Carpenters and Kings by Siddhartha Sarma

Author:Siddhartha Sarma [Sarma, Siddhartha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789353055103
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2019-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

The Source of All Evil

Around the time when Giovanni Montecorvino arrived on the Malabar Coast, a Mamluk Egyptian army under Sultan al-Ashraf left the Nile Delta and struck out north across the Holy Land. On 5 April 1291, they reached Acre in what is Israel’s Haifa Bay today.

It had been a quarter century of misfortune for the crusaders. After the Mongol debacle at Ayn Jalut, the Mamluks had turned their attention to European possessions in the Holy Land, taking the Principality of Antioch in 1268. The response from the West had been underwhelming. The Eighth Crusade, launched by King Louis IX in 1270, was aimed at reaching the Holy Land via the island of Cyprus. Despite Ilkhan Abaqa also attacking Egypt, it achieved nothing, beyond the death of Louis.

The royal courts of Europe, it seemed to observers, were just not able to put together a campaign to rival the tremendously successful First Crusade. Six years after the death of Louis, Henry II, claimant to the lost throne of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, left the Holy Land and settled down in Cyprus to await deliverance from the West. For generations, Europeans had been referring to the Holy Land as outre-mer or ‘beyond the sea’. Now, the kingdom built by the First Crusade had literally become an offshore venture.

More reverses ensued. In 1278, the crucial Syrian port of Latakia was lost. In 1289, the Mamluks took the County of Tripoli and its eponymous capital city, a feat that would rival if not exceed the taking of Jerusalem by Salah ad-Din 100 years previously.

The Mamluk army’s siege of Acre in 1291 was therefore a defining moment in medieval history. The Franks were defending their last major city in the Holy Land, but apart from a few sailors from the Italian cities and a band of knights sent by King Edward I of England, the West did not come to their aid. By the evening of 18 May, Acre had fallen.1 Some of its notable defenders, including King Henry II of Jerusalem, had fled back to Cyprus. Others, including the Hospitaller and Templar garrisons of the city, had perished. Among the dead was William of Beaujeu, Grand Master of the Templars. The Mamluks had completed the Muslim reconquest of the Holy Land.

Europe had seen it coming for years, and yet the loss of Acre and the erasure of crusader territory in the Holy Land had a profound impact on the political and intellectual environment of medieval Europe. The question in the papal and royal courts now was: How should the Crusades be conducted? What needed to be done?

In the Second Council of Lyons in 1274, where Pope Gregory X laid out the proposal by the Byzantine emperor, conveyed by Giovanni Montecorvino, of a reunion between the Greek and Latin churches, another matter was also discussed. Suggestions were sought for strategy manuals to outline campaigns against Muslim powers, aimed ultimately at recovering Jerusalem. Gregory personally asked the Franciscan friar Fidenzio of Padua for a proposal for such a campaign.

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