God's War: A New History of the Crusades

SOCIAL APPEAL

The wide social contact with crusading ideas and formulae transcended promotional special pleading and chroniclers’ exaggeration. Philip of Mezieres’s final plan for his crusading Order of the Passion (1397) divided Christian warriors into three groups: kings and princes; common people; and, lastly, ‘knights, squires, other barons, nobles, townsmen (bourgeois), merchants and men of honour of middling rank’.³ On campaigns, humbler crusaders were naturally much in evidence. As in any army, officers needed men to command. The widely attested presence on crusades of squires, mercenaries and sailors causes no surprise. Perhaps more indicative were the urban citizens and working elites who displayed enthusiasm to join up. In the 1320s and 1330s citizens of northern French towns refused to pay crusade subsidies but protested their willingness to serve in person, encouraging fellow townsmen to follow suit.⁴ Of course, these avowals may represent a traditional legal device to avoid novel fiscal demands, but they indicate how crusading remained a respectable public activity. More direct were the London apprentices who attempted to follow a crusade led by the bishop of Norwich against followers of the Avignon pope (i.e. the French) in 1382; or the eighty citizens of Ghent who took the cross, chose their own commander and set out for Venice in March 1464 (they were back by Christmas). Corporate pride sustained crusade traditions, in great commerical cities such as Venice, Genoa, Florence or London. Wine provided by the civic authorities of the small Flemish town of Axel in 1464 eased the tearful public farewells of the town’s crusaders, who had just received the spiritual sustenance of the mass.⁵

24. Crusades in Europe

Such occasional civic ceremonies were matched by more permanent demonstrations of crusade commitment: regular festivals, confraternities and gilds. Crusade interest in the 1330s at Tournai in north-eastern France may have been associated with the week-long festival of the Holy Cross that ended on 14 September, Holy Cross Day, a date closely linked with crusading.⁶ While the lay orders of chivalry provided for the tastes and aspirations of the nobility, non-noble organizations emerged to cater for a wider public. Lay confraternities to channel devotion and material support can be found in France as early as the 1240s. In Italy, similar confraternities served the papalist cause. In Norfolk, England, in 1384 two gilds were founded, St Christopher’s at Norwich and St Mary’s at Wiggenhall, that began their meetings with prayers for the recovery of the Holy Land. If other English gilds’ sponsorship of Jerusalem pilgrimages are a guide, these expressions of spiritual sociability could act as foci to arrange crusaders’ practical needs as well as to give crucesignati members a good send off.⁷

The Parisian confrarie of the Holy Sepulchre demonstrated how interest could be fostered by overlapping local, political and social networks. Founded with a lavish ceremony on Holy Cross Day 1317 in the church of the Holy Cross in Paris, the confraternity’s patron was Louis I count of Clermont and duke of Bourbon, grandfather of the 1390 al-Mahdiya commander and the French royal prince most frequently associated with French crusade plans for twenty years after 1316. Between 1325 and 1327, a church was built for the confrarie, dedicated to the Holy Sepulchre. This came to house a number of Holy Land relics, including three pieces of the True Cross, a key to one of the gates of Jerusalem, an arm of St George and a piece of stone from the Holy Sepulchre itself. Although attracting royalty and nobility, the core of the membership, apparently over 1,000 in the 1330s, were Parisian bourgeois, many of whom had taken the cross at Philip IV’s great ceremony of 1313. The function of the confraternity was to provide these crucesignati with a way to structure and display their continued devotion and, no doubt, their special status and public association with the great. The patronage of courtiers lent snobbish value to membership as well as widening the circles of nobles’ political clientage. The confrarie also acted as a charity, with the unachieved aim of founding a hospital for Holy Land pilgrims. Such institutions and buildings formed a tangible daily reminder of the negotium crucis, exploiting a variety of highly effective pressures: charity; the cult of relics; the elitism of a prominent civic social club; public display; the social allure of nobles and non-nobles mingling as confreres the imprimatur of the church.⁸ Such institutional context helped crusading continue as a social as well as religious phenomenon.

