God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  On Frederick’s death, attempts to reach an accommodation with his successors failed, and crusades were renewed against his heir, Conrad IV, and Frederick’s illegitimate son, Manfred, regent (1250–58), then king, of Sicily. Increasingly, the focus of crusading fell on Italy and Sicily. In 1255 Alexander IV persuaded Henry III of England to accept the crown of Sicily on behalf of his second son, Edmund, hoping to add the resources of a secular kingdom to those of the church. English involvement proved abortive, as the financial obligations of the project and the extravagance of its ambition helped provoke opposition and civil war in England (1258–65). However, the scheme of hiring a secular prince to attack Manfred was revived by Urban IV and Clement IV, who secured the services of Louis IX’s youngest brother, Charles of Anjou. After a lightning campaign in the winter of 1265–6, Charles defeated and killed Manfred at the battle of Benevento in February 1266. Two years later, Charles secured his position by victory at Tagliacozzo (August 1268) over Conrad IV’s now teenage son and titular king of Jerusalem, Conradin. In October 1268, Charles had Conradin executed at Naples, the last of the male Hohenstaufen line.46

  The baleful legacy of the crusades of conquest in southern Italy and Sicily infected the politics of the peninsula for generations. Opponents of papal interests became known as Ghibellines (Ghibellini), a nickname apparently derived from a twelfth-century Hohenstaufen war cry, ‘Waiblingen’, the name of a family estate in Swabia. Papal supporters and anti-imperialists, by deliberate contrast, were described as Guelphs, recognizing the long German opposition of the Welf family to the Hohenstaufen. Crusading became almost endemic in Italian politics, crusades being launched against Ezzelino and Alberic of Romano in 1255 and Sardinia in 1263. A new lease of papal energy followed the Sicilian uprising against Charles of Anjou in March 1282, known as the Sicilian Vespers, and the annexation of the island a few months later by Peter III of Aragon, whose wife was Frederick II’s daughter.47 In January 1283, a new crusade against Aragon was promulgated by Martin IV, to which Philip III of France was recruited. Philip’s invasion of Aragon in 1285 ended in dismal failure. Having wasted the summer months in a fruitless siege of Gerona in north-east Catalonia and losing his fleet to the Aragonese navy, Philip was forced to retreat, during which he died. This debacle probably persuaded Philip III’s son and heir, the inscrutable but single-minded Philip IV, to avoid such direct entanglements in the future. Further crusade bulls were issued when Frederick of Sicily, Peter III of Aragon’s younger son, defied his elder brother James II of Aragon by retaining control of Sicily despite a papal-Aragonese agreement in 1295 restoring the island to the Angevins. This fresh round of crusades only ended with the Treaty of Caltabellota in 1302 between Frederick of Sicily and the new papal claimant to the island, Charles of Valois, younger brother of Philip IV of France. Thereafter, there were no more crusades against Sicily. Although the crusade weapon may have helped destroy the Hohenstaufen, the final territorial settlement hardly matched papal aspirations; Sicily remained divided from the kingdom of Naples for another two centuries.

  In the fourteenth century, Italian battlelines fragmented, especially with the papacy largely absent from the peninsula (from 1305, at Avignon from 1309 until 1377). Popes persisted in using the crusade to further their policies.48 Twice aggressive attempts were launched to reassert imperial claims in Italy, by Henry VII (in 1310–13) and Louis IV (1328–30), German kings eager to acquire the traditional imperial title, the latter’s move on Rome eliciting a crusade against him. Most Italian crusades in the period were applied to more local targets; Boniface VIII in dealing with his rivals the Colonna in 1297–8; the suppression of the Piedmontese heretical leader Dolcino in 1306–7; or preventing Venetian annexation of Ferrara (1309–10). John XXII showed himself particularly bellicose. The signori (military rulers of cities) of Lombardy, Tuscany and central Italy tended to be anti-papal Ghibellines, prominently the Visconti of Milan. Florence and the rump Angevin kingdom of Naples favoured the papal, Guelph, side. Regardless of the traditional crusade rhetoric, privileges, funding and accoutrements, such as red and white crosses adorning the banners of John XXII’s Italian crusaders, self-interest, not principle or faith, determined action.49 Thus in 1334 Guelph Florence combined with its rival, Ghibelline Milan, to thwart papal plans for a new Lombard puppet state. Only a very narrow, technical, partisan and increasingly unconvincing equation of the political interests of popes with the spiritual health of Christendom could endow these wars with religious significance. This did not prevent participants enjoying the crusader status and privileges on offer. The wars would have been fought in any case and men would have fought in them. The crusade merely added lustre; it hardly determined their practical nature. As in Spain, the crusade in Italy became increasingly a fiscal device, a means of raising money for war.

