Yet many people ill-informed
Said in their foolishness that naught
Of good in Syria was wrought,
Since they won not Jerusalem.52
He also admitted the crushing casualties, from disease as much as battle. On the day the Treaty of Jaffa was sworn, Balian of Ibelin told Ibn Shaddad that he reckoned that perhaps as many as 20 per cent of crusaders had died in battle, but many more through illness or drowning. He thought that less than 50 per cent of the total Christian force survived, an impression, if not numbers, confirmed by western sources. William of Newburgh, writing shortly afterwards in northern England, pitched the losses at over 75 per cent: ‘not a quarter returned home’.53 One stock justification of the discrepancy between sacrifice and tangible success was to emphasize, as did William and Ambroise, the celestial ‘other Jerusalem’ these victims had won.54 Not all were convinced. Before the expeditions had even departed some sceptics, with a certain logic, had argued that God ‘could avenge himself without all these soldiers having to cross the sea’.55 After 1192, God’s purpose seemed more clouded than ever. Even if the theology remained unchallenged and human sin lay behind terrestrial failure, the loss of so many invited the charge of waste. Introducing a long list of notable casualties of the crusade, Gilbert of Mons squared this circle of blame by wondering at the extremes of sin that could have resulted in so many fine princes and knights from all parts of Christendom achieving so little: ‘they recovered only the city of Acre’.56
In fact, on the material side of the crusade’s balance sheet, the capture of Acre proved a major triumph, providing the otherwise ateliotic restored kingdom of Jerusalem with a commercial centre of international importance. The effective conquest of significant parts of the coastal plain allowed for the establishment of a territorial state that, with further additions in the decade after 1192, lasted intact until the 1260s, a modest but not the most insignificant player in the increasingly desperate contest for control of the Fertile Crescent from the Persian Gulf to the Nile Valley. The Third Crusade cast a long shadow over the future. The incorporation of Cyprus into Christian Outremer provided a new base and source of wealth and aristocratic opportunity. The Treaty of Jaffa of 1192 acted as a model for future diplomacy. For most of the next seventy years truces determined the relations between the Christian rulers of mainland Outremer and their Muslim neighbours, only unreflective or partisan westerners regarding the practice as irreligious. Every significant crusade that reached the Levant between 1192 and 1254 either sought or was forced to accept treaties with the infidel. The experience of the Third Crusade enshrined the understanding of the significance of sea-power to Christian prospects in the eastern Mediterranean. No new expeditions went by land for another 200 years. Richard’s Egypt strategy quickly became orthodoxy. Partly this resulted from the most glaring failure of the Third Crusade, Jerusalem. The arguments of Richard and his apologists that the key to the Holy City lay in Cairo seemed to have been persuasive. The continued Muslim occupation of Jerusalem supplied another lasting legacy. Unlike in the years 1099–1187, the Holy Land stood as a permanent, unavoidable criticism of Christian sin or disobedience, keeping the negotium Terrae Sanctae at the centre of religious politics and devotional populism for more than another century. Perhaps in that sense, those who argued for the spiritual success of the Third Crusade were right. The limited temporal achievement in Palestine paled beside the effect on the spiritual landscape of western Christendom.
