God's War: A New History of the Crusades

bulls concerning the crusade against the Greeks.¹⁴ Whereas the Holy Land crusade could be preached successfully throughout Christendom, recruitment for other crusading enterprises, in Frankish Greece (or Romania), Germany, Italy or the Baltic, suited geographically more limited, targeted constituencies.

Recruitment away from the French court was regionally vigorous, but in places slow to develop. Louis’s youngest brother Alphonse of Poitiers’ army was only ready in the spring of 1249. Even in northern France, men were still joining up into 1250.¹⁵ Holy Land recruitment was concentrated in the kingdom of France, Burgundy, Lorraine and the Low Countries between the Meuse and the Rhine. Small contingents were raised or promised elsewhere, such as England and Norway. However, the evangelizing demonstrated this was a French expedition, as did the way King Louis used it to consolidate and extend his domestic authority. Apart from the king and his brothers, there were loyalists such as the crusade veteran Duke Hugh IV of Burgundy and Count William of Flanders, whose close adherence to the king was secured by Louis’s favouring him in the disputed Flemish succession. Old reprobates such as Peter Maulcerc, the now retired count of Brittany, another veteran of the 1239–40 crusade, were enlisted alongside a range of former or recent rebels including Raymond of Toulouse and Hugh of Lusignan. Recruits came from across the kingdom, from Flanders and Brittany to Poitou, the Bourbonnais and Languedoc. From Brittany it appears that practically all the major landowners participated, a pattern that may have been repeated elsewhere. Although Theobald of Champagne rather pointedly declined to join, the Champenois provided a substantial contingent of perhaps as many as 175 knights in a total of about 1,000 men.¹⁶ A significant number of clergy, including bishops, took the cross. There is evidence of members of rural and urban elites, artisans, even some prosperous peasants signing up. Not being necessarily associated with a lord, they seemed to have been mobilized rather more slowly. Others identified local ways to implement commitment. By the spring of 1247, crusaders at Chateaudun, with the approval of the legate, Odo of Chateauroux, had formed a confraternity (confratria) to ease the purchase of war materials, hiring of ships and funding for those who went to ‘fight for the Lord’, as well as a focus for further donations by non- crucesignati. The establishment of such a confraternity served as a reminder of the material costs of the enterprise and the increasingly diverse responses to both the vow and its implementation. To ensure acceptance for this exercise in business sense reminiscent of earlier crusading communal action, members obtained papal approval.¹⁷ The motives of other recruits caused some alarm. The crusader’s temporal privileges granting certain legal immunities had always run the risk of attracting those wishing to avoid answering law suits and the downright criminal. In 1246, at Rouen, it was pronounced that crucesignati were not permitted to avoid law suits involving fiefs and pledges. The same year, Louis IX complained to Innocent IV that many crusaders, instead of abstaining from excess as befitted their privileged status, were enthusiastically indulging in theft, murder and rape. The pope ordered bishops not to protect such miscreants, crusade privileges notwithstanding.¹⁸

While the social aspects of crusade recruitment were largely out of the king’s hands, the political dimension of the recruiting process was manifest, not just in signing up rebels. In October 1245, Louis gathered a national assembly of barons to receive their agreement and support for the crusade. In the spring of 1248, Louis summoned another baronial gathering in Paris to swear fealty to his children in the event of his not returning from the crusade. One of those summoned was John lord of Joinville-sur-Marne and seneschal of Champagne, whose extraordinary account of Louis’s crusade remains the most detailed and vivid personal description of any crusade.¹⁹ Although as a vassal of the count of Champagne John refused to give his oath, the king’s intention in summoning him was plain enough, to extend the network of direct loyalty to the monarch into previously autonomous regions of the kingdom.

This political dimension embraced administrative reform.²⁰ All thirteenth-century western European regimes faced the problem of reconciling what they regarded as effective rule with what their subjects perceived as good government. Rights and liberties cut two ways, especially as writing laws down and recording legal decisions and precedents were increasingly fashionable. In France, as in England at the time, the government was potentially in a double bind. Inefficient or archaic administrative practice denied the king revenues and subjects effective justice. At the same time, suspicion of royal officials was encouraged by the abiding difficulty of arbitration in administrative disagreements. Who could provide impartial justice if the complaints were levelled at the agents of the supreme judicial authority, the crown? Reform of royal administration in the provinces could threaten vested interests and arouse popular suspicion. However, with preparations for the crusade, the practical need to maximize royal revenues combined with the opportunity presented by an almost universally admired public policy to drive change.

