God's War: A New History of the Crusades

pressure on the pope to grant crusade money to Philip V remains conjectural. Nevertheless, the French ‘pastou- reaux’ did not operate entirely outside the perimeter of official crusade policy. They challenge any idea of popular enthusiasm for the Holy Land crusade declining or retreating into a day-dream for the chivalric classes. Neither were the ‘pastoureaux’ enacting a social revolt in disguise. The social critique was subtler, a shared acceptance with the elites of moral purposes coupled with harsh criticism of how those elites pursued them. Public failure, not social exploitation, lay at the heart of the grievances of 1320.¹²

The concept of the crusade could exceptionally be harnessed to radical social demands. In the spring of 1514, Archbishop Thomas Bakocz of Esztergom, with the vigorous assistance of the Observant Franciscans, hastily arranged a crusade in Hungary against the Turks, partly as a sop for his ego, battered by his narrow defeat at the papal conclave the previous year. Reminiscent of scenes in 1456, the preaching struck a chord with hard-pressed rural peasantry, townsmen and students. The economic situation was dire, hitting market towns and livestock herdsmen as much as peasants and tenant farmers. The crusade was sold as redemptive both spiritually and socially. The Hungarian nobility proved hostile, uninterested in supporting war with the Turks, eager to retain revenue designated for the defence of the Turkish frontier and angry at the potential loss of agricultural labour for hay making and harvest. Almost immediately, the crusaders turned on the nobles. Displaying a strong sense of community, the crusader army, led by the minor nobleman George Dozsa and allegedly numbering tens of thousands, began a reign of terror against nobles and their property across the Hungarian plain. Despite Archbishop Bakocz cancelling the crusade as soon as he saw how it was developing, the crusaders continued their rampage, while maintaining their devotion to the cross, crusading privileges, the king and the pope. As so often in sixteenth- century Europe, this was a very conservative social revolt. On 22 May 1514 an army of nobles was defeated, the crusaders finally being crushed only in mid-July at Timisoara (Temesvar). Atrocities had been committed on both sides, the final one the most horrific. Dozsa was placed on a burning stake, platform or throne, a red-hot iron ‘crown’ placed on his head and his followers compelled to bite chunks out of his burning flesh and drink his blood, all this accompanied by singing, dancing and a carnival atmosphere. Dozsa was being branded a traitor to nation, class and faith, precisely what he publicly denied. The 1514 crusade had been officially sanctioned. It attracted large numbers from a wide underclass of civil society with sensitive political antennae. They blamed the nobles – accurately – for failing to pursue the crusade, but took it further. The Hungarian nobles were branded as worse than Turks, a traditional charge levelled against those who impeded the negotium Dei. Only this time, those making these judgements were not popes, princes or prelates, but minor aristocrats and peasants who had taken too literally the message of the cross as a sign of emancipation.¹³ It may be significant that one later Hungarian word for rebel, kuruc, is derived from crux and may enshrine a long cultural memory of the grim events of the spring and summer of 1514.¹⁴

The eccentric and gruesome Hungarian crusade revolt revealed the crusade as not necessarily the preserve of the social elites. However, it also illustrated how crusading motifs could be employed in contexts not essentially connected with holy war and, conversely, how initially tangential or non-crusading emotions and aspirations could find expression in crusade language and forms, however eccentrically or tendentiously construed, in this case by the radical Observant Franciscans. Equally, the behaviour of the Hungarian nobles in 1514 points to the absurdity of generalizing about crusade popularity or social embrace. The Hungarian elite became tepid at formal crusading at a time when the Habsburgs, heirs of the dukes of Burgundy but especially in their Iberian manifestation, eagerly employed the fully panoply of rhetoric, theology and privileges, tempered by their own brand of monarchical messianism. The Iberian revival found fewer echoes in fifteenth-century England when the collapse of the credibility of the Prussian crusade was not replaced by any new feasible object for action, except for those who became Hospitallers. In France, the crusade retained its lustre, but was inextricably caught up in the burgeoning religion of monarchy. As a bond of community and a justification for war, in many places and times crusading, having provided a model, became superseded. The very lack of such confidence in their share of national identity may have encouraged the less grand elements in Hungary to define their action against the Turks and then their nobles so tenaciously in terms of traditional crusading.