The Fourth Crusade
15
‘Ehud’s Sharpened Sword’1
Two decades after Richard I left the Holy Land in 1192, James of Vitry, prominent preacher, intellectual, monastic patron and ecclesiastical insider, future bishop of Acre and cardinal, was drumming up support for a new expedition to the east. His message was simple and uncomfortable. As long as Jerusalem remained under infidel occupation, all faithful Christians had an unavoidable moral duty to help regain Christ’s patrimony, in the same way that vassals were legally obliged to help their secular lords, except that God’s service transcended law and offered eternal rewards. The task was clear. But, he asked, where now was the zeal of the Old Testament heroes Mattathias, the Maccabees, Phinehas, Shamgar or Samson? ‘Where is Ehud’s sharpened sword?’2
By this time, during the preaching of the Fifth Crusade after 1213, such rhetoric was standard. It reflected in detail the theology of James’s master, Pope Innocent III, which gave a new precision to a universal concept that equated service to God with crusading. For Innocent, the trials of the Old Testament Israelite heroes were of contemporary relevance not just oratorical resonance. ‘Wounds that do not respond to the healing of poultices must be lanced with a blade.’ Fighting for God was the ‘servant’s service’ to his Lord, a test of faith ‘as gold in a furnace’ which determined salvation or damnation, not just for warriors but for all Christians. For Innocent the crusader was ‘following the Lord’, his ‘service to Jesus Christ’ regarded in quasi-liturgical as well as feudal terms. It was imperative that all Christians were able to join this ‘war of the Lord’. In his great crusade encyclical Quia Maior of 1213, Innocent tellingly refashioned the central crusading text from Matthew 16:24: ‘If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me’: ‘To put it more plainly: “If anyone wishes to follow me to the crown, let him also follow me into battle, which is now proposed as a test for all men.”’3 The elevation of the Holy Land war into the epitome of Christian devotion rested on the unique plenary indulgences offered to participants, access to which Innocent wished to extend to non-combatants. In turn, this depended on the emotional and psychological pull of the Holy Land, a place where God ‘accomplished the universal sacrament of our redemption’,4 a sanctified space that provided inspiration on all four levels of contemporary scriptural exegesis: literal, the site of the historical events of the Old and especially New Testaments; allegorical, as a representation of the Church Militant; moral (or tropological), a metaphor of the inner life and struggle of the soul; and mystical, an image of paradise.
These categories existed beyond clever theological dialectic, or even the formalized pleadings of preachers, evangelists and recruiting agents. The German lyric poet Walter von der Vogelweide numbered among his patrons Dukes Leopold V (d. 1194) and Leopold VI of Austria (d. 1230), whose combined crusading experience covered the Third, Fourth and Fifth Crusades, as well as campaigns in Spain and Languedoc. Walter’s Palestine Song illustrated this fourfold potency of the Holy Land, attractive to the sinner as the place of God’s incarnation where earth and heaven touched and, as such, the rightful possession of Christianity:
Now my life has found a purpose,
for my sinful eyes behold
that pure land and very country,
of which glorious things are told.
This has been my prayer of old:
I have seen the place which God
in a human form once trod.
Many a rich and splendid country
have I seen, but of them all
you deserve the highest honour,
where such wonders could befall.
That a maid to birth could bring
one who was the angel’s king –
was not this a wondrous thing?
Christians, Jews and also heathen
Claim this land as rightly theirs.
May God make our cause to triumph
by the threefold name he bears.
All the world has come to fight,
but to us belongs the right;
God defend us by his might!5
Such commitment required direction, focus, organization and explanation if the obligations of service were to be translated into effective military, material or devotional action. Preachers such as Gerald of Wales and James of Vitry described this process as a form of conversion. Innocent III referred to Holy Land crusaders as having ‘converted to penance’. The Cistercian chronicler Gunther of Pairis (d. c.1210
) described his abbot, Martin, ‘converting many to the militia of Christ’ at Basel in 1201. Another Cistercian, Caesarsius of Heisterbach, in his Dialogus Miraculorum (c.1223), placed his discussion of crusading under the heading ‘Concerning Conversion’ (De conversione). Caesarius and James both likened becoming a crucesignatus to entering a monastic order, crusaders in general, not just those who had taken vows in the military orders, constituting a distinct religio.6 In the two decades after the Third Crusade, this construction of crusading and the realization of Innocent III’s theology of God’s war were given ceremonial and administrative substance by the development of specific ecclesiastical institutions. Coupled with the political consequences of the Third Crusade and a newly confident papacy after Innocent’s accession in 1198, these turned ideology into regular church practice.
INNOCENT III AND THE BUSINESS OF THE CROSS
Lothar of Segni was elected pope on 8 January 1198, taking the name Innocent III. The nephew of Clement III, he had been associated with the Roman Curia since the late 1180s, a cardinal since 1190. Trained in theology at Paris and, probably, law at Bologna, aged only thirty-seven, Innocent revivified the papacy. His immediate predecessors had tended to be cautious, experienced old men – Celestine III had lived into his nineties – seeking to protect rather than promote or extend papal interests. The three pillars of Innocent’s pontificate were the assertion of papal authority – he popularized the title ‘Vicar of Christ’; the development of spiritual and ecclesiastical reform though evangelization and canon law; and prosecution of the crusade, which incorporated both.
