged.”' I have included in this collection, therefore, two contemporary sources which they used, and which are of particular value. The first is a history of the Ayyubids, the Mufarrij al-kurub fi akhbar bani Ayyiib (‘The Dissipator of Cares in the Account of the Ayyubid Dynasty’), by Jamal al-Din Muhammad ibn Salim, known as Ibn Wasil (d. 1298) (doc. 73]. The other principal Muslim source is a general chronicle, the Mir ‘at al-zaman fi ta’rikh al-a‘yan (‘The Mirror of the Age in the History of Notable Men’) of Shams al-Din Abii’!-Muzaffar Yisuf ibn Qizighli (d. 1256), known as the Sibt (‘maternal grandson’) of Ibn al-Jawzi (an earlier historian) [doc. 74(a), (d), (f) and (i)]. In my notes to the extracts from the works of Ibn Wasil and the Sibt Ibn al-Jawzi, I have frequently referred to two other contemporary works: the Dhayl ‘ala’l-Rawdatayn (‘Supplement to the Two Gardens’, a continuation of his earlier history), by the Damascene Muslim Abi Shama (d. 1268), and the Kitab almajmi' al-mubarak (‘The Fortunate Compilation’) of the Coptic Christian al-Makin Jirjis Ibn al-‘Amid (d. c. 1272). An excerpt from the somewhat suspect work of the later mamluk author Qaratay al-‘Izzi al-Khazandari, Ta’rikh majmi' al-nawdadir (c. 1330), describing how Emperor Frederick II warned Sultan Ayyiib of Louis’s impending attack [doc. 32], is included here together with a passage of Ibn Wasil which at least corroborates it in outline [doc. 33].
Ibn WAsil was in Cairo for most of the period of the crusader operations in Egypt, but spent some days in the Sultan’s headquarters at Mansura and was generally well informed about what transpired in the delta. The Sibt Ibn al-Jawzi, by contrast, wrote in Damascus, at some remove from the events of the crusade. But he drew a good deal of his material from the highly placed Sa‘d al-Din Ibn Hamawiya al-Juwayni (d. 1276), who had been in Egypt at the time and whose memoirs, in their original form, are long lost; and this gives the Sibt’s Mir ’at a special value. The text that has come down to us is regrettably corrupt in places, but can be corrected from the work of later historians who made extensive use of it, such as al-Jazari (d. 1338). I have also included with extracts from the Sibt’s work other passages from Sa‘d alDin preserved by the later author, Shams al-Din Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Dhahabi (d. 1348) [doc. 74(c), (e), (g), (hb) and (j)], and an additional excerpt which alDhahabt borrows from the al-Jami'‘ al-mukhtasar (‘The Abridged Compilation’) of the Baghdad chronicler Ibn al-Sa‘i (d. 1276) [doc. 74(b)). Further extracts from Ibn Wasil (doc. 118] and the Sibt [doc. 119] and passages from Ibn al-‘Amid [doc. 120] are incorporated in the section on King Louis’s four-year stay in Palestine. They tell us nothing of the Franks’ activities, but they throw valuable light, again, on developments within the Islamic Near East.
I have included here a number of sources that illustrate the impact of the disaster in Egypt on the Christian world, particularly back in Western Europe, and seek to apportion blame [docs 75-83]. Such material is inevitably fragmentary. It includes papal letters; two sermons by the Legate Eudes de Chateauroux, probably delivered in the Holy Land in 1251; a troubadour’s song, and the versified chronicle De triumphis ecclesiae of Jean de Garlande (c. 1252).?* Some of the sentiments expressed, of course, may simply be designed to vindicate already firmly held views about the crusade or crusade strategy. One notable reaction to the bad news from the East was the popular movement of 1251 known as the ‘Crusade of the Shepherds’ (or ‘Pastoureaux’), which began with the aim of going to Louis’s assistance, but degenerated into violence against clerics, friars and Jews and had to be suppressed by force. The principal sources for the outbreak form a discrete section in this volume [docs 84—97]}.
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