CHAPTER XI

.

THE SIXTH CRUSADE.

[Sidenote: Chief features of the sixth crusade.]

The infatuation by which in every instance the champions of the cross had nullified or thrown away the advantages gained by their victories was to be shown not less persistently in the sixth crusade. But the short-sighted obstinacy of the mass was to be brought out in more prominent relief by its contrast with the moderation and sagacity of the great sovereign whose name is especially associated with this enterprise. In the career of this remarkable man we have a picture in which we see running together or side by side the lines which belong to the old order of things with others which seem to belong exclusively to the modern civilization of Europe. The struggle between Frederick II. and Gregory II. anticipated in more than one of its features the struggle between Leo X. and Luther.

[Sidenote: Depression of the Latins in Palestine.]

The famine which Dandolo urged on the leaders of the fifth crusade (p. 153) as a reason for delaying their voyage to Palestine till the spring which followed the conquest of Zara, pressed less heavily on the Latin Christians in the Holy Land than the destruction wrought by an earthquake which laid many cities in ruins and which was regarded as a presage of the last judgment. In spite of this belief much money and labour was spent in repairing the shattered walls of Acre; and amongst the captives impressed for the work was, it is said, the Persian poet Saadi.

[Sidenote: A. D. 1204. Truce between Saphadin and the Christians.]

[Sidenote: A. D. 1206.]

Both sides in fact were greatly weakened and depressed: and the tidings that Constantinople was in the hands of Boniface, Dandolo, and Baldwin carried with them for Saphadin a conclusive reason for concluding a peace of six years with the Christians. But before the six years had come to an end the death of Almeric and his wife had left to Mary, the daughter of Isabella and Conrad of Tyre, the titular sovereignty of Jerusalem. Unable to find on the spot a man of sufficient energy and ability to share with her the shadowy dignity, the barons invoked the aid of the French king, Philip Augustus, to find her a husband. His choice fell on John of Brienne, who promised to lead a powerful army to Palestine within two years. The prospect of this formidable increase to the strength of his enemies led Saphadin to propose a renewal of the peace, and to give as guarantees of his good faith any ten castles which they might choose to name. As we might expect, the approval of the Teutonic knights and the Hospitallers called forth the angry protests of the Templars and the clergy: and the decision was given for war.

[Sidenote: A. D. 1210. John of Brienne, titular king of Jerusalem.]

Three hundred knights only accompanied John of Brienne when he set out for Palestine. In England the wretched John was defying the pope while the kingdom for his sake lay under the papal interdict; the French king was more anxious to turn that interdict to his own advantage than to face once more the perils of a distant enterprise; and for the time even Innocent III. felt that the chastisement of Christian heretics was a more pressing duty than the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre. Hence the marriage of John of Brienne to Mary, and their coronation as king and queen of Jerusalem, were soon followed by the sterner business of war. In his encounters with Saphadin his exploits may have equalled those of Tancred; but he was compelled to write and tell the pope that the Latin kingdom was attenuated to the shadow of a shade.

[Sidenote: Zeal of Innocent III. in promoting a new crusade.]

His entreaties roused in the pope the old crusading spirit. Innocent revoked the indulgences which had made the crusade against the Albigenses as attractive as the crusade against the Saracens; and in his encyclical letter he declared that the Moslem power was tottering and ready to vanish away. It had lasted 666 years, the mystic number which showed it to be the Beast of the Apocalypse. A little while ago he had written to the sultan of Aleppo to thank him for his moderation to the Christians and his respect for their religion. He now demanded of Saphadin the peaceable and immediate surrender of all Palestine, as a country from which he was deriving far more of annoyance than of profit.

[Sidenote: Robert of Courcon.]

The crusade which Innocent now wished to set in motion was preached in France by Robert of Courcon, an Englishman whom he had made his legate. This pupil of Fulk of Neuilly had inherited all his earnestness with some portion of his eloquence; nor, if the numbers whom he enrolled as pilgrims be taken as a test, was his success much less splendid. But in truth the barons and knights who engaged in these expeditions were getting tired of the zeal which invited the maimed, the halt, the blind, and the leper to take the kingdom of heaven by violence; and the same charge which had been heard in the days of Fulk was now urged with greater force against his disciple. Robert was convicted of diverting to other purposes money given solely for the recovery of the Holy Land; but he had a firm friend in Innocent who, in 1218, appointed him the colleague of Pelagius, bishop of Albano, in his legatine commission.

