The anti-Hohenstaufen wars further embedded crusading in western European politics. Crusades were directed against Ezzelino and Alberigo of Romano (1256) (see ‘A Day in Venice’, p. 356); Sardinia (1263); and English rebels (1263, 1265). After a Sicilian revolt against Charles of Anjou in 1282 (the so-called Sicilian Vespers) and the occupation of the island by Frederick II’s son-in-law, Peter III of Aragon, a fresh crusade was promulgated (January 1283), which led to a disastrous invasion of Aragon by Philip III of France (1270–85) in 1285. Fresh crusading was instituted when Frederick of Sicily (1296–1337), younger son of Peter III, refused to surrender the island to the Angevins. Only the treaty of Caltabellota in 1302, which left Sicily in Aragonese hands, ended the Sicilian crusades.
116. Charles of Anjou and Manfred.
The Later Middle Ages
In the fourteenth century, Italy remained the chief arena for crusades against Christians. They were employed when Louis IV attempted to revive German imperial claims in the peninsula (1328–30); to prevent Venetian control of Ferrara (1309–10); and against anti-papal (so-called Ghibelline) city rulers, or signori, prominently the Visconti of Milan. (Florence and Naples tended towards the papal – Guelph – side.) However, alliances were necessarily fluid: in 1334, Guelph Florence joined Milan to prevent a papal scheme to erect a Lombard puppet state. Defence of the Papal States, orchestrated by cardinal-legates, such as Bertrand du Poujet after 1319 and Gil Albornoz after 1353, regularly employed crusades. This was chiefly in order to allow the papacy, now settled in Avignon (1309–76), to raise huge sums of money to pay for the wars against Milan (1321, 1324, 1360, 1363, 1368); Ferrara (1321); Mantua and Ancona (1324); Cesena and Faenza (1354). In 1357, 1361 and 1369–70 crusades were directed against freelance mercenary companies (routiers) in the peninsula. Despite conventional rhetoric and privileges, these Italian crusades were restricted to regional politics and local recruitment. Outside Italy, successive popes declined to gild other temporal conflicts with the cross, whether French ambitions on Flanders or the Hundred Years War.
16. Crusades against Christians in Europe, fourteenth–sixteenth centuries.
A DAY IN VENICE, 1258
By the thirteenth century, crusade preachers were well used to employing props and histrionic devices in support of oral rhetoric. However, few could have outdone the scene that unfolded in Venice’s Piazza San Marco sometime in 1258,22 as recorded by the gossipy judgemental Franciscan, Salimbene de Adam (1221–c. 1289). A crusade had been authorised by Pope Alexander IV against the supposedly tyrannical and – in hostile accounts – sadistic ruler of Treviso, Alberigo of Romano, at the time a supporter of the anti-papal Hohenstaufen. One of Alberigo’s alleged atrocities had been the abuse of thirty Treviso noblewomen who had been stripped of their clothes below their breasts and forced to watch their husbands, sons, brothers and fathers being hanged before expulsion from the city. Apparently they made their way to Venice where the papal legate (identified by Salimbene as Cardinal Ottaviano degli Ubaldini), feeding off public outrage, theatrically exploited their predicament to excite the crowd: ‘in order to anger the people more against Alberigo . . . the cardinal . . . had the women come forth in the same shameful and nude condition that the wicked Alberigo had reduced them to’.23 To reinforce his message that the demonised Alberigo needed to be combated by force, the legate rehearsed a string of the more bellicose revenge texts from the Bible before, amid cries of ‘So be it! So be it!’, and by popular demand, he preached and dispensed the cross to the hysterically enthusiastic audience. Salimbene attributed such mass fervour to a combination of deference to the legate, the attraction of indulgences and the witness to Alberigo’s crimes. The friar’s account is lurid, probably more than a little embroidered: if the show did occur, the cardinal may have used actors, as the idea that he, let alone the women themselves, would have agreed to any such a public naked parade defies credulity. Yet, however formal or imaginative, the essential outline features of Salimbene’s story are consistent with many other descriptions of crusade sermons: the emphasis on the lure of spiritual reward; the explicit scriptural support for the justice of authorised violence; the power of atrocity narratives; the validation of reciprocal popular consent; and the skilled mechanics of crowd manipulation, from rhetoric to theatricals and crowd chanting. Effective preaching of the cross, whether outside St Mark’s or elsewhere, involved entertainment as much as conviction.
