The Registers of official correspondence of Innocent IV, a distinguished canon lawyer who himself wrote on the theory of just war, had shown just how extensively the crusade was applied to a variety of political conflicts.20 Preaching of the cross was ordered against Frederick II; his son Conrad IV; the duke of Bavaria; Hohenstaufen supporters generally; Livs and Balts in Livonia and Prussia; Mongols; the irreligious in Sardinia; Muslims in Spain, Africa and Palestine; Greeks threatening the Latin Empire of Constantinople; alleged heretics in Italy, Lombardy and Bosnia; and Ezzelino of Romano. At other times, targets included the Drenther peasants in the diocese of Utrecht (1228–32); Stedinger peasants of the Lower Weser (1232–4); Russian Greek Orthodox (beginning in 1240); Finns (certainly in 1257 and from 1348); political opponents of the kings of England (1216–17 and 1265); Sicilians and Aragonese (1283–1302); Piedmontese cultic followers of the charismatic Fra Dolcino (1306–7); a gazetteer of Italian city states from 1255, including Venice (1310) and Milan (from 1360); the Canary Islands (planned in 1344); various Turkish emirs in the Aegean (from the 1330s); fourteenth-century mercenary companies, or routiers (from 1357), that fed on the opportunities and spoils of the Anglo-French and Italian wars; supporters of both sides during the Great Schism of the papacy (1378–1417), chiefly in the 1380s; Bohemian Hussites (from 1420); and, of course, the Ottomans. Of the scores of campaigns of the cross in the centuries after Louis IX’s defeat in 1250 some answered urgent military necessity or traditional strategic ambition. Others were the result of allies’ political pressure on the papacy to grant status and access to church funds to assist recruitment, diplomacy and war finance. The papacy was not necessarily a soft touch. Gregory IX instituted a careful investigation into the alleged heresy of the Stedinger peasants in the diocese of Bremen before authorizing a crusade to suppress then in 1232.21 John XXII refused to accept the arguments of Philip V of France in 1318 that his enemies, the Flemish, were on a level with Saracens because, as excommunicates, their hostility to French policy impeded an eastern crusade.22 John’s successors remained reluctant to apply crusade formulae on behalf of the French during the Hundred Years War. Some popes were more enthusiastic for wars in the eastern Mediterranean; others for wars in Italy; others for a generally more pacific approach to Christendom’s ills.
This expanded use of crusading followed changing patterns of international politics and diplomacy. Intractable disputes in the western Mediterranean between Naples, Sicily and Aragon in the late thirteenth century were superseded by bitter internecine Italian rivalries throughout the fourteenth century, driven by revived German imperial interest in the peninsula, papal absence in Avignon (1309–77) and the rise of the signoria in the endlessly competing city states of Tuscany and Lombardy. To all of these, crusading privileges were assigned at some stage. The Hundred Years War may not have attracted crusading, except during the Great Schism, but much of the rhetoric advocating a negotiated peace was constructed in the context of first the recovery of the Holy Land and then defence against the advancing Turks. Far from an expression of cultural antiquarianism, the crusade retained practical resonance. It also continued to supply an ostensibly neutral and generally respected context and excuse for diplomatic settlement and compromise, from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean. Crusade talk was not necessarily cynical, hypocritical or sentimental double speak, although such elements existed. During the two long periods of truce between England and France in the 1360s and 1390s, crusade planning and action were conducted through the cooperation of former enemies. Failure to secure peace could elicit accusations of hindering the cause of the Holy Land or Christendom. Traditional formulae persisted into the sixteenth century.
