IF LOUIS IX had returned to France immediately, he would have done so under a dark cloak of humiliation and disgrace. His Crusade had been a total failure. The money forced from his people in heavy taxation had been wasted. There was hardly a noble family in France that did not have an honored member dead from wounds or disease, or being held a prisoner in the dungeons of Cairo. The fighting force of the Christian residents of the Holy Land, always meager, had been decimated. The military orders had lost men and money and had to call once again on their preceptories in Europe to replenish both. And the saintly king of France bore the major responsibility for all this misery.
Louis needed to raise the rest of his promised ransom money to buy the freedom of the thousands of his followers still captive in Egypt. To desert them now would be an additional disgrace too difficult to bear. He announced his intention to stay in the Holy Land and pleaded with his vassals to stay with him, but they had had enough. They had fulfilled their feudal obligations as well as their crusading vows, and most had run out of money. They had taken part in a great catastrophe, had nothing to be proud of, and just wanted to get home. Louis was reduced to negotiating payments and subsistence to those who would stay. As his army sailed away, he found himself with fewer than fifteen hundred followers.
With no great army to back him and with no legal grounds whatever, he simply asserted his total authority over the Holy Land, and none of the battle-weary local barons chose to argue with him. Louis did see one opportunity to bolster his power, and that was in the leaderless Knights of the Temple, who had not yet elected a grand master to replace the fallen William de Sonnac. Louis had in mind his friend Renaud de Vichiers. Renaud had proved his loyalty to the king when, as the Templar preceptor in France, he had made the transportation and supply arrangements with Genoa. As marshal of the order he had assisted Louis in getting the final portion of the first half of his ransom money from the Templar treasury. If Louis could get Renaud de Vichiers elected grand master of the Knights Templar, he could exercise effective control over the military order.
Louis had no problems with the electors of the Templar grand chapter. The Templars were a French-speaking order, most of their properties were in France, and their Temple in Paris was their most important base in Europe. Most of the Templars had relatives who were the subjects of the French king. It appeared to be an intelligent move to have as their grand master a friend of the monarch, with whom the new master could exert influence to the benefit of the Temple. They happily elected Renaud de Vichiers as the nineteenth grand master of the Knights Templar, never suspecting that he would bring a great humiliation down upon them, as de Vichiers would put his loyalty to Louis ahead of his loyalty to the military order he now commanded.
Jean of Joinville, the seneschal of Champagne, very early felt the benefits of the relationship between the king and the grand master. Joinville was one of those persuaded to stay in the Holy Land, in return for cash subsidies for his household. Cash kept at home was always a risk, unless there were soldiers available to guard it around the clock. The Knights Templar, with their carefully guarded vaults, provided the only safe alternative, so when Joinville received four hundred livres in gold from King Louis, he held back forty for current expenses and entrusted the balance to the Templars.
When his ready cash ran low and Joinville sought to withdraw some of his funds from the Templars, the commander of the Templar citadel at Acre told him that there was no record of funds being held in his name. Perhaps the commander remembered Joinville’s treatment of the Templars on their treasure ship at Egypt and had decided to teach him a lesson.
Joinville complained to the new grand master de Vichiers, “whom the king . . . had helped make Master of the Temple,” asking for justice for an officer of Louis of France. Four days later de Vichiers came to him with the news that the commander at Acre had been demoted and sent off to the little village of Sephouri. The new commander had orders to make Joinville’s funds available to him on demand.
The local barons watched all this with some interest, but the Templar connections of the French king were not their major concern, which was simple survival. With a good part of their fighting force in graves or in chains, it appeared that the Mameluke sultan Aibek could walk right over the Christian states whenever he wished. They wanted Louis to exert his influence to defend them from the inevitable Muslim invasion.
It appeared to be an impossible task, until word came that the Muslim empire was divided again. The Syrian city-states were still loyal to the Ayubbid line founded by Saladin. They rejected the authority of the Mameluke revolt in Cairo. In July 1250, when the prince of Aleppo, Saladin’s great-grandson an-Nasir Yusuf, was told of the murder of his cousin Turanshah, he gathered an army and occupied Damascus. Now Sultan Aibek had a much more serious problem than the meager Christian territories along the coast.
