professed to regard Markward’s ambitions as a hindrance to the Palestine project. War in Italy and Sicily clearly influenced arrangements for any crusade to the east, if only by denying crusaders safe passage to ports and access to transport. The effect of Innocent’s grant is hard to judge. It does not appear that the other central crusading features of preaching and giving the cross were employed, even though the conflict has been called the first ‘political crusade’.45
Besides distracting the pope from the eastern question, the wars in Italy and Livonia confirmed Innocent’s inclusive interpretation and use of the holy war of the cross. His theology was in place. Preaching had begun to raise the consciousness of the faithful. The bull of August 1198, coming so soon on the heels of Innocent’s accession and the end of the German crusade, had confirmed a near-permanent position for Holy Land crusading in the ecclesiastical and religious polity of the western church. However, to convert ambition into action required the initiative not of the pope, legates and clergy alone or even the masses enthused by crusade evangelists. To get anywhere, Innocent’s new crusade, as he had admitted in his bull, relied on the commitment and leadership of the secular rich and powerful.
16
The Fourth Crusade: Preparations
The central irony of the Fourth Crusade sprang from its achievements. The capture of Constantinople in April 1204 and the subsequent annexation by western lords of large tracts of the Greek empire constituted for many participants and witnesses a memorable and admirable triumph of western chivalry. Against great odds, as one of their leaders Geoffrey of Villehardouin was later at pains to emphasize, the crusaders had overcome ‘the greatest, most powerful, and most strongly fortified city in the world’.1 Yet every step of the way – from the treaty with Venice that insisted on a general muster there in 1202; to the attack on the Dalmatian port of Zara; to the diversion to Byzantium in 1203 – was accompanied by divisions, doubts, arguments and defections. The triumph itself seemingly required constant justification, at the time and subsequently. The Greek conquests failed to ignite much western interest or support, at least once the great holy booty of relics had been secured. This ‘new France’, as Innocent’s successor Honorius III called it, failed to capture the imagination to compete with the Holy Land. While Byzantium never fully recovered from the trauma of defeat and partition, the effect of the Fourth Crusade on most of western Europe remained peripheral. The exception was Venice, a city that had gambled and gained hugely on this unexpected inauguration of its international empire. Yet the image of a Christian army of crusaders laying waste the ancient Christian capital of Constantinople appeared, at the very least, striking, if not actively disturbing. The pope was appalled.2 A victory of pragmatism, perhaps even desperation, over idealism, conscience, even, some argued, law, the Fourth Crusade left its main purpose unrealized, the recovery of Jerusalem. Whatever the religious dimension of attacking the schismatic Greeks, the essential excuse for the events of 1203–4 depended on a variety of just war explanations allied to the rationale of expediency. By the time the enterprise to fight for the Holy Land was effectively called off in the summer of 1205, there had been no holy war. The crusade had been cancelled before it had begun.
RECRUITMENT AND FINANCE
Early recruitment for Innocent III’s crusade owed much to a ghost. Looking back half a century later, a knowledgeable Cistercian, Alberic of Trois-Fontaines, characterized the enterprise as ‘an overseas expedition of nobles signed with the Cross who had formerly abandoned King Philip when King Richard attacked, as well as other barons’.3 Half a decade of intense conflict had forced most of the higher nobility of France to choose between allegiance to the Capetians or alliance with the Angevins. In the late 1190s, Richard’s partisans included the counts of Flanders, Blois and St Pol, all prominent future leaders of the crusade. The death of Richard in April 1199 transformed prospects. While he lived, few nobles in any region of France would have been happy or sensible to leave for the east with the contest between the kings of France and England active and unresolved. No amount of fine words from Fulk of Neuilly could shift political necessities. The value of church protection for absent crusaders had been starkly exposed by the fate of Richard’s own French lands in 1193–4. However, on Richard’s death, new accommodations were reached, not least because of the rebarbative personality of Richard’s successor John, one of the most unsuccessful medieval monarchs who lost an empire and united his own baronage in dislike, resentment, fear and, ultimately, rebellion. The awkwardness facing Richard’s former allies could honourably be resolved by a decision to take the cross, a move that would serve the interests and win the approval of the king of France. Many of the great lords of northern France were young men. In 1199, the counts of Flanders, Blois and Champagne were all in their twenties, childless or with infants as heirs. For King Philip, their absence on crusade would remove proven or potential troublemakers and offer chances for lucrative royal intervention in their territories through regency or wardship arrangements.
