IMAGINING THE CRUSADE
One of the most characteristic literary genres of the later middle ages could be described as ‘recovery literature’, books, pamphlets and memoranda concerned with the crusade, the restoration of Jerusalem and the advance of the Turks. The clerical and lay elites of western Europe found it almost impossible to let go of the Holy Land as a political ambition or vision of perfection. Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, governments, moralists, preachers and lobbyists returned again and again to a subject in which practical and moral objectives were fused together. One early fourteenth-century master of the Hospitallers called the crusade ‘the nearest route to Paradise’; another grizzled veteran insisted it could ‘cure all ills and transform sadness into joy’.2 The mountain of written advice thrown up in the two centuries after 1291 consistently associated the recovery of the Holy Land or the defence of the church with personal redemption, honour and the resolution of Europe’s internal political, social and religious problems. Such ideas circulated as state papers as much as literary ephemera. All rulers contemplating a crusade demanded detailed advice and evidence from their own councillors or agents, from recognized interested parties, for instance the military orders or the Venetians, or from self-appointed experts and lobbyists who disseminated their ideas through networks of contacts, patronage and self-promotion. The former chancellor of Cyprus, Philip of Méziéres (1327–1405), ran a corps of propagandists and supplied a stream of pamphlets and longer works. Marino Sanudo Torsello produced a large volume of history in support of his memoranda, engaged a lively scriptorium that produced maps and other crusade literature and exploited his own extensive links with courtiers in England, France, Avignon, Naples and Byzantium.3 Such figures were taken seriously. Sanudo attended meetings of the French royal council in the 1320s that discussed his plans; seventy years later one of Meézieères’s agents received a grilling from the dukes of Burgundy and Gloucester over his crusade proposals.4 These theorists, lobbyists and pamphleteers were not writing necessarily for their own amusement. The context was official interest and action. These writers inhabited the circles they wished to influence, lobbyists and their audience sharing an emotional susceptibility to crusade ideology. The practical intent of these schemes should not be minimized, even if their details fail to convince. Philip VI’s doctor Guy of Vigevano’s recipe for slug soup was a serious prescription for the avoidance of poisoning on crusade.5
The weight of crusade advice reflected a continuing confidence in prospect for the recovery of the Holy Land. Schemes were accompanied by elaborate explanations, with statistics, historical evidence and proofs that varied from the impressive to the banal and absurd. They contributed to setting the strategic orthodoxies that determined planning. The overwhelming fourteenth-century consensus advocated a series of seaborne expeditions to destroy the economic and political power of Egypt. A few voices, usually Iberian, advocated using the land route across North Africa to attack the Nile, but only the advent of the Ottoman threat to eastern Europe revived ideas of using the land route of the First and Second Crusades. Some doubts of the efficacy of mass crusades surfaced, suggested by experience and expense. Sanudo calculated the cost of the initial expeditionary force to Egypt at over 2 million florins, ten times the ordinary annual income of the papacy, an order of magnitude confirmed when governments themselves estimated costs of such campaigns.6 This awareness of cost explains the often criticized concentration on methods of fundraising that accompanied any serious venture. However, financial problems failed to dissuade governments at least from investigating the possibilities of action, even if difficulties in raising the necessary sums acted as a material disincentive and political block.
However, theory rarely directed action. Neither Sanudo’s ideas in the 1320s nor Mézières’s in the 1390s were followed. When, half a century later, Bertrandon de la Broquière doubted the feasibility or wisdom of a crusade against the Turks, his employer, Duke Philip of Burgundy, ignored him in pursuit of his plans against the Ottomans.7 Apart from identifying the difficulty of eastern crusading, the tendency of writers and lobbyists to couch their schemes in the widest context of international reconciliation indicated why their ideas remained unfulfilled. Discussing the obstacles to crusading hardly made them disappear. Equally limiting was the extraordinary conservatism of much crusade advice and theorizing. Rarely at any time in the later middle ages were schemes for eastern crusades uncoupled from the comfortingly familiar call for the recovery of the Holy Land, even when the clear danger came from the Ottoman Turks. Such traditional propaganda paralleled the flourishing Holy Land liturgies of masses, prayers and processions that persisted across western Europe into the sixteenth century. Linking wars against the Turks with the historic struggle to recover the Holy Land increased the receptiveness of those, at least among courtly elites, whose pious and financial contributions were being sought.
