God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  CRUSADE AND NATION

  In the early years of the fourteenth century, an obliging French cleric attempted to present a case for the king of France’s war with the count of Flanders being regarded as holy, equivalent in merit to a traditional crusade. The French kings were holy because ‘they esteem holiness, protect holiness and beget holiness’. Their victory over Flemish opponents characterized as rebels would be both just and pious because ‘the king’s peace is the realm’s peace; the realm’s peace is the peace of the church, knowledge, virtue and justice, and it is [a precondition for] the conquest of the Holy Land’. The French were following Maccabees (2:15, vv. 7–8) in seeking God’s assistance, confident that those who died ‘for the justice of king and realm will receive the crown of martyrdom from God’.69 The argument embraced central elements of repeated attempts in the later middle ages to elevate national secular conflicts into holy wars, analogous or, occasionally, synonymous with crusading: monarchical holiness; the identification of king and nation; the providential destiny of a specially favoured patria; the consequent perfidy and evil of that nation’s enemies; the translation of crusade and holy war privileges to lay warfare; the promise of salvation; and the testing of unrelated political contests against the requirements of the recovery of the Holy Land. The success of such efforts profoundly affected western political culture and marked one of the most significant of the crusade’s legacies to succeeding generations.

  The translation of crusading ideology and emotion to national conflicts in some senses saw a resurrection of the early medieval sanctified patriotism that had surrounded Christian rulers such as Charlemagne. However, the concept of holy war was now allied with stronger central control by governments of society and social ideas. The increasingly high costs of warfare and the techniques of centralized fiscal exploitation they provoked gave rulers added authority. Although the church had in many instances led the way in experimenting with techniques of public taxation and supplying justification for it, lay power benefited most, witnessed across Europe in England, France, Iberia, fifteenth-century Burgundy, the German regional principalities and the Italian city states. Political theory and propaganda followed suit. The fusion of the ruler and the ruled became crucial to developments in political identity, the lay power personifying or representing the people or nation. Two associated phenomena supported this creation of self-sufficient and self-regarding states: the perception of a people as Elect, whose public business was therefore meritorious on a transcendent not just temporal plane; and the assumption by rulers of what has been called a religion of monarchy, which both copied and usurped traditional ecclesiastical presentations of authority.

  The scope for crusading to assume a national guise was thus greatly increased. The process could operate in three ways: through national pride in past involvement in crusades; formal crusades fought for national interests; and the elevation of the patria itself into a Holy Land, its defence being sanctioned by God and the Scriptures. Underpinning such a transformation lay the sacralization of war, its destinations and its participants inherent in crusading ideas and practices. Objects of crusading aggression were consistently couched in spiritual terms of the recovery of the lands of Christ (Palestine), His Mother (Livonia) or His disciples, such as James (Iberia) or Peter (any region extended papal protection or lordship, for example Prussia). By extension, the lands whence crusaders came assumed something of the numinous quality of the holy enterprise. As the universal homeland of these New Israelites or Maccabees, Christendom (Christianitas) became fragmented into distinct kingdoms, principalities or cities, patriae, these appropriated to themselves the concept of a Holy Land and the Old Testament images of the Chosen People. The consequent habit of equating national ambition with universal good formed a prominent part of the emergence of the nation state.70

  In some instances, the link between traditional crusading and national crusades was immediate and direct. Although an idea that dated back at least to Urban II in the late eleventh century,71 from the fourteenth, the idea of defensive bastions of Christianity (antemurales) standing on the frontier with the infidel was widely adopted along the borders with the Ottomans, from Poland and Hungary to the Adriatic. Apparently engaged in constant holy war, local rulers promoted national exceptionalism – and their own authority – though crusading imagery and the sacralization of their realms. Away from the frontline, myths and rituals of civic or national identity, as in Pisa, Genoa or Venice, proudly proclaiming their involvement in eastern crusades in public art, literature and municipal ceremonial. In Florence, crusading reinforced civic exceptionalism. The banner borne by Florentines at Damietta in 1219 became a revered relic in the church of San Giovanni. Florence repeatedly refurbished its crusade credentials, even responding positively, if cautiously, to Pius II’s crusade appeal in 1463–4. This context of the crusade helping define distinctive civic identity and virtue probably helped the radical evangelist Girolamo Savonarola, who dominated Florence between 1494 and 1498, when he declared the city to be a New Jerusalem.72 Although cities such as Florence or Venice may have been exceptional in the scale of crusade imagery on display, similar attention to their crusading past came from northern cities such as London or Cologne.

  A parallel trend can be observed in the parade of canonized crusaders that adorned the royal genealogies of Europe: Charlemagne, universally regarded as a proto-crusader (canonized in 1166); Eric IX of Sweden (d. 1160; canonized 1167); Ladislas of Hungary (d. 1095; canonized 1192); Ferdinand III of Castile (d. 1252, whose cult was apparent soon after his death, even though he was officially canonized only in 1671); and, most famously, Louis IX of France (d. 1270; canonized 1297). Local secular ‘saints’ could be made out of crusader heroes, such as James of Avesnes, killed at Arsuf in 1191, or William Longspee, cut down at Mansourah in 1250.73 In the absence of sanctified crusaders, local saints could be also pressed into service, such as Thomas Becket, whose shade was regularly invoked by Englishmen during the Third Crusade and who gave his name to a religious, briefly military, order at Acre. Such figures appeared as distinctively national or regional figures, the kings among them materially aiding the assertion of local royal dynasticism, all attaching an aura of sanctity to cities, regions or nations, helping mould a collective identity.

