actual vow may have continued to trouble academics. By equating the crusade with his general moral agenda rather than confining it to a narrow, military or foreign policy, Innocent left the papacy and church free rein to use the mechanics and language of preaching, recruitment, cross, vow, indulgence, temporal privileges, alms, taxation and redemptions. No longer simply a matter of marching or sailing to Palestine, the crusade found itself a more pervasive role in Christian society paradoxically at the same time as its exclusiveness, some might argue distinctiveness, was diluted.
THE GERMAN CRUSADE 1195–8
The enforced revival of active crusading in the east after 1187 encouraged the application of wars of the cross elsewhere, as it had in the early years of the twelfth century and again during the Second Crusade. Propaganda, recruitment and rounding up vow shirkers for the Holy Land scarcely ceased, keeping the crusade and the associated sense of Christendom in crisis prominently in view. Other frontiers seemed to demand attention. The success of the north African Berber Islamic reformist political sect the Almohads since the 1150s, and especially under Ya‘qub (1184–99), in annexing much of Muslim southern Spain and driving back earlier Christian advances, reached a climax in their defeat of Alfonso VIII of Castile at Alarcos in 1195. In 1193, Celestine III had authorized a crusade to bolster Iberian resistance. Similarly in the Baltic, in 1195 Celestine associated the crusade and its privileges with attempts to conquer and colonize Livonia (roughly modern Latvia) by Saxon entrepreneurs, adventurers and blood-stained penitents directed by Archbishop Hartwig II of Bremen (1185–1207) and his protege Berthold,
However, the Holy Land retained its primacy of concern and effort. Innocent ascended the papal throne in January 1198 just as a major crusade to the east was at the point of disintegration, its failure providing the new pope with the
At Bari, as a sign of his commitment and an incentive to recruitment, Henry announced that he would pay for 1,500 knights and 1,500 sergeants for a year; the knights were to receive thirty gold ounces (Troy weight) and provisions for themselves and two servants; the sergeants ten gold ounces. To pay the 5,000 gold pounds (Troy) needed for this, Henry demanded a tribute from the new Byzantine emperor, Alexius III, who had deposed and blinded his brother, Isaac II, on 8 April 1195. This formed part of Henry’s deliberate bullying of the Byzantine emperor, attempting to extract promises of material assistance for the crusade as well as restitution for Sicilian losses during the wars of the 1180s and, more pertinently, damages for those of Frederick Barbarossa in 1189–90. Henry’s new power gave substance to his diplomatic belligerence. Alexius submitted to the bullying and, after failing to get political support for a general property tax, fell back on appropriating ecclesiastical alms and bullion, apparently amounting to over 7,000 pounds of silver and a much smaller quantity of gold. This highly unpopular levy was known derisively as the ‘Alamanikon’ (i.e. German tax).29 Arrangements for its delivery were in hand when news of Henry’s death from one of his recurrent fevers (28 September 1197) halted payment. However, these negotiations with Byzantium charted a clear western attitude to Byzantium and the eastern crusade. As well as the tax, the Greeks were asked to provide their own help for the Holy Land in conjunction with a western expedition, their past reluctance noted and present hesitation or opposition cited as grounds for a possible future invasion. The assumptions and attitudes of the leaders of next great eastern crusade, in 1202–4, boasted a long pedigree.
Right up to his death, Henry had closely supervised recruitment, helped by papal legates and local bishops authorized by Celestine III in July and August 1195 to preach the cross throughout Germany as well as in France and England.30 At a series of diets at Gelnhausen (October 1195), Worms (December 1195) and Wurzburg (March 1196), crusaders enrolled, preparations were put in train and plans agreed. Departure from Germany was set for Christmas 1196 for muster at southern Italian and Sicilian ports, in particular Messina, in time for the next spring or, at the latest, autumn passages to the Levant. To avoid unnecessary conflicts of jurisdiction in the east of the sort that dogged the Third Crusade, as well as demonstrating high imperial prestige, at Gelnhausen Henry agreed with envoys from Cyprus to accept the homage of Aimery of Lusignan, who had succeeded his brother Guy as ruler of the island in 1194, in return for a crown. Beyond natural aspiration, Aimery may have wanted such an alliance to protect him from Byzantine attempts to reconquer his island. Shortly after, a similar deal was struck with Leo II of Cilician Armenia. If in the event unrealized, this extension of German imperial authority almost to create a new eastern empire possessed wide implications, not least for the cohesion of the Christian states of the Levant and for Byzantium, now increasingly surrounded by Henry’s satellites. Henry’s rhetoric of universal empire was acquiring reality. Within Germany, Henry signalled his control of the enterprise by sitting for hours in Worms cathedral while
In geographic extent and aristocratic involvement if not in actual numbers, recruitment matched that in 1188–9. The core contribution came from the imperial household and the emperor’s allies. Such was the dominant appearance of Henry VI that a thirteenth-century Outremer observer imagined he promised to pay the expenses of all the German crusaders.31 When the emperor’s notoriously feeble health and his still uncertain grip on his new southern kingdom persuaded him not to lead the expedition in person, he appointed as commanders the imperial chancellor, Conrad of Querfurt, bishop of Hildesheim, and the imperial marshal, Henry of Kalden, who had led the embassy to Constantinople in 1195. Clerical leadership was provided by Archbishop Conrad of Mainz and Archbishop Hartwig of Bremen, a holy war enthusiast who in 1195 persuaded Celestine III to initiate one against the Livs on the river Dvina. Both their dioceses had previously been centres of crusade support. The leading lay crusaders tended to come from western and southern Germany including Duke Henry of Brabant, Henry the Lion’s son Count Henry of the Rhine Palatinate, Duke Frederick of Austria, the dukes of Dalmatia and Carinthia and the landgrave of Thuringia. Many of them were heirs to family crusading traditions and a significant proportion had only succeeded to their titles in the previous five years or so. They may have felt they had something to prove beyond the customary appeal of the cross or the attraction of doing what their ruler wanted. Other former centres of crusade enthusiasm in the Rhineland or the northern river valleys contributed extensively. Lubeck apparently sent 400 citizens.32 The scale of the operation was reflected in the time and varied routes taken for the muster in Italy and Sicily. Some contingents that had probably travelled from southern Germany by land left for the east as early as March 1197. The duke of Brabant reached the Holy Land in the late summer, probably August. However, a northern fleet of forty-four vessels carrying possibly many thousands of recruits under Henry of the Palatinate and the bishop of Bremen, only reached Messina in August after its long voyage around the Iberian peninsular. This combined with the emperor’s paid troops to form the main body of the expedition that sailed from Messina for Acre early in September 1197. A distant observer, Arnold of Lubeck, claimed it carried 60,000 crusaders. It may have been a quarter or a fifth that size, but still constituted a substantial force. While a
