Prophecy in the Polemical, Exegetical and Homiletic Traditions

To understand Latin Christian authors’ perceptions of prophecy, we must therefore explore the ways in which Latin theologians interpreted the classical prophecies, sacred texts, and prognostications they shared and debated with Jewish, eastern Christian, and Muslim authors. However, despite a renewed interest in eschatology and apocalypticism, relatively few researchers have investigated how exegetical commentary and homiletic traditions shaped how ecclesiastics responsible for preaching the later crusades identified, validated, negotiated, and interpreted prophetic signs and prophecies.Footnote ¹³ If much of Latin Christian polemic directed towards Jews, Muslims, eastern Christians, heretics, and pagans (and towards other Christians to define Latin Christianity and prevent apostasy) accused various groups of misinterpreting or abusing claims to prophecy (as in the case of anti-Jewish polemic and the Messianic prophecies of the Old Testament and those of Caiaphas in the New Testament) or believing in “false” prophets (such as, in the eyes of Latin Christian polemicists, heretics, Muhammad, and Antichrist), why did Latin Christian authors routinely attribute prophecies to non-Christian authors? Was it to make such prophecies more credible by attributing the “truth” (albeit potentially veiled in ambiguous rhetoric or signs) to putatively hostile or ambivalent witnesses forced to acknowledge the superiority and triumph of Christianity? In an era where knowledge of and contact with other religions was increasing, did these “hostile” witnesses serve the same function for Latin authors as highly publicized converts from other religions (such as Jacques de Vitry's baptised Muslim children, which he hailed as firstfruits of a projected harvest, or the Jewish and Muslim converts of Louis IX resettled in Paris and northern France), that is, reaffirmation that Latin Christianity was, in fact, not only the defining culture of western Christendom but destined to spread throughout the entire orbis terrarum? Or, as Uri Shachar has argued, did shared “discursive strategies” and “interdependent literary conventions” mean that prophecies and eschatologies, like “militant piety,” enabled Jewish, Christian, and Muslim authors to define and negotiate “cultural boundaries and hermeneutical codependencies” while staking claim to contested holy spaces?Footnote ¹⁴

Similarly, Christian polemicists grudgingly admitted or even praised the fact that heretical, Jewish, and Muslim opponents acknowledged certain collective truths derived from shared religious texts or arguments based on reason or the natural world. But there was the problem, too, of prophecy being accompanied by or manifested in potentially ambiguous signs and miracles. If all the world were a book, to be glossed and interpreted as evidence of God's nature and divine providence, how could one correctly interpret whether historical, wondrous, unusual, or even supernatural events confirmed a particular prophecy (or doctrine)? In the case of Muhammad, Christian polemicists directly assaulted Muhammad's status as a prophet and the signs and miracles attributed to him, stressing that his message (supposedly dictated by a Jew and heretical apostate Christian) was incompatible with the true Christian tradition and that Muhammad could not truly either foretell or prevent future events, including his own injuries in battle and death.Footnote ¹⁵ And yet, as many Latin Christians who preached the crusades noted, in the scriptures there were cases of unwilling, hostile, or “false” prophets such as Caiaphas and Balaam forced, nevertheless, to reveal the divine will. As a pagan, Balaam represented another category of prophets: those who were neither Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. To this category could be added the Magi, described as astronomers or wise men persuaded by astrological signs that Christ was the Messiah, and the magicians or “doctors” of Egypt who engaged in combat with Moses and Aaron before the Pharaoh with apparent signs and miracles. These cases, discussed in the schools and preached in sermons, provided models which Latin Christian scholars used to debate and assess the veracity of prophecies and signs.Footnote ¹⁶

In some of these cases, prophecies from an outside, potentially hostile source were deemed as verifying, via external witnesses, the doctrines and eventual dominance of a particular religious tradition. In this sense, prophecy acted as the reverse of the emphasis on eye-witness testimony (even if it were fictional or reconstructed) in chronicles as “proof” that the events described had really happened; if memory was forged in crusade narratives as a form of communal consensus (a process certainly at work in surviving narratives of the Fifth Crusade), it was also forged in debate with other collectives in the form of eastern Christian, Jewish, and/or Muslim communities.Footnote ¹⁷ Both retrospective narrative and anticipatory eschatological or apocalyptic prophecy were capable not only of fashioning or reinforcing communal identities (in Latin Christendom or in crusading armies), but also of crossing cultural lines even while subtly reinforcing them, a process particularly important when cultures encountered perhaps formerly imagined “others” on a regular and sustained basis and hopes for conversion and fears of apostasy abounded. If sermons and polemical literature (re)shaped communities’ religious identities through the construction of hermeneutical “others,” yet, through reliance on shared texts, stories, and rhetorical techniques, could serve as a lingua franca that crossed cultures, the same also proved true for prophecies, visions, signs and wonders, and the Aristotelian libri naturales (with their Arabic commentaries).Footnote ¹⁸ Visions and prophecies were routinely ascribed to hostile parties (such as Kerbogha's mother in chronicles of the First Crusade), who, like Balaam and Caiaphas, were forced to bear witness to the very present or eventual apocalyptic triumph of Christianity through violence and/or conversion.Footnote ¹⁹ The process became increasingly complicated in the case of prophecies meant to be verified by specific astrological or natural phenomena (comets, eclipses, and earthquakes). As the “Toledan” prophecy proved, signs could be observed and shared and discussed between cultures. If the world were another revelatory book to be read, Latin Christian polemicists hoped that those who rejected textual evidence of Christianity's tenets might be persuaded to accept Christian doctrines based on proofs furnished by reason and/or observation of natural and supernatural phenomena, although the danger of mistaken interpretation was still real. Such were the aspirations expressed by Jacques de Vitry and Oliver of Paderborn for the conversion of the doctores of Egypt and of al-Malik al-Kāmil during the crusades of Frederick II.Footnote ²⁰

However, there were also supernatural signs and wonders (interpreted by all three monotheistic religions through the lenses of sacred texts, the Greco-Roman astrological corpus, and scientific observation) and prophecies from the Greek and Roman worlds, including Sibylline prophecies traditionally interpreted as foretelling the birth of Christ or other tenets of Hellenized Judaism or early Christianity. From late antiquity onwards, an apocalyptic prophecy ascribed to the Tiburtine Sibyl, repeatedly revised and often merged with the Syriac Pseudo-Methodius legend, foretold the advent of a last emperor figure who would defeat and/or convert non-Christians and usher in an era of peace before surrendering his crown to God in Jerusalem prior to the advent of Antichrist. These prophecies became so widely known that they commonly appeared in sermons and exegesis on the end of the world and crusading kings often attempted to associate themselves with the last emperor figure.Footnote ²¹ For example, one anonymous sermon probably preached about the time of the Third Crusade was preserved in a miscellany of homilies described as delivered to popular audiences (ad populum) in Paris, including several sermons by Stephen Langton which contain crusading themes. Langton's sermons are accompanied by the anonymous sermon “On the Antichrist,” that detailed the events of the end times and observed that the apostle Paul foretold that the Antichrist would not come until every kingdom once subject to the Roman empire had broken away. The preacher noted that this seems to have not yet occurred because while the Roman empire seems largely destroyed, as long as the kings of the Franks endure the imperial dignity will not perish entirely. However, “some of our doctors” say that one of the kings of the Franks will hold the Roman empire in full and will become the greatest and last king of the end times. He will travel to Jerusalem and lay down his scepter and crown. This will be the end and consummation of the Christians and the Roman empire before the advent of the Antichrist, who will deceive many through false signs and miracles.Footnote ²² The preacher has deliberately attached the Tiburtine Sybilline and Pseudo-Methodian prophecies to the biblical eschatology of the Apocalypse and hopes for Capetian glory within the context of the Third Crusade. Such sermons ought to remind us that prophecies were not confined to intellectual or courtly circles, but were forged and modified in discourse with other groups, including lay populaces and competing religions. To take one example, the Sunday on which the gospel verse “Beware false prophets” (Matthew 7:15) was traditionally read fell eight Sundays after the octave of Pentecost, enabling preachers to contrast the divine inspiration of the apostles charged with spreading the gospel around the globe to the dangers of pious-seeming yet lethal heretics (a category often enlarged to include Jews, schismatic Greeks, and Muslims). Sermons therefore provide historians with glimpses into teachings about the validity and dangers of prophecy that were shared with the general public.Footnote ²³

Prophecy and the Liturgical Year

In addition to “Beware false prophets” Sunday, there were also other set loci, within the western Christian liturgical calendar, for the discussion of the discernment of signs and spirits. One traditional locus for the treatment of the end times was the second Sunday in Advent, when the liturgy, texts, and preachers expounded the signs foretelling Christ's first and second (apocalyptic) advents. Luke 21 was the gospel of the day and spoke of false prophets; wars and rumors of wars; peoples rising against peoples; earthquakes, pestilence, famine, and heavenly signs; and Christ's prophecy of the desolation of Jerusalem, which would be downtrodden by the peoples until the timespan of the nations was fulfilled with the second coming. This passage provided the perfect context for treatment of prophecy and the crusade, and Caesarius of Heisterbach (whose abbot Henry was commissioned to promote Frederick's crusades) used it for precisely that purpose in the 1220s.Footnote ²⁴ Innocent III utilized the same liturgical occasion to tie the first advent of Christ to his expected second coming, stressing, as he did in his sermons to the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), that there could be no peace in the physical Jerusalem until the spiritual Jerusalem of the church and the Jerusalem of individual souls were renewed through conversion from sin and recourse to the sacraments.Footnote ²⁵

In a sermon collection for the liturgical year probably compiled during his cardinalate (1229–1240) from earlier drafts, Jacques de Vitry similarly exploited the second Sunday in Advent to compare and contrast Christ's salvific first advent with his second advent as judge. He also treated themes including Christ coming to save the peoples (gentes), the spiritual Jerusalem versus the spiritual Babylon, and the validation of prophecies. Jacques cited the examples of Balaam and the Sybilline prophecies of Christ's birth to argue that pagans could prophesy the truth, and he claimed that prophetic sayings could be believed more firmly when those things which they foretold were in fact fulfilled.Footnote ²⁶ His final sermon for the date invoked Luke 21 and Matthew 24, interpreting the signs in the sun, moon and stars, peoples versus peoples, and so on, as the corruption of the orders of secular clergy and dissensions and wars everywhere: overseas with the “Saracens,” in Spain with the “Moors,” in Greece against the schismatics, in Provence against heretics, and in France and the empire with internal upheavals. The rest of the signs mentioned (earthquakes, pestilence, famine) were interpreted in spiritual terms as a call for institutional and personal conversion. Jacques severely criticized detractors, heretics, and spiritual reprobates of all stripes (including whores, usurers, and hypocrites) who recrucified the members of Christ and tried to dissuade others from going to Jerusalem (presumably both literally and spiritually).Footnote ²⁷ His criticisms were echoed in the sermons of Caesarius of Heisterbach, the histories of Jacques’ colleague, Oliver of Paderborn, and in contemporary anonymous crusade appeals preserved in BnF, nouv. acq. lat. 999 and BnF, Latin 14470, suggesting that these images and arguments were widespread among Paris-trained individuals preaching the crusade and their Cistercian and Victorine collaborators.Footnote ²⁸

