The World of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  The Fourth Crusade prompted a refashioning of funding and administration when Innocent III launched a new mass eastern crusade in 1213. The bull Quia Maior offered the crusade remissio peccatorum, remission of sins, to anyone who contributed by personal service, proxy, subsidy or other material assistance. At the same time, overturning the official line adopted since Urban II, there was to be no restriction or test of suitability on who could take the cross, with the vow now able to be commuted, redeemed or deferred.26 Formally systematised by Gregory IX in 1234, this policy gave non-combatants – including the old, young, infirm, aged, and weak, men and women – and those of modest means access to the crusade’s uniquely comprehensive spiritual privilege, extending its social range while, through cash redemptions of vows, widening the source of funds. This spiritual largesse was supported by licensed regional teams of preachers, often led by University of Paris-trained theologians, keeping in direct contact with the papal curia. Congregations were encouraged to donate alms, bequeath legacies, and join in special prayers and processions. Chests for crusade funds were placed in parish churches across western Europe. Building on precedent, by further institutionalising crusade processions, prayers, vow redemptions, alms and legacies, Innocent III sought to embed crusading in the Catholic culture of the west. More directly, the pope raised taxes. The Fourth Crusade had demonstrated the consequences of the failure of his 1199 tax scheme. Now, Innocent deliberately secured the explicit assent of the assembled clerical representatives at the Fourth Lateran General Council of the Church in 1215 to an ecclesiastical income tax of a twentieth, a model for papal crusade taxes for another century and a quarter (the last such general tax was authorised in 1333) and a fiscal precedent for the rest of the Middle Ages.

  SACRED BOOTY

  Veneration of relics defined the spiritual mentality of medieval Christendom and nowhere more obviously than in the crusades. For believers, relics provided intimate tangible contact between the present and the eternal, proof of the living truth of the Gospel promise of salvation (the common medieval word for relic, pignus, also meant a pledge). Crusading’s initial inspiration focused on the repossession of the most numinous relic of all, the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem regarded as a liminal space between earth and heaven, the terrestrial and the transcendent. The Holy Land provided the unique repository of physical remains of the Apostles and material witness to the life of Christ, the places He visited, the objects He touched, the Passion and especially the True Cross. As the setting of the early Church, the scene of miracles and martyrdoms, the whole of the eastern Mediterranean provided fertile ground for relic hunters. Just as pilgrims had done before, crusaders were avid collectors, by purchase, gift, theft, plunder or discovery. The excavation of the supposed Holy Lance briefly and vitally transformed the crusaders’ morale at Antioch in 1098, while the convenient unearthing of a fragment of the True Cross at Jerusalem the following year provided the new Frankish settlement with its most iconic totem. The range of relics transported westwards is indicated by a fairly representative list of items brought back from Palestine and given to Gascon monasteries in the 1150s: splinters of the True Cross; Christ’s blood mixed with earth; pieces of Christ’s cradle, the Virgin Mary’s tomb and the rock where Christ prayed at Gethsemane; hairs of the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalen; and a miscellany of mementos of scriptural events and characters: the Apostles, John the Baptist, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Stephen Protomartyr.27 Following their supposed role at Antioch in 1098, eastern martial saints were increasingly popular: Robert of Flanders brought back St George’s arm and a portion of ribcage in 1099.28 All had been authenticated by reputable Holy Land donors, who may have turned tidy profits on such transactions. Certainly the supply seemed limitless. The continuous flood of relics carried back to western Europe by crusaders and pilgrims served many purposes: securing mutually beneficial patronage links between monasteries and patrons; enhancing the attraction of abbeys that housed the new holy objects as lucrative pilgrimage sites; promoting an internationalisation of scriptural and Holy Land saints’ cults; gilding the reputation and securing the memory of those who had brought them. Through acquisition in the east on crusade, even obviously secular objects, such as luxury textiles, gems or military equipment, could acquire quasi-spiritual significance when presented as gifts to shrines and religious houses. Some, such as the Fatimid silks at Apt and Cadouin (see p. 101) or the Sacro Catino in Genoa (a Roman basin of Egyptian emerald glass looted from Caesarea in 1101), became rebranded as actual relics themselves.29