Such traditionalism was never entirely shed by promoters of wars of the cross. However, the new threat of the Ottoman Turks coincided with and possibly provoked fresh interpretations of crusading among humanist historians and scholars, who sought to present the past as a model to inform present and future public behaviour. The drama and success of the First Crusade continued to inspire, but humanist crusade enthusiasts adopted a distinctive perspective. The Florentine chancellor Benedetto Accolti’s long history of the First Crusade (1464–6) consistently referred to the Turks and other Muslims as ‘barbari’, barbarians, implying a classical comparison.8 For humanist scholars, the crusades and their failure provided a commentary on the state of civil society in the west as well as the more familiar religious exegesis. On this reading, Latin Christendom had inherited the imperium of classical Rome, thus the conquest of Palestine was doubly a recovery, of religious space and imperial lands. For some apologists in this line of thought, not least Pope Pius II, who tried hard to organize a new general crusade, the two aspects of crusading united in the institution of the papacy, Christ’s vicar and residual legatee of the Roman Empire. The rise of the Ottomans allowed the lack of successful crusading to stand as an illustration of the political as well as moral decadence of Latin Europe in contrast with the disciplined, united and successful Turks, forcing its retention as a central issue of public debate into the sixteenth century.
CRUSADES TO THE EAST
After 1291, and the failure of Nicholas IV’s plans to launch an immediate new crusade to recover the Holy Land, international expeditions were seriously planned on three occasions.9 The Council of Vienne (1311–12) authorized a sexennial clerical tax for the crusade. A year later Philip IV of France hosted an elaborate ceremony in Paris at which he, his sons and his son-in-law, Edward II of England, took the cross. Such gestures had become familiar in the courts of western Europe without necessarily indicating more than a desire for diplomatic respectability, like joining the League of Nations and about as effective. However, Philip invested propagandist effort and possible personal devotion to the cause of the Holy Land. The aura of St Louis was eagerly embraced. Active steps towards a crusade also secured legitimate access to church funds, otherwise highly contentious. While Philip’s sincerity should not be dismissed too easily, his death and that of Pope Clement V in 1314, a papal interregnum (1314–16), the collapse of Edward II’s political position after his defeat at Bannockburn (1314), and a European famine (1315–17) effectively ended the Vienne crusade. However, Philip V of France sought lay taxes for a new crusade and his successor, Charles IV, attempted to revive serious planning in 1323, sponsoring a flotilla for the east, although it never embarked.10
Between 1331 and 1336, Philip VI of France negotiated, planned and prepared for a new Holy Land expedition.11 He took the cross in October 1333, having secured papal appointment as the church’s ‘Rector and Captain-general’ and the desired massive financial subsidy from Pope John XXII the previous July. Philip jointly sponsored an anti-Turkish naval league with Venice, Byzantium and the Hospitallers (1332–4), and
briefly toyed with a small preliminary expedition. However, French policy seemed more directed towards a new general passagium on the precedent of 1248 or 1270. While undoubtedly attracting the greatest chance of heavy papal subventions, such a strategy flew in the face of the realities of contemporary international politics. Only if Philip were able to engineer peace on his frontiers and across western Europe could his planned departure in 1336 be achieved. With the dispute between the papacy and the German king, Louis IV, unresolved, Italy at war and the Iberian monarchies disengaged, prospects seemed clouded. More damaging were relations between France, England and Scotland. Although Edward III of England had been involved in crusade diplomacy from at least 1332, the English attempts (1332–5) to subdue Scotland and oust Philip’s ally David Bruce (1329–71) as king of Scots rendered serious cooperation impossible. A new pacific pope, Benedict XII, was reluctant to allow Philip any flexibility in how he spent (or, more properly, diverted or misspent) the crusade taxes. The French king, aware that the English might take advantage of his absence, made his departure for the east dependent on a settlement in Scotland. Raising men, money and materials also proved far more difficult than Philip had anticipated. The crusade project was cancelled in 1336. The fleet intended for the Levant was subsequently directed to the Channel for the early preliminaries of the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453), a conflict that sounded the knell not just for Philip VI’s crusade schemes but for any substantial international campaign in the eastern Mediterranean. Benedict XII’s cancellation of the crusade removed a diplomatic restraint from both parties, which precipitated the outbreak of open hostilities a year later.
