Crusade and Christendom

Annotated Documents in Translation from Innocent III to the Fall of Acre, 1187-1291

Jessalynn Bird, Edward Peters, James M. Powell

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780812207651
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

In 1213, Pope Innocent III issued his letter Vineam Domini, thundering against the enemies of Christendom—the "beasts of many kinds that are attempting to destroy the vineyard of the Lord of Sabaoth"—and announcing a General Council of the Latin Church as redress. The Fourth Lateran Council, which convened in 1215, was unprecedented in its scope and impact, and it called for the Fifth Crusade as what its participants hoped would be the final defense of Christendom. For the first time, a collection of extensively annotated and translated documents illustrates the transformation of the crusade movement. Crusade and Christendom explores the way in which the crusade was used to define and extend the intellectual, religious, and political boundaries of Latin Christendom. It also illustrates how the very concept of the crusade was shaped by the urge to define and reform communities of practice and belief within Latin Christendom and by Latin Christendom's relationship with other communities, including dissenting political powers and heretical groups, the Moors in Spain, the Mongols, and eastern Christians. The relationship of the crusade to reform and missionary movements is also explored, as is its impact on individual lives and devotion. The selection of documents and bibliography incorporates and brings to life recent developments in crusade scholarship concerning military logistics and travel in the medieval period, popular and elite participation, the role of women, liturgy and preaching, and the impact of the crusade on western society and its relationship with other cultures and religions.Intended for the undergraduate yet also invaluable for teachers and scholars, this book illustrates how the crusades became crucial for defining and promoting the very concept and boundaries of Latin Christendom. It provides translations of and commentaries on key original sources and up-to-date bibliographic materials.

PART I

The Pope, Crusades, and Communities, 1198–1213

As Christoph Maier has observed, the thirteenth was “arguably the century with the most intense and varied crusading activity of the entire Middle Ages.”¹ Of course the circumstances of earlier crusade activity in northern Europe and Iberia and the changing fortunes of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem in the twelfth century, as well as the powerful Cistercian devotional commitment to the idea of crusade surely suggested the adaptability of the idea of crusade across a broader spectrum of ecclesiastical concern than Jerusalem and the Holy Land alone. But such adaptability played out most dramatically in the years after 1198, when Innocent III and his handpicked, trained assistants created a network of crusade preachers, recruiters, financial managers, and inspired lay warriors to link the crusade to the state of Christian society in many different forms, creating what may be considered a crusade culture.

This section illustrates at the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century the astonishing versatility of the crusade in the hands of a talented, driven, and frequently frustrated pope whose long view was always on the Holy Land, but whose many other concerns elsewhere and whose conviction that crusade and the need of religious reform in individuals and institutions were intimately connected were crucial to his pontificate.

In spite of the troubles in central and southern Italy, the diplomatic and marital problems of Philip II Augustus, the disputed imperial election following the death of Henry VI in September 1197, the turmoil of the city-republics in Tuscany, and the increasing volume of legal matters and the rising costs of administration in the curia, Innocent’s earliest papal letters were full of discussions of the plight of the Holy Land and of the need for a forthcoming crusade. Although Amalric of Jerusalem had signed a treaty with al-Adil of Damascus that was to last until 1203, the treaty did not cover Cairo, and there was some discussion of whether Alexandria was the intended target, an eventual gateway to Jerusalem. In 1198 Innocent began his preparations for a crusade, issuing the eloquent and lengthy letter Post miserabile in August. It rhetorically painted a vivid picture of Muslim taunts against Christian failures in the East, appointed two of his closest advisers, Peter of Capua, cardinal deacon of Santa Maria in Via Lata, and Soffredus, cardinal priest of Santa Prassede, as his legates in western Europe, “so that by word and example they might invite others to the service of the cross,” and reminded Christians that the crusade was God’s offering of a means to salvation, but that God’s people had to make themselves morally worthy of that gift.² On November 5, 1198, Innocent commissioned the preacher Fulk of Neuilly both to preach himself and to help Peter of Capua to select and train other preachers.³ In the same year, at a tournament at Écry a number of princes had voluntarily taken up the cross and begun their preparations for further recruiting and transportation by sea to the Holy Land (below, No. 6).

In his letter of 1199 to the Byzantine emperor Alexius III, Multe nobis attulit (below, No. 3), Innocent asked for more Byzantine aid to Christians in the Holy Land as well as for reunion between the divided Greek and Latin churches. Here, too, the crusade was linked to an overarching view of the nature and needs of Christian society.