As the political maneuvering got under way, both Muslim factions sought the cooperation of the Christian knights. Louis leaned in the direction of an alliance with the sultan of Egypt, to whom he still owed two hundred thousand livres, and who was still holding his Frankish prisoners. The local barons favored an alliance with Damascus, with which they had a history of cooperation. They did not trust the Mamelukes, whose sole reason for existence was war. They watched with keen interest as a Muslim army moved out of Damascus, then across Palestine, for an invasion of Egypt. The Syrians moved across the Isthmus of Suez to the upper delta. The Mameluke army, commanded by Sultan Aibek, met them in February 1251 on a field about twelve miles from the river town of Zagazig.
The Syrians were done in by an act of treachery that had probably been planned in advance. The regiment of Mamelukes in the Syrian army understandably favored the Mameluke revolt in Egypt, but they had kept that information to themselves. Their loyalty was unquestioned until a critical moment in the heat of battle, when the Syrian Mamelukes suddenly turned on the army of Damascus. It was the shock of the betrayal as much as anything else that demoralized the Syrians, who fled the field and didn’t stop until they were back at Damascus.
Although there was no reason to expect that the treachery that lost the battle with Egypt would ever occur again, an-Nasir Yusuf wanted to strengthen his hand. Envoys were sent from Damascus to King Louis suggesting that in exchange for a military alliance, Jerusalem might be returned to the Christians. This was a proposal that could quicken Louis’s blood. If he could occupy Jerusalem, he could return to Europe as a great hero in spite of his defeat in Egypt, because the primary goal of the Crusade was the rescue of the Holy Places. What stood in the way of that accomplishment was the thousands of French prisoners in Egypt. The local barons had assured Louis that if they went to war against Sultan Aibek, all of the Christian prisoners in Egypt would be killed. Louis’s recovery of Jerusalem had to come from a treaty with Egypt, not Damascus, in order to free the prisoners.
As he kept an-Nasir Yusuf dangling with no definite answer, Louis sent an envoy to Sultan Aibek. The mission was a great success: Aibek, to show his good faith, released three thousand Christian captives. These men added greatly to the fighting force, restored to health since even on their simple prison diet they at least got enough vitamins to overcome the malnutrition that had laid them low in the delta.
Encouraged by this success and bolstered by the praise that came from all sides, Louis decided to ask for more. He sent his envoys back to Cairo, this time to demand the release of all the rest of the Christian prisoners and cancellaton of the two hundred thousand livres of ransom still due. Sultan Aibek knew that the Christians were in active negotiations with Damascus and that Jerusalem was part of the bargaining. He countered with the proposal that in the event of a decisive military victory, the Christians would have all of the former kingdom of Jerusalem, bounded to the east by the Jordan River.
In the midst of those negotiations, Grand Master de Vichiers came to Louis with a report that enraged the king. It seems that the Templars, as was their custom in recent years, had been negotiating their own affairs with an-Nasir Yusuf in Damascus. The ownership of a large tract of land was in dispute, and Templar envoys had arrived at an agreement to divide the land. Louis was stunned that any Christian would dare to treat with any Muslim ruler without his permission. He sent for Hugh de Jouy, the Templar marshal who had negotiated for the Temple, and the emir who had come to sign for an-Nasir Yusuf.
The king demanded a great ceremony of apology that would not have been tolerated by any grand master except de Vichiers, who now proved conclusively that his loyalties were to his king, not his order. The entire Christian army was invited to watch the pageant, and three sides of the king’s pavilion were raised so that all could see. The grand master and all of the Knights Templar in the area, dressed in their white monastic robes but with their feet bare, marched through the gathered ranks of Christians to kneel before the king’s throne. The king ordered the grand master and the Muslim envoy to sit on the ground at his feet.
“Master,” shouted the king, so that all could hear, “you will tell the sultan’s envoy that you regret having made any treaty with his lord without first speaking to me. You will add that since you did not consult me you must hold the sultan released from the agreement he had made with you, and hand all relevant documents back to him.” The grand master obediently took the treaty document out of his robe and handed it to the envoy, saying, “I give you back the contract that I have wrongly entered into, and express my regret for what I did.”
Then the grand master got to his knees and formally surrendered to King Louis everything that the Order of the Temple owned in the Holy Land and in Europe, so that he might help himself to all or any part of it as punishment for the order’s grievous affront to his royal authority. Louis did not take the Templar property, which he must have known the pope and the order would not permit, but did declare that Brother Hugh, the Templar marshal who had negotiated the agreement, must be banished for life from the Holy Land.
