The Fifth Crusade (September 1217 – August 29, 1221) was a campaign in a series of Crusades by Western Europeans to reacquire Jerusalem and the rest of the Holy Land by first conquering the powerful Egyptian Ayyubid Sultanate, led by Sultan al-Adil, brother of Saladin.
After the failure of the Fourth Crusade, Innocent III again called for a crusade, and began organizing Crusading armies, with the majority of men joining the Fifth Crusade being from Germany, but also non-German forces from elsewhere inside the Holy Roman Empire (such as Holland and northern Italy) and other contigents. The crusader orders, the Kingdom of Jerusalem and briefly Hungary would participated among other small contigents. These armies were initially led by Andrew II of Hungary and Leopold VI of Austria upon arrival in Palestine, soon to be joined by John of Brienne, titular King of Jerusalem. Unlike previous crusades, few would join from France, as French nobles were preoccupied with events in western Europe. An initial campaign in late 1217 in Syria was inconclusive, and Andrew departed. A German army led by cleric Oliver of Paderborn, and another, more mixed army also from the Holy Roman Empire of German, Dutch, Flemish and Frisian soldiers led by William I of Holland, then joined the Crusade in Acre, with a goal of first conquering Egypt, viewed as the key to Jerusalem. There, cardinal Pelagius Galvani arrived as papal legate and de facto leader of the Crusade, supported by John of Brienne and the masters of the Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights. Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, who had taken the cross in 1215, did not personally participate as promised, despite the majority of forces involved being from his imperial domain.
Following the successful siege of Damietta in 1218–1219, the Crusaders occupied the port for two years. Al-Kamil, now Sultan of Egypt, offered attractive peace terms, including the restoration of Jerusalem to Christian rule. The sultan was rebuked by Pelagius several times, and the Crusaders marched south towards Cairo in July 1221. En route, they attacked a stronghold of al-Kamil at the battle of Mansurah, but they were defeated and forced to surrender. The terms of surrender included the retreat from Damietta—leaving Egypt altogether—and an eight-year truce. The Fifth Crusade ended in September 1221, a Crusader defeat that failed to achieve its goals.
Background
By 1212, Innocent III had been pope for 14 years and faced the disappointment of the Fourth Crusade and its inability to recover Jerusalem, the on-going Albigensian Crusade, begun in 1209, and the popular fervor of the Children's Crusade of 1212. The Latin Empire of Constantinople was established, with the emperor Baldwin I essentially elected by the Venetians. (The imperial crown was at first offered to doge Enrico Dandolo, who refused it.) The first Latin Patriarch of Constantinople, the Venetian Thomas Morosini, was contested by the pope as uncanonical.
The ongoing situation in Europe was chaotic. Philip of Swabia was locked in a dispute of the throne in Germany with Otto of Brunswick. Innocent III's attempts to reconcile their differences was rendered moot with Philip's assassination on 21 June 1208. Otto was crowned Holy Roman Emperor and fought against the pope, resulting in his excommunication. France was heavily invested in the Albigensian Crusade and was quarreling with John Lackland, resulting in the Anglo-French war of 1213–1214. Sicily was ruled by the child-king Henry II and Spain was occupied in their crusade against the Almohads. There was little appetite in Europe for a new Crusade.
In Jerusalem, John of Brienne became the effective ruler of the kingdom through his marriage to Maria of Montferrat. In 1212, Isabella II of Jerusalem was proclaimed queen of Jerusalem shortly after her birth, and her father John became regent. Antioch was consumed with the War of the Antiochene Succession, begun with the death of Bohemond III, not to be resolved until 1219.
Before the arrival of John of Brienne in Acre in 1210, the local Christians had refused to renew their truce the Ayyubids. The next year, John negotiated with the aging sultan al-Adil a new truce between the kingdom and the sultanate to last through 1217. At the same time, in light of the strength of the Muslims and their renewed fortifications, John also asked the pope for help. There was no real force among the Syrian Franks, with many of the deployed knights returning home. If a new Crusade were to begin, it must come from Europe.
