A crusade to the Holy Land organized by Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor and king of Sicily, that achieved the restoration of the city of Jerusalem and other territory to the kingdom of Jerusalem and also secured a ten-year truce with the kingdom’s Muslim enemies.
Frederick II had taken the cross on the occasion of his coronation as king of Germany at Aachen on 15 July 1215. It was not until 1218 that Pope Honorius III issued an urgent appeal to Frederick to fulfill his crusading obligations by leading an expedition to the Holy Land, where Jerusalem had been under the control of the Muslim Ayyubids since 1187. Frederick prepared for a campaign, planning to set sail in 1220. However, his departure came to be entwined with his demands for himself to be crowned emperor and for his eldest son, Henry (VII), to be crowned king of Germany, all of which Frederick wanted to be accomplished before leaving. Hampered by the initial lukewarm reception to the call for crusade among the German nobility, Frederick asked that his departure be postponed until 1221; he then proceeded to have Henry elected king by a diet of German princes at Frankfurt am Main in April 1220. Negotiations about his coronation as emperor, increasingly recognized as a prerequisite for his departure by Pope Honorius III, began in August 1220, with Frederick finally receiving the imperial crown at Rome on 22 November. Honorius also accepted the delay of the emperor’s departure, but threatened him with excommunication should he not depart the following year.
In April 1221, the emperor dispatched a first contingent of troops, led by Ludwig I, duke of Bavaria, to be followed by another fleet of forty ships in June, under the command of Walter of Paleara, chancellor of Sicily; Henry of Malta, admiral of the Sicilian fleet; and Anselm of Justingen, Frederick’s imperial marshal. Faced with political difficulties in Sicily, Frederick II himself did not leave for the Holy Land. Frederick and Honorius held further meetings in November 1222 at Verona, and in March 1223 at Ferentino, where they were joined by the patriarch of Jerusalem and John of Bri-enne, the king of Jerusalem. These meetings resulted in an agreement that Frederick would set sail by 24 June 1225; it was also arranged that he would marry John’s daughter Isabella II, the heiress of the kingdom of Jerusalem. Preparations for the campaign were, however, fraught with difficulties. Although transport for nearly 12,000 armed men had been procured by spring 1224, few were willing to join this expedition. Furthermore, Frederick’s actions in Sicily engendered resistance among the north Italian communes, which re-formed the Lombard League and engaged the emperor in a series of armed skirmishes, while a conflict over Poitou between Henry III of England and Louis VIII of France reduced the number of likely crusaders from outside Sicily and the empire. Hermann von Salza, the master of the Teutonic Order, was sent to meet Honorius III, and on 25 July 1225, at San Germano, the result of their negotiations was made public. Frederick promised to depart by 15 August 1227, and to provide 1,000 knights for two years at his expense; he was also to hand over 100,000 ounces of gold to John of Brienne, Hermann von Salza, and Patriarch Ralph of Jerusalem, which was only to be returned to him once he actually arrived in the Holy Land. Finally, the emperor accepted that, if, for whatever reason, he failed to set sail for the Holy Land, he was to be excommunicated.
To underline his commitment, Frederick II sent for Isabella in August 1225. Their marriage was celebrated at Brindisi on 9 November 1225. By mid-1227 the emperor had assembled a force of over 1,000 knights at Brindisi, with the main crusading army dispatched by mid-August 1227. Frederick II and Ludwig IV, landgrave of Thuringia, followed on 8 September. However, both emperor and landgrave soon fell ill, and Frederick was forced to return to Otranto. An embassy led by Hermann von Salza and Patriarch Gerold of Jerusalem was sent to the new pope, Gregory IX, to explain the delay, while in the meantime Duke Henry of Limburg was appointed as leader of the crusading army. The pope was, however, unwilling to accept Frederick’s reasoning, and on 29 September pronounced a sentence of excommunication against him.
The fleets dispatched by Frederick probably arrived in Palestine by October 1227. Their activities were limited to strengthening fortifications at Sidon (mod. Saida, Lebanon), Caesarea (mod. Har Qesari, Israel), and Jaffa (mod. Tel Aviv-yafo, Israel), and contributing to the building of Mont-fort castle near Acre (mod. ‘Akko, Israel). A reliable estimate puts the number of knights assembled at about 800 at most. These imperial contingents were joined by a group of English crusaders under the leadership of Walter Brewer, bishop of Exeter, and Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester. The crusaders lacked overall leadership and suffered from low morale. Frederick’s arrival was, therefore, essential. The main part of the imperial crusading army, about 500 knights under the leadership of Richard Filangieri, was dispatched in April 1228, with the emperor himself, accompanied by another 200 knights and an estimated 3,000 foot soldiers, following on 28 June 1228. He arrived in Cyprus on 21 July, and reached Acre on 7 September 1228.
