God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  The eccentric and gruesome Hungarian crusade revolt revealed the crusade as not necessarily the preserve of the social elites. However, it also illustrated how crusading motifs could be employed in contexts not essentially connected with holy war and, conversely, how initially tangential or non-crusading emotions and aspirations could find expression in crusade language and forms, however eccentrically or tendentiously construed, in this case by the radical Observant Franciscans. Equally, the behaviour of the Hungarian nobles in 1514 points to the absurdity of generalizing about crusade popularity or social embrace. The Hungarian elite became tepid at formal crusading at a time when the Habsburgs, heirs of the dukes of Burgundy but especially in their Iberian manifestation, eagerly employed the fully panoply of rhetoric, theology and privileges, tempered by their own brand of monarchical messianism. The Iberian revival found fewer echoes in fifteenth-century England when the collapse of the credibility of the Prussian crusade was not replaced by any new feasible object for action, except for those who became Hospitallers. In France, the crusade retained its lustre, but was inextricably caught up in the burgeoning religion of monarchy. As a bond of community and a justification for war, in many places and times crusading, having provided a model, became superseded. The very lack of such confidence in their share of national identity may have encouraged the less grand elements in Hungary to define their action against the Turks and then their nobles so tenaciously in terms of traditional crusading.

  CONTINUING TRADITIONS

  As in previous centuries, crusading continued to run in families and in regions. This could impose a sense of obligation, almost of responsibility, especially as stories of past crusading heroism circulated widely in literature, polemic and preaching. Parish churches and family homes were festooned with relics of past crusades and crusading ancestors. Tradition caused successive kings of France to be proclaimed as bearing an especial responsibility for crusading in the east, not least by themselves. The duty formed part of their kingship, a proprietorial association carefully nurtured by the first two rulers of the cadet Valois dynasty, Philip VI in the 1330s and John II in the 1360s. More junior branches of St Louis’s descendants were no less infected, notably Louis I of Bourbon and his grandson Louis II, the al-Mahdiya commander. Across Europe similar family histories encouraged members from all stations of the nobility and aristocracy to maintain the tradition, some, such as the Beauc-hamps, Mowbrays and Percys in England, or the Briennes in Champagne, boasting holy war pedigrees that stretched in some cases from the early twelfth to the late fourteenth centuries. In the fourteenth century, families’ engagement scarcely abated.15 Although some used holy wars as a finishing ground for a knightly education, others found them sterner training. For casualties of Nicopolis or young Geoffrey Scrope of Masham in Yorkshire, killed in the forbidding wastes of Lithuania in 1362, as for those western recruits who fought with the Hospitallers in defence of Rhodes against the Mamluks in 1444, such as Daniel Habin of Majorca, who lost a hand, or Matthew of Transylvania, deprived of the use of his right arm, these wars were no games.16 The decline in active crusading was the result of a reduction in opportunity not, as often asserted, the other way round. In relation to eastern crusades, at least, the continuing lure of the Holy Places alone testifies to lively interest. From the 1330s and entrenched by the 1370 Cypriot-Egyptian treaty, the Mamluk rulers of Palestine followed the precedent of Saladin in allowing western Christians access to the Holy Sites at a price. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries witnessed a resurgence of large-scale western pilgrimages to Palestine and Egypt and a welter of published accounts of pilgrims’ experiences as well as formal itineraries. Many of these pilgrims at other times also fought against the infidel, but not in the Holy Land.