Innocent regularly described crusading as the negotium crucis, the business of the cross, or, more pointedly, the negotium crucifixi, the business of the crucified, specifically Christ but also, by analogy, all Christians.7 In a theological work written before his election as pope, c.1195, De miseria humane conditionis (Concerning the misery of the human condition), the young Cardinal Lothar, explained, ‘the just man “denies himself” crucifying his body on the cross of its own vices and lusts so that the world is crucified to him and he to the world’.8 The metaphor of the cross – or, as Innocent saw it, its spiritual reality – ideally suited the crusade projects. In some circles they became synonyms. Caesarius of Heisterbach was one of a long line of theorists and propagandists who used crux transmarina and crux cismarina to describe crusades to Outremer and in Europe. The absence of a formal canonical word defining the activity, as opposed to its participants (crucesignati), did not prevent the emergence after the Third Crusade of a vernacular crusade vocabulary based on the cross: the verbs croisier, croier/croisé in northern French (langue d’oil); the nouns crozeia, crozea and crozada in southern French (langue d’oc).9 Taking the cross was, after all, the earliest ceremony that distinguished this form of religious activity, invented by Urban II. Now, a century later, the Latin term crucesignatus became firmly entrenched, a consequence of the insistence on the image of the cross in crusade propaganda and exhortation after 1187. This chimed theologically with the emphasis on the wider personal commitment of the faithful Christian servant of the Lord, who bore a cross in imitation as well in honour of Him. A contemporary (c.1200) English liturgy for the ceremonial adoption of the cross listed its virtues in this vein: ‘an especial means of assistance, a support of faith, the consummation of his (the crusader’s) works, the redemption of his soul and a protection and safeguard against the fierce darts of all his enemies’.10 As military ensign, mystic symbol, badge of penance, talisman or charm, no icon was more potent. Although ubiquitous in liturgy and as a public Christian symbol, worn equally by the non-crusading religious orders, members of confraternities or reformed heretics, the cross, with its particular association with the Jerusalem, lent the crusade an almost infinite plasticity of application, association, meaning and metaphor while retaining its precise central point of reference.
Innocent III established an institutional framework within which his crusading theology found concrete expression, even if much of his construction rested on earlier foundations. There was little absolutely original in his policies. He was a codifier as much as an innovator. Nonetheless, Innocent’s contribution could be regarded as a sort of creation. The bull Quia Maior of 1213 and the decree Ad Liberandam of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, contained a set of coherent legal, liturgical and fiscal provisions that brought together a range of previous expedients to form the basis and model for future crusades. Earlier propaganda themes were rehearsed: service to God; the offer of salvation; charity to oppressed Christians; the Holy Land as Christ’s patrimony; a test of religious devotion.11 The apparatus of inducement was given a new clarity, putting an end to a century of papal obfuscation, hesitation and reluctance to define whether the crusade indulgence remitted the sin or the penalty of the sin. Through the power vested by Christ in the pope, full remission of all orally confessed sins (annual oral confession was to become mandatory for Roman Catholics at the 1215 Lateran Council) were granted to those who took the cross and campaigned in person; to those who sent and paid for proxies to fight in their stead; and to those proxies. Those who provided matériel, donations and alms for the crusade were to receive an indulgence proportionate to their contribution, picking up an idea canvassed as early as 1157 by the English Pope Hadrian IV and repeated by Innocent himself in 1198.12 Consonant with his desire for military effectiveness and his theology of the Lord’s war, Innocent, extending and clarifying a precedent set by Clement III, invited ‘anyone who wishes’ to take the Cross ‘in such a way that this vow may be commuted, redeemed or deferred by apostolic mandate when urgent need or evident expediency demand it’. The means of redemption was payment. Vow redemption helped alter radically the funding of crusading, the manner in which the cross was preached, the methods of recruitment and planning, and even the reputation of the exercise itself as the system became vulnerable to charges of ‘crosses for cash’.
Characteristic of Innocent III and his fellow Paris-trained ecclesiastics was the practical and social application of theology. Financing the crusades formed a part of this. In 1199, Innocent unsuccessfully attempted to levy a compulsory fortieth on clerical surpluses to pay for mercenaries for the crusade.13 Quia Maior suggested a voluntary aid, with equal lack of response, so the decree Ad Liberandam imposed a three-year tax of a twentieth on the church to be collected by centrally appointed papal officials. Equally practical were the restatements in 1213 and 1215 of the temporal crusader privileges of immunity from taxes and usury to Jews, moratorium on debts and general church protection for the crusaders and their property. While bishops were to enforce some of the provisions, the secular arm was called upon to police those against Jewish credit collection. Secular individuals and communities were encouraged collectively to supply warriors, as in 1198. Following a similar injunction of 1199, special chests were to be deposited in parish churches to receive indulgence-earning almsgiving for the Holy Land, visible reminders of a permanent obligation.