  Major campaigns over the Papal States were organized by cardinallegates Bertrand du Poujet after 1319 and Gil Albornoz after 1353. Crusades were instigated against Milan and Ferrara in 1321; Milan, Mantua and rebels in Ancona in 1324; Cesena and Faenza in 1354; and Milan again in 1360, 1363 and 1368. After 1357, a new element was introduced, with crusades directed to eradicating those mercenary companies not in papal pay, in 1357, 1361 and 1369/70. Huge sums were spent, especially by the spendthrift amateur war-monger John XXII. Yet outside Italy, the same popes were reluctant to apply crusading to other people’s wars, such as those between France and England. Even in Italy, it is hard to see how the use of the crusade as a local coercive weapon, with strictly limited regional objectives, preaching, recruitment and impact, made much of a difference. They may not have been theoretical perversions of the institution of crusading. They were certainly enthusiastically embraced by those who were on the pope’s side in the first place. They may have persuaded more to join the spiritual gravy train. They ensured the crusade remained embedded in western European experience, yet only on a limited scale. The Italian wars were not universal, even in propaganda. Although canonically legitimate – how could they not be, as popes determined what was canonical? – the papal crusades in Italy, and crusades against Christians generally, lacked the distinctive numinous historical resonance that gave holy wars elsewhere their particular spiritual charge.

  As if to reinforce this, the early years of the Great Schism (1378–1417) saw crusades launched by both sides against each other. In 1378 the Roman pope Urban VI launched a crusade against his Avignon rival Clement VII. In 1383, a campaign against Flanders organized and led by Bishop Henry Despenser of Norwich gained funds and popular support by being granted crusade status by Urban VI as an attack on Clementists. Despite the panoply of cross taking, preaching, masses, processions, confessions and a massive campaign of selling indulgences, the 1383 expedition amounted to nothing more than an episode in the Hundred Years War under another name. Its true nature was tellingly exposed as most of Despenser’s Urbanist army spent its time ravaging Urbanist territory and besieging Urbanist towns.50 A neat device to conduct a chevauchée on the cheap, the crusading elements of the 1383 Flanders crusade nonetheless disturbed some members of the English establishment wary of excessive ecclesiastical control over secular affairs and, as it transpired, rightly suspicious at the efficacy of the stratagem.51 Official unease was cast in the shade by the English heresiarch John Wyclif’s radical condemnation of Despenser’s crusade and the sale of indulgences, De Cruciata, which portrayed the exercise as a corrupt and deceitful ploy, among other things to raise money.52 Wyclif’s opinion was not general. Schism crusading continued. In 1386, John of Gaunt received Urbanist crusade credentials to back his unsuccessful attempt to realize his wife’s claim to the throne of Clementist Castile. The year before, at the battle of Aljubarrota, the victorious Urbanist Anglo-Portuguese troops had been fortified by receiving the cross from the bishop of Braga, while their defeated Castilian and Clementist foe had been offered indulgences from Clement VII by their spiritual advisors. However, at Aljubarrota, as with Despenser’s crusade, the popularity of crusade im
ages and privileges merged with a sense of national identity.53 This lent such traditional gestures continuing potency but not in a traditional crusading context.

  The death of the belligerent Urban VI (1389) and the withdrawal of active political support from the Avignon papacy by the French government in the 1390s effectively ended the use of the crusade as a weapon in the papal schism. The long-running succession dispute in the kingdom of Naples attracted crusade bulls in 1382 from Clement VII and in 1411 and 1414 from John XXIII, himself a former naval adventurer and military commander in the Neapolitan wars. However, the experience of the Italian wars of the previous century as well as the Schism wars dissuaded popes after the end of the Schism in 1417 from using the crusade to defend the Papal States. Only the aggressive Julius II revived the tradition of crusading in Italy (for which he was imperishably lampooned in Erasmus’s Julius Exclusus) as well as granting Henry VIII of England’s French war of 1512 crusading status.54 The abandonment of crusades against political enemies perhaps signalled retrospective recognition of their futility and the damage they caused to the standing of both papacy and crusade. In the context of the growing dangers presented to Latin Christendom by the advances of the Ottomans, such applications of papal crusade theory appeared politically, militarily and financially self-defeating.

