pt3
Toulouse, in southern France, was another great city which demonstrated its resilience in the face of a determined attack. It defied the army of the Albigensian Crusade in 1211: Simon de Montfort was unable to surround the city, whose walls were three miles round, and he could not depend on reinforcements. But, decisively, the crusaders were starving outside the city while Toulouse was able to buy food through its other gates, so after two weeks the siege was raised. The crusader army went on to attack Moissac, but even this small walled town defied them for a month, and in the end fell because of dissension between the garrison of knights and German mercenaries and the citizens.
Through changing political conditions, the walls of Toulouse were almost destroyed in 1215–16, but in September 1217 Count Raymond of Toulouse regained the city and once again de Montfort and his crusading army laid siege in October 1217. The citizens were united in their defiance of the crusader army and they organized themselves efficiently – men, women and even children. They improvised fortifications with earthworks and timber, and, where these did not exist, poured down stones and other missiles from the roofs upon the attacking French, making the narrow streets impassable.
The citadel, the Château de Narbonne, was held by the French, but it was completely cut off from the city. Once the fury of their first attacks was spent, the French settled down for a long siege. Focaud of Berzy advised Simon: “We must work out how to maintain a long siege so as to destroy the town. Every day we must make raids across the whole country so as to deprive them of corn, grain, of trees too and vines, of salt, timber and other provisions. In this way we shall force them to surrender.”
By January 1218, reinforcements from France were starting to arrive, and more poured in in May and June, but although savage assaults were mounted from both sides of the city, supported by elaborate siege equipment, it was never wholly closed off, and this enabled the citizens to receive reinforcements. When Simon de Montfort was killed by a stone from a mangonel on 26 June 1217, the siege was abandoned. The city was besieged for a third time in 1228, but ultimately it surrendered to the overwhelming power of the French monarchy.
In fact, many sieges of cities were unsuccessful. Frederick II had huge resources, but at Brescia in 1238 his large army was poorly organized and unable to prevent effective sallies by the besieged. At Parma in 1247, his allies blocked the river to prevent food entering the city, which soon became desperate, but a sally caught his forces unprepared. In 1243, tiny Viterbo defected to his enemies at a time when he had dismissed his forces and defied the troops that he raised with Pisan loans. In 1241, the small city of Faenza eventually fell after a bitter six-month siege, which deflected his army from Bologna, its main goal.
By contrast, as we have seen, Henry II and his son Richard had been able to reduce castles with relative ease. The castle was formidable against an enemy with limited wealth and where, as in thirteenth-century Germany, warfare was on a limited scale, but only an exceptionally strong castle could resist a monarch who could mobilize resources on Henry II’s scale.
In Spain, the Christian kingdoms exploited the strength of cities to defend their frontiers. As the kingdoms advanced into Islamic territory, they planted cities to secure their new frontiers. Citizens were recruited by the offer of land, on generous terms. Fired by a mixture of religious zeal, well founded fear and anxiety to defend what they held, the settlers made good garrisons quite ready to sally out to attack Muslim ravagers and to offer determined resistance in the face of greater attacks. Even when Alfonso VIII was defeated at Alarcos in 1195, the Muslims were unable to make much progress in reconquering the lands, because the cities stood against them, only three minor ones falling.
Attacks on cities were relatively uncommon in northern Europe before the major growth of cities in the thirteenth century. London was besieged by Cnut in 1016, but it offered no resistance to Duke William in 1066 and stood no siege in the civil wars under Stephen, King John and Henry III, although it played a role in all three upheavals.
In Germany, attacks on cities were very frequent, and were essentially “a by-product of the fractured political landscape into which Germany and its sub-regions developed by the thirteenth century”. The dissolution of the kingdom, especially after the death of Frederick II in 1250, produced a chaos of competing forces – many of them very small indeed – and free cities of one kind or another loomed large amongst them. These sieges almost always failed, in part because of the strength of town fortifications, but the major factor must surely have been the small size of the competing political units and their inability to sustain conflict over a long period of time.
Siege was a test of political will and resources on both sides. The defenders needed to provide food and to maintain hope of ultimate success: the task was very much the same on the attackers’ side, complicated by the need to provide shelter and an infrastructure of support. Strong fortifications were an important factor in this struggle of wills.
The fortifications of cities were not, in principle, very different from those of castles. Milan’s in 1158 incorporated a Roman arch which stood outside the main circuit, while Alessandria was a new city, whose fortifications at the time of Barbarossa’s unsuccessful siege of 1174–5 were probably earth and timber. At the time of the First Crusade vulnerable sections of the defences of Antioch and Jerusalem were reinforced by double walls, and the twelfth-century sources indicate that most of the important cities of the Palestinian littoral enjoyed this form of protection: these were almost certainly the inheritance of the Roman past.
The great walls of Constantinople were of course the example of systematic fortification. Such relatively sophisticated structures were rare in the West. Crema had a double wall at the time of its siege in 1159–60, while at Carcassonne in 1228–39 a strong concentric pattern was developed, and this was used in the new fortifications at Oxford shortly after. St Louis constructed Aigues Mortes as a modern fortification from which to launch his crusades. In the East, he recreated Caeserea with massive stone-lined ditches and a steeply raked talus on the wall side, on the model of Belvoir. Acre’s walls were rebuilt on much the same pattern in the thirteenth century; the city fell to al-Ashraf after a siege of only six weeks, but its garrison was not numerous and the enemy was overwhelming.
In North Wales, the walls of Conway and Caernarfon shared the modern sophistication of the castles that sheltered them. In these advanced fortifications, all of the devices found in the castle – machicolations, angled arrow-slits and sally-gates – were emulated. Such complex structures were probably as rare as concentric castles, although the strengthening of city defences with stone walls was a feature of the thirteenth century, and barbicans seem to have been a common addition at weak points. Determination compensated for lack of walls at Toulouse in 1217, and at Alessandria from 27 October 1174 to 12 April 1175, when the threat posed by the army of the Lombard League persuaded Barbarossa to raise the siege.
