God's War: A New History of the Crusades

successive rulers’ determination to control them. Each kingdom created its own orders, as well as patronizing the Templars and Hospitallers, who stood as the models for the rest. In the 1140s, these two international orders had begun to be employed in a military capacity as opposed to merely receiving grants of land. Within thirty years, every kingdom except Navarre had established their own orders, while retaining the services of the Temple and Hospital, especially in Aragon and Catalonia. Among the lasting foundations were Calatrava (1158) in Castile; Santiago (1170) and St Julian of Pereiro, later known as Alcantara (by 1176), in Leon; Evora, later Avis (by 1176), in Portugal. During the same periods a number of more ephemeral orders were established, each, like the more permanent orders, based on frontier castles which, in many cases, gave them their names as well as headquarters. One order, of La Merced (c.1230), was founded in Barcelona to ransom captives of the Moors, a task it shared with the French Order of the Trinity.³⁷ Although the details are often obscure, the initiative to found these orders appears to have come from pious noblemen (or in the case of the Mercedarians a wealthy merchant), with the encouragement and patronage of kings and ecclesiastical hierarchies. The larger orders soon began to resemble the Holy Land military orders in attracting international investment; by 1200 the Order of Santiago held estates from the British Isles to Carinthia. The chronology of foundation, the second half of the twelfth century, suggests that the institutionalization of holy war was not an immediate consequence either of the Reconquest successes of the previous century or of the First Crusade. The presence of these orders influenced the way the Reconquest was pursued, as well as playing a prominent role in national politics and internecine warfare between Christian rulers. However, only when the major conquest in al-Andalus were nearing completion did the Orders of Alcantara (1238) and Calatrava (1240) receive permanent privileges from the pope granting indulgences to any who fought with them against the Moors, creating for them the sort of ‘eternal crusade’ seen later in the thirteenth century, applied to the activities of the Teutonic Knights in the Baltic. Consistently, Spanish crusading, while providing a framework for lay enthusiasm and, in the military orders, institutions for maintaining conquests, remained secondary or complementary to secular considerations and an older association of Christian conquest with religious war.

Another characteristic of Spanish crusading lay in the two distinct audiences courted by papal grants. Within the peninsula, crusading privileges merely underpinned the pre-existing sense of mission and righteousness involved in fighting armies of infidels and winning land ostensibly for Christianity. It is difficult to gauge the autonomous effect of such appeals on recruits. The wars would have been fought in any case, their cause identified as religious and just. Raising armies followed secular patterns of military obligations and clientage. Troops were summoned as to any other war, their terms of service, chronological and financial, being the same as for secular or non-crusading warfare. Pay or shares in booty held the armies together. The church may have felt more obliged to contribute to crusading ventures as it stood to gain new bishoprics and lands. Crusade privileges, especially those contained in general appeals of the kind instituted by Calixtus II in 1123, were also designed to attract foreign assistance, the crusade as an international recruiting device constituting one of its chief roles in the Spanish Reconquest. Certain areas, such as southern France, were also specifically targeted. There were exceptions, as in 1189–90 and 1217, when crusaders en route to the eastern Mediterranean assisted locals rulers in new conquests along the southern coastline of the peninsula on the pattern familiar from 1147–8. Even so, the significance of cross-Pyrenean aid was largely limited to the period up to the greatest Reconquest victory at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212. Thereafter, although foreigners continued to campaign in the peninsula and to settle in new conquests such as Seville (conquered in 1248), the crusades were increasingly overt adjuncts to national territorial expansion and internal state building. The failure of successive rulers in Catalonia and Languedoc to create a unified kingdom stretching from the Ebro to the Rhone compounded this patriation of the Spanish crusade.