  By contrast, where fighting for the cross appeared more appropriate, there was little hesitation. Five crusades were fought against the Hussite heretics of Bohemia (1420, 1421, 1422, 1431, 1465–71) and another planned (1428–9).55 The Hussites, puritanical scriptural fundamentalists similar to Wyclif’s followers in England, took their name from one of their early leaders, Jan Hus, a Prague academic who was burnt by the Council of Constance in 1415. The Hussites combined strong religious revivalism with a powerful sense of collective identity. The twin pillars of corporate unity rested on faith, expressed in rituals such as Communion in both kinds, which distinguished them from Roman Catholics, and nationality, demonstrated in the use of the written Czech vernacular. The mixture of political, social and religious rebellion forged a potent threat, which gave Bohemia a period of hard-fought independence for much of the fifteenth century. The serial failure of the crusades launched initially by Sigismund, the king of Bohemia and Hungary and the German emperor (d. 1437), and the indiscriminate brutality of the invading crusaders merely enhanced Czech appreciation of their own exceptionalist destiny, one holy war decisively repulsing another.

  The sixteenth-century Reformation led to a fleeting revival of crusade schemes against the new heretics and schismatics, such as Henry VIII of England in the 1530s and his daughter Elizabeth I in the last years of the century, when Spain’s attack in 1588 and Roman Catholic subversion in Ireland became associated with crusading.56 Occasionally, popes, exasperated at compromises with confessional opponents, could threaten crusades against Catholic rulers such as Henry II of France, criticized by Julius III. The austere papalist militant Paul IV even waved the menace of a crusade against the Habsburgs Charles V and Philip II.57 At the sharp local level of religious conflict, in the early years of the French Wars of Religion (1562–98), crusading motifs appeared among Catholic associations committed to combating the Huguenots. In Toulouse, Catholics defending the city from Huguenot attack in 1567 started wearing white crosses to symbolize their holy cause. The following year, 1568, Pius V granted these ‘crucesignati’ plenary indulgences.58 However, the general political approach to fighting Protestants, in Germany, France or England, avoided overt crusading, even if the circumstances of holy war were inescapable.

  The absence of crusades against Protestants provided its own barometer of the decline of crusading as a living force within Christendom. To some extent this represented more a series of shifts in cultural emphasis than a wholesale abandonment of the crusading tradition. In 1536, elements of society in northern England rebelled against religious and political measures of the government of Henry VIII. At a crisis of the rebellion, the rebels were given badges of the Five Wounds of Christ that had been made for an English contingent sent to Cadiz to join a crusade to north Africa in 1511. Kept in storage ever since, they were now used to emphasize the religious legitimacy of rebellion, to the alarm of Henry’s ministers, who suspected that the rebel leadership was trying to equate the uprising with a crusade. The 1511 crusade had ended in drunken brawls on the streets of Lisbon as the English, as many of their successors abroad, had found the local wine too intoxicating. The badges lent the rebels of 1536 no better fortune, but revealed how introspective religious priorities and ideas of holy violence could become. Thirty years later, crusade symbols were again on display, during the 1569 Northern Rebellion, like its predecessor in part a protest at religious change. However, by then few had any experience of crusading, unlike the leaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace. The resonances of the crusade had become fainter. Partly this charted the success of the Protestantizing policies of Elizabeth I; partly it revealed a significant change in perceptions of the Christian polity.59

