Other aspects of crusade organization, including privileges and taking the cross, similarly varied in intensity and application. Processions inspired by specific crusading campaigns were conducted at Douai regularly during the mid-fifteenth century. Such public demonstrations assumed greater significance in the absence of frequent recruiting drives. The near-permanent sale of indulgences, in many regions robustly popular in terms of profit, operated at a different, less intense level of public or personal involvement.33 With fewer people actually taking the cross, the associated privileges tended to fall into disuse. One much exploited privilege of crucesignati allowed them to delay answering law suits, known as essoin of court. In his Mirror of Justices, Andrew Horn (d. 1328), fishmonger and Chamberlain of the City of London, described, as a matter of course, the essoin of crusaders engaged in ‘a general passage to the land of Jerusalem’. By the end of the century, such assumptions may have became genuinely anachronistic. In France by the 1380s, for instance, the lawbook known as the Grand Coutumier de France omitted any mention of crusaders from its detailed list of essoins.34 The habit of taking the cross had become too infrequent.
The ceremony of taking the cross, the defining ritual of crusading, remained available for the faithful, penitent or adventurous, but, as an active expression of interest in holy war, appears increasingly exceptional compared with earlier centuries. In December 1382, Bishop Henry Despenser of Norwich took the cross in St Paul’s cathedral, London. He apparently had experienced some difficulty locating an order of service, given its recent rarity. In fact, copies of the ceremony existed in many English cathedrals and abbeys. Different English rites for taking the cross existed in York, Lincoln and Salisbury (Despenser found his version in the liturgy books of the monks of Westminster).35 Although notable for their absence during the 1390 al-Mahdiya and 1396 Nicopolis expeditions, or as part of the Burgundian court’s display of crusade enthusiasm in the 1450s, examples of individuals and groups taking the cross show how the practice continued, as among the Hungarian peasantry in 1456 or the citizens of Ghent in the 1460s. Individual vows to fight the infidel can be found from France and Bavaria in the fourteenth century to Englishman and Scotsmen in the 1450s and worsted weavers from Norfolk in 1499.36 Rites for taking the cross continued to be copied into diocesan service books throughout the period, alongside the wider Holy Land liturgy. When Innocent VIII standardized the rite in the Roman Pontifical, he acknowledged the new circumstances of the Turkish advance when he changed the preamble to the ceremony from one restricted to those ‘going to assist the Holy Land’ to those wishing ‘to assist and defend the Christian faith or the recovery of the Holy Land’.37 The change indicated the pope believed or hoped the rite was in current use. Below the level of papal authorization, the cross could be given by local clergy to adventurers, such as Robert Almer at Canterbury in 1462, or to penitent robbers, a couple of whom received the cross at St Alban’s in 1479.38 The adaptability of the ceremony and institution was repeatedly confirmed, from new Iberian conquistadors to devout Roman Catholics fighting Protestant Huguenots in Toulouse during the French Wars of Religion in the 1560s. No less than Innocent III summoning the Fourth Lateran Council in 1213, Paul III was certain his congregation knew the significance of assuming the cross of Christ when he assembled the Council of Trent in 1544–5.39
By then, the whole idea of the redemptive merit of crusading had been challenged by critics of the Roman Church, mostly, but not exclusively, by Protestant confessional opponents. Ironically, central to the criticism lay the question of indulgences. Although those directed at serving the recovery of the Holy Land, the fight against the Turks or subsidizing the Hospitallers at Rhodes could still prove popular, the wide application and in places blatant racketeering involved threatened to discredit the whole system, as Pius II had warned.40 Thus at the very core of the crusading practices, a de facto separation emerged between function – fighting the infidel – and method – the offer and sale of indulgences. This occurred at the same time as other dimensions of holy war asserted themselves across Christendom, some overtly associated with crusading, some less so, some not all. Hussites and Protestants could happily fight holy wars without the apparatus of Roman Catholic crusade theology. Prayers for aid against the Turks appeared in Edward VI of England’s Protestant Prayer Book (1549, 1552). Just as not all prayers for the Holy Land indicated closet crusading, so not every expression of holy war, just war or hostility towards infidels came wrapped in formal crusading packaging. Even amongst Roman Catholics, the devolution of crusading to frontlines where combat was a matter of national survival, not religious duty, further diluted any ideological exclusivity the crusading may have possessed. The association of holy war with lay politics at once provided one of the commonest and most controversial battlefields for crusaders. As with indulgences, one of the most characteristic features of later medieval crusading proved one of the most self-defeating. To understand this, it is necessary to return to the thirteenth century.
