God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Neapolitan wars. However, the experience of the Italian wars of the previous century as well as the Schism wars dissuaded popes after the end of the Schism in 1417 from using the crusade to defend the Papal States. Only the aggressive Julius II revived the tradition of crusading in Italy (for which he was imperishably lampooned in Erasmus’s Julius Exclusus) as well as granting Henry VIII of England’s French war of 1512 crusading status.⁵⁴ The abandonment of crusades against political enemies perhaps signalled retrospective recognition of their futility and the damage they caused to the standing of both papacy and crusade. In the context of the growing dangers presented to Latin Christendom by the advances of the Ottomans, such applications of papal crusade theory appeared politically, militarily and financially self-defeating.

By contrast, where fighting for the cross appeared more appropriate, there was little hesitation. Five crusades were fought against the Hussite heretics of Bohemia (1420, 1421, 1422, 1431, 1465–71) and another planned (1428–9).⁵⁵ The Hussites, puritanical scriptural fundamentalists similar to Wyclif’s followers in England, took their name from one of their early leaders, Jan Hus, a Prague academic who was burnt by the Council of Constance in 1415. The Hussites combined strong religious revivalism with a powerful sense of collective identity. The twin pillars of corporate unity rested on faith, expressed in rituals such as Communion in both kinds, which distinguished them from Roman Catholics, and nationality, demonstrated in the use of the written Czech vernacular. The mixture of political, social and religious rebellion forged a potent threat, which gave Bohemia a period of hard-fought independence for much of the fifteenth century. The serial failure of the crusades launched initially by Sigismund, the king of Bohemia and Hungary and the German emperor (d. 1437), and the indiscriminate brutality of the invading crusaders merely enhanced Czech appreciation of their own exceptionalist destiny, one holy war decisively repulsing another.

The sixteenth-century Reformation led to a fleeting revival of crusade schemes against the new heretics and schismatics, such as Henry VIII of England in the 1530s and his daughter Elizabeth I in the last years of the century, when Spain’s attack in 1588 and Roman Catholic subversion in Ireland became associated with crusading.⁵⁶ Occasionally, popes, exasperated at compromises with confessional opponents, could threaten crusades against Catholic rulers such as Henry II of France, criticized by Julius III. The austere papalist militant Paul IV even waved the menace of a crusade against the Habsburgs Charles V and Philip II.⁵⁷ At the sharp local level of religious conflict, in the early years of the French Wars of Religion (1562–98), crusading motifs appeared among Catholic associations committed to combating the Huguenots. In Toulouse, Catholics defending the city from Huguenot attack in 1567 started wearing white crosses to symbolize their holy cause. The following year, 1568, Pius V granted these ‘crucesignati’ plenary indulgences.⁵⁸ However, the general political approach to fighting Protestants, in Germany, France or England, avoided overt crusading, even if the circumstances of holy war were inescapable.

The absence of crusades against Protestants provided its own barometer of the decline of crusading as a living force within Christendom. To some extent this represented more a series of shifts in cultural emphasis than a wholesale abandonment of the crusading tradition. In 1536, elements of society in northern England rebelled against religious and political measures of the government of Henry VIII. At a crisis of the rebellion, the rebels were given badges of the Five Wounds of Christ that had been made for an English contingent sent to Cadiz to join a crusade to north Africa in 1511. Kept in storage ever since, they were now used to emphasize the religious legitimacy of rebellion, to the alarm of Henry’s ministers, who suspected that the rebel leadership was trying to equate the uprising with a crusade. The 1511 crusade had ended in drunken brawls on the streets of Lisbon as the English, as many of their successors abroad, had found the local wine too intoxicating. The badges lent the rebels of 1536 no better fortune, but revealed how introspective religious priorities and ideas of holy violence could become. Thirty years later, crusade symbols were again on display, during the 1569 Northern Rebellion, like its predecessor in part a protest at religious change. However, by then few had any experience of crusading, unlike the leaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace. The resonances of the crusade had become fainter. Partly this charted the success of the Protestantizing policies of Elizabeth I; partly it revealed a significant change in perceptions of the Christian polity.⁵⁹

