God's War: A New History of the Crusades

politics or religion. Oliver’s late devotion to holy war suggests a fluid but serious piety grounded in the reality of temporal opportunities. Not a pacifist, he serially supported two highly contrasting strands of thirteenth-century belief, Catharism and crusade, each determined by conflicting political allegiance but indicating that the contending ideologies reflected a shared cultural desire for active religious purity.

Oliver was not alone among Cathar sympathizers or even credentes in taking the cross as a positive sign of reconciliation with the church. However, such a path was denied the hapless Raymond VI, one of the most excommunicated men of the middle ages. His fate was to find himself in an impossible position. Unable to mount effective diplomatic or military resistance to his enemies, neither could he achieve what they asked of him even if he had been disposed to do so. The contrast with his father Raymond V’s attempt to suppress the Cathars in 1179 probably lay not with Raymond VI’s personal religious tastes; he was an active patron of the Hospitallers. Rather, by his accession in 1194, the Cathars had become too entrenched socially as well as religiously. Short of a disruptive and devastating conquest of his own lands, for which he had neither the appetite nor the resources, it is hard to see what Raymond could have done to appease Innocent III’s implacable legates and their military enforcer Montfort, who, in any case, was after Raymond’s lands. The personal bitterness directed at Raymond is difficult to understand; his iconic significance less so. He was the epitome of the fautor, the heretic’s accomplice. As such, there appeared no forgiveness, even beyond the grave. In 1222, Raymond had died technically excommunicate, prevented by his final stroke from making oral confession to the abbot of St Sernin.⁹⁷ His body, covered in a pall provided by the Hospitallers, was refused burial. Despite repeated appeals by his son and numerous ecclesiastical inquiries, his coffin remained unburied in the precincts of the Hospitaller house in Toulouse, where it was still to be seen over a century later, the shrouded body half-eaten by rats. By 1515, the worm-ridden coffin had collapsed in pieces and the bones had gone, except for the skull. This was kept by the Hospitallers, who, as late as the 1690s, used to show it off to the morbid and the curious.⁹⁸ There was something appropriate in this exhibition of antiquarian bad taste. The gruesome relic represented both the eternal vengeance of a church so badly rattled that it could not forgive or forget and the only too obvious corruption of the flesh. A Cathar might have drawn a succinct moral.

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The Fifth Crusade 1213–21

Writing in an optimistic mood in 1208 to the crusade enthusiast Duke Leopold VI of Austria, Innocent III characterized holy war as an imitation of Christ, an act of unconditional devotion. In recognition of this he sent Leopold a cloth cross and letters conveying the plenary indulgence.¹ This innocuous exchange encapsulated the distinctive elements of Innocent III’s crusade policy: theological precept, moral conviction, papal authority, pastoral care, administrative control and bureaucratic precision. The developments set in train by the Third Crusade reached new levels of thoroughness as Innocent sought to accomplish what he had failed to achieve in 1202–4, the destruction of Ayyubid Egypt, the recovery of Jerusalem and the spiritual renewal of Christendom. To this end, the so-called Fifth Crusade, planned in 1213, launched in 1215 and fought in a series of running expeditions between 1217 and 1229, marked the climax in papal cooperation with secular power. Innocent is often depicted as the most successful promoter of papal monarchism, wishing to control, even exclude, lay domination in his crusading policy after the debacle of 1202–4. It is frequently asserted that the Fifth Crusade represented the church’s greatest and last serious attempt to run a holy war though its own leadership. Yet although the last acts of the Fifth Crusade were conducted in a hail of mutual recrimination and mistrust between popes and the emperor, Frederick II, leading to the bizarre, but not entirely unprecedented, scene in 1228 of a Holy Land crusade under an excommunicated leader, as with the Albigensian wars, Innocent III and his successor Honorius III based their policy on trying to obtain the cooperation and support of lay monarchs. The Fifth Crusade was intended to marry the universal ambitions of the papacy with the imperialism of the Hohenstaufen rulers of Germany and southern Italy. Innocent’s involvement of the young Frederick II opened the prospect of a new order in Christendom. A mutually advantageous acceptance of the respective authority of pope and emperor would be signalled by the fulfilment of the eastern aspirations of Conrad III, Frederick I and Henry VI no less than those of Urban II, Eugenius III or Gregory VIII. The failure of the enterprise, and the reciprocal demonization that dominated papal-Hohenstaufen relations for the subsequent fifty years, obscured this central feature of Innocent’s conception. If historical turning points exist, the Fifth Crusade was one; the direction of international high politics could have been set on a very different course.²