The World as Book and the Toledan Astrological Prophecy

This interest in prophecy among Jacques’ generation had been spawned partly by the events of their youth, including signs and prophecies (the Toledan prophecy among them) retroactively interpreted as foretelling the loss of the True Cross and Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187. These events sparked mass calls for repentance, intercessory liturgies, intense soul-searching, and a crusade recruitment drive spearheaded by Paris masters and Cistercians: Henry of Albano, Garnier of Rochefort, Alan of Lille, Gerald of Wales, Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury, and Peter of Blois among them.Footnote ²⁹ Recruitment was encouraged by reports in Philip Augustus’ court in Paris, brought back by a messenger sent to Constantinople and embedded in a brief on the current diplomatic and political situation in Outremer, of a Greek prophet (David or Daniel) predicting that in the year that the Annunciation fell on Easter/Passover (1190), the Franks would reconquer the Holy Land, stable their horses in Baghdad (Baldach), and pitch their tents “beyond the dry tree.” This encouraging message was accompanied by accounts of further prophecies and astrological prognostications of Greeks and “Turks” that within three years (1191) one third of the “Turks” would perish by the sword, another third would flee beyond the dry tree, and another third would convert (and that the Latins would take Constantinople). While accompanying diplomatic reports accused the Greeks of deceptively bargaining with Saladin for sole access to sacred spaces in the Holy Land, the Armenians were portrayed as ready to ally with crusader forces.Footnote ³⁰ The complicated interpretation of the Toledan prophecy was therefore conditioned by real communication networks that spanned eastern and western courts and by an awareness that multiple interfaith negotiations and pan-Christian alliances would be necessary for the success of any crusade. These political and religious expectations were mediated partly through elements (such as the dry tree) derived from the Sybilline and Pseudo-Methodian prophetic traditions shared and endlessly reinterpreted by Latin and eastern Christian, Jewish, and Muslim scholars and courts in order to lay claim to the possession of sacred spaces, particularly Jerusalem.Footnote ³¹

Those promoting the Third Crusade were also part of the generation witnessing the profound impact of translations, from the Greek or Arabic, of philosophical, religious, and scientific texts (such as the Algamest) circulating in the Mediterranean and elsewhere, including multicultural communities and courts such as those in Paris, London, southern Italy, Sicily, and the Iberian peninsula (particularly Toledo and Cordoba).Footnote ³² From the viewpoint of Christian theologians and polemicists, the potential posed by arguments from reason and these new texts (including the Aristotelian libri naturales) for enabling a potential common intellectual ground between groups otherwise divided by their divergent readings of shared sacred texts was immense. Observation of the “book” of the natural world was another potential point of exchange. The spread of eschatological prognostications of doom attached (from Jewish, Muslim, and Christian traditions) to a predicted conjunction of planets in 1186 (known commonly as the Toledan prophecy) was world-wide, testified by chroniclers working in Byzantium (Niketas Choniates), the domains of the Ayyubids, Persia and Mesopotamia, the Iberian peninsula (Abraham bar Ḥijja) and eastern Christian communities (Michael the Syrian, Gregory Bar ‘Ebrōyō), and demonstrates contemporary long-distance communication and exchanges between intellectual and religious communities in Europe, the Mediterranean, and Asia.Footnote ³³

When the vast destructive “storm” and triumph of Christianity foretold by the Toledan prophecy failed to materialize, Christian interpreters were faced with a dilemma. The astrological components of the prophecy were indisputably based on observations conducted by astronomers around the world. The interpretation of what those astronomical observations meant, however, had been cast into doubt, precisely because while all three monotheistic religions shared some eschatological assumptions, the particulars were deliberately adapted to speak to the needs and hopes of specific audiences. For example, Jewish communities in Yemen and the Iberian Peninsula, under pressure to convert, linked the predicted conjunction to Messianic expectations (which Maimonides was quick to quash). On the other hand, some Christian accounts, writing with the luxury of retrospect, relocated the predicted day of the disastrous planetary conjunction to September 14, a date traditionally associated with the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, perhaps hoping that the foretold destruction would avenge the loss of Jerusalem and the True Cross in 1187.Footnote ³⁴ The list of eastern cities which were to be destroyed by a destructive wind spawned by the conjunction may also have been of Jewish origin, but western Christian authors extended the list's geographic reach to “Babylon,” Ethiopia and Egypt, and added to the eschatological “wind” the annihilation of Islam and triumph of Christianity familiar from western Christian interpretations of the Sibylline and Pseudo-Methodian traditions.Footnote ³⁵

Latin Christian chroniclers from courtly, monastic, and scholastic circles were quick to attribute the prophecy to philosophers, astronomers, or learned men from competing religions (Judaism, Greek Christianity, Islam) and/or regions known for their astrological expertise and intercultural exchange (Toledo, Cordoba, Egypt, Mosul, Iconium, Constantinople, Apulia, and England).Footnote ³⁶ However, as the additional astronomical accounts and corrective religious revelations added by western and eastern religious chroniclers illustrate, eastern Christian, Jewish, and Latin Christian scholars all criticized these exoticized learned men for faulty or lying predictions when the forecast disasters failed to materialize (this was, after all, the litmus test for prophecy). What had seemed attractive as confirmatory evidence of a culture's eschatological traditions via the testimony of external or hostile witnesses was in fact both misled and misguided; the astronomers were not Balaam or Magi, but false prophets.Footnote ³⁷ The problem, according to Latin Christian polemicists, was that Jewish, Muslim, and heretical opponents (and Christian astronomers who privileged philosophy or observation over biblical exegesis) were capable of misinterpreting both sacred texts and the book of nature. This tension emerged also with eastern Christian, Muslim, and Jewish religious authorities, who mocked astronomers for misreading heavenly signs as indications of events which did not occur; the astronomers leapt to their own scientific conclusions, falling prey to a fatalistic outlook that horoscopes and planets determined human actions, rather than praying for divine guidance or consulting trained theologians who knew that divine will manifested itself in signs and nature but was not controlled by these signs. Divine anger manifested in a hostile and destructive planetary conjunction could be averted by appropriate penitential responses; God was ultimately in charge of nature, not vice versa.Footnote ³⁸

Several Latin Christian writers with access to excellent sources of information from the Capetian and Angevin courts reported this astrological prophecy, including Roger of Howden, Gerald of Wales, and Rigord. Perhaps closest to Paris, Rigord claimed that astrologers from both the East and the West, Jews, “Saracens,” and Christians, sent letters throughout the world, predicting that in September of 1186 (582 AH), a conjunction of planets would cause an eclipse, earthquakes, and a strong and destructive wind which would completely destroy Mecca, Balsara, Baldach, and Babylon, lay waste Ethiopia and Egypt, and spread further eastwards. Meanwhile in the West, rebellions and bloodshed would mark the changing of kingdoms, the strengthening of the Franks, doubts and ignorance among the Jews, the destruction of “Saracens,” and exaltation of Christianity. It was perhaps not coincidental that most Latin authorities attributed the date of the conjunction to September 14, the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. Rigord alone reported another letter from the wise men (sapientes) of Egypt, containing a more detailed list of cities facing destruction in the East and five miracles: an eastern wise man who will convert many and be numbered among the prophets; a short-lived conqueror from “Helam”; a false prophet who will seduce many; comets which signify warfare, consummations, tumult, drought, and bloodshed in the East and the West; and an eclipse of the sun.Footnote ³⁹

Rigord's account was echoed by the prophecy-obsessed Roger of Howden, who likewise noted that in 1184, astrologers from Spain, Sicily, and both the Greek and Latin worlds, including a mysteriously named “Corumfixa” or “Corumphiza,” agreed as to the date of the looming conjunction. Roger clearly was aware of the epicenters of translation activities associated with the twelfth-century renaissance and with the interest of his own countrymen, including “William the astrologer,” in the prognostication. However, Roger counter-balanced the accounts with an open letter from an unlearned laybrother Anselm, who proffered his own divine revelation. God worked clearly not only through the learned availing themselves of newly translated scientific works from the Arabic and eastern Christian worlds (via Sicily and Spain), but also through the traditional divine manifestation of miracles through the saints. According to Anselm, the “opinions of the philosophers” (sententia philosophorum) would be tested by strange signs in the heavens and a time of trials, an account Roger of Howden followed with the appeal of the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, Heraclius, for western assistance to counter Saladin's conquests.Footnote ⁴⁰

William the astrologer, a clerk of John, constable of Chester, appears only in Roger's retrospectively revised Chronica, and William's description of the conjunction included a resolutely Christian gloss. Ambivalent planetary alignments were interpreted as calls to repentance and indications of eventual Christian triumph. Saturn symbolized the pagans and adversaries of Christianity, the sun stood for Christian magnates. Christians could save themselves from impending disasters and avert the forecasted punishments by repenting; there was no place in this anglicized version for astrological determinism (the idea that humans’ actions were fated by the heavens) and divine will could clearly alter the natural conjunction foretold by human astrologers, a conclusion Roger of Howden reaffirmed by recopying the letter recounting the revelations granted to the conversus Anselm mentioned above and another ascribed to the Muslim “Pharamella.”Footnote ⁴¹

Roger describes the initial impact of the Toledan prophecy on the learned and unlearned alike as one of terror and despair. However, in his later Chronica, he attached a comforting letter that he claims was written to John, bishop of Toledo, by Pharamella, son of Abdelabi of Cordoba, an Arab raised and educated in the palace of the great king “Even Jacob” (Abū Yūsuf Yaʿqūb al-Manṣūr). “Pharamella” may embody a twisted refraction of the very real Averroës (Ibn Rushd), who was known for his commentaries on Aristotle and astronomy, had been sponsored by al-Manṣūr and his father, and had been active in both Cordoba and northern Africa. The letter appealed to the bishop of Toledo as someone sharing Pharamella's monotheism: those who fear God and adore him with pure hands, washed clean and with their whole heart, will be exalted. Pharamella claimed that he had seen Christian merchants selling woolen cloth who had come from the kingdom of the Franks, and had learned from them through an interpreter named Ferrand, John's “fellow citizen,” now “our captive,” that some false astrologers from the West, not understanding the power of heavenly bodies and the effect of the five wanderers (the planets) and two lights (sun and moon) in their epicycles and orbits, had terrified those believing in Christ, not merely the simple, but even those who were considered to be wise. These misguided men claimed that in the Arabic year 572 (really 582 AH), that is, the Christian year 1186, a great ruinous wind would surge from West to East, leveling and pestilent, spawned by the conjunction of the planets in Libra. Pharamella argued against this interpretation on astrological grounds; conjunctions had occurred before without disastrous results. He referred to the astronomical tables of the Persians and Arabs and the observations and calculations of the more modern “Albumassar,” “Messehellae,” and “Alkandi,” which did not confirm the disasters predicted. Rather, unless God will have foreseen otherwise, there would be an uncommon (or scanty) vintage, adequate harvests, great slaughter by the sword, and many shipwrecks. Pharamella therefore urged the misguided to abandon their deceitful dreams (presumably those of Christian victory) and convert to Islam.

Roger of Howden followed this letter with an account of an embassy from Baldwin, king of Jerusalem, which deliberately evoked the Sibylline and Pseudo-Methodian images of a western emperor coming to assist Jerusalem; the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, ironically named Heraclius, offered the king's banner and the keys to the Holy Sepulchre, the tower of David, and city of Jerusalem to European rulers while seeking western assistance to regain the holy city.Footnote ⁴² As he would with the prognostications of Joachim of Fiore, Roger was working overtime first to align the Toledan prophecy with hopes for the triumph of the crusade in which he personally participated, then to explain why the anticipated prophesied destruction of Islam and triumph of Christianity had not occurred. Perhaps it was safer to put the critique of Christians, including himself, who had invested eschatological hopes in astronomical signs, into the mouth of a respected yet non-Christian sage (Pharamella/Averroës). Interestingly, Roger's accounts reveal an awareness of the circulation of information between the Iberian Peninsula, northern Africa, the Holy Land, and regions further East, the allure of astronomy for all faiths, and the dangers of misinterpreting indications of divine will which had seemed to be manifested in natural and supernatural phenomena.Footnote ⁴³

The Paris-educated Gerald of Wales, who had resolutely denounced Muhammad as a pseudo-prophet, likewise included the Toledan prophecy in his manual for Angevin princes, deliberately situating it within the context of Richard I, Henry II, Philip Augustus, and Frederick Barbarossa all taking the cross in order to avenge the “injury” done to Christ by Saladin's capture of the True Cross and Jerusalem in 1187.Footnote ⁴⁴ An avid recruiter for the Third Crusade writing with the benefit of hindsight, Gerald claimed that philosophers and astronomers from Toledo and Apulia, both Christian and “infidel,” had been deceived by their prognostications, a year or more before, of disasters resulting from the course and motion of the planets. As a theologian versed in metaphorical as well as literal interpretation of the scriptures, Gerald somewhat smugly noted that many were deceived, thinking that the “motion of earthly things” was a literal future earthquake, when it should have been interpreted metaphorically.Footnote ⁴⁵ The prophecy foretold the destruction of many cities, particularly in the East, because such disasters commonly struck many cities and forts in that region.

