God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  Although such liturgies stretched the link between crusade ideology and crusade action to an extreme, they testify to the inescapable power and penetration of the image of the liberation of the Holy Land, which did not depend on sporadic official preaching or fundraising to hold the thoughts of the faithful. Further confirmation of this can be found in wills across western Europe, certainly in the fourteenth century, bequeathing money for the crusade as well as for Holy Land masses. However, the lack of association with active crusading suggests that the liberation of the Holy Land provided a spiritual metaphor, both for the liberation of the individual soul from the consequences of sin, as in the English Gregorian Trentals, and, more widely, for the struggle against the ungodly. This passive response was evinced most clearly by Holy Land bidding prayers. These were vernacular intercessory prayers said in parish churches across Europe on Sundays and feast days directly after the sermon. From the late thirteenth century they became a habitual part of the general supplicatory apparatus of church liturgy. They were far from calls to crusade, unlike elements elsewhere in the liturgy.31 The only action prescribed for the recovery of the Holy Land was prayer, an ultimate distillation of the growing passivity that the extension of crusade institutions in the thirteenth century inadvertently encouraged. Once again, the recovery of the Holy Land appears as a symbol of God’s favour and the acceptability of the prayers of the faithful. This tradition sustained the image of crusading as a central Christian devotional activity long after fighting for the cross had become a rarity. However, on all sides of the confessional divides that opened up in the sixteenth century, such externalized manifestations of corporate religion, using a physical act – the recovery of the Holy Land – as a means of securing grace and salvation, became increasingly unconvincing as more and more articulate believers turned towards systems of devotion that concentrated more directly on the interior personal experience of God and faith. Furthermore, different categories of ‘ungodly’ entered Christian demonology, replacing the old stereotypes and analogies, rendering crusade polemical imagery redundant.

  Central ceremonies of crusading persisted. As in bidding prayers, the emphasis on the cross displayed in crusade sermons became integrated into more general evangelism and penitential exhortation centred on the cross’s redemptive powers; parts of many crusade sermons were interchangeable with those concerned with moral reform. Sermons delivered or circulated in manuscript to provide models for local exhortation displayed a traditional formalism of structure and content, evident, for example, in England, in crusade sermons well into the fourteenth century. In fact, the heavily allusive metaphorical language of crusade was developed more by desk-bound or court-based propagandists, mostly laymen, than working preachers, who tended to operate within a tight academic tradition. Despite the crafted crusade preaching of, for instance, the fourteenth-century English Dominican John Bromyard, or the Frenchman Pierre Roger, the future Pope Clement VI, subsequently, the true heirs of the great crusade preachers of earlier generations were figures such as Mézières. Statistics of sermons in northern France between 1350 and 1520 indicate only a tiny proportion concerned the crusade, indulgences, Saracens or heretics.32 The crusade preaching tour and sermon, like the sale of indulgences, became routine aspects of administration, no longer the necessary focal point of recruitment and propaganda, sometimes omitted altogether. The exception of John of Capistrano’s popular evangelism in Hungary in 1456 exposed the contrast with other crusade initiatives where, if present at all, sermons were delivered to elite court audiences, with no thought to mass communication. Increasingly, the commonest public encounter came with the pardoner or indulgence salesman, not the preacher.

  Other aspects of crusade organization, including privileges and taking the cross, similarly varied in intensity and application. Processions inspired by specific crusading campaigns were conducted at Douai regularly during the mid-fifteenth century. Such public demonstrations assumed greater significance in the absence of frequent recruiting drives. The near-permanent sale of indulgences, in many regions robustly popular in terms of profit, operated at a different, less intense level of public or personal involvement.33 With fewer people actually taking the cross, the associated privileges tended to fall into disuse. One much exploited privilege of crucesignati allowed them to delay answering law suits, known as essoin of court. In his Mirror of Justices, Andrew Horn (d. 1328), fishmonger and Chamberlain of the City of London, described, as a matter of course, the essoin of crusaders engaged in ‘a general passage to the land of Jerusalem’. By the end of the century, such assumptions may have became genuinely anachronistic. In France by the 1380s, for instance, the lawbook known as the Grand Coutumier de France omitted any mention of crusaders from its detailed list of essoins.34 The habit of taking the cross had become too infrequent.

