Dominican Involvement in the Crusader States
Author(s): James-Francis Friedenthal
Source: New Blackfriars, Vol. 75, No. 885 (September 1994), pp. 429-437
Published by: Wiley
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43249639
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Dominican Involvement in the
Crusader States
James-Francis Friedenthal
Although the Dominican Order was not in existence when the Crusades
began, during the thirteenth century the Dominicans developed a strong
presence in the Holy Land and found themselves laying the new network
of Church administration, as they took over many of the newly created
Latin sees, and establishing links with the Greek and Oriental Churches
they encountered. Great travellers and great critics, they bequeathed to
the Church a closer understanding of what kind of religion Islam really
was, what the Eastern churches were really like, and insights into the
whole nature of the Crusades just as the Crusader States were finally
collapsing. Their findings and opinions may be found in such works as:
Burchard's " Descriptio Terrae Sanctae ; the "Itinerarium" of Riccoldo
de Monte Croce2, and the "Opus Tripartitum " of Humbert of Romans.
In 1221 St. Dominic died at Bologna, having seen his Order
approved by the Holy See and established in Provence, Paris, Spain,
Italy, Poland, Hungary and England. One of the ambitions of his life
remained unfulfilled, however: he had always wanted to go to the East to
convert the Saracens. Innocent in encouraged him instead to devote his
attention to the Albigensian heretics in the South of France and to similar
sects in Lombardy. It was left to his spiritual descendants to fulfill his
dream of evangelising the East.
The first approach of the Dominicans to the Holy Land came in 1226
when Alice of Champagne, widow of King Hugh I of Cyprus, founded
the monastery of St Dominic at Nicosia in Cyprus, later to become the
burial place of the Kings of Cyprus and Jerusalem after the loss of the
mainland. Cyprus had been taken by Richard I on the Third Crusade in
1 191 to serve as a victualling station and staging-post on the sea route of
crusaders coming from Northern and Western Europe. The following
year, 1227, Étienne de Lusignan, a younger son of the royal house,
invited the Dominicans to the Levant and gave them property and
endowments: the new province of Terra Sancta came into existence. In
1228 the Chapter General of the Dominicans lists Terra Saneia as one of
the eight provinces of the Order, and in 1230 the Chapter General in
Paris was inundated with Dominicans volunteering for a transfer to the
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new province, asking "to be sent to die land consecrated by the Saviour's
blood."3
The headquarters of the new province was at Acre where there was a
flourishing priory until the fall of the city in 1291. It has vanished
without trace but was, according to a letter of Riccoldo de Monte Cruce,
situated close to the seafront. On a map by Merino Sanuto Torselli in his
" Liber Secretorum Fidelium Crucis " c. 1310, a church with a tower
marked ' Fratres Praedicatores' is shown at the crossing of the two
streets. Along with many of the churches of Acre, a special indulgence
could be obtained there. In an almanac entitled "Pelrinages et Pardouns
de Acre " c. 1280, the reader is informed "as Freres preschours III aunz
XL jours". The second Master General of the Order, Jordan of Saxony,
came out to Acre to make his visitation, only to drown in the bay as the
ship on which he was returning to Europe went down. His body was
recovered and buried in the priory church, where his tomb became a
place of miracles so that even years after the fall of Acre the Moslems
revered it as the grave of a holy man and would allow no-one to molest
it.
At first the Dominicans were not given much scope for work in the
rather restricted Kingdom of Jerusalem; by this time Jerusalem and all of
Southern Palestine were in Saracen hands, and the Crusaders held Acre
and the Galilee. Opportunities came further north in the neighbouring
crusader state, the Principality of Antioch, where the Patriarch Albert of
Antioch became a great patron of the new mendicant orders, using
Dominicans and Franciscans more and more to replace his secular clergy
in the outposts of his scattered dioceses and appointing them to his
suffragan sees, so that by the end of the thirteenth century the majority of
the surviving Latin bishoprics in Antioch were held by Dominicans and
Franciscans.4 We hear of Peter of St. Hilarión OP being Bishop of
Latakiah c. 1260, and of Pope Urban IV in 1263 asking the Patriarch
Opizo to give William of Fréjus OP a titular see, as he is sending him out
as a missionary and episcopal rank would be of benefit to him.5
The Dominican profile in the Kingdom of Jerusalem was raised by
Thomas Agni OP of Lentino, former prior of Naples, who went out to
Acre in 1260 as legate a latere from Pope Alexander IV to mediate
between the Italian communities there. To give him some rank for the
task, he was appointed Bishop of Bethlehem, by then in partibus
infidelium but even so a significant move, as it made him the first
mendicant to hold episcopal office in the kingdom. Soon after his arrival,
the Patriarch of Jerusalem, James Pantaleon, left for Rome, leaving him
as the chief authority in Acre to fece the danger of a Mongol invasion.
