God's War: A New History of the Crusades

of audit. The process of scrutinizing redemptions appeared meticulous. A knight’s redemption, for instance, may have been around 200 l.t., a year’s wages.²⁸ However, secular policy actually may have encouraged corners to be cut by preachers, collectors and the descroisiees alike. Louis, in seeking appropriate fighting men and support units, apparently left many behind when he embarked in August 1248. These presumably had little option but to redeem their vows for cash on the best, i.e. cheapest, terms available in order to enjoy the anticipated spiritual privileges.

While it is impossible to calculate how much was raised for Louis’s expedition by redemptions, legacies and alms, of clerical taxation there is little doubt. The Council of Lyons authorized a general clerical tax of a twentieth. The French clergy offered a tenth over five years. The distraction of the anti-Hohenstaufen crusade and the clear identification of the Holy Land venture with the French reduced international contributions, the English and German churches staying largely aloof. However, along the eastern frontiers of France, in Burgundy and Lorraine, the tax was levied, a sign of the growing assimilation of the regions beyond the Rhone and Meuse into French politics and culture. The combined proceeds from the clerical tenth, over five years, may have come to as much as 950,000 l.t.²⁹ As in 1239–41, individual crusade commanders received subventions, notably the king’s brothers. They, and other property owners, also raised funds from their own lands. However, the bulk of crusade funds and clerical taxes probably found their way into the royal coffers. With the increased income for the king’s own demesne, this centralized system of financing the expedition gave Louis unprecedented control over his main followers.

The experience of John of Joinville was typical. Refusing to swear fealty to Louis in 1248, he embarked with his cousin in a ship they hired together at Marseilles with a company of twenty knights. John recorded that despite mortgaging most of his lands, by the time he reached Cyprus in the autumn of 1248, after paying for his passage, he had in hand only 240 l.t., or, at best, about enough for only a couple of knights’ annual expenses. His retinue became mutinous, forcing John to enter the king’s service, in return for which he received an immediate grant of 800 l.t.³⁰ This pattern of debt rescued by royal aid was widespread, involving even substantial lords such as the counts of Flanders and Forez. Alphonse of Poitiers enjoyed substantial clerical grants and income from his vast estates (Auvergne alone contributing 7,500 l.t.). Yet he was forced to seek his brother’s financial help.³¹ The success of Louis’ financing of the operation found extraordinary testimony in his ability, even in the extremes of defeat, to find over 200,000 l.t. to pay his army’s ransom in 1250 and then still be able to finance his subsequent stay in the Holy Land, even though expenditure there reached over one million l.t. over 1250–53. Only in 1252–3 does it appear the money ran out, which may reflect the difficulties experienced in France after the death of the regent Blanche of Castile.³² Even with his improvement of royal finances and administration, it is hard to imagine that Louis’s solvency could have been achieved without the church’s money, a precedent that possessed wide and controversial future implications for clerical funding of the state.

Translating funds into crusading required similarly strenuous royal organization. The core of the expedition lay in the king’s fleet, based around the ships he hired, sixteen from Genoa and twenty from Marseilles. The contracts drawn up in 1246 specified delivery at Aigues Mortes, an unpromising little port with a small, shallow harbour in an obscure corner of the Rhone Delta.³³ Although prone to silting and with an awkward channel to the Mediterranean, Aigues Mortes possessed one advantage. It had recently become part of the royal demesne. This allowed Louis to avoid negotiating with the patriciates of other, more obvious and better-equipped ports, some of which resented the growing royal power in the region. Other convenient ports were controlled by foreign powers, for example Montpellier by the king of Aragon. The ports of Apulia and Sicily were effectively closed by Frederick II’s excommunication. Nonetheless, the choice of Aigues Mortes showed Louis’s determination to preside directly over his crusade. It was not his best decision. Political expedience prevailed over practical efficiency. A new port, with sufficient access by land as well as sea, had to be built from scratch. It speaks for the energy and resolve of Louis’s government that the king was able to gather his army and navy there just three and an half years after deciding to go east.

