God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  The Ottoman problem did not. By 1481, when Mehmed the Conqueror died, Venice had lost its Aegean capital Negroponte (1470), the Hospitallers in Rhodes had narrowly survived a massive siege (1480), and Otranto, in southern Italy, had briefly been occupied. In Rumelia, there were no Turkish retreats, even if further conquest ceased under Bayezid II, only to be renewed with a vengeance by Selim the Grim and Suleiman the Magnificent. However, the crusade increasingly assumed a walk-on part in the drama. Bulls continued to be issued. Men still took the cross and rulers the money. The efficacy of the ideal continued to receive obeisance, sometimes genuine, sometimes not. In Hungary, recognized as ‘the wall, bastion or shield’ of Latin Christendom, defence was the priority.92 Hunyadi’s son, Matthias Corvinus, used crusading rhetoric to bolster his royal credentials as a monarch from a parvenu dynasty. However, income from papal crusade funds, while useful, made little impression on the cost of Hungary’s military establishment. The recrudescence of crusade enthusiasm in the Iberian peninsula looked to other theatres of holy war, even when its promoters sought to associate them. When Charles VIII of France invaded Italy in 1494 to assert his claim to the kingdom of Naples, he placed the adventure in the context of a desire to fight the Turk and recover Jerusalem. The sincerity of the emotion need not be doubted, even if its implementation was outside practical politics. By initiating a sixty-year war in Italy, Charles VIII destroyed any serious chance to fulfil his ambition. His priorities were very clear. As for so many of his predecessors, the crusade became always the next thing to be done, always just one more military or diplomatic coup away.

  Crusading refused to fade away. It still addressed central issues of politics, war, faith and community. International crusading remained a matter of courtly speculation, diplomatic trope and academic, and occasionally scholarly, debate. Popes continued to promote crusading with literary vigour, although the frequency and eloquence of their bulls were not matched by deeds. Increasingly the cruciata, through its taxes or sale of indulgences, became a matter of pious fiscality, in Spain a significant feature of public finance, jealously guarded by sixteenthcentury monarchs. Indulgences remained popular. In England alone, between 1444 and 1502 there were twelve indulgence sales campaigns on behalf of crusades against the Turks. One of the earliest surviving pieces of English printing was an indulgence form issued to Henry and Katherine Langley of London on 13 December 1476.93 In 1464, a new curial finance department was established, the papal privy purse, specifically to receive crusade money. While the Ottomans presented a vital danger, talk of the recovery of Jerusalem remained the familiar small change of diplomatic parley and bombast, as in Francis I’s attempt to impose an Italian peace in 1515. His later treaty with the Turks (1536) dealt a serious blow to the concept of a confessional foreign policy. Yet old habits died hard. In 1498, the Roman poet laureate promised the new French king Louis XII a Roman triumph and a greeting by Apollo if he liberated the Holy Land and Constantinople.94

  The atmosphere more than the apparatus of crusading infected the language used to describe battles with the Turks. One account of the attack on Lesbos in 1501 is decorated by a lay crusade sermon supposedly delivered by the French king’s lieutenant, compete with promises of papal indulgences, salvation, temporal and eternal honour and glory.95 Ironically, on the eve of the Lutheran revolt against papal indulgences in 1517, the greatest challenge to the theology of crusading yet mounted, reassuring anachronism gave way to some appreciation of reality. None of the debates or decrees of the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–17), which discussed an expeditio against the Turks, mentioned Jerusalem.96 The febrile and hostile politics of Italy, France and Spain prevented any but verbal activity. Religious disunion of a sort unknown in the west for centuries soon complicated responses to both crusading and the Turk. The greatest Muslim threat to Christendom, the advance of the Ottomans to the suburbs of Vienna in 1529, occurred in the same year German evangelical princes signed the ‘Protest’ from which the name Protestant derived. Thereafter, although many Protestants were far from squeamish about holy war or fighting the Turks, crusading assumed a partisan status, a weapon, if at all, of a splintered confessional affinity some, at least, of whose ideological assumptions and roots had been attacked if not hacked off. Crusade institutions remained in the papal armoury, especially in support of Habsburg campaigning around the Mediterranean. For the Roman Catholic faithful, the ideal still shone. Pope Paul III’s summons to the great reforming council at Trent in 1544 announced its purpose: ‘the removal of religious discord, the reform of Christian morals, and the launching of an expedition under the most sacred sign of the cross against the infidel.’97