Nonetheless, by the fifteenth century, the scope of crusading – action, institutions and rhetoric – had contracted, its nature changing as a consequence. Again, the dialectic of decline misses the point. Very crudely, in terms of material activity and international political attention, crusades to the Holy Land dominated the period 1188 to 1250; those in Italy from 1250 to the late fourteenth century; the wars with the Turks from the late fourteenth to the end of the sixteenth century.23 The Italian and Turkish conflicts inevitably merged more seamlessly into their local, political, non-crusading settings than had the campaigns to Palestine or Egypt, even if the legal status was presented by the papacy as identical. Outside Iberia and, to a lesser extent after 1300, north-eastern Europe, the crusade was attached primarily to defensive operations: to resist Mamluks, Turkish pirates or the Ottomans; to extirpate the routiers; or to defeat those who, in papal eyes, were trampling on the church’s rights and threatening its patrimony in Italy. Even where the military campaigns were offensive, such as in the Aegean in the 1330s and 1340s or during the Italian wars, the conventional justification remained that of defence, Christendom in danger. This persuasive device had formed part of the language of crusading since the 1090s. Yet before 1250 many of the wars supported by such justifications had actually been campaigns of aggression, notably the attacks of Egypt. After 1250, no similar offensives left the drawing board. Even the Nicopolis campaign of 1396, which saw a western European army fighting the Turks on the Lower Danube, was framed as part of the defence of Hungary, even if optimists hoped for a subsequent war of reconquest. By the fifteenth century the problem of crusading had become subsumed into the perceived problem of Europe, a question of cultural and political survival against what appeared, at least until the successful defences of Belgrade (1456) and Rhodes (1480), an inexorable force. As Pius II warned in 1463: ‘Christendom is reduced to an angle of the world.’24
The strategic shift during the fourteenth century from plans to reinvade the Near East to desperate attempts to shore up the frontiers of Latin Christian Europe itself coincided with a contraction of crusading destinations. Louis IX’s Egyptian campaign had no successors: it was the last occasion when a substantial land army from western Europe attempted to conquer or reconquer territory in the eastern Mediterranean. Nicopolis and Belgrade apart, all subsequent attacks on Mamluks and Turks represented either naval raids or rapid seaborne assaults, equivalent to the small, fast-moving scorched-earth sorties of the Hundred Years’ War known as chevauchées. Of the attacks on Smyrna (1344), Adalia (1361), Alexandria (1365), Tripoli (1367, 1403) or Beirut (1403), only Smyrna was occupied (1344–1402). The exception was Rhodes, conquered and settled by the Hospitallers (1306–10). However, the success of the Hospitallers had not come as a result of a general crusade. Their presence in Rhodes until 1522 illustrated how Christian warfare in the eastern Mediterranean became a function of local interests – Venice, Genoa, Cyprus as well as the Hospitallers – rather than the imperatives of western Christendom. The elaborate fiscal administration established by the Second Lyons Council in 1274 was used as a universal system for less than half a century. The last general clerical crusade tithe, imposed and levied throughout Christendom, was granted by the Council of Vienne in 1312 and collected between 1313 and 1319. Thereafter the system was employed for regionally or nationally limited taxes. During the thirteenth century, central ecclesiastical administration of non-fiscal crusade matters, such as privileges, protection of property and legal immunities, was placed under the papal penitentiary, which acted as a sort of curial clearing-house. Yet this more coherent and more bureaucratic structure wholly failed to translate into crusade action.
