Frederick II and the Crusades: An Excommunicated Emperor Leases Jerusalem

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The most successful Western bid for Jerusalem came at a negotiating table, when Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, excommunicated by Pope Gregory IX, secured the city in the 1229 Treaty of Jaffa. The episode traces how the Crusades of 1095 to 1291 led there. Seljuk victory at Manzikert in 1071 pushed Byzantine emperor Alexios I to seek mercenaries, and at Clermont in 1095 Urban II offered full penance for armed pilgrimage. Peter the Hermit's People's Crusade massacred Rhineland Jews under Count Emicho and was destroyed at Civetot. Nobles mortgaged castles, since a knight's journey could cost four years of income. After the siege of Antioch and the Holy Lance, Jerusalem fell in 1099 with the slaughter of its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants.

Zengi took Edessa in 1144, the Second Crusade botched an attack on allied Damascus, and Saladin crushed the crusaders at Hattin in 1187 by cutting off water and setting the scrub on fire. In the Third Crusade, Frederick Barbarossa drowned, Philip II went home, and Richard the Lionheart executed nearly 3,000 prisoners at Acre, won at Arsuf, then settled for pilgrim access. Venice's Doge Enrico Dandolo turned the unpaid Fourth Crusade toward the sack of Constantinople in 1204, and Francis of Assisi crossed the lines to preach to Sultan al-Kamil. Frederick, fluent in Arabic, won a 10-year lease on Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth that left the Temple Mount and Al-Aqsa in Muslim hands. The Mamluks took Acre in 1291.

• Only about 11,000 crusaders showed up for a Venetian fleet built to carry 33,000 men.
• Frederick sailed east while still excommunicated after repeatedly delaying his crusader vow.
• Al-Kamil agreed to Frederick's terms while fighting a civil war against his own relatives.
• The papacy later turned crusades against Baltic pagans and the Cathars of southern France.
• Nineteenth-century romantic nationalism recast the Crusades as chivalry, an image still used in modern political rhetoric.