Innocent also sent out letters to the great churches of Europe and their leaders, urging, and then commanding them to contribute a fortieth part of their income to the crusade effort—the first tax on clerical income. Innocent also proposed to contribute substantially out of his own strained finances, and he commanded that special money chests be placed in churches, so that when crusade sermons were preached, contributions of the laity could also be collected and applied to the needs of crusade, although their application caused a number of difficult problems. His letters specifically echoed the privileges laid out by Gregory VIII in Audita tremendi, and they indicate a growing awareness of the size and complexity of mounting such an expedition early in the thirteenth century.⁴

The problems of finance reflected one great difficulty of a crusade to the East. Another was that of overall management and command. Thibaut III of Champagne, one of the first princes to take the cross at Écry, died before he could set out. The remaining princes elected Boniface of Montferrat as their leader and appointed a committee to represent them in arranging transportation by sea from Venice. After the financing and logistical planning of the crusade and the signing of a binding contract with the Venetians, the crusaders found that they could not provide enough troops and money to satisfy that contract. Many crusaders had simply ignored the Venetian rendezvous and made their ways to Syria by themselves, while others had simply never started out. The Venetians, who for their part had suspended their entire maritime economy for a year in order to build the ships and lay in the supplies needed for what would have been the largest amphibious military campaign in European history, demanded full payment.

Once it was clear that this was impossible, they offered an alternative—the crusaders might have their period of obligation extended if they assisted Venice in bringing to heel the city of Zara, in Dalmatia, a rebellious former ally of Venice at the time dependent on the kingdom of Hungary, whose ruler had taken the cross and was therefore technically protected against any military intrusion at home. At this point a number of crusaders, including Simon de Montfort, who later led the forces of the Albigensian Crusade (below, No. 7), left the army because they refused to attack a Christian city. After the capture of Zara, another diversion appeared in the person of Alexius IV, an exiled claimant to the imperial throne at Constantinople, whose father Isaac Angelus had been blinded and deposed by his brother, Alexius III. Alexius IV made substantial promises of aid for crusader-Venetian assistance in gaining the throne. When the crusaders and Venetians installed Alexius IV, the new emperor failed to fulfill his promises, and the forces that had placed him on his throne attacked and conquered the city in 1204.

The devastation caused by military conquest and several vast fires that destroyed much of the city appalled both Latin and Greek Christendom, including Innocent III, but it also presented an irresistible fait accompli to the pope—the reunion of the divided Greek and Latin churches. The Venetians and crusaders promptly elected a Latin emperor, Baldwin of Flanders, and divided the Eastern Roman Empire among themselves. By 1207 they had ceased to call themselves “crusaders” as they parceled out the spoils of conquest, although some of them then moved on to the Holy Land to join other crusaders. Innocent, horrified, infuriated, and undaunted, began plans for yet another crusade.

And he launched one, but not to the Holy Land. The highly intensified perception of religious dissent as heresy in the course of the twelfth century momentarily appeared just as pressing as the needs of Outremer and much closer to home. In some parts of western Europe, notably around the county of Toulouse, “heretics” appeared to have become almost a numerical majority. Innocent sent preachers, papal legates, and eminent monastic leaders, chiefly Cistercians, but also Premonstratensians, into the area, but response was generally indifferent or hostile, and local bishops appear not to have been of much use. The murder of the papal legate Peter of Castelnau in 1208 made the pope determine that stronger measures were needed. Since moral reform, orthodoxy and orthopraxy, and crusade were already firmly linked in his mind, in the same year Innocent offered full crusade privileges for the first time to those who would take up arms against the heretics, and the first crusade against Christians, the Albigensian Crusade, was launched (below, No. 7).

This crusade, too, slipped from papal control, and the bloodbath in southern France between 1209 and 1229 elicited expressions of horror not only from Christians elsewhere but from churchmen themselves. If the crusade crushed heresy in southern France, it did not crush it elsewhere, and the chief beneficiary of the enterprise was to be the king of France, who eventually gained, by a judicious exploitation of military force and legal authority, a large addition to his kingdom. But the crusade against Christians was not the only new direction that the crusade took during this period.

In 1195 the Almohad caliph Ya’qub had inflicted a grievous defeat on the forces of King Alfonso VIII of Castile at the battle of Alarcos. So seriously did the pope consider the loss that in 1197 Pope Celestine III granted to warriors in Aquitaine the right to apply in Spain instead the vows they had taken to go on the Third Crusade but had not fulfilled. In 1210 the caliph took the strategically important castle of Salvatierra. These losses inspired Innocent III to proclaim yet another crusade, this time in Spain, accompanied by intercessory processions in Rome that were imitated elsewhere in Europe (below, No. 8). The plan drew in Peter II, king of Aragón, King Sancho VII of Navarre, and a large number of knights from Iberia and France.

In July 1212, while the Albigensian Crusade was well underway, Innocent III tried with limited success to suspend it in favor of the expedition in Iberia. The Christian rulers of Castile, Aragón, and Navarre and their combined forces encountered the Almohad army at Las Navas de Tolosa and, gambling on the outcome of a single pitched battle, routed the enemy and opened the route of reconquest into Andalusia (below, No. 9).