Some of the main features of crusading enterprise of the thirteenth century and before fell away in the generations after 1250. The wars in the Baltic were almost exclusively subcontracted to the Teutonic Knights or to the kings of Denmark and Sweden. There was limited international participation in Iberian wars against the Moors, which, as well as being infrequent, had become the preserve of royal governments, until the later fifteenth century as much vehicles of finance and self-image as serious attempts to oust the Muslims from Granada. The mainly unsuccessful attempts by successive popes from the 1230s to launch crusades against the Greeks in defence of Latin Romania were compromised by paral
lel attempts at the union of the Roman and Greek Orthodox churches from the 1270s. After the death of Charles of Anjou in 1285, strenuous and persistent diplomatic efforts to involve the French royal family in Greece produced few tangible results. By 1320, despite the anti-Latin policies of the Byzantine emperor, Andronicus II, prospects for an anti-Greek crusade had effectively ended. Never popular in the west, such plans had consistently failed to be supported by extensive preaching or successful fundraising. After the 1320s, western policy turned to attempts to ally with the Greeks against Turkish pirates and acquisitive emirs in the Aegean. As with the Greeks, moves in the years before and after 1300 to accommodate another former enemy, the Mongols, removed another crusade target. The Mongol successor state of the Golden Horde in what is now southern Russia and the Ukraine began to operate within the orbit of the secular politics of eastern Europe, one competing power amidst the rivalries of Lithuania, Poland, Novgorod, Hungary and the Teutonic Knights. Only rarely could the interests of a Christian power extract a papal grant of crusade privileges against the Golden Horde, as in 1345, when the Genoese were defending their Crimean trading base at Caffa.25 Only a very few new applications for crusading privileges appeared, such as the abortive plans and attempts to conquer the Canary Islands in 1344–5 and 1402, justified by the principle of the expansion (dilatio), not just defence, of the faith, later a potent argument employed in the European penetration of the Atlantic and the Americas.26
THE FALL OF THE TEMPLARS
As another symptom of contraction, one of the most prominent military, ideological and institutional features of active crusading was attacked and transformed. By 1291, the reputation of the military orders had long been equivocal. No observer could ignore their contribution to the cause of the cross on all fronts. Yet other clerical interest groups resented the orders for their papally protected privileges. Their demands for profit from their extensive estates in the west, although justified as a means of funding war in the east, aroused resentment from their tenants. Secular rulers, notably the kings of France, relied on their banking skills, especially those of the Templars, to help manage royal finance. Rulers regarded the orders’ autonomy and supposed wealth with envy and suspicion even as they employed their leaders in secular government. The Masters and regional heads of the orders occupied important positions as representatives of large landed corporations in all the kingdoms of western Europe. In Spain, their autonomy was gradually eroded by the determined royal patronage and increasing control, until they became by the end of the middle ages almost an arm of the state. Hermann von Salza played a major political role in imperial politics under Frederick II and, as a prince of the empire, helped create a unique order-state in Prussia. In France, the Temple in Paris acted as a sort of national bank in the thirteenth century, closely integrated into servicing royal finances. In England the Priors of the Hospital sat in the House of Lords, some even acted as the king’s treasurer, such as Joseph Chauncy (1273–80) or Robert Hales (1381), the veteran of the Christian attack on Alexandria in 1365 who paid for his involvement in government with his life at the hands of rebels in London during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.27
However, the loss of the Holy Land in 1291 cast the very function of the orders into doubt. The Teutonic Knights, in the years around 1300, were vigorously attacked by the local Livonian church hierarchy, who accused them of cruelty, greed, friendship with pagans, larceny and violence against the church. The Knights were saved by their continuing role as defenders, with their blood and treasure, of the Christians of Livonia against the pagan Lithuanians. Even so, their escape from papal censure and suppression was a close-run thing.28 The Order of St John could still claim their original hospitaller calling. Yet, almost from the earliest days of the militarized religious communities in the mid-twelfth century, writers had noted the rivalries and divisions between the orders, from the Egyptian wars of the 1160s to the civil wars of later thirteenth-century Outremer. Sermons and chronicles may have included elevating anecdotes of the special Christian heroism of members of the orders, yet the darker aspect of their reputation could not be dispelled, especially once mainland Outremer fell.