Reform operated through two mechanisms. From 1245 the salaried local royal fiscal and administrative agents (baillis in the king’s lands in the north, seneschaux in the south) began to replaced, often by what one modern scholar has called troubleshooters.²¹ This reduced the agents’ independence, improved their sensitivity to royal interests and demands, emphasized their accountability and increased revenues reaching the king’s coffers. From some areas of the royal demesne, income rose dramatically, the crusade acting as a convenient and not wholly mendacious justification. Besides the tightening of local administration, in the early months of 1247 Louis appointed investigators (enqueteurs reformateurs) to inquire into complaints against royal officials. Traditionally, departing crusaders sought to settle outstanding grievances of their subjects. By relying heavily on friars to conduct these inquiries, Louis underlined the link between governmental reform and religious mission. They also lent the exercise a possibly spurious but politically necessary gloss of impartiality. These investigations, covering the royal demesne and the lands held by his brothers (known as apanages), contributed to the changes in methods and personel of the baillis and seneschaux in 1247–9.

With the advantages of such reforms creating a consensus of support for the monarchy came fiscal pickings. It was later calculated that between the Ascension audit of 1247 and that of 1257, Louis’s expenses on the crusade (‘pro passagio ultramarino’ in the accounts) came to 1,537,570 livres tournois 13 sous 5 deniers tournois, perhaps six times the king’s annual revenues.²² The king’s bill for troops alone may have run at 1,000 l.t. a day. Although Louis was largely able to cover this from sources other than his ordinary revenues, the hidden costs of administration and government for and during the crusade needed to be covered and the regency administration adequately funded. The increase in royal revenues and income from the administrative reforms supplied an important part of Louis’s general fundraising. Certain specific measures were clearly related to the expedition. In 1248–9, Jewish moneylenders were expelled from the kingdom, their property confiscated, a hardening of the king’s habitual and notorious anti-Jewish policies and prejudices. More income for vacant church benefices was sought. Most striking of all, ‘gifts’ from towns, sometimes explicitly ‘pro auxilio viae transmarinae’ (‘to help the overseas journey’) were collected on a massive scale. At least eighty-two towns from across northern and central France raised over 70,000 l.t. in 1248, a figure that excluded contributions from Normandy likely to have almost matched this sum. It appears that the total figure of the urban ‘gifts’, including widely levied supplementary grants from towns that had already paid up, may have reached almost 275,000 l.t.²³ Louis’s taxation of towns was not unprecedented; royal towns may have helped pay for Louis VII’s crusade. However, the extent and thoroughness mark it out as a symbol of the new authority wielded by the French king in his realm. Although not entirely transparent, the accounting system appeared able to identify crusade income so that Louis could either arrange with his agents how to spend it or could convey the surplus to the Templars, the usual royal bankers, for transmission to the east, where it could stay on deposit or be used to purchase supplies to await the arrival of the king’s army.

The bulk of Louis’s funding, and the largest single resource for other crusaders, was money derived from or through the church. This came in two forms; private sources – vow redemptions, legacies and alms – collected by the clergy; and clerical taxation. The Council of Lyons in 1245 had encouraged crusade legacies, as had Odo of Chateauroux. Vow redemptions now operated as a central accompaniment to the preaching campaign. By 1247, redemptions were systematically being offered and collected by diocesan agents, usually friars.²⁴ In Normandy in 1248, two groups of papal agents quarrelled over the right to collect the crusade redemptions.²⁵ In the same year, Innocent IV expressed concerns lest the conditions for redemption were too lax and the rates accepted too low.²⁶ The potential for peculation and fraud was evident. Early in the preaching campaign, a Franciscan in Frisia took advantage of feeble supervision to pass himself off as an authorized collector of redemptions and legacies which in fact went straight into his own pocket.²⁷ Aware the system could degenerate into a vast racket, in 1247 Innocent IV imposed a form