Like Roger of Howden, Gerald turned to “exotic” witnesses as corrective authorities. He inserted letters from some of the more prudent “philosophers” of his times sent to some of their familiars to console them and propose remedies against the foretold disasters: a tempest, various kinds of disease, other impropitious events, and a planetary conjunction. The philosophers asserted that false preachers and other liars have misled many, as most of the disasters foretold in the Toledan prophecy had either not occurred, or not at the times foretold, or were not as severe as predicted. The best precaution against the conjunction was to take prudent measures and pray for divine protection. Based on their expertise, the philosophers reassured their audiences that the disasters foretold would be less severe and widespread than those publicly preached.Footnote ⁴⁶ However, as a Paris-trained theologian, Gerald claimed to read the book of nature more accurately than these philosophers. He asserted, “Was this wonder (mirum) really discordant with reason?” For if the entire world was disordered by the death of Christ, creator of all things, would not the sacrilegious seizure of the most precious wood on which the salvation of entire world had been accomplished (the relic of the True Cross), also disturb the surface of the earth?Footnote ⁴⁷ Gerald therefore argued that the “storm” and “earthquakes” of the Toledan prophecy should be metaphorically interpreted as applying to the victories of Saladin and also at the same time, as literally true, as the book of nature changed its text (phenomena) in response to the anger or suffering of its author at the loss of the True Cross. In Gerald's mind, the Toledan prophecy thus became a way for western Latin Christians to “foretell” the disaster of the loss of the True Cross at Hattin and of Jerusalem and to bolster the “because of our sins” (peccatis exigentibus) call to reform self and society for the success of the planned Third Crusade.Footnote ⁴⁸

For Gerald and his Parisian contemporaries trained in biblical exegesis, the book of nature could be read both figuratively and literally. Although science and philosophy should remain the handmaids of theology, theologians such as Gerald also turned to eschatology, reason, natural observation, and the libri naturales mediated through Arabic commentaries and translators in Apulia, Sicily, and the Iberian Peninsula as potential pan-Mediterranean languages which could lead to conversion and the triumph of Latin Christianity. The lasting influence of the Toledan prophecy and the paradigm of the Third Crusade upon those responsible for the promotion of the Fifth Crusade in terms of prophecy, intellectual exchanges, and cross-cultural diplomatic negotiations is illustrated by the incorporation of the Toledan prophecy's mention of famine, earthquakes, eclipses, plenary conjunctions and winds as evidence of divine displeasure at the sins of Christians and the resultant loss of Jerusalem and other cities to Saladin in the Itinerarium peregrinorum, compiled during the Fifth Crusade (ca. 1217–1221) from earlier accounts of the Third Crusade.Footnote ⁴⁹

Biblical Exegesis and Prophecy within Papal, Parisian, and Cistercian Networks

As the Latin Christian interpretations of the Toledan prophecy demonstrate, the multiple exegetical meanings and eschatological import attached to Jerusalem remained central to the concept of crusading from its very inception. Innocent III, Honorius III, and many of the men they appointed to preach the crusade had been profoundly influenced by Saladin's capture of the city of Jerusalem in 1187, including Joachim of Fiore, whom Innocent III knew and quoted in detail and later appointed to preach the Fourth Crusade.Footnote ⁵⁰ During recruiting for the Third Crusade, Joachim's prophecies influenced many potential and actual participants, including Richard I, Philip Augustus, and Henry VI.Footnote ⁵¹ His eschatological schemata were also known to Paris masters of Peter the Chanter's circle.Footnote ⁵² Reacting to Sibylline and Pseudo-Methodian prophecies and viewed primarily in his lifetime as a prophet of an imminent Antichrist, Joachim of Fiore described a series of persecutions of the Church (paralleled with the chosen people of the Old Testament) culminating in the loss of the Holy Land due to the sins of false Christians.Footnote ⁵³ The earthly Jerusalem would be regained only by the reform and reunion of eastern and western Christians necessary for a Christian ruler to triumph over the sixth and seventh heads of the dragon of the Apocalypse (interpreted as Saladin or, after the failure of the Third Crusade, as another “Saracen” ruler).Footnote ⁵⁴ Joachim's prophecies appear to have heightened expectations for the dawning of a final age around 1200 (culminating ca. 1260) and were reported by many of the same sources who promulgated the Toledan prophecy, including Roger of Howden and Rigord.Footnote ⁵⁵ The prophecies also influenced the self-identity and reception of Paris masters and Cistercians involved in the promotion of the Third Crusade or appointed to preach the Fourth Crusade, including Eustace of Flay, Abbot Adam of Perseigne, and Fulk of Neuilly. Fulk in particular was alternatively hailed by contemporaries as one of Joachim's new spiritual men (viri spirituales) or decried as Antichrist's minion.Footnote ⁵⁶

In addition to Joachim's prognostications, other prophecies emerged during the campaign of the Fourth Crusade or in its immediate aftermath, partly to justify the crusade's redirection and ultimate outcome.Footnote ⁵⁷ Paris-trained preachers involved in the promotion of the Fifth Crusade, including Jacques de Vitry and Robert of Courson, also knew of the “heretical” Amalricians’ application of elements of Joachimist and Sybilline prophecies to Philip Augustus and his son Louis VIII.Footnote ⁵⁸ These prophecies were echoed in the fervor of the misnamed “Children's” Crusade, and contemporary orthodox crusading sermons delivered in Paris quickly sought to reappropriate the biblical, Sybilline, and Joachite images of a greening tree and dawn of the final age where triumph over the forces of Antichrist came through spiritual men marked not by worldly power but by mental poverty. Paris-trained preachers described the pueri and impoverished Paris masters (that is, themselves) as the firstfruits of the hoped-for spiritual renewal which would enable the triumph of what would become the Fifth Crusade.Footnote ⁵⁹

From the Third Crusade onwards, Innocent III, Paris masters, and their Cistercian colleagues adopted elements of Joachim's vision, presenting the crusade, preaching, and reform of both the East and the West as complementary means for the extirpation or conversion of the Muslims, schismatics, pagans, and heretics believed to threaten the Latin Church during the world's senescence. They focused particularly on reunion with the Greek church, the Maronites, Armenians, and the Melkite patriarch of Alexandria, and made contacts with other religious communities.Footnote ⁶⁰ Deeply involved in the promotion of both the Fifth Crusade and the crusade of Frederick II (1227–1229), Jacques de Vitry and Oliver of Paderborn evaluated various eastern Christian churches according to their deviance from Latin doctrine and rites, their potential for reunion with Rome, and their military and political usefulness as Latin allies, focusing their overtures on the Armenians, Georgians, Jacobites, Copts, Nubians, and the Nestorians supposedly allied with Prester John.Footnote ⁶¹ Prophecy therefore became a potentially useful diplomatic tool during the campaign of the Fifth Crusade and negotiations for reunion and/or conversion. Eastern Christians produced or altered prophecies in circulation to create prognostications that encouraged western crusaders to ally with them in an eschatologically driven enterprise; simultaneously, many Latin crusaders were searching for eastern Christian allies and for prophetic reconfirmation of their hopes for the recovery of Jerusalem and the conversion of all peoples to Christianity before the end times.

The Role of Prophecy in the Campaign of the Fifth Crusade: The Historiography

Despite significant research into intellectual exchanges and debates between Latin Christians, Muslims, and various eastern Christian churches, historians including Paul Pelliot, James Powell, and more recently Brett Whalen, Thomas W. Smith, and Pierre-Vincent Claverie have protested that little can be known about how much Latin ecclesiastics in the train of the Fifth Crusade's armies knew of various prophetic traditions.Footnote ⁶² There is no doubt that Latin variants of the Syriac Pseudo-Methodius prophecy and Sibylline traditions circulating in the West shaped expectations for the role of a last world emperor in the extirpation of Islam and the recovery of the Holy Land. There is evidence, too, that alternatively glossed versions of these prophecies circulated among many of the eastern Christian groups encountered or described by Jacques de Vitry and Oliver of Paderborn, including the Greek, Armenian, Georgian, Coptic, Nubian, Ethiopian, and Nestorian communities. Jacques’ and Oliver's debates and discussions with eastern Christians and these groups’ presence in the crusading army and in the Latin East would prove instrumental for introducing multiple eastern prophecies to western crusaders and Latin Christendom during the campaign of the Fifth Crusade, sparking further negotiations for alliances and religious communion. Prophecy became a shared discourse which enabled the discussion of mutual expectations for a pan-Christian alliance against Islamic rulers despite divisions in hierarchies, doctrine, and praxis.Footnote ⁶³

Prophecy could also enable or shape diplomatic negotiations. The Gesta obsidione Damiatae attributed prophetic hopes to the Christian army's Muslim opponents as well, claiming that the sultan of Egypt, al-Malik al-Kāmil, exhorted his troops by invoking a historical-prophetic tradition that the Muslims would subjugate the Roman empire, fighting prophecy with prophecy.Footnote ⁶⁴ Through asserting that they were the true heirs of the Roman empire in prophecies and histories, divergent faiths could stake claim to regions formerly under the control of the Romans, including the Holy Land and Egypt. Specific prophecies and prophetic discourses could cross as well as define cultures, religions, time periods, and communities. Prophecies often spread through both formal and informal networks, and written and oral forms.Footnote ⁶⁵ This was certainly the case for prognostications, signs, and wonders reported before and during the crusades of Frederick II.

The Western Tradition: Frederick II as Eschatological World Emperor

From the very beginning of the organization of the Fifth Crusade, Frederick II actively worked to identify himself with Joachite and Sybilline prophecies of the last emperor. The crusading kings of France and Germany had long sought to appropriate from the Sybilline and Pseudo-Methodius prophecies the image of a salvific last emperor who would extirpate Islam and usher in an era of peace before the Antichrist's advent.Footnote ⁶⁶ Acquainted with many crusade preachers from the Paris circle, Caesarius of Heisterbach presented the struggle for the imperial throne and recent crusades as part of the biblical eschatology of the last days marked by wars, natural disasters, and various heavenly signs. He listed further celestial apparitions (including eclipses and cross visions) reported by crusade preachers (including Oliver of Paderborn) to bolster the apocalyptic imperative of their appeals in Paris, Frisia, Flanders-Brabant, and Germany.Footnote ⁶⁷ Eschatology provided justification and an urgent impetus for participation in crusade and mission efforts. Latin Christians’ assumptions that the recovery of Jerusalem and conversion of the world's peoples were necessary preconditions for Christ's second coming were all too familiar to multiple faith communities acquainted with biblical prophecies, John's Apocalypse, and the Sybilline and Pseudo-Methodian traditions.

One reforming recruiter known to Caesarius was John of Xanten, who preached the crusade at Frederick II's first coronation. In 1215, Frederick II appears to have taken the crusader's cross shortly after his crowning, which was deliberately staged in Aachen to identify himself with earlier “crusading” emperors, including Charlemagne, Frederick Barbarossa, and Henry VI, and to compete with his rival Otto IV, who had also taken the crusade vow.Footnote ⁶⁸ Frederick Barbarossa's decision to assume the crusader's cross in 1188 on Laetare Sunday (the fourth Sunday in Lent when the verse “Rejoice Jerusalem” was traditionally read) had been presented in similarly prophetic and eschatological terms. Likewise, the important role assigned to Frederick II's father, Henry VI, in Joachim's prophecies may have encouraged Henry to take the cross in the 1190s to conquer the seventh head of the beast of the Apocalypse (identified with Islam) and usher in a new age of peace. Godfrey of Viterbo's Speculum regum (ca. 1186/7), and Pantheon, both dedicated to Henry VI, had defined a role for the king of the Romans and the Sybilline last emperor descended from Charlemagne, claiming that he would be called Constantine (or Constans), lead a crusade, crush the infidel, and create a universal empire centered on Jerusalem. This may be why Frederick II's mother, Constance, had wished to name him Constantine and why his father, Henry VI, had laid titular claim to overlordship of Armenia and Cyprus, among other territories.Footnote ⁶⁹ As Henry VI's chancellor and Innocent III's Paris-educated contemporary, Conrad of Querfurt was one of the foremost supporters of the German crusade of 1197, and commissioned Peter of Eboli to write the Liber ad honorem Augusti sive de rebus Siculis. The poem sycophantically lauded the Hohenstaufen as new Augustuses who would conquer Egypt.Footnote ⁷⁰ Sacred and imperial histories and prophecies were therefore refashioned to encourage and support the spiritual, political, and territorial ambitions of the Hohenstaufen.

