Malbork castle (in Malbork, Poland, formerly Marienburg, Prussia) was the headquarters of the Teutonic Knights after they left the Holy Land.
The Crusade and Christian Society
Crusading was a function of western European society. Assessment of its impact must distinguish between the distinctive and the contingent. The wars of the cross did not create the expansion of Latin Christendom or the internationalization of saints’ cults. Nor did they create Christianity’s embrace of holy war, a more sophisticated penitential system, the birth of purgatory, the militancy of the papal monarchy, the rise in anti-Semitism, or the exclusion or persecution of minorities and Christian dissidents. Unlike the campaigns in the eastern Mediterranean, the conquests and colonization in Spain or the Baltic and the papal wars against its enemies did not owe their inception to crusading formulae. Most people did not go on crusade. Only occasionally could crusading enterprises be regarded as “popular” in the sense of being initiated primarily by groups below the rural and urban elites, such as the Children’s Crusade of 1212 and the Shepherds’ Crusades of 1251 and 1320. The wider social involvement came from large-scale recruitment by the nobility in limited areas for specific campaigns and, increasingly, through taxation, the legal implications of the taking of the cross and the extension of access to the indulgence via contributions and vow redemptions after 1200. The concept of “Crusading Europe” misleads. Nevertheless, these wars added a particular quality to society in their rhetorical definition of a pathology of respectable violence, the unique attraction of the associated privileges, and the disruption to public and private life.
The peculiar fashioning of a vocabulary and practice of penitential violence that developed in the century and a half after 1095 provided the Church with a powerful weapon to aim at its opponents and a means to cement its importance in the politics of its allies and the lives of the faithful. As an activity that justified the social mores of the ruling military elites of the west, crusading became the context for a wide range of unconnected social and political rituals. Landowners dated their charters from their crusading deeds. Diplomatic alliances were agreed under the cloak of aiding the Holy Land. Taking the cross acted as a symbol of reconciliation between parties in dispute or a demonstration of loyalty and allegiance in which no side lost face. Politicians at a low ebb sought help in the language of the cross; King John of England took the cross in 1215 shortly before being forced to agree to the Magna Carta. By the mid-thirteenth century, commitment to the business of the cross had become a requisite in diplomatic exchanges, rulers, such as Henry III of England, who left their vows unfulfilled cutting morally ambiguous figures. Those refusing to go on crusade were popularly known as “ashy,” tied to their home fires. The familiar literary stereotype of the descroisié, content to enjoy his crusade privileges through vow redemptions, frightened of the sea, and anxious to protect his position at home, indicated how far crusading institutions had penetrated beyond the recruiting hall.
King John of England was forced to sign the Magna Carta of 1215. It was in such moments of weakness that he, and other European monarchs, looked for legitimacy by taking up the cross.
The social and economic disruption of active crusading varied. The expeditions east of Theobald of Champagne or Richard of Cornwall in 1239-41 did not compare with the great efforts of 1146-48, 1189-92, or 1248-50, while crusades in Spain and the Baltic added only marginal luster and perhaps some recruits to the habitual campaigning of the Iberian, Danish, or German princes. Yet even small-scale enterprises could influence local land markets and regional balances of wealth and power as crusaders mortgaged or sold their property. For families, the cost of crusading and the absence of property owners for very long periods could be highly damaging, leading to disparagement of estates and widows, or worse, some wives being murdered by impatient claimants to the crusaders’ lands. Casualty rates, especially on the land-based expeditions, could be extreme; perhaps over 80 percent of those who set out in 1096-97 did not survive. Enhanced social standing for returning crusaders may have been little compensation. More generally, the liberation of church-held bullion to subsidize crusaders may have encouraged the circulation of wealth and thus stimulated local economies. Regionally, prices of war commodities, such as horse shoes, arrows, sides of bacon, and cheese could rise, as they did in England in the early 1190s. Suppliers of transport, from mules and carts to the great transmarine fleets, benefited. However, a fair proportion of the wealth collected in the west was dissipated unproductively on war materials and campaign expenses far from home. Crusade taxation, like any other in the Middle Ages, tended to be regressive, falling on those at the base of the economy. That helped to ensure the popularity among aristocratic crusaders of the new financing arrangements in the thirteenth century. Vow redemptions cost less than active crusading but acted as a hidden tax on the faithful. Yet, without crusading, it cannot be clear that this wealth would have been redirected to more ostensibly productive ends or even circulated at all. International trade between the eastern and western Mediterranean piggy-backed on the Crusades and vice versa; they were manifestations of a single, if diverse, process of commercial expansion of markets and trade routes. An overall financial balance sheet is impossible to determine, but the Crusades, however wasteful of lives and effort, of themselves neither significantly ruined nor enriched the economy of western Europe.