  With Christendom no longer confessionally united, nonetheless a sense of unity transcended the religious divide in the face of a common enemy, the Turk. This was one reason sixteenth-century anti-Protestant crusades failed to become more established. Both Lutheran and Roman Catholic addressed the Turkish threat to Germany in writing and action. Monks and Calvinists alike sought to extract from crusade histories lessons of faith and devotion.60 Edward VI and his ministers called the Turks in 1552 ‘the old common enemy to the Name and Religion of all Christianity’.61 In 1571, news of the great Habsburg Mediterranean naval victory over the Turks at Lepanto, seen by Roman Catholics as a crusading venture, was greeted with great enthusiasm in London, with sermons of Thanksgiving at St Paul’s and bonfires and banquets in the streets ‘for a victorie of so great importance unto the whole state of Christian commonwealth’. One observer even hoped Protestant and Roman Catholic might reach a compromise so that they could pit their combined resources against the Turk.62 This was remarkable given that England’s monarch had only the year before been excommunicated and her subjects advised to overthrow her by the pope, who planned the coalition that achieved the Lepanto triumph. An increasingly secular concept of Europe, a continent shared by different confessional groups, supplanted the idea of a religiously uniform Christendom. In this new world, anti-Christian crusades held little meaning, let alone prospects for success outside a narrow closed circle of Spanish Habsburg strategists and their apologists at the papal Curia.

  Even in their heyday, crusades against Christians had thrown up anomalies. The longevity of wars of the cross directed against Christians depended on cultural attitudes and an understanding of how the world operated that demanded formal religious sanction for what in other respects was secular behaviour. This mentality helps explain the eccentric phenomenon of what can only be called crusades against crusaders, on display among rebels in England in 1215–17,63 anti-papalists in Germany in the 1240s,64 during the Shepherds’ Crusade of 1251 and with Simon of Montfort’s radical anti-royalist idealists in 1263–5.65 Such counter-crusades appear to be confined to the thirteenth century. Even though the English and the French smoothly incorporated holy war motifs into their propaganda and apologetics, and, later, both Hussites and Protestants were wholly familiar with justifications of religious warfare, the trappings of crusading had become at once undifferentiated and controversial through their use, some at the time argued overuse, in wars within Christendom. Victims and opponents naturally sought to distance themselves from what many asserted was an abuse. Crusades against Christians could seem tawdry rackets, distracting the faithful from the higher calling of the Holy Land or the defence of eastern and central Europe. In the thirteenth century many otherwise sympathetic to crusading opposed the papal wars in Italy: clergy resentful at taxation; English and French nobles reluctant to commute their vows; citizens of Lille in 1284; Florentines who refused to allow their crusade legacies to be diverted. Hostiensis, a passionate advocate of crusades against Christ
ians, was forced to admit to widespread hostility to them in Germany.66 Even Innocent IV recognized this when he insisted his order stop preaching the cross for the Holy Land to facilitate the war of the cross against Frederick II be kept secret.67 The use of the Holy Land clerical taxes granted in 1274 and 1312 for the Italian wars looked like fraud. Those many, especially in the fourteenth century, who saw in crusading a means and expression of moral and spiritual regeneration, looked to wars with heretics and infidels, not fellow Christians. Numerous popes largely agreed, such as Gregory X, Nicholas IV, Benedict XII, Gregory XI and even Urban V, despite his use of crusades to tackle routiers. While certain popes and their apologists insisted that the Hohenstaufen and Italian crusades were necessary prerequisites for any successful eastern campaign, others, such as the Venetian lobbyist and habitueé of the papal Curia Marino Sanudo or Philip of Mézières, argued instead that they constituted major impediments to the recovery of the Holy Land and defence against the Turks.68 The coincidence of the gradual loss of the Holy Land after 1250 with the intensification of Italian crusading struck some as reprehensible. Anti-Christian crusading did not destroy the popularity of some holy wars of the cross, except in so far as it sharpened scepticism over papal motives and provided polemical ammunition for papal enemies, such as Wyclif or the influential political philosopher Marsilius of Padua in the 1320s. By the early fifteenth century, with papal plenitude of power compromised by schism, a sclerotic bureaucracy, political corruption and the growing assertion of national ecclesiastical autonomy, the Italian crusades appeared at worst objects of derision and at best irrelevant beyond the regional conflicts to which they were applied. When, in the last years of the fourteenth century, the English civil servant and poet Geoffrey Chaucer outlined the career of a perfect crusading knight, he pointedly omitted from his roll of honour the Italian crusades, with which he was personally most familiar. Whatever notional spiritual benefits the crusaders enjoyed, as a weapon of policy they failed to transcend normal secular constraints of politics and military action. A generation after Chaucer, the secular anti-Christian crusades were abandoned, not as ideologically corrupt so much as bad business. A century and a half later, they were joined by the crusades against schismatics and heretics.