Hailed by the poet Thomasin von Zirklaria as the third Frederick who would succeed in taking the Holy Land, Frederick II followed his namesake and grandfather, Frederick Barbarossa, in actively linking himself to the cult of the ur-crusader Charlemagne in Aachen by translating the relics of Charlemagne to a new golden shrine after his coronation.Footnote ⁷¹ Frederick II was also directly competing with his rival Otto IV, who after his own coronation in Aachen, had likewise taken the cross and appears to have formed the locus for eschatological hopes for the recovery of the Holy Land among some parties in Germany, at least until his death in 1218. As Frederick II later claimed, in thanks for a divinely granted empire (imperium), he took the cross and heard crusade sermons preached by Oliver of Paderborn's compatriot, John of Xanten (a canon at Aachen's cathedral, the Marienkirche), and other recruiters, including Conrad of Speyer (later bishop of Hildesheim), who would become responsible for the promotion and coordination of Frederick's crusade in Germany.Footnote ⁷² Frederick also wrote to the Cistercian General Chapter, a traditional exchange point for crusade propaganda and liturgical intercession, asking for the Cistercian order's prayers in support of his crusade aspirations; unspoken, but understood, was the request for the support of the Cistercians and other crusade preachers in Germany for his imperial candidacy.Footnote ⁷³ Conrad of Urach, a former Cistercian abbot of Villers, then cardinal-bishop of Porto and papal legate, would later further strengthen the association between Frederick's crusade, Charlemagne's holy wars, and the putative translation of the Roman empire to Charlemagne (and Frederick II). After the crusaders’ loss of Damietta (1221), Conrad elevated Charlemagne's relics to a new altar in Aachen and issued an indulgence for visiting them while attempting to drum up support for the delayed imperial crusade with seasoned preachers including Oliver of Paderborn, John of Xanten, Conrad of Hildesheim, and many others.Footnote ⁷⁴ The concept of the translation of the Roman empire (translatio imperii) thus proved crucial for bolstering the legitimacy of western Latin rulers laying claim to portions of the former western Roman empire and also for western kings’ aspirations to the role of the last world emperor who would retake Jerusalem and other lands formerly belonging to the Roman empire in the East before the end times. To fulfill this role, however, western Latin rulers would have to compete with the Greek emperors of Constantinople and/or the Latin king of Jerusalem (and later the Latin emperor of Constantinople) as alternative claimants to the eschatological role of the last emperor.

Prophecy and the Papacy: Innocent III and Honorius III

Frederick II may well also have been responding to the apocalyptic tone of the Fifth Crusade, set from the moment Innocent III issued the crusade letter Quia maior (1213), which crusade preachers were urged to use as raw material for their own recruiting sermons. Calling for a combination of crusade and reform, Innocent depicted Islam as the beast of the Apocalypse whose end was drawing near. Already nearly 600 years had elapsed from its allotted span of 666 years; Innocent envisaged Islam's ultimate demise around the Joachite deadline of 1260. Innocent's prophetic timeline was therefore familiar to many of those preaching the crusade and their audiences, partly because both he and many of them were versed in Joachim's prophecies and “mainstream” monastic and scholastic exegetical explanations of the number 666 in John's Apocalypse. In his Historia Orientalis, begun during the campaign of the Fifth Crusade, Jacques de Vitry followed Pseudo-Methodian, Sybilline, and Joachite prophecies in attributing the rise and triumph of Islam to the sins and heresies of Christians throughout the world. He claimed that Islam would end as it had begun, by the sword, for nearly 600 years had already elapsed from rise of Muhammad.Footnote ⁷⁵ Jacques's sermons to crusaders also presented a portrait of the church in its old age and the end of the world as nigh: the crusade was a special and transient opportunity for salvation and participation in divine history and eschatology.Footnote ⁷⁶

Innocent's successor Honorius III, whom Jacques de Vitry met in person before travelling eastwards to become bishop of Acre, was a firm proponent of prophecy as well. While preaching in Rome in support of the Fifth Crusade in 1217, Honorius assured its populace that, as had been foretold to him at the time of the fall of Jerusalem (1187), Jerusalem would be recovered by Christians during his pontificate. As he was aged, this should occur shortly! Burchard of Ursberg reported that many took the cross at this news and that the prophecy's diffusion into Germany yielded more recruits.Footnote ⁷⁷ Honorius may also have deliberately inspired a revival of the Toledan and other prophecies and their application to the upcoming crusade in order to counter doubts raised by the premature death of Innocent III. This revival might explain the interest of Caesarius of Heisterbach and many other crusade preachers of his circle in prophecy and heavenly signs during preparations for an imperial crusade (from roughly 1213 to 1227). Caesarius’ list of recruiters included individuals who preached with Jacques de Vitry and Oliver of Paderborn, including Oliver himself, Hermann, abbot of Heisterbach, and John of Xanten, to whom Burchard of Ursberg added two of Oliver's other known collaborators: Conrad of Marburg and Master Solomon of Würzburg. All invoked prophecies (including those of the Cistercian conversus Simon of Aulne), rationalized the supernaturally drastic floods which plagued Frisia during recruiting, and referred to earthquakes and heavenly signs (including cross apparitions and eclipses) in their sermons in support of the crusade.Footnote ⁷⁸

Similarly, the prophet and conversus Simon of Aulne moved within Cistercian circles allied to Paris masters in the vicinity of Liège and to prelates and holy women associated with them, including Conrad of Urach (as abbot of Villers and papal legate), Hugh of Pierrepont, bishop of Liège (Jacques de Vitry would later serve as Hugh's episcopal vicar), and several of Jacques’ correspondents: Lutgard of Aywières, John of Nivelles, and Walter, abbot of Villers (Walter also preached the crusade). Simon attended the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and relayed his visions to Innocent III and the future Honorius III and Gregory IX. Simon was personally close to Jacques, who praised him in his Historia Occidentalis, and there is considerable evidence for regular communication between and a shared spirituality among reforming masters and students in Paris and the holy men and women in the dioceses of Liège and Cologne in the later twelfth through mid-thirteenth centuries.Footnote ⁷⁹ Just as the visions of the laybrother Anselm had responded to and modified the reception of the Toledan prophecy in England, the visions of Simon of Aulne, and those of Jacques’ spiritual muses, Marie d'Oignies and Christina “The Astonishing” (regarding the salvation of the anti-heretical crusaders slain at Montgey and the need to repent in order to counteract the divine ire which had resulted in the loss of Jerusalem) allowed groups traditionally unable to join crusade armies directly to assist in shaping multiple crusade projects and timelines, as part of the Cistercian and Parisian expansion of the crusade project to include visions, liturgy, prayers, processions, fasting, almsgiving, and social reform.Footnote ⁸⁰

These spiritual networks doubled as crusade propaganda networks during the Fourth, Albigensian, and Fifth Crusades as well as the second crusade of Frederick II. Cross apparitions and miracles which occurred during the recruiting of Oliver of Paderborn, Robert Courson, and Jacques de Vitry were circulated by letter and word of mouth and were reutilized by Caesarius of Heisterbach, Odo of Cheriton, and in multiple anonymous appeals preached in Paris during overlapping recruiting campaigns in support of crusades in the Iberian Peninsula, Greece, the Holy Land, and the Midi.Footnote ⁸¹ In a surviving model crusade sermon, Jacques de Vitry also related that Simon of Aulne asked to be allowed a revelation of the reward granted to would-be crusaders. Simon received a vision of the Virgin Mary bestowing her son on all who took the cross with a contrite heart. This affirmative vision, one typically granted to devout men and women in the Liège region who tormented themselves to release others from purgatorial tortures, was quickly further disseminated by preachers active in Paris in multiple surviving crusade appeals.Footnote ⁸² Together with Honorius III and the masters at Paris (many of whom were preaching the crusade), John of Nevilles, Walter of Villers, Lutgard of Aywières (a close acquaintance of Simon of Aulne) and the monastery of Aulne would receive newsletters and prophecies from Jacques de Vitry in his capacity as bishop of Acre and as one of the leading prelates during the campaign of the Fifth Crusade.Footnote ⁸³

News therefore circulated not only via the military orders or through secular or papal courts, but also through pre-established reforming and spiritual networks that united secular and regular ecclesiastics, devout laypersons, and regular religious. Similar networks for the adaptation and exchange of prophetic and polemic materials appear to have existed among eastern Christian communities. When these eastern networks intersected with Latin Christian networks (at entrepôts such as Acre, Antioch, Alexandria, Cairo, and Damietta), prophecies were negotiated and exchanged between communities much as marriages, treaties, and supplies were. Exchanges of adapted prophetic materials could be leveraged by eastern Christian communities to (re)focus, harness, or diffuse the power of western crusading armies and missionaries. Similarly, western leaders seized on eastern prophecies, even those purportedly by non-Christian authors, as justification for their evangelizing and military strategies and as useful material for impelling western audiences (and crusading armies) to action.

Preachers in the East: Jacques de Vitry and Oliver of Paderborn

Although both Jacques de Vitry and his compatriot Oliver of Paderborn had publicized cross apparitions in their recruiting sermons as indications of divine favor and they and others claimed that some hailed them as a sign that Jerusalem would be reconquered, both preachers also appear to have been on an active watch for astronomical signs which might confirm the Toledan prophecy mooted during the time of the Third Crusade.Footnote ⁸⁴ They also frequently expressed their hopes for military assistance from and reunion with various eastern Christian powers, particularly the Melkite church in Egypt (whose patriarch had visited the Fourth Lateran Council attended by Oliver), the Nubians and Ethiopians, the Armenians and Georgians, and the Nestorians (and/or Jacobites) supposedly ruled by the mysterious Prester John. Such hopes and overtures were confirmed and shaped by a swirl of prophecies that emerged during a decisive period in which the crusader army, then led by Cardinal Pelagius, had to decide whether to hold on to the Egyptian city of Damietta in hopes of Frederick II's arrival or proceed onwards to attempt to take Cairo. These prophecies emerged from Eastern Christian traditions and communities and ultimately proved most influential in shaping public opinion as to proper strategy and goals for the Fifth Crusade, both in the East and in Latin Christendom. Prophecy became a multifaceted dialogic tool for defining and communicating the aspirations and goals of all sides involved in religious polemic and “righteous” warfare: eastern and western Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Similar to sermons and polemic, prophecy defined identity and communities through the creation of hermeneutical “others” and apocalyptic calls for reform and conversion but also created occasions for genuine intercultural exchange of and influence by shared genres, rhetorical techniques, texts, beliefs, and praxes.Footnote ⁸⁵

During the Fifth Crusade, these networks of exchange involved a newly established Jewish community in the Holy Land and Muslim writers. As Uri Zvi Shachar has convincingly demonstrated, many Jews from northern France, including noted exegetes, emigrated to Jerusalem and then, after the destruction of Jerusalem's walls during the campaign of the Fifth crusade (in 1219), to Acre. As did the recently arrived Jacques de Vitry and Oliver of Paderborn, this newly formed community used historical and apocalyptic language, including allusions to the prophecy of Daniel and biblical and classical warriors and empires, to justify their presence in the Holy Land in terms appreciable to Jewish audiences and Christian and Muslim communities throughout the known world.Footnote ⁸⁶

Similarly, the importance of Mount Tabor as the initial symbolic and strategic goal of the Fifth Crusade may have stemmed partly from the mountain's key role in contemporary Muslim and Christian eschatology. In crusade letters and histories, Innocent III, Jacques, and Oliver had decried the Muslim seizure of Mount Tabor because of its religious and eschatological significance to Latin Christians as well as its strategic importance. Its recapture by the armies of the Fifth Crusade would supposedly enable the repossession of Jerusalem and the eschatological demise of Islam. The crusaders’ failure to retake Tabor was softened, in letters and histories intended for recruiting centres in Europe, by reports of the destruction of Muslim fortifications on Tabor and Jacques’ baptism of Muslim captives, hailed by Oliver as the precursor of the conversion of all peoples (and Christian repossession of Jerusalem) before the end times.Footnote ⁸⁷ Perhaps in competition with the Latin Christian focus on Tabor, an Ayyubid account probably written after the Fifth Crusade merged an updated version of the “Toledan” conjunction-based prophecy and the ecumenical eschatological language of Gog and Magog and Pseudo-Methodius with a prognostication referencing events from the Third and Fifth Crusades (eerily reminiscent of the Fil Agap prophecy described below). The author granted a starring role to the by-then destroyed Christian fortress originally seized and refortified by al-Malik al-‘Adil on Mount Tabor and appropriated the Christian emphasis on Christ's role at the end times for Muslim eschatological purposes.Footnote ⁸⁸