It has been argued that the somewhat sclerotic organization for the crusade before 1336 suggested a lukewarm attitude to the venture, especially among certain of the factions that dominated Philip VI’s court, and that the crusade was abandoned because it looked increasingly risky. While the latter is self-evident, the accusation of a lack of commitment underestimates the chances Philip took, not least in expending political capital trying unsuccessfully to extract a lay subsidy in 1335–6. Equally, the crusade helped Philip establish the claim by his new royal dynasty, the Valois, to the authority inherent in the religion of monarchy created by his Capetian predecessors, especially St Louis. The administrative and diplomatic effort had been considerable, and reached beyond France in the embrace of clerical taxation and authorized preaching. What is more, as predicted by one French crusading hopeful, failure or deceit would attract ‘la honte du monde’, disgrace in the eyes of the world.12 Reactions varying from resigned embarrassment to savage denunciation for hypocrisy echoed around the courts and commentators. Contemporaries accused Philip of using the crusade as a smokescreen behind which he prepared war against the English. Some ascribed his failures in that war to this supposed deceit. Decades later, Philip of Mézières, a boy in Picardy at the time, recalled clearly the unfortunate consequences of Philip VI’s failure.13 The memory was stitched into the narratives of recent events popular around 1400 on both sides of the Channel. The ambition of 1332 and, still more, the decision of 1336 remained to haunt the Valois kings of France.
The last concerted diplomatic effort to arrange a new general passagium directly against the Mamluks had to await the great truce in the Hundred Years War 1360–69. King Peter I of Cyprus (1359–69) was eager to enlist western aid for his ambitious policy to protect Cypriot trade in the Levant by destabilizing the Mamluk regime and its grip over the trade routes that passed through Alexandria.14 Recent relaxation of papal embargoes on western commerce with Egypt stimulated Peter to bolder action. In 1361, he had taken the southern Turkish port of Adalia. In 1362, tapping the traditional enthusiasms of western chivalry, Peter gave notice of a new campaign to recover the Holy Land, a declaration he followed with a personal visit to the major capitals of Europe, from England, Flanders and France to Poland and Bohemia. He had managed to gain Pope Urban V’s support at a conference at Avignon in March and April 1363 attended by a large and distinguished gathering, including King John II of France, Amadeus count of Savoy, the Master of the Hospitallers and the English Thomas of Beauchamp earl of Warwick. The climax of the conference came with the reception of the cross by these luminaries and the new papal legate Elias of Périgord, Cardinal Talleyrand, a veteran diplomat. New crusade taxes were proposed, preaching authorized and indulgences offered. The protagonists at Avignon became immortalized in Andrea Bonaiuti’s fresco of the Church Militant in St Maria Novella, Florence.15
The results of Peter I’s grand tour of Europe in 1362–5 fell short of the extravagant hopes of the Avignon conference. John II and Cardinal Talleyrand both died in 1364. Crusade management devolved on to Peter I, and his advisors, the new crusade legate Pierre de Thomas (d. 1366), already legate in the east, and his chancellor, Philip of Mézieères. Money from Pope Urban paid for a significant body of hired troops, including English mercenaries, possibly from the English Free Company based at Pisa. Leaving Venice in June 1365, Peter made his rendezvous with Cypriot and Hospitaller reinforcements in August, the combined fleet perhaps numbering 165 ships, capable of carrying a substantial body of men – as many as 10,000 has been suggested – and their horses. Recruits came from as far as Scotland, France, Geneva and England. The English mercenary contingent was commanded by an English noble, possibly the earl of Hereford.16 However, the polyglot nature of the forces at King Peter’s disposal did not tend to cohesion or unity of purpose, tactics or strategy. While the decision to attack Egypt’s main port, Alexandria, was the king’s, even on the first day of fighting one group of barons almost immediately suggested a withdrawal to avoid pointless casualties, implying that they thought the whole enterprise futile.