The Templars kneeling before the king must have been seething with anger toward the king and their grand master. Everything had been wrong about this humiliation. Louis had no authority whatever over the Templar order, which was responsible only to the pope. The grand master had no right to offer to surrender any property of the order. The king had no right to banish any Templar officer. If the Templars had resisted, Louis would not have been able to force them, but they were sworn to obey their grand master. His must be the responsibility for the basest act of degradation to which the order had ever been subjected, and all just to satisfy the royal ego and to assert to all the world the supreme authority of Louis of France. Templar morale was shattered.
That didn’t bother Louis, who took his army south to meet the Egyptian sultan and consummate the treaty that would make Louis a hero in Europe. Before they could join up, an-Nasir Yusuf sent an army to Gaza to keep them apart. They all sat there for almost a year, with no one anxious to start the war. Louis used the time to strengthen the defense of Jaffa, while an-Nasir Yusuf used the time to call upon the caliph of Baghdad to make peace between the Muslim factions. The caliph accepted the charge with enthusiasm. He managed to convince Sultan Aibek that he should be content to be the uncontested ruler of Egypt, with Palestine thrown in for good measure. The Jordan River would be the boundary to the east, the Sea of Galilee to the north. Beyond that would be the domain of the Syrian ruler an-Nasir Yusuf, who had agreed to the boundaries. With that treaty signed, there was no role for the Christians, and no reward. In his dejection, there was nothing for Louis to do but march from Gaza back to Acre.
An-Nasir Yusuf also went home, but he made his joyous journey a fast raid through the Christian territory. Villages fell, prisoners were taken, flocks and herds were driven before them. It was an army on horseback, so sieges didn’t fit in, but the Muslims did raid the town of Sidon, helping themselves to property and people and ignoring the garrison in the castle, who were not numerous enough to come out to do battle.
Frustrated by the resolution of the Muslim treaty, Louis was in a receptive mood when he was called upon by ambassadors of the Ismaili order of the Assassins. He had heard enough about them to be concerned, as any monarch should be when faced with thousands of fanatics whose ruler traveled with a herald in front of him holding a battle-ax bound with knives, shouting, “Turn out of the way for him who bears in his hands the death of kings!”
The envoys stated that they had come to ask why their master had not received from Louis the gift of gold that he traditionally received from kings. And if Louis did not feel inclined to pay such a tribute, their master would be satisfied if Louis would arrange that the Assassin sect could stop paying tribute to the Knights Templar and the Hospitallers, so that the military orders would not harass the members of the sect who lived on or near the lands controlled by them. They explained to Louis that although they had ample means and sufficient suicide-prone adherents to kill any enemy, it would do no good to kill a grand master. His order would simply elect another master of equal ability, and the Assassin sacrifice would have been for nothing.
Louis listened, then invited the envoys to meet with him later in the day. When they returned, they found the grand masters of the Templars and Hospitallers seated with the king. The Assassin envoys were ordered to repeat their demands, which they did reluctantly. Then they were ordered to meet on the following day with the two grand masters alone, without the king. At that meeting the grand masters pointed out that it was not the place of the Assassins to make demands for rich gifts from the French king; the proper conduct was the other way round. They should think of what rich gifts they would give, not what they would get. The grand masters emphasized that only their respect for the French monarch kept them from killing the Assassin envoys now, nor would they fear any reprisal. Much shaken, the envoys returned to their leader.
A couple of weeks later the envoys returned, bearing their ruler’s shirt and ring as evidence of the symbolic wedding of the rulers of France and of the Assassin sect. With these, they also brought caskets filled with rich gifts of carved crystal, amber, and gold. Louis responded with rich gifts of jewels and gold to the Assassin leader. No military aid resulted, but the Templars and Hospitallers continued to receive their tributes, and Louis could go about his business without fear of assassination.
Still in search of allies, Louis turned to the Mongols, about whom he knew almost nothing. When Louis was told that Sartaq Khan, a great-grandson of Genghis Khan, had become a Christian, he sent two Dominican preachers to suggest a Christian alliance with the young khan. Sartaq had no authority to effect such an important agreement. Besides, he was not really familiar with the concept of an “alliance.” Rulers submitted to the Mongols, paid annual tribute, then governed their people as Mongol vassals, or they did not submit and were killed. It was really quite simple. The message the good friars brought back to Louis was along those lines: Submit, and send a yearly tribute. Otherwise, Louis would be destroyed, as so many kings had been before him.
Before Louis could make any further effort to find friends and allies, a report from France told him that his mother had died. She was a strong woman and had looked after Louis’s interests in his absence. Her death had been the signal for the king of England to renew his encroachments into French lands, and Louis’s own vassals were beginning to assert independence, since their king had been away for almost five years. Louis had no choice if he was to protect his kingdom. He sailed away from the Holy Land, leaving just a token military force behind.
