God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Holy war also remained a prominent feature of later medieval Europe for external reasons. The eastern Mediterranean outposts remained under threat. The Mamluk empire gradually consolidated its hold on its thirteenth-century conquests, resisting Mongol attacks on Syria around 1300 and widening its aggression to the seas and coasts of the northern Levant. The Christian enclave of Cilician Armenia, sporadically paraded as a possible base for reconquering the Holy Land, was finally annexed by the Mamluks in 1375. Cyprus remained a target for Egyptian attack far into the fifteenth century. Yet despite a flood of written advice, strenuous diplomacy and occasional assaults on the Levant coast, no major western campaign was assembled to reverse the verdict of 1291. Western European presence in Palestine was reduced to well-heeled pilgrim tourists, spies, merchants and visiting clergy. By the mid-1330s, the Franciscans were established as representatives of the Roman church in Jerusalem, under Mamluk licence.¹ Taking over the Latin sectors within the Holy Sepulchre, as well as the Coenaculum (Upper Room), the tomb of the Virgin Mary and the Grotto of the Nativity in Bethlehem, they devised a package of ritual site-seeing, rerouting the Via Dolorosa and inventing suitably moving ceremonies, including overnight vigils in the church of the Holy Sepulchre and, later, special knightly dubbings with a sword allegedly that of Godfrey of Bouillon. Christian military aggression against the Mamluks only interfered with this steady pilgrim trade. A treaty in 1370 between Egypt and Cyprus explicitly or implicitly secured lasting visiting rights for Latin Christian pilgrims, at a fixed price, providing the circumstances for the continued popularity of this form of religious adventure tourism, which, by 1400, had developed into a routine itinerary of chaperoned site-seeing. However, from the 1330s, a new power disrupted the thirteenth-century settlement. The land-based Ottoman sultanate of north-west Asia Minor gradually established itself as the greatest threat to the integrity of Christendom since the Mongols in the 1240s, and one that proved more durable and more immediate. By the time western Christendom began to succumb to ineradicable and violent religious schism in the sixteenth century, the Ottomans had conquered Greece, the Balkans, Asia Minor and the Mamluk empire, including Palestine, and were battering at the gates of Austria. There remained plenty of scope for anti-Muslim crusading.

IMAGINING THE CRUSADE

One of the most characteristic literary genres of the later middle ages could be described as ‘recovery literature’, books, pamphlets and memoranda concerned with the crusade, the restoration of Jerusalem and the advance of the Turks. The clerical and lay elites of western Europe found it almost impossible to let go of the Holy Land as a political ambition or vision of perfection. Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, governments, moralists, preachers and lobbyists returned again and again to a subject in which practical and moral objectives were fused together. One early fourteenth-century master of the Hospitallers called the crusade ‘the nearest route to Paradise’; another grizzled veteran insisted it could ‘cure all ills and transform sadness into joy’.² The mountain of written advice thrown up in the two centuries after 1291 consistently associated the recovery of the Holy Land or the defence of the church with personal redemption, honour and the resolution of Europe’s internal political, social and religious problems. Such ideas circulated as state papers as much as literary ephemera. All rulers contemplating a crusade demanded detailed advice and evidence from their own councillors or agents, from recognized interested parties, for instance the military orders or the Venetians, or from self-appointed experts and lobbyists who disseminated their ideas through networks of contacts, patronage and self-promotion. The former chancellor of Cyprus, Philip of Mezieres (1327–1405), ran a corps of propagandists and supplied a stream of pamphlets and longer works. Marino Sanudo Torsello produced a large volume of history in support of his memoranda, engaged a lively scriptorium that produced maps and other crusade literature and exploited his own extensive links with courtiers in England, France, Avignon, Naples and Byzantium.³ Such figures were taken seriously. Sanudo attended meetings of the French royal council in the 1320s that discussed his plans; seventy years later one of Meezieeres’s agents received a grilling from the dukes of Burgundy and Gloucester over his crusade proposals.⁴ These theorists, lobbyists and pamphleteers were not writing necessarily for their own amusement. The context was official interest and action. These writers inhabited the circles they wished to influence, lobbyists and their audience sharing an emotional susceptibility to crusade ideology. The practical intent of these schemes should not be minimized, even if their details fail to convince. Philip VI’s doctor Guy of Vigevano’s recipe for slug soup was a serious prescription for the avoidance of poisoning on crusade.⁵

