God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  The preaching campaign promised to be more efficient. A chain of authority reached from the pope to legates, local ecclesiastical hierarchies and specially appointed preachers with the powers to conscript deputies, including monks and canons. The problem lay not in the message but the promotion and reception. In November 1198, Innocent pulled off a public relations coup by enlisting the charismatic French evangelist Fulk of Neuilly, who already enjoyed a large popular following for his brand of austere moral rearmament.38 A parish priest of imposing bearing, a notorious gourmand, Fulk had honed his rhetorical skills during a stay at the sophisticated theological schools in Paris, where the pope as young man may have encountered him. Despite this elite training, Fulk affected the common touch in his career as an itinerant holy man. He made his reputation in the late 1190s preaching a return to apostolic virtue, the practice of simplicity and poverty and a rejection of outward signs of corruption such as usury, luxury and sexual licence. He attracted stories of miracles based on those found in the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles: healing the sick; curing the blind, dumb and lame; exorcism; reforming prostitutes; and escaping from chains and prison. Although covertly something of an establishment figure himself, Fulk – and his admirers – cultivated the figure of the prophet apart, John the Baptist or even Peter the Hermit. This carefully fashioned image of plain-talking fearless pursuit of the truth and redemption, so useful for a professional evangelist, was greatly enhanced by his well-publicized encounter with Richard I. He accused the king to his face of pride, avarice and sensuality, drawing Richard’s neat riposte: ‘I give my pride to the Templars; my avarice to the Cistercians; and my sensuality to the Benedictines.’39 Fulk lacked shyness; in mock humility and floods of tears he told an audience of Cistercians in 1201 that he had personally signed up 200,000 crusaders, a preposterous claim, but one that reflected a possibly necessary self-belief. In the words of his contemporary eulogist and fellow preacher, James of Vitry, Fulk was a star (‘stellam in medio nebule’).40

  As such, Innocent was evidently keen to harness his fame, popularity and promotional ability to the crusade. Fulk embodied Innocent’s attempt to integrate the war of the cross into the wider reform movement, loosely described as Apostolic Poverty. Fulk’s appointment as a preacher of the cross in November 1198 allowed him free rein, not least in choosing his own evangelizing lieutenants. His crusade preaching took him to Flanders, Normandy and Brittany as well as his home region of the Ile de France.41 A measure of his impact is the indelible impression his preaching left in the memories of contemporaries. Two crucesignati who wrote accounts of their experiences, the grand Geoffrey of Villehardouin, and a Picard knight of modest means, Robert of Clari, both opened their histories of the Fourth Crusade with Fulk’s preaching. To emphasize the importance of Abbot Martin of Pairis near Basel in preaching the cross, his panegyrist Gunther took pains to associate him with Fulk’s mission. Yet the tangible results of Fulk’s preaching were elusive, at least in regard to enrolling lords and property owners on whom the success of any expedition depended. No important recruits came forward for another year, by which time Fulk’s appeal may have faded.

  Despite Innocent III’s theology of redemption and the Lord’s War, aspects of the alliance of Apostolic Poverty with crusading jarred. Robert of Clari noted that, as well as preaching the cross, Fulk had collected ‘much wealth to be carried to the Holy Land overseas’, presumably in the form of alms and donations, as encouraged by the papacy. James of Vitry’s account is less innocuous and more revealing.

  [Fulk] began amassing a great sum of money from the alms of the faithful which he had undertaken to pay out to poor men who took the cross, both soldiers and others. But through avarice or other base motive, he did not make these payments, and from that time, by God’s hidden judgement, the power and influence of his preaching swiftly declined. His wealth grew, but the fear and respect he had commanded fell away.42

  According to James, following these charges of embezzlement, his reputation shot to pieces, Fulk slunk away into retirement and death. In fact he continued to play an important, if only iconic, role, at least in observers’ memories.

