In the tumultuous world of the Middle Ages, the line between law enforcement and lawbreaking was often blurred, and sometimes, the enforcers were as corrupt as the medieval criminals they pursued.
By Steve Tibble
The boundaries between medieval cops and medieval robbers were fine indeed. The police, where they existed at all, were experts at bribery. They had the law on their side and ready access to violence (or the threat of violence) at their disposal.
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The bailli, or chief of police, of Arras in the late thirteenth century, for instance, was an infamous individual by the name of Jehan de Beauquesne. He was so notoriously corrupt that he was eventually arraigned by the Count of Artois for his offences. The scale of his wrongdoing was massive – no less than fifty criminal cases with which he had been involved were retrospectively investigated for bribery, extortion and other illegal practices. Almost everything he touched was corrupt.
In 1294, Jehan de Beauquesne’s corruption came to light with the murder of Jehan de Feuchi. On an otherwise quiet night in Arras, Jehan de Beauquesne and his sidekicks were summoned to the scene of a violent crime. A corpse – that of the late Mr de Feuchi – lay on the ground. The fight which had culminated in his murder had been watched by many bystanders, eight of whom were still there when the police arrived – ostensibly, this was an open-and-shut case.
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Except that it wasn’t. The murderer, a man named Robert de Cans, was allowed to leave the scene – and the police decided not to press charges, even though the crime was of the most serious kind. It was later established that the murderer had paid them off.
Presumably, the witnesses were corrupt too. Perhaps they were Robert’s friends, who could be relied upon to give false testimony – or perhaps they too had been bribed to stay quiet. Most said, entirely implausibly given the presence of a dead body, that the alleged crime had never taken place.
Another case was just as shocking. Two men – named Wauteron Li Buriers and Sousse Soumillons – had raped a woman just outside the city walls of Arras. The incident had taken place in broad daylight, and in front of witnesses. Again, one might imagine that this would be an open-and-shut case.
But no. Beauquesne opened up discussions with the rapists’ friends and dropped all charges in return for a large cash payment.
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Sometimes, when the case was less serious, or there was just less money to extort, he would not even charge much to pervert the course of justice – Jehan had his own sliding scale of corruption. In the aftermath of a drunken fight in 1294, for example, a dispute ended in what we might call today ‘wounding with intent’. Beauquesne asked the assailants’ friends to pay for it all to go away – but, when no money was forthcoming, he was prepared to drop the matter altogether in return for some wine.
‘Justice’ was scarce – but it could also be cheap.
The count of Arras did his best to root out the problem – his investigators found that a crude, and consistently corrupt, business model was in place. Beauquesne’s standard approach was to draw up charges verbally, put the consequences to the guilty men and their friends – and then offer to drop all charges in return for a cash sum. Or, where that was not possible, as we have seen, for goods or services in lieu.
He was found guilty of taking massive bribes, over a period of several years, in order to pervert the course of justice. He was dismissed from his role as bailli. So far, so good. Medieval justice, one might imagine, was slow to stop his corrupt ways, but at least it had eventually brought him to justice.
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It was not such a clear-cut, happy ending, however. Within three years, the irrepressible Beauquesne was back working in the senior ranks of law enforcement, this time as bailli of nearby St Omer.
Money and contacts had presumably allowed him to jump back into the moneymaking scam that passed for policing in thirteenth-century France.
Corruption in the Latin East
While corruption plagued France, it was not all bad elsewhere. Ibn Jubayr, the twelfth-century Spanish traveller and merchant, had uniformly low expectations of officialdom in general, and Muslim officialdom in particular – ports and their duty offices were, as he knew all too well, traditional places where merchants might be stung for ‘irregular fees’ by the local officials.
He left a colourful account of his dealings with the tax officials at Acre, capital of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. As Acre was held by the Crusaders, Ibn Jubayr was expecting even worse treatment than usual. ‘We were taken to the custom-house,’ he later wrote, ‘which is a khan [that is, an inn or caravanserai] prepared to accommodate the caravan. Before the doors are stone benches, spread with carpets, where are the Christian clerks of the Customs, with their ebony ink-stands decorated with gold…All the dues collected go to the contractor for the customs, who pays a vast sum [to the government, for the privilege of doing so].’