  Compensation for the absence of active crusading was found in the round of indulgences on offer and liturgies performed. Occasionally the crusading element in the prevailing cultural milieu found more targeted demonstration. In 1407–8, partly as a public relations exercise, the Hospitallers of Rhodes constructed the fortress of St Peter at Bodrum, classical Halicarnassus, on the mainland opposite Cos. To pay for the hugely expensive building work, which included reusing dressed stone from the nearby mausoleum, the Hospitallers launched an appeal, backed by papal indulgences. English contributions alone helped to pay for a tower on whose walls twenty-six coats-of-arms were set up in stone, including those of King Henry IV, his four sons and the families with recent or ancient crusade pedigrees, such as the Montagues, Courtenays, Nevilles, Percys, Beauchamps and Hollands. Possibly copied for an armorial roll, they may represent the chief contributors. One set of arms was those of the FitzHughs. Henry FitzHugh had sent equipment to Bodrum in 1409; Sir William, probably Henry’s son, and his wife bought Bodrum indulgences in 1414. Bodrum retained strong links with the English section (or langue) of the Hospitallers throughout the fifteenth century, William Dawney and John Langstrother, later prior of the English Hospitallers, holding the command there in 1448 and 1456 respectively.17

  Regional commitment varied but also demonstrated tenacious links with the past. The dukes of Burgundy played on their inheritance as counts of Flanders of the Flemish crusading legacy during attempts to arouse their subjects’ support for a crusade in the 1450s. For a venture directed to the relief of Constantinople, it was convenient and appropriate to invoke the memory of Baldwin IX, the first Latin emperor. Each area seemed to require its crusade heroes – St Louis in France; Richard I in England; the Iberian champions of the reconquista, etc. – even ones with spurious credentials, such as St Ladislas in Hungary. The Low Countries, western Germany, Champagne and northern France, the heartlands of the First Crusade, remained fertile recruiting grounds. Grafting crusading enthusiasm on to social groups not attuned by long experience proved less easy, as the relative indifference of the Polish or Hungarian nobilities in the later fifteenth century testified. Long absence of concerted preaching or actual recruitment could relegate active crusading to an increasingly eccentric if no less sincere minority, as in England after the 1330s and even more after 1400. Conversely, as in Iberia in the later fifteenth century, crusade enthusiasm could be revived by government commitment and action. Either way, cultural recognition, once established, proved extremely tenacious, even when producing only fitful ignition of official or public activity.

  One sign of this came in the way crusading acted as a mechanism of social advancement. Service in holy war acted as a means of entry to the ranks of the knightly and respectable for parvenus, a ticket of admission into the secular social elite. Such rites of social passage could include meritorious service in national or royal wars, but crusading, as indicated by the emphasis placed on it by numerous lay orders of chivalry, attracted especially rewarding recognition. Nicholas Sabraham, a veteran of Crécy in 1346, made his fortune at war for three decades, from the 1330s, on English campaigns in Scotland, France and Spain. He also fought in Prussia, joined Peter of Cyprus’s crusade to Alexandria in 1365 and from there went to serve on Amadeus of Savoy’s expedition of 1366–7 to the Dardenelles and Bulgaria. Most of the crusades offered few, if any, easy pickings. A professional soldier very different from the gilded crusading youths with whom he rubbed shoulders, Sabraham nonetheless was called to give evidence in a great armorial dispute held in the English Court of Chivalry in 1386, where he carefully described his crusading exploits.18 They were a guarantee of his gentility of deed regardless of birth. Across the English Channel, Bertrand du Guesclin, the chief military commander and strategist under Charles V, by no means from the top drawer of the French nobility, attempted to enhance his status when fighting for French allies in Spain in 1366 by associating the Spanish war against the English with a crusade to Granada. Bertrand was even crowned ‘king of Granada’ by his employer, King Henry II of Castile.19 The image of holy wars of the cross required little explanation or special pleading to attract admiration.