While in Cyprus, Frederick sought to establish imperial overlordship over the island, in recognition of the homage done to the emissaries of his father, Henry VI. This soon brought him into conflict with John of Ibelin, the lord of Beirut and regent of Cyprus. A faction hostile to John had called upon Frederick to intervene, and the emperor, having taken offense at John’s delay in presenting the infant king of Cyprus to him, began a formal investigation into John’s administration. This led to John’s flight, and the imperial army, supported by a contingent of troops from the Frankish states of the mainland, laid siege to one of John’s Cypriot strongholds. In the end, a prolonged military confrontation was avoided, but Frederick had engendered the hostility of one of the most important baronial families in the kingdom of Jerusalem. His handling of the situation caused apprehension among the other barons in the Holy Land and laid the foundation for his and his officials’ difficulties in administering the emperor’s Palestinian domains.
In the meantime, Gregory IX had commanded the military orders and the clergy of the Holy Land not to cooperate with the excommunicate emperor. This command caused divisions among the crusading army, which were circumvented by nominal command being handed over to Hermann von Salza, Richard Filangieri, and Odo of Mont-beliard. In the meantime, changing political fortunes in the Muslim East held out the prospect that a military confrontation might be avoided. In 1226 envoys from al-Kamil, sultan of Egypt, had gone to Sicily to suggest that as many towns in Palestine could be restored to Christian control as Frederick wished, if he aided al-Kamil in his campaign against the governor of Damascus, al-Mu‘azzam. Archbishop Berard of Palermo contacted the ruler of Damascus in October 1227 and remained in touch with al-Kamil until just before the arrival of Frederick in Acre. The death of al-Mu‘azzam in November 1227 strengthened al-Kamil’s position and added urgency to the negotiations. Frederick’s army, heavily depleted by sickness and desertions, and beset by disputes as to the legitimacy of the emperor’s position, could not contemplate mounting a serious military challenge. Furthermore, Frederick’s father-in-law, John of Brienne, was now in command of a papal army that was attacking the kingdom of Sicily.
The emperor could thus not afford to remain in the East for long, and so took up negotiations with al-Kamil. These did not progress well, and at one point Frederick even considered military action and (in late 1228) encamped his army near Jaffa. Nonetheless, in January or February 1229 a ten-year truce was agreed on. Jerusalem was returned to Christian control, with the exception of the Temple Mount containing the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock. Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Toron, with a strip of territory as far as the coast, were also returned to the kingdom of Jerusalem. However, no military help was to be given to the Christian states of Tripoli and Antioch, and support for a series of Templar and Hospitaller castles was to be curtailed.
The emperor even undertook to aid al-Kamil for the duration of this truce against all his enemies, including Christians. The treaty aroused heavy opposition from the patriarch of Jerusalem and the military orders. This opposition did not derive from the fact that the return of Jerusalem had been accomplished by negotiation rather than combat, but rather was directed against specific clauses of the agreement between Frederick and al-Kamil: the emperor’s promise to aid the sultan even against Christians, the continuing presence of Muslim soldiers in parts of Jerusalem, the promise that the city’s fortifications would be destroyed, and the concession that the truce would not extend to all the strongholds of the military orders or to all of Outremer.
Patriarch Gerold undertook concerted efforts to prevent the emperor from entering Jerusalem by placing the city under interdict and threatening excommunication to anyone following Frederick there. On Saturday, 17 March 1229, Frederick entered Jerusalem with his German and Italian troops and some of the barons of the kingdom. Of the military orders only the Teutonic Knights were present. Finding no priests at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre the next day, Frederick had a crown laid on the altar and placed it on his own head. Queen Isabella had died in 1227, and technically Frederick was only regent for their infant son Conrad. Nevertheless, he continued to claim the title of king of Jerusalem and appointed his own officials to govern the kingdom, although he was faced with growing opposition from the Ibelins and their supporters. Yet the worsening situation in Sicily forced the emperor’s departure for Acre, where he narrowly avoided an armed skirmish with troops raised by Gerold and the Templars. On 1 May 1229 Frederick left Acre, and he arrived back in Sicily on 10 June. The emperor’s return resulted in a quick reversal of recent papal advances, and by early 1230 negotiations began to revoke his excommunication, resulting in the Treaty of San Germano on 28 August 1230.
-Bjorn K. U. Weiler
See also: Frederick II of Germany (1194-1250); Germany
Bibliography
Abulafia, David, Frederick II. A Medieval Emperor (London: Penguin, 1988).
Aziz, Mohammed A., “La croisade de l’Empereur Frederic II et l’Orient Latin,” in Autour de la Premiere Croisade, ed. Michel Balard (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1996), pp. 373-378.
Hiestand, Rudolf, “Friedrich II. und der Kreuzzug,” in
Friedrich II: Tagung des Deutschen Historischen Instituts in Rom im Gedenkjahr 1994, ed. Arnulf Esch and Norbert Kamp (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1996), pp. 128-149.
Sturner, Wolfgang, Friedrich II, 2 vols. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994-2000).
Van Cleve, Thomas C., “The Crusade of Frederick II,” in A History of the Crusades, 2d ed., ed. Kenneth M. Setton (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 2:429-462.
World History
