crucesignatus were addressed: family pressure, difficulty with obstructive spouses, the pain of leaving children, the value of the indulgence. The two strands, heroic and domestic, signified the double battle waged by the crucesignatus, against the enemy within – doubt, luxury, sin, the devil – and the enemy without, the Saracen. While some anecdotes did the rounds of crusade preachers, assuming common currency, others attempted to explain the theology of crusading with more local resonance. The divine guarantee to crucesignati was confirmed ‘as if by charter’, a familiar legal image to the property owners of western Europe.36 One rather charming exemplum, recorded after the Fifth Crusade, was aimed at the sort of Netherlandish audience to whom Oliver of Paderborn preached. Just as people in Flanders pole-vaulted over small canals, so the crusade indulgence allowed crucesignati to pole-vault across purgatory.37 Elsewhere, gender resistance to crusading was addressed in stories of the consequences – uniformly dire – of women obstructing their spouses from taking the cross, just as later in the century more sympathetic accounts of the involvement of the Virgin Mary and miracles of the Holy Blood were thought to encourage female support. Accounts of local heroes and their martyr’s deaths spoke directly to the practical fears of potential crucesignati as well as to their wider patterns of devotion and belief.
Tapping into popular religious enthusiasm and anxieties at the same time as offering social respectability, the patronage of the church and money appeared to be highly successful. Oliver of Paderborn asserts that his labours among the coastal settlements and islands of the Netherlands netted at least 15,000 fighters, who, with the Rhineland recruits, required a fleet of 300 ships to carry them east. Such a prominent and potentially disruptive church enterprise inevitably did not pass without controversy. In France, the activities of Robert of Courcon ran foul of royal interests and magnates’ rights. Official apologists criticized the whole approach to vow redemption and commutation inaugurated by Quia Maior, a hostility that may have contributed to the toning down of such provisions in the crusade conciliar decree in 1215.38 Another consequence was possibly less predictable. The wide authority delegated to regional agents allowed for highly devolved recruitment. Despite Innocent III’s conciliar proclamation in November 1215 that the expedition should be prepared to depart on 1 June 1217 from the ports of southern Italy and Sicily, no mechanisms were devised to coordinate the gathering of so many autonomous local, regional or national groups. Innocent knew from his experiences of 1198–1202 and memories of 1187–90 how long a major eastern expedition could take to assemble, so his deliberately long preparation period of four years was prudent. However, the pope’s and the council’s failure to address the issue of unified leadership and planning of the sort seen in 1146–7, 1188–90, 1201–3 and even 1095–6, bequeathed a distinctive character to the Fifth Crusade, at once universal and endemically fissiparous. The scope of papal centralization grated with the complexity of its own devolved operation, producing damaging and potentially fatal political weakness. In the very size and ambition of the project lay the seeds of its failure.
By contrast, too, with previous mass expeditions, the Fifth Crusade was not dominated by recruits from the kingdom of France. Many important French magnates took the cross, including the dukes of Burgundy and Brabant and the counts of Bar, la Marche and Nevers, the last a veteran of the Languedoc wars. Recruitment from eastern France and Champagne, traditional areas of crusade enthusiasm, appeared brisk, even though it was complicated in Champagne by becoming entangled in a protracted succession dispute. Anecdotal evidence indicated large-scale adoption of the cross from all sections of society in town and country. However, the Albigensian adventure and Prince Louis’s invasion of England in 1216–17 offered alternative occupation, even to crucesignati waiting to go east. At the same time, a combination of Robert of Courcon’s wider puritanical agenda and the legal and fiscal implications of the papal arrangements aroused conflicting emotions, including resistance. Philip II and some leading nobles objected to what they regarded as papal interference in French customs and the prohibitions on usury loudly endorsed by Legate Robert. Odo of Burgundy objected to the church’s blanket protection given to crusaders and their property, their immunity for repayment of debts and the ban on Jewish credit. There were stories of tensions between lords and the mass of crucesignati and complaints that French crusaders were still being forced to pay taxes, despite earlier promises to them to the contrary. A formal agreement between Philip II and the French episcopacy in March 1215 sought to limit the impact of the fiscal, credit and legal implications of Quia Maior, for example by removing immunity from those charged with capital crimes and certain civil suits concerning obligations to lords.39 Crusaders’ protection risked disrupting tenurial as well as financial obligations. Negotiated limitations on privileges became a common feature of thirteenth-century crusading, a seemingly important prerequisite for the harmonious cooperation of church and state over the intrusion of canon law into the habitual conduct of secular life and the rights of governments increasingly conscious of their legal jurisdiction.40 Yet, whatever the reaction to his controversial mission in France, Robert of Courcon, one of western Europe’s leading intellectuals, was to die in the fetid camp before Damietta in the last days of 1218.41 The crusade depended for its success on thousands of similar commitments.