In the midst of these prophetic negotiations, the crusader army clearly considered Frederick II to be their leader in absentia. Those responsible for crusade preparations in Europe and for spurring Frederick on to the fulfillment of his vow, including Honorius III and remaining recruiters such as Conrad of Speyer (then bishop of Hildesheim), were similarly profoundly influenced by the crusader army's appeals for reinforcements after the capture of Damietta in the autumn of 1218. These appeals were accompanied by the Fil Agap prophecy, whose Sybilline overtones may have resonated with the prophecies Frederick had heard in his youth and confirmed his ambition to become the emperor who would recapture Jerusalem.Footnote ⁸⁹ Both news reports and prophecies enabled the alignment of imperial, papal, and popular plans for the crusade, an alignment which proved crucial to Frederick's attempts to wrangle coronation in Rome from Honorius III as the precondition for his setting out on crusade. If a western emperor were to retake Jerusalem, Frederick must be crowned as emperor prior to his departure. It is no accident that Frederick's coronation in Rome in 1220 was marked by the public renewal of his crusade vow before Jacques de Vitry's close acquaintance, Cardinal Hugolino (later Gregory IX), and by an immediate intensification of recruiting efforts.Footnote ⁹⁰

The Prophecy of Fil Agap

Likewise, it was certainly no accident that either directly before or directly after the capture of Damietta (1219), the prophecy of Fil Agap (or Hanaan, son of Isaac) came to the crusaders’ notice, perhaps brought forward by eastern Christians: Egypt was populated by Copts, Melkites, Armenians, Jacobites, Nubians, and Nestorians, who were in frequent contact both with al-Malik al-Kāmil and the crusaders.Footnote ⁹¹ Historians remain divided regarding the provenance and authorship of the Fil Agap prophecy and when precisely it appeared in the crusader camp. Paul Pelliot and Hans Mayer believed it might be of Iranian Nestorian origin (perhaps an updated version of an older prophecy of the Nestorian Persian scholar Hunayn ibn Ishaq) and that it was brought forward by Syrian Nestorians in the crusader army between November 1219 and January or February 1220.Footnote ⁹² More recently, Uri Zvi Shachar has posited that the author may have been a French-speaking Christian who bolstered his authority by claiming to be Muslim and who drew on a cross-culturally shared and contested stock of eschatological imagery (Arabicized place-names, the capture of Bilbeis, the color yellow, rivers of blood, and a pregnant she-camel).Footnote ⁹³

It seems more likely, however, that an eastern Christian would have been familiar with and able to navigate shared prophetic traditions. For example, Fidenzio of Padua claimed that a Syrian Christian later handed him a copy of the Clementine prophecy (discussed below) in Tripoli, written in Arabic, but supposedly translated from the Greek.Footnote ⁹⁴ In his history of the Fifth Crusade, Oliver of Paderborn claimed that the Fil Agap prophecy, written in Arabic by an author who claimed to be neither Jew, Christian, nor Muslim, was discovered before the capture of Damietta in November 5, 1219. This non-monotheist prophetic identity might have been created by the eastern Christians who helped to translate and interpret the text to assert its neutrality and therefore its disinterested veracity, or it may echo previous attributions of the Toledan prophecy to a non-monotheistic (“pagan”) and therefore putatively “objective” source. Intriguingly, Oliver's original newsletter on the siege of Damietta does not mention the prophecy. James Powell noted that Oliver's memory may simply have played a trick on him. Writing his history of Damietta's capture with the benefit of hindsight, Oliver may have deliberately situated the prophecy's appearance before the capture of Damietta both to retroactively reassert the crusader's divine right to conquer the city and the validity of the prophecy's predictions of it. However, perhaps following the “Balaam model,” where truthful prophecy was attributed to a hostile witness, the Chronicle of Tours claimed that the Fil Agap prophecy was found in enemy hands and both Jacques de Vitry and Alberic of Troisfontaines dated it to 1220, leading Paul Pelliot to conclude that it was publicized after Damietta's capture.Footnote ⁹⁵

It may have been local Copts who brought the prophecy to the crusading army's notice and helped to interpret and translate it. In the Coptic History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria, the continuator Yuḥannā b. Būlus attributed a dream to a Coptic priest in which a Hungarian (perhaps Andrew II of Hungary) reassured him that the crusaders would permit the Copts to continue their religious practices in peace; the same chronicler praised the Frankish conquerers of Damietta as just. The prophecy may thus have represented the Coptic community's attempt to encourage the crusading army's continued advance in Egypt (towards Damietta and then to Cairo). Although al-Malik al-Kāmil was a relatively tolerant ruler, the Coptic community in Egypt risked losing their Christian identity in the midst of an Arabicizing “Coptic Renaissance.” Arabization both put the Coptic community in contact with other Christian, Muslim, and Jewish prophecies, scholarship, and religious works written in Arabic (including works from Iraq and Syria), yet also generated a crop of reflexively defensive polemical works and led to the creation of the anti-assimilation Coptic Apocalypse of Samuel of Qalamūn, itself ironically preserved in Arabic translation. So too was the Fil Agap prophecy, which could have been of Coptic manufacture or had perhaps recently arrived in Egypt from regions further east through the networks of informational exchange outlined above.Footnote ⁹⁶

It seems that the Fil Agap prophecy was initially greeted with skepticism by the crusader camp because of its Arabic form and putatively pagan authorship. Probably working with eastern Christian interpreters, Jacques, Oliver, and the papal legate Pelagius became largely responsible for interpreting, validating, and disseminating this prophecy not only to the crusader camp, but also through letters to Europe. They had it translated into French and Latin, preached it to the crusader camp, and argued for its veracity by virtue of its accurate prediction of past events and the fact that many past unbelievers had uttered divinely inspired prophecies in the Old Testament and Sybilline traditions — points drawn straight from the theology schools in Paris and Latin treatises against Islam. Jacques de Vitry in fact forwarded an account of the prophecy to Paris and addressed it specifically to Philip the Chancellor, who later cited the same examples mentioned by Jacques (Balaam, Caiaphas, and so on) while discussing how to distinguish between various types of prophecy and prophets.Footnote ⁹⁷ Perhaps influenced by Pseudo-Methodius (and the prophecies which had circulated at the time of the Third Crusade), Jacques noted that the Fil Agap prophecy claimed that Islam had begun and would end by the sword, and predicted Saladin's capture of Holy Land and the campaign of Third Crusade, which would precede the crusaders’ capture of Damietta, Alexandria, Cairo, and Babylon, the liberation of Syria, and the destruction of pagans and their law.Footnote ⁹⁸ The prophecy proved a valuable tool in asserting Pelagius’ authority during his attempts, in Frederick II's absence, to divide the spoils of Damietta, to reform an army besieged on all sides and fearful of Coradin's razing of the walls of Jerusalem and onslaught of Château Pèlerin, and to decide upon the ultimate goal of the crusade, which was to become the conquest of Cairo, Babylon, and all of Egypt (ultimately in order to obtain and retain the Holy Land).Footnote ⁹⁹

Once Damietta's capture confirmed the prophecy's veracity, Pelagius forwarded to Honorius III a translation, which appears to have been widely disseminated, while Jacques de Vitry spread the good news to fellow recruiters. One copy of Pelagius’ prophecy reached Alberic of Troisfontaines via a papal legate and the Cistercian network, another reached the prior of Dunstaple, who as recruiter for the crusade, was presumably meant to use it to inspire laggard recruits to fulfill their vows.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Multiple surviving variants of the Fil Agap prophecy in the French vernacular and in Latin illustrate how translators and recipients purveyed their hopes onto the identity of the kings responsible for destroying Islam. All surviving western variants strove to establish the credibility of the prophecy's author by stressing his identity as a Muslim philosopher or “wise man” from the land of the “pagans,” and/or by opening the prognostication with signs easily interpretable as already fulfilled. These included a tailed comet evoking the astrological elements of the well-known Toledan prophecy; the conquests of a Muslim ruler bearing a saffron-colored banner (Oliver of Paderborn and others interpreted this figure as Saladin), including the coastal cities of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (excepting Tyre) and Jerusalem; and the campaign of the Third Crusade (two western kings retaking Acre yet failing to conquer Jerusalem). One variant clearly influenced by Sybilline prophecies of the last emperor portrayed a lean man leading the triumphant crusader armies (identified by some near contemporaries as the legate Pelagius), whose conquests of Damietta, Tanis, Cairo, and other cities in Egypt would inspire the destruction of Jerusalem's walls. For this very reason, Coradin's razing of the walls of Jerusalem in 1219 was noted by both Jacques of Vitry and Oliver of Paderborn as proof that elements of the prophecy had already been fulfilled. Different variants of the prophecy tweaked the timeline. Its vague “twenty-eight and a half or perhaps twenty-nine years” after the Christian recapture of Acre and the capture of Damietta in the “summer” was read more precisely as May, June, or July of 1219, although Damietta was in fact captured in November of 1219. A king from beyond the mountains (or from noble stock) would simultaneously attack Damascus, Maubec, and Haman, destroying Islam in Syria, although his reign would last only a year and a few months (or two years in some versions). Meanwhile, another Christian king from India or Calabre or the North (Alberi, Albexi) would attack Mecca and the empire of Muhammad, and destroy or convert all pagans. He would then convene in Jerusalem with the ultramontaine king (the conqueror of Damascus). Together they would visit the Temple and Holy Sepulchre and witness the reblossoming of the dry tree.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Other versions of the prophecy omitted the Sybilline meeting in Jerusalem, and differed in the identity of the king who would destroy Mecca, identifying him variously as the king of “Alberi,” “Albexi,” “Abisme,” and “Calabre.”Footnote ¹⁰² The surviving versions, including one Latin translation preserved in a manuscript with what appears to be one of many compilations of materials intended to replace the missing third book of Jacques de Vitry's history (London, Gray's Inn, MS 14), are mind-bogglingly variable, and were perhaps deliberately constructed to allow for maximum flexibility in soliciting potential allies for the armies of the Fifth Crusade. In the crusader army, hopes for assistance appear to have initially focused on the king of Nubia or Ethiopia (as the king who would take Mecca), the Georgians (who would promise to specifically attack Damascus), and Frederick II.Footnote ¹⁰³

Oliver of Paderborn's history's gloss of the Fil Agap prophecy for western audiences expressed his hopes that a Christian Nubian king might fulfill the role of destroyer of Mecca. At the time of the prophecy's discovery, this had not yet happened, but Oliver stressed that it could be fulfilled in the future. Through oral interpretations of the prophecy and in written translations (and perhaps composition) of it, Coptic communities living in cities adjacent to the crusader army, including those with ties to the army's next putative target (Cairo), appear to have tapped their own vibrant apocalyptic traditions to deliberately stoke crusader expectations for assistance from the Christian king of Nubia. Mordechay Lewy has traced the transferral of at least one motif from early Islamic apocalyptic literature — the destruction of Mecca by an Abyssinian king — into the Syrian, Coptic, and Abyssinian (Ethiopian) apocalyptic traditions. The prophecies of Pseudo-Methodius, which circulated in both eastern and western variants, also potentially allowed for a key role for a Nubian or Ethiopian king in the end times. The contact of crusade planners and armies with the Melkite patriarch of Alexandria (his freedom was one of the terms stipulated by the treaty eventually negotiated by the crusade's leaders with al-Malik al-Kāmil) and Coptic Christians appears to have put Nubia and/or Ethiopia onto the map of crusader eschatology; the king of Nubia was spliced into the western prophetic tradition by the vector of newsletters and prophecies interpreted and transmitted by the crusader army. Added plausibility came from the fact that Christians living in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Ayyubid dynasty both already well knew that Nubians and Copts visited the Holy Sepulchre and that Christian Nubian kings had routinely raided Ayyubid-controlled portions of Egypt, particularly during the reign of Saladin.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

