God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Gregory could expect to stiffen local resistance but also mobilize a larger coalition in northern Italy and Germany by making church funds available to those prepared to take the field against the emperor. The crusade, renewed in 1240 and 1243, was primarily preached in imperial lands north and south of the Alps. Anti-kings were established in Germany: Henry Raspe of Thuringia (1246–7), then William of Holland (1247–56). Ringingly endorsed by the First Council of Lyons (1245), these anti-Hohenstaufen crusades attracted many recruits, some defecting from Louis IX’s crusade. The association of crusading to the political conflicts of Italy and Germany lent the anti-imperialist cause an element of institutional commitment and international appeal (or outrage, depending on the observer) they would otherwise not have enjoyed. However, the crusade’s main contribution was financial: the church subsidized the war to destroy the Hohenstaufen, which would otherwise have been beyond the resources, let alone will, of the motley collection of secular lords ranged with the papacy.

On Frederick’s death, attempts to reach an accommodation with his successors failed, and crusades were renewed against his heir, Conrad IV, and Frederick’s illegitimate son, Manfred, regent (1250–58), then king, of Sicily. Increasingly, the focus of crusading fell on Italy and Sicily. In 1255 Alexander IV persuaded Henry III of England to accept the crown of Sicily on behalf of his second son, Edmund, hoping to add the resources of a secular kingdom to those of the church. English involvement proved abortive, as the financial obligations of the project and the extravagance of its ambition helped provoke opposition and civil war in England (1258–65). However, the scheme of hiring a secular prince to attack Manfred was revived by Urban IV and Clement IV, who secured the services of Louis IX’s youngest brother, Charles of Anjou. After a lightning campaign in the winter of 1265–6, Charles defeated and killed Manfred at the battle of Benevento in February 1266. Two years later, Charles secured his position by victory at Tagliacozzo (August 1268) over Conrad IV’s now teenage son and titular king of Jerusalem, Conradin. In October 1268, Charles had Conradin executed at Naples, the last of the male Hohenstaufen line.⁴⁶

The baleful legacy of the crusades of conquest in southern Italy and Sicily infected the politics of the peninsula for generations. Opponents of papal interests became known as Ghibellines (Ghibellini), a nickname apparently derived from a twelfth-century Hohenstaufen war cry, ‘Waiblingen’, the name of a family estate in Swabia. Papal supporters and anti-imperialists, by deliberate contrast, were described as Guelphs, recognizing the long German opposition of the Welf family to the Hohenstaufen. Crusading became almost endemic in Italian politics, crusades being launched against Ezzelino and Alberic of Romano in 1255 and Sardinia in 1263. A new lease of papal energy followed the Sicilian uprising against Charles of Anjou in March 1282, known as the Sicilian Vespers, and the annexation of the island a few months later by Peter III of Aragon, whose wife was Frederick II’s daughter.⁴⁷ In January 1283, a new crusade against Aragon was promulgated by Martin IV, to which Philip III of France was recruited. Philip’s invasion of Aragon in 1285 ended in dismal failure. Having wasted the summer months in a fruitless siege of Gerona in north-east Catalonia and losing his fleet to the Aragonese navy, Philip was forced to retreat, during which he died. This debacle probably persuaded Philip III’s son and heir, the inscrutable but single-minded Philip IV, to avoid such direct entanglements in the future. Further crusade bulls were issued when Frederick of Sicily, Peter III of Aragon’s younger son, defied his elder brother James II of Aragon by retaining control of Sicily despite a papal-Aragonese agreement in 1295 restoring the island to the Angevins. This fresh round of crusades only ended with the Treaty of Caltabellota in 1302 between Frederick of Sicily and the new papal claimant to the island, Charles of Valois, younger brother of Philip IV of France. Thereafter, there were no more crusades against Sicily. Although the crusade weapon may have helped destroy the Hohenstaufen, the final territorial settlement hardly matched papal aspirations; Sicily remained divided from the kingdom of Naples for another two centuries.