Before leaving, Louis had committed to a two-and-a-half-year treaty with Damascus and a ten-year treaty with Egypt, but the treaties were observed only for purposes of diplomacy. Raids and counter-raids began almost immediately. As the year 1256 opened, Christians plundered a great Muslim caravan. A few weeks later, the governor of Jerusalem led a raid of vengeance on Christian territory and was killed in a decisive Christian victory. Still the actions did not provoke total war, which neither side wanted.
The real problems of the Holy Land were internal. Emperor Frederick’s son, King Conrad of Jerusalem who never laid eyes on his kingdom, had died in May of 1254. The legitimate heir to the throne of Jerusalem was his infant son Conradin. Ignoring the rights of the baby-king off in Italy, Louis had named Geoffrey of Sargina as seneschal of the kingdom of Jerusalem, and Count John of Jaffa was recognized by the local lords as bailli. In 1253 King Hugh of Cyprus died, leaving the crown to his son, Hugh II, who was less than a year old. The baby’s mother, Queen Plaisance, claimed the regency of both Cyprus and Jerusalem, but the barons of the kingdom of Jerusalem rejected her claim. Now each of the two Christian kingdoms was ruled by a baby, with no strong central authority exercised on his behalf.
Such authority would have been useful in putting an early end to a senseless squabble in Acre that exploded into open warfare. The walls of Acre embraced many acres of land, including the sections assigned to the merchant states of Venice and Genoa, which were separated by a hill. On top of that hill sat the ancient and peaceful monastery of San Sabas. Both the Genoese and the Venetians claimed ownership of the monastery, apparently without regard for the opinions of the resident monks. The arguments grew increasingly more heated and bitter, as both sides retained lawyers to prepare cases to set before the Commune of Acre.
Confucius had stated that the man who strikes the first blow shows that he has run out of ideas, and that is what may have happened to the men of Genoa. At dawn on a day in the late winter of 1256, an armed party of Genoese crept up the hill and occupied the monastery. After some light resistance, the Venetians inside the monastery were driven back down the other side of the hill into their own quarter. The Genoese found no Venetian force there strong enough to stop them, and the hilltop raid turned into a brief battle that then gave way to a frenzy of looting. An argument over a small piece of Church real estate—which was not a source of profit or protection for either side—had turned into a forced seizure, then into a battle, which in turn degenerated into the plundering and killing of civilians and the seizure of ships, and so to an open act of war between Genoa and Venice, all in the course of a single morning. As soon as the Genoese retired, one of the remaining Venetian galleys was dispatched to Venice to inform the doge and the Grand Council.
The local barons should have stepped in speedily to restore peace, but some saw instead an opportunity to achieve personal profit from the situation. Philip, the lord of Tyre, seized his chance and pushed the Venetian traders out of the one-third of the city of Tyre that legally belonged to them. He took it for himself, seeking cover behind an alliance with Genoa.
While this new internal struggle threatened to shatter the Holy Land, the Knights Templar met in grand chapter to elect a new grand master. There is no record whatever as to what had happened to Grand Master de Vichiers, who had led the Templars to such humiliation at the feet of his friend, King Louis IX. He may simply have died in office, or he may have resigned and gone home with the king of Frence, or he may possibly have been impeached by his angry brothers-in-arms. We know only that early in 1256 the Templars elected Thomas Berard their twentieth grand master. Had de Vichiers still been in command of the Templar order, he undoubtedly would have asked Louis of France to tell him how the order should react to the Genoese aggression. With de Vichiers gone, the new English grand master wouldn’t care what King Louis wanted, one way or the other—a strong reason for his election.
Now, as the resident Crusaders and merchants took sides in a conflict that looked ugly enough to break out beyond the two Italian city-states into full-scale civil war, the Knights Templar did not hesitate to side with their ancient Venetian allies. The Hospitallers, to no one’s surprise, chose to support the Genoese. Henry of Jebail sent troops to aid the men of Genoa, so his suzerain and rival, Bohemond VI of Antioch and Tripoli, responded by sending troops to fight for Venice.
Nor were the Venetians looking solely to allies to fight their battle. Always quick to defend their commercial interests, the Grand Council of Venice had responded to the news of the struggle by dispatching every available war galley, each with a complement of fighting men. The Genoese had taken the harbor at Acre and had stretched a chain across to keep out rival ships. When the Venetian fleet arrived, the experienced seamen rammed and broke the chain. The galleys landed their troops, who pushed back the men of Genoa in brutal hand-to-hand street fighting, until the harbor area was clear and the Venetians had occupied the hilltop monastery of San Sabas, where the fighting had started.