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The potential for corruption and coercion in this situation was obvious and, from the tone of Ibn Jubayr’s account, it was something he was fully expecting – from his perspective, it was all very depressing, but just part of the cost of doing business.
14th century map of Acre – British Library Additional MS 27376 f. 190r
In the event, however, he was pleasantly surprised at how well everything went.
The merchants were charged the correct dues. Those who claimed to have ‘nothing to declare’ had their baggage searched. But again, contrary to all expectations, ‘all this was done with civility and respect, and without harshness and unfairness’. In fact, commercial relations between the Franks of the Crusader States and their Muslim subjects were so good that Ibn Jubayr found it altogether rather troubling – the kind of thing which might encourage Muslims to live far too comfortably alongside unbelievers.
He worried that his coreligionists ‘have been seduced, for they observe how unlike them in ease and comfort are their brethren in the Muslim regions under their [Muslim] governors. This is one of the misfortunes afflicting the Muslims. The Muslim community bewails the injustice of a landlord of its own faith, and applauds the conduct of its opponent and enemy, the Frankish landlord, and is accustomed to justice from him.’
Ibn Jubayr’s comments may be exaggerated to make a point, but they clearly say as much about the endemic corruption in Muslim territories as they do about the Franks.
Fraud and Punishment in Mamluk Egypt
Ibn Jubayr’s jaundiced view of the corruptibility of Muslim officials was not entirely without foundation. In April 1288, for example, the state administrator of Egypt, one of the leading Mamluk ministers, the emir Alam al-Dīn, was arrested for fraud on a massive scale. His corruption had been so astonishingly blatant that it was almost endearing.
The emir had used his high status to gain access to the state-run arsenals of Egypt. He then sent his men into the storerooms to gather the stocks of weapons together and shipped them up north for sale to the regime’s arch-enemies – the Franks. When caught, he came up with an ingenious, albeit transparently bogus, explanation for his bold money-making scheme.
He admitted that he had indeed ‘sold a number of spears and weapons from the sultanic storehouses to the Franks’. But that was, he suggested, just a ruse. ‘Yes’, he said, ‘I sold them for a hefty profit and a clear advantage. The profit was that I sold those spears and weapons which were old and falling apart, and were of little benefit. I also sold them at twice their value, and worth, just so the Franks would know that we are selling them weapons out of contempt for them, and taking them lightly, and because we do not care about them.’
This was a highly imaginative effort on the part of Alam al-Din. Not surprisingly, however, the sultan’s agents were unimpressed. Their riposte was to the point and had the advantage of being far more plausible. The Franks, they said, ‘do not allow weapons to be sold to them in the manner at which you have hinted. What is common knowledge among them, passed back and forth by the enemies, is that they say that the ruler of the Egyptian homelands and Syrian lands is in such need [of money] that he sells his weapons to his enemies. That is about what they say!’
Drawing of a street in Cairo – from The Story of Cairo, by Stanley Lane-Poole”. J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd.: London, 1918
The sultan issued orders for Alam al-Din’s property to be seized, ‘and fined him a large amount of gold. He was not allowed to sell any of his horses, his weapons or the provisions or saddles of the emirate. The sum to be paid had to be delivered in cash.’ Alam al-Din was tortured to ensure that he understood how little leverage he had left, and to speed up his compliance.
Bankrupted and disgraced, the emir’s other misdemeanours quickly came to light. Amongst these were the even more serious offences of kidnapping and human trafficking. Police raided his private prison and freed various individuals from whose families he had been extracting money.
A Multicultural Crime Gone Wrong
Occasionally, there were even heart-warming stories of multi-cultural fraud.
One day, a Muslim, a Christian and a Jew decided to steal some agricultural produce belonging to the Mamluk Sultan Qalawun – it sounds like a bad joke, but they very nearly failed to see the funny side of it.
