The World of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  While these precedents formed a significant context for Urban II’s Jerusalem war, the new institutions of the crusade – preaching, vow, cross, privileges – did not automatically transfer to these older forms of ecclesiastically justified inter-Christian conflict. Conservatism prevailed in practice and legal theory. Policing operations by Louis VI of France (1108–37) were supported by parish priests bearing banners to join royal armies along with their parishioners in operations described by sympathetic memorialists in terms of war directly approved by God and the clergy (‘the pious slaughtered the impious’), including, one observer suggested, absolution of sins and salvation for those who died.3 One account of the Anglo-Scottish battle of the Standard in 1138 suggested that the English who died would receive remission of penalties of sin. Offers of remission for those killed in battle, for example against mercenary war-bands in Languedoc in 1139, appeared more frequently. This may reflect the generally greater precision in describing the Church’s penitential and legal systems, as witnessed by Gratian’s canon law compendium, the Decretum (1139), in which wars against Christians occupy much space (the crusade against the infidel none).

  Elsewhere, direct links to the crusade were made. Paschal II, in the afterglow of the First Crusade, offered plenary remission or absolution for conflicts against his political opponents and, under the masquerade of a new crusade to Palestine, to Bohemund’s campaign against Byzantium in 1107–8. The influence of the First Crusade provisions was apparent in spiritual rewards offered to papalists in the war against the anti-pope Anacletus in the 1130s, an association explicit in the indulgence proposed at the Council of Pisa in 1135. However, the First Lateran Council of 1123 reserved the Jerusalem war institutions to conflicts in the Holy Land and Spain, a restriction tangentially extended to Wendish pagans by Eugenius III in 1147. During campaigns crucesignati did fight Christians: Greeks during the First, Second and Third Crusades and the Venetian crusade in 1122–5; and Sicilians in 1190; but none was the stated object of crusade vows. In 1197 an exasperated Celestine III exceptionally authorised Holy Land privileges to those who sought to bring Alfonso IX of León to heal after he had campaigned with Moors against fellow Christians. However, the material advantages of crusading as they had matured by the 1190s – legal protection, debt relief, access to special taxation and church funds – coupled with the militant evangelising and political agenda of the papacy, made the association of crusading with wars against Christians likely. In 1199, Innocent III granted Holy Land plenary indulgences to those who campaigned against the German Markward of Anweiler (d. 1202), ‘another Saladin’, who was challenging papally supported regents in the kingdom of Sicily. Innocent argued that Markward threatened the Papal States and the new Jerusalem crusade.4 As other crusade features such as vow, cross and temporal privileges were absent, this hardly constituted radical departure, more logical opportunism.

  Crusades against Christians

  Innocent’s logic went further. In 1208 the full Holy Land paraphernalia of preaching, cross, indulgence and temporal privileges were deployed to deal with the heretics of Languedoc, an initiative confirmed and reinforced by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.5 As the practice developed, three different categories of Christian opponent attracted crusades: heretics, classed as religious deviants, who consciously refused to accept the orthodox teachings and authority of the Church, notably but far from exclusively the Cathars in Languedoc; the religiously ignorant, such as sections of the German peasantry or Bosnian faithful in the 1220s and 1230s, whose failings were deemed to require forcible discipline; and those whose political actions endangered the integrity of the Roman Church, its territory or its client states, and who therefore could be accused of fomenting schism, which readily equated with heresy. Chief antagonists in this last category were the Hohenstaufen rulers of Germany and Sicily until 1266 and, thereafter, anti-papal powers in Italy and the western Mediterranean. As obedience to social and political hierarchies mirrored God’s ordered world, disruption or disturbance invited scriptural condemnation (e.g. ‘Kingdom/House divided against itself cannot stand’, Mark 3:24–5; ‘foxes in the vineyard’, Song of Solomon 2:15). Heresy, in reality rejecting existing ecclesiastical establishments, was branded as treason to God, offering falsehood instead of truth, corrupting the Church, weakening its ability to save souls or, in a crusading context, restore the Holy Land. Heresy was thus deemed to pose an existential danger to every faithful Christian. Like a cancer, it needed excision. Political opponents who attacked the pope’s lands in Italy threatened the pope’s security and, thus, given the Roman Church’s claim to embody the universal Church, constituted an assault on the whole Church. To counter possible disquiet, crusades against Christians were repeatedly equated with less controversial targets, with opponents branded as obstructions to the cause of the Holy Land, collaborators with infidels, similar to or worse than ‘Saracens’ or pagans. The Hohenstaufen excited particularly fevered papal excoriation as enemies of the Church, ‘treacherous and impious’, Frederick II a ‘limb of the devil, minister of Satan and calamitous harbinger of the Anti-Christ’, likened to the Biblical Pharaoh and Herod and the Roman Nero, his son a closet Muslim.6 Not everyone was convinced.