  He was not the last evangelist to find preaching and the crusade a corrosive mix. In the sermons of many of the Paris-trained moralists who promoted Innocent III’s crusades, the concentration lay as much, occasionally more, with the redemptive and reforming dimensions of the message than with the military or material. One of those Fulk recruited to preach the cross, Eustace abbot of St Gemer de Flay, after preaching tours of England in 1200 and 1201 was remembered for his vitriolic attacks on illicit trading and breaches of the Sabbath rather than for his urging of holy war.43 Fulk’s difficulty lay in a series of potential conflicts and contradictions between his usual stance against usury and the requirements of the crusade. Insistence on the rejection of usury (i.e. credit) and the abandonment of wealth in favour of the rigorous vita apostolica presented aspirant crusade contributors and participants with material and moral quandaries. Fulk found himself preaching poverty and the evils of money, which he was simultaneously salting away. Whether he was actually corrupt hardly mattered: as always, there were fellow clerics eager to cast the first stone. Fulk had built his name on perceptions; he lost it the same way. Yet, despite the whiff of scandal, his efforts were remembered as seminal. It may have been no coincidence that some of the areas he toured in northern France, including Flanders, produced large contingents of crusaders. Both the Champenois Villehardouin and Picard Robert of Clari stressed Fulk’s probity; perhaps they had heard the stories of embezzlement. Despite the rumours, Fulk remained attached to the crusade venture until his death in May 1202, attending on the crusade leaders at Soissons in May 1201 and addressing the General Chapter of the Cistercians, an order heavily involved in the preaching campaign, in September the same year.

  Despite the claims made by and for Fulk, most recognized the guiding hand of Pope Innocent behind the charismatic French preacher. Whatever success the preachers enjoyed, in 1198–9 the crusade hardly progressed publicly, not least because of Innocent’s difficulties. Fulk’s own travails indicated one of Innocent’s problems: money. In December 1199, with his proposed deadline long past and no prospect of royal involvement, the pope proclaimed a tax on clerical profits of a fortieth (2.5 per cent) in order to pay ‘for the upkeep of fighting men’.44 To try to forestall resistance to this novel demonstration of papal authority, he promised the levy would create no precedent, an indication that Innocent’s conception of papal power still lacked general consensus. Hiring paid troops on crusade was not a new idea. Conrad III had done it in the Holy Land in 1148, as had both Philip II and Richard I on their arrival in 1191. Richard had paid for his fleet and its sailors. Henry VI had provided wages for a mounted regiment at least 3,000 strong in 1195. If, as James of Vitry reported, Fulk of Neuilly was raising funds to pay soldiers, then Innocent had recognized the need for such a pool of men and money from the start. Finance and mercenaries were to lie at the centre of how the Fourth Crusade operated and developed.

  In 1198–9, Innocent’s eastern schemes were taking time to coalesce. Elsewhere, grants of crusade privileges, as against the Livs renewed in 1198, cost little, the burden of action being taken by locals. The wars in France and Germany were partly responsible for the delay in the Holy Land enterprise. More pressing were political difficulties in Italy, where a German adventurer and former imperial steward, Markward of Anweiler (d. 1202), was attempting to carve out a territory for himself from the lands of his former master Henry VI in southern Italy and Sicily. Innocent as guardian of the rights of Henry’s infant son Frederick II, sought to organize resistance. In January 1199, he toyed with the idea of granting Holy Land plenary indulgences to those resisting Markward on the mainland. By November, perhaps as a last resort when it appeared that Markward and his Muslim allies had Sicily at their mercy, Innocent offered Holy Land indulgences to those prepared to fight the invaders, in part because he professed to regard Markwar
d’s ambitions as a hindrance to the Palestine project. War in Italy and Sicily clearly influenced arrangements for any crusade to the east, if only by denying crusaders safe passage to ports and access to transport. The effect of Innocent’s grant is hard to judge. It does not appear that the other central crusading features of preaching and giving the cross were employed, even though the conflict has been called the first ‘political crusade’.45

  Besides distracting the pope from the eastern question, the wars in Italy and Livonia confirmed Innocent’s inclusive interpretation and use of the holy war of the cross. His theology was in place. Preaching had begun to raise the consciousness of the faithful. The bull of August 1198, coming so soon on the heels of Innocent’s accession and the end of the German crusade, had confirmed a near-permanent position for Holy Land crusading in the ecclesiastical and religious polity of the western church. However, to convert ambition into action required the initiative not of the pope, legates and clergy alone or even the masses enthused by crusade evangelists. To get anywhere, Innocent’s new crusade, as he had admitted in his bull, relied on the commitment and leadership of the secular rich and powerful.