  But Paul hoped the council would abolish or restrict bulls for crusade indulgences, efforts thwarted by Spanish opposition for reasons of income not salvation. Yet that part of the game was up. Roman Catholic crusade apologists were increasingly reluctant to emphasize the offer of indulgences; their sale was abolished by Paul V in 1567. Crusading retained its place as an appropriate vehicle for Roman Catholics to use in fighting holy war. Yet religious division rendered its theology anathema to significant sections of Christian society who sought and found other ways and means to articulate and pursue violence in the name of their God.

  26

  The Crusade and Christian Society in the Later Middle Ages

  Crusading mentalities did not wholly depend on active military engagement. The emotions sporadically summoned to support fundraising or recruitment were nourished by liturgy, literature, preaching, the sale of indulgences and taxation, from Cyprus to Greenland.1 By the fourteenth century, planners and publicists assumed popular understanding and, for anti-Muslim crusades, sympathy. The familiarity of the crusading spawned recognizable social stereotypes: the ‘ashy’ descroisié or pontificating armchair crusader; the money-grubbing huckster and indulgence salesman; the power-seeking crusade preacher; the pious and chivalrous crusading knight; the faithful footslogger. The categories identified by Francis Bacon in his discussion of responses to holy war in the early seventeenth century boasted long histories: thoughtful theologians; fiery religious zealots; pragmatic soldiers; calculating courtiers; temporizing politicians.2 In the later middle ages, crusading enjoyed greater prominence within western European society than on many frontiers with the infidel.

  SOCIAL APPEAL

  The wide social contact with crusading ideas and formulae transcended promotional special pleading and chroniclers’ exaggeration. Philip of Mézières’s final plan for his crusading Order of the Passion (1397) divided Christian warriors into three groups: kings and princes; common people; and, lastly, ‘knights, squires, other barons, nobles, townsmen (bourgeois), merchants and men of honour of middling rank’.3 On campaigns, humbler crusaders were naturally much in evidence. As in any army, officers needed men to command. The widely attested presence on crusades of squires, mercenaries and sailors causes no surprise. Perhaps more indicative were the urban citizens and working elites who displayed enthusiasm to join up. In the 1320s and 1330s citizens of northern French towns refused to pay crusade subsidies but protested their willingness to serve in person, encouraging fellow townsmen to follow suit.4 Of course, these avowals may represent a traditional legal device to avoid novel fiscal demands, but they indicate how crusading remained a respectable public activity. More direct were the London apprentices who attempted to follow a crusade led by the bishop of Norwich against followers of the Avignon pope (i.e. the French) in 1382; or the eighty citizens of Ghent who took the cross, chose their own commander and set out for Venice in March 1464 (they were back by Christmas). Corporate pride sustained crusade traditions, in great commerical cities such as Venice, Genoa, Florence or London. Wine provided by the civic authorities of the small Flemish town of Axel in 1464 eased the tearful public farewells of the town’s crusaders, who had just received the spiritual sustenance of the mass.5

  24. Crusades in Europe

  Such occasional civic ceremonies were matched by more permanent dem
onstrations of crusade commitment: regular festivals, confraternities and gilds. Crusade interest in the 1330s at Tournai in north-eastern France may have been associated with the week-long festival of the Holy Cross that ended on 14 September, Holy Cross Day, a date closely linked with crusading.6 While the lay orders of chivalry provided for the tastes and aspirations of the nobility, non-noble organizations emerged to cater for a wider public. Lay confraternities to channel devotion and material support can be found in France as early as the 1240s. In Italy, similar confraternities served the papalist cause. In Norfolk, England, in 1384 two gilds were founded, St Christopher’s at Norwich and St Mary’s at Wiggenhall, that began their meetings with prayers for the recovery of the Holy Land. If other English gilds’ sponsorship of Jerusalem pilgrimages are a guide, these expressions of spiritual sociability could act as foci to arrange crusaders’ practical needs as well as to give crucesignati members a good send off.7