  79. The Sacro Catino, Cathedral of San Lorenzo, Genoa, acquired from Caesarea in 1101.

  80. Byzantine loot: the Archangel Michael, St Mark’s, Venice.

  While relic-gathering was integral to the expectations and experience of all eastern crusading, nothing compared with the orgy of theft by ‘holy robbers’ at Constantinople, Christendom’s greatest depository of holy detritus, after its capture by the Fourth Crusade in 1204.30 In the mayhem following the city’s fall, crusading clergy and laymen alike systematically scoured the churches and monasteries of the Byzantine capital in search of relics to transport home to glorify their own or a local church. Using trickery, bullying and force, some, like the bishops of Soissons and Halberstadt and the abbot of Pairis in Alsace, made off with cartloads of relics and reliquaries, as well as gold, silver, gems, silks and tapestries to decorate their new shrines, to be welcomed as miraculous benefactors when they returned home with their loot, ‘triumphal spoils of holy plunder’.31 Laymen were equally eager: the great Burgundian monastery of Cluny acquired the head of St Clement thanks to the burgling skills of a local noble crusader, Dalmas of Sercy.32 The knightly chronicler Robert of Clari donated his probably purloined relics of the Passion to the monastery of St Pierre, Corbie. The trade did not stop in 1204. One calculation identified over 300 individual objects that reached western Europe taken between 1205 and 1215, with forty-six feasts instituted to commemorate the arrival of new relics in the west.33 The benefits were clear, in new foci for miracles, a quickening of the pilgrim trade and the consequent rise in some ecclesiastical incomes, and hence increased investment in buildings and local infrastructure. The fortune of the previously struggling monastery at Bromholm in Norfolk was made thanks to the arrival in 1205 of a piece of the True Cross stolen from Constantinople. However, this sacred contraband created a glut on the market that highlighted the problem of duplicates and fakes. Relics were often subject to scrutiny of their authenticity, none more famously than the Holy Lance of Antioch during the First Crusade (a trial by fire proving inconclusive but seriously undermining its reputation). After 1204, the issue became so acute that the Fourth Lateran General Council of the Church in 1215 imposed a papal licensing system for all newly venerated relics to protect the faithful from ‘lying stories or false documents as has commonly happened in many places on account of the desire for profit’.34 The need for authentication led to a trade in provenances in Constantinople and a slew of simultaneously celebratory and exculpatory narratives of the Fourth Crusade designed to validate legitimacy of both relic and ownership, the latter often no less dubious than the former. However, despite the queasiness of some authorities, the centrality of relics persisted. Crusade preachers regularly used splinters of the True Cross as props, while Louis IX of France integrated his possession of Passion relics, especially the Crown of Thorns acquired from Constantinople via the Venetians, into his vision of sacral kingship and promotion of the crusade. After his canonisation in 1297, in a sort of sacred relay, his cult generated relics of its own.35

  The promotional campaign emphasised the crusade as a metaphor and exemplar for the Christian life. Innocent’s enthusiasm for the crusade’s fusion of religious commitment and political action, while, as Quia Maior made clear, never losing sight of the primacy of the Holy Land as an objective, prompted the application of crusade formulae – cross, indulgence, privileges, prayers, processions, etc. – in various configurations to other arenas: against enemies of t
he papacy in Italy and Sicily; heretics in Languedoc; Muslim rulers in Spain and pagans in the Baltic. Such were the pope’s predilections that petitioners actively sought the perceived benefits of crusade institutions for their own local battles, as did the bishop of Riga in the eastern Baltic in 1215. Victims, such as the Languedoc counts in 1215, facing a crusade against alleged heresy in their lands, argued equally vigorously for their cancellation.36 Innocent III permanently influenced how future crusades were conducted and the ways in which crusading permeated western European society. His policies came close to establishing a near-permanent crusade by disseminating a sense of existential crisis, depicting Christendom beset by enemies: Turks in the east; Moors to the south; pagans in the north; and, no less toxic, within Christendom itself, heretics and dissenters. Popular mood was focused by the increased presence of preachers broadcasting messages of threat supported by the communal ritual of prayers and intercessory processions. The effectiveness of this programme received unexpected proof. In 1212 the failure of the Fourth Crusade, the dissemination of news of the dire threats to the faith and preachers’ rhetorical revivalist emphasis on the sanctity of Apostolic poverty provoked demonstrations and marches in northern France and the Rhineland later configured as the Children’s Crusade (see ‘The Children’s Crusade’, p. 258).37 Such awareness from those on the fringes of social power – the young, the rootless, the economically marginalised – revealed the reach of Innocent III’s proselytising.