The weight of crusade advice reflected a continuing confidence in prospect for the recovery of the Holy Land. Schemes were accompanied by elaborate explanations, with statistics, historical evidence and proofs that varied from the impressive to the banal and absurd. They contributed to setting the strategic orthodoxies that determined planning. The overwhelming fourteenth-century consensus advocated a series of seaborne expeditions to destroy the economic and political power of Egypt. A few voices, usually Iberian, advocated using the land route across North Africa to attack the Nile, but only the advent of the Ottoman threat to eastern Europe revived ideas of using the land route of the First and Second Crusades. Some doubts of the efficacy of mass crusades surfaced, suggested by experience and expense. Sanudo calculated the cost of the initial expeditionary force to Egypt at over 2 million florins, ten times the ordinary annual income of the papacy, an order of magnitude confirmed when governments themselves estimated costs of such campaigns.⁶ This awareness of cost explains the often criticized concentration on methods of fundraising that accompanied any serious venture. However, financial problems failed to dissuade governments at least from investigating the possibilities of action, even if difficulties in raising the necessary sums acted as a material disincentive and political block.

However, theory rarely directed action. Neither Sanudo’s ideas in the 1320s nor Mezieres’s in the 1390s were followed. When, half a century later, Bertrandon de la Broquiere doubted the feasibility or wisdom of a crusade against the Turks, his employer, Duke Philip of Burgundy, ignored him in pursuit of his plans against the Ottomans.⁷ Apart from identifying the difficulty of eastern crusading, the tendency of writers and lobbyists to couch their schemes in the widest context of international reconciliation indicated why their ideas remained unfulfilled. Discussing the obstacles to crusading hardly made them disappear. Equally limiting was the extraordinary conservatism of much crusade advice and theorizing. Rarely at any time in the later middle ages were schemes for eastern crusades uncoupled from the comfortingly familiar call for the recovery of the Holy Land, even when the clear danger came from the Ottoman Turks. Such traditional propaganda paralleled the flourishing Holy Land liturgies of masses, prayers and processions that persisted across western Europe into the sixteenth century. Linking wars against the Turks with the historic struggle to recover the Holy Land increased the receptiveness of those, at least among courtly elites, whose pious and financial contributions were being sought.

Such traditionalism was never entirely shed by promoters of wars of the cross. However, the new threat of the Ottoman Turks coincided with and possibly provoked fresh interpretations of crusading among humanist historians and scholars, who sought to present the past as a model to inform present and future public behaviour. The drama and success of the First Crusade continued to inspire, but humanist crusade enthusiasts adopted a distinctive perspective. The Florentine chancellor Benedetto Accolti’s long history of the First Crusade (1464–6) consistently referred to the Turks and other Muslims as ‘barbari’, barbarians, implying a classical comparison.⁸ For humanist scholars, the crusades and their failure provided a commentary on the state of civil society in the west as well as the more familiar religious exegesis. On this reading, Latin Christendom had inherited the imperium of classical Rome, thus the conquest of Palestine was doubly a recovery, of religious space and imperial lands. For some apologists in this line of thought, not least Pope Pius II, who tried hard to organize a new general crusade, the two aspects of crusading united in the institution of the papacy, Christ’s vicar and residual legatee of the Roman Empire. The rise of the Ottomans allowed the lack of successful crusading to stand as an illustration of the political as well as moral decadence of Latin Europe in contrast with the disciplined, united and successful Turks, forcing its retention as a central issue of public debate into the sixteenth century.

CRUSADES TO THE EAST

After 1291, and the failure of Nicholas IV’s plans to launch an immediate new crusade to recover the Holy Land, international expeditions were seriously planned on three occasions.⁹ The Council of Vienne (1311–12) authorized a sexennial clerical tax for the crusade. A year later Philip IV of France hosted an elaborate ceremony in Paris at which he, his sons and his son-in-law, Edward II of England, took the cross. Such gestures had become familiar in the courts of western Europe without necessarily indicating more than a desire for diplomatic respectability, like joining the League of Nations and about as effective. However, Philip invested propagandist effort and possible personal devotion to the cause of the Holy Land. The aura of St Louis was eagerly embraced. Active