In 1285, a senior Arab cavalryman of Damascus, a certain al-Shihab b. al-Dubaysi, had come up with a clever ‘get rich quick’ scheme. Together with his two partners, a local Christian and a ‘Jewish Samaritan’, he had made elaborate forgeries of letters purporting to be from the Sultan – and they had used these letters to divert some of the harvests from the Sueth region (which had, many years previously, been farmed as a condominium with the Franks) for their own use.
Their scam had been discovered, however. Reports of their crimes had been sent to the Sultan himself. He was furious and decided to sentence them to punishments which were significantly in excess of the legal guidelines – probably because of the seriousness involved in the lèse-majesté of forging documents in his name.
The Muslim perpetrator was sentenced to having his tongue cut out, and to then be ‘publicly exposed’ (presumably tied and left as a high-profile warning to others). His colleagues were to be crucified (‘nailed up’) as a similarly visible deterrent.
Qalawun was subsequently advised by a brave judge that his sentencing had been unduly, perhaps even illegally, harsh, and their punishment was scaled down. Instead, the Sultan’s men were instructed ‘to beat them and imprison them, as a warning to prevent anyone from doing this other than them’.
Hardly a happy ending for the fraudsters.
But, although they perhaps did not realise it at the time, it could have been far worse.
Want to learn more about crime during the Crusades? Check out Steve Tibble’s new book Crusader Criminals: The Knights Who Went Rogue in the Holy Land.
Dr Steve Tibble is a graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge and London University. He is an Honorary Research Associate at Royal Holloway College, University of London. Steve is a leading authority on warfare and violence in the crusading era.
In the tumultuous world of the Middle Ages, the line between law enforcement and lawbreaking was often blurred, and sometimes, the enforcers were as corrupt as the medieval criminals they pursued.
By Steve Tibble
The boundaries between medieval cops and medieval robbers were fine indeed. The police, where they existed at all, were experts at bribery. They had the law on their side and ready access to violence (or the threat of violence) at their disposal.
The bailli, or chief of police, of Arras in the late thirteenth century, for instance, was an infamous individual by the name of Jehan de Beauquesne. He was so notoriously corrupt that he was eventually arraigned by the Count of Artois for his offences. The scale of his wrongdoing was massive – no less than fifty criminal cases with which he had been involved were retrospectively investigated for bribery, extortion and other illegal practices. Almost everything he touched was corrupt.
In 1294, Jehan de Beauquesne’s corruption came to light with the murder of Jehan de Feuchi. On an otherwise quiet night in Arras, Jehan de Beauquesne and his sidekicks were summoned to the scene of a violent crime. A corpse – that of the late Mr de Feuchi – lay on the ground. The fight which had culminated in his murder had been watched by many bystanders, eight of whom were still there when the police arrived – ostensibly, this was an open-and-shut case.
Except that it wasn’t. The murderer, a man named Robert de Cans, was allowed to leave the scene – and the police decided not to press charges, even though the crime was of the most serious kind. It was later established that the murderer had paid them off.
Presumably, the witnesses were corrupt too. Perhaps they were Robert’s friends, who could be relied upon to give false testimony – or perhaps they too had been bribed to stay quiet. Most said, entirely implausibly given the presence of a dead body, that the alleged crime had never taken place.
Another case was just as shocking. Two men – named Wauteron Li Buriers and Sousse Soumillons – had raped a woman just outside the city walls of Arras. The incident had taken place in broad daylight, and in front of witnesses. Again, one might imagine that this would be an open-and-shut case.
But no. Beauquesne opened up discussions with the rapists’ friends and dropped all charges in return for a large cash payment.
Sometimes, when the case was less serious, or there was just less money to extort, he would not even charge much to pervert the course of justice – Jehan had his own sliding scale of corruption. In the aftermath of a drunken fight in 1294, for example, a dispute ended in what we might call today ‘wounding with intent’. Beauquesne asked the assailants’ friends to pay for it all to go away – but, when no money was forthcoming, he was prepared to drop the matter altogether in return for some wine.
