God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Tyerman, Christopher

  The prime export of the Latin empire, from the night of 12–13 April 1204 onwards, lay in relics. Such was the flood of them on to the western market that Innocent III issued instructions on how rationally to authenticate them. In Constantinople, tourists and sacred bargain hunters sought certificates guaranteeing that the piece of bone, wood, cloth or stone was genuine. Gunther of Pairis’s account of Abbot Martin’s grand larceny amid the fires and chaos of Constantinople sought to validate the great haul that constituted the most tangible profit of the enterprise for his abbey. Martin and his chaplain had stuffed their folded habits with over fifty treasures from the monastery of Christ Pantocrator, ranging from relics of the True Cross and Holy Blood, to stone chips from the main Holy Sites to miscellaneous physical detritus and body parts of saints, including ‘a not inconsiderable piece of St John’.74 Similar motives of validation lay behind the descriptions of the deeds of the bishops of Soissons and Halberstadt, both of which listed the sacred booty acquired by their episcopal heroes, in Conrad of Halberstadt’s case including distinctly secular trophies: jewels, silks and tapestries. Bishop Nivelo of Soissons stayed at Constantinople in 1204–5, sending home a number of choice high-prestige objects associated with the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist and, when he returned, bringing with him pieces of the True Cross. Even Robert of Clari’s memoirs may be seen as adding lustre to his gifts of relics of the Passion at the monastery of St Pierre, Corbie.75 These relics provided the Fourth Crusade’s most positive and lasting legacy in western Europe. The recipients of the holy treasure across northern France hoped to benefit through increased visitors to their new shrines. In places, entrepreneurial clerics transformed the fortunes of previously impoverished and obscure religious houses and churches. The struggling Cluniac house at Bromholm in Norfolk made its fortune after acquiring a piece of the True Cross purloined from the imperial chapel by an English priest in 1205.76 The key to success lay in miracles. Across western Christendom, this new influx of divine favour manifested in these fresh agents of the miraculous provided its own justification for the enormities of 1204. More tangibly, miracles attracted pilgrims. Church income rose. The new buildings erected to house the relics and cater for the tourists employed local labour and skilled craftsmen. The increase in church profits generated higher incomes, which were used to improve estates, roads and bridges.

  Whatever transcendent gains accrued, the relics of Byzantium contributed to patches of economic prosperity across Europe. Some relics could even play a political role. The Crown of Thorns pawned to the Venetians in 1237 and later sold to Louis IX of France prompted the construction of the luminous Sainte Chapelle in Paris and played a significant part in the manufacture of a Capetian religion of monarchy. The acquisition by wealthy nations of the cultural icons of conquered or exploited weaker lands is a staple of world history, as shown by glancing at Ancient Rome, nineteenth-century England or the United States of America in the past century. Byzantium was another prime example, a storehouse of classical and Christian artefacts, many of which had been translated, stolen or otherwise removed from provinces of the empire. After 1204, this process took another step, if in an unrefined, vicious and unwelcome manner. The transfer of treasure and relics stood as symbol of defeat, the four horses from the Hippodrome erected in front of St Mark’s in Venice, although only placed there after 1260, a careful, considered celebration of victory and a new imperialism.

  The consequences of the Fourth Crusade were not measured in spiritual or material profit and loss alone. In his history of the Crusades, Runciman’s pro-Hellenist complaint has two barbs; the duplicitous destruction of a civilization and the gratuitous weakening of a bastion of Christendom against invasion from the east. The Byzantine empire never recovered from the events of 1203–4. Much of the damage was self-inflicted by the political chaos and myopic self-interest so vividly displayed in the tawdry or desperate parade of emperors. Much of the physical destruction in Constantinople came from the secondary effects of the conquest, the fires of 1203–4 and Alexius IV’s frenzied scrabbling for bullion. There is no convincing evidence that the crusaders plotted the violent overthrow of the Byzantine system until they were presented with no viable alternative in 1204. That is not to say that Greeks were not demonized, their religious observances despised and feared by western elites as much as the rest. Doctrinal differences and the traditional Greek lukewarm response to the call of the cross could be and were exploited. Baldwin declared in his coronation circular that Constantinople had been stormed ‘for the honour of the Holy Roman Church and for the relief of the Holy Land’, a not completely mendacious justification.77