The ancient monastic buildings of San Sabas had never been a military objective. They were simply the fuse that set off the explosion of greedy commercial rivalries that had been growing to the point where almost any conflict would have been taken as justification for open war. The fighting went on, with no king and no local noble strong enough to stop it.
In 1258 Queen Plaisance saw the internal conflicts as an opportunity to assert the claims of her son King Hugh II of Cyprus, now five years old, who was next in line for the throne of Jerusalem after the German Conradin. She took her son to Antioch to get the support of her brother, Prince Bohemond. Backing that support with a military escort, Bohemond took her to Acre, where he called for a meeting of the High Court of Jerusalem. He asked that the assembly acknowledge that King Hugh II should have all of the royal power in Conradin’s absence, and that the child’s mother, Queen Plaisance, should serve as regent.
The majority of the nobles of the High Court agreed, subject to the rights of Conradin, should he ever make an appearance. The Knights Templar, probably influenced by the pope’s hatred of the Hohenstauffen dynasty, of which Conradin was a member, gave their full support to the decision. The Knights of the Hospital were quick to assert their objections, stating that they would recognize only Conradin as king. Venice agreed with the High Court. Genoa naturally disagreed. The High Court prevailed, at least legally, and the establishment of a central authority should have put an end to the conflict. Instead, that authority merely furnished more fuel for the fires of civil war.
In that same year of 1258, Conradin had been deprived of the Sicilian crown by his uncle Manfred, an illegitimate son of Emperor Frederick II. That loss did not alter the child’s claim to the throne of Jerusalem, but it had stripped his Sicilian supporters of a military power base from which to operate. It was unlikely that the six-year-old king could make any strong move to occupy the throne of Jerusalem for many years to come, if ever.
Genoa sent a fleet to the Holy Land in an attempt to end the civil war with a decisive Genoese victory. All of the Genoese ships in the Middle East were assembled to join the new fleet at Tyre, for a total of forty-eight Genoese galleys. They easily outnumbered the thirty-eight galleys of Venice and Pisa that lay off Acre.
It was to be a combined land and sea attack, with the land forces moving down the coast to Acre under the Genoese ally Philip of Montfort, lord of Tyre. The land forces of Acre, together with all of the Knights Templar that Grand Master Berard could pull in from nearby Templar castles, prepared to march north to intercept Philip of Montfort before he could approach the walls of Acre.
The Venetians were outnumbered, but they were not out-fought. They had generations of experience to draw upon in the approaching battle with their traditional enemies. Cannon were far in the future, so galley warfare usually led to direct contact. Apart, but close enough, the ships could attack each other with flights of arrows or try to hit each other with stones and pots of fire, not easily aimed when both target and artillery base were moving in a choppy sea. More certain victory came from hand-to-hand combat on bloody decks or from a successful ramming.
Fixed to the bow of every galley was a metal-capped battering ram at the waterline, designed to smash a hole in the enemy ship too large to be plugged up in time to keep the sea from rushing in. Sometimes the ram locked the two ships together, and then the sailors and marines of the sinking ship would try to save their lives by climbing or jumping over the side onto the deck of the ramming ship, to take it in hand-to-hand battle. The galley slaves in a successful ram were doomed. Compassion might suggest that as their ship began to sink they should be relieved of the chains that kept them fastened to their benches, but practical wisdom had to consider that, once free, their built-up muscles might combine with their pent-up anger in an attack on their captors. They usually went to the bottom with the ship.
The rowers, of course, were vital to success at sea. Victory with galleys went to the masters of maneuver, and in battle the galley slaves were the sole means of propulsion. They might be called upon to effect a sudden turn or put on an extra burst of speed. It was agonizing work, and the miserable men at the oars could become so completely exhausted that even the brutal whips laid on their bare backs could coax no more energy from them. The Venetians had the advantage because they had preserved that energy. By the time the Genoese arrived to give battle, their rowers had been straining their muscles for hours, while the Venetians had sat waiting for them.
Naval battles usually had high casualty rates, and the great clash off Acre was no exception. The Genoese lost twenty-four of their forty-eight ships and almost two thousand men. The casualties on land were lighter, but the victory was just as decisive. The Knights Templar and the forces of Acre completely routed the army of Philip of Montfort, who beat a fast retreat back to Tyre. Now the division became geographical as well as political. The Genoese fled Acre and made their base at Tyre, while all the Venetians who had been in Tyre joined their countrymen at Acre.