‘Justice’ was scarce – but it could also be cheap.
The count of Arras did his best to root out the problem – his investigators found that a crude, and consistently corrupt, business model was in place. Beauquesne’s standard approach was to draw up charges verbally, put the consequences to the guilty men and their friends – and then offer to drop all charges in return for a cash sum. Or, where that was not possible, as we have seen, for goods or services in lieu.
He was found guilty of taking massive bribes, over a period of several years, in order to pervert the course of justice. He was dismissed from his role as bailli. So far, so good. Medieval justice, one might imagine, was slow to stop his corrupt ways, but at least it had eventually brought him to justice.
It was not such a clear-cut, happy ending, however. Within three years, the irrepressible Beauquesne was back working in the senior ranks of law enforcement, this time as bailli of nearby St Omer.
Money and contacts had presumably allowed him to jump back into the moneymaking scam that passed for policing in thirteenth-century France.
Corruption in the Latin East
While corruption plagued France, it was not all bad elsewhere. Ibn Jubayr, the twelfth-century Spanish traveller and merchant, had uniformly low expectations of officialdom in general, and Muslim officialdom in particular – ports and their duty offices were, as he knew all too well, traditional places where merchants might be stung for ‘irregular fees’ by the local officials.
He left a colourful account of his dealings with the tax officials at Acre, capital of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. As Acre was held by the Crusaders, Ibn Jubayr was expecting even worse treatment than usual. ‘We were taken to the custom-house,’ he later wrote, ‘which is a khan [that is, an inn or caravanserai] prepared to accommodate the caravan. Before the doors are stone benches, spread with carpets, where are the Christian clerks of the Customs, with their ebony ink-stands decorated with gold…All the dues collected go to the contractor for the customs, who pays a vast sum [to the government, for the privilege of doing so].’
The potential for corruption and coercion in this situation was obvious and, from the tone of Ibn Jubayr’s account, it was something he was fully expecting – from his perspective, it was all very depressing, but just part of the cost of doing business.
In the event, however, he was pleasantly surprised at how well everything went.
The merchants were charged the correct dues. Those who claimed to have ‘nothing to declare’ had their baggage searched. But again, contrary to all expectations, ‘all this was done with civility and respect, and without harshness and unfairness’. In fact, commercial relations between the Franks of the Crusader States and their Muslim subjects were so good that Ibn Jubayr found it altogether rather troubling – the kind of thing which might encourage Muslims to live far too comfortably alongside unbelievers.
He worried that his coreligionists ‘have been seduced, for they observe how unlike them in ease and comfort are their brethren in the Muslim regions under their [Muslim] governors. This is one of the misfortunes afflicting the Muslims. The Muslim community bewails the injustice of a landlord of its own faith, and applauds the conduct of its opponent and enemy, the Frankish landlord, and is accustomed to justice from him.’
Ibn Jubayr’s comments may be exaggerated to make a point, but they clearly say as much about the endemic corruption in Muslim territories as they do about the Franks.
Fraud and Punishment in Mamluk Egypt
Ibn Jubayr’s jaundiced view of the corruptibility of Muslim officials was not entirely without foundation. In April 1288, for example, the state administrator of Egypt, one of the leading Mamluk ministers, the emir Alam al-Dīn, was arrested for fraud on a massive scale. His corruption had been so astonishingly blatant that it was almost endearing.
The emir had used his high status to gain access to the state-run arsenals of Egypt. He then sent his men into the storerooms to gather the stocks of weapons together and shipped them up north for sale to the regime’s arch-enemies – the Franks. When caught, he came up with an ingenious, albeit transparently bogus, explanation for his bold money-making scheme.