  However destructive the sack of 1204, ultimately more damaging to the cohesion of Byzantium was the effect on church union and the inability of the Latins to re-establish a thriving capital. The failure of Latin – Greek accommodation and the inability of the Latins to suppress opposition changed the nature of the Greek polity as much as it failed to create a new Latin one. After 1204, independent, autonomous Greek statelets emerged, as at Nicaea/Smyrna, Epirus and Trebizond, with no constitutional relations with each other and owing no allegiance to a central Greek political authority. By 1261, this separatist tradition, unknown before 1204, had become enshrined as a feature of Byzantium, which persisted until the Ottoman conquests. Before 1204, Greek regional opposition had been reflected in central, imperial politics. Now the regions appeared entire to themselves. The Fourth Crusade had unstringed the lyre of universal order and degree. Between 1204 and 1261 Constantinople was no longer a centre of bureaucracy or consumption, had ceased to be a functioning capital except in name only. The restoration of 1261 could not recover its imperial dominance. The absence of metropolitan authority that had underpinned Byzantine power and unity before 1204 allowed the Orthodox church to fill the void. The role of emperor after 1261 was permanently weakened as the Christian religion rather than the Christian state acted as the chief source of cultural cohesion and political identity. This shift in authority was emphasized when successive Byzantine emperors over the next two centuries sought church union with Rome as the price for western military help. Thus the Fourth Crusade destroyed but redefined Byzantium, enshrining a political fragmentation that included the remaining western enclaves and was to be so brilliantly exploited by the Ottomans from the mid-fourteenth century.

  This does not necessarily establish the Fourth Crusade’s blame for the later woes of eastern Europe, the second of Runciman’s complaints. He saw Byzantium so undermined by 1204 that it could ‘no longer guard Christendom against the Turk’. This ultimately handed ‘the innocent Christians of the Balkans’ to ‘persecution and slavery’.78 This is a view clouded by a crude religious and cultural analysis. Many Christians in the Balkans, innocent or not, had fought for generations against the Greeks – Serbs, Bulgars, Albanians – just as they later fought against the Turks. Byzantium had hardly been universally beneficent in its rule. Equally, the failure of Byzantium to retain its own territorial integrity from 1180 or defend itself in 1203–4 did not suggest it could necessarily have presented much of a bastion against later Turkish attack. However unpleasant, the Fourth Crusade did not precipitate the triumph of the Turk. The occupation of parts of the Greek empire by Latins and Venetians at least ensured some continuing western investment in resistance to the Ottomans that outlasted the Byzantine empire itself. More widely, the assumption that Ottoman rule was per se bad, ‘worse’ than Greek imperial rule or that of fractious and often vicious Christian groups in the Balkans, depends upon racial and religious stereotypes and prejudices. Not all fourteenth-century Greeks preferred Byzantium to Latin or Turkish rule. The translation of later historical, religious or cultural prejudices to explain past phenomena is here unprofitable. However, it reflects the most enduring legacy of the Fourth Crusade, one that as recently as 2001 elicited an apology from Pope John Paul II. The Fourth Crusade, the subsequent failure of the victorious Latins to build firm bridges between the Latin and Greek communiti
es and the exploitation of the catastrophe by the Orthodox church to buttress its sense of unique righteousness confirmed and deepened the still unresolved and perhaps irrevocable estrangement of Greek and Roman Christendom. At least Innocent III was right about that.

  The Expansion of Crusading

  18

  The Albigensian Crusades 1209–29

  On 24 June 1213, in a field outside the walls of Castelnaudary, between Toulouse and Carcassonne, Amaury of Montfort was knighted by Bishop Manasses of Orléans. Amaury’s father, Simon of Montfort, commanded the forces summoned by the pope in 1208–9 to extirpate heresy in Languedoc and dispossess its adherents, promoters and protectors. He now insisted the reluctant bishop ‘appoint his son a knight of Christ and personally hand him the belt of knighthood’. In a very public show, Amaury was presented by both his parents:

  they approached the altar and offered him to the Lord, requesting the Bishop to appoint him a knight in the service of Christ. The bishops of Orléans and Auxerre, bowing before the altar, put the belt of knighthood round the youth and with great devotion led the Veni Creator Spiritus.

