God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  Characteristic of Innocent III and his fellow Paris-trained ecclesiastics was the practical and social application of theology. Financing the crusades formed a part of this. In 1199, Innocent unsuccessfully attempted to levy a compulsory fortieth on clerical surpluses to pay for mercenaries for the crusade.13 Quia Maior suggested a voluntary aid, with equal lack of response, so the decree Ad Liberandam imposed a three-year tax of a twentieth on the church to be collected by centrally appointed papal officials. Equally practical were the restatements in 1213 and 1215 of the temporal crusader privileges of immunity from taxes and usury to Jews, moratorium on debts and general church protection for the crusaders and their property. While bishops were to enforce some of the provisions, the secular arm was called upon to police those against Jewish credit collection. Secular individuals and communities were encouraged collectively to supply warriors, as in 1198. Following a similar injunction of 1199, special chests were to be deposited in parish churches to receive indulgence-earning almsgiving for the Holy Land, visible reminders of a permanent obligation.

  These material considerations were balanced by the organization of penance and preaching more systematically than before to ensure the negotium crucis became a permanent feature of lay devotional life, ‘to fight in such a conflict’, Innocent proposed, ‘not so much with physical arms as spiritual ones’.14 Special prayers and liturgical devices had been instituted by Gregory VIII and Clement III. Within the liturgy of the Cistercian Order in the 1190s prayers for crucesignati and ‘pro terra Ierosolymitana’ were introduced. Bidding prayers and clamor now included the needs for the Holy Land.15 Quia Maior provided for monthly penitential processions throughout Christendom, accompanied by preaching, fasting and almsgiving. A new intercessory ritual was added to the daily service of the mass between the Kiss of Peace and the reception of the Communion. In addition to a specially composed intercessory prayer calling for the restoration of the Holy Land, this included the familiar crusading Psalm 79, ‘O God, the heathen are come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple have they defiled; they have laid Jerusalem on heaps.’ The rite underlined the association of the crusade as a physical public duty and personal spiritual obligation with the mass. Confession, penance and the mystical presence of Christ Crucified (transubstantiation was another dogma accepted by the 1215 Lateran Council) provided an appropriate ceremonial as well as spiritual context for, as the intercessory prayer of 1213 put it, the liberation of ‘the land which thine only-begotten son consecrated with his own blood’. A few years later, masses for the Holy Land were marked by the ringing of a bell during the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.16 Such formal rituals acted within the wider process of crusade evangelism, to which Innocent gave clear direction by constructing an elaborate network of crusade preachers in every province and diocese of western Christendom under the direction of papal-appointed legates. In these ways, the cause of the Holy Land became a habitual feature of the parochial liturgical round in ways it had not been before 1187. The business of the cross was the business of Christianity.

  This had extensive practical consequences. Until the Third Crusade, application of crusaders’ privileges had lagged behind the rhetoric of holy war in establishing recognized, coherent conventions. Given the infrequent nature of large-scale wars of the cross, this was unsurprising. This changed with the enormous convulsion of 1187–92, when tens of thousands of crucesignati were recruited in all parts of western Christendom. The implications did not end with the Treaty of Jaffa. The failure to recapture Jerusalem embedded the recovery of the Holy Land into western European politics, with hardly a year passing without an attempt to mobilize a new expedition somewhere in Christendom. The human detritus of the Third Crusade included not just those who departed on that campaign, with their relicts and dependants at home, but also the substantial numbers of crucesignati, who for reasons of accident, poverty or convenience had failed to fulfil their vows in the first place. Church authorities repeatedly attempted to insist on the performance of crusade vows, a problem that had dogged every expedition; the First Crusaders at Antioch in January 1098 had complained about the backsliders at home, threatening them with excommunication. After the Third Crusade, the problem appeared endemic. Celestine III in 1196 and Innocent III in 1200 and 1201 addressed the issue by instructing local ecclesiastical authorities to force compliance on pain of excommunication, to persuade lapsed crucesignati to send proxies, or, in Innocent’s instructions, to allow the poor and infirm to redeem their vows.17 Lists of defaulting crusaders drawn up by the Third Crusade veteran Hubert Walter, from 1193 archbishop of Canterbury, reveal the social range of the business of the cross as well as some of its attendant problems. In a list of forty-seven names from Cornwall, local artisans featured prominently – miller, blacksmith, tanner, tailor, cobbler, etc. – as well as four or five women crucesignatae. Crusaders may have lacked social elevation, but they needed legal freedom and economic substance. This social profile was repeated in a similar list from Lincolnshire, where the main cause of non-fulfilment was poverty. Such evidence confirmed the need for central funding Innocent III had identified in 1199 when he proposed the clerical crusade tax.18 These lists of English crusaders, paralleled in the records of secular government, reveal two important features of crusading at the end of the twelfth century; its wide social embrace and, in common with governments across Europe, its increasing bureaucratization.