117. The Venice piazza in Bellini’s Procession of the True Cross.
The rivalries of the Great Schism (1378–1417) provided new crusading opportunities: the Roman Pope Urban VI against his Avignon rival Clement VII (1378); both Roman and Avignon popes authorised crusades during succession wars in Naples (1382, Clement VII; 1411 and 1414, John XXIII). Urban VI associated the crusade with Bishop Despenser of Norwich’s campaign in Flanders in 1383. This was no casual association. Bishop Despenser milked the traditional symbolism in a dramatic performance when he assumed the cross at a ceremony in December 1382 at St Paul’s Cathedral in London, the bishop lifting then carrying a large, heavy cross onto his shoulders in a physically theatrical display of observing the central crusading command of Christ to ‘take up his cross’.24 The crusade still provided incentives, not least financial. Despenser’s crusade, for instance, offered the English government a cheap, if in the event drearily unsuccessful, French campaign, while crusade bulls elevated the status of John of Gaunt’s bid to become king of Castile in 1386. However, the nature of the schism meant that neither side’s crusades had access to adequate church taxes to underwrite substantial campaigns. At the same time papal universalist claims underpinning crusade theory were degraded even if crusading against overt heretics, pagans, Mamluks and Ottomans retained cultural lustre. Following the end of the schism in 1417, popes refrained from using the crusade to defend the Papal States until Julius II (1503–13) briefly revived the habit in Italy. Julius also afforded crusade status to Henry VIII of England’s French campaign of 1512–13. Crusade detritus still littered the political landscape. Occasionally, as in Hungary in 1514, it became enmeshed in civil revolt, although in this case the crusaders’ violence was provoked by the Hungarian nobility’s reluctance to fight Ottomans.
The exception to the decline in crusades against Christians came with six crusades fought against the Hussites of Bohemia (1420, 1421, 1422, 1427, 1431, 1465–71) and another planned (1428–9) and with a rhetorically grand but, in execution, petty and squalid assault on Waldensian communities in Savoy (1488). The Hussites combined organised religious radicalism – vernacular texts, distinct liturgies, Bible-based theology, and a rejection of traditional ecclesiastical authority – with the political cause of anti-German Czech nationalism. This gained it important allies among the Bohemian nobility. A policy of a crusade to crush Hussite heresy attempted to demonstrate the new unity of the western Church after the end of the papal schism (1417) and successfully drew international attention and support across western Europe. However, the continuing Hundred Years War sapped Franco-English support. The leadership of the German Emperor Sigismund (king of Hungary, 1387–1437; of Germany, 1411–37), also king of Bohemia (1419–37), emphasised how far the crusades were enmeshed in discrete regional politics, with religion forming only a part of the cause of conflict. The crusaders’ successive military failures between 1420 and 1431, coupled with their indiscriminate violence, served to reinforce Czech identity and independence while hardly adding lustre to the crusade as a weapon against Christian European powers. The 1465–71 crusade concerned politics and diplomacy rather than faith; Bohemia had long since been recognised by fellow rulers less as a rogue state and more as a potential partner. Inevitably, the following century, the Reformation stimulated revived crusade talk, but talk it chiefly remained (see Chapter 12).25
Criticism and Opposition
Given the pre-1095 tradition of holy war and the kudos of the Jerusalem war, the use of crusading against Christians was inescapable. Its rapid extension in the thirte
enth century rested on clearer categories of holy and just war, the arrival of a settled theology of plenary indulgences and the new availability of funds. Inevitably, crusades against Christians aroused controversy. Victims and opponents naturally objected: Languedoc poets loudly lamented the rape of their land and culture.26 Such crusades could easily be characterised as tawdry political and financial rackets, sometimes with justice. The popes’ arguments that their enemies were distracting efforts to help the Holy Land could be turned back on them. In the thirteenth century, otherwise crusade sympathisers condemned papal wars against the Hohenstaufen in Italy and Germany. Clergy, such as the rectors of Berkshire in 1240, resented taxation for them. English and French nobles objected to attempts to force them to commute their Holy Land vows to fight the Greeks in the 1230s and 1240s. Opponents were found from citizens of Lille in 1284 to Florentines who refused to permit crusade legacies to be diverted. The papalist preacher and canon lawyer Hostiensis ran into trouble on an anti-Hohenstaufen preaching tour of Germany where he was heckled by crowds who preferred the Holy Land crusade. The diversion of church taxes granted in 1274 and 1312 from the Holy Land to Italy appeared fraudulent. Wars in the Holy Land and against pagans and heretics retained primacy of respect; those against fellow Christians attracted limited international approval and inconsistent papal enthusiasm. While Gregory IX, Innocent IV, Clement IV, Boniface VIII or John XXII (1316–34) eagerly promoted such wars, Gregory X (1271–6) or Nicholas IV (1288–91) worked for internal peace in pursuit of a new eastern expedition. The curia was not deaf to critics: in 1246, Innocent IV wished his order to stop preaching the Holy Land crusade in favour of the Hohenstaufen crusade to remain secret.27 As the disgruntled responses of crucesignati in the 1230s and 1240s showed, the coincidence of different crusade objectives caused unease. To some in the later thirteenth century, the erosion of Outremer while crusades in Italy intensified appeared deplorable.