[Sidenote: A. D. 1215. Fourth council of Lateran.]

[Sidenote: A. D. 1216.]

[Sidenote: Crusade of Andrew, king of Hungary.]

[Sidenote: A. D. 1217.]

A few months sufficed after the council of Clermont to get together and send forth the armies of the first crusade: for these latter enterprises the time of preparation was extending to years. In his sermons preached before the fourth council of Lateran Innocent declared his intention of accompanying the champions of the cross to the scene of their exploits; and the troubadours in their songs extolled him as their firm and courageous guide. But another year had passed before the king of a people who had done what they could to bar the way of the first crusaders was prepared to set forth on his eastward journey. The ships of Venice conveyed Andrew, king of Hungary, first to Cyprus, and thence to Palestine, where an unsuccessful attack on a tower or castle on Mount Thabor seems to have disgusted him with the undertaking. He determined to return to Hungary, and he reached home with scant glory, but rich in relics gathered in Armenia and Greece.

[Sidenote: A. D. 1218. Siege of Damietta.]

[Sidenote: Death of Saphadin.]

[Sidenote: Terms of peace offered by Coradin.]

In the following year another force, which had been brought together at Cologne and on its way had done some work in Portugal by taking Alcazar from the Moors, joined the Templars and Teutonic knights who had fortified a post on mount Carmel. These warriors now inclined to the policy of Almeric I. which had aimed at attacking and recovering Palestine through Egypt. The siege of Damietta was begun; the castle was soon taken; and the Christians were still further aided by the disorders which in Egypt followed the death of Saphadin, and which drove his son, the Egyptian sultan Kameel, to take refuge in Arabia. In the crusaders’ camp success, as usual, produced arrogance and sloth. Their strength was increased by the arrival of new bands from France under the counts of Nevers and la Marche, from England under William Longsword, earl of Salisbury, and from Italy under the bishop of Albano and Robert of Courcon. The latter landed only to be cut off by sickness; and while the other chiefs lay idle, Kameel was brought back to his throne by his brother the Syrian sultan Coradin. At length the siege was resumed with some vigour and good fortune: and Coradin, knowing the consequences which the fall of Damietta would bring with it, dismantled the walls of Jerusalem and then offered peace to the besiegers, pledging himself to rebuild the walls which he had just thrown down, and to surrender not only the piece of the true cross but the whole of Palestine, with the exceptions of the castles of Karac and Montreal for the purpose of protecting the pilgrims for Mecca.

[Sidenote: Mad rejection of the terms by the crusaders.]

[Sidenote: 1219. Nov. 5. Fall of Damietta.]

All that the crusaders could even hope to accomplish was thus within their grasp. But the eagerness of king John of Brienne, with the Teutonic knights and the French, to seize the prize was for the Templars and Hospitallers, with the Italians and the papal legate, a sufficient reason for rejecting the proffers of the sultan with indignant contempt. Folly carried the day. Damietta was taken, and the Christians hurried in to plunder and to slay. The pillage was abundant enough; but in the work of slaughter pestilence had been beforehand with them. Three thousand only remained, it is said, of the 70,000 who were shut up in the city at the beginning of the siege, and to these plague-stricken wretches life was promised on condition that they should clear the streets and houses of the dead bodies of their kinsfolk.

[Sidenote: A. D. 1220. March of the Christians for Cairo.]

[Sidenote: The old terms again rejected.]

[Sidenote: Ruin of the crusaders.]

The crusades had everything once more in their hands; but the winter was allowed to pass by without further action. When spring came round the legate, in opposition to the remonstrance of John of Brienne, insisted on attempting the conquest of Egypt. On their march to Cairo they received from the Sultan Kameel the same offers which they had rejected during the siege of Damietta; and they rejected them again. But the Nile was fast rising. The Egyptians opened the sluices; the camp of the crusaders was inundated; their tents and baggage swept away. It was now the turn of the legate to sue for peace, and he offered to surrender Damietta. In the Saracen camp it was no easy task for the Sultan Kameel to repress the stern indignation with which many of the chiefs demanded the utter destruction of the enemy. He urged the vast importance of doing nothing which should excite fresh crusades in Europe, while Syria was menaced and ravaged by Tartar invasions, and of recovering Damietta without a blow from a garrison strong enough to sustain a siege as long as that which had come to an end a few months ago.

