God's War: A New History of the Crusades

collective penitential act and the failure of the leaders of society to perform their obligations on either count. The most striking feature of these marches lay in that they were conducted by ‘pueri’, literally children. In fact, these ‘pueri’ may have been less juvenile than the name implied. To a Cologne chronicler, who may be reporting eyewitness memories, the pueri ‘ranged in age from six years to full maturity’.⁸ Norman and Alpine monks recorded that the marchers were adolescents and old people.⁹ Accounts indicated that participants came from outside the usual hierarchies of social power – youths, girls, the unmarried, sometimes excluding even widows – or economic status: shepherds, ploughmen, carters, agricultural workers and rural artisans without a settled stake in land or community, rootless and mobile. Signs of anti-clericalism and the absence of clerical leadership accentuated this sense of social exclusion. Yet despite the absence of ecclesiastical authority, there was little church condemnation. The popular movements of 1212 demonstrated the success of Innocent’s evangelism. The marches sprang from communal anxiety, not specific social or economic hardship. Dissatisfaction with the inability of the leaders of the social hierarchy to secure victory in Spain, Languedoc or Palestine may have coincided with a more diffuse trend whereby rural populations were attracted to towns, especially at a time of increasing demographic pressure in the countryside. Yet the immediate impulse appeared to be religious.

The recorded chronology of events is confusing. There were two distinct areas of enthusiasm, one in northern France, south-west of Paris, the other in the Low Countries and the Rhineland. From chronicle accounts it is possible to argue that the Ile de France marchers combined with those from the Rhineland, or, less likely, that the Rhinelanders joined the French uprising or that the two movements remained separate, coinciding only in timing. According to the Cologne chronicler, around Easter (25 March) and Whitsun (13 May) 1212 large processions of youths from the traditional crusade recruiting grounds of the Rhineland, the Netherlands, north-eastern France and western Germany, defying family and friends, began to move in the general direction of Italy. Although some groups assembled in Lorraine, a number being stopped at Metz, the main body gathered at Cologne, where a leader emerged called Nicholas, a youth from the surrounding countryside. As reported, their declared purpose was the relief of the Holy Land. A contingent of crusaders from Cologne under the provost of the cathedral had joined Simon of Montfort in Languedoc in April that year, but this commitment had been too restricted in scope to satisfy the spiritual expectations aroused by the attendant evangelizing.¹⁰ Instead, the failure of the experienced, rich and proud (an apparent reference to the Fourth Crusade) was to be redeemed by the innocent, pure and humble. Some of the German marchers adopted the pilgrim’s scrip and staff as well as the cross. Their leader, Nicholas, was remembered as carrying a tau cross, a symbol elsewhere associated with Francis of Assisi and his dynamic brand of poverty and humility.

The German processions were reported to have assembled at Speyer on 25 July 1212 before heading south through Alsace to the Alpine passes, probably the St Gotthard or the Simplon, before arriving at Piacenza on 20 August. This sequence of events fits badly with the Cologne chronicle’s dating of the beginning of the movement to March, April and May. Other accounts trace marchers at Liege and Trier earlier in July, which might find confirmation in the Cologne writer’s mention of trouble at Metz. Some modern historians have tried to combine the Lorraine, Netherlands and Rhineland crusaders as mustering together at Speyer, while others have explained the Lorraine marchers as coming from further west, from the uprising in northern France.¹¹ There, the link between the official programme of special penitential processions appeared even more specific. Here the leader who emerged from the crowd, Stephen from Cloyes, near Vendome, was a shepherd, a highly symbolic occupation in the context of Christian populist fundamentalism. The area of enthusiasm, the Dunois, Chartrain and Ile de France, like the Rhineland, had recently witnessed recruitment for the Albigensian war. In June 1212, Stephen led groups of penitents – boys, girls, youths, old men – to St Denis near Paris, coinciding with the annual Lendit Fair, the high point of the abbey’s pilgrim and commercial calendar. Stephen’s followers carried crosses and banners, the trappings of liturgy, while chanting ‘Lord God, exalt Christianity! Lord God, restore to us the True Cross!’ echoing papal preaching.¹² Some of Stephen’s companions may have been recruited for the Albigensian war, but there is no exactly contemporary evidence linking his march with the recovery of the Holy Land or the simultaneous German enterprise. If the Cologne chronicle’s dating is accepted, then it is possible that rumours of the marches in the Rhineland provoked emulation in northern France. If the Lorraine and Speyer July dates reflect the chronology of the eastern expedition, then the inspiration, and even reinforcements, may have travelled in the opposite direction.