In the winter of 1199–1200 a closely related group of great nobles from northern France accepted the cross, the counts of Champagne and Blois during a tournament at Ecry-sur-Aisne on Advent Sunday, 28 November, and the count of Flanders in Bruges on Ash Wednesday, 23 February.4 Theobald of Champagne and Louis of Blois were cousins. Baldwin of Flanders was married to Theobald’s sister, Marie, who took the cross with him, although heavily pregnant. The dates were not coincidental, each falling on the first days of the two great penitential seasons of the Christian year, Advent and Lent, familiar times to take the penitential vow of the cross. These were far from spontaneous acts, each count having assembled large numbers of important vassals to take the cross. The timing may also indicate wider preparations involving the pope, although there is no direct evidence for this. A month after the ceremony at Ecry, Innocent issued his bull announcing his own financial provision for the expedition.5 The pope may have been waiting for news of the public commitment by the French nobles. Certainly the preamble to the bull of 31 December implied that action had already begun to which the pope wished to be seen to contribute. He also assigned two papal legates to travel to the Holy Land. At the same time, the preaching campaign was revived or extended, for example to Germany and the British Isles.6
The preaching campaign for the Fourth Crusade was organized through three agencies: papal legates; local bishops; and the Cistercians. Even Fulk of Neuilly fitted this scheme. Innocent declared that his appointment to preach the cross had been made with the ‘advice and assent’ of the legate to France, Peter Capuano.7 A well-informed Cistercian source insisted that Fulk had previously adopted the cross at the order’s general chapter at Citeaux on 4 September 1198 and subsequently had failed to persuade many Cistercians to help in the preaching campaign. It was later alleged in Outremer that some of Fulk’s ‘innumerable wealth’ was deposited with the Cistercians, who sent it to the Holy Land to pay for repairs to the walls of Tyre, Beirut and Acre.8 Whatever the truth or pious fictions associating Fulk with the Cistercians, other members of the order played significant roles both in preaching and accompanying the crusade. Abbot Martin of Pairis roused considerable enthusiasm at Basel, probably in May 1201, after a modest response to the earlier preaching of the local bishop. He subsequently joined the Basel crusaders on their journey to the muster at Venice in the summer of 1202. The abbots of Loos and Les Vaux de Cernay were leading figures on the expedition itself, although finding themselves on opposite sides of the argument over the diversion to Byzantium. Cistercians, including the abbot of Luciedo, were among the entourage of Boniface marquis of Montferrat when he arrived in France to accept the leadership of the crusade in the late summer of 1201; they may have been instrumental in persuading him to accept the task. In September 1201, the Cistercian General Chapter at Citeaux played host to Boniface and other crusade leaders at an assembly that included Fulk of Neuilly and, possibly, Martin of Pairis.9 The evangelical tradition of St Bernard and the Second Crusade, which had sustained Cistercian enthusiasm for the crusade after 1187, provided the expedition’s organizers with a useful web of proselytizing, information and influence. The order was exempted from the clerical tax of 1199. Its role perhaps added spice to Richard I’s gift to them of his greed.
However, as before, preaching operated as part of a process of public commitment. When Martin of Pairis preached at Basel, his audience were bursting with expectation, filled by rumours of preaching elsewhere, ‘prepared in their hearts to enlist in Christ’s camp… hungrily anticipating an exhortation of this sort’.10 Whatever frisson of excitement or moment of epiphany struck congregations, the decision to take the cross depended on a long chain of conscious individual and collective calculations and decisions. This deliberate and