The intercessory processions that Innocent held in Rome and in northern Europe on the eve of Las Navas de Tolosa appealed widely to Christians throughout Europe. They also seem to have been identified with another idea that had taken shape after the disaster at Hattin. One of those present at the papal curia when Audita tremendi was read aloud was Peter of Blois, a scholar, moralist, and ecclesiastical administrator, who was struck by the spectacular failure of the great and powerful leaders at Hattin and became convinced that only through apostolic poverty and individual moral reform could the Holy Land be regained.⁵ The failure of the Third Crusade certainly heightened this view. Peter, who had gone on the Third Crusade in the service of Baldwin, archbishop of Canterbury, wrote several works between 1187 and 1189 in which he laid out these ideas, claiming that only the poor and devout, not the proud and the mighty, could legitimately accomplish this task.

In 1212 and 1213 a number of the poor and devout took up these ideas, which were certainly not unique to Peter of Blois, and launched several militant processions toward the south of France and Italy, which came to be known as the Children’s Crusade (below, No. 10).

By 1212 there had also been developed a formal liturgical rite for taking the cross (below, No. 4), sufficiently well known that even those who went on the Children’s Crusade could voluntarily adopt it or a variation of it.

The number and variety of crusades and the communities in which they operated between 1198 and 1213 is utterly unlike those of any comparable period of crusade activity. It suggests just how intensely the need for moral reform—individual and collective—could be made a precondition for a successful crusade, and, conversely, how the crusade itself could then be applied in entirely new situations and places. It also suggests how local interests and concerns always stood in tension with the broad views of the popes and the curia. Innocent III expressed pity for those who had gone on the hopeless Children’s Crusade, and he echoed his friend Peter of Blois in lamenting that the rich and noble had been shamed by the poor and devout in performing God’s business. And he decided that it was now time to place both of these issues before all of Christian society, East and West, which he did by calling for the Fourth Lateran Council in Vineam Domini in 1213.

2. Innocent III, Post miserabile, August 13, 1198

As the author of the Gesta Innocentii, the first volume of the register of Innocent’s letters, and virtually all recent scholarship make abundantly clear, the first year of Innocent’s pontificate was occupied with a number of major political and moral crises that compelled most of the pope’s time and attention. Among these were the instability of the city of Rome and the papal territories and the problem of the divided and dangerous kingdom of Sicily in the wake of the death of Henry VI and the attempted takeover of the kingdom by Henry’s powerful servants as well as the return of Henry’s crusaders from the Holy Land in the spring of 1198. Moral reformers were greatly concerned with the venality of some of the clergy and the bitter legal disputes that often involved the highest ranks of churchmen, as they were with the marital problems of Philip Augustus of France, hostility between France and England, and unsettled relations with Eastern Christendom in the person of the emperor Alexius III, who had deposed his brother Isaac II Angelus and pursued Isaac’s son Alexius IV. Innocent hoped and expected to be able to rely on archbishops and bishops, as well as the Cistercian monks and Premonstratensian canons to solve these problems; he regularly held consistories at the curia three times a week, began to reform the papal household and curia, and he also selected and appointed trusted individuals as legates.

But in the midst of these concerns, some of which lasted throughout his entire pontificate, Innocent never forgot the Holy Land and its greatly diminished condition, nor his and Christendom’s obligations toward it. In chapter 46 the author of the Gesta states:

Of all these things, he hoped most fervently to aid and recover the Holy Land, considering carefully how he could effectively fulfill this desire. Because some said that by delaying action the Roman Church was imposing serious and insupportable burdens on others, and, moreover, she was not ready to raise a finger for it, he chose two of his brethren, namely, Soffredus, cardinal priest of Santa Prassede, and Peter, cardinal deacon of Santa Maria in Via Lata, on whom he imposed the sign of the cross, so that by word and example they might invite others to the service of the cross. He also ordered that all clerics in major and minor orders should pay one-fortieth of their ecclesiastical incomes in support of the Holy Land.⁶

Although the Gesta does not mention Innocent’s first call to a major crusade, the letter Post miserabile of August 13–15, 1198, much of this paragraph is a summary of its text. But although Post miserabile was Innocent’s first crusade proposal, it is not the first mention of his concerns for the Holy Land. In late February 1198, a month after his coronation and nearly two months after his election, Innocent sent to Aymeric, patriarch of Jerusalem (1194–1202), the letter Rex regum, announcing his election and his profou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Editors’ Note
• Maps
• Note on Abbreviations and Translation
• Introduction: Crusade and Christendom, 1187–1291
• Part I. The Pope, Crusades, and Communities, 1198–1213
• Part II. Crusade and Council, 1213–1215
• Part III. The Fifth Crusade, 1213–1221
• Part IV. The Emperor’s Crusade, 1227–1229
• Part V. The Barons’ Crusade, 1234–1245
• Part VI. The Mongol Crusades, 1241–1262
• Part VII. The Saint’s Crusades, 1248–1270
• Part VIII. The Italian Crusades, 1241–1268
• Part IX. Living and Dying on Crusade
• Part X. The Road to Acre, 1265–1291
• Index
• Acknowledgments