  THE IMAGE OF CRUSADING

  The commitment of individuals and communitie
s to the ideals and occasional practice of crusading found expression in art and literature. At the end of Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (finished 1469/70), Sir Bors, Sir Blamore, Sir Ector and Sir Bleoberis finish their careers fighting ‘miscreants and Turks’ in the Holy Land.20 Judging by the contents of contemporary late fifteenth-century libraries, this was a historical but not cultural anachronism. Texts of crusade history and advice continued to be written, copied or, later, printed with undiminished energy into the sixteenth century, when new genres of vernacular literature emerged regarding the Turkish menace, particularly in Germany. Especially popular across Europe were histories and legends of the Holy Land crusades, not just with kings, princes and courtiers. Chronicles of Jerusalem, probably William of Tyre, found their way into the possession of local gentry in Norfolk and Bedfordshire in England. The Norfolk gentleman John Paston II owned a chronicle, in English, about Richard I. The printer William Caxton translated William of Tyre in 1481.21 Historical knowledge was assumed. Entertaining Peter I of Cyprus to dinner in London in the winter of 1363–4, Edward III of England teased his guest that, if Peter succeeded in recovering Jerusalem, Cyprus, ‘which my ancestor Richard entrusted to your predecessor to keep’, should be restored to the English king.22

  Contemporary news from the eastern front was equally avidly devoured, by word of mouth or in writing. Jean Waurin’s account of the anti-Turkish wars of the 1440s reached the English court under Edward IV. Guillaume de Caoursin’s eyewitness account of the siege of Rhodes (1480), with vivid woodcut illustrations, reached a wide international audience within a decade of its appearance, soon being translated, for example, into English in 1484.23 Printers other than Caxton cashed in. The mid-fourteenth century pseudonymous compendium of crusade exhortation, pilgrim guide and stories of the mythic marvels of the east known as The Travels of John Mandeville remained an international best-seller for 200 years, transmuting into a series of at least fourteen separate versions in twelve different languages to suit contrasting tastes, purposes and regions. There was even a ‘textless’ pictorial ‘Mandeville’ derived from a Czech redaction. Some of its versions, at least, stressed the need for ‘the right children of Christ… to challenge the heritage that Our Father left us and do it out of heathen men’s hands’.24

  Visual representations of crusading had long been popular. Many manuscript and printed books were embellished with especially luminous portrayals of famous crusading moments. Some of these suggest how, aesthetically, the past was hardly distinguished from the present, figures being shown in anachronistically contemporary dress. Late fifteenth-century illuminations depict Heraclius, the seventh-century Byzantine emperor whose return of the Holy Cross to Jerusalem opens William of Tyre’s chronicle, sporting the heraldic device of fifteenth-century Habsburg German emperors. Stained glass, murals, sculpture and decorative tiles all provided media for commemorating a heroic past that allowed some to dream of a heroic future. In the 1390s, Thomas of Woodstock adorned his castle at Pleshey with fifteen tapestries on the romances of Godfrey of Bouillon.25 Seventy years later, the demand for such artefacts led to the London merchant Sir Thomas Cooke being arraigned for treason because he refused to sell to Edward IV’s mother-in-law an arras ‘wrought in the most richest wise with gold of the story of the siege of Jerusalem’.26

  Dramatic tableaux and ritualized plays supplied another medium to remind audiences of the significance of their crusading heritage. In 1378, Charles V of France entertained the emperor Charles IV of Germany in Paris with a lavish production of the siege of Jerusalem, possibly stage-managed by Philip of Mézières.27 The impact of this presentation was later enshrined in manuscript illuminations of the event. On one level a wallow in shared chivalric nostalgia, the Paris production possessed a practical resonance. Both the French and German courts had been involved in actual crusade planning in the 1360s and were subject to more recent appeals for action against the Ottomans. Such play-acting could reduce the huge gap in time and circumstance, in a manner parallel to the static impression of time often given in church sermons; the past was somehow contemporary, whether biblical or crusading. These displays possessed purpose: to create a sympathetic atmosphere for the circulation of crusading ideas and to demonstrate continued official commitment, even of a generalized sort. Charles V was the first king of France not personally to be involved in crusading or crusade planning since Louis VI (d. 1137). The Paris fête asserted his credentials nonetheless. Elsewhere, such dramatic performances promoted more immediate causes, as at Mons in 1454, when the Burgundian court witnessed a pageant on the Fourth Crusade, Baldwin of Flanders and the 1204 capture of Constantinople.28 These extravagant theatricals raise questions of seriousness and sincerity. They were showy entertainments, not recruiting platforms. Yet they revealed the cultural vivacity of crusading and a receptiveness to retaining at least a sentimentalized idealism within which wars of the cross could be thought of as possible as well as admirable. In the light of those who fought and died in such wars, this playfulness contained a serious message.