In fact, Lewy argues that it was the Copts who inserted the Nubians into the eastern Pseudo-Methodius tradition. The Nubian king became the putative partner with a Byzantine emperor in ending the reign of Islam in several Arabic-Coptic apocalypses; similar Pseudo-Clementine Peter apocalypses had reached Ethiopia by the thirteenth century. The now lost Pseudo-Clementine prophecy shown by eastern Christians from Damietta to Jacques and Oliver may have been an Arabic-Coptic apocalypse similar to the continuously updated Fourteenth Vision of Daniel, one version of which was attributed by Otto Meinardus to the reign of Saladin. For the Copts who made references to a newly reminted Daniel apocalypse in the section of the history of their patriarchs describing the period just prior to the crusaders’ arrival in Egypt, the Nubians (and Latins) were potential counterweights to Saladin's heirs, the Ayyubids. Under Oliver of Paderborn's watch, the king of “Abyssinia” responsible for destroying Mecca in Arabic-Coptic apocalyptic traditions became associated with the Nubians under the technical oversight of the Coptic church, representatives of which were communicating with the armies of the Fifth Crusade.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Hopes for Nubian assistance were transmitted throughout Latin Christendom by Jacques’ and Oliver's works, the Fil Agap prophecy, Latin Pseudo-Methodius traditions, and later writers dependent on them, including Vincent of Beauvais, who dedicated his Speculum historiale to another western king intent on crusading in Egypt, Louis IX. This meant that Nubians and Copts became targets of reunion negotiations during the precise period in which Jacques was a cardinal in Gregory IX's curia.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Even before the Fifth Crusade's armies set foot in Egypt, both it and Ethiopia played a role in western versions of the Toledan prophecy, the Tiburtine Sibyl, and the Latin Pseudo-Methodian traditions. The Nubians had appeared on the crusaders’ radar at the time of the Fourth Crusade; Robert of Clari claimed that their king hoped to die in Jerusalem, while the pilgrim Thietmar (1217–1218) stressed that they would first attack Egypt and then proceed to Jerusalem. Together with Thietmar, Jacques and Oliver both drew on the anonymous Tractatus de locis et statu sancta terre ierosolimitane. All three viewed the Coptic population which lived partly under Muslim rule and partly under Christian kings in Nubia and Ethiopia as a potential source for military aid. So also did Alberic of Troisfontaines, who distinguished the Nubians from the Christians living under Prester John and described them as potential military allies in his entry for 1234. It seems unlikely, however, that hopes for the king of Nubia were merged with the King David and Prester John legend (discussed below), aided by the supposedly routine geographic conflation of India and Nubia Paul Pelliot attributed to medieval authors. As Jean Richard has illustrated, the two kingdoms were clearly differentiated by Jacques, Oliver, and others in the crusader army. Some authors have cited Jacques’ description of Prester John ruling over Nestorians in India (recently converted to Jacobitism as he heard from a merchant who returned from there). This does not mean, however, that Jacques was identifying Prester John with “Jacobite” (Coptic) Ethiopia; he firmly placed Prester John's kingdom in India. Jacques’ observations do, however, point to the importance of commercial trading routes as vectors for the transmission of both ideas and merchandise.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Significant differences between surviving written variants of the first version of the Fil Agap prophecy, some still possessing traces of the Arabic from which they were translated, may reflect an attempt to insert Sybilline elements to make it more approachable to western readers and to highlight the role of Frederick II as last emperor, either during the campaign of the Fifth Crusade or in preparation for Frederick II's later crusade.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ However, some versions omitted the Sybilline meeting in Jerusalem, but spoke of a deliberately unidentified tall, lean man from the West who would conquer the Arabs.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ More versions of the Fil Agap prophecy were adapted for and associated with the crusade of Frederick II in 1229 by the popular Old French translations and continuations of William of Tyre, and, with other prophecies, the Fil Agap was also copied into the Historia Damiatina of Oliver of Paderborn.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Portions of Oliver's history were quickly incorporated into the spurious “Third Book” appended to Jacques de Vitry's Historia Orientalis, and both circulated widely during preparations for Frederick's second crusade and in later periods.Footnote ¹¹¹

Clearly, while ecclesiastics within the crusading army had added an initial layer of interpretation and adaptation of the prophecies produced by eastern Christians, once in Europe, the prophecies were subjected to further alterations. Writing from hindsight, Alberic of Troisfontaines critically appraised the Fil Agap prophecy, although he appears to have merged it with another Clementine prophecy from the crusader army and the Relatio de David. He claimed that it foretold the capture of Damietta (1220) twenty-nine years after the fall of Acre (1191) and that a king from the West would meet a King David from the East. Together they would destroy Muslim lands and meet in Jerusalem, while in the month of July a battle would rage between Christians and Muslims in Cairo.Footnote ¹¹² Seizing upon Innocent III's declaration that the expiration date of Islam was imminent, the continuator of the Chronicle of Tours inserted into the Fil Agap prophecy the mention of Spain, which the chronicler claimed the Spaniard Pelagius used to identify himself as the “lean man.” This Iberian element probably originated not from the crusader camp but rather from a Sybilline prophecy earlier cited by Rigord concerning a frost in Spain before whose face peoples and their kings would perish.Footnote ¹¹³ Both ecclesiastics within the crusading army and western scribes attempted to calculate the precise date for the capture of Damietta and the destruction of the kingdom of the “Turks.”Footnote ¹¹⁴

The Fil Agap prophecy clearly resonated with the Pseudo-Methodian and Sybilline prophecies possessed of an enduring appeal for both eastern and western Christians. Together with the legend of Charlemagne, the ur-crusader, these prophecies had long been popular among crusading German emperors and their Capetian rivals.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Philip Augustus and his court were well-acquainted with the prognostications which had colored his own participation in the Third Crusade, including the Toledan prophecy, another concerning the fall of Baghdad, and most infamously, Joachim of Fiore's predictions on the putative roles of Richard I and the German emperors in the denouement of Islam.Footnote ¹¹⁶ One sermon on the Antichrist recorded as being delivered by a Paris master, a contemporary of Stephen Langton, to popular audience in the Capetian capital of Paris (perhaps during recruiting for the Third Crusade when eschatological hopes were high), discussed the advent of the Antichrist in riveting detail, inserting a Sybilline prophecy on the role of the Frankish king as last world emperor.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The Amalrician heretics condemned in Paris in 1210 by Guérin and many Paris masters later responsible for preaching the crusade (including Robert Courson) appear to have applied elements of Joachite and last emperor prophecies to Philip Augustus and his son Louis VIII. Philip would conquer the world, while his son would live forever in the age of the Holy Spirit.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Perhaps in competition with the Fil Agap prophecy, an altered version of a Sybilline prophecy was added to the registers of Philip Augustus in 1220 by the royally favored Hospitaller Guérin, bishop of Senlis, then heavily involved in the promotion of the Fifth Crusade. The epic struggle of various Christian kings against Islam (including Charlemagne), would be followed by a time when the West would be vitiated by vices and internal wars until a king of the Greeks and Romans would bring peace and forcibly repress and proselytize pagans. After all peoples converted to Christianity and worshipped at the Holy Sepulchre, Gog and Magog would be unleashed and then subdued by the king of the Romans, who would come to Jerusalem and entrust his kingdom to God. Philip was meant to be identified with the final imperial figure and perhaps took his eschatological role seriously, bequeathing significant sums to the Holy Land and to his son Louis VIII, should he choose to go on crusade.Footnote ¹¹⁹

The Pseudo-Clement and Sergius-Baḥīrā Prophecies and the Relatio de David

Simply put, Philip Augustus may have been seeking to compete with the image of Frederick II as the last emperor in the Fil Agap prophecy, a claim bolstered by another prophecy produced by Melkites (Suriani) within the crusading army in 1221. Titled “The Revelations of St. Peter the Apostle to his disciple Clement,” it was probably of the apocalypse genre popular among Arabic and Greek-speaking Christian communities, the Nestorians in Edessa, and the Copts in Egypt and Ethiopia. It prophesied the destruction of Islam by one or more kings and featured eschatological tree imagery. The region surrounding Alexandria possessed a particularly venerable tradition of Clementine literature, including discourses on the Apocalypse of Saint Peter, and may have been the origin for the variant which reached the crusader camp.Footnote ¹²⁰ After a careful examination of the book to determine its age and authenticity, the papal legate Pelagius had it translated and read out and interpreted in sermons to the assembled army, perhaps, as the Chronicle of Tours suggested, by Jacques de Vitry himself.Footnote ¹²¹ Both Oliver and Jacques claimed that the new prophecy further confirmed the Fil Agap prophecy of 1220 and rumors of assistance from a Prester John-like King David. After the capture of a “grassy city” (interpreted as Damietta), Alexandria, and Damascus, two new kings, one from the East and one from the West, would meet in Jerusalem when Easter fell on April 3. This conjunction was calculated by ecclesiastics in the army, including Oliver of Paderborn, as occurring all too soon, in 1222. Muslim law and the majority of its adherents would be destroyed, the remnant with all other peoples converted before the Antichrist's advent. After this prophecy was preached, news of Frederick II's projected arrival, the Georgians’ pledge to attack Damascus, and the reported advent of a putatively all-conquering eastern Christian King David boosted the crusader army's morale. It seemed as if the Clementine and the prior Fil Agap prophecies were being fulfilled, with the concrete result that the cruader army rejected Al-Kāmil's truce offer and advanced on Cairo.Footnote ¹²² It may be too, that the rumors of King David's advent and multiple doom-laden prophecies in fact prompted Al-Kāmil's diplomatic overtures.

For the Sergius-Baḥīrā prophecy may also have been contemporaneously translated into Latin (from either the Nestorian Syriac or, as its original editors suggested, Arabic) within the crusader army. It claimed that after a time of Muslim triumph, a green king would come from the East, drive the Muslims back to their place of origin, rebuild churches, and rule the world in anticipation of the last (and in some versions, western Roman) emperor at the end of time. The text circulated within the Nestorian, Jacobite, Melkite, Coptic, and Armenian communities and embodied eastern Christian hopes for aid from an eastern king, hopes that promoted the acceptance of reports of the activity of “King David” (loosely modeled on Prester John), supposedly coming to aid the crusader army.Footnote ¹²³ These reports were purveyed by Nestorian merchants trading in Antioch. The next prophecy to reach the crusader camp, the Relatio de David, may also have been the work of Nestorian Christians from Iraq, based on the actual conquests of Naiman princes (including Küchlüg), the Khwarizmian shahs, or the Mongols. There were further interpolations concerning hoped-for aid from the Georgians and Sibylline hopes for a meeting of Christian kings in Jerusalem added when the Relatio was translated for a Frankish audience in Antioch and for the crusaders at Damietta.Footnote ¹²⁴

Both Acre, Jacques de Vitry's home see, and Antioch were well-known entrepôts for the exchange of knowledge between religious and ethnic groups (Oliver interviewed Nestorians in Antioch and Jacques had intended to travel there), as were Alexandria and Cairo, potential targets of the Fifth Crusade.Footnote ¹²⁵ Other eastern Christians may have approached the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem with prophetic treatises and letters, in hopes that he would forward them to the crusading army and/or to the pope in Rome, which one letter claimed he did in June 1221. Jean Richard has posited that similar to the reports of King David, eastern Christians from Mosul may have drafted this newsletter, attached to a prophetic treatise which they claimed was widespread among these eastern conquering armies (Liber executionis Novi Testamenti). Pierre-Vincent Claverie has suggested, however, that this prophecy may have originated from Erbil, was perhaps compiled by translators employed by the Mongols, and may have reached the Latin patriarch in 1221 while he was still with the crusading army.Footnote ¹²⁶ In contrast, both Peter Jackson and Thomas W. Smith viewed the letter as an apocryphal forgery from the 1230s describing the advance of the Mongols in that period.Footnote ¹²⁷ Its origins will remain open to debate until further evidence surfaces.