  110. A contemporary depiction of Markward of Anweiler.

  Developing academic canon law on categories of just war made war against fellow Christians easier to justify on general grounds of legitimate violence, defence, retribution, the recovery of land and rights denied or wrongfully invaded, and the restoration of peace. The clergy attached to the Fourth Crusade persuaded crusaders to fight the Greek Christians in 1204, arguing that the Greeks were regicides, or tacitly complicit in regicide and ‘above and beyond all this’ schismatics, so ‘this battle is right and just (droite et juste)’; those killed in the fighting qualified for the crusaders’ indulgence provided they had fought with the ‘right intention’ of returning Byzantium to obedience to Rome and had confessed their sins.7 As crusade preaching and propaganda became increasingly the preserve of theologians and canonists trained, like Innocent III himself, at the universities of Paris and Bologna, crusade rhetoric adopted just-war arguments. In the mid-thirteenth century the canonist and crusade preacher Henry of Segusio (Hostiensis, c. 1200–71) identified seven different types of just war, arguing for the priority of crusading within Christendom (the crux cismarina) over the overseas crusade (crux transmarina). As well as condoning papal crusades against the Hohenstaufen, this drew on the older legal criteria for just war against heretics, seen as a greater threat to Christian souls than infidel possession of the Holy Land.8 Not all wars fought against Christians on behalf of Church or pope after Innocent III’s reign attracted the trappings of crusading. Nonetheless, the crusade within Christendom became the most exploited use of the war of the cross in the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

  Four long-term trends contributed to this. Two were financial: the extension of the uniquely generous crusade indulgence to non-combatants who, from 1213, could redeem their vows for material contributions; and the introduction of church crusade taxes (proposed in 1199; implemented in 1215). These provided obvious incentives for rulers to get their wars proclaimed crusades. The third development arose from the consolidation of a papal state in central Italy from Innocent III’s pontificate onwards that required policing and defending. Finally, the thirteenth century saw the general promotion of the crusade as a model of Christian life within a beleaguered societas Christiana threatened by sin, temporal enemies and religious dissidents. Initiative for crusades against fellow Christians came from the pope but also from regional secular and ecclesiastical authorities pursuing local interests. This denied many internal crusades the universal appeal of wars with infidels and attracted more critical scrutiny than their Holy Land exemplars.

  The Albigensian Crusades, 1209–29

  The suppression of heresy, broadly defined as false beliefs and disobedience to the authority of the Church, provided an established justification for t
he use of physical force. Gratian of Bologna’s mid-twelfth-century Decretum conveniently collated patristic and later texts defining heresy and the measures that legitimately could be employed against them. Events pushed the issue into prominence as religious diversity and dissent proliferated during the eleventh and twelfth centuries across western Christendom. The reasons for this are contested and complex: the quickening of the transmission of ideas following the expansion of regional and international commerce; a simultaneous growth of literacy, the technology of writing and access to learning; the encouragement of criticism of ecclesiastical structures and traditions by church reformers, including some eleventh-century popes; the erosion of customary hierarchical alliances between lay and church authorities in the wake of the Investiture dispute; the emergence of greater urban political autonomy; the popularity of ideals of puritanical austerity in reaction to the increased materialism of a wealthier society; the emergence of a self-conscious clerical elite jealous of its authority and privileges; the encounter with different Christian and infidel belief systems. The move towards greater definition in theology and canon law inevitably placed uniformity at a premium, threatening eccentricity or deviation with exclusion and condemnation and making anomalies in law, doctrine or ritual more obvious and more dangerous. Heresy was defined by shifting orthodoxy. Nevertheless, in the sense of adherents to different belief systems or lived patterns of expression, heretics existed, more visible to the vigilant gaze of fresh-minted guardians of religious truth.

  Heresies fell into different categories. Refined academic disputes; evanescent charismatic personality cults exploiting popular anxiety over death, divine judgement and the end of the world; and organised social revolts that embraced aggressive anti-clericalism. Most proved fleeting, arcane or ephemeral. More challenging were groups of believers with resilient corporate identity possessing distinctive shared literature, doctrine and ritual. Notable among these were the followers of Peter Valdes (c. 1140–c. 1205), the Poor Men of Lyons or Waldensians, whose puritanical scriptural fundamentalism contradicted the official Church’s development of an elaborate sacramental penitential system. After papal investigation condemned them as heretics from the 1170s and 1180s, Waldensian communities established themselves, chiefly in the French and Italian Alps, suffering a crusade as late as in 1488, before being subsumed into the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation.

