God's War: A New History of the Crusades

The efficacy of crusading always depended on the alliance of ecclesiastical authority with secular power. Alongside the institutionalization of crusading in the devotional life of the west, governments became involved in securing the temporal status and privileges of crusaders in addition to their traditional role in organizing and conducting the military expeditions. Crusaders’ temporal privileges were consolidated through the circumstances of the Third Crusade, which required secular authorities to recognize and protect the various immunities enjoyed by crucesignati if they were to be effective. Famously, church protection of one crusader’s property, Richard I’s, despite loud papal concern, proved futile in the face of the ambitions of Philip II and Richard’s brother John in 1192–4. Temporal privileges regarding property, civil and criminal litigation, debt and interest repayment, fiscal exemption and the disposal of assets, relied on the cooperation and active support of lay power. Indeed, much of the surviving evidence for the operation of such privileges comes from the records of secular justice and administration. The basic principle behind crusader privileges that withdrew the crucesignatus from a purely lay condition involved its acceptance by lay courts and lords. It was their responsibility to establish case by case claims by individual crusaders to protection and immunities and, frequently, to restrict or define these in accordance with local custom and effective justice or administration. For instance, it was of considerable practical importance that a secular legal inquest at Rouen in 1205 acknowledged that a croise enjoyed similar legal status to a cleric.¹⁹

The Third Crusade set the pattern. Gregory VIII’s bull Audita Tremendi provided an inadequate guide to tax and debt immunities. Angevin and Capetian royal ordinances on the Saladin Tithe and debt clarified how the exemptions would work. Interest payments supplied a particularly sharp problem. The crusader’s exemption from interest on loans protected his goods and his state of Grace from usury while simultaneously destroying his creditworthiness and hence limiting his ability to fulfil his vow and thus his access to the means of Grace. As a result, some thirteenth-century crusaders voluntarily waived this exemption. The assembly of prelates and barons at Paris in March 1188 established detailed rules in an attempt to stabilize the banking system, avoid a flood of litigation and prevent debtors taking the cross simply to escape their obligations. Although subsequent papal decrees on crusaders’ immunities became more precise, the gap between ecclesiastical theory and secular practice persisted. A French royal ordinance on crusade financial and legal exemptions and privileges of March 1215 declared the intention of safeguarding the ‘law and customs of Holy Church and similarly… the law and customs of the kingdom of France’.²⁰ Secular approval was vital for the system to work, as many of the crusader’s privileges directly affected lay judicial procedures. Thus in 1204 the English justiciar Geoffrey FitzPeter intervened in a case of mort d’ancestor (determining the right to inheritance) because the defendant was crucesignatus.²¹ Across western Europe secular courts had to recognize crusaders’ immunity from certain civil and non-capital criminal law suits, the postponement of their cases and the standing of their attorneys. Legal and chronological limits had to be determined and modified; in England the so-called crusaders’ term, during which the privileges were effective, was set at three years in 1188 but was regarded by some lawyers fifty years later as five years or indefinite.²² Tax collectors needed instructions to exempt crusaders’ property and methods to establish who they were. On local justices and policing agents, such as sheriffs in England, fell the responsibility to implement the church’s protection of crusaders’ possessions and families.

The potential domestic repercussions of a decision to take the cross could be considerable. For some, crusading offered lasting advantages. The development of proxy crusaders, while expensive for the non-combatant crucesignatus, benefited the representative often with more than the cost of passage, equipment, travel expenses and wages. To secure proxies’ services, added incentives or bribes were provided, usually land, which then remained in their family’s ownership. As all crusaders were ipso facto legally free, if a landowner chose a possibly easily persuadable unfree tenant to perform his vow, this would imply, at the very least, manumission (i.e. being set free) for the proxy. Hugh Travers, an English servile tenant manumitted as a Jerusalem proxy in the early thirteenth century, was released servile dues and allowed to hold his previously servile tenure as a free tenancy, a move that enabled his descendants to thrive in an increasingly competitive agrarian land market.²³ More widespread benefits accrued to those who provided cash or materials in return for gifts, leases, mortgages or sale of property.