CRUSADES AGAINST CHRISTIANS
Between the late thirteenth and early fifteenth centuries, crusades launched against Christians, in the heart of Christian society, formed the most consistent application of papal holy war. Inherent in the emergence of an ideology of holy war in the early middle ages, canonists and theologians in the thirteenth century, including Thomas Aquinas, further developed the doctrine of religious just war in Christendom. Henry of Segusio or Hostiensis argued that the crux cismarina, the crusade within Christendom, possessed more urgency and justice than the crux transmarina, or overseas crusade. In condoning papal policy, Hostiensis was reflecting traditional attitudes.41 This did not absolve them from criticism and controversy. When preaching against the Hohenstaufen in Germany in 1251, Hostiensis himself discovered wide and deep opposition to preaching the cross against Christians.42 Intellectually and legally valid, crusades against Christians never sat as comfortably in the mentalities of the faithful as wars against infidels. One of the key attractions of crusading lay in demonizing ‘aliens’ against whom the faithful could define their identity; crusades against Christians too often looked uncomfortably like crusades against themselves.
During the twelfth century, the papacy continued to sanction wars against its political opponents. Yet none, even the substantial expedition directed against the adventurer Markward of Anweiler in 1199, seems to have been accompanied by preaching, cross-taking or the full array of Holy Land privileges.43 Only with the Albigensian crusade in 1209, directed to the Christian protectors of heretics as much as the heretics themselves, was the complete Holy Land apparatus employed, its equality with the eastern war confirmed in the bull Excommunicamus of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). Innocent III’s desire to offer the crusade indulgence as widely as possible and his encouragement of the idea of Christian society as a church militant constantly challenged by sin and temporal enemies made the incorporation of wars against Christians a logical step. Clerical crusade taxation for political conflicts appealed to secular rulers caught up in them, as well as providing the papacy with a mechanism of control and the capacity the vast sums of church money granted to initiate military action on its own behalf. This became useful with the acquisition under Innocent III and his successors of temporal Papal States in central Italy that required maintaining and defending.
The main wars of the cross against Christians in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries revolved around the temporal position of the papacy in Italy, the defence of the Papal States, church rights, access to ecclesiastical wealth and fears of territorial encirclement. This last was no paranoid fiction. Thirteenth-century popes, such as Innocent IV, spent long periods in exile from Rome. A regularly peripatetic papacy presiding over an increasingly effective centralized bureaucracy and growing international recognition of papal ecclesiastical jurisdiction offered an irony not lost on papal adherents as much as opponents. Physical insecurity contradicted papal claims to temporal as well as spiritual plenitude of power. Directing c
rusades as a remedy implemented the ideological implications of papal ambition as well as confronting their material adversaries. Thus crusading became a major device in papal attempts to protect its vassals and allies. To achieve independence in Italy and primacy in Christendom, popes applied crusading to wars with the Hohenstaufen rulers of Germany and Sicily (1239–68), the Wars of the Sicilian Vespers to restore Angevin rule in Sicily (1282–1302), campaigns to secure papal interests in central and northern Italy during the evacuation of the papal Curia to Avignon (1309–77) and attempts to resolve by force the Great Schism (1378–1417), when two, then three popes claimed to be the legitimate successors of St Peter.
Papal ideology could easily become distracted to essentially secular conflicts, as in England in 1216–17 and 1263–5.44 Between 1208 and 1214, England had lain under a papal interdict (which meant that the church ceased to function except for infant baptism and Extreme Unction) because of King John’s refusal to accept Innocent III’s nominee Stephen Langton as archbishop of Canterbury. John had been excommunicated (1209–13). In 1213, as part of the agreement that ended the interdict, John made England and Ireland fiefs of the papacy. After his attempt to win back lost lands in France in 1214, John took the cross in 1215, in part to gain protection against the growing threat of rebellion against his harsh financial exactions and roughshod management of his nobility. This failed to prevent England’s slide into civil war, but the alliance with the Roman church persisted. After John’s death, his nine-year-old heir, Henry III, reinforced his credentials as a deserving recipient of church assistance by taking the cross immediately after his coronation in 1216. The crusader’s privilege paid dividends. In January 1216, Innocent III offered remission of sins to those who fought for King John; his opponents were branded as renegades hindering the crusade to the Holy Land. Indulgences were repeated by Honorius III in September 1216. Crusaders destined for the east were permitted to deflect their crusade vow to fight for the king. Contemporary chroniclers were unequivocal in describing royalists as crucesignati, the victors over the rebels at the crucial battle of Lincoln being depicted wearing the white crosses of the Angevins, albeit on their backs, not shoulders. Although the documentary evidence is more equivocal, it seems possible that a number of individuals took the cross to defend the English king in 1216–17. More certainly, eyewitnesses painted the conflict in explicitly crusading terms through language that sat comfortably with Innocent III’s extended use of wars of the cross.
