A History of the Crusades

by Jonathan Riley-Smith

  The Crucible Years and their Legacy

  ‘In order to acquire the Holy Land, three things are required above all: that is, wisdom, power, and charity.’ Thus Ramon Lull, in the preamble to his crusade treatise De acquisitione Terrae Sanctae (1309), set the agenda for the promotion of a recovery crusade. Wisdom (sapientia), in the form of advice, was not lacking. Lull himself was one of the most prominent and prolific of the many Latin Christians who penned recovery treatises in the decades between the Second Lyons Council and the beginning of the Anglo-French war. Sylvia Schein has listed twenty-six between the councils of Lyons and Vienne (1274–1314), after which there were still many to come. In terms of origin, status, affiliation, and expertise, the authors formed a cross-section of European male society (interestingly, there are no known contributions by women). They included kings (Henry II of Cyprus and Charles II of Naples), a leading French royal official (William of Nogaret), an assortment of bishops and mendicant friars, the masters of the leading military orders, an exiled Armenian prince, a Venetian businessman, and a Genoese physician. Some were armchair strategists, others experts, although this was not always apparent in their advice; all wrote for an audience, usually one of popes and kings, in the hope and expectation of action.

  This outpouring of counsel and exhortation was new, distinctive, and significant. It came about in part because popes from Gregory X onwards acted on a precedent of Innocent III— in this, as so often, the fons et origo of crusading developments—by soliciting advice. Most of the earliest surviving tracts and memoranda were written for the Second Lyons Council and the first full-blown recovery treatise, that of Fidenzio of Padua, was probably also a response to Gregory X’s appeal for written counsel, although it was not completed until shortly before the fall of Acre. Such appeals reflected a widespread perception of the need for radical and innovative thinking about virtually every aspect of crusade organization, from the form to be assumed by the expedition through to the disposition and protection of the conquered lands, if the mistakes of the past were not to be repeated. This constructive and unblinkered response to past errors led to something like a consensus of views emerging on many principal facets of the longed-for recovery crusade. The expedition should be preceded by a sustained blockade of the Mamluk lands, with the twin goals of depriving the sultan of essential war imports (including the slaves who were trained as his élite cavalry), and weakening his fisc. It should take place in two stages, the first of which (the passagium particulare) would establish a foothold, which the second (the passagium generale) would exploit. The crusade should be organized on a professional basis, well-funded, and subject to clear-cut, respected, and experienced leadership. Civilians and camp-followers should be excluded.

  It would be wrong either to exaggerate this consensus or to assume that the emerging blueprint was a workable one. Some theorists, including, surprisingly, the last master of the Templars, James of Molay, rejected the passagium particulare and favoured a single, all-out general passage. There was no agreement about where the passagium should land. Axes were liberally ground and politics constantly intruded. For the French theorists Peter Dubois and William of Nogaret the crusade was in part an instrument of Capetian dynastic ambitions, while even such a brilliant and altruistic thinker as Ramon Lull allowed himself to be heavily influenced by Aragonese and French interests, which he incorporated into his plans of attack. On the other hand, it would have been a waste of time writing in a political vacuum; it was unrealistic to try to disentangle the crusade from the dynastic and economic goals of the great powers, and one of the most striking features of the finest treatise writers, Lull and the Venetian Marino Sanudo Torsello, is the fact that their presence was welcomed at courts, assemblies, and church councils. They were great networkers and it is clear that the flow of ideas and influence was two-way.