These material considerations were balanced by the organization of penance and preaching more systematically than before to ensure the negotium crucis became a permanent feature of lay devotional life, ‘to fight in such a conflict’, Innocent proposed, ‘not so much with physical arms as spiritual ones’.14 Special prayers and liturgical devices had been instituted by Gregory VIII and Clement III. Within the liturgy of the Cistercian Order in the 1190s prayers for crucesignati and ‘pro terra Ierosolymitana’ were introduced. Bidding prayers and clamor now included the needs for the Holy Land.15 Quia Maior provided for monthly penitential processions throughout Christendom, accompanied by preaching, fasting and almsgiving. A new intercessory ritual was added to the daily service of the mass between the Kiss of Peace and the reception of the Communion. In addition to a specially composed intercessory prayer calling for the restoration of the Holy Land, this included the familiar crusading Psalm 79, ‘O God, the heathen are come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple have they defiled; they have laid Jerusalem on h
eaps.’ The rite underlined the association of the crusade as a physical public duty and personal spiritual obligation with the mass. Confession, penance and the mystical presence of Christ Crucified (transubstantiation was another dogma accepted by the 1215 Lateran Council) provided an appropriate ceremonial as well as spiritual context for, as the intercessory prayer of 1213 put it, the liberation of ‘the land which thine only-begotten son consecrated with his own blood’. A few years later, masses for the Holy Land were marked by the ringing of a bell during the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.16 Such formal rituals acted within the wider process of crusade evangelism, to which Innocent gave clear direction by constructing an elaborate network of crusade preachers in every province and diocese of western Christendom under the direction of papal-appointed legates. In these ways, the cause of the Holy Land became a habitual feature of the parochial liturgical round in ways it had not been before 1187. The business of the cross was the business of Christianity.
This had extensive practical consequences. Until the Third Crusade, application of crusaders’ privileges had lagged behind the rhetoric of holy war in establishing recognized, coherent conventions. Given the infrequent nature of large-scale wars of the cross, this was unsurprising. This changed with the enormous convulsion of 1187–92, when tens of thousands of crucesignati were recruited in all parts of western Christendom. The implications did not end with the Treaty of Jaffa. The failure to recapture Jerusalem embedded the recovery of the Holy Land into western European politics, with hardly a year passing without an attempt to mobilize a new expedition somewhere in Christendom. The human detritus of the Third Crusade included not just those who departed on that campaign, with their relicts and dependants at home, but also the substantial numbers of crucesignati, who for reasons of accident, poverty or convenience had failed to fulfil their vows in the first place. Church authorities repeatedly attempted to insist on the performance of crusade vows, a problem that had dogged every expedition; the First Crusaders at Antioch in January 1098 had complained about the backsliders at home, threatening them with excommunication. After the Third Crusade, the problem appeared endemic. Celestine III in 1196 and Innocent III in 1200 and 1201 addressed the issue by instructing local ecclesiastical authorities to force compliance on pain of excommunication, to persuade lapsed crucesignati to send proxies, or, in Innocent’s instructions, to allow the poor and infirm to redeem their vows.17 Lists of defaulting crusaders drawn up by the Third Crusade veteran Hubert Walter, from 1193 archbishop of Canterbury, reveal the social range of the business of the cross as well as some of its attendant problems. In a list of forty-seven names from Cornwall, local artisans featured prominently – miller, blacksmith, tanner, tailor, cobbler, etc. – as well as four or five women crucesignatae. Crusaders may have lacked social elevation, but they needed legal freedom and economic substance. This social profile was repeated in a similar list from Lincolnshire, where the main cause of non-fulfilment was poverty. Such evidence confirmed the need for central funding Innocent III had identified in 1199 when he proposed the clerical crusade tax.18 These lists of English crusaders, paralleled in the records of secular government, reveal two important features of crusading at the end of the twelfth century; its wide social embrace and, in common with governments across Europe, its increasing bureaucratization.
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