Thomas rose to the occasion; he stilled all the internal squabbles and
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threatened with excommunication all Latin Christians submitting to the
Mongols or aiding them in any way, meanwhile sending an urgent plea
for military help to Charles of Anjou, brother of Louis IX. By the time
the menace of invasion subsided, Thomas had become the dominant
force in the kingdom, which he remained until James Pantaleon, by now
Pope Urban IV, recalled him in 1263. However, in 1272 he was back in
the Holy Land, having been appointed Patriarch of Jerusalem with full
legatine powers by Urban IV's successor, Clement IV. Several
Dominican appointments were made at this point: a Dominican called
Gaillard became Bishop of Bethlehem; another Dominican, Godfrey,
became Bishop of Hebron; and the Dominican Bishop of Sidon, John of
St. Maxentius, was translated to the Archbishopric of Tyre. Gaillard had
been Clement IV's penitentiary and before that lector in the priories of
Narbonne and Agen; he was typical of the talented intellectuals who now
figured on the bench of bishops. This was the highwater mark of
Dominican influence: Thomas Agni had full legatine powers not only for
Jerusalem, but also for Northern Syria, Cilicia and Cyprus; after King
Hugh left the mainland in 1276 saying it was ungovernable and retired to
Cyprus, Thomas was in sole charge of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. On his
death in 1277 Pope Nicholas III tried in vain to secure another
Dominican for the Patriarchate, even offering it to the then Master
General, John of Vercelli, who refused.6
Thomas of Agni had pursued a new policy with church
appointments, trying wherever possible to give posts to natives of the
Holy Land; hence he appointed a native-bom Dominican, Bonacursus de
Gloria to succeed the Dominican John of St Maxentius as Archbishop of
Tyre, and made many other lesser appointments. Thanks partly to this
series of Dominican episcopal appointments, the bench of bishops in
Jerusalem in the thirteenth century had a much wider range of talent than
a century before. The church in the Holy Land was no longer a
backwater.
Perhaps the most attractive figure among the Dominican
appointments to high office was the last Patriarch of Jerusalem, Nicholas
of Hanapes OP 1288-91, who was appointed by Nicholas IV, to whom
he had been penitentiary, with more extensive privileges than any of his
predecessors. He had the right to nominate clergy to all the vacant
benefices in the East, including all those which had until then devolved
upon the Holy See, so that virtually every clerical appointment in
Outremer was in his gift The Pope had also given him a fleet of galleys
for the defence of Acre, to be under his personal command, and it fell to
his lot to try to organise the last defence of the city against the Saracens
in 1291. As the city fell and the Saracens swarmed into the streets, the
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Patriarch Nicholas was hurried by his staff down to the seafront, where
frightened crowds were desperately trying to get out to the ships in every
kind of craft. Nicholas was evidently a kindhearted man and after he had
been helped into his waiting barge, would not let the crew push off but
kept yielding to the pleas of the peqple on the quay and letting more and
more jump on. Finally the barge set out, hopelessly overladen, only to
capsize before it could reach the galleys. The Patriarch perished in this
last act of generosity.*
While he was being hustled to the quayside, the Dominicans in the
priory of Acre had decided against escape. They gathered at the tomb of
Jordan of Saxony and when the Saracens broke into the church, began to
sing the 'Veni Creator', which they continued to chant as they were
hacked to death. Of the thirty Dominicans in the priory, only one escaped
to tell the tale: Fra Matteo, who took fright and ran down to the harbour,
managing to get on a boat for Italy, where he lived to old age in the
priory of San Marco in Florence.' The Saracens pillaged the priory of
Acre, and in 1292 Riccoldo de Monte Croce recoiled in horror in
Baghdad at seeing amid a pile of breviaries and plate a bloodstained
white habit, which he brought as a precious relic of the end of the
province of Terra Sancta. He wrote a hymn of praise to his dead brethren:
"Gaudete quia pro fide occisi es tis! Et eo quidem poteratis fugere,
poteratis de civitale exire, quia juxta mare erat noster conventos. Sed
voluistis in civitate remanere, ut essestis aliis ad fidei
firmamentům".10
As well as establishing a province in Outremer and contributing men
of learning and administrative ability to the crusader Church, the
Dominican Order provided a very useful resource for embassies both
political and ecumenical. Being an Order particularly devoted to study,
from the first the Dominicans had been keen to acquire languages,
especially the Biblical languages, the better to know their texts and the
better to sharpen their arguments. They had been in the forefront of the
study of Hebrew and as soon as they reached the Holy Land they began
in a similar way to learn Arabic and to try to understand Islam, with the
missionary aim of debate and conversion in view. This knowledge of the
languages of the Orient was to put them in great demand, and as often as
not, in great danger, as ambassadors. Innocent IV sent Ascelin of
Lombardy OP to Tabriz in 1247 with messages to the Mongol general
Baichu," and in 1254 had the rather quixotic idea of sending some
Dominicans to the Sultan of Iconium to explain Catholicism to him.12
Ascelin got nowhere with the general; he reported to the Pope that
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Baichu was "offensive and difficult"." Louis IX used Dominicans a great
deal for his diplomatic missions in the Middle East. In 1249 he sent two
Arabic-speaking Dominicans, Andrew of Longjumeau and his brother,
from Cyprus on a three-year mission to the Great Khan in Mongolia.