Innocent III had hoped to mount such a Crusade to the Holy Land, never forgetting the goal of restoring Jerusalem to Christian control. The pathos of the Children's Crusade only nerved him to fresh efforts. But for Innocent, this tragedy had its moral: "the very children put us to shame, while we sleep they go forth gladly to conquer the Holy Land."
Preparations for the Crusade
In April 1213, Innocent III issued his papal bull Quia maior, calling all of Christendom to join a new Crusade. This was followed by a conciliar decree, the Ad Liberandam, in 1215. The attendant papal instructions engaged a new enterprise to recover Jerusalem while establishing Crusading norms that were to last nearly a century.
The message of the Crusade was preached in France by legate Robert of Courçon, a former classmate of the pope's. He was met with bitter complaints by the clergy, accusing the legate of encroaching on their domains. Philip II of France supported his clergy, and Innocent III realized the Robert's zeal was a threat to the success of the Crusade. On 11 November 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council was convened. The prelates of France presented their grievances, many well-founded, and the pope pleaded for them to forgive the legate's indiscretions. In the end, very few Frenchmen took part in the expedition of 1217, unwilling to go in the company of Germans and Hungarians, with France represented by Aubrey of Reims and the bishops of Limoges and Bayeux, Jean de Veyrac and Robert des Ablèges.
At the council, Innocent III called for the recovery of the Holy Land. Innocent wanted it to be led by the papacy, as the First Crusade should have been, to avoid the mistakes of the Fourth Crusade, which had been taken over by the Venetians. He planned to meet with the Crusaders at Brindisi and Messina for departure on 1 June 1217, and prohibited trade with the Muslims in order to ensure that the Crusaders would have ships and weapons, renewing an 1179 edict. Every Crusader would receive an indulgence as well as those who simply helped pay the expenses of a Crusader, but did not go on the Crusade themselves.
In order to protect Raoul of Merencourt, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, on his return trip to the kingdom, Innocent III tasked John of Brienne to provide escort. As John was in conflict with Leo I of Armenia and Hugh I of Cyprus, the pope ordered them to reconcile their differences before the Crusaders reached the Holy Land.
Innocent III died on 16 July 1216 and Honorius III was consecrated as pope the next week. The Crusade dominated the early part of his papacy. The next year, he crowned Peter II of Courtenay as Latin Emperor, who was captured on his eastward journey in Epirus and died in confinement.
Robert of Courçon was sent as spiritual advisor to the French fleet, but subordinate to newly-chosen papal delegate Pelagius of Albano. Bishop Walter II of Autun, a veteran of the Fourth Crusade, would also return to the Holy Land with the Fifth Crusade. French canon Jacques de Vitry had come under the influence of the saintly Marie of Oignies and preached the Albigensian Crusade after 1210. He arrived at his new position as Bishop of Acre in 1216 and shortly thereafter Honorius III tasked him with preaching the Crusade in the Latin settlements of Syria, made difficult with the rampant corruption at the port cities.
Oliver of Paderborn preached the Crusade in Germany and had great success in recruitment. In July 1216, Honorius III called on Andrew II of Hungary to fulfill his father's vow to lead a Crusade. Like many other rulers, the pope's former pupil, Frederick II of Germany, had taken an oath to embark for the Holy Land in 1215 and appealed to German nobility to join. But Frederick II hung back, with his crown still in contention with Otto IV, and Honorius repeatedly put off the date for the beginning of the expedition.
In Europe, the troubadours were equally adept in awakening the interest in the Crusade. These included Elias Cairel, a veteran of the Fourth Crusade, Pons de Capduelh, later joining the Crusade in 1220, and Aimery de Pégulhan, who implored by verse a young William VI of Montferrat to follow in his father's footsteps and take the cross.
The strength of the armies was estimated at more than 32,000, including more than 10,000 knights. It was described by a contemporaneous Arab historian as: "This year, an infinite number of warriors left from Rome the great and other countries of the West." The Crusader force was also prepared to use the latest siege technology, including counterweight trebuchets.
