God's War: A New History of the Crusades

given to the land market by departing crusaders’ need to raise cash on their landed assets is unquantifiable but everywhere apparent.

Although some contemporaries noted, perhaps formally rather than arithmetically, the participation of large numbers of the ‘mediocrium’ or ‘menu peuple’, the commons or ‘ordinary’ people⁶⁰ – and there is evidence of involvement by some non-noble or knightly freeholders – the core of the crusade comprised the subsidized entourages of earls, counts and dukes, around whom gathered political and dynastic affinities. Superficially, the French crusaders fell into certain broad groups – royal baronial officials, such as Amaury of Montfort, the constable and the butler Robert of Courtenay – and circles of nobles associated by blood or allegiance with a few great lords who had taken the cross: Duke Hugh IV of Burgundy, Theobald of Champagne and Count Peter of Brittany. The muster, from all parts of the kingdom except the south, represented the most extensive commitment of French nobles since the Fourth Crusade, including the counts of Bar, Macon, Joigny, Sancerre, Soissons, Grandpre and Nevers. Yet this conceals the most striking feature of the recruitment. Each of these lords, as well as many of their crusading followers such as the counts of Bar, Chalons and Nevers, had been central to the largely anti-royalist disturbances of the late 1220s and early 1230s. Taking the cross formed part of a process of reconciliation with Louis IX and his mother, the powerful regent Blanche of Castile. It is perhaps significant that in the end the most loyalist baron who took the cross, Humbert of Beaujeu, actually went to defend Constantinople and did not accompany his former adversaries to the Holy Land. Taking the cross afforded former rebels protection and served as a guarantee of future conduct as well as presenting a respectable opportunity for political losers to absent themselves from the kingdom. The government could feel secure and the ex-rebels escape further harassment. A key role of the crusade in secular politics was to assist the process of achieving political consensus, the absence of which rendered any medieval polity ungovernable.

In England, the pattern was similar. The symbolic taking of the cross by the most important political recruits in 1236 represented an attempt to reconcile dissidents with the royal court after the near civil war of 1233–4, in which the king and his foreign advisors, led by the former crusader Peter des Roches, were challenged by a baronial coalition under Richard and Gilbert Marshal. Between 1236 and 1239, the cross was taken by a range of former allies and opponents. By taking the cross together, the alliance between Richard of Cornwall and his brother-in-law Gilbert Marshal was consolidated. The crusade encompassed complex currents of personal and factional hostility, including the outlaw Richard Siward, a longstanding enemy of Earl Richard, and the man who engineered his arrest in 1236, Simon of Montfort. At Northampton in 1239, the crucesignati swore an oath not to be deflected from the Holy Land as the goal of the expedition. They included former dissidents such as Siward and Gilbert Marshal as well as royal captains instrumental in combating the Marshals, such as Henry of Turbeville.⁶¹ Those who embarked in 1240 ranged from close allies, servants and relatives of the king to previously fierce opponents such as Robert Tweng or Philip Basset.

Yet although the vows of prominent political figures in England and France, the main areas for recruitment, may have been sworn in the context of the political in-fighting of the 1230s, the structure of the crusading armies that embarked scarcely reflected the urge to unity that their original commitment apparently symbolized. The great English and French lords had mostly taken the cross by the end of 1236. Yet, despite the enterprise being conceived by Gregory IX and even Frederick II as a single operation, there appeared only partial coordination of effort. The main French wave left in 1239. The English contribution was divided into three distinct armies, under Richard of Cornwall, who set off in June 1240 and sailed via Marseilles; Simon of Montfort who left independently and travelled via Brindisi; and William of Forz, who left in 1241. Each attracted a distinctive constituency of followers. With Richard went his own extended familia, courtiers and close relatives and allies such as his cousin William Longspee and half-brother Eudo. Simon of Montfort led a mixed Anglo-French retinue, while William of Forz seems to have been followed by his fellow expatriate Poitevins. Each group retained independence of structure, policy and action once in the east.⁶² As one of the more bizarre, yet suggestive features of the 1239–41 crusading effort, Richard of Cornwall timed his arrival at Acre just weeks after Theobald had left the city for home.