Louis seems to have placed rather too much faith in a vaguely worded
letter from two Nestorian clergy who reported the Khan's commissioner
in Mosul as saying he had a sort of fellow-feeling for the Christians. The
Dominicans set out, with a portable altar, several relics, and gifts of a
more secular nature for the Khan, but when they reached Karakorum he
was dead. His widow, bewildered by their arrival, sent them away
unheard.14 Louis IX 's main diplomatic ambition was to secure the
friendship of the Mongols; it was the balance of power he sought, of the
Franks and the Mongols making common cause against the Saracens.
Later, in 1274, the Dominican William of Tripoli wrote "De Statu
Saracenorum", a report for Gregory X in which he put forward the
opinion that there was little hope for another crusade conducted from
Europe; the Mongols were the only ones who could destroy Islam and
therefore the Mongols should be the target of conversion.15 In 1253
rumour reached Acre that the Mongol prince Sartaq had converted. Louis
found two more Dominicans, William of Rubruck and Bartholemew of
Cremona, and sent them to find Sartaq and urge him to come to the aid of
the crusaders. They found Sartaq in Syria, but he sent them on to
Karakorum, where the Khan's widow this time welcomed them. They
were eventually sent home with the message that aid would be sent to the
Christians in the Holy Land if first their rulers would come in person and
pay homage. Their journey back, recorded in Rubruck's ' Itinerarium ',
was a pleasant one, for they had been given the status of envoys of the
Great Khan, and so received great respect wherever they went." Louis IX
always kept by him on his campaigns in Outremer the Dominican Yves
le Breton, who is mentioned in Joinville as "frère Yves li Bretons, de
l'ordre des F reres Preschours qui savoit le sarrazinais". He finally
became provincial of Terra Sancta."
The Dominicans were possibly the only people at the time with any
understanding of Islam, although a century before, in 1143, a translation
of the Koran had been made by Robert de Retines at the request of Peter
the Venerable." One only has to read the 'Gesta Francorum' or the
'Chanson de Roland' to see that for the average mediaeval, a moslem
was an idolatrous pagan with a god Mahound. In such a climate of
ignorance, dialogue was impossible. The Dominicans tried to remedy
this. Already in 1236 Matthew Paris writes that Dominicans from the
East have sent Pope Gregory IX a document containing an account of the
life and death of Mohammed, and the doctrines and beliefs of the
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Saracens.1' Riccoldo de Monte Croce, a fluent Arabic-speaker, went off
on a bizarre solo preaching mission on the borders of modern Turkey and
Iran, with a Turcoman interpreter. He finally reached Baghdad, where he
began to translate the Koran, breaking off, he says, in disgust and never
finishing the work. John VI Cantacuzenes, the Byzantine Emperor who
became a monk in the fifteenth century, wrote two books against Islam,
the " Apologiae " and the " Discursa in the latter he quotes from the
translation of Riccoldo, which has since been lost20
As well as their attempts to make Islam more widely and properly
understood, the Dominicans were heavily involved in relations between
the Holy See and the Oriental Churches; the task of bringing them back
into union with Rome was confided to the Dominicans of Terra Sancta
as their special apostolato by Innocent IV. They were involved in this
field before that, however, for the document sent to Gregory IX also
contains details of a visit made to Jerusalem in 1236 by the Jacobite
Patriarch of Syria, Ignatius II. The visit had been a great success; the
Patriarch joined the Palm Sunday procession, swore an oath of allegiance
to the Holy See, abjured his errors, signing a document in Arabic and
Syriac to that effect, and asked to be allowed to wear the Dominican
habit.1' In 1244 Innocent IV sent the province some guidelines for the
way to deal with these Jacobite submissions: they may continue in
membership of their own church and thus work for unity from the inside,
if the Dominicans choose to grant such a dispensation; and it is not