  The ceremony of taking the cross, the defining ritual of crusading, remained available for the faithful, penitent or adventurous, but, as an active expression of interest in holy war, appears increasingly exceptional compared with earlier centuries. In December 1382, Bishop Henry Despenser of Norwich took the cross in St Paul’s cathedral, London. He apparently had experienced some difficulty locating an order of service, given its recent rarity. In fact, copies of the ceremony existed in many English cathedrals and abbeys. Different English rites for taking the cross existed in York, Lincoln and Salisbury (Despenser found his version in the liturgy books of the monks of Westminster).35 Although notable for their absence during the 1390 al-Mahdiya and 1396 Nicopolis expeditions, or as part of the Burgundian court’s display of crusade enthusiasm in the 1450s, examples of individuals and groups taking the cross show how the practice continued, as among the Hungarian peasantry in 1456 or the citizens of Ghent in the 1460s. Individual vows to fight the infidel can be found from France and Bavaria in the fourteenth century to Englishman and Scotsmen in the 1450s and worsted weavers from Norfolk in 1499.36 Rites for taking the cross continued to be copied into diocesan service books throughout the period, alongside the wider Holy Land liturgy. When Innocent VIII standardized the rite in the Roman Pontifical, he acknowledged the new circumstances of the Turkish advance when he changed the preamble to the ceremony from one restricted to those ‘going to assist the Holy Land’ to those wishing ‘to assist and defend the Christian faith or the recovery of the Holy Land’.37 The change indicated the pope believed or hoped the rite was in current use. Below the level of papal authorization, the cross could be given by local clergy to adventurers, such as Robert Almer at Canterbury in 1462, or to penitent robbers, a couple of whom received the cross at St Alban’s in 1479.38 The adaptability of the ceremony and institution was repeatedly confirmed, from new Iberian conquistadors to devout Roman Catholics fighting Protestant Huguenots in Toulouse during the French Wars of Religion in the 1560s. No less than Innocent III summoning the Fourth Lateran Council in 1213, Paul III was certain his congregation knew the significance of assuming the cross of Christ when he assembled the Council of Trent in 1544–5.39

  By then, the whole idea of the redemptive merit of crusading had been challenged by critics of the Roman Church, mostly, but not exclusively, by Protestant confessional opponents. Ironically, central to the criticism lay the question of indulgences. Although those directed at serving the recovery of the Holy Land, the fight against the Turks or subsidizing the Hospitallers at Rhodes could still prove popular, the wide application and in places blatant racketeering involved threatened to discredit the whole system, as Pius II had warned.40 Thus at the very core of the crusading practices, a de facto separation emerged between function – fighting the infidel – and method – the offer and sale of indulgences. This occurred at the same time as other dimensions of holy war asserted themselves across Christendom, some overtly associated with crusading, some less so, some not all. Hussites and Protestants could happily fight holy wars without the apparatus of Roman Catholic crusade theology. Prayers for aid against the Turks appeared in Edward VI of England’s Protestant Prayer B
ook (1549, 1552). Just as not all prayers for the Holy Land indicated closet crusading, so not every expression of holy war, just war or hostility towards infidels came wrapped in formal crusading packaging. Even amongst Roman Catholics, the devolution of crusading to frontlines where combat was a matter of national survival, not religious duty, further diluted any ideological exclusivity the crusading may have possessed. The association of holy war with lay politics at once provided one of the commonest and most controversial battlefields for crusaders. As with indulgences, one of the most characteristic features of later medieval crusading proved one of the most self-defeating. To understand this, it is necessary to return to the thirteenth century.

