A History of the Crusades (7 page)

The astonishing achievement of the expedition partly inspired the departure of ‘the third wave’, the so-called crusade of 1101, but no one in these years could have predicted that what Urban had conjured up would prove to be only the
First
Crusade, nor that the crusade would come to be deployed elsewhere than in the Holy Land and against opponents other than Muslims—in short, that the crusading movement would emerge to become one of the most important components, and defining characteristics, of late medieval western culture.

So far as crusading to the Latin East is concerned, it was fundamentally the political circumstances facing the settlers after 1099 that required the summoning and dispatch of further expeditions in their support. A pattern came to be established in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries whereby a setback in the East prompted calls for help from the West, which were then endorsed by the papacy in the form of crusade declarations, although not all aid was in the shape of a crusade and neither did easterners always ask for a crusade in their appeals. This pattern embraces most of the major crusades that have traditionally been numbered as well as a host of lesser and lesser-known expeditions shown by modern research to be as much crusades as their more famous siblings. (This renders the traditional numbering anachronistic.) The deteriorating position in the East led to at least one crusade summons being directed at every generation in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries— although by no means all were universal calls to arms—first to bolster the Latin settlements and then, beginning with the fall of Edessa to the Muslim atabak Zangi in 1144 and of Jerusalem itself to Saladin in 1187, to recover them. The crusades declared on behalf of the Latin empire of Constantinople
(1204–61), created in the wake of the notorious Fourth Crusade which resulted in the sack of the city, also fit the pattern; but these crusades were chiefly directed against the Byzantines, now established in Nicaea and seeking to restore the losses of 1204.

A change in approach and strategy in crusading to the East, with considerable logistical implications, should also be noticed. The First Crusade took the overland route to Palestine through the Byzantine empire, as we have seen. So did the forces of the Second Crusade (1147–9) that went East, led by King Louis VII of France and King Conrad III of Germany. But the forces of Emperor Frederick I ‘Barbarossa’ on the Third Crusade (1189–92) were the last to attempt this. The future, with the benefit of hindsight, lay in the decision taken by his fellow monarchs Richard I of England and Philip II of France to sail across the Mediterranean to the Holy Land. Moreover, it is from the time of the Third Crusade that the idea of making Egypt the goal of crusade emerged as a serious alternative to campaigning in the Latin East itself. This was sensible, since the wealth and political importance of Egypt within the Ayyubid empire established by Saladin meant that if it could be weakened, even taken, then the Latin East could more easily be restored. The first crusade to depart apparently with this intention was the Fourth (1202–4), but it came to be diverted to Constantinople. The initial forces of the Fifth Crusade (1217–29) were the first to disembark in Egypt, at Damietta, but disaster struck as they advanced down the Nile towards Cairo. The same fate befell the first crusade of King Louis IX of France (1248–54). His second crusade, which proved to be the last of the great international crusades to the East before 1300, saw his death at Tunis in 1270.

Some other thirteenth-century expeditions did sail directly to the Holy Land, but, as has been shown earlier, crusading was never necessarily tied to that location. Indeed, it must be stressed that at the very time (1096) that the first crusaders were
en route
to Jerusalem, Urban II quite unambiguously permitted, or rather urged, Catalan nobles who had taken the cross for the crusade to the East to fulfil their vows in Spain. In return for aiding the church of Tarragona, they were promised forgiveness
of sins. The crusade, then, at the very point of its inception, was being simultaneously applied by the same pope at both ends of the Mediterranean against Muslims. Given this precedent, it is not surprising that after the First Crusade Spain quickly became an established theatre for crusading expeditions, beginning with those of 1114 and 1118. The nature and pace of the
Reconquista
was fundamentally altered as a result of a series of crusades throughout this period and beyond.

Nor is it very surprising that the crusade also came to be deployed rapidly against other peoples on other frontiers of western Christendom. Particularly notable was its extension to the struggle between Germans and pagan Slavs to the north and east of areas of German settlement. The Saxons’ war with the Wends was first elevated into a crusade by Pope Eugenius III in 1147, although previous to this, in 1108, crusading rhetoric had been employed in an attempt to gain recruits. As the
Drang nach Osten
proceeded, so in time crusades came to be declared further and further beyond the Elbe, and along the Baltic: in Pomerania, Prussia, Livonia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Finland. Again, to the south, the brunt of the sudden, ferocious descent of the Mongols upon Europe in 1241 was borne by the hapless Poles and Hungarians, prompting in the same year the declaration of the first of a number of crusades against them. Attitudes would change in the later thirteenth century with the prospect of a joint alliance against the Muslims.

Two further species of crusade remain to be considered. Both were controversial at the time and continue to be so. The first involved the application of force against papal political opponents within western Christendom in the bid to remove them from power. It may have been Innocent II who first proclaimed such a crusade in 1135, in the course of his bitter struggle with Roger II, Norman king of Sicily. The evidence is not entirely conclusive, but it does indicate a direction of thinking and policy that had its roots in the holy wars declared by the reform popes of the later eleventh century against their enemies, notably Emperor Henry IV of Germany. Whatever the case, the first unambiguous crusade of this type was launched by Pope Innocent III in 1199 against Markward of Anweiler and his supporters
porters in Sicily, who were opposing papal policy in Italy. The crucial precedent set, other ‘political crusades’ followed. In England, for example, a crusade was declared in 1216–17 against both the English rebels who had forced King John to concede Magna Carta and their French allies, under Prince Louis of France, who was chosen in late 1215 to replace John as king. Like Sicily, England had by then become a papal fief, and its king a papal vassal, following John’s submission to Innocent III in 1213, so action could be justified as force applied against rebellious papal sub-vassals. But of all these crusades, the most significant, so far as their momentous political consequences are concerned, were those declared against the Hohenstaufen emperors in Italy and Germany. So critical had the struggle with Emperor Frederick II become, in the pope’s perception, that a crusade was first proclaimed against him in 1239. By then, Frederick had control of southern Italy and Sicily and he had recently crushed the papacy’s north Italian allies. By early 1240 he was threatening Rome itself. Upon his death in 1250, further crusades were declared against his heirs until 1268, when the last of the hated dynasty, Conradin, was captured and executed.

