God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  Quia Maior established a comprehensive practical as well as religious framework for a new crusade. After presenting the universal moral obligation, the continuing scandal of Christians in Muslim captivity and the immediate crisis threatening the Holy Land, the pope announced an unequivocal plenary indulgence for all who took the cross and served or sent proxies at their own expense and to the proxies themselves: ‘full forgiveness of their sins of which they make truthful oral confession with contrite hearts truly repented of’. Familiar temporal privileges were rehearsed: ecclesiastical protection of crusaders’ property; moratorium on debts to Christians and their cancellation if owed to Jews. Citing his authority to ‘speak as Vicar of Christ for Christ’, Innocent instructed the clergy, civil communities and non-crusading lay magnates to supply troops for three years out of their resources and demanded naval help from maritime cities. The pope promised that he would also contribute. Income from clerical benefices could be pledged for three years. Trade with Muslims was banned, as was consorting with pirates. The efficacy of the practical rested on the penitential. Special monthly processions were to be accompanied by the preaching of the cross. Prayers for the Holy Land were to be supported by fasting and almsgiving with special chests placed in churches to receive pious donations. A new intercession was to be inserted in the mass. More controversial, but no less pragmatic, was Innocent’s invitation ‘that anyone who wishes, except those bound by religious profession, may take the cross in such a way that his vow may be commuted [i.e. replaced by another penance], redeemed [i.e. dispensed in return for a cash payment equivalent to the cost of crusading] or deferred by apostolic mandate when urgent or evident expediency demands it’. Poverty, incapacity, illness, age, gender or legitimate prior calls no longer prevented the enjoyment of crusade indulgence, a measure at once reducing the delays in checking suitability of putative crucesignati and increasing their numbers and social range. To focus attention and resources on the Holy Land expedition, Innocent cancelled the crusade indulgences for those fighting the Moors in Spain or the heretics in Languedoc who came from outside those regions. Knowing from the experience of the previous quarter of a century how long recruitment could take, Innocent preferred to wait until recruits had taken the cross before setting a deadline for the crusade muster.

  Quia Maior operated within a wider policy. Simultaneously, Innocent summoned a general council of the church to meet in 1215 to discuss church reform and the crusade, and instituted elaborate systems to preach the cross. Papal control was central. The pope himself took the lead in Italy. Legates were appointed for France and Scandinavia. In Hungary, each bishop was authorized to preach the cross. Elsewhere, panels with legatine powers were established in every province to delegate the work of recruiting to deputies. Preachers were instructed to use the details of Quia Maior as the basis of their message. To avoid the controversy that swamped Fulk of Neuilly before the Fourth Crusade, they were to refuse money for themselves and, reminiscent of the bishop of Osma and Dominic Guzman in Languedoc, to travel modestly and set a good example by sober behaviour. On the ground, preachers kept written records of those they recruited and were ordered by the pope to deposit any crusade donations with local religious houses before rendering annual returns to the papal Curia so Innocent could assess the progress of the vast operation.17 The pope maintained close scrutiny over his agents across Europe. To the dean of Speyer’s request for clarification, Innocent reiterated the need to deflect Languedoc crusaders to the Holy Land, to allow recruits to take the cross despite their wives’ opposition, and to follow the encyclical’s radical extension of vow redemption and commutation, which was clearly arousing some concern. At his request, Bishop Conrad of Regensberg was allowed a grander entourage than Innocent had proposed. He was also permitted to absolve certain categories of criminals provided they took the cross. The abbot of Rommersdorf in Austria compiled a collection of Quia Maior and other papal letters as a reference tool while other preachers, such as James of Vitry, descanted on Innocent’s themes.18

  While the preaching campaign began, Innocent prepared the diplomatic ground, once more aided by events. John of England’s submission to the pope in 1213, the defeat of his allies by Philip II of France at Bouvines in 1214 and the subsequent English civil war prompted the king to take the cross on Ash Wednesday (4 March) 1215, using his new status in Magna Carta three months later to postpone settling disputed judgements from his predecessors’ reigns.19 John’s intentions probably owed more to politics than penance, adopting the cross may have been an attempt to facilitate a settlement with his enemies, many of whom were or were about to become crucesignati. The commitment to the crusade among the English propertied classes reached levels similar to the Third Crusade. The context of civil war also influenced Frederick II of Germany and Sicily’s decision to take the cross in the same year, a move encouraged by papal agents now actively supporting his cause.20 Further east, Leopold VI of Austria and King Andrew of Hungary were already crucesignati. Such was his determination to involve the whole of Christendom, Innocent even called on the Venetians to honour their still unfulfilled and unabsolved crusade vow of 1202.21