  ‘A novel and unprecedented form of induction into knighthood’, some said.1

  The Castelnaudary ceremony distilled many of the elements that distinguished the twenty years’ war sponsored by the church and fought between the Dordogne, Mediterranean and Pyrenees. It represented, in a ceremony previously uncommon so far south in France, the rededication of the Montfort clan to Pope Innocent III’s vision of holy violence by creating almost a fresh category of knight, dedicated to Christ’s war yet without the religious vows of the military orders. It signalled an alien cultural imposition, witnessed by two northern French bishops and an army almost exclusively containing warriors, like the Montforts themselves, from north of the Midi, conquerors who brought their own churchmen, laws, hierarchy and military self-sufficiency. Simon claimed, by right of conquest and ecclesiastical sanction, to be ruler of large swathes of Languedoc. At Castelnaudary, Simon demonstrated that his dynasty had come to stay, a message underpinned by memories of the startling military victory Simon had won on those same fields two years earlier against the forces of Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, whose lands and titles Simon was seeking to appropriate. The knighting emphasized the sanction of orthodox religion in the exercise of political authority, a crude identification of church and secular power that disconcerted the bishop of Orlé ans. Castelnaudary showed how Simon specifically identified his and his family’s mission as holy. The primacy of the anti-heretical message that had inspired Innocent III to call for a crusade in 1208–9 was increasingly drowned out by the secular implications of Simon’s conquests: the political reorganization of Languedoc. The Castelnaudary rite consecrated a new religious cause, that of Montfort authority.

  18. Languedoc, France and the Albigensian Crusade

  The knighting of Amaury formed part of the campaign of conquest and destruction that had begun as a crusade to crush the Cathars and their protectors in 1209.2 The fighting lasted until the Treaty of Paris in 1229 confirmed the annexation of Languedoc by the French crown. With Simon of Montfort’s holy war ending in violent death outside the walls of Toulouse in 1218 and Amaury’s subsequent failure to make good his father’s claims, the Montfort rights and ambitions were adopted by their overlord, the king of France, in 1224, on political as much as religious grounds, heresy surviving better than did the counts of Toulouse or the viscounts of Béziers and Carcassonne. The sweeping away of the ancien régime in south-west France stirred anger and nostalgia at the time but much more since. The crusades that assisted the process attracted condemnation as cynical frauds, a hostile English monk pointedly calling the invasion of the south by Louis VIII of France in 1226 a ‘bellum injuste’.3 The theme has echoed down the centuries. Later criticism of the Albigensian wars has tended to the sentimental and unhistorical, as have assessments of the virtues and open-mindedness of the heretics. Faith, bigotry and atrocities were the prerogatives of all sides. Heresy was not a yardstick of southern liberality and sophistication, even if certain aspects of heretics’ behaviour appeal to modern audiences, such as their acceptance of women in roles of authority or their vegetarianism. Languedoc social structures and culture did not depend upon heresy nor were they defined by it, even where they sustained it. The Albigensian crusades failed in their objective of eradicating heresy while succeeding in reordering political society and the local Catholic church. This failure paved the way for the introduction of the Inquisition, which, through reason and judicial process not the arbitrariness of the sword, achieved what eluded the crusaders, the destruction of heresy.

  Church-approved violence against heretics could claim a tradition reaching back to Augustine of Hippo in the early fifth century and found renewed justification from twelfth- and early thirteenth-century canon lawyers. The novelty of the Albigensian crusades lay in the church’s recruitment of an international force rather than rely on local secular Christian rulers to combat heresy, and the application to the campaigns of the privileges of Holy Land penitential warfare. It also exposed a ready acceptance by churchmen of allowing lay powers to kill heretics more or less at will, an eagerness reined in by the calmer procedures of the Inquisition after the wars ended. The exploitation of these wars by Simon of Montfort and the Capetians did not pass unnoticed by Innocent III and his successors. Yet, to dismiss the Albigensian crusades simply as ideologically corrupt or cynically manipulative is to adopt the position of the pacifist heretic Peter Garcias of Toulouse, who was reported in 1247 as fulminating against the crusades because ‘God desired no justice which would condemn anyone to death’. ‘All preachers of the Cross are murderers; and the cross which preachers give is nothing than a bit of cloth on the shoulder’.4 Many Catholics disagreed. It is also clear that adherents of heresy were equally willing to take the physical fight to their attackers.

