God's War: A New History of the Crusades

complex activity took time to gain the acceptance, permission and support of family, lords, tenants or vassals, and to begin the necessary material as well as spiritual preparations. The sermons stood as ritualized representations of this, taking the cross confirming as much as inspiring enlistment. But months and years were required to convert the commitment into action, because, unlike the First Crusaders in 1095–6, their successors increasingly knew what to expect and took pains to anticipate the difficulties.

Between 1199 and 1202, crusade recruitment extended from the Irish Sea to the Adriatic, from Saxony to Lombardy and Provence. Yet the core regions stretched from Flanders southwards through Champagne and the Ile de France to the Loire. It gave the appearance of a very French affair. The carefully crafted ceremony at Ecry lent important momentum. One of those who took the cross there with Count Theobald, Geoffrey of Villehardouin, marshal of Champagne, noted that ‘people throughout the country were greatly impressed when men of such high standing took the cross’.¹¹ Whatever private conviction or enthusiasm prompted responses to the call of the cross, networks of family, lordship, region, community and tradition exerted a powerful influence. As with a number of the German crusade leaders four years earlier, the youth of some of the French counts may have encouraged adventure. Preaching alone was insufficient. Many noble crucesignati boasted distinguished crusading pedigrees. Theobald of Champagne’s father, Count Henry I, had twice visited the Holy Land, the first time with the Second Crusade; his elder brother, Count Henry II, from whom he had had inherited the county, had been one of the commanders of the Third Crusade and ruler of Jerusalem 1192–7. Louis of Blois, as a teenager, had campaigned with his father in Palestine on the Third Crusade. Baldwin of Flanders was heir to one of the most distinguished of all crusade traditions, stretching back to Count Robert II on the First Crusade and including three other twelfth-century counts. Other veterans included Geoffrey of Villehardouin, who had spent four years in a Muslim prison after being captured outside the camp at Acre in 1190, and Simon de Montfort, who had only just returned from the Holy Land.¹²

In retelling the story of the Fourth Crusade, eyewitnesses grouped noble recruits in regional or lordship associations. The Picard knight Robert of Clari described bodies of crusaders from Picardy, Flanders, Burgundy, Champagne, the Ile de France, the Beauvaisis and the Chartrain, dividing them between the very rich and those he called ‘poor’, men of his own modest but knightly standing who demonstrated and shared in the ‘prouesse’ of the chivalric elite, if not always their pick of the booty.¹³ Villehardouin similarly listed recruits according to family and regional affinities, although he arranged them more hierarchically under the precedence of their local counts. When Baldwin of Flanders took the cross, his wife and brother, Henry, and a significant entourage of local nobles accompanied him. His example was soon followed by neighbouring lords in Artois and Picardy, such as Hugh IV count of St Pol and his nephew Count Peter of Amiens, one of whose vassals was Robert of Clari. In Flanders, as in Champagne and Blois-Chartres, the public commitment of the great regional overlord drew in wider aristocratic circles. In Burgundy, by contrast, with Duke Eudes III declining to participate, numbers of prominent lords recruited were fewer, and included Odo of Champlitte and his brother William, who were closely related to the Champagne comital family. However, recruitment was not confined to the networks of locality, kin and clientage in northern France. Although there was minimal enrolment in England, by 1202, crusaders from southern Burgundy and Forez were making their way east via Marseilles. Southern Germany and the Rhineland had been evangelized from early 1200 to some effect. The force from Basel that set out in 1202 included Abbot Martin of Pairis, who had led some of the local preaching. This alternative focus of support around local bishops or a monastic order, such as the Cistercians, was shown by the bishops of Autun in Burgundy, Soissons and Troyes in Champagne, the abbot of Loos in Flanders and, more eccentrically, the bishop of Halberstadt in Saxony, an unorthodox crusader.

In 1202, Conrad of Krosigk, the new bishop of Halberstadt, was excommunicated by the papal legate, Cardinal Guy of Palestrina, for his fierce partisanship on behalf of Philip of Swabia, whose claims to the German throne were then being strongly opposed by Innocent III. Undaunted, Bishop Conrad took the cross on 7 April 1202, ‘judging it wiser to fall into the hands of God than into the hands of men’.¹⁴ After accompanying the main crusade force from Venice to Zara and Constantinople, he fulfilled his vows in the Holy Land late in 1204. Only then did he receive absolution for his excommunication, reluctantly confirmed by the pope in June 1205. For the whole of his crusade, Bishop Conrad was an excommunicate. His equivocal status did not seem to interfere with his contacts with ecclesiastical authorities nor inhibit his acquisition in the Greek capital of choice relics, silks, precious stones and other lustrous fabrics and tapestries. Conrad’s status and enthusiasm cut across legal niceties. He seems to have arranged for his memoirs to be recorded during his retirement in 1209. In them, acceptance by the mass of sceptical crusaders of the decision to divert the crusade to Constantinople in 1203 was ascribed to the crusaders being ‘swayed partly by prayers, partly by price’.¹⁵ Prayers and price: rather a neat description of the whole crusade.