[Sidenote: Frederick II., grandson of Barbarossa.]

[Sidenote: A. D. 1212.]

[Sidenote: The popes and the emperors.]

[Sidenote: A. D. 1200.]

[Sidenote: Otho of Brunswick.]

[Sidenote: A. D. 1214. Battle of Bouvines.]

[Sidenote: A. D. 1216. Honorius III. pope.]

[Sidenote: A. D. 1220.]

[Sidenote: Nov. 22.]

The triumph of the Egyptian sultan seemed to be complete; but he had now to encounter an enemy of a very different temper. At the age of eighteen Frederick, the son of the infamous Henry VI. and grandson of Frederick Barbarossa, had been summoned by the pope to assume the imperial crown which Otho of Brunswick, the son of Henry the Lion, was pronounced to have forfeited by his misdeeds. It was the old story. The strife between pope and anti-pope was but a reflection of the almost fiercer strife of rival emperors; and in this struggle the pope naturally inclined to that side from which the church was likely to reap the most advantage. Otho, the nephew of Richard Cœur de Lion, came of a house which had been generally loyal and faithful to the Roman pontiffs; his rival belonged to the Swabian house of Hohenstaufen, at whose hands the popes had experienced more of enmity than of friendship. The remembrance of the days of Frederick Barbarossa was vivid in the mind of Innocent III., to whom the two emperors appealed after their coronation. The deliberation was grave and long; but the issue was not doubtful. Otho’s rival Philip was ‘an obstinate persecutor of the Church’, and he was even then scheming to deprive the pontiff of his kingdom of Sicily. He must be put down before he could reach his full strength; and therefore the pope declared himself for Otho, himself devoted to the Church, by his mother’s side from the royal house of England, by his father from the duke of Saxony, all loyal sons of the Church. ‘Him, therefore, we proclaim king; him we summon to take on himself the imperial crown.’ Innocent, like the frogs in the fable, was only exchanging king Log for king Stork. The reign of Otho was a period of desperate strife and anarchy in Germany, of desperate struggles on his part to throw off the papal yoke. The pope turned his eye on the youthful Frederick, then basking in the sunshine of his Sicilian paradise and giving promise of the brilliant qualities of his nature which were afterwards to be sullied by darker lines of angry passion. In 1212 Frederick was chosen emperor at Frankfort. In 1214 his victory at Bouvines shattered the power of Otho. The gratitude of Frederick for the favour of the pope had been shown by taking the crusader’s vow and pledging himself to lead an army for the recovery of the Holy Land. While his rival Otho lived, it was impossible for him to fulfil his promise. Two years before his death Innocent III. had passed away from the scene of proud dominion and unceasing toil, and the more moderate and kindly Honorius III. sat in his seat. In courteous language which might pass for that of friendship, the pope besought him to march to the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre; but the dark shadows were already stealing across the clear sky. Without asking the sanction of the pope Frederick by a compact made with his vassals and prelates at the Diet of Frankfort procured the election of his son Henry to the crown of Germany. Honorius expressed his displeasure at a step which seemed designed to unite permanently the Sicilian kingdom with the empire. Frederick hastened to say that he had no such wish, and that Sicily should revert to the pope if he should die without lawful heirs. When, a little while later, he was crowned with his queen by the pope in the church of St. Peter’s, Frederick promised that part of his army should be ready for the crusade in March of the following year, while he himself would follow in August with the rest.

[Sidenote: A. D. 1221. Loss of Damietta.]

[Sidenote: A. D. 1222. April.]

[Sidenote: Treaty of Ferentino.]

[Sidenote: A. D. 1225. July. Treaty of San Germano.]

[Sidenote: Frederick, king of Naples, Sicily, and Jerusalem.]