While Innocent III’s programme of extending social access to the crusade indulgences further integrated the activity into society, there were casualties far removed from the battlefields of the cross. Improvident or unlucky crusaders could inflict lasting damage to their patrimonies through debt or alienation. It was no accident that so many preachers’ anecdotes concerned wives trying to prevent their spouses from taking the cross. Although many women took the cross, accompanied expeditions and bequeathed funds for the Holy Land in their wills, crusaders’ wives stood to lose income, status, livelihood, even life itself. Ironically, Innocent III, who elsewhere strongly promoted the ideals of Christian marriage, crucially diminished the rights of women married to crusaders. Traditionally, in canon law, conjugal rights operated with complete equality between the partners, neither having the right unilaterally to deny the other. In theory, before Innocent III, putative crusaders required the permission of their wives to go. Innocent relaxed this provision, effectively giving permission for wives to be abandoned without their consent. Crusade widows, metaphorical and actual, especially if they held or guarded property, were potentially very vulnerable. The protection of the courts often failed to prevent land being stolen, still less offer compensation for any financial hardship consequent on the crusader’s absence. Although a crusader needed his wife’s consent to any land deals that involved dower land set aside to provide for her widowhood, for obvious domestic reasons such permission was regularly forthcoming, exposing that property to the depredations suffered by the rest. Illicit deprivation or expulsion from family land were not the worst outcome. William Trussel left his English lands on crusade in 1190. Six weeks later his wife was murdered by his bastard half-brother and her body flung into a nearby marl pit.²⁴ Property rather than passion was the likely motive. Contrary to modern fantasies, it was not a chastity belt that a crusader’s wife required (in any case an invention of the seventeenth century) but a good lawyer or a strong guardian.

The proliferation of evidence from the decades after 1187 showing the penetration of crusading into the interstices of social and cultural life reflected the increasing acceptance of written record keeping in politics, administration and the law. Yet it also charted genuine developments in how the business of the cross was presented, operated and perceived, in organization, preaching, liturgical prominence and social penetration. This process did not cease with the pontificate of Innocent III. New theories reconciling the holy war of the crusades with the just war categories of the canon lawyers became increasingly fashionable after 1216. Preaching grew more systematic and standardized, with a proliferation in handbooks and manuals on how to do it and what to say coupled with the emergence as a standing army of evangelism of the new orders of friars, the Dominicans and Franciscans, founded in the second decade of the thirteenth century. As members of orders that held no possessions, begged for their sustenance (hence the name Mendicants) and, while living in communal houses, conducted an active ministry in the outside world, the friars were, in theory at least, ideally suited as preachers. Crusade finance was transformed by the increase in the income from vow redemptions, donations, alms and legacies as well as by regular clerical taxes for the cause. By the mid-1270s, all western Christendom was divided into collection regions. Stronger and more settled central governments were able to mobilize more coherent state responses, even to the extent of levying lay subsidies for the crusade, as in France in 1248 and England in 1270. Recruitment, as a consequence, was based on more professional, contractual and mercenary lines, the link between taking the cross and military service no longer inevitable or essential. To be a crucesignatus could denote spiritual status, not physical activity. Indulgences were applied even more extensively, to include sermon audiences or congregations, crusaders’ non- crucesignati family members and even, on occasion, deceased relatives. Within a century, indulgences were sold directly to the faithful. Although abuses were inevitable, this institutionalization was not so much a racket as an expression of managed commitment.

Few of these developments were untouched by the legacy of Innocent III, who saw the crusade with moral and religious reform – sabbatarian (i.e. Sunday observance), anti-usury, anti-materialist – as central to his mission. They were the reasons he announced for summoning the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.²⁵ All the great crusade preachers of his reign combined the call of the cross of holy war with that of personal penitence and a return to Apostolic poverty, the way of Christ in public arms and private devotion. The ordinances contained in Quia Maior and Ad Liberandam demonstrated a world view allied to administrative details that exerted an extraordinary hold over succeeding papal legislation, even if their lack of precise definition of the canonical status of holy war or the exact relationship between taking the cross and the