We know for a certainty, however, that Antioch was the capital of the closest Latin principate to Armenia and Georgia. Jacques and Oliver had also contacted adherents of the Armenian church and may well have been aware of the various Armenian prophecies in circulation. Certainly, they were cognizant of previous reunion and alliance attempts and the potential of John of Brienne or Raymond-Roupen of Antioch annexing Cilician Armenia or at the very least of Armenian assistance enabling a potentially multi-pronged assault on Ayyubid forces. Pseudo-Methodius and the motif of the last world emperor were well known to Armenian ecclesiastics and had been applied to the Turkic invasions and to the arrival of the crusaders (the “Romans”), including their seizure of Constantinople in 1204. In Cilician Armenia, the prophetic tradition of a meeting between converted kings Constantine and Trdat of Armenia was interwoven with Pseudo-Methodius and the crusaders’ advent to create the prophetic prognostication of two new kings (a new Constantine and a new Trdat) meeting in Jerusalem after crushing the infidel and ushering in a period of world peace.Footnote ¹²⁸ During the campaign of the Fifth Crusade and again during the crusade of Frederick II, reunion attempts with Armenians and other eastern Christians went hand in hand with negotiations for a putative pan-Christian anti-Islamic alliance. Prophecy functioned as a diplomatic language, enabling crusaders and eastern Christians alike to make sense of the threat posed by Islam and mutual hopes for assistance against it. Prophetic discourse also stressed that the time was now; it was better to overlook minor doctrinal differences in order to work towards a common eschatological goal.

The Relatio de David in the West

Similar to the prior Fil Agap and Clementine prophecies, news of the advent of King David and the Georgians’ pledge to attack Damascus was transmitted West in letters intended to spur on recruits to fulfill their vows with the encouraging information that the Ayyubids would now have to split their forces to face three potential Christian allies: the Georgians, King David, and the crusader army. Pelagius sent one report of King David's activities to the crucesignatus Henry III of England and to Pope Honorius III, who appears to have forwarded it to all bishops responsible for organizing the crusade: copies survive in the recruiting centers of Dunstaple, Rommersdorf, and Troisfontaines. Jacques de Vitry later sent another fuller report to various interested parties, including Honorius III, the crusader Leopold VI of Austria (one of Frederick II's most trusted advisers, his daughter married Frederick's son Henry VII), the masters of Paris, Walter of Villers (responsible for preaching the crusade with Bruno of Rommersdorf), and crusade recruiters in the diocese of Liège. One copy of Jacques’ report (letter 7) and another anonymous account reached Cardinal Hugolino, then mustering resources for the Fifth Crusade from towns in Lombardy. This latter account claimed that the letter writer had heard of the conquests of King David, described as the son of Prester John who first attacked and then allied with the Georgians, based on reports from both Christians and “Saracens” and the master of the Temple. It claimed that these accounts were all the more credible for coming from the crusading army's adversaries and asked the recipient to forward them to other interested parties (R. the chaplain and master G. of Saint-Gilles).Footnote ¹²⁹ The letters had an immediate impact in England: at the legate Pandulf's urging, Henry III promised the proceeds of a newly levied hearth tax to John of Brienne, then king of Jerusalem.Footnote ¹³⁰

Jacques and Oliver deliberately drew on the legend of Prester John familiar from the imperially-sponsored cult of the Magi in Cologne (known also to Alberic of Troisfontaines, a chronicler to whose monastery Jacques de Vitry had granted property early in his career) to portray King David as a king of kings who had vowed to visit the Holy Sepulchre with a great army bearing cross standards.Footnote ¹³¹ He would rebuild the walls of Jerusalem after extirpating Islam and forcing its adherents to convert.Footnote ¹³² Originating in the mid-twelfth-century crusading context, the legend of a Christian king, Prester John, who lived in the Far East and desired to ally with western Christians against the spread of Islam, was itself based on a similar conglomeration of the legends of the fabulously wealthy Magi, classical and medieval literary traditions on the wonders of the East, actual embassies from eastern Christians, and western reattribution of victories in central Asia to a resolutely Christian yet exotic priest-king. The Prester John “correspondence” was in fact a means to facilitate these processes, to model what diplomacy with an eastern Christian king (other than the emperor of Byzantium) might look like; to critique those elements of western society deemed necessary to reform for crusading success; to reassert the primacy of Rome and the importance of the western German emperor (rather than the Greek emperor and church) while acknowleding the centrality of Jerusalem to multiple faiths; and to reassure western Christians that Christians were in fact neither numerically, nor culturally, nor militarily inferior to the Muslim kingdoms with which they had been drawn into regular contact and conflict.Footnote ¹³³

Although it is evident that Jacques did not believe all the elements of the Prester John legend, he may have consciously aided in their incorporation into the Relatio de David and contemporary descriptions of the Georgians. He may have done so to tap into popular belief in the legend of assistance against Islam from a Christian king Prester John, whom Jacques claimed the common people identified with King David.Footnote ¹³⁴ Jacques depicted both the Georgians and King David as fiercely devoted to the Holy Sepulchre and riding into cities occupied by the “Saracens” with no other tribute than their cross banners. King David reportedly demanded reparations for the walls of Jerusalem from the caliph of Baghdad, while the Georgians threatened to wreak vengeance for Coradin's razing of Jerusalem's fortifications during the seige of Damietta. Moreover, Jacques took the legend of the enclosed Jews and Gog and Magog (familiar from version C of the Prester John legend, Peter Comestor, Pseudo-Methodius, and various Alexander legends) and transplanted both groups from their usual association with Prester John in India (the Caucasus mountains) to regions associated with the Georgians (the Caspians). He also associated the Amazons, traditionally described as tributaries of Prester John in the Far East, with the Georgians by describing the Georgian women as warlike and relocating the Amazons to the Caspians. The Chronicle of Tours also claimed that Jacques used the legend of Gog and Magog to emphasize the ferocity of King David's army, which would literally devour Muslim forces.Footnote ¹³⁵

Other reports painted King David as fulfilling multiple roles from the Fil Agap and Clementine prophecies, including subjugating Damascus and all of Syria, such that in the crusader camp and in letters and chronicles in the West, the Georgians and King David were soon conflated.Footnote ¹³⁶ One crusader wrote to the archbishop of Besançon, describing the Georgians as Indian Christians who would assist the Latin army in 1221. This is hardly surprising, considering that hopes for Georgian collaboration were reported and preached simultaneously with rumors of assistance from King David, an association spread further in papal accounts of the Relatio de David sent to recruiting centers throughout Europe, which stressed firm pledges of assistance from the Georgians. Latin Christians may have conflated the attributes and military exploits attributed to the mythical King David and the real military exploits of the Georgians, including the doughty King David IV the Builder (1089–1125) and Queen Tamar (1184–1213). In 1211, Innocent III had written to the Georgians proposing an alliance with the crusaders. After receiving news of the capture of Damietta, the Georgian King Ghiorghi IV Lasha (1212–1223) sent messengers to the crusaders offering his assistance. Pelagius responded by inviting the Georgians to invade Jerusalem, assuring them of the imminent arrival of Frederick II. Even after the crusaders lost Damietta, Ghiorghi's successor Queen Rusudan wrote to Honorius III, explaining that her previous inability to assist the crusaders was due to Mongol incursions. Her constable, Ivané, likewise wrote to the pope promising armed assistance for Frederick's forthcoming crusade. Honorius replied on May 12, 1224, urging the Georgians to prepare to join Frederick II. Similar to western crusaders, the Georgians, Armenians, and Rus appear initially to have believed that the armies of “King David” were Christians. Peter Jackson suggests that the Mongols may have deployed subterfuge and carried crosses to pass themselves off as Christians.Footnote ¹³⁷

Oliver of Paderborn similarly presented King David in an apocalyptic and Joachite tone. As part of the divinely ordained transmission of empires, he would combat the beast with many heads (familiar from John's Apocalypse).Footnote ¹³⁸ Disseminated to England, France, Germany, Spain and elsewhere, these prophecies and news bulletins from the front contributed to intense pressure on Frederick II, at his coronation at Rome, to pledge to fulfill his vow by departing for the East in the spring of 1221.Footnote ¹³⁹ The prophecies had a similarly dramatic impact on recruiting throughout Latin Christendom. Honorius III forwarded news of the situation of the crusader army in Egypt and the military advances of Prester John (the gist of the Relatio) to prelates on March 13, 1221; copies survive addressed to the archbishops of Cologne, Trier, and Tarragona, and their suffragans.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ As late as June 20, 1221, in a letter intended to badger Frederick II into the prompt fulfillment of his vow, Honorius III noted that the crusaders were planning on timely assistance from both the emperor and eastern powers.Footnote ¹⁴¹ In the crusading army, hopes for imperial and eastern collaboration, papal and imperial instructions to reject Al-Kāmil's peace offers, and the impending prophetic deadline for the capture of Cairo and Babylon (Easter, 1222) prompted Pelagius and the crusader army to advance down the Nile, with disastrous results. The crusaders were forced to cede Damietta in exchange for their own freedom and that of the captive Melkite patriarch of Alexandria, a remnant of the True Cross, and a truce of eight years. Importantly, this truce was viewed as non-binding on Frederick II, should he arrive to lead the crusade in person.Footnote ¹⁴² Jacques de Vitry appears to have taken the prophecies to heart, as the master of the Templar order claimed that Jacques and Frederick II's representatives wanted to defend Damietta even after the crusader army's surrender.Footnote ¹⁴³

How to Break the News: Efforts Immediately Following the Loss of Damietta (1221)

Undoubtedly aware that many were criticizing the ecclesiastical leaders of the crusade and Frederick II for failing to ensure the emperor's opportune departure and perhaps hoping that the prophecies’ deadlines could still be met, many of the ecclesiastical and military leaders of the failed expedition become immediately involved in preaching and planning Frederick II's next crusade. As former recruiters, erstwhile spiritual leaders of the failed crusade possessing invaluable knowledge of the situation in the East, and later as cardinals under Honorius III and Gregory IX, Jacques and Oliver became involved in crusade planning at the highest levels. Together with Hermann von Salza, the head of the Teutonic Order, Bishop Conrad of Hildesheim, and the papal legates Pelagius and Conrad of Urach, Jacques and Oliver were present at key meetings which attempted to enable crusaders's recruitment, funding, and departure, largely by binding Frederick II to a definitive departure date.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ However, after the prophetic deadline of 1222 had passed and anticipated assistance from King David and the Georgians proved illusory, Jacques appears to have become at least temporarily deeply discouraged. By 1224, Honorius had to prod him to continue to promote the crusade in the East by promising, as he had many times before, that Frederick would soon be fulfilling his crusade vow.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

Jacques was not alone in having to rationalize passed prophetical deadlines and explain the hostile advent of the Mongols rather than the materialization of the projected pan-Christian alliance. The Relatio de David and Prester John legends would persistently shape western perceptions of the Mongols in the 1220s and later periods.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ A former participant in the Fifth Crusade directly threatened by the Mongols's hostile incursions, King Andrew of Hungary appears to have received a copy of the Relatio de David, for in 1223 he wrote to Honorius III informing him that King David had left India and was currently slaughtering Russians and Comans in Ruthenia. Attempting to reconcile the activities of the Mongols with the King David legend, Alberic of Troisfontaines claimed that in 1221 it was announced in France that King David, or “as some say” his son, had already entered Comania and parts of Russia, slaying many, and that many were murmuring that he was neither Christian nor “Saracen.” Under his entry for 1222, Alberic reported that King David and his followers, now called Tartars, had returned to their homeland in disgust after hearing that Damietta was lost, as did the continuator of the Annals of Marbach, who tied King David to the cult of the Magi at Cologne by claiming that the incursions had been directed at ultimately reclaiming the Magi's relics.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ By 1234 and 1237, Alberic of Troisfontaines was still hopeful regarding potential aid from the Nestorians living under Prester John, but claimed that the Mongols had turned on Prester John, slain him, and invaded Armenia and Comania. The Dominican Vincent of Beauvais and a fourteenth-century legend of the Magi by John of Hildesheim featured similar rationalizations, explaining that King David, the son of Prester John, had been murdered by the Mongols, previously his tributaries.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