  16

  The Fourth Crusade: Preparations

  The central irony of the Fourth Crusade sprang from its achievements. The capture of Constantinople in April 1204 and the subsequent annexation by western lords of large tracts of the Greek empire constituted for many participants and witnesses a memorable and admirable triumph of western chivalry. Against great odds, as one of their leaders Geoffrey of Villehardouin was later at pains to emphasize, the crusaders had overcome ‘the greatest, most powerful, and most strongly fortified city in the world’.1 Yet every step of the way – from the treaty with Venice that insisted on a general muster there in 1202; to the attack on the Dalmatian port of Zara; to the diversion to Byzantium in 1203 – was accompanied by divisions, doubts, arguments and defections. The triumph itself seemingly required constant justification, at the time and subsequently. The Greek conquests failed to ignite much western interest or support, at least once the great holy booty of relics had been secured. This ‘new France’, as Innocent’s successor Honorius III called it, failed to capture the imagination to compete with the Holy Land. While Byzantium never fully recovered from the trauma of defeat and partition, the effect of the Fourth Crusade on most of western Europe remained peripheral. The exception was Venice, a city that had gambled and gained hugely on this unexpected inauguration of its international empire. Yet the image of a Christian army of crusaders laying waste the ancient Christian capital of Constantinople appeared, at the very least, striking, if not actively disturbing. The pope was appalled.2 A victory of pragmatism, perhaps even desperation, over idealism, conscience, even, some argued, law, the Fourth Crusade left its main purpose unrealized, the recovery of Jerusalem. Whatever the religious dimension of attacking the schismatic Greeks, the essential excuse for the events of 1203–4 depended on a variety of just war explanations allied to the rationale of expediency. By the time the enterprise to fight for the Holy Land was effectively called off in the summer of 1205, there had been no holy war. The crusade had been cancelled before it had begun.

  RECRUITMENT AND FINANCE

  Early recruitment for Innocent III’s crusade owed much to a ghost. Looking back half a century later, a knowledgeable Cistercian, Alberic of Trois-Fontaines, characterized the enterprise as ‘an overseas expedition of nobles signed with the Cross who had formerly abandoned King Philip when King Richard attacked, as well as other barons’.3 Half a decade of intense conflict had forced most of the higher nobility of France to choose between allegiance to the Capetians or alliance with the Angevins. In the late 1190s, Richard’s partisans included the counts of Flanders, Blois and St Pol, all prominent future leaders of the crusade. The death of Richard in April 1199 transformed prospects. While he lived, few nobles in any region of France would have been happy or sensible to leave for the east with the contest between the kings of France and England active and unresolved. No amount of fine words from Fulk of Neuilly could shift political necessities. The value of church protection for absent crusaders had been starkly exposed by the fate of Richard’s own French lands in 1193–4. However, on Richard’s death, new accommodations were reached, not least because of the rebarbative personality of Richard’s successor John, one of the most unsuccessful medieval monarchs who lost an empire and united his own baronage in dislike, resentment, fear and, ultimately, rebellion. The awkwardness facing Richard’s former allies could honourably be resolved by a decision to take the cross, a move that would serve the interests and win the approval of the king of France. Many of the great lords of northern France were young men. In 1199, the counts of Flanders, Blois and Champagne were all in their twenties, childless or with infants as heirs. For King Philip, their absence on crusade would remove proven or potential troublemakers and offer chances for lucrative royal intervention in their territories through regency or wardship arrangements.

  In the winter of 1199–1200 a closely related group of great nobles from northern France accepted the cross, the counts of Champagne and Blois during a tournament at Ecry-sur-Aisne on Advent Sunday, 28 November, and the count of Flanders in Bruges on Ash Wednesday, 23 February.4 Theobald of Champagne and Louis of Blois were cousins. Baldwin of Flanders was married to Theobald’s sister, Marie, who took the cross with him, although heavily pregnant. The dates were not coincidental, each falling on the first days of the two great penitential seasons of the Christian year, Advent and Lent, familiar times to take the penitential vow of the cross. These were far from spontaneous acts, each count having assembled large numbers of important vassals to take the cross. The timing may also indicate wider preparations involving the pope, although there is no direct evidence for this. A month after the ceremony at Ecry, Innocent issued his bull announcing his own financial provision for the expedition.5 The pope may have been waiting for news of the public commitment by the French nobles. Certainly the preamble to the bull of 31 December implied that action had already begun to which the pope wished to be seen to contribute. He also assigned two papal legates to travel to the Holy Land. At the same time, the preaching campaign was revived or extended, for example to Germany and the British Isles.6