The legal privileges granted crusaders reached as far as finance into the interstices of social life. Church protection and immunity from interest, debts, and law suits were enforced by secular as well as ecclesiastical courts from the Papal Curia downwards. Away from the high-profile cases of infringement of the rules, as when Richard I’s lands were threatened in his absence, the operation of the privileges and church protection was conducted in local courts across Christendom, whose decisions defined and determined much of the effect of the crusade on the home front, from whether or not a crusader could participate in a trial by battle in Normandy, to illegal wine-sellers avoiding fines in Worcestershire by citing their crusader status, to whether crucesignati could literally get away with murder. The civil attractions of the crusader privileges made abuse inevitable, a problem recognized by the decree Ad Liberandam (1215). There were regular complaints that crusaders were using their status as license to commit theft, murder, and rape; criminals or those facing awkward litigation regularly cited crusade privileges to delay or avoid the day of reckoning. This did not mean the system was corrupt, merely open to corruption. References to the operation of crusading immunities in the records of secular courts allow a glimpse of the extent of the Crusades’ reach. They also point to a high level of cooperation between civil and ecclesiastical jurisdictions, not least because there were so few detailed rules, the practical implications and extent of privileges being worked out over many generations on a national, regional, local, or even individual basis.
With the institution of vow redemptions and spiritual rewards for contributing as well as participating in crusading, and the paraphernalia of alms-giving, special prayers, liturgies, processions, and bell-ringing that developed after 1187, the spiritual privileges entered the habitual devotional life of the west. Church reformers saw in the dissemination of its indulgence the opportunity to use the crusade as a model as well as a metaphor for spiritual and penitential amendment of life. Taking the cross became depicted as part of a regenerative cycle of confession, penance, good works, and redemption, a sort of conversion, its votaries described by James of Vitry as a religio, a religious order. Some argued that taking the cross could end demonic possession, secure time off purgatory for relatives, even dead ones, cure the sick, and console the dying. Sermons de Cruce, on the Cross, were used almost interchangeably for preaching the crusade or moral reform. For devout thirteenth-century puritans such as Louis IX or Simon de Montfort, the crusade formed part of their private religious life as well as their public career. Thus as a religious habit as much as a martial endeavor, crusading survived its
defeats on the battlefields of the later Middle Ages.
Simon de Montfort’s military campaigns to exterminate the Cathars won him royal favor. This 1216 vellum document is de Montfort’s homage to King Philip II of France for the gift of territories confiscated from Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse, who had sympathized with and defended the heretics.
This does not imply universal or consistent commitment. The myriad sermons and devotional works reminding the faithful of some basic tenets of Christianity, among other evidence, suggest that the Middle Ages were no more or less a period of faith or skepticism than the twenty-first century. Contemporaries were as keen to delineate contrasting crusade motives as modern historians. Much of the typology was equally crude. After the fiasco of the Second Crusade, one bitter observer in Würzburg accused the crusaders of lack of sincere love of God; most “lusted after novelties and went in order to learn about new lands” or out of a mercenary desire to escape poverty, debts, harsh landlords, or justice. Such brickbats are the price of failure and the small change of moral rearmers. The idea that crusaders to the east were driven by greed is considerably less convincing than that they were fired by anger and intolerance. Anti-Jewish attacks had been known in northern Europe before 1096, most notably after 1009, but the repeated ferocity of attacks by crusaders indicates that the wars of the cross lent spurious justification to such communal barbarism. Yet the attacks on the Jews signal a piety of sorts, however underpinned by ignorance, larceny, and criminality. To suggest mixed motives for many crusaders does not convict them of hypocrisy, merely complexity.
It has become fashionable to ascribe purely mercenary inspiration to the citizens of the Italian maritime cities, in a peculiar modern historiographical combination of retrospective snobbery and a belief that commerce is “modern” and so immune from “naive” or “medieval” religious sincerity. Material advantage and genuine religious commitment have never been mutually exclusive; nor were they among crusaders. The Venetian crusade of 1122—25, in a sort of foreshadowing of the Fourth Crusade, raided Byzantine territory to force a restoration of preferential trade rules. Yet it also fought a hard sea battle against the Egyptians and helped capture the port of Tyre, again in return for trading privileges and property. On return to the Adriatic further raiding carried off booty and relics. Modern disapproval misses the essence. The Italian trading cities’ contributions to crusading of men, blood, treasure, and materials were second to none. Crusading enthusiasm did not stop at the gates of commercial ports, nor did the desire for profit or, at least, an avoidance of loss contradict the spirituality as well as the material risks inherent in taking the cross, any more than did a knight’s desire to fight to earn salvation and to survive. While elements of duty, fear, devotion, repentance, excitement, adventure, material profit, and escapism feature in the sources as contributory spurs to action, one overwhelming urge, with secular and spiritual dimensions, may have been what could inadequately be described as status—with church, peers, neighbors, relatives, God. The most typical trophies of this status were relics which the returning crusader bestowed on local churches, further enhancing both social reputation and godly credit; the lure of the unique richness of treasure houses of Christian relics at Constantinople acted as a spur to its destruction in 1204. The discredit afforded those who failed to fulfill their vows, or those who deserted or refused to enlist, alone reflected the continuing social admiration that clung to veterans of the cross.
