turn, which revealed the extent of popular engagement in public affairs, the fragility of social and political control by the authorities and the existence of a wider civil society whose voice was usually drowned out by the deeds of their social, educational and economic superiors.
In the spring of 1251 a popular movement began to be organized in Brabant, Flanders, Hainault and Picardy, all areas of active, if in places confused, crusade preaching and fundraising. Rural bands of what clerical observers slightingly referred to as ‘shepherds and simple people’ gathered with the declared purpose of joining Louis in the Holy Land.92 Critical of the failure of the nobility to achieve success in the crusade and hostile to those who had not even gone east, these ‘pastoureaux’ (literally shepherds) adopted the guise of religious processions, reminiscent of 1212. Marching on Paris, they carried holy banners, proclaimed their direct inspiration from the Virgin Mary and offered crosses and absolution of sins as they went. The influence of crusade preaching and Louis’s religious propaganda that surrounded the raising of men, money and provisions were obvious from the symbols of the passion they carried on their flags, the cross and the lamb. The latter may even have helped provide them with their name.93 The marchers were not inarticulate rabbles. Their mission spoke of ordered response to the crisis of Louis’s defeat. Coming from liminal regions of France may have heightened their desire to occupy the centre of the political debate without the traditional networks of contact and exchange with that central authority. Their social critique matched the official line on collective sin, their increasing anti-clericalism a reflection on the prominent part in crusade preparations played by the clergy, especially the friars, for financial and administrative purposes.
Initially, the ‘pastoureaux’ appeared a credible force of active support for the beleaguered French king. The regency government under his mother, Blanche of Castile, welcomed them in Paris and provided them with supplies. Some, at least, apparently found the means to join the king in the Holy Land.94 However, the implied social radicalism of their message soon drove elements of the movement beyond the pale of political respectability. Although characterized by observers as a single large army of protestors, it is likely that, as well as the main contingents from the north-east of the kingdom, there were separate and simultaneous outbreaks of popular enthusiasm across northern France, from Normandy to the Loire and into Berry. After the government decided to reject their call, some of these groups turned to violence and crime. There was trouble at Rouen in June. At Orleans, scholars were attacked. Everywhere, priests and friars were threatened. The ‘pastoureaux’ now appeared as armed criminal gangs, living off the land and terrorizing the population. At Bourges, a large body ran riot under a leader called ‘the Master of Hungary’, allegedly fluent in French, German and Latin, possibly a renegade monk, a characterization that served the purposes of disapproving observers by locating authority in traditional but perverted hands. This band assaulted Jews and looted the local synagogue before the city authorities and townspeople turned on them. ‘The Master’ himself was hacked to death and his followers dispersed, although some managed to continue their rampage as far south as Bordeaux.
Many aspects of these uprisings showed a clear and precise understanding and knowledge of the public policy of the French crown, witnessed by the symbols of the Passion, the request for validation and support from Blanche of Castile, the hostility to the venality of the clergy, the criticism of the nobility, and the appropriation of the mechanics of giving the cross and remitting sins. The attacks on Jews was entirely in keeping with Louis IX’s own persecution, as was the general call to press political action into the service of God, who was presented as the chief instigator of policy. Although disapproving clerical commentators branded them as sexually hedonistic and criminal, out of social order and so out of moral control, the marchers seemed to possess discipline. The Master of Hungary claimed education. His targets could have been convincingly characterized to a far wider audience than the rioters as privileged spongers: Jews, scholars and clergy who appeared in cahoots with a political system whose venality ostentatiously conflicted with its stated goals. Yet this was no random proletarian revolt or social rebellion. The ‘pastoureaux’ declared their devotion to their king and his cause, claiming that they, instead of the traditional elites, were expressing and pursuing the best interests of royal policy. The uprisings’ organization, cohesion and behaviour suggests the involvement of the politically rather than the economically marginalized, but not of the politically ignorant or innocent. The disturbances in 1251 revealed further evidence of the penetration of crusading practice into the mentalities of an increasingly diverse and sophisticated civil society, one educated by evangelism and taxation, energized by the circulation of detailed news of atrocities and disasters that, in the perspective of collective religious imagination, seemed not distant, but immediate and urgent. Just as such emotions underpinned and explained Louis IX’s preparations from 1244 to 1248, so they produced the unrest and violence of 1251.