  The Parisian confrarie of the Holy Sepulchre demonstrated how interest could be fostered by overlapping local, political and social networks. Founded with a lavish ceremony on Holy Cross Day 1317 in the church of the Holy Cross in Paris, the confraternity’s patron was Louis I count of Clermont and duke of Bourbon, grandfather of the 1390 al-Mahdiya commander and the French royal prince most frequently associated with French crusade plans for twenty years after 1316. Between 1325 and 1327, a church was built for the confrarie, dedicated to the Holy Sepulchre. This came to house a number of Holy Land relics, including three pieces of the True Cross, a key to one of the gates of Jerusalem, an arm of St George and a piece of stone from the Holy Sepulchre itself. Although attracting royalty and nobility, the core of the membership, apparently over 1,000 in the 1330s, were Parisian bourgeois, many of whom had taken the cross at Philip IV’s great ceremony of 1313. The function of the confraternity was to provide these crucesignati with a way to structure and display their continued devotion and, no doubt, their special status and public association with the great. The patronage of courtiers lent snobbish value to membership as well as widening the circles of nobles’ political clientage. The confrarie also acted as a charity, with the unachieved aim of founding a hospital for Holy Land pilgrims. Such institutions and buildings formed a tangible daily reminder of the negotium crucis, exploiting a variety of highly effective pressures: charity; the cult of relics; the elitism of a prominent civic social club; public display; the social allure of nobles and non-nobles mingling as confréres the imprimatur of the church.8 Such institutional context helped crusading continue as a social as well as religious phenomenon.

  Before the gradual fading of realistic hopes of recovering the Holy Land, active planning could generate wider popular engagement, occasionally with disruptive consequences. Preaching, offers of indulgences and taxation could still ignite popular response from those on or beyond the margins of accepted political society. In 1309, in reaction to a small crusade expedition run by the Hospitallers, engaged in completing their conquest of Rhodes, apparently large numbers from England, the Low Countries and Germany took the cross and converged on Mediterranean ports. The papal-Hospitaller campaign, designed to relieve Armenia and Cyprus, only departed early in 1310. It had not been planned as a mass crusade, even if some hoped it would constitute an advance guard of much larger force, a dual strategy urged by contemporary theorists. In 1308, Pope Clement V had granted crusade privileges to those who helped the Hospitallers. A discrepancy arose between organizers and public. Official interest was in raising money to pay for a largely professional army; over two years in the archdiocese of York nearly £500 was collected, primarily from indulgences. However, the loss of the Holy Land in 1291, combined with more recent hopes of a Mongol liberation of Jerusalem, encouraged a wider participation. While hostile conservative chroniclers dismissed the recruits as unauthorized, underfunded and indisciplined, of lowly peasant or urban status, the social mix in this ‘popular’ crusade, as in 1212 and 1251, was broader than clerical snobbery and hierarchic defensiveness implied. From England, those licensed to depart for the Holy Land ranged from nobles to a surgeon. Some of the unofficial levies were sufficiently conversant with the political mechanics of crusading to petition the pope to summon a general crusade; he refused. Larceny and thuggery provided a familiar accompaniment to the progress of these bands southwards. As well as demonstrating the commonplace of violence and lawlessness on the fringes of mass demonstrations that disrupt the tenor of local communities, the alleged outrages reflected the crusaders’ lack of funds and the impossibility of mounting a mass crusade without elite leadership and massive treasure. The existence of a pool of willing, if not particularly able, recruits cannot be doubted. The crusade industry had created its own market with customers unwilling to be fobbed off with spiritually passive or exclusively financial bargains.9

