If Frederick thought his success would be greeted with jubilation, he was wrong. In his own letter, Patriarch Gerold condemned the emperor’s conduct as ‘deplorable’, stating that his actions had been ‘to the great detriment of the cause of Jesus Christ’. In part his anger was incited because Frederick’s unilateral agreement with the Ayyubids had been formulated ‘after long and mysterious conferences, and without having consulted any [native Franks]’. Along with the Templars and Hospitallers, Gerold also complained about the failure to secure control of a sufficient number of castles to defend the Holy City (many of which had previously belonged to the Military Orders) and pointed out that the emperor likewise had done nothing to supervise Jerusalem’s refortification. Beneath the surface of all these attacks, however, was the quickening fear that Frederick would now be in a position to assert his full autocratic authority over the Latin kingdom.

The emperor may well have had a mind to impose his will, but troubling news from the West had begun to reach his ears. In his absence, Pope Gregory IX had launched a blistering invasion of southern Italy, aiming to capture Sicily and thus put an end to the Hohenstaufen encirclement of Rome. Even in light of Frederick’s excommunication, this was a cynical and transparently self-serving ploy–one that later elicited widespread censure in Europe. To make matters worse, the pope sought to encourage recruitment for this campaign by offering participants spiritual rewards that seemed to echo those available to crusaders. Among those who spearheaded Gregory’s cause were the two rivals from the Fifth Crusade, Cardinal Pelagius and John of Brienne, now reconciled.

With the threat to his western empire pressing, Frederick swiftly reached a compromise with the kingdom of Jerusalem’s Latin nobility. Rather than appoint one of his own outsiders, he agreed to install two native barons to govern Palestine in his absence. This was little more than a temporary expedient, but it allowed the emperor hurriedly to depart for Italy. Even so, resentment at Frederick’s high-handed tactics was stirring among a large number of Levantine Franks. Mindful of the heated atmosphere, the emperor tried to slip away from Acre on 1 May 1229 with a minimum of ceremony by taking ship at dawn. But according to one Latin chronicle, Frederick suffered a final indignity when a group of ‘butchers and old people of the street’ spotted him as he made his way down to the docks, and this angry mob ‘ran along beside him and pelted him with tripe and bits of meat’. The Hohenstaufen emperor had recovered the Holy City for Christendom, but he was said to have left the Near East a ‘hated, cursed and vilified’ man.²⁵

A NEW HORIZON

Frederick II returned to southern Italy in time to drive back the forces fighting in the name of Pope Gregory IX. Despite an atmosphere of anger and ill will, both sides recognised that, for now at least, reconciliation was in their best interests. In 1230 the emperor’s excommunication was lifted, Gregory acknowledged the legality of the treaty brokered with al-Kamil in the East and a tense rapprochement was achieved. Meanwhile, in Palestine, the Franks gradually began to return to Jerusalem. For all their earlier complaints, Patriarch Gerold, the Templars and the Hospitallers all re-established a presence in the city, and slow work began on rebuilding its fortifications. With the Ayyubids still locked in an ongoing internecine struggle for supremacy, the terms of the 1229 truce held, and the Latins were left largely unthreatened.

Before long, though, the Christians were embroiled in squabbles of their own. In his rush to return westwards in 1229, Frederick had been forced to compromise his vision of direct Hohenstaufen hegemony of the Holy Land. But with the settlement in Italy, he dispatched Riccardo Filangeri to assert imperial rights over Cyprus and Palestine in 1231. Something of a hard-nosed autocrat, Filangeri proved to be deeply unpopular with much of the native Frankish nobility and clashed heavily with Jean of Ibelin, who now became the figurehead of anti-Hohenstaufen resistance. Through the remainder of the decade and beyond, the struggle to resist imperial authority simmered on–even leading Acre’s local populace to declare their city an independent commune, separate from the kingdom of Jerusalem. Distracted by this hapless bickering, the Latins made little attempt either to consolidate their recent territorial gains or to exploit Ayyubid weakness.

To compound this situation, the barely contained animosity between Frederick II and Gregory IX resurfaced once more in 1239. The emperor was again excommunicated and, this time, the pope called for a fully fledged crusade against his Hohenstaufen opponent–now defamed as an enemy of Christendom and ally of Islam. Another crusade against the emperor was announced in 1244 and this led to open warfare that rumbled on until Frederick II’s death in December 1250. Resolute in its desire to uphold and advance the strength of the Church, the papacy had finally embraced the idea of wielding the weapon of holy war against its political enemies. Similar calls to arms would follow for decades, even centuries, to come. These prompted some outcry, occasionally even vociferous condemnation, but nonetheless many willing recruits took the cross–content to fight on Latin soil against fellow Christians in return for an indulgence. Of all the criticisms levelled at the papacy by contemporaries for this dilution of the ‘crusading ideal’, the most telling was the frequent complaint that the true battlefield in the holy war lay in the East. It is certainly true that, over time, Rome’s redirection of crusade armies–both within western Europe and to other theatres of conflict in Iberia, the Baltic and the faltering state of Latin Romania–served further to isolate and enfeeble Frankish Outremer.

The Barons’ Crusade

These developments did not suddenly lead the papacy to abandon the Latin East. Rather, the Levant became one front among many, and it sometimes fell to secular leaders to prioritise the interests of the surviving crusader states. This was the case between 1239 and 1241 when two relatively small-scale expeditions (sometimes called the Barons’ Crusade) were led by Thibaut IV of Champagne–a member of one of the West’s great crusading dynasties–and by Henry III of England’s brother, Richard of Cornwall. Their campaigns enjoyed a marked degree of success, partly because they adopted Frederick II’s technique of forceful diplomacy, but primarily as a result of the fresh spiral of Ayyubid insecurity caused by al-Kamil’s death in 1238. With various members of the late sultan’s family vying for control of Egypt and Syria, Thibaut and Richard were able to play rival Ayyubids against one another, recovering Galilee and refortifying the southern coastal outpost of Ascalon.

In the wake of these successes, the kingdom of Jerusalem’s Frankish nobility finally threw off the yoke of Hohenstaufen domination, declining to acknowledge the authority of Frederick’s son and heir Conrad in around 1243. Tied up with events in Europe, the best response the emperor could muster was to install a new representative in Tripoli. From this point forward, the Jerusalemite crown shifted to the royal bloodline of Latin Cyprus, but in real terms power rested with the aristocracy.²⁶

By 1244 the fortunes of Frankish Palestine seemed rejuvenated. Large swathes of territory had been reoccupied and Jerusalem, though still only sparsely populated, was in Christian hands. It looked as though the kingdom might return to the position of relative strength and security enjoyed before the ravages of 1187. But in truth, these signs of vitality were illusory and ephemeral. The Latins were actually in a desperately vulnerable state. Having alienated the Hohenstaufen Empire, their martial potency depended almost entirely upon the Military Orders and direct aid from the West in the form of crusades–a stream of support that might well diminish. Above all, the Franks’ recent fortunes were a direct consequence of Ayyubid weakness. Should that Muslim dynasty recover or, perhaps worse still, be replaced by another force, the consequences for Outremer might be catastrophic.