  The efficacy of crusading always depended on the alliance of ecclesiastical authority with secular power. Alongside the institutionalization of crusading in the devotional life of the west, governments became involved in securing the temporal status and privileges of crusaders in addition to their traditional role in organizing and conducting the military expeditions. Crusaders’ temporal privileges were consolidated through the circumstances of the Third Crusade, which required secular authorities to recognize and protect the various immunities enjoyed by crucesignati if they were to be effective. Famously, church protection of one crusader’s property, Richard I’s, despite loud papal concern, proved futile in the face of the ambitions of Philip II and Richard’s brother John in 1192–4. Temporal privileges regarding property, civil and criminal litigation, debt and interest repayment, fiscal exemption and the disposal of assets, relied on the cooperation and active support of lay power. Indeed, much of the surviving evidence for the operation of such privileges comes from the records of secular justice and administration. The basic principle behind crusader privileges that withdrew the crucesignatus from a purely lay condition involved its acceptance by lay courts and lords. It was their responsibility to establish case by case claims by individual crusaders to protection and immunities and, frequently, to restrict or define these in accordance with local custom and effective justice or administration. For instance, it was of considerable practical importance that a secular legal inquest at Rouen in 1205 acknowledged that a croisé enjoyed similar legal status to a cleric.19

  The Third Crusade set the pattern. Gregory VIII’s bull Audita Tremendi provided an inadequate guide to tax and debt immunities. Angevin and Capetian royal ordinances on the Saladin Tithe and debt clarified how the exemptions would work. Interest payments supplied a particularly sharp problem. The crusader’s exemption from interest on loans protected his goods and his state of Grace from usury while simultaneously destroying his creditworthiness and hence limiting his ability to fulfil his vow and thus his access to the means of Grace. As a result, some thirteenth-century crusaders voluntarily waived this exemption. The assembly of prelates and barons at Paris in March 1188 established detailed rules in an attempt to stabilize the banking system, avoid a flood of litigation and prevent debtors taking the cross simply to escape their obligations. Although subsequent papal decrees on crusaders’ immunities became more precise, the gap between ecclesiastical theory and secular practice persisted. A French royal ordinance on crusade financial and legal exemptions and privileges of March 1215 declared the intention of safeguarding the ‘law and cus
toms of Holy Church and similarly… the law and customs of the kingdom of France’.20 Secular approval was vital for the system to work, as many of the crusader’s privileges directly affected lay judicial procedures. Thus in 1204 the English justiciar Geoffrey FitzPeter intervened in a case of mort d’ancestor (determining the right to inheritance) because the defendant was crucesignatus.21 Across western Europe secular courts had to recognize crusaders’ immunity from certain civil and non-capital criminal law suits, the postponement of their cases and the standing of their attorneys. Legal and chronological limits had to be determined and modified; in England the so-called crusaders’ term, during which the privileges were effective, was set at three years in 1188 but was regarded by some lawyers fifty years later as five years or indefinite.22 Tax collectors needed instructions to exempt crusaders’ property and methods to establish who they were. On local justices and policing agents, such as sheriffs in England, fell the responsibility to implement the church’s protection of crusaders’ possessions and families.

  The potential domestic repercussions of a decision to take the cross could be considerable. For some, crusading offered lasting advantages. The development of proxy crusaders, while expensive for the non-combatant crucesignatus, benefited the representative often with more than the cost of passage, equipment, travel expenses and wages. To secure proxies’ services, added incentives or bribes were provided, usually land, which then remained in their family’s ownership. As all crusaders were ipso facto legally free, if a landowner chose a possibly easily persuadable unfree tenant to perform his vow, this would imply, at the very least, manumission (i.e. being set free) for the proxy. Hugh Travers, an English servile tenant manumitted as a Jerusalem proxy in the early thirteenth century, was released servile dues and allowed to hold his previously servile tenure as a free tenancy, a move that enabled his descendants to thrive in an increasingly competitive agrarian land market.23 More widespread benefits accrued to those who provided cash or materials in return for gifts, leases, mortgages or sale of property.

  While Innocent III’s programme of extending social access to the crusade indulgences further integrated the activity into society, there were casualties far removed from the battlefields of the cross. Improvident or unlucky crusaders could inflict lasting damage to their patrimonies through debt or alienation. It was no accident that so many preachers’ anecdotes concerned wives trying to prevent their spouses from taking the cross. Although many women took the cross, accompanied expeditions and bequeathed funds for the Holy Land in their wills, crusaders’ wives stood to lose income, status, livelihood, even life itself. Ironically, Innocent III, who elsewhere strongly promoted the ideals of Christian marriage, crucially diminished the rights of women married to crusaders. Traditionally, in canon law, conjugal rights operated with complete equality between the partners, neither having the right unilaterally to deny the other. In theory, before Innocent III, putative crusaders required the permission of their wives to go. Innocent relaxed this provision, effectively giving permission for wives to be abandoned without their consent. Crusade widows, metaphorical and actual, especially if they held or guarded property, were potentially very vulnerable. The protection of the courts often failed to prevent land being stolen, still less offer compensation for any financial hardship consequent on the crusader’s absence. Although a crusader needed his wife’s consent to any land deals that involved dower land set aside to provide for her widowhood, for obvious domestic reasons such permission was regularly forthcoming, exposing that property to the depredations suffered by the rest. Illicit deprivation or expulsion from family land were not the worst outcome. William Trussel left his English lands on crusade in 1190. Six weeks later his wife was murdered by his bastard half-brother and her body flung into a nearby marl pit.24 Property rather than passion was the likely motive. Contrary to modern fantasies, it was not a chastity belt that a crusader’s wife required (in any case an invention of the seventeenth century) but a good lawyer or a strong guardian.