With Christendom no longer confessionally united, nonetheless a sense of unity transcended the religious divide in the face of a common enemy, the Turk. This was one reason sixteenth-century anti-Protestant crusades failed to become more established. Both Lutheran and Roman Catholic addressed the Turkish threat to Germany in writing and action. Monks and Calvinists alike sought to extract from crusade histories lessons of faith and devotion.⁶⁰ Edward VI and his ministers called the Turks in 1552 ‘the old common enemy to the Name and Religion of all Christianity’.⁶¹ In 1571, news of the great Habsburg Mediterranean naval victory over the Turks at Lepanto, seen by Roman Catholics as a crusading venture, was greeted with great enthusiasm in London, with sermons of Thanksgiving at St Paul’s and bonfires and banquets in the streets ‘for a victorie of so great importance unto the whole state of Christian commonwealth’. One observer even hoped Protestant and Roman Catholic might reach a compromise so that they could pit their combined resources against the Turk.⁶² This was remarkable given that England’s monarch had only the year before been excommunicated and her subjects advised to overthrow her by the pope, who planned the coalition that achieved the Lepanto triumph. An increasingly secular concept of Europe, a continent shared by different confessional groups, supplanted the idea of a religiously uniform Christendom. In this new world, anti-Christian crusades held little meaning, let alone prospects for success outside a narrow closed circle of Spanish Habsburg strategists and their apologists at the papal Curia.

Even in their heyday, crusades against Christians had thrown up anomalies. The longevity of wars of the cross directed against Christians depended on cultural attitudes and an understanding of how the world operated that demanded formal religious sanction for what in other respects was secular behaviour. This mentality helps explain the eccentric phenomenon of what can only be called crusades against crusaders, on display among rebels in England in 1215–17,⁶³ anti-papalists in Germany in the 1240s,⁶⁴ during the Shepherds’ Crusade of 1251 and with Simon of Montfort’s radical anti-royalist idealists in 1263–5.⁶⁵ Such counter-crusades appear to be confined to the thirteenth century. Even though the English and the French smoothly incorporated holy war motifs into their propaganda and apologetics, and, later, both Hussites and Protestants were wholly familiar with justifications of religious warfare, the trappings of crusading had become at once undifferentiated and controversial through their use, some at the time argued overuse, in wars within Christendom. Victims and opponents naturally sought to distance themselves from what many asserted was an abuse. Crusades against Christians could seem tawdry rackets, distracting the faithful from the higher calling of the Holy Land or the defence of eastern and central Europe. In the thirteenth century many otherwise sympathetic to crusading opposed the papal wars in Italy: clergy resentful at taxation; English and French nobles reluctant to commute their vows; citizens of Lille in 1284; Florentines who refused to allow their crusade legacies to be diverted. Hostiensis, a passionate advocate of crusades against Christians, was forced to admit to widespread hostility to them in Germany.⁶⁶ Even Innocent IV recognized this when he insisted his order stop preaching the cross for the Holy Land to facilitate the war of the cross against Frederick II be kept secret.⁶⁷ The use of the Holy Land clerical taxes granted in 1274 and 1312 for the Italian wars looked like fraud. Those many, especially in the fourteenth century, who saw in crusading a means and expression of moral and spiritual regeneration, looked to wars with heretics and infidels, not fellow Christians. Numerous popes largely agreed, such as Gregory X, Nicholas IV, Benedict XII, Gregory XI and even Urban V, despite his use of crusades to tackle routiers. While certain popes and their apologists insisted that the Hohenstaufen and Italian crusades were necessary prerequisites for any successful eastern campaign, others, such as the Venetian lobbyist and habituee of the papal Curia Marino Sanudo or Philip of Mezieres, argued instead that they constituted major impediments to the recovery of the Holy Land and defence against the Turks.⁶⁸ The coincidence of the gradual loss of the Holy Land after 1250 with the intensification of Italian crusading struck some as reprehensible. Anti-Christian crusading did not destroy the popularity of some holy wars of the cross, except in so far as it sharpened scepticism over papal motives and provided polemical ammunition for papal enemies, such as Wyclif or the influential political philosopher Marsilius of Padua in the 1320s. By the early fifteenth century, with papal plenitude of power compromised by schism, a sclerotic bureaucracy, political corruption and the growing assertion of national ecclesiastical autonomy, the Italian crusades appeared at worst objects of derision and at best irrelevant beyond the regional conflicts to which they were applied. When, in the last years of the fourteenth century, the English civil servant and poet Geoffrey Chaucer outlined the career of a perfect crusading knight, he pointedly omitted from his roll of honour the Italian crusades, with which he was personally most familiar. Whatever notional spiritual benefits the crusaders enjoyed, as a weapon of policy they failed to transcend normal