In Iberia and the Levant
The departure of the Crusaders began finally in early July 1217. Many of the Crusaders decided to go to the Holy Land by their traditional sea journey. The fleet made their first stop at Dartmouth on the southern coast of England. There they elected their leaders and the laws by which they would organize their venture. From there, led by William I of Holland, they continued on their way south to Lisbon. As in previous crusading seaborne journeys, the fleet was dispersed by storms and only gradually managed to reach the Portuguese city of Lisbon after making a stopover at the famous shrine of Santiago de Compostela.
At their arrival in Portugal, Bishop Soeiro Viegas of Lisbon attempted to persuade the Crusaders to help the Portuguese capture the Almohad-controlled city of Alcácer do Sal. The Frisians, however, refused on account of Innocent III's disqualification of the venture at the Fourth Lateran Council. The other members of the fleet, however, were convinced by the Portuguese and started the siege of Alcácer do Sal in August 1217. The Crusaders finally captured the city with the help of the Knights Templar and Knights Hospitaller in October 1217.
A group of Frisians who refused to aid the Portuguese with their siege plans against Alcácer do Sal, preferred to raid several coastal towns on their way to the Holy Land. They attacked Faro, Rota, Cádiz and Ibiza, gaining much booty thereby. They thereafter followed the coast of southern France and wintered in Civitavecchia in Italy in 1217–1218, before continuing on their way to Acre. In the north, Ingi II of Norway took the cross in 1216, only to die the next spring, and the eventual Scandinavian expedition was of little consequence.
Innocent III had managed to secure the participation of the Kingdom of Georgia in the Crusade. Tamar of Georgia, queen since 1184, led the Georgian state to its zenith of power and prestige in the Middle Ages. Under her rule, Georgia challenged Ayyubid rule in eastern Anatolia. Tamar died in 1213 and was succeeded by her son George IV of Georgia. In the late 1210s, according to the Georgian chronicles, he began making preparations for a campaign in the Holy Land to support the Franks. His plans were cut short by the invasion of the Mongols in 1220. After the death of George IV, his sister Rusudan of Georgia notified the pope that Georgia was unable to fulfill its promises.
Situation in the Holy Land
Saladin had died in 1193 and was succeeded in most of his domain by his brother al-Adil, who was the patriarch of all successive Ayyubid sultans of Egypt. Saladin's son az-Zahir Ghazi retained his leadership in Aleppo. An exceptionally low Nile River resulted in a failure of the crops in 1201–1202, and famine and pestilence ensued. People abandoned themselves to atrocious practices, habitually resorting to cannibalism. Violent earthquakes, felt as far away as Syria and Armenia, devastated whole cities, and increased the general misery.
After naval raids on Rosetta in 1204 and Damietta in 1211, the chief concern of al-Adil was Egypt. He was willing to make concessions to avoid war, and favoured the Italian maritime states of Venice and Pisa, both for trading reasons and to preclude them from supporting further crusades. Most of his reign was conducted under truces with the Christians, and he constructed a new fortress at Mount Tabor, to buttress the defenses of Jerusalem and Damascus. Most of his conflicts in Syria were with the Knights Hospitaller at Krak des Chevaliers or with Bohemond IV of Antioch, and were dealt with by his nephew az-Zahir Ghazi. Only once, in 1207, did he directly confront the Crusaders, capturing al-Qualai'ah, besieging Krak des Chevaliers and advancing to Tripoli, before accepting an indemnity from Bohemond IV in exchange for peace.
Az-Zahir maintained an alliance with both Antioch and Kaykaus I, the Seljuk sultan of Rûm, to check the influence of Leo I of Armenia, as well as to keep his options open to challenge his uncle. Az-Zahir died in 1216, leaving as his successor al-Aziz Muhammad, his 3-year-old son, whose mother was Dayfa Khatun, al-Adil's daughter. Saladin's eldest son, al-Afdal, emerged to make a bid for Aleppo, enlisting the help of Kaykaus I, who also had designs on the region. In 1218, al-Afdal and Kaykaus invaded Aleppo and advanced on the capital. The situation was resolved when al-Ashraf, al-Adil's third son, routed the Seljuk army, which remained a menace until the death of Kaykaus in 1220. Given the Crusaders' Egyptian plan, these diversions were useful in stretching the resources of the sultanate that controlled the Levant with an uneasy cooperation.