  In 1320, the links between well-publicized official crusade policy and unauthorized crusade enthusiasm were just as clear. In the winter of 1319–20, Philip V of France held a series of conferences in Paris to discuss his crusade plans. A year earlier he had appointed Louis of Clermont as leader of the proposed French advance guard. In the spring, groups of so-called ‘pastoureaux’, indicating countrymen, if not literally shepherds, from northern France, converged on Paris around Easter. News of Philip’s crusade plans may have penetrated these regions through the summonses to the winter assemblies, especially Normandy, Vermandois, Anjou, Picardy and the Ile de France. Economic conditions in some of these rural areas had been appalling. Peace with Flanders in 1319 and the hope generated by prospects of better times and a new crusade may have helped set these bands on the road to Paris. As in 1212 and 1251, many of those who set out were young men, with loose domestic ties, possibly without jobs or tenancies to sustain them through the severe agrarian depression. Yet their association with court policy was evident. A Parisian observer noted many of them came from Normandy, heavily represented at the crusade conferences.10 Some marched behind the banner of Louis of Clermont, not improbably with his consent, hinting at the summons of the wider civil society in support of a troubled political elite. Pope John XXII expressed surprise that Philip V had acquiesced in the activities of the ‘pastoureaux’.11 Initially, churches gave them food and shelter. There was talk of using the marchers on a projected campaign to Italy by Philip V’s cousin, Philip of Valois, the future Philip VI, hardly a task for a criminal mob. Parisians let them pass unmolested. The bands were well organized, some professing clear objectives, such as Aigues Mortes, whence they wished to sail to the Holy Land, indicating the power of nostalgia, precedent, history and legend, here the dominant memory of St Louis. As the bands headed towards the Midi, lack of assistance, realization of their isolation and resentment at the parasitic privileges of those deemed to have exploited or failed the crusade were channelled into violence. Wealthy laity and clergy were attacked; Jews were massacred. Such mayhem acted as a symptom as much as a cause of disintegration, a sign of the desperation to sustain themselves through acts of chastisement, in their eyes moral deeds that had to serve as substitutes for the greatest moral deed of all, the crusade.

  The extent to which the French regime was complicit in encouraging the ‘pastoureaux’ in order to put pressure on the pope to grant crusade money to Philip V remains conjectural. Nevertheless, the French ‘pastou-reaux’ did not operate entirely outside the perimeter of official crusade policy. They challenge any idea of popular enthusiasm for the Holy Land crusade declining or retreating into a day-dream for the chivalric classes. Neither were the ‘pastoureaux’ enacting a social revolt in disguise. The social critique was subtler, a shared acceptance with the elites of moral purposes coupled with harsh criticism of how those elites pursued them. Public failure, not social exploitation, lay at the heart of the grievances of 1320.12

  The concept of the crusade could exceptionally be harnessed to radical social demands. In the spring of 1514, Archbishop Thomas Bakocz of Esztergom, with the vigorous assistance of the Observant Franciscans, hastily a
rranged a crusade in Hungary against the Turks, partly as a sop for his ego, battered by his narrow defeat at the papal conclave the previous year. Reminiscent of scenes in 1456, the preaching struck a chord with hard-pressed rural peasantry, townsmen and students. The economic situation was dire, hitting market towns and livestock herdsmen as much as peasants and tenant farmers. The crusade was sold as redemptive both spiritually and socially. The Hungarian nobility proved hostile, uninterested in supporting war with the Turks, eager to retain revenue designated for the defence of the Turkish frontier and angry at the potential loss of agricultural labour for hay making and harvest. Almost immediately, the crusaders turned on the nobles. Displaying a strong sense of community, the crusader army, led by the minor nobleman George Dozsa and allegedly numbering tens of thousands, began a reign of terror against nobles and their property across the Hungarian plain. Despite Archbishop Bakocz cancelling the crusade as soon as he saw how it was developing, the crusaders continued their rampage, while maintaining their devotion to the cross, crusading privileges, the king and the pope. As so often in sixteenth-century Europe, this was a very conservative social revolt. On 22 May 1514 an army of nobles was defeated, the crusaders finally being crushed only in mid-July at Timisoara (Temesvar). Atrocities had been committed on both sides, the final one the most horrific. Dozsa was placed on a burning stake, platform or throne, a red-hot iron ‘crown’ placed on his head and his followers compelled to bite chunks out of his burning flesh and drink his blood, all this accompanied by singing, dancing and a carnival atmosphere. Dozsa was being branded a traitor to nation, class and faith, precisely what he publicly denied. The 1514 crusade had been officially sanctioned. It attracted large numbers from a wide underclass of civil society with sensitive political antennae. They blamed the nobles – accurately – for failing to pursue the crusade, but took it further. The Hungarian nobles were branded as worse than Turks, a traditional charge levelled against those who impeded the negotium Dei. Only this time, those making these judgements were not popes, princes or prelates, but minor aristocrats and peasants who had taken too literally the message of the cross as a sign of emancipation.13 It may be significant that one later Hungarian word for rebel, kuruc, is derived from crux and may enshrine a long cultural memory of the grim events of the spring and summer of 1514.14