THE FAILED COUNTER-ATTACK OF LOUIS IX’S SECOND CRUSADE
Louis IX’s unofficial protectorate over Frankish Palestine survived his departure in April 1254, embodied in the resident French garrison and the annual material and financial subsidies channelled east, some years thousands of livres, mainly derived from church funds and loans, although underwritten by the French government. Despite Joinville’s prediction on the day they sailed away from Acre, that Louis ‘had that day been reborn’, entering a ‘new life when he escaped from that perilous land’, the king never forgot Jerusalem.95 Instead, he cultivated the impression of a monarch whose gaze rested on the world of the spirit, a focus given physical expression in his and his court’s continued declarations of devotion to the plight of the Holy Land. Added to his material power, this stance lent Louis enormous prestige and effectiveness as an international arbiter, especially as successive popes between 1254 and 1268 became locked into the destruction of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, a cause not seen by all Christians as of transcendent importance. Louis established a moral authority rare for a medieval layman. He became in some respects,
Yet of far greater importance than Louis’s personal enthusiasm for prospects for a new general crusade or the survival of Frankish Outremer were events in Italy and Syria. International attention and the resources of the western church were increasingly directed at exterminating the Hohenstaufen. The issues of control over the Sicilian church and the territorial integrity and security of the papal states in central Italy loomed larger in the policies of successive popes than did the Holy Land, for all the lip service paid to beleaguered Outremer. Alongside grants of crusading privileges to those who fought for the papacy against their Italian enemies, the priority was to find a papal champion. After a number of false starts, in 1265 agreement was reached with Louis IX’s youngest brother, Charles of Anjou. He then proceeded to destroy first Manfred, Frederick’s illegitimate son and ruler of Sicily, in 1266 and then, in 1268, Conradin, Frederick’s grandson and titular king of Jerusalem. Until then, especially as England was only just emerging from a protracted and latterly vicious period of internecine conflict and civil war (1258–65), chances of a large eastern campaign were remote.
However, by the mid-1260s the outlook for mainland Outremer looked bleak. The structure of the kingdom of Jerusalem was slowly disintegrating. While John of Jaffa was composing his great lawbook commemorating a part historical, part imaginary world of legal niceties and juridical precedents, some institutions faced physical and legal annihilation. In 1255, Pope Alexander IV afforded diplomas of the abbey of Our Lady of Josaphat outside Jerusalem, renewing privileges with the same validity as the original grants because part of the abbey’s archives had been destroyed by ‘Saracens’, thus endangering the very legal identity of the corporation.97 Similar threats to the existence of the Latin settlement soon transferred to the level of high politics and diplomacy. The appearance of the Mongols in Syria radically altered the structure of power in the region, to the Franks’ serious disadvantage. In February 1258, Hulegu (d. 1265), brother of the Great Khan Mongke (1251–9), captured Baghdad, killing the last Abbasid caliph, al-Musta ‘sim. Moving on to Syria, the Mongols took Aleppo (January 1260) and Damascus (March 1260), ousting the Ayyubid ruler, al-Nasir Yusuf. Palestine was exposed. Mongols raids reached Ascalon, Jerusalem and the gates of Egypt. A Mongol garrison was placed at Gaza. Sidon was attacked and briefly occupied in August 1260. By then, most of the remaining Ayyubid and other princes left between the Euphrates and the Mediterranean had capitulated.98 The Franks were divided how to respond. Bohemund VI of Antioch-Tripoli, briefly one of Outremer’s most important power brokers, had already accepted Mongol over-lordship, with a Mongol resident and battalion stationed in Antioch itself, where they stayed until the fall of the city to the Mamluks in 1268. The Frankish Antiochenes assisted in the Mongols’ capture of Aleppo, thus in part achieving a very traditional Frankish target, and had received additional lands in reward. By contrast, the Franks of Acre saw no advantage in submission to the Mongols. Equally, they held aloof from outright military alliance with the new Mamluk sultan of Egypt, Qutuz, who was preparing an army to contest the Mongol conquest of Syria. Although many wanted to enlist