  Whether or not the purged and reformed crusade which such men advocated had any chance of materializing is more difficult to judge, hinging as it did on the other two attributes which Lull considered necessary, charity (caritas) and power (potestas). Any attempt to gauge public sentiments about the crusade either on the basis of reactions to the disasters in the East—above all the loss of Acre—or on that of the response to crusade preaching, is all but doomed from the start. The first was too conditioned by special interests and the universal search for a scapegoat, while the second was distorted by the shift in official preaching towards the collection of funds in lieu of personal participation. There were, however, some telling, if short-lived, eruptions of popular interest not long after the fall of Acre. These were usually linked to the eschatological strand in crusade ideas. They were at odds with the advanced, professional form of crusade advocated by most of the theorists, but have the virtue of revealing that the theorists’ obsession with the recovery of the Holy Land touched the population at large when the mood was right. Such eruptions occurred at roughly ten-year intervals: in 1300, when news reached the West of the ilkhan Ghazan’s victory over the Mamluks at Homs, and in 1309 and 1320, when ‘peasants’ crusades’ in Germany and France demonstrated clearly that the poor were still susceptible to outbreaks of crusading zeal.

  Higher up the social scale, we are on firmer ground. Evidence is richer, and it is clear that the cult of chivalry, which attained its fullest elaboration at about the time of the fall of Acre, incorporated crusading as one of its defining characteristics. It was no coincidence that secular rulers so often chose to announce or launch their crusade plans in settings of chivalric splendour; indeed, this would be true as late as Philip the Good’s Feast of the Pheasant in 1454. Family traditions of crusading, particularly in France and England, also predisposed numerous nobles to respond enthusiastically to the projects which were hatched at the papal and royal courts. Their enthusiasm was increasingly tinged with suspicion about the motives and real intentions of those promoting the projects, and this expressed itself in greater wariness about undertaking the formal obligation of assuming the cross; but again and again, from the time of Edward I of England’s crusade plans in the 1280s, through to those of Philip VI of France in the early 1330s, recruitment of fighting men did prove possible.

  In fact one is led to the conclusion that it was the lack of potestas, rather than that of caritas, which brought the recovery projects to nothing. To explain why, it is necessary first to outline some of the enormous advances in military organization and financial support which were occurring, and together with the treatises came to form a permanent legacy of the Lyons council and the fervid planning of the following half-century. There was gradually emerging a practice of crusading which, while less streamlined and efficient than that envisaged by some of the theorists, was more in tune with trends in contemporary warfare and was therefore more likely to produce results. A movement towards contractual recruitment, with all its advantages in terms of control and accountability, can clearly be seen in the crusade planning of Edward I, Charles IV, and Philip VI. There was a growing appreciation of the importance of making full use of the West’s supremacy at sea, and not solely in terms of the projected naval embargo on the Mamluk lands. Due importance was vested in reconnaissance, spying, and the cultivation of allies amongst neutral powers. The need to adapt tactics to deal with differing circumstances and enemies was appreciated, and the provision of experts in siege warfare was anticipated. Overall, the balance between the mystical and the military, once a crusade had taken the field, was firmly tipped in favour of the latter, to a degree which it had not been even as recently as the campaigns of St Louis.

  The most significant breakthrough, however, came in funding. All the changes mentioned in the previous paragraph were expensive, and in order to handle the ever-mounting costs of crusading the Second Lyons Council proposed a tax on the laity throughout Christendom. This foundered on the rocks of suspicion and particularism, but the council achieved a lasting success with its other main financial measure, a six-year tenth levied on the entire Church. Clerical income taxes had been
recognized for some decades as the only reliable means of ensuring a continuous flow of funds for the crusades, but the procedures for assessing, collecting, and transmitting the funds had to date been haphazard. It was Gregory X’s greatest contribution to the movement that he grasped the nettle of placing this taxation on a firm institutional basis. The pope set up twenty-six collectorates and, in his bull Cum pro negotio of 1274, laid down detailed guidelines for the assessment of clerical revenues for tax purposes. In the years following Gregory’s death in 1276 his successors had to make amendments to his procedures, but by the death of Boniface VIII in 1303 the papacy possessed a comprehensive system of taxation on which it could draw to finance crusading ventures. Indeed, this system had by then come through its first major trial, in the shape of the numerous tenths and subsidies which the popes levied in order to finance the series of crusades which they waged against the rebel Sicilians and their allies between 1282 and 1302.