The period 1199–
c
.1240 is an important one in the history of the crusading movement, since any inhibitions in papal circles had finally been overcome when it came to the application of the crusade against political opponents. The same period also saw diversification in another respect with the emergence of the crusade against heretics. Again there are clear indications that such action had been foreshadowed, not least by Innocent III, the pope who was finally provoked in 1208 to declare a crusade against the adherents of the Cathar heresy in southern France, by then very strongly entrenched. The notorious Albigensian Crusade, which failed to eradicate the heresy but destroyed so much of the cultural, social, and political fabric of Languedoc, would proceed episodically for the next twenty years. Once more, precedent set, it was so much easier to launch crusades against other heretics, for example those against the Stedinger heretics in Germany in 1232, and against Bosnian heretics in 1227 and 1234.

In sum, so far as applications of crusade are concerned, we can identify and plot a clear process of evolution from the time of the First Crusade. Urban II saw little distinction in the merit to be gained from seeking to rescue Christian people and places from Muslim oppression in Spain and the Levant, and he considered the crusade to be an appropriate instrument to that end in both theatres. His successors drew out the logic of that position and extended it to other opponents of the Church. The scope of the Second Crusade, as it evolved in practice, illustrates this graphically in relation to the West’s frontiers: simultaneously, crusade operations were being conducted in Spain and Portugal, and north-eastern Europe, as well as Syria. Under Pope Innocent III another major breakthrough occurred with the first deployments of crusading against heretics and papal political opponents. Both could be, and were, depicted as oppressors of Christians and Mother Church, and much the same justificatory framework, sentiment, and imagery that were used in papal bulls declaring crusades against Muslims, Slavs, or Mongols, were employed in the calls to crusade against Hohenstaufen emperors or Cathar heretics. Enemies within posed no less a threat than the enemy without; indeed, as popes and others frequently stressed, they were more dangerous. Crusades against these enemies were considered more necessary than those to the Holy Land accordingly. The crusade, the most potent weapon in the papacy’s formidable arsenal, increasingly emerged, then, as an instrument to be applied as and when popes saw fit, and against whomsoever and wherever its use was appropriate. By the middle of the thirteenth century, this was unquestionably the reality, but it should be stressed that by no means all contemporaries were content with each and every aspect of this broad development. Papal policy was one thing, public opinion another.

If crusade was a moving target across time and space in terms of whom it came to be applied against and where, then equally, considered as an institution, it was so with regard to content, substance, and apparatus. This can be seen very clearly in the case of crusaders’ spiritual and temporal privileges, but a similar broad evolutionary pattern is to be seen, for example, in the
way in which crusades were promoted and preached, and how they were financed and organized. By the end of this period, crusading had become an elaborate and complex business, ‘the business of the cross’ as it was described at the time. Some key aspects of this are considered below.

The core of all crusade promotion consisted of papal proclamation of the expedition in question since popes alone possessed the requisite authority to declare a crusade and offer the spiritual and material privileges enjoyed by crusaders. But proclamation alone was rarely sufficient to move men and women to take the cross. Additional measures were needed. According to one account of the Council of Clermont, Urban II instructed the assembled prelates to announce what he had said throughout the churches of their dioceses and to preach the cross. He himself proclaimed the crusade in the course of his itinerary around France, and he also commissioned specific agents to preach in particular localities. The evidence does not suggest that Urban’s hopes were fully realized in practice, however, not least because prelates lacked the means to publicize the crusade call easily and automatically throughout their dioceses: ecclesiastical administrative structures were still primitive, and the lack of a formal authenticated crusade bull scarcely helped matters. Preaching, too, was in its infancy, an unfamiliar act for most clergy. But the First Crusade provided a model, however rudimentary, which would be progressively elaborated and extended upon in the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the attempt to maximize the impact of the crusade call, with dissemination of papal proclamations and local preaching remaining the fundamental components. These will be examined in turn.

No formal bull launched the First Crusade. In this it is unusual, since most of the others were proclaimed by crusade encyclical, the basic form of which was finally established by
Quantum praedecessores
(1145) for the Second Crusade: an initial narrative section explaining why a crusade is necessary, an exhortation to take the cross, and a listing of crusader privileges. From
the letters of St Bernard of Clairvaux, commissioned to preach the crusade, and other evidence, it is plain that the bull was to be publicized, but in practice it seems that dissemination was haphazard. It was only in Alexander III’s pontificate that the attempt was first made to disseminate crusade bulls systematically at local level, crucially through direct mandate to local prelates. In 1181, in particular, the pope instructed all prelates to ensure that his crusade bull
Cor nostrum
was published in all churches and to announce crusader privileges to the faithful. This was probably achieved by the production of transcripts of the letter in local episcopal chanceries, which were then distributed to the individual churches of the diocese in question. This, at any rate, became the routine procedure in the thirteenth century, and in a few instances we can trace exactly the sequence of administrative measures leading from the papal curia to provincial archbishops, thence to their suffragan bishops, and so on down the hierarchy to parish priest level. The whole process is indicative both of the increasing sophistication of the Church’s administrative structures (possible with the greater application of literacy to the art of government) and also of the progressive establishment of a centralized Church under papal monarchy. Local prelates were now being mandated to act in the matter of the crusade, as in other business, in a much more streamlined and sure way than was possible in 1095. This is equally true with regard to crusade preaching.