But Frederick had enough, and more than enough, to do in dealing with the turbulent barons of Apulia and in guarding against Saracen insurrection in Sicily. A fleet of forty ships was sent to no purpose: and the tidings of the loss of Damietta were construed as an expression of divine displeasure for his slackness. It was clear that only a vast army under a skilful general could turn the scale in favour of the Latin Christians of Palestine: but nothing was said of the besotted folly which had more than once flung aside all the advantages which could possibly be gained by the most successful crusade. Such an army could not, however, be got together in a month or in a year. The decision was postponed from a meeting at Veroli to a meeting at Verona which never took place. When next the pope and emperor met at Ferentino (March 1223), it was agreed that two years more should be spent in preparations, and that Frederick, now a widower, should marry Iolante, the daughter of the titular king of Jerusalem, and thus as his heir go forth to the maintenance of his own rights. King John of Brienne, who was present at the debate, started at once on a mission in which he hoped to achieve a success not unlike that of the hermit Peter, of Bernard, or Fulk of Neuilly. But the times were changed, and king John could only report to the pope the impossibility of moving at the time named in the treaty of Ferentino. A new agreement was made at San Germano, postponing the departure of the army for two years longer. Four months later Frederick married Iolante, and proceeded at once to deprive his father-in-law of his shadowy royalty. John of Brienne, he insisted, was king only by right of his wife: by her death the title had passed to his daughter, and to him as her husband, and he, Frederick, was thus king of Naples, Sicily, and Jerusalem. John was furious, but he could revenge himself only by accusations, whether true or false, of gross and habitual profligacy on the part of the young emperor.

[Sidenote: A. D. 1227. Gregory IX. pope.]

‘Never did pope love emperor as he loved his son Frederick.’ Such were the words of Honorius when he parted from him after his coronation at Rome. Before the close of his pontificate in 1227 the gentle pontiff had to address not a few stern remonstrances to his loving son. The real struggle was reserved for the papacy of the cardinal Ugolino, a kinsman of Innocent III., who assumed the triple crown at the age of eighty years. To an eloquence unrivalled in his own day, to a profound knowledge of the canon law and the decretals, Gregory IX. united the monastic severity of Gregory the Great and the inexorable will of Gregory VII. The sovereign with whom he had to deal was still a young man of only thirty-three, a young man with whose wishes and dreams, with whose tastes and accomplishments, Gregory had nothing whatever in common. Frederick had been born and bred in Sicily; and in the voluptuous splendours of that beautiful island, in the luxury of its sunshine, in the gorgeous profusion and glory of its vegetation, his youth passed in a passion of delight, fed by the charms of music, poetry, painting, and a rich literature which laid at his feet the treasures of ancient knowledge. From the lays of the troubadour and the company of noble knights and fair women, Frederick could turn to men learned in the lore of the East and in the philosophy of Alexandria and Athens. His life was far from faultless. With more truth it may be described as one of license which cast to the winds, at least for himself, the moral code of priests and monks, but a license to which all grossness and coarse rioting, all unrefined and boorish vices, were altogether abhorrent. Here in his southern paradise Frederick could say, with a freedom horrifying to the sacerdotal spirit of the age, that if God had seen his beautiful home he would never have chosen the barren land of Judæa for the abode of his own people. Here too he was subjected to influences which were likely to cultivate a temper far more disliked and dreaded by popes and their followers than irreverence or even blasphemous profanity. Around him were gathered populations brought from many lands, all softened by the genial and delicious climate. The Norman had here laid aside some of his northern roughness, and become an apt disciple of the gay science in which Frederick had won a foremost place. Even the Germans were toned down to something like decency of demeanour and language: and in contrast to these were numbers of Jews, who surpassed the Christians as much in refinement and learning as in their wealth, and of Saracens not less polished, not less cultivated, who delighted to call themselves subjects of Frederick and to submit themselves peaceably to his rule. Frederick was, in short, learning the dangerous lessons of toleration, and his eyes were being gradually opened to the perilous views which have become the orthodox creed of modern statesmen. As a ruler, he could survey without dislike the mingling of different religions, and see that an empire surpassing the wildest dreams of feudal grandeur could be achieved by the extension and freedom of a commerce spread over all portions of the earth. As a man of learning he could promote the cultivation of a philosophy which, whatever might be its merit, could not fail to set the mind working and accustom it to regard all questions as matters to be settled by reason and evidence, not by authority. A picture more repulsive to the mind of a man like Gregory IX. cannot well be imagined. The light-hearted enjoyment and the liberal government of the one were hopelessly opposed to the monastic gloom and ingrained despotism of the other.

[Sidenote: A. D. 1227. Excommunication of the emperor.]

[Sidenote: A. D. 1228.]

[Sidenote: Departure of Frederick from Brundusium.]

