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PART V The Barons’ Crusade, 1234–1245 Honorius III was succeeded in 1227 by Cardinal Hugolino, who took the papal name Gregory IX (1227–1241). Gregory had been protector of the Franciscan order, papal legate in Lombardy for the Fifth Crusade, and was a relative of Innocent III. His complex relations with Frederick II have already been noted, particularly his concerns with Frederick’s power over ecclesiastical affairs in Sicily, his fears about Frederick’s power in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, and his excommunication of Frederick in 1227. But Gregory’s powers were also limited. He could not impose his will on the Roman nobles who dominated the city, and he could not ignore the emperor who had regained Jerusalem, not when other problems emerged in the early 1230s.1 The Holy Land itself was protected for ten years by the truce that Frederick II and al-Kamil had made in 1229, but as early as 1234 Gregory had begun to call for a crusade to depart for the Holy Land in 1239. He had already released Frederick II from the ban of excommunication in 1230 and their uneasy cooperation continued for most of the decade. The autocratic assertion of Frederick’s authority in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and Cyprus and resistance to Frederick’s claims and continuing conflict among the Ayyubid rulers sharpened by the death of alKamil in 1238 characterized the situation in the East. Gregory was also concerned with the unstable fortunes of the Latin Empire of Constantinople and the failure of ecclesiastical unification of the Greek and Latin churches. Gregory even tried as early as 1236 to deflect the Holy Land crusade to Constantinople, although most crusaders rejected his urging, choosing in 1239 to go to Acre instead. The putative date for the departure of the crusaders was also repeatedly changed—Gregory IX originally planned for the crusaders to depart well before the actual date of the expiration of Frederick II’s truce with alKamil , while Frederick exhorted the participants to wait instead until August 1239, promising them imperial aid if they adhered to the later deadline. Moreover, by March 1239 the papal-imperial conflict had renewed itself. Gregory excommunicated Frederick yet again, and both pope and emperor appealed to crusaders to delay their departures. Such attitudes illustrate the variety of responses to the call for crusade that were possible in the 1230s. A group of French barons including Thibaut of Champagne, Peter of Dreux, and Amalric of Montfort had taken the cross in France in 1236. Gregory IX had attempted to finance the crusade by levying a tax of one penny per week upon every inhabitant of Western Christendom and through repeated appeals for income 1. Björn Weiler, ‘‘Gregory IX, Frederick II and the Liberation of the Holy Land, 1230–9,’’ Studies in Church History 36 (2000), 192–206. Barons’ Crusade 267 tax levied upon ecclesiastics, but many of the barons who took the cross were severely impoverished. In the end the majority of French crusaders left for the Holy Land in August 1239. Their first priority was the fortification and defense of the city of Jerusalem, which had been ceded to Frederick under the terms of his treaty with al-Kamil and was now threatened with Muslim recapture. Based initially in the port city of Acre, the crusaders also faced a difficult choice of which threat to the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem to neutralize—the sultan of Damascus or the sultan of Egypt. While marching south toward Ascalon, part of the crusader army encountered the advance forces of the sultan of Egypt and was defeated at Gaza, with the result that many influential crusaders were taken prisoner. The fate of these prisoners became a matter of later diplomatic negotiation on the part of Richard of Cornwall. Although the main crusader army managed to beat back the Egyptian forces, the army’s leaders, among them Thibaut of Champagne, decided to return to Acre. Shortly thereafter, the forces of an-Nasir Dawud of Kerak, lord of the Transjordan , captured Jerusalem. Despite this grim development, civil war within the Ayyubid political world presented a unique opportunity to the crusaders. Although Thibaut was ultimately unable to forge an alliance with the lord of Hama, who, under attack from the sultan of Damascus and the lord of Homs, offered to turn his fortresses over to the crusaders and convert to Christianity, he proved luckier when an-Nasir Dawud, lord...

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