  The proliferation of evidence from the decades after 1187 showing the penetration of crusading into the interstices of social and cultural life reflected the increasing acceptance of written record keeping in politics, administration and the law. Yet it also charted genuine developments in how the business of the cross was presented, operated and perceived, in organization, preaching, liturgical prominence and social penetration. This process did not cease with the pontificate of Innocent III. New theories reconciling the holy war of the crusades with the just war categories of the canon lawyers became increasingly fashionable after 1216. Preaching grew more systematic and standardized, with a proliferation in handbooks and manuals on how to do it and what to say coupled with the emergence as a standing army of evangelism of the new orders of friars, the Dominicans and Franciscans, founded in the second decade of the thirteenth century. As members of orders that held no possessions, begged for their sustenance (hence the name Mendicants) and, while living in communal houses, conducted an active ministry in the outside world, the friars were, in theory at least, ideally suited as preachers. Crusade finance was transformed by the increase in the income from vow redemptions, donations, alms and legacies as well as by regular clerical taxes for the cause. By the mid-1270s, all western Christendom was divided into collection regions. Stronger and more settled central governments were able to mobilize more coherent state responses, even to the extent of levying lay subsidies for the crusade, as in France in 1248 and England in 1270. Recruitment, as a consequence, was based on more professional, contractual and mercenary lines, the link between taking the cross and military service no longer inevitable or essential. To be a crucesignatus could denote spiritual status, not physical activity. Indulgences were applied even more extensively, to include sermon audiences or congregations, crusaders’ non-crucesignati family members and even, on occasion, deceased relatives. Within a century, indulgences were sold directly to the faithful. Although abuses were inevitable, this institutionalization was not so much a racket as an expression of managed commitment.

  Few of these developments were untouched by the legacy of Innocent III, who saw the crusade with moral and religious reform – sabbatarian (i.e. Sunday observance), anti-usury, anti-materialist – as central to his mission. They were the reasons he announced for summoning the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.25 All the great crusade preachers of his reign combined the call of the cross of holy war with that of personal penitence and a return to Apostolic poverty, the way of Christ in public arms and private devotion. The ordinances contained in Quia Maior and Ad Liberandam demonstrated a world view allied to administrative details that exerted an extraordinary hold over succeeding papal legislation, even if their lack of precise definition of the canonical status of holy war or the exact relationship between taking the cross and the actual vow may have continued to trouble academics. By equating the crusade with his general moral agenda rather than confining it to a narrow, military or foreign policy, Innocent left the papacy and church free rein to use the mechanics and language of preaching, recruitment, cross, vow, indulgence, temporal privileges, alms, taxation and redemptions. No longer simply a matter of marching or sailing to Palestine, the crusade found itself a more pervasive role in Christian society paradoxically at the same time as its exclusiveness, some might argue distinctiveness, was diluted.

  THE GERMAN CRUSADE 1195–8

  The enforced revival of active crusading in the east after 1187 encouraged the application of wars of the cross elsewhere, as it had in the early years of the twelfth century and again during the Second Crusade. Propaganda, recruitment and rounding up vow shirkers for the Holy Land scarcely ceased, keeping the crusade and the associated sense of Christendom in crisis prominently in view. Other frontiers seemed to demand attention. The success of the north African Berber Islamic reformist political sect the Almohads since the 1150s, and especially under Ya‘qub (1184–99), in annexing much of Muslim southern Spain and driving back earlier Christian advances,
reached a climax in their defeat of Alfonso VIII of Castile at Alarcos in 1195. In 1193, Celestine III had authorized a crusade to bolster Iberian resistance. Similarly in the Baltic, in 1195 Celestine associated the crusade and its privileges with attempts to conquer and colonize Livonia (roughly modern Latvia) by Saxon entrepreneurs, adventurers and blood-stained penitents directed by Archbishop Hartwig II of Bremen (1185–1207) and his protégé Berthold, soi-disant bishop of the Livs.26 The precedents for such extensions of the crusade reached back a century in local practice and found legitimacy in the decrees of the First Lateran Council (1123) and Bernard of Clairvaux at the Diet of Frankfurt (1147). The Third Lateran Council of 1179 had sidled towards a further extension involving Christians, not just infidels. Decree XXVII offered plenary indulgences to those who were killed helping local bishops fight Cathar heretics in southern France or mercenary companies who were terrorizing and devastating whole regions ‘more paganorum’, like pagans. Those who joined up for these campaigns and did not die were to receive only limited indulgences, although they and their goods were to be placed under the same church protection as those who visited the Holy Sepulchre.27 Innocent III developed these precedents into an unambiguous programme of religious warfare on all fronts.