The Sixth Crusade: The Power Of Diplomacy

In 1228, the most powerful ruler in Christendom sailed for the Holy Land under a sentence of excommunication, condemned by the very Church whose holiest city he intended to recover. Emperor Frederick II had spent thirteen years postponing his crusade, and when he finally departed, Pope Gregory IX declared him an enemy of the faith. What followed was the strangest crusade ever undertaken, a military expedition that achieved its goal without fighting a single major battle.

Frederick recovered Jerusalem through negotiation with Sultan al-Kamil of Egypt, exploiting the divisions within the Ayyubid dynasty to accomplish what the armies of kings and princes had failed to achieve through force. The treaty he signed returned the Holy City to Christian hands for the first time since Saladin's conquest forty years earlier. Yet when Frederick crowned himself king in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, no priest would bless the ceremony, and when he departed Acre weeks later, the city's butchers pelted him with garbage and offal.

The Sixth Crusade reveals a medieval world far more complex than the simple clash of civilizations that popular memory preserves. Here was a Christian emperor who kept Muslim bodyguards and debated philosophy in Arabic, a sultan who preferred diplomacy to jihad, and a pope who launched a crusade against the very man who recovered Jerusalem. The alliances and enmities that shaped this story cut across religious lines in ways that would have baffled the warriors of the First Crusade.

This book traces the full arc of Frederick's extraordinary expedition, from the disasters that made it necessary to the catastrophe that erased its achievements. Fifteen years after Frederick's treaty restored Christian rule, Khwarezmian warriors sacked Jerusalem with a savagery that shocked both Christians and Muslims, and a single battle destroyed the military power the crusader states had built over a century. The Sixth Crusade is a story of brilliant success and ultimate failure, of what diplomacy can achieve and what it cannot preserve.