  Papal taxation of the Church was an extraordinary achievement. It can appear deceptively simple. In 1292, for example, the annual revenues of the bishop of Rochester were assessed at £42 2s. 2d., including rents, fisheries, mills, markets, and courts; it followed that he had to pay £4 4s.2 d. a year towards the tenth which Pope Nicholas IV had granted to Edward I for his crusade project. But this apparently straightforward reckoning was beset with difficulties. Should the tenth be based on an assessment of income made by an impartial investigator, which was time-consuming and quickly out-of date, or should payment be made retrospectively on the basis of a cleric’s conscience and his knowledge—not always accurate of course—of what his income for a given year had been? How should assessors and collectors be found and remunerated, and how should their work be monitored? How could the proceeds best be secured and transferred? In addition to this, there were two enormous groups of problems relating to the taxpayers and the secular leaders who received the money for crusading purposes. The means of resistance employed by clerics, from evasive measures and subterfuges to open defiance, were numerous and astute. And at the other end of the process, it was necessary to devise some means of ensuring that money handed over was actually spent on a crusade, that accounts were kept and checked, and that unspent proceeds were returned.

  These problems proved to be beyond solution: tax-evading clerics, fraudulent collectors, highwaymen, insolvent banking companies, and rulers who purloined crusade taxes, were unchanging features of the European socio-economic landscape throughout the late Middle Ages. Like most medieval systems of taxation, the papacy’s taxation of the Church was ramshackle, much-criticized and resented, costly yet inefficient. But for all its faults, it did provide a large proportion of the funds on which crusading had now come to depend, and it therefore made possible the continuation of the movement. It also, of course, actively stimulated that continuation. The levy of universal sixyear tenths for the crusade, not just at Lyons in 1274 but also at Clement V’s general council at Vienne in 1312, brought into existence vast sums of money which were supposed to be spent on a passage to the East, and therefore helped to keep this issue alive in the political sphere. And the readiness of the papal curia to grant an individual ruler a tax on his clergy, either directly for a crusade or for a cause which was depicted as essential preparation for such a venture, had much the same effect. The presence of the crusade in late medieval Europe was perhaps more than anything else that of the armies of collectors, bankers, and bureaucrats who busied themselves assembling and distributing the money without which nothing could be done.

  To a large degree, Lull’s potestas was money, and there was not enough of it for a recovery crusade; or more accurately, the political conditions of Europe around 1300 made it impossible for it to be sufficiently concentrated. The growing self-confidence and acute domestic needs of Christendom’s lay rulers meant that while they would accept papal taxation of the Church in their lands, particularly if they could hope to enjoy at least a share of the proceeds, they would not permit the export of those funds for use by another ruler who was supposedly organizing a passage to the Holy Land. No designated leader of a recovery crusade could therefore manage, in practice, to gather in the resources needed. Philip VI, who probably came nearest, in the early 1330s, to initiating a recovery passagium, tried to bypass this problem by collecting lay taxes within France, and by pressurizing the papal curia into bringing in funds from outside France and her satellite states. But the latter measure could not succeed because the papacy’s influence in the political sphere had weakened too much. There was a double irony here.

  It was Philip VI’s own uncle, Philip the Fair, who had glaringly highlighted this weakness in the course of his great struggle with Pope Boniface VIII; and the reason for Philip VI’s pressure was the creation of a papal taxation system which displayed the impressive extent of the authority which the papacy still wielded, by contrast, within the Church.