Yet the French armies were no more unified. After delaying their departure until 1239 out of deference to Frederick II’s opposition to a precipitate breaking of the ten-year 1229 truce, a delay possibly secured by the emperor’s promise to provide Theobald of Champagne with funds once he reached the Holy Land, the French crusaders displayed little cohesion.⁶³ Although most sailed from Marseilles, others used the ports of Apulia. Both before embarkation and in the Holy Land, an apparent primacy was afforded Theobald of Champagne, perhaps in deference to his grand crusading pedigree rather than his diminished wealth or conspicuous lack of political talent. Although Theobald had abandoned the 1226 Albigensian crusade at the siege of Avignon, his father (d. 1201) had been the lost leader of the Fourth Crusade; his uncle, Henry, had ruled Jerusalem 1192–7, and his predecessors and county had been central to crusade enthusiasm since the 1090s. However, on campaign in Palestine, he appeared unable to impose unity within the crusade force despite being recognized as commander of the crusade at an assembly of crusaders and Franks on arrival at Acre. At different times, Peter of Brittany, Hugh of Burgundy and Henry of Bar pursued their own separate tactics. The duke of Burgundy operated throughout as a semi-detached ally, remaining in the east a year after Theobald and most of the French had departed in 1240. When a private raid of Peter of Brittany’s managed to seize a considerable haul of booty, livestock and meat were distributed to other commanders and ‘the poor’, but only as gifts, arousing jealousy and resentment. The duke of Burgundy and the counts of Bar and Montfort decided, disastrously, to forage and plunder for themselves because ‘they were just as powerful as the count of Brittany’ and they would be shamed if they failed to follow his example.⁶⁴ Attempts by Count Theobald to stop them, even his appeal to the fealty they had sworn him at Acre as leader of the army, failed. Such divisions reflected funding as much as the politics and personalities of the French operation. There was no central fund in the hands of a unified leadership. Each noble had funded himself and his followers and had received individual grants from the ecclesiastical depositories. None of the great lords depended financially on another. No pay; no discipline. One commentator remarked that by the end of his stay in Outremer, in the late summer of 1240, Theobald of Champagne lamented how members of his army disliked him so much that ‘they did not obey his orders, as they had promised to do at the beginning when he landed in Syria’.⁶⁵

This lack of unity was not entirely the crusaders’ own making. Just as recruiting for the Holy Land was reaching completion towards the end of 1236, Gregory IX complicated arrangements by suggesting a parallel expedition to help defend the ailing Latin empire of Constantinople against a new menacing coalition of Greeks and Bulgars. Despite assumptions by later historians, the Latin empire never attracted much support from the west beyond the relatives of those French nobles who had established themselves in Greece. As reaction to the pope’s new demands in the 1230s confirmed, in no sense did the Latin presence in Greece, or Romania as they called it, deflect western aid for the Holy Land. Rather the reverse; money raised in England for the Latin empire had to be assigned to the Palestine crusade because no English lord would change course for the Bosporus instead of Acre.⁶⁶ Gregory’s appeal in 1236–8, made in conjunction with the mission to the west of the co- emperor Baldwin II, failed to redirect many crucesignati from the Holy Land. The pope’s strenuous efforts on his behalf failed to disguise Baldwin II’s own poor showing as an impecunious and unimpressive political mendicant with nothing to offer but relics, such as the Crown of Thorns eagerly acquired by Louis IX of France, and the sale of some vestigial western patrimonial lands. More damaging to the Palestine project were the pope’s attempts to persuade or insist that crusaders commute their vows from Jerusalem to Constantinople. His main target in France was Peter of Brittany and his associates, including the counts of Bar and Soissons. Although negotiations drifted on for a couple of years, resistance to the Greek crusade hardened. The counts of Brittany and Bar both explicitly refused to commute their vows to the Greek scheme.⁶⁷ Of the French barons, only Humbert of Beaujeu and Thomas of Marly went with Baldwin II to Constantinople in 1239; Peter of Brittany and his colleagues went to Palestine. In England, Richard of Cornwall also resisted papal blandishments to commute his vow and divert his crusade money to subsidize Baldwin II’s campaign.

If the papal dalliance with Greece sowed confusion and resentment, his renewed excommunication and subsequent crusade against Frederick II in 1239 provoked open disobedience. For one thing, the breach with Frederick potentially closed various routes to the east, especially the ports in Apulia. At least one army, that of Simon of Montfort, ignored this by using Brindisi. Frederick’s son, Conrad, was titular king of Jerusalem, and the emperor retained agents in Outremer with access to funds and troops useful to any crusade. They held the Holy City itself. Many in France and England did not share Gregory’s paranoia over the Hohenstaufen. Beyond the practical lay the principle. When faced by papal demands for a clerical tax to fund the Hohenstaufen war, the rectors of Berkshire