God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Host before the Communion. It appeared in various standard forms in manuscript and printed missals from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, those derived from the English dioceses of Salisbury, York and Hereford being particularly prominent. Associated with the rite of taking the cross, these prayers were inserted into the mass on special occasions. By contrast, normal celebrations of the Eucharist could be dedicated as a whole to the special votive aim of the recovery of the Holy Land. Provision for such special masses was included in the instructions for the preparations for a crusade by John XXII (1333), Urban V (1363) and Gregory XI (1373). Such special masses could be directed towards a particular crusade or, especially in the fifteenth century, to less precise assistance to the Holy Land. The later fifteenth century saw an increase in dedicated masses against the Turks, but they were also invoked against Hussites and, more vaguely, ‘pagans’ and ‘infidels’.

A more remarkable use of masses for the Holy Land were the so-called Gregorian Trentals, originating in England in the later fourteenth century. These comprised clusters of thirty masses to be said for the soul of the dead after the death or burial of the testator who endowed the services. Within the mass, prayers were included for the liberation of the Holy Land alone or combined the liberation of the Holy Land with the liberation of the soul of the departed from ‘the hands of demons’, i.e. in purgatory. The destination of the soul and the Holy Land were equated, the pagans by analogy liturgically demonized. In England alone there survive eighty separate liturgical sources for this habit, as well as almost 150 wills, mainly from the fifteenth century. Calixtus III appears to have encouraged the practice during his crusade efforts in 1455. In England, at least, these daily masses could be sung 365 days a year.

Although such liturgies stretched the link between crusade ideology and crusade action to an extreme, they testify to the inescapable power and penetration of the image of the liberation of the Holy Land, which did not depend on sporadic official preaching or fundraising to hold the thoughts of the faithful. Further confirmation of this can be found in wills across western Europe, certainly in the fourteenth century, bequeathing money for the crusade as well as for Holy Land masses. However, the lack of association with active crusading suggests that the liberation of the Holy Land provided a spiritual metaphor, both for the liberation of the individual soul from the consequences of sin, as in the English Gregorian Trentals, and, more widely, for the struggle against the ungodly. This passive response was evinced most clearly by Holy Land bidding prayers. These were vernacular intercessory prayers said in parish churches across Europe on Sundays and feast days directly after the sermon. From the late thirteenth century they became a habitual part of the general supplicatory apparatus of church liturgy. They were far from calls to crusade, unlike elements elsewhere in the liturgy.³¹ The only action prescribed for the recovery of the Holy Land was prayer, an ultimate distillation of the growing passivity that the extension of crusade institutions in the thirteenth century inadvertently encouraged. Once again, the recovery of the Holy Land appears as a symbol of God’s favour and the acceptability of the prayers of the faithful. This tradition sustained the image of crusading as a central Christian devotional activity long after fighting for the cross had become a rarity. However, on all sides of the confessional divides that opened up in the sixteenth century, such externalized manifestations of corporate religion, using a physical act – the recovery of the Holy Land – as a means of securing grace and salvation, became increasingly unconvincing as more and more articulate believers turned towards systems of devotion that concentrated more directly on the interior personal experience of God and faith. Furthermore, different categories of ‘ungodly’ entered Christian demonology, replacing the old stereotypes and analogies, rendering crusade polemical imagery redundant.

Central ceremonies of crusading persisted. As in bidding prayers, the emphasis on the cross displayed in crusade sermons became integrated into more general evangelism and penitential exhortation centred on the cross’s redemptive powers; parts of many crusade sermons were interchangeable with those concerned with moral reform. Sermons delivered or circulated in manuscript to provide models for local exhortation displayed a traditional formalism of structure and content, evident, for example, in England, in crusade sermons well into the fourteenth century. In fact, the heavily allusive metaphorical language of crusade was developed more by desk-bound or court-based propagandists, mostly laymen, than working preachers, who tended to operate within a tight academic tradition. Despite the crafted crusade preaching of, for instance, the fourteenth-century English Dominican John Bromyard, or the Frenchman Pierre Roger, the future Pope Clement VI, subsequently, the true heirs of the great crusade preachers of earlier generations were figures such as Mezieres. Statistics of sermons in northern France between 1350 and 1520 indicate only a tiny proportion concerned the crusade, indulgences, Saracens or heretics.³² The crusade preaching tour and sermon, like the sale of indulgences, became routine aspects of administration, no longer the necessary focal point of recruitment and propaganda, sometimes omitted altogether. The exception of John of Capistrano’s popular evangelism in Hungary in 1456 exposed the contrast with other crusade initiatives where, if present at all, sermons were delivered to elite court audiences, with no thought to mass communication. Increasingly, the commonest public encounter came with the pardoner or indulgence salesman, not the preacher.