  This incorporation of public religion, if not necessarily overt crusading, into assumptions of national self-image was reflected in the adoption across Europe of the cross as a national symbol, banner or uniform. It provided the sign of the Florentine popolo. Danish kings adopted the cross for their symbol around 1200. As already seen, at the battle of Evesham in Worcestershire in 1265, facing rebels wearing white crusader crosses, the royalists wore red ones. In the fourteenth century the red cross became the emblem of English troops in France and Spain and the national symbol, branded as the cross of St George. Apparently, some rebels during the so-called Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 wore them. Yet iconographically red crosses remained associated with crusading, worn by crusaders in Prussia, on Despenser’s crusade in 1383 and against the Hussites in the 1420s.74 This elision of reference may not have been accidental. One description of Edward I of England’s 1300 campaign against the Scots to Annandale and Carlaverock talked of him signing himself and his troops ‘with the Lord’s Cross’, an unmistakable gesture in a war that observers on both sides equated with a holy war. In similar vein, Henry Knighton, a canon of Leicester, looking back from the 1390s on the French wars a generation earlier, depicted the English before the battle of Poitiers (1356) signing themselves ‘with the Holy Cross’.75 Overtones of holy war were convenient for Edward III, accused by many as responsible for scuppering the crusade plans of the 1330s and the first English king since Stephen not to take the cross for the Holy Land.

  The most consistent hijack of the crusade for national objectives came from the French. By 1300, crusading had been claimed almost as a national prerogative, an enterprise in which the king of France held the major shareholding. A lavish illuminated manu
script produced at Acre c.1280 shows Louis IX attacking Damietta in 1249, the king and his followers emblazoned with the royal emblem of the fleur de lis. There is not a cross in sight.76 Fashioned at the French royal court by a coalition of xenophobic clergy and smooth Roman lawyers, the ideologies of the crusade and the providential destiny of France and its monarch were woven into a legal imperialism backed by a form of apocalyptic royal, hence national, messianism. The argument deployed against the Flemish above was typical. The harnessing of the crusade semiotics of the Old Testament Israelites and Maccabees extended the transformation of a land of crusaders into a Holy Land in its own right. At least diplomatically, some were convinced. In 1311, Pope Clement V – a Frenchman from Gascony – declared: ‘Just as the Israelites are known to have granted the Lord’s inheritance by the election of Heaven, to perform the hidden wishes of God, so the kingdom of France has been chosen as the lord’s special people.’77 This tradition helped sustain French propaganda through the darkest days of defeat during the Hundred Years’ War. In 1429, Christine de Pisan prophesied that Joan of Arc’s recent victories over the English presaged her leading Charles VII to reconquer the Holy Land because God specially favoured the royal house of France. Joan, like Moses, would lead God’s new people, the French, out of defeat and occupation.78 In the manner of earlier crusaders, Charles was declared to be the fulfilment of the prophecy of the Last Emperor, whose career of world conquest would end with the laying down of his crown on the Mount of Olives in preparation for the Last Days. God directs the destiny of France; those who die in her cause will gain paradise. With or without the formal trappings, the ideology and mentality of crusading here permeated nationalist propaganda. This cocktail of prophecy, eschatology, holy war and the recovery of Jerusalem enlivened the rhetoric surrounding Charles VIII’s invasion of Italy in 1494. Such justifications acted both as cover for political ambition and genuine inspiration. The potency of the identification of crusading with ‘the Most Christian Kings’ of France (a twelfth-century courtesy title bestowed by a grateful pope) was such that it survived the destructive Wars of Religion (1562–98) to find new literary expression from both Roman Catholic and Huguenot apologists of Henry IV (1589–1610).79

  However, the appropriation of crusading mentalities did not lead to the application of formal crusade institutions to French wars. Popes consistently refused to elevate French conflicts with Flanders or England into crusades. Here the contrast with the otherwise closely parallel experience of late medieval Spain, in particular Castile, is most notable. An indigenous Iberian prophetic tradition nurtured by the reconquista encouraged a belief that the Iberian holy wars required ultimate fulfilment in the recovery of Jerusalem. Unlike the French, whose immediate enemies were fellow Christians, the Spanish faced Muslims, allowing papal grants of crusade privileges, especially taxation and indulgences, to flow more or less on demand. The expulsion of the Moors from Granada led to north African forays by Ferdinand of Aragon and his grandson Charles V (I of Spain). These not only attracted crusading privileges, but were cast by royal polemicists as preludes to the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre. Whatever the religious dimension, these were national campaigns in pursuit of local strategic conquest, political aggression and commercial advantage. However, for Charles’s son, Philip II, the synergy of God’s war and Spain’s war occupied the centre of his world-view. The crusade, in the Mediterranean, north Africa, Europe or the Americas, imposed a specifically national responsibility in fulfilment of Spain’s providential mission to lead the redemption of Christendom, whether the rest of Christendom approved or not.