  Not surprisingly, few contemporaries had a clear perception of these subtle but vital shifts of power and authority, or of their impact on the crusade; the impression they received was of muddle, prevarication, and dissimulation on the part of their rulers. To use Anthony Luttrell’s striking phrase, it was ‘an epoch of crises and confusions’. Project after project was mooted with the aims of recovering the Holy Land, assisting Cyprus and Cilician Armenia, or seizing Constantinople back from the Greeks, these latter goals being viewed as preparatory to the former. Nearly all were abandoned, building up a massive fund of disillusionment. To rub salt into the wound of popular frustration, much crusading of one sort or another did take place; in 1309, for example, there were no fewer than three campaigns, in northern Italy, Granada, and the Aegean Sea. Above all, the fall of the Templars in 1307–12 provoked consternation and disarray. If it resolved, for some, the problem of who was to blame for the events of 1291 and settled, by force majeure, the vexed question of unifying the military orders, it also raised disturbing questions about the power and motives of the French crown. Faced with the repeated postponement of crusade programmes, the diversion of crusade funds by both popes and secular rulers, and the daunting strategic and financial problems involved in recovering the Holy Land, there is no doubt that some despaired of the latter. As we know from Humbert of Romans’s rejoinder to the critics of crusading, as early as 1274 some people agreed with Salimbene of Adam that ‘it is not the divine will that the Holy Sepulchre should be recovered’.

  In the last resort, the crisis which confronted the crusading movement towards the close of the thirteenth century was not resolved. Instead, two things happened. First, following the collapse of Philip VI’s crusade project in 1336, when the pope indefinitely postponed it, the recovery of the holy places slipped down the agenda. It survived, mainly for reasons of clerical convenience, in the terminology used to define the indulgence and privileges of each crucesignatus. More significantly, it continued to exert a powerful hold on the minds of some enthusiasts, such as Philip of Mézières; and at times, notably during the early 1360s and mid-1390s, it briefly re-emerged as a topic of discussion and planning in Christendom’s courts. But in general it became subsumed under other, more realistic goals. Secondly, as we shall see below, the new ideas, approaches, and structures which had been formulated under the pressure of defeat and in the hope of clinging on to or recovering the Holy Land, both invigorated existing areas of crusading and helped to create new ones. This is not a point to be stretched too far: it was local circumstances, active papal policy, and the deep-rootedness of crusading within the religious and social culture of Catholic Europe, which carried it beyond the painful hiatus of 1291. But there is a lot to be said for stressing the adaptability, as well as the sheer resilience, of the movement.

  Continuing Traditions—New Directions

  The middle decades of the fourteenth century were particularly difficult ones for the crusading movement. The Anglo-French war, the collapse between 1343 and 1348 of the Italian banking houses on whose resources and expertise papal taxation of the Churc
h strongly depended, the Black Death (1348) and the resulting dislocation of economic and social life, all dealt hammer-blows to the political and financial initiatives on which large-scale crusading hinged. Viewed against this gloomy backcloth, the range and vitality of crusading in the fourteenth century were remarkable. This activity took place both within existing traditions and in new forms and contexts. Its ebb and flow was heavily influenced, if not dictated, by the pace of the war in France, but subject to this constraint it displayed great exuberance. The days have long since passed when this period could be relegated to the status of an aftermath or Indian summer in the history of the crusades.

  Crusading in Iberia and Italy may be taken as examples of continuing traditions which were given renewed vitality by the organizational advances which had occurred. In Iberia the massive gains of the mid-thirteenth century had created a complex group of problems which prevented for many generations the acquisition of further gains of any major significance. All the Christian kingdoms faced the task of absorbing their conquests; in Castile, the greatest beneficiary, this was achieved at the cost of creating an extremely powerful and intransigent magnate class which constantly defied the crown. Aragon and Portugal, fearful of Castile’s hegemonical ambitions, both encouraged this defiance and usually opposed any resumption of the Reconquista on the grounds that the chief result would be yet more gains for the Castilians. The Moors, on the other hand, were very conscious of their precarious situation in Granada and not only constructed formidable defences there, but made it clear that in the eventuality of a big Christian offensive they were ready to call on the assistance of their co-religionists in North Africa, even at the price of losing their own independence.