Other aspects of crusade organization, including privileges and taking the cross, similarly varied in intensity and application. Processions inspired by specific crusading campaigns were conducted at Douai regularly during the mid-fifteenth century. Such public demonstrations assumed greater significance in the absence of frequent recruiting drives. The near-permanent sale of indulgences, in many regions robustly popular in terms of profit, operated at a different, less intense level of public or personal involvement.³³ With fewer people actually taking the cross, the associated privileges tended to fall into disuse. One much exploited privilege of crucesignati allowed them to delay answering law suits, known as essoin of court. In his Mirror of Justices, Andrew Horn (d. 1328), fishmonger and Chamberlain of the City of London, described, as a matter of course, the essoin of crusaders engaged in ‘a general passage to the land of Jerusalem’. By the end of the century, such assumptions may have became genuinely anachronistic. In France by the 1380s, for instance, the lawbook known as the Grand Coutumier de France omitted any mention of crusaders from its detailed list of essoins.³⁴ The habit of taking the cross had become too infrequent.

The ceremony of taking the cross, the defining ritual of crusading, remained available for the faithful, penitent or adventurous, but, as an active expression of interest in holy war, appears increasingly exceptional compared with earlier centuries. In December 1382, Bishop Henry Despenser of Norwich took the cross in St Paul’s cathedral, London. He apparently had experienced some difficulty locating an order of service, given its recent rarity. In fact, copies of the ceremony existed in many English cathedrals and abbeys. Different English rites for taking the cross existed in York, Lincoln and Salisbury (Despenser found his version in the liturgy books of the monks of Westminster).³⁵ Although notable for their absence during the 1390 al-Mahdiya and 1396 Nicopolis expeditions, or as part of the Burgundian court’s display of crusade enthusiasm in the 1450s, examples of individuals and groups taking the cross show how the practice continued, as among the Hungarian peasantry in 1456 or the citizens of Ghent in the 1460s. Individual vows to fight the infidel can be found from France and Bavaria in the fourteenth century to Englishman and Scotsmen in the 1450s and worsted weavers from Norfolk in 1499.³⁶ Rites for taking the cross continued to be copied into diocesan service books throughout the period, alongside the wider Holy Land liturgy. When Innocent VIII standardized the rite in the Roman Pontifical, he acknowledged the new circumstances of the Turkish advance when he changed the preamble to the ceremony from one restricted to those ‘going to assist the Holy Land’ to those wishing ‘to assist and defend the Christian faith or the recovery of the Holy Land’.³⁷ The change indicated the pope believed or hoped the rite was in current use. Below the level of papal authorization, the cross could be given by local clergy to adventurers, such as Robert Almer at Canterbury in 1462, or to penitent robbers, a couple of whom received the cross at St Alban’s in 1479.³⁸ The adaptability of the ceremony and institution was repeatedly confirmed, from new Iberian conquistadors to devout Roman Catholics fighting Protestant Huguenots in Toulouse during the French Wars of Religion in the 1560s. No less than Innocent III summoning the Fourth Lateran Council in 1213, Paul III was certain his congregation knew the significance of assuming the cross of Christ when he assembled the Council of Trent in 1544–5.³⁹

By then, the whole idea of the redemptive merit of crusading had been challenged by critics of the Roman Church, mostly, but not exclusively, by Protestant confessional opponents. Ironically, central to the criticism lay the question of indulgences. Although those directed at serving the recovery of the Holy Land, the fight against the Turks or subsidizing the Hospitallers at Rhodes could still prove popular, the wide application and in places blatant racketeering involved threatened to discredit the whole system, as Pius II had warned.⁴⁰ Thus at the very core of the crusading practices, a de facto separation emerged between function – fighting the infidel – and method – the offer and sale of indulgences. This occurred at the same time as other