It is often argued that the crusade declined as a political, religious, and social force from the mid-thirteenth century. This has been attributed to a growth in the wealth of western Europe, which is supposed to have begun a process of “modernization” in which crusading appeared old hat as a cause inspired by God not Mammon. The decadence of crusading has been attributed variously to the corruption of money in the professionalization of the business of the cross and to the rise of national self-interest over the demands of Christendom in general. The diversion of holy war to internal enemies of the papacy has been taken as a barometer of this decay. Many of these arguments refer to the Holy Land crusade and make little sense applied elsewhere. It is undeniable that papal crusades in Italy aroused the anger of clerics who had to pay taxes for them or political opponents; successive popes trod carefully to avoid inciting opposition. Preaching for internal crusades tended to be far more restricted geographically than that for eastern expeditions, and there persisted a nervous sensitivity to local feeling if internal crusades were to be preached in parallel or in competition with eastern campaigns. Yet much of the hostility to the anti-Hohenstaufen or Italian crusades in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, beyond the overtly partisan, revolved around anxieties lest they diverted attention from the plight of the Holy Land. The business of the cross retained its popularity, even if its adherents were more discriminating than papal apologists hoped or imagined. The rise of stronger national regimes delivered a more damaging blow. By appropriating political energy, material resources, and even holy war mentalities, the Hundred Years’ War between England and France (1337—1453) sealed the loss of the Holy Land as decisively as the military system of the Mamluk Empire. Fighting for God remained an ideal and practice throughout the later Middle Ages and beyond, its legal implications absorbed into secular as well as canon law codes. Libraries were full of crusade histories and romances; veterans’ artifacts became cherished heirlooms; illuminated manuscripts, theatrical re-enactments, paintings, tiles, and tapestries in palaces, houses, and town halls kept the images fresh. However quixotic it may seem to blinkered modern eyes peering at the past for the origins of our own world, the Christian holy war we call the Crusades, partly because of its lack of rigid definition and protean adaptability, had seeped into the bedrock of western public consciousness through social and religious as well as political and military channels, embodying many of the human qualities and inspiring martial actions that remained highly regarded for centuries after Outremer had faded into a golden memory.
The Battle of Crécy (1346), shown in this sixteenth-century painting, was a decisive English victory in the Hundred Years’ War—a conflict that redirected the militant energy of the French and English.
The Dome of the Rock shrine in Jerusalem, pictured here at sunrise, was a long-sought-after prize of Crusaders and a symbol of Islam in the Holy Land.
SEVEN
Holy Lands
CRUSADING SACRALIZED THE LANDS it attacked or conquered. These were seen in terms of recovery of the heritage of Christ (Palestine), His Mother (Livonia), or His disciples, such as James (Spain) and Peter (any region placed under papal protection or lordship). Less obviously, crusading also tended to sacralize the lands from which the holy warriors had been drawn. The numinous distinction bestowed by participation in crusading merged with concepts of just wars fought for the patria, the homeland. These consecrations provoked a series of anomalies between image and reality. Crusade frontiers, in Spain, Syria, Prussia, or Livonia, were at once ideologically rigid while physically, culturally, or politically porous. Promoters and chroniclers of conquest proclaimed sharp religious and ethnic divisions when economic contact and the mechanics of lordship required social exchange leading to cultural transmission. The universal homeland of these New Israelites, Christendom (Christianitas), became fragmented into distinct patria, kingdoms or cities, appropriating to themselves the concept of a “Holy Land” where, for the political elite, involvement in the crusade stood as a touchstone of identity, respect, and authority. Crusading stood as an objective of national policy and an analogy for national war. No less than the holy lands of crusader conquest, these patria were bolstered by images derived from the Israel of the Old Testament and egregious apocalyptic political propaganda and thought, in which any successful crusader king could lay claim to the prophecies of the Last Emperor at the End of Time. The consequent habit of equating national aggression with transcendent universal good and vice versa constitutes a lasting inheritance. “One nation under God” has a c
omplex ancestry but it includes the medieval holy wars of the cross.
The Holy Land Overseas: Outremer and Colonial Myths
The Crusades Page 10