Frederick may have been slow in fulfilling his promise: there is no evidence that he ever deliberately intended to break it. But he had no intention of wading through a sea of blood if he could obtain his ends without striking a blow. He had already had some friendly intercourse with the Egyptian sultan: and from these relations he was hereafter to reap good fruit. For the present they served only to excite the anger of Gregory, whose patience was exhausted when at length Frederick gathered his forces at Brundusium (Brindisi) only to see them decimated by fever, and when he himself, having set out with his fleet, was compelled to return after three days to the harbour of Otranto. On St. Michael’s day the pope excommunicated Frederick with bell, book, and candle. In his discourse to the Apulian bishops, the subjects of Frederick, he spoke of the tender care with which the Church had nursed him in his infancy and childhood in order that he might fight the serpents and basilisks whom she had unwittingly fostered in her bosom. She had borne him on her shoulders; she had rescued him from those who would have slain him; she had hoped to find in him a protecting staff and support. These hopes had been cheated. Frederick had purposely exposed his army at Brundusium to pestilence, and after pretending to set off on his voyage for Palestine had returned under a false plea of illness to the luxuries of the baths of Puteoli. On St. Martin’s day and again on Christmas day the excommunication was repeated with all its appalling ceremonies. The sentence was by the pope’s orders to lie published in all churches of his obedience. By one of the clergy of Paris, who professed to know merely the fact of the quarrel and nothing of the merits of the case, it was published as a sentence of condemnation against the one who might be in the wrong. ‘I excommunicate the aggressor, and I absolve the sufferer.’ Frederick appealed not to the pope, but to the sovereigns of Christendom. His illness had been real, the accusations of the pope wanton and cruel. ‘The Christian charity which should hold all things together is dried up at its source, in its stem, not in its branches. What had the pope done in England but stir up the barons against John, and then abandon them to death or ruin? The whole world paid tribute to his avarice. His legates were everywhere, gathering where they had not sown, and reaping where they had not strawed.’ But although he thus dealt in language as furious as that of the pope, the thought of breaking definitely with him and of casting aside his crusading vow as a worthless mockery never seems to have entered his mind. He undertook to bring his armies together again with all speed, and to set off on his expedition. His promise only brought him into fresh trouble with the pope, who in the Holy Week next following laid under interdict every place in which Frederick might happen to be. If this censure should be treated with contempt, his subjects were at once absolved from their allegiance. The emperor went on steadily with his preparations, and then went to Brundusium. He was met by papal messengers who strictly forbade him to leave Italy until he had offered satisfaction for his offences against the Church. In his turn Frederick, having sailed to Otranto, sent his own envoys to the pope to demand the removal of the interdict; and these, of course, were dismissed with contempt.

[Sidenote: Landing of Frederick at Ptolemais.]

[Sidenote: A. D. 1229. Feb. 13. Treaty between Frederick and the sultan Kameel.]

In September the emperor landed at Ptolemais; but the emissaries of the pope had preceded him, and he found himself under the ban of the clergy and shunned by their partisans. The patriarch and the masters of the military orders were to see that none served under his polluted banners. The charge was given to willing servants: but Frederick found friends in the Teutonic knights under their grand-master Herman of Salza, as well as with the body of pilgrims generally. He determined to possess himself of Joppa, and summoned all the crusaders to his aid. The Templars refused to stir, if any orders were to be issued in his name; and Frederick agreed that they should run in the name of God and Christendom. But while the enemy was aided greatly by the divisions among the Christians, the death of the Damascene sultan Moadhin was of little use to Frederick. The Egyptian sultan Kameel was now in a position of greater independence, and his eagerness for an alliance with the emperor had rapidly cooled down. Frederick on his side still resolved to try the effect of negotiation. His demands extended at first, it is said, to the complete restoration of the Latin kingdom, and ended, if we are to believe Arabian chroniclers, in almost abject supplications. At length the treaty was signed. It surrendered to the emperor the whole of Jerusalem except the Temple or mosque of Omar, the keys of which were to be retained by the Saracens; but Christians under certain conditions might be allowed to enter it for the purpose of prayer. It further restored to the Christians the towns of Jaffa, Bethlehem, and Nazareth.

[Sidenote: Frederick at Jerusalem.]