The campaign comprised a stunning victory, an embarrassing retreat and a huge, if tainted, profit. Against all expectations, Alexandria, one of the best-defended ports in the Mediterranean, fell by storm on the first day of fighting, 10 October 1365. Once inside the city, the Christians spent the following week massacring thousands of civilians in rapidly securing vast quantities of booty from one of the richest entrepûts in the world then known to Europeans. It was not a pretty sight; but it appeared, not least to Egyptian eyewitnesses, thoroughly effective, even if the parallels lay less with Constantinople in 1204 than with Damietta in 1249. Sudden success prompted an immediate row. Later apologists depicted King Peter, Pierre de Thomas and Mézières arguing for the retention of Alexandria as a lever to secure the return of Jerusalem. Others, equally well versed in crusade history, insisted the military position of the crusaders was untenable. Better to cut and run with the enormous booty than insist on a futile sacrificial gesture. Prudence prevailed, the Christians evacuating Alexandria on 16 October.
Peter possibly agreed with this analysis. He would have understood that without a promise of a massive relief force, the road from Alexandria led nowhere. Cypriot interests lay in disrupting Alexandrian trade to favour their own ports. By presenting the west with such a dramatic, startling and lucrative victory, the first on such a scale since 1249, Peter may also have hoped to provide impetus for fresh anti-Mamluk commitment at a time when popes and princes were increasingly distracted by the Turks further north. The novelty of Peter’s crusade scheme of 1362–5 lay in the active leadership by an eastern Latin ruler of a western crusade, a coalition as obvious as it was rare. If Peter hoped to create a sensation, he succeeded. Encomiasts, such as Mézières, and the fashionable French poet and musician Guillaume de Machaut, in his verse epic La Prise d’Alexandre left vivid – if politically and morally pointed – accounts.17 The English monastic chronicler Thomas Walsingham recorded that not only did the cost of spices rise as a consequence of the sack of Alexandria but many English and Gascons returned from Egypt with ‘cloth of gold, silks and splendid exotic jewels in witness of such a victory achieved there’.18 Despite criticism of the evacuation and the easily caricatured greed of the troops, the capture of Alexandria retained its lustre as a campaign honour whose renown Geoffrey C
haucer, who knew many of the real veterans, was careful to borrow for his Knight in the Canterbury Tales.19
Yet Peter I’s strategy, whether of conquest or trade war, failed utterly. The 1365 crusade disintegrated with the evacuation; the next western crusading venture was conducted by the count of Savoy in 1366–7 in the Dardenelles and Black Sea. A few further Cypriot raids on the Levantine coast over the next few years and another extensive western progress by King Peter in 1367–8 achieved nothing. Peter himself was assassinated in 1369, a victim of Cypriot feuding that rarely declined from the vicious. In fact, he had begun negotiations with the Mamluks in 1366. After his death, a Cypriot-Egyptian peace treaty was agreed. As it transpired, this ended the last crusade specifically directed at the Mamluks who controlled the Holy Land. Priorities changed, despite the cloak of traditional rhetoric. While both Cyprus and the Hospitallers of Rhodes regularly secured truces, treaties and accommodations with the Mamluks, the new power of the Ottoman Turks redirected the use of the crusade.
EXPANSION AND RETRACTION
Traditional eastern Mediterranean crusading operated in the context of a much wider application of wars of the cross. Crusade institutions – vow, cross, indulgence, privileges – continued to be associated with an expanding list of armed conflicts. The professionalism of recruitment and organization, by encouraging vow redemptions, alms and legacies, extended the social reach of involvement while risking the frustration of those forced to be non-combatant participants in an increasingly ritualized activity. By concentrating on the redemptive benefits of the cross to encourage donations, sermons de cruce lent themselves to wider penitential and eschatological themes than the crusade. By precept and analogy, crusading was stitched into the broad evangelism of the church and, hence, into religious experience, attitudes and expectations. The crusade also became a feature of state public finance. The availability of huge sums of money derived from church property through regular crusade clerical taxation and fundraising often proving irresistible to lay rulers.
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