  More threatening than cells of radical Christian dissenters appeared to be the adherents to a wholly alternative Christian theology to trinitarian Christianity, now known as Cathars (from the Greek katharos, ‘clean’ or ‘pure’, a term used by some of their opponents). Cathars regarded creation as controlled by two principles, Good and Evil, expressed through the different spheres of the spiritual and material. Some thought that Evil/the material came from a rebellion against the Good God, a view not that far removed from orthodox Christian teaching. Others, more radically, believed the two forces were co-eternal, the material world being the creation of Lucifer, the Evil force, not the Good God. This dualist doctrine contradicted the most fundamental tenets of traditional Christianity as it denied the Good God could in any material sense become part of the Evil temporal world and so rejected the Incarnation. The more absolutist position became prevalent across Cathar communities from the 1160s. As with orthodox Catholic believers, precise details of doctrinal theory were filtered by Cathar faithful, the credentes, into simpler articles of belief: the reality of sin; the evil inherent in creation and the material world; the primacy of asceticism; the rejection of the carnal, including marriage, sex and procreation. The central ritual to which the faithful aspired, often on their deathbeds, was the consolamentum (derived from the Latin for ‘strengthening’ or ‘comforting’), a sacramental rite in which the believer received the Holy Spirit and absolution of sin, becoming a perfectus (or perfecta: unlike the Catholic Church the Cathars lacked formal institutional misogyny). Perfecti, sometimes known as Boni Homines, or Good Men, acted as preachers, delivering the consolamentum, and leading exemplary lives avoiding meat and sexual intercourse.

  Cathar communities apparently produced written theological and doctrinal texts, in Latin and the vernacular. The circulation of these texts was mirrored by international contacts between dualist groups in northern and southern France, west Germany, northern Italy, the Balkans (another name for Cathars was ‘Bulgarian heretics’) and Constantinople. Some of these communities appear, by the second half of the twelfth century, to have been organised into recognised bishoprics that shadowed Catholic provinces. Cathars were Christian, just not Catholic or Trinitarian, rejecting the Catholic sacramental system and the humanity of Christ. Large parts of the New Testament and a few passages from the Old Testament were incorporated and reinterpreted by Cathar preachers and theologians, their discussions, as recorded, littered with scriptural references. Theirs was a wholly different version of the Christian message, which nonetheless confronted many of the same issues as Catholic teaching: the problem of sin and evil; anxiety over materialism; the dangers of moral and venal corruption of the Church and churchmen; the desire to return to some pristine austerity. In many ways, the similarities and points of contact with mainstream Catholicism made Cathars in the eyes of church authorities appear more insidious, especially where organised in regional social networks supported by believers with property, money and status.9

  The origins of western Christian dualism – the belief in two competing cosmic forces – probably lay in evangelism from the Bogomil dualist Church, established in the Balkans in the tenth century. As part of the increasing flow of commerce and people between Byzantium and western Europe in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, Bogomil dualist doctrines were possibly mediated by western, Latin converts in Constantinople. Probably from at least the 1140s, dualist communities existed in the Rhineland, Champagne, western Languedoc and Lombardy. By the 1170s, dualist bishops had been established in Lombardy, northern France and across Languedoc – Agen, Albi, Carcassonne and Toulouse – and were likely in contact with a bishop from Constantinople. The number of Cathar believers is hard to assess through lack of statistical evidence and because the nature of the faith blurred confessional boundaries. Dualism existed socially in tandem with Catholicism, one strand in a diverse popular religious culture, the plurality of which added to the disquiet of church authorities. A Catholic knight justified his refusal to pursue heretics from his lands: ‘we cannot; we were brought up with them, there are many of our relatives amongst them, and we can see that their way of life is a virtuous one’.10 Where lay and ecclesiastical authorities worked in harmony, as in parts of the Rhineland, northern France, or England, heretics were vigorously policed and contained by orchestrated repression and swift joint legal action. Where no such alliance existed and where the Church’s increasingly prescriptive intrusions into social behaviour were matched by popular dislike of clerical wealth and hierarchical solipsism, alternative doctrines could flourish.

  Languedoc between the Garonne and Rhône rivers proved especially fertile ground, a region of distinctive cultures, commerce, political rivalries, loose centralised lordship, and ineffective pastoral leadership, with intractable geography, distant from the centres of reformist Catholicism. The Cathar heresy attracted members of social elites, not just the excluded or marginal. The papacy began to take notice, from the 1170s planning counter-measures that within a generation led to the unleashing of a crusade to eradicate heresy in the region. Heresy was not new to Languedoc in the 1170s. Bernard of Clairvaux had preached against heretics there in 1145. However, the rise of organised Catharism prompted Count Raymond V of Toulouse (count 1148–94) to seek outside assistance. A mission to Toulouse led by a papal legate, Peter of Pavia, and Henry of Marcy, abbot of Cîteaux, in 1178 excommunicated a number of prominent local heretics. They probably observed how heretics were accepted members of Languedoc society, freely engaged in trade, employment, landholding, and mundane communication with their Catholic neighbours and relatives.
A more strident policy was proposed by Canon XXVII of the Third Lateran Council of 1179, which offered the threat of physical coercion as well as excommunication. Those who fought heretics in southern France were to receive papal protection of person and property, ‘as we do those who visit the Lord’s Sepulchre’, and a limited, two-year remission of penance; those who were killed would be rewarded with a full indulgence and salvation. The politicisation of the campaign against heresy was reinforced by the canon’s inclusion of similar provisions for those who enlisted against rapacious mercenary companies terrorising Christian communities ‘like pagans’.11