  CRUSADES AGAINST CHRISTIANS

  Between the late thirteenth and early fifteenth centuries, crusades launched against Christians, in the heart of Christian society, formed the most consistent application of papal holy war. Inherent in the emergence of an ideology of holy war in the early middle ages, canonists and theologians in the thirteenth century, including Thomas Aquinas, further developed the doctrine of religious just war in Christendom. Henry of Segusio or Hostiensis argued that the crux cismarina, the crusade within Christendom, possessed more urgency and justice than the crux transmarina, or overseas crusade. In condoning papal policy, Hostiensis was reflecting traditional attitudes.41 This did not absolve them from criticism and controversy. When preaching against the Hohenstaufen in Germany in 1251, Hostiensis himself discovered wide and deep opposition to preaching the cross against Christians.42 Intellectually and legally valid, crusades against Christians never sat as comfortably in the mentalities of the faithful as wars against infidels. One of the key attractions of crusading lay in demonizing ‘aliens’ against whom the faithful could define their identity; crusades against Christians too often looked uncomfortably like crusades against themselves.

  During the twelfth century, the papacy continued to sanction wars against its political opponents. Yet none, even the substantial expedition directed against the adventurer Markward of Anweiler in 1199, seems to have been accompanied by preaching, cross-taking or the full array of Holy Land privileges.43 Only with the Albigensian crusade in 1209, directed to the Christian protectors of heretics as much as the heretics themselves, was the complete Holy Land apparatus employed, its equality with the eastern war confirmed in the bull Excommunicamus of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). Innocent III’s desire to offer the crusade indulgence as widely as possible and his encouragement of the idea of Christian society as a church militant constantly challenged by sin and temporal enemies made the incorporation of wars against Christians a logical step. Clerical crusade taxation for political conflicts appealed to secular rulers caught up in them, as well as providing the papacy with a mechanism of control and the capacity the vast sums of church money granted to initiate military action on its own behalf. This became useful with the acquisition under Innocent III and his successors of temporal Papal States in central Italy that required maintaining and defending.

  The main wars of the cross against Christians in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries revolved around the temporal position of the papacy in Italy, the defence of the Papal States, church rights, access to ecclesiastical wealth and fears of territorial encirclement. This last was no paranoid fiction. Thirteenth-century popes, such as Innocent IV, spent long periods in exile from Rome. A regularly peripatetic papacy presiding over an increasingly effective centralized bureaucracy and growing international recognition of papal ecclesiastical jurisdiction offered an irony not lost on papal adherents as much as opponents. Physical insecurity contradicted papal claims to temporal as well as spiritual plenitude of power. Directing crusades as a remedy implemented the ideological implications of papal ambition as well as confronting their material adversaries. Thus crusading became a major device in papal attempts to protect its vassals and allies. To achieve independence in Italy and primacy in Christendom, popes applied crusading to wars with the Hohenstaufen rulers of Germany and Sicily (1239–68), the Wars of the Sicilian Vespers to restore Angevin rule in Sicily (1282–1302), campaigns to secure papal interests in central and northern Italy during the evacuation of the papal Curia to Avignon (1309–77) and attempts to resolve by force the Great Schism (1378–1417), when two, then three popes claimed to be the legitimate successors of St Peter.

  Papal ideology could easily become distracted to essentially secular conflicts, as in England in 1216–17 and 1263–5.44 Between 1208 and 1214, England had lain under a papal interdict (which meant that the church ceased to function except for infant baptism and Extreme Unction) because of King John’s refusal to accept Innocent III’s nominee Stephen Langton as archbishop of Canterbury. John had been excommunicated (1209–13). In 1213, as part of the agreement that ended the interdict, John made England and Ireland fiefs of the papacy. After his attempt to win back lost lands in France in 1214, John took the cross in 1215, in part to gain protection against the growing threat of rebellion against his harsh financial exactions and roughshod management of his nobility. This failed to prevent England’s slide into civil war, but the alliance with the Roman church persisted. After John’s death, his nine-year-old heir, Henry III, reinforced his credentials as a deserving recipient of church assistance by taking the cross immediately after his coronation in 1216. The crusader’s privilege paid dividends. In January 1216, Innocent III offered remission of sins to those who fought for King John; his opponents were branded as renegades hindering the crusade to the Holy Land. Indulgences were repeated by Honorius III in September 1216. Crusaders destined for the east were permitted to deflect their crusade vow to fight for the king. Contemporary chroniclers were unequivocal in describing royalists as crucesignati, the victors over the rebels at the crucial battle of Lincoln being depicted wearing the white crosses of the Angevins, albeit on their backs, not shoulders. Although the documentary evidence is more equivocal, it seems possible that a number of individuals took the cross to defend the English king in 1216–17. More certainly, eyewitnesses painted the conflict in explicitly crusading terms through language that sat comfortably with Innocent III’s extended use of wars of the cross.