  CRUSADES AND SALVATION

  Evidence from popular devotional practices confirm that two central elements of the appeal of crusading retained potency throughout the later middle ages and beyond: the offer of remission of sins and fear of the infidel, usually couched in terms of the recovery of the Holy Land. Of all the continuities of crusading, its promotion by the church remained the clearest and most ubiquitous. The apparatus of privileges remained in place. Clerical taxation became habitual, if localized. The offer of indulgences remained part of a general penitential system, increasingly commercial as redemption of vows or even the performance of any particular meritorious act gave way to simple sale and payment. The doctrine of a Treasury of Merits, a sort of divine bank account laid up by God to be drawn on by the penitent faithful, was perfected by Clement VI. This further institutionalized crusading indulgences. Preaching, donations and legacies persisted. The chests set aside for contributions stayed in parish churches. The increasingly bureaucratic procedures of the papacy and local dioceses still administered the crusade, its promotion, privileges, organization and finance. At the most mundane, parochial level, the liturgy for the recovery of the Holy Land and appeals to God to turn back the infidel reached the daily lives of the faithful throughout Christendom until the Reformation tore it apart.

  Recent research has identified large quantities of surviving manuscripts recording a range of associated liturgical rites centred on general or specific supplications for divine aid on behalf of the Holy Land or the Turks.29 They reveal the extent of strenuous, regular religious activity, conducted in parish churches, monasteries and cathedrals across western Europe from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, directed towards the object of crusading, the liberation of the Holy Land or defence against pagans, infidels or Turks. Although there are examples of papal orders to conduct Holy Land masses not being carried out, as in the diocese of Rouen in the 1330s, the nature and weight of the records suggest prayers and masses were not being copied out in some arcane collective antiquarian homage to past, dead usages but represent a set of living observances.30 The Holy Land supplicatory devices appeared in a number of liturgical categories. The clamor to invoke God’s help for the Holy Land was inserted in the mass between the consecration and the breaking of the Host before the Communion. It appeared in various standard forms in manuscript and printed missals from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, those derived from the English dioceses of Salisbury, York and Hereford being particularly prominent. Associated with the rite of taking the cross, these prayers were inserted into the mass on special occasions. By contrast, normal celebrations of the Eucharist could be dedicated as a whole to the special votive aim of the recovery of the Holy Land. Provision for such special masses was included in the instructions for the preparations for a crusade by John XXII (1333), Urban V (1363) and Gregory XI (1373). Such special masses could be directed towards a particular crusade or, especially in the fifteen
th century, to less precise assistance to the Holy Land. The later fifteenth century saw an increase in dedicated masses against the Turks, but they were also invoked against Hussites and, more vaguely, ‘pagans’ and ‘infidels’.

  A more remarkable use of masses for the Holy Land were the so-called Gregorian Trentals, originating in England in the later fourteenth century. These comprised clusters of thirty masses to be said for the soul of the dead after the death or burial of the testator who endowed the services. Within the mass, prayers were included for the liberation of the Holy Land alone or combined the liberation of the Holy Land with the liberation of the soul of the departed from ‘the hands of demons’, i.e. in purgatory. The destination of the soul and the Holy Land were equated, the pagans by analogy liturgically demonized. In England alone there survive eighty separate liturgical sources for this habit, as well as almost 150 wills, mainly from the fifteenth century. Calixtus III appears to have encouraged the practice during his crusade efforts in 1455. In England, at least, these daily masses could be sung 365 days a year.