Before the gradual fading of realistic hopes of recovering the Holy Land, active planning could generate wider popular engagement, occasionally with disruptive consequences. Preaching, offers of indulgences and taxation could still ignite popular response from those on or beyond the margins of accepted political society. In 1309, in reaction to a small crusade expedition run by the Hospitallers, engaged in completing their conquest of Rhodes, apparently large numbers from England, the Low Countries and Germany took the cross and converged on Mediterranean ports. The papal-Hospitaller campaign, designed to relieve Armenia and Cyprus, only departed early in 1310. It had not been planned as a mass crusade, even if some hoped it would constitute an advance guard of much larger force, a dual strategy urged by contemporary theorists. In 1308, Pope Clement V had granted crusade privileges to those who helped the Hospitallers. A discrepancy arose between organizers and public. Official interest was in raising money to pay for a largely professional army; over two years in the archdiocese of York nearly ?500 was collected, primarily from indulgences. However, the loss of the Holy Land in 1291, combined with more recent hopes of a Mongol liberation of Jerusalem, encouraged a wider participation. While hostile conservative chroniclers dismissed the recruits as unauthorized, underfunded and indisciplined, of lowly peasant or urban status, the social mix in this ‘popular’ crusade, as in 1212 and 1251, was broader than clerical snobbery and hierarchic defensiveness implied. From England, those licensed to depart for the Holy Land ranged from nobles to a surgeon. Some of the unofficial levies were sufficiently conversant with the political mechanics of crusading to petition the pope to summon a general crusade; he refused. Larceny and thuggery provided a familiar accompaniment to the progress of these bands southwards. As well as demonstrating the commonplace of violence and lawlessness on the fringes of mass demonstrations that disrupt the tenor of local communities, the alleged outrages reflected the crusaders’ lack of funds and the impossibility of mounting a mass crusade without elite leadership and massive treasure. The existence of a pool of willing, if not particularly able, recruits cannot be doubted. The crusade industry had created its own market with customers unwilling to be fobbed off with spiritually passive or exclusively financial bargains.⁹

In 1320, the links between well-publicized official crusade policy and unauthorized crusade enthusiasm were just as clear. In the winter of 1319–20, Philip V of France held a series of conferences in Paris to discuss his crusade plans. A year earlier he had appointed Louis of Clermont as leader of the proposed French advance guard. In the spring, groups of so-called ‘pastoureaux’, indicating countrymen, if not literally shepherds, from northern France, converged on Paris around Easter. News of Philip’s crusade plans may have penetrated these regions through the summonses to the winter assemblies, especially Normandy, Vermandois, Anjou, Picardy and the Ile de France. Economic conditions in some of these rural areas had been appalling. Peace with Flanders in 1319 and the hope generated by prospects of better times and a new crusade may have helped set these bands on the road to Paris. As in 1212 and 1251, many of those who set out were young men, with loose domestic ties, possibly without jobs or tenancies to sustain them through the severe agrarian depression. Yet their association with court policy was evident. A Parisian observer noted many of them came from Normandy, heavily represented at the crusade conferences.¹⁰ Some marched behind the banner of Louis of Clermont, not improbably with his consent, hinting at the summons of the wider civil society in support of a troubled political elite. Pope John XXII expressed surprise that Philip V had acquiesced in the activities of the ‘pastoureaux’.¹¹ Initially, churches gave them food and shelter. There was talk of using the marchers on a projected campaign to Italy by Philip V’s cousin, Philip of Valois, the future Philip VI, hardly a task for a criminal mob. Parisians let them pass unmolested. The bands were well organized, some professing clear objectives, such as Aigues Mortes, whence they wished to sail to the Holy Land, indicating the power of nostalgia, precedent, history and legend, here the dominant memory of St Louis. As the bands headed towards the Midi, lack of assistance, realization of their isolation and resentment at the parasitic privileges of those deemed to have exploited or failed the crusade were channelled into violence. Wealthy laity and clergy were attacked; Jews were massacred. Such mayhem acted as a symptom as much as a cause of disintegration, a sign of the desperation to sustain themselves through acts of chastisement, in their eyes moral deeds that had to serve as substitutes for the greatest moral deed of all, the crusade.

The extent to which the French regime was complicit in encouraging the ‘pastoureaux’ in order to put