The organization and conduct of the Fifth Crusade witnessed growing bureaucracy. In concert with developments in secular government and law, increasingly the crusade was becoming a written phenomenon.³ Preachers received licences and based their sermons on circulated papal bulls. Recruitment and finance was sustained by central and local record keeping, lists of crucesignati, accounts of moneys raised and expended, and written authorization for individuals’ legal and fiscal privileges. While the creation of new technologies of record may not coincide with changes in what is being recorded, the weight of writing indicated the growing institutionalization of crusading as a social and religious activity.

THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE Of 1212

Crusade preaching, taxation and liturgical propaganda reached an extended audience beyond the ranks of those who were able to join up: the poor, the old, the landless, the rootless and the young, all in their ways disenfranchised from direct involvement in the increasingly highly structured armies of the cross. The broader social and religious demands of crusading stimulated engagement in what would later be described as civil society, as observers, commentators, critics and participants, by sections of the community not necessarily included in the ruling hierarchies. The Albigensian crusades were attended by so-called ribaldi, low-born camp followers, as well as local peasants.⁴ The organization of some contingents, such as the fleets from northern European waters, revolved around sworn communes, wide consultation across social groups and a measure of general debate, even occasionally, as at fraught moments during the Fourth Crusade, public consent.⁵ The collective commitment to the crusade evinced in communal ceremonies of dedication, in cities from London to Cologne to Venice, was matched by the development of regular parochial rituals of devotion and support. Taking the cross, like sermons, assumed the witness of congregations. Innocent III’s offer of the indulgence to those not themselves soldiers of the cross and the spread of crusade taxation further lent the negotium sanctum a genuinely popular, public dimension. Political and social anxieties could be articulated through support for the transcendent cause of the Holy Land by groups habitually excluded, ignored, marginalized or simply disorganized by virtue of low material status. An extraordinary demonstration of this penetration of the crusade into wider political consciousness and communal action came with the phenomenon known as the Children’s Crusade.⁶

In the winter and spring of 1211–12, Innocent III’s habitual concerns at the sinfulness of the faithful, the heretics in Languedoc, the Moors in Spain and the precarious plight of Outremer were focused by papal decree and battalions of preachers on just two: the Albigensian crusades and the advances of the Almohads of north Africa in the Iberian peninsula. An intensive recruiting campaign for the Languedoc war in the Rhineland and northern France was led by James of Vitry and Archdeacon William of Paris, Simon of Montfort’s siege expert.⁷ At the same time, Almohad victories in the autumn of 1211 prompted Innocent III to appeal for aid for the Christians in Spain, instituting a series of special penitential processions to be held in mid May. The impression of heightened crisis, reinforced by repeated calls for Apostolic simplicity and active penance, through taking the cross or collective liturgical contrition, stimulated unlicensed popular response. In at least two regions this coalesced into demonstrations of public support for the defence of Christendom from those not normally associated with leadership of formal crusading.

In the spring and summer of 1212, crowds of penitents assembled in the Low Countries, the Rhineland and northern France, areas heavily evangelized for the crusade. They called for an amendment of life and, in places, the liberation of the Holy Land. Some contingents apparently crossed the Alps into Italy in search of transport to the Levant. Details of intentions varied locally, but all these marches were seen to have been inspired in part by the rumours of the threats to Christendom, the dissemination of a redemptive theology emphasizing the crusade as a