Half a century and a weight of crusades against Christians later, there was no doubt. In the autumn of 1263, in answer to an appeal from Henry III, Urban IV appointed Gui of Foulquois (subsequently Pope Clement IV) to negotiate peace between the king and his domestic opponents, if necessary by preaching the cross against them. The rebel victory at Lewes in May 1264 denied Gui access to England and, beyond excommunicating them, there is no sign Gui preached the cross. However, as Pope Clement IV, Gui renewed the royalist crusade. In the summer of 1265, Cardinal Ottobuono was instructed to preach the cross in north-west Europe and to raise a clerical tax in England, avoiding areas of southern Europe where Charles of Anjou’s crusade to Sicily was being raised. In the event, the royalists crushed the rebels under Simon of Montfort at Evesham in August 1265 before any continental crusade force had been gathered. Nonetheless, the willingness of Urban IV and Clement IV to throw the full panoply of Holy Land crusading behind the political interests of their temporal allies reveals how far the war of the cross had become integrated into all aspects of papal secular policy, in the eyes of its promoters, synonymous, if only rhetorically, with the defence of the faith, i.e. the Roman church. This assumption, falling as a material burden on the whole church through taxation, grated on many, especially when it seemed to promise no end to conflict and bore few tangible benefits.
The war against the Hohenstaufen (1239–68) witnessed the most sustained pursuit of this policy.45 It marked a final collapse of hopes for a papal–imperial alliance that had seemed attainable on a number of occasions between 1180 and 1230, not least during the youth of Frederick II, when he was a papal protégé and designated commander of the pope’s crusade. The dispute derived from an intractable range of problems. The dynastic claims of Frederick to rule Sicily and the German empire, including rights over northern Italy, posed a potential challenge to papal independence. The creation of the Papal States inevitably led to tensions over frontier regions, especially the March of Ancona and the duchy of Spoleto. Local territorial rivalries were complicated by the special relationship of pope and emperor, symbolized by papal recognition and coronation of imperial candidates. Control of Sicily, as a papal fief, provided another focus of conflict, especially as Frederick and his successors governed the church in their lands with scant regard for papal supremacy and disdain for papal interference. The bitterness of papal hostility towards Frederick II in particular was a product of previously close attachment turning sour. A fundamental lack of trust in what Urban IV called a ‘viper race’ fuelled the tenacity with which the successive popes pursued Frederick and his heirs.
Earlier papally sponsored campaigns against Frederick II, such as that under John of Brienne in 1228–30, had been funded by clerical taxation. Frederick had twice been excommunicated, in 1227 and March 1239. However, only in the winter of 1239–40 did Gregory IX call for a formal crusade against the emperor. The pope’s allies, the Lombard League of northern Italian cities, had been heavily defeated by Frederick in 1237. Imperial forces threatened Rome, where, as so often in the period, support for the pope remained fickle. By summoning a crusade, Gregory could expect to stiffen local resistance but also mobilize a larger coalition in northern Italy and Germany by making church funds available to those prepared to take the field against the emperor. The crusade, renewed in 1240 and 1243, was primarily preached in imperial lands north and south of the Alps. Anti-kings were established in Germany: Henry Raspe of Thuringia (1246–7), then William of Holland (1247–56). Ringingly endorsed by the First Council of Lyons (1245), these anti-Hohenstaufen crusades attracted many recruits, some defecting from Louis IX’s crusade. The association of crusading to the political conflicts of Italy and Germany lent the anti-imperialist cause an element of institutional commitment and international appeal (or outrage, depending on the observer) they would otherwise not have enjoyed. However, the crusade’s main contribution was financial: the church subsidized the war to destroy the Hohenstaufen, which would otherwise have been beyond the resources, let alone will, of the motley collection of secular lords ranged with the papacy.
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. Papa
l 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.
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