The fate of those penitents and crusaders who reached the Mediterranean is similarly clouded, not least by later lurid romantic fantasies. The German bands, once in Italy, dispersed. Some may have reached Genoa, or even Brindisi and Marseilles. Others – a handful of the many thousands who set out – returned home. Stories circulated that some embarked for the east while others had been sold into slavery or worse. There is no convincing evidence of the French marchers making a separate journey to the Mediterranean ports. All soon vanish from the record, leaving only startled memories or eccentric morality tales. Unlike similar subsequent popular uprisings associated with crusading, these outbursts left no trace in the surviving papal registers. However, whatever its fate, the so- called Children’s Crusade reveals a popular and ordered reaction by sections of the usually silent public, in this case it seems predominantly rural, to the propagandizing of the church authorities. This was no outpouring of inchoate mass hysteria. The zeal may have been untempered by official direction. Ecclesiastical unease was evident. Yet few demonstrations of the effectiveness of the thirteenth-century church’s redemptive message could have been more potent. The events of 1212 reveal the success of Innocent’s policy of using crusade preaching and ceremonial to promote reformist as well as militant messages. The depiction of those involved as shepherds or pueri captured the preachers’ insistence on a return to apostolic simplicity, free from the snares and obligations of materialism. Like the friars who were soon to become the shock troops of church evangelism, the marchers in 1212 were mendicants. Initially at least, some clerical observers were distinctly sympathetic to the marchers’ aspirations. The extent and potential of spiritual excitement throughout the wider Christian public exposed in 1212 may have encouraged Innocent to launch a new general crusade to the Holy Land the following year. One Alpine monastery preserved an apt, if possibly ben trovato, tradition that Nicholas of Cologne himself joined this new expedition and found himself a few years later facing the infidel at Damietta on the Nile.¹³

SUMMONING THE NEW CRUSADE 1213–15

The papal encyclical Quia Maior of April 1213, the conciliar decree Ad Liberandam of November 1215 and the attendant papal instructions to preachers, legates and tax collectors set in motion a vast new enterprise to recover Jerusalem while establishing rhetorical, legal, fiscal, liturgical and administrative norms of official crusading for the next century and a half. The circumstances seemed propitious; the planning meticulous. In July 1212, the Almohads had been destroyed at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa. Simon of Montfort, after successfully completing his annexation of the Trencavel lands in Languedoc in 1211, had secured control of most of the Toulousain. With the political objectives of the anti-heresy war seemingly achieved or even exceeded, Innocent III suspended that crusade in January 1213.¹⁴ By contrast, in Outremer, the truce between the Franks and Sultan al-Adil of Egypt, renewed in 1211 and due to expire in 1217, barely concealed the Christians’ weakness, penned up in a few northern Syrian enclaves. John of Brienne, king of Jerusalem, regent for his infant daughter Queen Isabella, doubted that the truce would hold and urged a new crusade. While al-Adil showed no willingness to provoke a western challenge, the recent fortification of Mt Tabor in western Galilee by his son, al Mu ‘azzam of Damascus, posed a potential threat to Acre and the Franks’ precarious presence on its surrounding plain. Given western sensitivities, it took little to arouse a Holy Land scare. Mt Tabor, ‘where Christ revealed to his disciples a vision of his future glory’, supplied the pope with a casus belli.¹⁵

The secular politics of western Christendom provided an equal, if riskier, opportunity. The German succession remained in dispute between the fading former papal protege Otto IV and the then pope’s new favourite, Frederick of Hohenstaufen, son of Henry VI. Their struggle reverberated across Germany and Italy, subsuming and focusing myriad local rivalries and political contests. The consequences of Simon of Montfort’s conquests in Languedoc had created a whole class of dispossessed nobles as well as a legion of angry, suspicious or fearful neighbours, beginning with Peter of Aragon. England had been under a papal interdict since 1208 over King John’s refusal to accept Innocent’s nominee Stephen Langton as archbishop of Canterbury. Now, faced by an assassination plot in 1212, hints of a papal deposition and French preparations for invasion, John was eager to reach a settlement that would allow him to take the offensive to recover his lost French lands. Modern historians have commonly assumed