  While such conflation of the temporal and transcendent proved harder to pull off elsewhere, others played the same game. Reflecting on English success in the French wars, Chancellor Adam Haughton, bishop of St David’s, insisted to Parliament in 1377 that ‘God would never have honoured this land in the same way as he did Israel… if it were not that He had chosen it as His heritage’. A popular verse at the time reinforced the message; the pope had become French, but Jesus had become English. God’s career as an Englishman lasted for centuries.80 Such fancies and scriptural references connected with pre- and non-crusading traditions of the Old Testament and providential precedents for the defence of homelands. However, the congruence of language used to sacralize national warfare with concurrent crusade rhetoric made neat distinctions unconvincing. The intent of those English sources in describing crusaders against rebels in 1216–17 or the Montfortian crucesignati in 1263–5 as fighting ‘pro patria’ was clear. So, too, were the motives of writers such as Henry Knighton or the Scottish propaganda that equated their war of independence in the early fourteenth century with the Holy Land crusade. In England, liturgy, church processions and prayers similar to those devoted to the recovery of the Holy Land were directed in support of royal wars.81 In the 1340s, those in royal service received the temporal privileges of essoin of court, exemption from taxation, moratorium on debt and pardon for crimes. It seems only the indulgences could not be transferred from crusading to national war. Even that may not have made too much difference, if Froissart, a close observer of the Anglo-French nobility, can be believed: ‘Men at arms cannot live on pardons, nor do they pay much attention to them except at the point of death.’82

  While numerous examples can be found of writers throwing a crusading mantle over secular warfare, the more powerful and lasting transference came where national wars were portrayed as of equal worth as crusading, as holy wars in their own right, independent of the Holy Land tradition. Just as the Hundred Years War fatally undermined practical efforts to raise a new eastern crusade, so it went far to replace crusading as the central public meritorious military act, even if many still hankered after the easy certainties of wars of the cross against infidels on far foreign fields. The construction of non-crusading holy war was a feature of fifteenth-century Europe where not all national wars were linked to the crusade tradition. While rejecting the theology and institutions of crusading, the Hussites in Bohemia self-consciously created their own holy land, renaming cult sites after places in Palestine, such as Mount Tabor or Mount Horeb. Within the pale of Catholic Christendom, similar reinventions were equally possible and plausible. In his description of the battle of Agincourt (25 October 1415), Henry V’s chaplain had the king call the English ‘God’s people’ as they donned ‘the armour of penitence’, exhorting them to follow the example of Judas Maccabeus.83 Confession, absolution and taking Communion were familiar pre-battle morale-raising techniques, but the focus in this account is unambiguous. King Henry was God’s soldier as well as the Lord’s anointed. On his return to London after his victory, he was greeted by patriotic displays in praise of the blessed kingdom of England, its patron saints and holy kings.84 While the crusade mentality and images infected the sacralization of political rule and patriotic identities in the later middle ages, national holy lands and holy wars acquired and projected an independent vitality. National crusades became the nations’ wars.

  THE WIDER WORLD

  Medieval prophets and some post-medieval historians have not been shy to attribute sweeping consequences for the crusade, from a role in the Apocalypse to the opening of the west to new scholarly learning and fresh commercial markets. Such claims have prompted one modern historian to react by reducing crusading’s contribution to western culture to the introduction of the apricot.85 Yet it is undeniable that both practically and intellectually the traditional western European ambition of occupying Palestine encouraged sensitivity to Christendom’s place in the wider world of the three classical continents of Europe, Asia and Africa. In turn this contributed to an inquisitive and acquisitive expansionism that characterized high and late medieval western European approaches to other peoples and regions near and distant. The extension of western European Christian culture and power to all other parts of the globe provided one of the major features of world history after 1500. In the origins of this process, which formed such as marked contrast to, say, the Chinese ex
perience after 1400, the idealism and activity of crusaders in the four centuries after 1095 played a part.

  The intellectual and physical, geographic aspects of the crusade’s influence on European expansion cannot neatly be separated. Neither should it be exaggerated. The creation of Asiatic empires and the altering of trade routes; the development of the European economy, technology and commerce; or the transmission of classical and Arabic texts via Spain, Sicily, southern Italy and Byzantium ran distinct and parallel to the effect of the wars of the cross. However, crusading idealism led to significant political settlements of Latin Christians in the Near East and, in places, an obsessive European concern for western Asia and the eastern Mediterranean that would not have developed in the way it did without the distinctive dynamism of the crusade mentality and tradition. Politically, the nature of the Muslim powers of the Near East mattered to Frankish rulers and warriors. The acute interest in events further east during the Fifth Crusade stood as an extreme example of a more general concern, evinced, for example, in William of Tyre’s lost history of the Muslim east. Although the irruption of the Mongols into western Asia and eastern Europe owed nothing to crusading, the European response did, in so far as successive missions were despatched to Mongol rulers in the thirteenth century at least in part to test prospects for an anti-Muslim alliance.