The papal peacemaker arrived early in the summer of 1260. He was the newly appointed patriarch of Jerusalem, James Pantaleon, who had no way of knowing that he would soon be selected to reign over the Church from the Throne of Peter. He listened to the accounts of the Mongol incursions into nearby lands and of the creation of a military Mameluke sultanate in Egypt. He listened to the background of the Christian civil war that he had walked into, and although he favored the Venetians and the Knights Templar, he could see that the very survival of the Crusader states depended upon all of the Roman Christians working in common cause.
He worked every day to bring them together, and his efforts led to a peace-seeking assembly of the High Court of Jerusalem in January of 1261. The meeting was attended by its regular members, the local barons, but was extended to also include representatives of the warring Italian states and the grand masters of the Knights Templar and the Hospitallers. The court confirmed that the Genoese would have their trading base at Tyre, while the Venetians and Pisans would operate from Acre. The local barons agreed to live and work together. The Knights Templar and the Hospitallers went through the motions of agreeing that their differences were now laid to rest. The Italians kept their word as it applied to conflict on land, but the rivalry and hate were still there, as evidenced by their incessant attacks on each other at sea.
In spite of the conflict, Venice definitely had the upper hand in the eastern trade, which flowed through three important channels. In the first channel, goods traveled by ships from the Indies up into the Arabian (Persian) Gulf, then overland to the Mediterranean. This was the trade that came to Acre, Tyre, and the other ports of the Palestine-Lebanese coast, largely through the merchants of Damascus. In the second route, ships came up through the Red Sea to the Isthmus of Suez, joining the flow of trade from central and eastern Africa. The Venetians were there, too, because they willingly supplied the Egyptians with important military and naval stores such as long, straight timbers and ingots of iron. The third trade route, the overland road from Central Asia, India, and even China, was growing fast. The Mongol leaders encouraged it, and they provided absolute safety to those caravans that dutifully paid their proper tolls and taxes. As a result of their role in the Fourth Crusade, the Venetians held a large quarter in Constantinople, the major terminus for the overland trade, and they held trading privileges throughout what had been the Byzantine empire.
The Genoese, who saw huge profits going to their rivals, matched their frustration with determination to come up with a plan. The success of the plan would be a great blow to Roman Catholic Christianity in the Middle East, but it would bring a golden flow of profits to Genoa, and that, to an Italian merchant, was what life was all about.
The plan was simple: Do what Venice had done for the Latin Christians, but do it for the Greeks. The original Byzantine empire as conquered by the Crusaders was being chipped away in successful wars of independence by the Serbs and Bulgarians. The Seljuk Turks grabbed off pieces of Anatolia wherever they could, but the displaced Greek royal family still held on to an independent state around Nicaea under its emperor, Michael Paleologus. Michael had had some success at recovering bits of his lost empire, but he simply did not have the naval force necessary to retake Constantinople. This was the basis of the Genoese plan.
Genoa’s proposal was very welcome to Emperor Michael, and in March of 1261 he signed an agreement of alliance that would give the Genoese a clear position of trading supremacy in exchange for their naval support of an attack to retake the greatest city in the Middle East. Four months later the triumphant Greek army entered Constantinople to a background of cheers from the happy citizens who lined the streets. The Genoese replaced the Venetians, the Greek Orthodox Church replaced the Roman Catholic, and the flow of landless Latin knights from Outremer to Byzantium was now reversed. Unfortunately for them, the shrunken Holy Land had no lands to give them.
Later that same year Patriarch Pantaleon received delegates from Rome who informed him that he had been elected to rule the Roman Church. He took the papal name Urban IV, and although he was intensely aware of the need for a new Crusade in the face of the twin threats of Mongol and Mameluke, he had to look first to the priorities of his Church. He had been urged by the local barons and his friends in the Templar order to use his new power to call that Crusade, but for now the papacy had need of a Crusade of its own.
The Genoese had helped to change the rule of Byzantium, and now the Church wanted to change the rule of Sicily and Naples. There was a new ruler in Persia, and soon a new ruler would come to power in Egypt. The Holy Land would struggle to survive the impact of all these changing sovereignties, most of which they understood, but to have a good grasp of the political and military upheavals that would soon burst forth, we need to take a brief diversion to understand the newest player, the Scourge of God who had come west out of Mongolia.