In the fourteenth century, Italian battlelines fragmented, especially with the papacy largely absent from the peninsula (from 1305, at Avignon from 1309 until 1377). Popes persisted in using the crusade to further their policies.⁴⁸ Twice aggressive attempts were launched to reassert imperial claims in Italy, by Henry VII (in 1310–13) and Louis IV (1328–30), German kings eager to acquire the traditional imperial title, the latter’s move on Rome eliciting a crusade against him. Most Italian crusades in the period were applied to more local targets; Boniface VIII in dealing with his rivals the Colonna in 1297–8; the suppression of the Piedmontese heretical leader Dolcino in 1306–7; or preventing Venetian annexation of Ferrara (1309–10). John XXII showed himself particularly bellicose. The signori (military rulers of cities) of Lombardy, Tuscany and central Italy tended to be anti-papal Ghibellines, prominently the Visconti of Milan. Florence and the rump Angevin kingdom of Naples favoured the papal, Guelph, side. Regardless of the traditional crusade rhetoric, privileges, funding and accoutrements, such as red and white crosses adorning the banners of John XXII’s Italian crusaders, self-interest, not principle or faith, determined action.⁴⁹ Thus in 1334 Guelph Florence combined with its rival, Ghibelline Milan, to thwart papal plans for a new Lombard puppet state. Only a very narrow, technical, partisan and increasingly unconvincing equation of the political interests of popes with the spiritual health of Christendom could endow these wars with religious significance. This did not prevent participants enjoying the crusader status and privileges on offer. The wars would have been fought in any case and men would have fought in them. The crusade merely added lustre; it hardly determined their practical nature. As in Spain, the crusade in Italy became increasingly a fiscal device, a means of raising money for war.

Major campaigns over the Papal States were organized by cardinallegates Bertrand du Poujet after 1319 and Gil Albornoz after 1353. Crusades were instigated against Milan and Ferrara in 1321; Milan, Mantua and rebels in Ancona in 1324; Cesena and Faenza in 1354; and Milan again in 1360, 1363 and 1368. After 1357, a new element was introduced, with crusades directed to eradicating those mercenary companies not in papal pay, in 1357, 1361 and 1369/70. Huge sums were spent, especially by the spendthrift amateur war-monger John XXII. Yet outside Italy, the same popes were reluctant to apply crusading to other people’s wars, such as those between France and England. Even in Italy, it is hard to see how the use of the crusade as a local coercive weapon, with strictly limited regional objectives, preaching, recruitment and impact, made much of a difference. They may not have been theoretical perversions of the institution of crusading. They were certainly enthusiastically embraced by those who were on the pope’s side in the first place. They may have persuaded more to join the spiritual gravy train. They ensured the crusade remained embedded in western European experience, yet only on a limited scale. The Italian wars were not universal, even in propaganda. Although canonically legitimate – how could they not be, as popes determined what was canonical? – the papal crusades in Italy, and crusades against Christians generally, lacked the distinctive numinous historical resonance that gave holy wars elsewhere their particular spiritual charge.

As if to reinforce this, the early years of the Great Schism (1378–1417) saw crusades launched by both sides against each other. In 1378 the Roman pope Urban VI launched a crusade against his Avignon rival Clement VII. In 1383, a campaign against Flanders organized and led by Bishop Henry Despenser of Norwich gained funds and popular support by being granted crusade status by Urban VI as an attack on Clementists. Despite the panoply of cross taking, preaching, masses, processions, confessions and a massive campaign of selling indulgences, the 1383 expedition amounted to nothing more than an episode in the Hundred Years War under another name. Its true nature was tellingly exposed as most of Despenser’s Urbanist army spent its time ravaging Urbanist territory and besieging Urbanist towns.⁵⁰ A neat device to conduct a chevauchee on the cheap, the crusading elements of the 1383 Flanders crusade nonetheless disturbed some members of the English establishment wary of excessive ecclesiastical control over secular affairs and, as it transpired, rightly suspicious at the efficacy of the stratagem.⁵¹ Official unease was cast in the shade by the English heresiarch John Wyclif’s radical condemnation of Despenser’s crusade and the sale of indulgences, De Cruciata, which portrayed the exercise as a corrupt and deceitful ploy, among other things to raise money.⁵² Wyclif’s opinion was not general. Schism crusading continued. In 1386, John of Gaunt received Urbanist crusade credentials to back his unsuccessful attempt to realize his wife’s claim to the throne of Clementist Castile. The year before, at the battle of Aljubarrota, the victorious Urbanist Anglo-Portuguese troops had been fortified by receiving the cross from the bishop of Braga, while their defeated Castilian and Clementist foe had been offered indulgences from Clement VII by their spiritual advisors. However, at Aljubarrota, as with Despenser’s crusade, the popularity of crusade images and privileges merged with a sense of national identity.⁵³ This lent such traditional gestures continuing potency but not in a traditional crusading context.

The death of the belligerent Urban VI (1389) and the withdrawal of active political support from the Avignon papacy by the French government in the 1390s effectively ended the use of the crusade as a weapon in the papal schism. The long-running succession dispute in the kingdom of Naples attracted crusade bulls in 1382 from Clement VII and in 1411 and 1414 from John XXIII, himself a former naval adventurer and military commander in the