  The array of monarchs, princes and cities added to a sense of united purpose when the 1,300 ecclesiastical delegates from all parts of Latin Christendom from the Atlantic to Syria met at the Lateran Palace in Rome in November 1215. These included most of those appointed to preach the cross, the Latin Patriarchs of Constantinople and Jerusalem, and representatives from the Maronite church in Lebanon (in communion with Rome since 1181) and of the Melkite (i.e. Syrian and Egyptian Greek Orthodox) archbishop of Alexandria, with whom the pope had maintained a regular correspondence over the conditions of Frankish prisoners in Egypt.22 The business of the council was Christian renewal, reform and the crusade, regarded by Innocent as different aspects of the same religious enterprise. The decisions concerning the crusade suggest some hard bargaining, with the pope not necessarily getting his way. Innocent’s defence of Raymond VI of Toulouse failed to convince the council, who condemned the count in favour of Simon of Montfort, whose activities had long since given the pope pause. More general papal anxieties over the legal proprieties of the war against heretics were seemingly brushed aside in the council’s third decree, which established their canonical legitimacy as attracting the equivalent indulgences and privileges ‘as is granted to those who go to the aid of the Holy Land’.23 This may mark a victory for the bellicose French hierarchy, which had consistently been more robust in prosecuting the Languedoc campaigns than the more legally fastidious pope. The reverse may have been true regarding the plans for the Holy Land crusade, with the implementation of the provisions in Quia Maior regarding vow redemptions, debt and tax exemption causing disquiet in French official circles as being too radical.

  The council’s final decree (no. 71), Ad Liberandam, largely endorsed Quia Maior but with additions, modifications and omissions.24 It established the ‘sanctum propositum’, the ‘negotium Jesu Christi’ in canon law. After two years of active preaching and recruitment, the tone was urgent. The muster was fixed for June 1217, significantly in the ports of the Sicilian regno, the lands of the new papal protégé and imperial candidate Frederick II. For those intending to take a land route, a legate would be appointed. Clerics were encouraged to participate and allowed to fund themselves from their benefices. The pope contributed 30,000 pounds and a ship for the contingent from the city of Rome. Tax exemption was clarified, although behind the scenes concessions may have been made to Philip II, who already in March 1215 had published an ordinance restricting crusaders’ legal immunities in accordance with French customs.25 The direct encouragement to indiscriminate adoption of the cross and vow redemption, another bone of contention, was dropped, although not explicitly contradicted, a convenient obfuscation.26 Proportionate indulgences for ‘aid’ remained. Tournaments were banned for three years and a general Peace, backed by the threat of excommunication, was instituted for four years.

 
By far the most important innovation involved the imposition of a tax of a twentieth on ecclesiastical incomes or three years. Perhaps as a quid pro quo, the pope and cardinals agreed to pay a tenth. Innocent’s earlier attempt to tax the church on papal authority in 1199 had failed. Now, to ensure compliance, the explicit approval of the general council, ‘sacro concilio approbante’, was invoked, in the conciliar decree and in every letter sent out concerning the tax’s collection.27 Both Roman law and political custom across Europe, as, famously, in Clauses 12 and 14 of Magna Carta five months earlier, indicated the importance of representative consent for extraordinary fiscal burdens.28 To effect his financial and legal arrangements, Innocent was simply bowing to contemporary constitutionalism to bind all parties more absolutely than any unilateral recourse to papal absolutism. Clerical crusade taxation combined with the extension of full and proportionate indulgences redeemable by material and cash contributions, the detailed provision for alms and donations, and the beginnings of an international ecclesiastical network of collection and audit, to transform the way crusades operated. All subsequent major crusading enterprises sought similar financial provision, especially ecclesiastical taxes, often to the consternation of local churchmen. The translation of the ideology of inclusive obligation to the cause of the Lord’s War into cash deposits, while arousing the cynicism of some, allowed for more central control of operations by crusade commanders with access to these funds. This made crusading attractive to magnates and kings while encouraging greater professionalism in recruitment, funding and military organization. Immediately after the Lateran Council, the fiscal scheme lent a new coherence to fundraising and papal control. In law, finance and management, Innocent left an indelible imprint on the business of the cross.

