Treaty of Jaffa

In February 1229 the Ayyubid sultan of Egypt, al-Kamil, and the emperor Frederick II concluded an agreement at Jaffa that returned Jerusalem to Christian hands without a battle. Frederick had arrived in the East in 1228 under excommunication, having repeatedly delayed his promised crusade, and commanded a force far too small for serious conquest. Al-Kamil, for his part, was preoccupied with a power struggle among the Ayyubid family confederation, above all with his nephew an-Nasir Dawud, who held Damascus. The sultan had earlier dangled Jerusalem before Frederick as the price of an alliance, and although the political situation had shifted by the time the emperor landed, months of negotiation produced a settlement.

The treaty established a truce of ten years and restored Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth to the Latin kingdom, together with a corridor connecting Jerusalem to the coast. The terms were carefully hedged: the Haram al-Sharif, with the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque, remained under Muslim custody with free access for Muslim worship, the city's walls had already been dismantled and its defensibility remained limited, and outlying Muslim villages were excluded from Latin jurisdiction.

Both principals were denounced by their own sides. Preachers in Damascus mourned the surrender of the holy city, which an-Nasir Dawud used against his uncle, while the Latin patriarch placed Jerusalem itself under interdict because the excommunicate emperor had recovered it; Frederick wore the crown in the church of the Holy Sepulchre in March 1229 in a ceremony without clergy, then left the East within weeks as war against his Italian lands loomed. The arrangement nevertheless held roughly to its term. Latin Jerusalem survived precariously until 1244, when Khwarazmian horsemen in Ayyubid service sacked the city, ending Christian rule there permanently.