The loss of the orders’ great fortresses in Syria and Palestine represented a potentially terminal threat to the orders’ occupation. Reform was suggested at the Second Lyons Council of 1274. Scandal had never been far from some military orders, unregulated by local ecclesiastical authority and institutionally introspective as their calling made them. The suppression of the Swordbrothers in 1237 could be seen only as an extreme – or publicized – example of the pitfalls inherent in a corporate ideal that insisted on the awkward marriage of religious conventual exclusivity with close and necessary involvement in secular affairs – war, diplomacy, finance and property. Some of these temporal snares were common to all religious orders, many of which attracted similar complaints of corruption throughout the middle ages. However, the military orders were more vulnerable. Their vocation, perched at an extreme of cultural acceptability, had always been controversial in some quarters. Unlike other religious orders, the success of a military order could, in a sense, be tested by tangible, not just imagined spiritual, results. Defeat in the Holy Land indicated clear failure. The cause could only be God’s displeasure, provoked by contumacious sin. The military orders thus stood as symbols – potential scapegoats – for the perceived moral failings of Christendom.29
Criticism, not all of it consistent, grew in scope after 1274. The orders were accused of being corrupt. Their ineffectual worldiness required the disendowment of their estates situated away from the frontlines. The orders should be amalgamated into one super-order to provide a well-funded, disciplined core for attempts to recover and defend the Holy Land. Some even argued that rule in a reconquered Holy Land should be vested in such a united order and its head, a Bellator Rex, recruited from one of the royal houses of the west. There was no consensus behind these ideas, the Master of the Temple, Jacques de Molay (1292–1314), for one arguing against union. Some critics appeared as enthusiastic for the idea of military orders as they were hostile to their practice. Others admired the model of an order-state pioneered by the Teutonic Knights. These ideas did not remain the preserve of theorists and lobbyists. In 1291, Nicholas IV instructed provincial church councils to consider the orders’ future. At least four (Arles, Canterbury, Lyons and Norwich) supported a merger, as did Charles II of Naples, son of Charles of Anjou and a claimant to the throne of Jerusalem.30 While between 1305 and 1307 the Masters of the Temple and Hospital added their own opinions, unsurprisingly supportive of their orders, the weight of advice 1290–1312 urged at least reform of the orders, if not union or a new order altogether.
The arrest, persecution, trials and final suppression of the Templars did not, therefore, come from nowhere.31 Beginning with the arrest of all Templars in France on Friday 13 October 1307 (allegedly the origin for the ill-omen of Friday 13th), punctuated by torture, confessions, recantations and burnings, the sordid process was driven by officials of the king of France, appeased by the papal Curia and the other monarchs of western Europe. The attack culminated in the order’s suppression by Clement V at the Council of Vienne in 1312 and the final, brusque execution by burning of the last Master in Paris in 1314. The assault on the Templars became notorious for the luridness of the accusations against them, the barbarism of the use of torture by French inquisitors, the inconsistent leadership of Clement V, the confused defence mounted by the order and the single-minded ruthlessness of Philip IV of France and his ministers, especially Guillaume de Plaisians and Guillaume de Nogaret. The ambitious but sporadically spendthrift Philip IV may have wanted control of Templar propertied wealth. He may also genuinely have believed them to have failed in their holy mission, to which he possibly held a sincere attachment.32
If so, he was by no means alone. Pious conviction, self-righteous brutality and myopic moral certainty are familiar partners. There existed sufficient belief in the justice of their cause among t
he French persecutors and the watching secular and ecclesiastical elites of western Christendom to sustain a campaign of oppression that reeked of hypocrisy, mendacity and avarice as well as cruelty. The charges of blasphemy, sodomy, irregular and obscene ceremonies, the common currency of formal ecclesiastical abuse, were lent added plausibility by the perception of dereliction of duty. The low grade of Templar membership, comprising a worryingly high number of dim, often elderly and politically inadequate minor nobility, did not enhance their defence or inspire confidence in the order’s long-term value or viability. The garbled accounts of peculiar, half-remembered admission rituals may indicate some strange practices, not uncommon in closed, secretive elite male societies. Yet the confessions to the substantive charges appear mainly to have been extracted under torture, the trauma of public humiliation and sudden loss of liberty or the threat of violence. When led to the stake by his persecutors in 1314, the unfortunate Jacques de Molay insisted on his and his order’s innocence of all charges, a protestation in extremis from an unsubtle man of apparent sincere faith that perhaps should command credence. Clement V refused to bow to French pressure to condemn the order, merely citing its irredeemable loss of reputation as the cause for its suppression in 1312 without a verdict of guilt or innocence. Clement even wrong-footed the French persecutors by granting the confiscated Templar property to the Hospitallers.
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