  The Albigensian crusades violently altered the political destinies of Languedoc, its social structures as well as religious and cultural orientation. They have been accused of the wilful destruction of a uniquely vibrant and tolerant culture. However, given the wealth of the region, its weak political and ecclesiastical authorities, its ties with neighbouring rulers of church and state, and its strategic importance at the hub of a circle uniting north Italy, the Ebro valley, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, it is in every way unlikely that the fate of early thirteenth-century Languedoc would have been ignored by its distant and not so distant overlords, the kings of France, England and Aragon and the emperor. Their involvement was anticipated rather than created by the pope’s concern with the enfeebled state of the Languedoc church and the threat, as he saw it, to its survival and to that of the whole Catholic church from a particularly robust and attractive heresy.

  THE CATHARS

  Near the heart of the Christian religion sits the problem of suffering, traditionally interpreted as a consequence of sin, of the fall of man as described in the Book of Genesis and, therefore, of the existence of evil. Both the Creation stories and experience of the material world suggested to Christians that evil existed in terrestrial matter, the city of Man, in contrast to paradise, the city of God. Much of the reform initiated within the western Catholic church from the eleventh century had been directed precisely at mitigating some of the implications of this by developing explanations, mechanisms, sacraments and devotional practices through which the consequences of inevitable sin could be alleviated, its penalties satisfied or purged and heaven attained. The penitential strand in crusade ideology and its plenary indulgence formed part of this process, as did the Fourth Lateran Council’s acceptance of individual oral confession and transubstantiation in 1215 and the thirteenth-century elaboration of a coherent doctrine of purgatory and a Treasury of Merits endowed by God to save souls.

  While going some way to assuage the anxieties of the faithful, this concentration on the redemptive sufferings of Christ exposed a central conundrum of belief. Christ the Son could save from s
in the world created by God the Father. If the material world was sinful, it was still by definition the creation of an eternal, omnipotent and presumably loving God. Some devout and godly people found (and find) the orthodox Christian explanations for this problem of evil opaque, evasive and unconvincing. This was not a new phenomenon in the twelfth century, but the added concentration by orthodox Christians on the corruption of the world and the implications of sin and evil may have lent added encouragement to those who sought alternative and more satisfying doctrines. The vita apostolica trumpeted by reformers, not least Innocent III’s own teams of licensed preachers, explicitly condemned many of the church’s temporal accretions. More fundamentally, the sharp distinction between the spiritual and temporal spheres that lay at the heart of the Gregorian reformist critique highlighted the eternal paradox of God and Matter, the presence of evil in a world created by a beneficent Deity. Incentive to question belief and practice followed perennial orthodox interest in the nature and immanence of God, expressed by theologians such as Anselm of Canterbury, preachers such as Bernard of Clairvaux and generations of academics at the university of Paris. This was matched by official concern with the state of the church and its ministers, constantly lashed by the criticisms of Gregorian papal reformers. By challenging traditional assumptions and structures and by posing fundamental questions about the nature of the church and the place of religion in society, Catholic reformers, while engineering a transformation in their church, indicated paths that led away from disciplined uniformity. Heresy, defined as systems of belief unacceptable to prevailing ecclesiastical authority, flourished as the church’s leadership proclaimed first principles; as Gregory VII commented, ‘Christ did not say I am Tradition but I am the Truth.’ Radicalism rarely flows along neat channels. Heresy became reform’s inescapable companion in the search for solutions to these central issues of faith and observance. The western medieval church’s age of reformation c. 1050–1300 was therefore also its great age of heresy.5