  The new eastern crusade was intended as the most coherent yet. The well-attended Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 was framed by the call to the Holy Land crusade, part of an agenda including pastoral reform and the fight against heresy. At the council, the crusade led a programme of lay evangelisation including decrees establishing the doctrine of Real Presence of Christ’s Body and Blood in the eucharist and the requirement for annual oral confession, both sacramental measures involving access to God’s grace and salvation paralleled in the penitential commitment of crusading. The council confirmed the crusade preliminaries, with a few modifications, and fixed the time and place of the muster (Messina or Bari, 1 June 1217) and Egypt as the destination. Details, including bans on tournaments and trade with the enemy, were collected in the decree Ad Liberandam, which was to serve as a model for later crusades. The programme of preaching and recruitment initiated, in some regions, a decade-long engagement with the eastern crusade, only ending with the controversial expedition of the excommunicated Frederick II of Germany and Sicily in 1228–9. This commitment sustained through three pontificates (Innocent III, who died in 1216; Honorius III, 1216–27; and Gregory IX, 1227–41) confirmed crusading as a familiar and regular rather than exceptional feature of devotional life and politics, a process enhanced by parallel crusading ventures in the north-eastern Baltic (against pagan natives) and Languedoc (against heretics).

  Recruitment demonstrated the continued popularity of eastern crusading, although, unusually, this did not include the kingdom of France, due to war with the king of England, the distraction of the Languedoc crusade, and the unpopularity of the papal legate, Robert Courson. In Germany, England and the cities of northern Italy, all regions of civil war and festering political rivalries, the crusade, as a neutral higher calling, provided context for conflict resolution. Details of recruitment, surviving in greater quantity than for previous expeditions, show the mobilisation of all sections of free society, women as well as men.38 As before, contingents revolved around traditional lordship and communal hierarchies. However, the scale of recruitment, combined with the absence of clearly established overall leadership, produced an uncoordinated muster. With sea travel now the only practicable means of transporting large armies, by the summer of 1217 two substantial coalitions gathered at opposite ends of Europe, one led by King Andrew of Hungary and Duke Leopold VI of Austria in the Adriatic, and the other, from Frisia, the Low Countries and the Rhineland, in the North Sea. Neither coalition stayed united. The Germans and Hungarians arrived separately at Acre in the late summer and autumn of 1217, to be followed the next spring by the northern Europeans, who had wintered severally in Iberia or Italy by which time Andrew of Hungary had already departed overland for home (January 1218). Staggered arrivals and departures became prominent features. The fluid rules for taking the cross and preachers’ tone of easy spiritual reward seem to have encouraged vow fulfilment based on personal contribution rather than strategic completion. Philip II in 1191 provided a precedent, while the short-term commitments of the Albigensian crusaders and the annual campaigners under the cross in Livonia offered immediate models.

  THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE

  Popular engagement with the crusade found exceptional expression in the spring and summer of 1212 when crowds of enthusiasts in the Low Countries, the Rhineland and parts of northern France gathered in marches proclaiming devotion to the cause of the liberation of the Holy Land and return of the True Cross. Conditioned by a generation of blanket crusade evangelism, these demonstrations took the form of mendicant penitential processions, probably stimulated by Innocent III’s institution of liturgical processions to solicit divine aid to counter Almohad advances in Spain in 1211 and the intense preaching campaign on behalf of the Albigensian Crusade in 1211–12. The deliberate promotion of an urgent sense of Christendom in crisis, coupled with preachers’ persistent emphasis on the virtues of apostolic poverty, moral purity and the redemptive power of the cross, served to draw attention both to the failures of the elite-led expeditions to the east and the consequent frustrations of those prevented from participating in the crusade and its benefits by virtue of their marginal social and economic status.