Other problems concerned the nature and equipment of the fleet. Alongside the hired vessels, both Genoa and Marseilles agreed to supply additional shipping initially at their own expense which would later, once in the Levant, be available for the king’s hire. Some at least of the ships were horse-carriers, tarridae. But the fleet lacked landing craft, which had to be constructed once Louis had reached Cyprus in the winter of 1248–9. Although the contracts of 1246 contained details of each ship’s equipment, royal agents in 1248, as well as gathering food and wine, spent at least 5,926 l.t. on basic naval supplies, including canvas, rope, yard arms and rudders.³⁴ There may also be a possibility that the shippers had driven an excessively hard bargain, knowing that, as at Venice in 1201–2, this was a very strong seller’s market. When returning from the Holy Land in 1254, Louis was told by his Genoese master mariners that his flagship, which had just run aground off Cyprus, was worth 4,000 l.t. when fully loaded with cargo. In 1246, Louis had paid up to 7,000 l.t. for the largest ship.³⁵ However, in general Louis’s alliance with Genoa proved mutually highly beneficial. Crusade business was spread widely through the city. In return Genoese not only crewed ships and supplied significant military assistance in Egypt, but also provided important banking facilities for the king throughout his stay in the east.

The force that sailed with Louis from Aigues Mortes in late August 1248 may have been of comparable size with Richard I’s army when he left Sicily in April 1191, well over 10,000 strong. With Louis and separately went troops not directly in his pay or service. Not all followed the king to Aigues Mortes. The count of Toulouse, who died before he could depart, arranged a contract with shippers at Marseilles, as did John of Joinville and his cousin. Some vessels seem to have come a long way. The count of St Pol, another who died before setting out, apparently if improbably hired a ship from Inverness, while one of the transports for Raymond of Toulouse’s force had to come to Marseilles from the Atlantic coast via the Straits of Gibralter, a delay that kept the count in port for the winter 1248–9.³⁶ Even the best-funded commanders, such as Alphonse of Poitiers, ran out of their own money and found raising an army more time-consuming than originally intended. Alphonse only sailed east in 1249. If the logistics of his followers ran less smoothly than his own, Louis also recognized the limits of what could be prepared in France. By the time he reached Cyprus, the designated muster point, his agents had spent two years stockpiling vast quantities of food. Joinville described the stacked barrels of wine as resembling great wooden barns while the heaps of wheat and barley looked like hills: ‘the rain had made it sprout on the outside so all you could see was green grass’.³⁷ Salt pork, another staple of western military diet consumed in great quantities, was either purchased in Cyprus or shipped with the army from France. By hiring, paying, buying or manufacturing, Louis appeared determined to leave as little as possible to fate or chance.

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Crusading was never a matter of logistics alone. The personal and domestic were no less central than the public and material. Joinville, his memory gilded by sixty years’ nostalgia, left a vivid picture of the rituals of a propertied crusader’s departure.³⁸ Joinville’s crusading pedigree was impeccable. His grandfather had died on the Third Crusade. Two uncles had joined the Fourth Crusade, one of them travelling to Palestine, where he was killed. His father, Simon, had fought in the Albigensian wars and in Egypt during the Fifth Crusade. To prepare for his departure in 1248, Joinville raised money through mortgaging most of his lands, possibly to bankers in Metz, and entered into a joint venture with his cousin to hire a ship at Marseilles to carry their combined retinue of twenty knights, which possibly implied a total force of over 100. Complying with the tradition of the crusade providing a context for justice, at Easter 1248, Joinville held an assembly of his fief-holders where, amidst an enthusiastic round of feasting, he settled all outstanding law suits and grievances held against him. The need to put affairs in order found repeated confirmation in the records of disputes that clogged the courts after every crusade, especially, Joinville admitted to his tenants, as it was quite likely the crusader would not return. Such general settlements went some way to ensure the continued integrity of the crusader’s lands. In Joinville’s case, his tenants and relatives at the same time probably recognized his recently born son as his heir. Western Europe was littered with examples of battered or murdered crusaders’ wives and deprived heirs. The jollifications and judgements at Joinville thus shared a common purpose.

After sending his luggage on ahead, Joinville received the scrip and staff of a pilgrim from the Cistercian abbot of Cheminon. So armed, and dressed as a penitent, barefoot, in only a shirt, Joinville toured local shrines to emphasize the religious character of his enterprise and to equip his soul as well as he had his soldiers. He recalled