  RAISING CRUSADERS

  By the time Ad Liberandam received the council’s approval on 14 December 1215, preaching and recruitment had been going for over two years. It was to continue intensively for another six years then, more sporadically, for at least a further six. The undertaking was massive, in every province and diocese from Scotland to France to Sweden to Hungary to the Mediterranean and even Acre itself, whose new bishop James of Vitry was despatched east in 1216 to drum up local support. It is the first such campaign that has left detailed evidence of every stage of its operation: the reception and dissemination of papal letters; chronicle and personal accounts of the preaching and its effect; the contents of sermons; the mechanics of spreading propaganda between preachers; accounts of money raised and spent. All indicates the grandeur of Innocent’s design. However, its success depended on innumerable local encounters and individual responses.

  The success of crusade preaching depended on skilful manipulation of listeners’ aural, intellectual, emotional and visual perceptions. Evidence from the preaching tours after 1213 shows few opportunities were missed to provide the most receptive circumstances for the papal message. Oliver, scholasticus (i.e. teacher) at the cathedral school at Cologne, later bishop of Paderborn, recorded his experiences preaching the cross to Netherlanders in 1214.29 At the village of Bedum in northern Frisia he preached after mass to a crowd that overflowed the church into the fields outside, a familiar literary and possibly actual scene. His text, Galatians 6:14 (‘God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ’) exploited the rhetoric of the cross and Christ Crucified in Quia Maior, the language of its special crusade prayer and the liturgy of the Eucharist to emphasize penance, obligation, vocation. On cue, so Oliver reported, a vision of three crosses appeared on the sky, two empty, the one in the centre bearing the image of the crucified Christ. Witnesses, apparently about a hundred drawn from all social and age groups, literally saw the point. One recognized the crosses as predicting the recapture of the Holy Land. Another, who had been following Oliver’s preaching tour for some time, was finally persuaded by this visible evidence to take the cross. Other similar apparitions in Frisia confirmed the message of Bedum. Such celestial manifestations were increasingly common in accounts of crusade preaching and usually credited, as here, with inspiring heavy recruitment. In the Cologne region, the success of John of Xanten was directly attributed to such phenomena.30 The link between cloud-gazing and the spoken message, in sermon and liturgy, was clear. At Bedum, Oliver recorded, the vision lasted for as long as it took to sing mass. However the effect was contrived during actual sermons, news of such wonders spread by letter to fellow preachers and, from them, to later chronicle descriptions.

  Other techniques included prophecy. One circulated after the accession of Honorius III as pope in 1216 told of how in 1187 the future pope had been apprised by a mysterious old man, later presumed to be St Peter, that Jerusalem would be regained during his pontificate.31 This clutching at straws seemed to provide a necessary adjunct to the official programme of evangelical preaching that the abbot of Rommersdorf kept in his letter book. The use of the supernatural reflected the context of the preaching. In Frisia and the Rhineland in 1214 the emphasis lay on collective, public visions, with reports careful to record details of time and place. A decade later, a mission to Marseilles under the provost of Arles, which claimed to have enlisted 30,000 citizens for the cross, was accompanied by a series of private miracles and personal visions. Women in ecstatic trances saw ‘many secrets of the cross’.32 Although numerous anecdotes favoured by crusade preachers or poets cast women more often as obstacles to male recruitment, either as wives or lovers, female commitment could be presented as further evidence of universal appeal. At Genoa in the autumn of 1216 James of Vitry managed to attract large numbers of noblewomen to take the cross as a prelude to enlisting their husbands.33 At Genoa and Marseilles, the preachers were careful to publicize their experiences and to establish that their crusade work formed part of a more general campaign to assert orthodoxy.

