God's War: A New History of the Crusades

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