  The preaching campaign for the Fourth Crusade was organized through three agencies: papal legates; local bishops; and the Cistercians. Even Fulk of Neuilly fitted this scheme. Innocent declared that his appointment to preach the cross had been made with the ‘advice and assent’ of the legate to France, Peter Capuano.7 A well-informed Cistercian source insisted that Fulk had previously adopted the cross at the order’s general chapter at Cîteaux on 4 September 1198 and subsequently had failed to persuade many Cistercians to help in the preaching campaign. It was later alleged in Outremer that some of Fulk’s ‘innumerable wealth’ was deposited with the Cistercians, who sent it to the Holy Land to pay for repairs to the walls of Tyre, Beirut and Acre.8 Whatever the truth or pious fictions associating Fulk with the Cistercians, other members of the order played significant roles both in preaching and accompanying the crusade. Abbot Martin of Pairis roused considerable enthusiasm at Basel, probably in May 1201, after a modest response to the earlier preaching of the local bishop. He subsequently joined the Basel crusaders on their journey to the muster at Venice in the summer of 1202. The abbots of Loos and Les Vaux de Cernay were leading figures on the expedition itself, although finding themselves on opposite sides of the argument over the diversion to Byzantium. Cistercians, including the abbot of Luciedo, were among the entourage of Boniface marquis of Montferrat when he arrived in France to accept the leadership of the crusade in the late summer of 1201; they may have been instrumental in persuading him to accept the task. In September 1201, the Cistercian General Chapter at Cîteaux played host to Boniface and other crusade leaders at an assembly that included Fulk of Neuilly and, possibly, Martin of Pairis.9 The evangelical tradition of St Bernard and the Second Crusade, which had sustained Cistercia
n enthusiasm for the crusade after 1187, provided the expedition’s organizers with a useful web of proselytizing, information and influence. The order was exempted from the clerical tax of 1199. Its role perhaps added spice to Richard I’s gift to them of his greed.

  However, as before, preaching operated as part of a process of public commitment. When Martin of Pairis preached at Basel, his audience were bursting with expectation, filled by rumours of preaching elsewhere, ‘prepared in their hearts to enlist in Christ’s camp… hungrily anticipating an exhortation of this sort’.10 Whatever frisson of excitement or moment of epiphany struck congregations, the decision to take the cross depended on a long chain of conscious individual and collective calculations and decisions. This deliberate and complex activity took time to gain the acceptance, permission and support of family, lords, tenants or vassals, and to begin the necessary material as well as spiritual preparations. The sermons stood as ritualized representations of this, taking the cross confirming as much as inspiring enlistment. But months and years were required to convert the commitment into action, because, unlike the First Crusaders in 1095–6, their successors increasingly knew what to expect and took pains to anticipate the difficulties.

  Between 1199 and 1202, crusade recruitment extended from the Irish Sea to the Adriatic, from Saxony to Lombardy and Provence. Yet the core regions stretched from Flanders southwards through Champagne and the Ile de France to the Loire. It gave the appearance of a very French affair. The carefully crafted ceremony at Ecry lent important momentum. One of those who took the cross there with Count Theobald, Geoffrey of Villehardouin, marshal of Champagne, noted that ‘people throughout the country were greatly impressed when men of such high standing took the cross’.11 Whatever private conviction or enthusiasm prompted responses to the call of the cross, networks of family, lordship, region, community and tradition exerted a powerful influence. As with a number of the German crusade leaders four years earlier, the youth of some of the French counts may have encouraged adventure. Preaching alone was insufficient. Many noble crucesignati boasted distinguished crusading pedigrees. Theobald of Champagne’s father, Count Henry I, had twice visited the Holy Land, the first time with the Second Crusade; his elder brother, Count Henry II, from whom he had had inherited the county, had been one of the commanders of the Third Crusade and ruler of Jerusalem 1192–7. Louis of Blois, as a teenager, had campaigned with his father in Palestine on the Third Crusade. Baldwin of Flanders was heir to one of the most distinguished of all crusade traditions, stretching back to Count Robert II on the First Crusade and including three other twelfth-century counts. Other veterans included Geoffrey of Villehardouin, who had spent four years in a Muslim prison after being captured outside the camp at Acre in 1190, and Simon de Montfort, who had only just returned from the Holy Land.12