  The wider political dimensions of the recruitment campaign emphasized the resolution of conflict. Just as in Marseilles, where reception of the crusade acted as a ritual of reconciliation between the church and a city under the ban of excommunication, so Oliver of Paderborn’s tour of western Germany and Netherlands seemed to be aimed at areas supportive of Otto IV, even though the crusade was sponsored by Hohenstaufen partisans such as the Fourth Crusade veteran Bishop Conrad of Halberstadt, as well as by Frederick II himself. James of Vitry’s preaching in Genoa was aimed at securing peace between the city and its enemies. Between 1214 and 1219, disputing factions within Bologna were drawn together to sponsor and join a crusade contingent. Similar procedures characterized the activities of crusade preachers across Tuscany and northern Italy, led, from 1217, by Cardinal Ugolino of Ostia, the future Pope Gregory IX. He helped engineer pacification of disputes at Lucca, Pisa, Padua, Pistoia, Genoa, Bologna and Venice. By 1221, armed with money from the clerical twentieth, Ugolino was easing his diplomatic path with grants of funds to mercenaries for the eastern enterprise as well as crucesignati, a distinction that reflected the changes wrought in crusade recruitment by the relaxation of conditions for taking the cross and the arrangements for central church funding.34 More prominently, Robert of Courçon, crusade legate in France from 1213, attempted, without success, to resolve the Anglo-French conflict for the sake of the Holy Land. While managing to recruit a few magnates, Robert failed prevent the campaigns in northern France of 1214, which ended in the defeat of King John, or the French invasion of England in 1216–17. John’s adoption of the cross in March 1215 and Prince Louis of France’s crusading jaunt to Languedoc that spring owed nothing to Robert’s efforts.

  These different aspects of the function and conduct of crusade preaching and recruitment were reinforced by the sermons’ contents. Playing on the mutually supporting emotions generated by the plight of the Holy Land, personal penitence, corporate guilt and communal anger, preachers’ exempla – uplifting anecdotes – were crafted to match theology and recruitment by encapsulating common assumptions, anxieties and expectations. According to the collection of preaching materials assembled during the r
aising of the Fifth Crusade in England, known as the Ordinatio de predicatione Sancti Crucis, exempla were designed to attract attention, prevent boredom, inspire contrition and encourage the rejection of earthly vanities.35 Their form may have been deliberately demotic, punchy vignettes in the French vernacular in contrast to the Latin meditations on the figure of Christ Crucified that comprised the bulk of the Ordinatio. While much of the text explains the significance of the cross and the requirement on the faithful to imitate and follow Christ, a section, ‘The call (or Vocation) of men to the cross’, uses repeated refrains and the exempla to transmit the message to the audience’s memory and arouse immediate engagement through the frisson of almost trance-like emotion, a sort of flexible liturgy. Many exempla involved crusade heroes and heroics, stressing the heavenly reward for those who died. Other anxieties concerning the process of becoming a crucesignatus were addressed: family pressure, difficulty with obstructive spouses, the pain of leaving children, the value of the indulgence. The two strands, heroic and domestic, signified the double battle waged by the crucesignatus, against the enemy within – doubt, luxury, sin, the devil – and the enemy without, the Saracen. While some anecdotes did the rounds of crusade preachers, assuming common currency, others attempted to explain the theology of crusading with more local resonance. The divine guarantee to crucesignati was confirmed ‘as if by charter’, a familiar legal image to the property owners of western Europe.36 One rather charming exemplum, recorded after the Fifth Crusade, was aimed at the sort of Netherlandish audience to whom Oliver of Paderborn preached. Just as people in Flanders pole-vaulted over small canals, so the crusade indulgence allowed crucesignati to pole-vault across purgatory.37 Elsewhere, gender resistance to crusading was addressed in stories of the consequences – uniformly dire – of women obstructing their spouses from taking the cross, just as later in the century more sympathetic accounts of the involvement of the Virgin Mary and miracles of the Holy Blood were thought to encourage female support. Accounts of local heroes and their martyr’s deaths spoke directly to the practical fears of potential crucesignati as well as to their wider patterns of devotion and belief.