CONTINUING TRADITIONS

As in previous centuries, crusading continued to run in families and in regions. This could impose a sense of obligation, almost of responsibility, especially as stories of past crusading heroism circulated widely in literature, polemic and preaching. Parish churches and family homes were festooned with relics of past crusades and crusading ancestors. Tradition caused successive kings of France to be proclaimed as bearing an especial responsibility for crusading in the east, not least by themselves. The duty formed part of their kingship, a proprietorial association carefully nurtured by the first two rulers of the cadet Valois dynasty, Philip VI in the 1330s and John II in the 1360s. More junior branches of St Louis’s descendants were no less infected, notably Louis I of Bourbon and his grandson Louis II, the al-Mahdiya commander. Across Europe similar family histories encouraged members from all stations of the nobility and aristocracy to maintain the tradition, some, such as the Beauc-hamps, Mowbrays and Percys in England, or the Briennes in Champagne, boasting holy war pedigrees that stretched in some cases from the early twelfth to the late fourteenth centuries. In the fourteenth century, families’ engagement scarcely abated.¹⁵ Although some used holy wars as a finishing ground for a knightly education, others found them sterner training. For casualties of Nicopolis or young Geoffrey Scrope of Masham in Yorkshire, killed in the forbidding wastes of Lithuania in 1362, as for those western recruits who fought with the Hospitallers in defence of Rhodes against the Mamluks in 1444, such as Daniel Habin of Majorca, who lost a hand, or Matthew of Transylvania, deprived of the use of his right arm, these wars were no games.¹⁶ The decline in active crusading was the result of a reduction in opportunity not, as often asserted, the other way round. In relation to eastern crusades, at least, the continuing lure of the Holy Places alone testifies to lively interest. From the 1330s and entrenched by the 1370 Cypriot-Egyptian treaty, the Mamluk rulers of Palestine followed the precedent of Saladin in allowing western Christians access to the Holy Sites at a price. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries witnessed a resurgence of large-scale western pilgrimages to Palestine and Egypt and a welter of published accounts of pilgrims’ experiences as well as formal itineraries. Many of these pilgrims at other times also fought against the infidel, but not in the Holy Land.

Compensation for the absence of active crusading was found in the round of indulgences on offer and liturgies performed. Occasionally the crusading element in the prevailing cultural milieu found more targeted demonstration. In 1407–8, partly as a public relations exercise, the Hospitallers of Rhodes constructed the fortress of St Peter at Bodrum, classical Halicarnassus, on the mainland opposite Cos. To pay for the hugely expensive building work, which included reusing dressed stone from the nearby mausoleum, the Hospitallers launched an appeal, backed by papal indulgences. English contributions alone helped to pay for a tower on whose walls twenty-six coats-of-arms were set up in stone, including those of King Henry IV, his four sons and the families with recent or ancient crusade pedigrees, such as the Montagues, Courtenays, Nevilles, Percys, Beauchamps and Hollands. Possibly copied for an armorial roll, they may represent the chief contributors. One set of arms was those of the FitzHughs. Henry FitzHugh had sent equipment to Bodrum in 1409; Sir William, probably Henry’s son, and his wife bought Bodrum indulgences in 1414. Bodrum retained strong links with the English section (or langue) of the Hospitallers throughout the fifteenth century, William Dawney and John Langstrother, later prior of the English Hospitallers, holding the command there in 1448 and 1456 respectively.¹⁷

Regional commitment varied but also demonstrated tenacious links with the past. The dukes of Burgundy played on their inheritance as counts of Flanders of the Flemish crusading legacy during attempts to arouse their subjects’ support for a crusade in the 1450s. For a venture directed to the relief of Constantinople, it was convenient and appropriate to invoke the memory of Baldwin IX, the first Latin emperor. Each area seemed to require its crusade heroes – St Louis in France; Richard I in England; the Iberian champions of the reconquista, etc. – even ones with spurious credentials, such as St Ladislas in Hungary. The Low Countries, western Germany, Champagne and northern France, the heartlands of the First Crusade, remained fertile recruiting grounds. Grafting crusading enthusiasm on to social groups not attuned by long experience proved less easy, as the relative indifference of the Polish or Hungarian nobilities in the later fifteenth century testified. Long absence of concerted preaching or actual recruitment could relegate active crusading to an increasingly eccentric if no less sincere minority, as in England after the 1330s and even more after 1400. Conversely, as in Iberia in the later fifteenth century, crusade enthusiasm could be revived by government