118. Hussite wars.
However, the German and Italian crusades elicited support, chiefly from those with immediate political interests in play. Crusades against Christians failed to tarnish other wars of the cross and played only a subordinate part in attacks on papal authority. The English radical theologian John Wyclif’s coruscating attack on Despenser’s Crusade of 1383 fitted wider anxieties exposed by the crisis of the Great Schism. Papal crusades against Christians produced some dramatic political successes: the conquest of Languedoc; Charles of Anjou’s success in Sicily; the destruction of the Hohenstaufen. Yet papal territory remained insecure and the aura of sanctity wore very thin during the interminable Ghibelline–-Guelph wars. As with crusade grants in Iberia and elsewhere, the later Middle Ages saw crusades against Christians become financial expedients. By the early fifteenth century, even that failed to compensate.
CHAPTER TEN
THE END OF THE JERUSALEM WARS, 1250–1370
The failure of the Egyptian crusade of 1248–50 could not be reversed. The succession of aggressive Mamluk sultans in Egypt bent on proving their Islamic credentials made conquest of enfeebled Frankish Outremer a clear objective once the immediate threat of Mongol lordship in Syria had receded after the Mamluk victory at the battle of Ain Jalut in 1260. Thereafter, Outremer survived through piecemeal treaties and increasingly desperate and ineffectual military and diplomatic expedients. Louis IX could do little more than follow the pattern during his stay at Acre between 1250 and 1254: shoring up the defences of Outremer’s remaining cities and castles; futile diplomacy, such as the abortive treaty with Egypt in 1252 against Damascus or pursuing contacts with an indifferent Mongol Great Khan; and funding modest garrisons at Acre after his departure. In the west, since the 1230s, competing threats, such as the Mongols, or distracting alternative opportunities, such as crusades with the Teutonic Knights in the Baltic, against supposed religious dissidents or even papal crusades against the Hohenstaufen, may have blunted active engagement with the Holy Land and provoked criticism.1 However, especially in Italy and France, generalised enthusiasm for the original cause continued to resist strategic reality, the concept of divine retribution for sin providing cover for logistical contradictions that three generations of planners, theorists and lobbyists sought and failed to unravel. Ideas for Eurasian alliances, maritime blockades, economic embargos, fiscal innovations and professional armies regularly reached the council chambers of rulers whose lip service to the Holy Land failed to override domestic political obligation, a dilemma appreciated by the veteran crusader John of Joinville when he condemned Louis IX’s crusade to Tunis in 1270 as damaging to the peace and security of France.2
The Shepherds’ Crusade, 1251
A striking illustration of Joinville’s dilemma came with the so-called Shep-herds’ Crusade in France during 1251, which exposed the impotence of popular enthusiasm and the perils of absentee rulers. News of Louis IX’s defeat and capture reached western Europe in the summer and autumn of 1250, provoking disturbances in Italian cities and outpourings of communal grief in France. By the spring of 1251 people in rural Brabant, Flanders, Hainault and Picardy, described slightingly as ‘shepherds and simple people’, mobilised with the stated intention of travelling to join Louis in the Holy Land.3 Echoing the 1212 Children’s Crusade in criticising the crusade failings of the nobility, disparate groups of pastoureaux (shepherds) across northern France parodied the crusade processions familiar since the early thirteenth century. Some marched on Paris carrying banners with symbols of the Passion (including the paschal lamb that may have provided their nickname) and the Virgin Mary, while handing out crosses and absolution of sins. Far from an inarticulate formless rabble, they were initially supported by the Regent, Blanche of Castile (d. 1252). Some may have actually reached the Holy Land, indicating means beyond those of shepherds.4 Demonstrations, expressing social frustrations as well as crusade enthusiasm, spread from Normandy to the Loire and south into Berry and beyond. Degenerating into armed gangs, they provoked violence in Rouen, Orléans and Bordeaux, particularly directed at clerics. At Bourges, one band, led by an educated man called ‘the Master of Hungary’, allegedly trilingual in French, German and Latin, attacked Jews before being dispersed and their leader killed.