Similar to Jacques, Oliver of Paderborn likewise immediately threw himself into preparations for a new crusade. Shortly after the crusading army's defeat before Cairo, Oliver drafted a letter, presumably to al-Malik al-Kāmil, but almost certainly also for use as a propaganda piece explaining the continued need for a crusade. Prior to the military campaigns of the Fifth Crusade, Innocent III had written similarly propagandistic letters to Saphadin (al-Malik al-Ādil Sayf ad-Din), sultan of Damascus and “Babylon.” Calling on the prophecy of Daniel regarding the divine translation of empires, both Innocent and Oliver noted that the sins of Christians had provoked God to hand over the Holy Land to the “Saracens,” but warned the addressees of their letters to restore the lands and captives seized by Saladin or face yet another crusade. After a short history of the crusades to prove that the Holy Land, including Egypt, in fact rightfully belonged to Latin Christians (as true heirs to the Roman empire), Oliver intriguingly suggested that victory was perhaps reserved for another Christian prince. He warned al-Kāmil that the Christians could not overlook Coradin's extortion of money from pilgrims to Jerusalem for long and asked him to cede the lands conquered by Saladin (including the fortresses of Krak and Montregal) and admit pilgrims freely to the holy city. Perhaps conditioned by the Toledan prophecy's accreditation to the “doctors” of Egypt, Oliver's letters to al-Kāmil and another to the “learned men (doctores) of Egypt,” probably intended more for European than Egyptian audiences, saw common ground and potential for conversion in appealing to shared yet contested textual authorities (Old Testament prophecies of Christ as the Messiah), arguments from reason and the libri naturales, and shared sacred sites.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

A similar fictional letter reported to be from Frederick II to the sultan of Iconium (written in 1228–29) titled Frederick as Roman emperor and world monarch and urged the Sultan to return to Christian worship the land sanctified by Christ's blood.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Both Oliver's and Frederick's letters may have been conditioned by the long tradition of crafting polemical treatises in the form of epistolary duels and the supposed challenge issued by Frederick Barbarossa to Saladin at the time of the Third Crusade.Footnote ¹⁵¹ While the arguments utilized may reflect polemical, diplomatic, and conversion strategies genuinely thought to be useful in negotiations with Al-Kāmil (the terms suggested were strikingly similar to the treaty of Jaffa by which Frederick II negotiated Christian ownership of Jerusalem in 1229), the letters served a dual purpose in reassuring Christian audiences in Europe of the superiority of their religion and the likelihood of regaining Jerusalem and converting many to Christianity through a combination of missions, diplomacy, and force. The “letters” were also a form of damage control after a humiliating defeat, written by Oliver at a time when prophecy-driven dates demanded the speedy organization of a new crusading expedition.Footnote ¹⁵²

For just as Oliver and Jacques de Vitry wrote newsletters during the Fifth Crusade which circulated widely in the West, so too Jacques’ Historia Orientalis and Oliver's Historia Damiatina were written during and disseminated quickly after the disappointing denouement of the Fifth Crusade. Both Oliver and the anonymous compilers of substitutes for Jacques's unfinished third book incorporated the prophetic material which had circulated during the campaign of the Fifth Crusade. Oliver and Jacques appear to have envisaged that their works would be used to promote the longed-for fulfillment of Frederick II's crusading vow. The emperors Heraclius, Frederick Barbarossa, and Henry VI were assigned key roles in redeeming the Holy Land in Jacques's Historia Orientalis.Footnote ¹⁵³ Oliver of Paderborn's Historia regum terre sancte and Historia de ortu Jerusalem et variis eventibus portrayed German emperors as heirs to the Judeo-Christian empire transferred from Israel, to Rome, and then to the German emperor, so that the Holy Land, including Egypt, rightly belonged to Frederick II as German emperor and king of Jerusalem.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Oliver's Historia Damiatina (one variant of which ended with the council of Verona's plans for a new crusade in 1222) assured the inhabitants of Cologne and the Frisians, whom Oliver was actively recruiting for another crusade in the 1220s, that their contributions during the Fifth Crusade had pleased God and victory would soon follow under Frederick II.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ As crusade recruiters and later as cardinals in the curia of Honorius III and Gregory IX, both men also became involved at the highest levels with negotiations and preparations for the fulfillment of Frederick's vow, including the endlessly and frustratingly shifting deadlines set for imperial departure. In this capacity they may have aided in the revival and application of prophecies to Frederick II's new crusade effort, in particular the readaptation of the prophecies discovered during the Fifth Crusade to highlight Sybilline elements more familiar to western audiences.

The Revival of the Toledan Prophecy

Witness to prophetic hopes for the eschatological role of a crucesignatus Otto IV, Caesarius of Heisterbach, through his abbot Henry, was familiar with the work of Oliver, Jacques, John of Xanten, and others in recruiting for the Fifth Crusade and the crusade of Frederick II. Similar to Oliver, Roger of Wendover, and Richard of San Germano, Caesarius appears to have been tempted to resurrect the astronomical Toledan prophecy which had circulated prior to the campaign of the Third Crusade and to tailor it to Frederick II.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ As with the prophecies “discovered” in the camp of the Fifth Crusade, the Toledan prophecy's authenticity was bolstered by its non-western and worldwide origins and circulation: it was attributed to astrologers in Spain or from Ethiopia, to Jews, to Greek and Armenian Christians, to “Saracens” and Hebrew philosophers.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Precisely because apocalyptic and astrological traditions were shared by all these cultures, the fact that an exotic or hostile culture supposedly prophesied the victory of Latin Christianity made the prognostication seem more authentic to Latin audiences. These witnesses fit the models of the Magi or of Balaam or Caiaphas familiar from the exegetical tradition.

According to Ralph Diceto, the arrival of the Toledan prophecy in the West was accompanied by a report claiming to have been written by French ambassadors to the Greek emperor regarding promising reverses recently suffered by Saladin. Both items helped to spark a program of liturgical intercession for the Third Crusade in England and elsewhere.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Surviving in several variants, the Toledan prophecy blamed the loss of the Holy Land on the sins of the East and West, calling for conversion and penance. Within seven years, an unusual alignment of the planets and the sun's presence in the Dragon's tail would breed natural disasters, including a horrific wind and floods, as well as solar and lunar eclipses. These heralded a confusion of peoples followed by wars in the East and West, universal earthquakes, the destruction of certain key eastern cities (including Mecca, Baghdad, and Cairo), the death of the greatest emperor, and a great flood, followed by the conversion of the “Saracens” (and in some versions the Jews) to Christianity.Footnote ¹⁵⁹

The attribution, general tone, and specific promises of the Toledan prophecy and those of others circulating during the Third Crusade were well-known throughout Latin Christendom and in Paris, and may well have influenced Jacques’ and Oliver's interpretation of the Fil Agap, Pseudo-Clementine, and King David prophecies in the crusader camp. All of these prophecies envisaged not only rewinning Jerusalem and the Holy Cross lost at Hattin, but also the worldwide conversion of Muslims to Christianity. The Toledan prophecy would again be recirculated in 1229 and 1230 and was applied by Roger of Wendover and Richard of San Germano to Frederick's triumphant entry into Jerusalem in 1229.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Prophecy was resilient and adaptable; it could be used to promote a particular campaign or to retroactively justify and contextualize it in sacred history. Prophecies could be fêted by a chronicler or letter writer as applicable to a particular moment in time or individual. They could also be explained away or modified by the very same or different authors, as we have seen in the cases of Odo Rigord, Roger of Howden, and Gerald of Wales, as misinterpreted or applicable to a different time-frame or individual after the prediction failed to materialize around the desired date or person.

Oliver's and Jacques’ letters and histories and contemporary sermons shared the Toledan prophecy's stress upon sins and internal division as the root causes of the loss of Jerusalem to Saladin. In a sermon for the second Sunday of Advent written in the 1220s, Caesarius explained that Luke 21's warning of heavenly and earthly signs prior to Christ's advent and the end times was being literally fulfilled, citing recent reports of miraculous signs by crusade preachers including John of Xanten, Oliver of Paderborn, and Henry of Heisterbach. Glossing the predictions of Luke 21 as manifested in the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin, Caesarius's Dialogus miraculorum envisaged Frederick II as one in a long succession of German emperors signed with the cross, who would help to combat the schismatics, heretics, and internecine wars of the last days. This period would be characterized by natural disasters including famines and earthquakes, and the irruption of an unknown people into the lands of the Rus. Both Caesarius and Oliver carefully noted the lunar eclipse which marked the campaign of the Fifth Crusade (read as a portent of Islam's imminent demise) and the serious earthquakes which ravaged Cyprus in 1222. In fact, Oliver preached a sermon on the latter while recruiting for Frederick II's crusade in Cologne in 1222. Alberic of Troisfontaines and Roger of Wendover similarly noted earthquakes and violent winds in 1222, while Richard of San Germano described a mysterious comet.Footnote ¹⁶¹ All were working hard to spot and correctly interpret the signs necessary to demonstrate that the Toledan prophecy was coming true. If the prognostication of the original astronomers was to be proved to apply to a new date, those traditionally responsible for interpreting the scriptures must now correctly read the book of nature, thereby reaffirming both the compatibility of revelation and observation and the superiority of theology over astronomy.

Alberic of Troisfontaines reported that a prophecy was circulating that within three years from the feast of the Ascension in 1224 (that is, by 1227, the projected date for Frederick II fulfilling his vow according to the provisions of the council of San Germano) Christians would acquire certain kingdoms of the pagans, and in the following August would be victorious over the “Saracens” in Spain.Footnote ¹⁶² In the same year (1224), several crusade preachers working from the imperial city of Marseilles publicized cross apparitions similar to those promoted by Oliver and Jacques during the Fifth Crusade as signs of divine approbation. In 1227, Roger of Wendover recorded an Alpine hermit's prophecy concerning “approaching turmoil” at the birth of the immutator saeculi, which he later viewed as fulfilled by the papal-imperial struggle. Roger also described similar cross apparitions in England in June 1227, which were initially given a positive interpretation as divine support for the self-sacrifice of a large host of English crusaders planning to accompany Frederick II. They were later dramatically reinterpreted as divine reproach for the injury to Christ caused by the emperor's failure to cross overseas from Brindisi at the time set, which resulted in the death or return of many crusaders.Footnote ¹⁶³ In a circular letter copied into a recruiter's handbook compiled at the monastery of Rommersdorf, Frederick himself invoked the prophetic image of the end of the world with charity grown cold, internal turmoil, plague and famine. He painted this grimly apocalyptic picture while seeking to blame his failure to depart in 1227 on the supposedly lackluster efforts of papal preachers, and while highlighting his own preparations, sabotaged by an unexpected illness. He urged potential crusaders to meet with him in May, promising to pay their way.Footnote ¹⁶⁴

Roger of Wendover was not alone in his reproaches of the emperor. For over a decade, preachers had been presented with imperial dates for departure by which they were to force recruits to fulfill their vows (via excommunication in many instances) and muster funds, only to have those dates repeatedly changed. Involved in crusade preparations at the highest levels, Jacques and Oliver may have joined Honorius III, his cardinals, and Herman von Salza, head of the Teutonic order, in envisaging the marriage of the daughter of John of Brienne, the king of Jerusalem, to Frederick II in 1225 as a further means of binding Frederick to the fulfillment of his vow, something Oliver stressed in letters to the Flemish he was organizing to depart with Frederick at the promised target date of June 1225. In 1226, nudged by Oliver, Frederick similarly praised the Frisians for their reputation for bravery and martyrdom before Damietta. Promising imperial assistance, he urged them to join him in fulfilling the vow he had taken with pure motives by joining their navy to a crossing which proved to be of greater utility than all earlier ones in 1227. Frederick's immediate claim, on his marriage, to the title of king of Jerusalem and the monetary aid promised by Philip Augustus in his will swiftly alienated John of Brienne. It may be, however, that Frederick was determined not only to validate his right to rule in the West by demonstrating his commitment to fulfilling his binding crusade vow, but also to show that he would fulfill the hopes raised by the Fil Agap and Pseudo–Clementine, Sybilline, and Toledan prophecies which predicted that a western emperor would become king of Jerusalem and usher in the final age.Footnote ¹⁶⁵