To Frederick the conclusion of this treaty was a reason for legitimate satisfaction. It enabled him to hasten back to his own dominions, where a papal army was ravaging Apulia and threatening Sicily. One task only remained for him in the East. He must pay his vows at the Holy Sepulchre. But here also the hand of the pope lay heavy upon him. Not merely Jerusalem but the Sepulchre itself passed under the interdict as he entered the gates of the city, and the infidel Moslem saw the churches closed and all worship suspended at the approach of the Christian emperor. On Sunday, in his imperial robes, and attended by a magnificent retinue, Frederick went to his coronation as king of Jerusalem in the church of the Sepulchre. Not a single ecclesiastic was there to take

## part in the ceremony. The archbishops of Capua and Palermo stood aloof,

while Frederick, taking the crown from the high altar, placed it on his head. By his orders his friend Herman of Salza read an address in which the emperor acquitted the pope for his hard judgment of him and for his excommunication, and added that a real knowledge of the facts would have led him to speak not against him, but in his favour. He confessed his desire to put to shame the false friends of Christ, his accusers and slanderers, by the restoration of peace and unity, and to humble himself before God and before his Vicar upon earth.

[Sidenote: Moderation of the emperor.]

From the Saracens he won golden opinions. The kadi silenced a muezzin who had to proclaim the hour of prayer from a minaret near the house in which the emperor lodged, because he added to his call the question, ‘How is it possible that God had for his son Jesus the son of Mary?’ Frederick marked the silence of the crier when the hour of prayer came round. On learning the cause he rebuked the kadi for neglecting on his account his duty and his religion, and warned him that if he should visit him in his kingdom he would find no such ill-judged deference. He showed no dissatisfaction, it is said, with the inscription which declared that Saladin had purified the city from those who worshipped many gods, or any displeasure when the Mahomedans in his train fell on their knees at the times for prayer. His thoughts about the Christians were shown, it was supposed, when, seeing the windows of the Holy Chapel barred to keep out the birds which might defile it, he asked, ‘You may keep out the birds; but how will you keep out the swine?’

[Sidenote: Condemnation of the treaty by Gregory IX.]

In glowing terms Frederick wrote to the sovereigns of Europe, announcing the splendid success which he had achieved rather by the pen than by the sword. He scarcely knew what a rock of offence he had raised up amongst Christian and Moslem alike. By a few words on a sheet of parchment the Christian emperor had deprived his people of the hope of getting their sins forgiven by murdering unbelievers: by the same words the Moslem sultan had prevented his subjects from ensuring an entrance to the delights of paradise by the slaughter of the Nazarenes. From Gerold, patriarch of Jerusalem, a letter went to the pope, full of virulent abuse of the emperor as a traitor, an apostate, and a robber; but even before he received this letter Gregory had condemned what he chose to consider as a monstrous attempt to reconcile Christ and Belial, and to set up Mahomed as an object of worship in the temple of God. ‘The antagonist of the cross,’ he wrote, ‘the enemy of the faith and of all chastity, the wretch doomed to hell, is lifted up for adoration, by a perverse judgment, and by an intolerable insult to the Saviour, to the lasting disgrace of the Christian name and the contempt of all the martyrs who have laid down their lives to purify the Holy Land from the defilements of the Saracens.’

[Sidenote: Return of the emperor with the crusaders to Europe.]

[Sidenote: Renewed excommunication of the emperor.]

But Frederick in his turn could be firm and unyielding. He returned from Jerusalem to Joppa, from Joppa to Ptolemais; and there learning that a proposal had been made to establish a new order of knights, he declared that no one should without his consent levy soldiers within his dominion. Summoning all the Christians within the city to the broad plain without the gates, he spoke his mind freely about the conduct of the patriarch and the Templars, with all who aided and abetted them, and insisted that all the pilgrims, having now paid their vows, should return at once to Europe. On this point he was inexorable. His archers took possession of the churches; two friars who denounced him from the pulpit were scourged through the streets; the patriarch was shut up in his palace; and the commands of the emperor were carried out. Frederick returned to Europe, to find that the pope had been stirring up Albert of Austria to rebel against him, and that the papal forces were in command of John of Brienne, who may have been the author of the false news of Frederick’s death, and who certainly proclaimed himself as the only emperor. To the pope Frederick sent his envoys, Herman of Salza at their head. They were dismissed with contempt; and their master was again placed under the greater excommunication with the Albigensians, the Poor Men of Lyons, the Arnoldists, and other heretics who in the eyes of the faithful were the worst enemies of the Christian church. Such was the reward of the man who had done more towards the re-establishment of the Latin kingdom in Palestine than had been done by the lion-hearted Richard, and who, it may fairly be said, had done it without shedding a drop of blood.

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