The piety of crusaders in the cause of the Holy Land should not be discounted. Documentary as well as chronicle evidence for the now traditional pious bequests and arrangement of affairs survives in some abundance. The testimony of events proves personal and collective commitment even to death. As crucesignati poets put it, the choice between the lady love and the cross is an unfair contest, ‘whether to go to God or to remain here’.¹⁶ Theobald’s enthusiasm seems to have played a significant part in setting the crusade in motion, even if his early death allowed him to be given the role of the lost leader unsullied by the compromises of subsequent events. However, the importance at least of the comital commanders, Theobald especially, was due as much to their wealth as to their status or conviction. When Hugh count of St Pol complained that, by July 1203, when the crusade army arrived outside Constantinople, he was heavily in debt, this reflected the expense of the campaign rather than his original financial position.¹⁷ Baldwin of Flanders and Theobald of Champagne were probably the richest nobles in France, their combined resources rivalling those of the king. Louis of Blois, also by the right of his wife count of Clermont, controlled another extensive and rich block of territory. The ability of these lords to subsidize their followers provided the necessary mixture of incentive and control.

Crusading had developed into a joint enterprise operation. Great lords paid the expenses of their immediate entourage as well as any mercenaries. Beyond that, almost as an attribute of lordship, many leaders saw it necessary to subsidize their aristocratic vassals as well. Fleets, such as Richard I’s, could also be partly funded by a commander. The experience of twelfth-century crusading had suggested that central funding contributed to efficiency and order in planning and execution. Against this, the canonical assumption of payment by the individual crucesignatus remained strong, although, with Innocent III’s financial expedients, beginning to weaken. The Fourth Crusade occurred during a period of change from mainly self-financed expeditions to those predominantly underwritten by the leaders and the church that became a feature of the mid-thirteenth century and later. In this, crusading armies reflected patterns of military organization emerging across Europe. In 1199–1202, at the very least, to attract support, the crusade leadership, as the pope recognized, needed to be prepared openly to offer financial support to their followers. However, as they were to be forcibly reminded, the paymaster retained authority only for as long as he remained solvent. No cash, no control and, ultimately, no crusade. The experience of the Fourth Crusade stripped aside sentimental views of the material basis of crusading, its course almost wholly determined by finance and the constant quest for resources. From the outset, the crusade leaders understood this. Theobald of Champagne had calculated he needed 25,000 livres to pay his own retinue and proposed another 25,000 livres to retain other troops. Innocent III assumed the conscription of warriors for pay. On campaign at Constantinople, Hugh of St Pol reckoned knights as well as mounted sergeants and infantry required wages, if only to cover expenses.¹⁸ Baldwin of Flanders provided Gilles de Trasignies, later a hero of a vernacular verse romance and one of his sworn vassals (home lige), 500 livres to go with him on crusade. The count also hired experienced troops. Along with clothing, food and other provisions, Baldwin sent some of these in his own ships with a fleet that sailed from Flanders in the summer of 1202 under the command of the governor of Bruges and others. This was evidently a comital project. When they arrived at Marseilles at the end of the year they sought Baldwin’s orders as to where to go next.¹⁹ Without such investment by the leaders there would have been no crusade.

Funds were sought across Europe. Count Baldwin was one of the richest men in Europe, his county the centre of a woollen cloth industry and trade that stretched from the British Isles to the Mediterranean. Even so, in 1202 he tried to raise money directly from his subjects, with the permission of their immediate overlords.²⁰ Bishop Conrad of Halberstadt received 550 silver marks from the dean of Magdeburg.²¹ Apart from the apparently unsuccessful clerical tax of 1199, a voluntary lay tax of a fortieth was proposed in England and France in 1201. This may have aroused Philip II’s hostility, as did other ecclesiastical crusade ordinances.²² In England some money may have been raised and paid out,