  Half a century and a weight of crusades against Christians later, there was no doubt. In the autumn of 1263, in answer to an appeal from Henry III, Urban IV appointed Gui of Foulquois (subsequently Pope Clement IV) to negotiate peace between the king and his domestic opponents, if necessary by preaching the cross against them. The rebel victory at Lewes in May 1264 denied Gui access to England and, beyond excommunicating them, there is no sign Gui preached the cross. However, as Pope Clement IV, Gui renewed the royalist crusade. In the summer of 1265, Cardinal Ottobuono was instructed to preach the cross in north-west Europe and to raise a clerical tax in England, avoiding areas of southern Europe where Charles of Anjou’s crusade to Sicily was being raised. In the event, the royalists crushed the rebels under Simon of Montfort at Evesham in August 1265 before any continental crusade force had been gathered. Nonetheless, the willingness of Urban IV and Clement IV to throw the full panoply of Holy Land crusading behind the political interests of their temporal allies reveals how far the war of the cross had become integrated into all aspects of papal secular policy, in the eyes of its promoters, synonymous, if only rhetorically, with the defence of the faith, i.e. the Roman church. This assumption, falling as a material burden on the whole church through taxation, grated on many, especially when it seemed to promise no end to conflict and bore few tangible benefits.

  The war against the Hohenstaufen (1239–68) witnessed the most sustained pursuit of this policy.45 It marked a final collapse of hopes for a papal–imperial alliance that had seemed attainable on a number of occasions between 1180 and 1230, not least during the youth of Frederick II, when he was a papal protégé and designated commander of the pope’s crusade. The dispute derived from an intractable range of problems. The dynastic claims of Frederick to rule Sicily and the German empire, including rights over northern Italy, posed a poten
tial challenge to papal independence. The creation of the Papal States inevitably led to tensions over frontier regions, especially the March of Ancona and the duchy of Spoleto. Local territorial rivalries were complicated by the special relationship of pope and emperor, symbolized by papal recognition and coronation of imperial candidates. Control of Sicily, as a papal fief, provided another focus of conflict, especially as Frederick and his successors governed the church in their lands with scant regard for papal supremacy and disdain for papal interference. The bitterness of papal hostility towards Frederick II in particular was a product of previously close attachment turning sour. A fundamental lack of trust in what Urban IV called a ‘viper race’ fuelled the tenacity with which the successive popes pursued Frederick and his heirs.

  Earlier papally sponsored campaigns against Frederick II, such as that under John of Brienne in 1228–30, had been funded by clerical taxation. Frederick had twice been excommunicated, in 1227 and March 1239. However, only in the winter of 1239–40 did Gregory IX call for a formal crusade against the emperor. The pope’s allies, the Lombard League of northern Italian cities, had been heavily defeated by Frederick in 1237. Imperial forces threatened Rome, where, as so often in the period, support for the pope remained fickle. By summoning a crusade, Gregory could expect to stiffen local resistance but also mobilize a larger coalition in northern Italy and Germany by making church funds available to those prepared to take the field against the emperor. The crusade, renewed in 1240 and 1243, was primarily preached in imperial lands north and south of the Alps. Anti-kings were established in Germany: Henry Raspe of Thuringia (1246–7), then William of Holland (1247–56). Ringingly endorsed by the First Council of Lyons (1245), these anti-Hohenstaufen crusades attracted many recruits, some defecting from Louis IX’s crusade. The association of crusading to the political conflicts of Italy and Germany lent the anti-imperialist cause an element of institutional commitment and international appeal (or outrage, depending on the observer) they would otherwise not have enjoyed. However, the crusade’s main contribution was financial: the church subsidized the war to destroy the Hohenstaufen, which would otherwise have been beyond the resources, let alone will, of the motley collection of secular lords ranged with the papacy.