necessary for them to adopt the Latin rite or to secede to a Uniate
Church.22 In 1246 Andrew of Longjumeau OP conducted negotiations
with Ignatius II and drew up plans with him for corporate reunion with
the Holy See of the whole Syrian Church. However, when the Patriarch
took the plans back to his bishops and clergy, they were unimpressed and
the scheme came to nothing. The same document of 1236 which carried
so much information from the Dominicans to Gregory IX also mentioned
the reception into the Church of a Nestorian archbishop, although it is not
clear who or where he was. Encouraged by this example, a Dominican
mission had set out for Baghdad under William of Montferrat OP and
had had an audience with the Nestorian Patriarch who apparently had
expressed a desire to be in communion with Rome.23 In the thirteenth
century the Papacy was able to ascertain, via the Dominicans, the great
differences between the Oriental Churches and the Greeks and
Armenians. The Jacobites and Nestorians were poorly instructed on
matters of faith and many of them no longer held the teachings that had
been the original cause of their schisms; with them the Dominicans
created an atmosphere of goodwill. With the well educated and
theologically sophisticated Greeks and Armenians, however, they made
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very little headway."
The Dominicans, as has already been noted, were great travellers,
setting out on journeys that even at the end of our own century are
impressive. Fortunately, many of these intrepid travellers committed their
experiences to paper. The most interesting is the travel journal of Fra
Riccoldo de Monte Croce, a Dominican originally from Santa Maria
Novella in Florence, who had been a lector in the priory of Pisa before
arriving in Acre in 1288. He soon wandered off on his own, crossing the
Saracen lines to attempt to visit all the pilgrim sites. By the end of 1288
he was in Cana, where he was moved to pray: "I pray the Christ who
changed the water into wine, to tum the water of my lukewarmness and
lack of devotion into an exquisite wine of spiritual tenderness." He
managed to get to Jerusalem itself and with some subterfuge to the Holy
Sepulchre. He returned to Acre but, luckily for him, shortly before the
siege of 1291 he set off again, preaching his way across the Taurus
mountains and along the borders of Turkey and Iran. From there he
journeyed through Mesopotamia to Baghdad, where the news and
evidence of the fall of Acre confronted him. In his distress he composed
many laments, addressing them to God, Our Lady/the Church
Triumphant, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and his dead brethren at Acre,
quoted above. He became too frightened to stay in Baghdad and moved
on to Nineveh, where further evidence of the fall of Acre awaited him; he
saw some soldiers about to tear up a copy of the 'Mor alia in Job' and an
altar missal to use the parchment for drumskins and just managed to
purchase them and rescue them. At this point the journal breaks off and it
is hard to know how, in these extremely unsealed years, he could have
travelled from Nineveh back to Florence, but he did and lived in his
home priory, serving as prior and subprior, until his death in 1320 at the
age of 77. As well as his 'Itinerarium' and his lost translation of part of
the Koran, he wrote 'Contra Errores Judaeorum' and 'Libellus contra
Nationes Orientales ' in which he gave future missionaries his golden
rules: do not use interpreters; know the Scriptures thoroughly; know the
doctrines and arguments of the different sects; always discuss with the
sect leaders (others may well convert, but they will not persevere without
their leaders' example); and, above all, be fervent and constant and
moved only by the love of God and of souls.25
Another Dominican traveller was Burchard of Mount Sion, a
German from either Magdeburg or Strasbourg, who wrote a very popular
work, * Descriptio Terrae Sanctae' which enjoyed considerable vogue in
the Middle Ages and which recounts his visit to the Holy Land in the
early 1280s. He too managed to visit most of the Christian sites in
Moslem hands but stayed longer in crusader society than Riccoldo.