He admitted that he had indeed ‘sold a number of spears and weapons from the sultanic storehouses to the Franks’. But that was, he suggested, just a ruse. ‘Yes’, he said, ‘I sold them for a hefty profit and a clear advantage. The profit was that I sold those spears and weapons which were old and falling apart, and were of little benefit. I also sold them at twice their value, and worth, just so the Franks would know that we are selling them weapons out of contempt for them, and taking them lightly, and because we do not care about them.’
This was a highly imaginative effort on the part of Alam al-Din. Not surprisingly, however, the sultan’s agents were unimpressed. Their riposte was to the point and had the advantage of being far more plausible. The Franks, they said, ‘do not allow weapons to be sold to them in the manner at which you have hinted. What is common knowledge among them, passed back and forth by the enemies, is that they say that the ruler of the Egyptian homelands and Syrian lands is in such need [of money] that he sells his weapons to his enemies. That is about what they say!’
The sultan issued orders for Alam al-Din’s property to be seized, ‘and fined him a large amount of gold. He was not allowed to sell any of his horses, his weapons or the provisions or saddles of the emirate. The sum to be paid had to be delivered in cash.’ Alam al-Din was tortured to ensure that he understood how little leverage he had left, and to speed up his compliance.
Bankrupted and disgraced, the emir’s other misdemeanours quickly came to light. Amongst these were the even more serious offences of kidnapping and human trafficking. Police raided his private prison and freed various individuals from whose families he had been extracting money.
A Multicultural Crime Gone Wrong
Occasionally, there were even heart-warming stories of multi-cultural fraud.
One day, a Muslim, a Christian and a Jew decided to steal some agricultural produce belonging to the Mamluk Sultan Qalawun – it sounds like a bad joke, but they very nearly failed to see the funny side of it.
In 1285, a senior Arab cavalryman of Damascus, a certain al-Shihab b. al-Dubaysi, had come up with a clever ‘get rich quick’ scheme. Together with his two partners, a local Christian and a ‘Jewish Samaritan’, he had made elaborate forgeries of letters purporting to be from the Sultan – and they had used these letters to divert some of the harvests from the Sueth region (which had, many years previously, been farmed as a condominium with the Franks) for their own use.
Their scam had been discovered, however. Reports of their crimes had been sent to the Sultan himself. He was furious and decided to sentence them to punishments which were significantly in excess of the legal guidelines – probably because of the seriousness involved in the lèse-majesté of forging documents in his name.
The Muslim perpetrator was sentenced to having his tongue cut out, and to then be ‘publicly exposed’ (presumably tied and left as a high-profile warning to others). His colleagues were to be crucified (‘nailed up’) as a similarly visible deterrent.
Qalawun was subsequently advised by a brave judge that his sentencing had been unduly, perhaps even illegally, harsh, and their punishment was scaled down. Instead, the Sultan’s men were instructed ‘to beat them and imprison them, as a warning to prevent anyone from doing this other than them’.
Hardly a happy ending for the fraudsters.
But, although they perhaps did not realise it at the time, it could have been far worse.
Want to learn more about crime during the Crusades? Check out Steve Tibble’s new book Crusader Criminals: The Knights Who Went Rogue in the Holy Land.
Please visit the publisher’s website or buy this book
on Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk
Dr Steve Tibble is a graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge and London University. He is an Honorary Research Associate at Royal Holloway College, University of London. Steve is a leading authority on warfare and violence in the crusading era.
You can check out Steve’s other books: Templars: The Knights Who Made Britain, The Crusader Armies and The Crusader Strategy
Further Readings:
Baybars’ Successors – Ibn al-Furāt on Qalāwūn and al-Ashraf, Cook, D. ed. and tr., Farnham, 2020, pp. 189-90.
Chronicles of Qalāwūn and his Son al-Ashraf Khalīl, Cook, D. ed. and tr. 2020 p. 140.
Skoda, H., Medieval Violence: Physical Brutality in Northern France, 1270-1330, Oxford, 2013.
The Travels of Ibn Jubayr, tr. R.J.C. Broadhurst, London, 1952.
Top Image: British Library, MS Royal 14 E III, f. 42r
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