The Las Navas de Tolosa campaign was instrumental in this process. The battle of 16 July 1212 was won by a coalition of Spanish kings, Alfonso VIII of Castile, Peter II of Aragon, and Sancho VII of Navarre. Although a few northern allies under Archbishop Arnaud Amaury of Narbonne remained in the Christian army for the battle, the bulk of the French recruits had deserted the campaign a fortnight earlier, disappointed at the lack of action or booty and oppressed by the summer heat, while the duke of Austria had not yet arrived. The victory over al-Nasir (1199–1214) and his large Almohad force could thus be proclaimed as a specifically Spanish achievement and fitted into a providential narrative of Spanish revenge for the ‘Spanish’ defeat of 711. Although surrounded by the panoply of crusading, the campaign relied on the secular resources of Castile. Alfonso VIII bankrolled the whole enterprise, paying for the bulk of the coalition troops, including stipends for Peter II and his Aragonese army, and providing the unreliable French with horses. To allow him to do this, Alfonso had extracted a massive forced aid of 50 per cent of annual revenues from the Castilian church. The muster had been fixed at Castilian Toledo for Pentecost 1212. The consequences of the Las Navas campaign were profound, if equivocal. The Reconquest’s association with crusading institutions failed to disguise the dependence for success on the national strength of, in particular, Castile, re- emphasized following the death during the Albigensian crusade at Muret in 1213 of Peter II, a crusader killed by crusaders. The victory of Las Navas opened Andalucia to Castilian aggression. It fatally undermined Almohad prestige and power both in Spain and Morocco, where a demoralized al-Nasir died in 1214. The financial precedent exerted possibly the most direct material influence as successive Iberian monarchs exploited the church to fund their wars, in particular appropriating a third of ecclesiastical tithe income (tercias) as well as attempting to syphon off clerical taxation designed to help the Holy Land. Combined with a range of extraordinary lay levies and forced loans, the needs of the Reconquest materially strengthened the fiscal and hence political power of the state in thirteenth-century Iberia, a lasting legacy of the expedients that won the triumph at Las Navas.³⁸

Within forty years, all that remained of Muslim al-Andalus politically was the emirate of Granada, reduced to a Castilian tributary. As the disintegrating Almohad empire fell with accelerating rapidity into Christian hands, crusading in Spain adopted a settled local flavour. There were no more Muslim counter-attacks to excite the fear of all western Christendom. When the kingdom of Navarre devolved on to Theobald IV count of Champagne (1201–53) in 1234, its new French ruler preferred to take the cross for the Holy Land, not Andalucia. The great warrior kings of the thirteenth century, Ferdinand III of Castile (and of Leon from 1230) and James I, ‘the Conqueror’ of Aragon, rolled back the Muslim frontier self-consciously in the name of God. Each flirted with carrying the fight beyond the peninsula, to Africa or Palestine. Yet neither found the commitment that led their contemporary Louis IX of France to the Nile (1249–50), even though, as Christendom’s elder statesman, James I sent an Aragonese regiment east in 1269 and played a central if hardly positive role in plans for a new eastern crusade in 1274. Some conquests were accompanied by gestures of religious restoration and purification, with a stated goal of extending the Christian faith. When Ferdinand III captured Cordoba in 1236, he returned to the cathedral of St James in Compostela the bells al-Mansur had seized in 997, which had been housed in the Cordoban great mosque ever since. Elsewhere, the siege of Valencia (1238) attracted English and French recruits and Seville (captured 1248), was partly settled by foreign Christians to replace the expelled Muslims. Yet much of the Reconquest involved negotiation and accommodation of the religious, legal and civil liberties of the conquered, as with James I’s annexation of Mallorca (1229) and Valencia (1231–8) and Ferdinand III’s occupation of Murcia in 1243. In the kingdom of Valencia, the majority Muslim population remained, despite James having taken the cross in 1232 to symbolize his religious credentials. The few attempts at conversion amounted to little, although some Muslims apostatized, such as Abu Zayd, the king of Valencia deposed in 1229 and ally of James I. He adopted the Christian name Vincent. In 1245, his son, al-Hasan, by then governor of the Moroccan Atlantic port of Sale, abortively offered to convert and turn his city over to the Order of Santiago as a start to the conversion of the Maghrib.³⁹ In many ways, after the conquests, Muslims and Christians changed roles, the mudejars now becoming the protected second-class citizens. The sound of calls of the muezzin to prayer persisted in some areas for centuries, to the growing annoyance of their Christian neighbours. Although new sacred and secular landscapes and spaces were created, from encouraging Christian immigration and changing Arabic place names to converting mosques into churches, initially, at least, holy war did not impose a holy settlement on the ancient Muslim communities of conquered al-Andalus. Accommodation survived. In regions such as Valencia, non-Christian communities negotiated their own futures, their subordinate status only very slowly succumbing to concerted discrimination. However, the status and rights of the mudejars did deteriorate, until the recrudescence of militant neo-crusading led to the imposition of intolerant and increasingly racist Christian uniformity under the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella of Castile and their heirs Charles V and Philip II. Yet, the expulsions and persecutions of mudejars and moriscos testified to the hold not of the crusading ideals familiar to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but to a newly configured aggressive militancy that engaged the crusade tradition as well as the Reconquest myth to drive its chariot’s wheels.