  The narrative of what happened in 1212 is impossible to determine with any certainty. Chronicle accounts cannot be reconciled, reflecting individual attempts to organise memories of events that appeared startling, eccentric and potentially unnervingly disruptive, from the start encouraging myths, morality tales and tall stories. What emerges is a picture of two centres of action. One in western Germany, focusing on traditional urban as well as rural centres of crusade recruitment, including Metz, Cologne and Speyer, appeared overtly directed towards the crusade to the Holy Land, with stories of massed processions from March to July, a leader called Nicholas carrying a tau cross, and of contingents carrying pilgrim insignia crossing the Alps into Italy and, largely vainly, seeking ships to the Levant. In the other area of agitation, in the Dunois, Chartrain and Ile de France south-west of Paris, the emphasis as recorded appeared more generally revivalist, although those marchers who converged on the abbey of St Denis near Paris for the annual Lendit Fair in June, apparently carried crosses and banners and chanted for the restoration of the True Cross. These were led, in some accounts, by a shepherd, Stephen of Cloyes, near Vendôme, a symbolically significant profession in populist religious fundamentalism. Direct association between these two contemporary movements may have been real, accidental, coincidental, non-existent, imaginary or merely literary.

  81. Modern myth images: the Children’s Crusade in the Rhineland by Gustave Doré, 1877.

  The intriguing element that has attracted subsequent attention came from descriptions of participants as pueri, literally ‘children’, but more likely indicating the powerless and rootless. Descriptions identify those involved as being on the fringes of the settled social hierarchy: youths, including girls; adolescents; the unmarried; the old; shepherds; carters, ploughmen, farm labourers, artisans. Whether any reached Palestine is doubtful, although there were stories of some ‘crusaders’ finding employment in Languedoc and one writer placed Nicholas at Damietta on the Fifth Crusade. But such accounts fit moral not historical narratives. Nonetheless, the uprisings of 1212 reveal an extensive social engagement with crusading, providing strong testimony to the cultural penetration of crusading as a social and religious ambition; to the effectiveness of sustained preaching in stirring popular response; and to the existence of political awareness and agency among groups ostensibly far removed from tradition
al political elites. The issues raised by the 1212 demonstrators – moral reform, the threats to Christendom, the redemptive power of the cross – precisely fitted papal policy, even though there is no mention of these events in surviving papal records. The 1212 marchers exposed the dynamic popular appeal of crusading later illustrated in the so-called Shepherds’ Crusades of 1251 and 1320 in France. They may also have exerted significant influence on the future direction of the crusade project. Faced by this potentially disruptive combination of popular enthusiasm with frustration at being excluded from the institutional apparatus and benefits of crusading, a year later, in his bull Quia Maior of 1213, Innocent III proposed a system of vow redemptions so that, regardless of military suitability, anyone could take the cross and enjoy crusade spiritual privileges while contributing whatever they could afford. This could thereby offer at least partial opportunity for direct general public involvement, a measure that at once recognised mass aspirations while simultaneously seeking to contain their expression.39

  12. Places associated with the Children’s Crusade.

  82. A crusading bishop’s mitre – that of James of Vitry.

  The early arrivals helped secure the environs of Acre and its food supplies, culminating in the fortification of the Athlit promontory twenty-five miles to the south, necessary preliminaries to an attack on Egypt.40 An alliance with the Seljuks of Iconium served to further protect the Outremer enclave. Once the northern European fleets had assembled at Acre, the only question for the crusaders and the king-regent of Jerusalem, John of Brienne (1210–25), widower of Queen regnant Mary (1205–12) and father of Queen Isabel II (1212–28), was which Egyptian port should be attacked. The choice fell on Damietta, at the head of the main eastern estuary of the Nile, already the target of a Byzantine-Frankish assault in 1169 and, unlike Alexandria, without a large western commercial presence. The combined crusader and Outremer fleet arrived off Damietta in late May 1217, the opening of a gruelling two-year siege that stretched the invaders’ logistics, technological ingenuity and morale to their limits. Internal divisions within the Ayyubid regime surrounding the death of Sultan al-Adil in August 1218, and the rocky succession of his son al-Kamil, failed to weaken Egyptian resistance, while the regular bi-annual reinforcement and departure of crusaders undermined their strategic focus and campaign camaraderie.