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Consequently he became sharply critical of its laxity and interminable
political intrigues, as well as its supine reliance (»1 western aid.26 Mention
has already been made of the 'Itinerarium' kept by William of Rubruck,
the account of his journey to Karakorum and stately progress back, and
the report made to Pope Gregory IX by William of Tripoli OP 'De Stala
Saracenorum' . This process of feedback from Terra Sancta to the
Papacy, in the hope of injecting a certain realism into the increasingly
threadbare idealism of the crusades as they were preached and
understood at home in Europe, has as its great example the 'Opus
Tripartitum' of Humbert of Romans, fifth Master General of the Order.
This contains three sections, as its title suggests, dealing with the
Crusades; the Greek Schism; and Church Reform. It was composed as a
consultation document to be laid before the General Council of Lyons
1274. In this work, Humbert stated that he had no faith at all in the
likelihood of the Moslems ever converting to Catholicism, although he
was prepared to believe in the eventual conversion of the Jews, as this
had been promised by God. He listed and repudiated all the reasons that
men put forward as excuses for not going on crusades, and urged a new
crusade. Later he wrote a manual for the Order on how to preach the
crusade and how to meet objections: 'De Praedicatione Sanctae Crucis
The fact that preachers of this crusade must expect cynical heckling
was a sorry sign of the times, as was the reluctant admission that
conversion made no headway with Moslems. In 1291 Acre fell and the
crusader kingdom after two hundred rather precarious years of existence
came to an end. The Dominicans had only had a province in the kingdom
for sixty-five years but in that short time they had quickly assumed a
dominant role in Church affairs and distilled from their experiences in
Outremer works that enriched the Church long after the crusaders had
vanished, with their insights into Islam, the Oriental Churches, the
languages and culture of the East, and, indeed, the whole nature of
missionary activity.
1 See ail article by Aiyeh Grabois: "Christian Pilgrims in the 13C and the Latin
Kingdom of Jerusalem, in Outremer", Essays in honour of Prower 1982.
2 See three articles by R. P. Mandonnet OP: "Fra Ricoldo de Monte Croce", in Revue
Biblique 1893, II pp. 44-61; 182-202; IV pp. 384-607.
3 Quoted in an article by F. M. Abel: "Le Couvent des Frères Precheurs a Saint Jean
d'Acre", in Revue Biblique XLHI 1934. pp. 265-284.
4 Bernard Hamilton: The Latin Church in the Crusader States, p. 242.
5 ib¡d,p.235.
6 for the career of Thomas Agni, ibid. p. 269ff.
7 ibid, p. 276.
8 ibid, p. 278.
9 in F. M. Abel. q.v. supra.
10 ibid.
1 1 Steven Runciman '.History of the Crusades Vol. IH, p. 259.
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12 in F. M. Abel, q.v. supra.
13 Runciman, q.v. supra.
14 ibid. p. 260.
15 ibid, p. 340.
16 ibid, p. 280
17 in F. M. Abel, q.v. supra.
18 in R. P. Mandonnet, q.v. supra, II pp. 182-202.
19 in F. M. Abel, q.v. supra.
20 in R. P. Mandonnet, q.v. supra, IV, pp. 584-607.
21 in B. Hamilton, q.v. supra, pp. 349-50.
22 ibid, p. 352.
23 ibid, p. 356.
24 ibid, p. 358.
25 see footnote 2.
26 see footnote 1.
Reviews
ARISTOTLE'S DE ANIMA, edited by Michael Durrant, Routledge
paperback, 225 pp, £11.99.
This consists of Bks II and III (with a small introductory portion of Bk I) of
Aristotle's De Anima in a light revision of R. D. Hicks's classical
Cambridge translation of 1 907, together with major essays on Aristotle's
thinking in this area by Thomas J. Slakey, Terrell Ward Bynum, Malcolm
F. Lowe, Michael V. Wedin, Richard Sorabji and William Charlton.
My own personal edition of Hicks's translation (1907) sits upon the
shelf just above my desk as I write. An outstretched hand automatically
falls on it, rather than on the Greek New Testament, smaller and just to
its left, whenever I feel the need for a Greek example - be it for
typographical, linguistic or philosophical reasons - more or less at
random. Frequently throughout the thirty five years that I have lived in
such companionship with it this has resulted in my having replaced it
some hour or so later having been caught and fascinated once again, not
only by the genius of Aristotle, but by that of Hicks in presenting him. All
this would have no relevance to this review except in that it might
indicate the extent to which I have immersed myself in this translation of
the text, and have revered its author - it is indeed a classic as a
translation.
Michael Durrant, in this current presentation, stresses the classic
quality of Hicks's translation, and argues convincingly for its primal role in
this field, and for the value of its being once again presented; but how
437
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