In England, recruitment was interrupted by the civil war of 1215–17 to which, with ecclesiastical encouragement, some protagonists as well as observers applied the instruments and rhetoric of holy war.42 Following King John’s reconciliation with the papacy in 1213, his rule was supported by the presence of a succession of papal legates. Preaching the cross was in the hands of a team of academics, Walter, archdeacon of London, Philip of Oxford, a veteran of organizing the Fourth Crusade, John of Kent and, after 1214, William of London and Dean Leo of Wells. The crusade became an important political gesture with the king’s adoption of the cross in March 1215, a precedent followed, on John’s death, by his nine-year-old son and successor, Henry III, immediately after his coronation in October 1216. Both sides in the civil war were led by crucesignati, some of whom were offered commutation of their vows if they fought for the royalist cause while others may even have been induced to take the cross to fight for the king, an early and rather confused example of a crusade with an essentially secular political purpose. Despite attempts to the contrary, in England the crusade not only failed to achieve a political reconciliation, it may have temporarily exacerbated divisions as one side tried to appropriate a cause common to both. Only once the civil war had ended, when magnates from both sides left for the east, did the reconciling aspects of the Holy Land crusade emerge. Between 1218 and 1221, departing crusaders included rebels, such as the earls of Hereford and Winchester and the rebel leader Robert FitzWalter, and royalists such as the earl of Chester, who may, as John’s executor, have been fulfilling his late master’s crusade vow, and the loyalist captain Savaric of Mauleon. Savaric’s contacts with crusading illustrate the futility of judging crusaders’ motives and perceptions, still less the integrity of the institution itself. He fought against Simon of Montfort’s crusaders at Castelnaudary in 1211 and seems to have temporarily commuted his crusader vow in favour of defending the Angevin cause in England in 1216, before joining the Fifth Crusade in Egypt and, finally, accompanying Louis VIII’s crusade to Languedoc in 1226. A professional fighting man, Poitevin lord and royal servant, Savaric seemed attracted to paymasters and respectability. His actions reveal much about the cosmopolitan reach of the western European aristocracy but little of any inner spiritual life.43
The English contingent was not negligible but without royal leadership it lacked cohesion in structure or timing of departure. Groups, based around lordship or regional affinities, reached Egypt on each biannual passage from western ports. The earl of Chester, briefly a strong voice in the crusade’s high command, left soon after the capture of Damietta in November 1219 after two years’ stay, while the earl of Winchester had arrived only shortly before. Some, such as Philip of Aubigny, only appeared in eastern waters after Damietta had been returned to the sultan in 1221, while the bishop of Winchester, Peter des Roches, the controversial former justiciar, only took the cross eleven days after the city had, unknown to him, fallen. Repeatedly during the Egyptian campaign, the English presence was noted.44 The earl of Arundel played a prominent role in acrimonious debates on strategy. It was later recorded that, after the capture of Damietta in 1219, to honour the English presence two converted mosques were dedicated to the national saints Edmund the Martyr and Thomas Becket. The new church of St Edmund was decorated with wall paintings of the martyr’s passion commissioned by an English knight, Richard of Argentan, who during the expedition made himself something of an expert on eastern customs and legends. Whatever their military impact, the English crusaders reignited a habit of involvement in eastern crusading that lasted for generations. Philip of Aubigny, royalist and tutor to the young Henry III, arrived off Damietta in September 1221 to find the Christian evacuation in full swing. His father, Ralph, had died in the Third Crusade. In 1228 Philip again took the cross and, with his nephew Oliver and a significant company of knights, embarked for Palestine in 1235. He died in Jerusalem (which had been restored by treaty in 1229) the following year and was buried outside the church of the Holy Sepulchre in view and under the feet of all who visited. Philip’s tomb slab, bearing his arms,