While, for the mass of followers, the uprisings led nowhere, they demonstrated significant popular acquaintance with official policy and high politics: the use of crusading symbols, such as images of the Passion, favoured by King Louis himself; indulgences; cross-giving; the desire for government approval; criticism of the nobility and clergy; predatory hostility towards Jews, another royal habit; and the call for political action in the service of God. Clerical accusations of disorder, criminality and sexual excess concealed the movement’s coherence and the popular resonance of targets such as venal clergy, feather-bedded scholars and Jews. Of varied economic status, the ‘pastoureaux’, proclaiming loyalty to the king, expressed the frustrations of the marginalised not the ignorant. They revealed wide social diffusion of crusading practices and mentalities achieved through preaching, communal ceremonies, taxation and gossip. Like their social superiors in the Nile Delta, they also showed how devotion alone was not enough, a fact confirmed by Louis IX’s crusade to Tunis in 1270.
The 1270–2 Crusade
Louis IX did not abandon Outremer after 1254. He provided for a French garrison at Acre and annual subsidies. At home, he fashioned an image of royal asceticism and Christian devotion, for which his sufferings in Egypt provided unimpeachable witness, the commitment to the Holy Land supporting a programme of moral authority crafted in art, architecture, anti-Semitism, religious observance and politics.5 Charles of Anjou’s victory in southern Italy and Sicily (1266–8) and the triumph of the royalists in the English Civil War (1263–7) freed Louis to try reversing the verdict of 1250. By September 1266, partly in response to worsening news from the Holy Land, he was planning to take the cross once more.
The survival of Outremer was in increasing jeopardy. The arrival of the Mongols had transformed the regional balance of powe
rs. After capturing Baghdad and killing the last Abbasid caliph in 1258, the Mongols conquered Syria in early 1260, briefly occupying Sidon and raiding as far as Gaza.6 Bohemund VI of Antioch-Tripoli (1252–75) submitted to Mongol overlordship, accepting a Mongol garrison in Antioch that remained until 1268 when the city fell to the Mamluks. Armenian Cilicia also accepted Mongol overlordship. By contrast, the Franks of Acre refused to ally with the Mongols but equally declined to assist the new Mamluk sultan of Egypt, Qutuz, against them. Given Mamluk hostility and the Mongols’ uncompromising unilateral approach to alliances, this may have appeared prudent. However, both Acre and Tripoli-Antioch were left vulnerable after the Egyptian victory at Ain Jalut in southern Galilee (3 September 1260) over a modest Mongol force left behind when the main army had withdrawn eastwards. With Mongol attention subsequently focused on Iraq, Iran and the Caucasus, the Mamluks rapidly proceeded to annex Muslim Syria, ejecting or overawing the surviving Ayyubid princes. By the end of October 1260 when the Bahriyya Mamluk commander Baibars (1260–77) assassinated Qutuz and assumed the sultanate, the unification of Egypt and Syria was more complete than at any time since 1193.
119. Hulagu captures Baghdad, 1258.
Baibars, who had played a central role in the Egyptian military campaigns and internal violence of 1249–50, now used the conquest of Outremer to cement his political and ideological authority, in the process denying the Mongols a potential ally. From 1265 he proceeded to dismantle the remains of Outremer through asymmetrical diplomacy and irresistible siege warfare: Caesarea, Arsuf, Toron and Haifa fell in 1265; Safed, Galilee, Ramlah and Lydda in 1266; Jaffa, Beaufort and, with a punitive massacre, Antioch in 1268. Baibars’ aggression provoked Pope Clement IV to revive crusade plans begun in 1263 under his predecessor Urban IV. On 25 March 1267, the Feast of the Annunciation, before the relics of the Passion in the Sainte Chapelle in Paris, Louis IX took the cross with his immediate family and the leading magnates in France.7
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