secular constraints of politics and military action. A generation after Chaucer, the secular anti-Christian crusades were abandoned, not as ideologically corrupt so much as bad business. A century and a half later, they were joined by the crusades against schismatics and heretics.
CRUSADE AND NATION
In the early years of the fourteenth century, an obliging French cleric attempted to present a case for the king of France’s war with the count of Flanders being regarded as holy, equivalent in merit to a traditional crusade. The French kings were holy because ‘they esteem holiness, protect holiness and beget holiness’. Their victory over Flemish opponents characterized as rebels would be both just and pious because ‘the king’s peace is the realm’s peace; the realm’s peace is the peace of the church, knowledge, virtue and justice, and it is [a precondition for] the conquest of the Holy Land’. The French were following Maccabees (2:15, vv. 7–8) in seeking God’s assistance, confident that those who died ‘for the justice of king and realm will receive the crown of martyrdom from God’.69 The argument embraced central elements of repeated attempts in the later middle ages to elevate national secular conflicts into holy wars, analogous or, occasionally, synonymous with crusading: monarchical holiness; the identification of king and nation; the providential destiny of a specially favoured patria; the consequent perfidy and evil of that nation’s enemies; the translation of crusade and holy war privileges to lay warfare; the promise of salvation; and the testing of unrelated political contests against the requirements of the recovery of the Holy Land. The success of such efforts profoundly affected western political culture and marked one of the most significant of the crusade’s legacies to succeeding generations.
The translation of crusading ideology and emotion to national conflicts in some senses saw a resurrection of the early medieval sanctified patriotism that had surrounded Christian rulers such as Charlemagne. However, the concept of holy war was now allied with stronger central control by governments of society and social ideas. The increasingly high costs of warfare and the techniques of centralized fiscal exploitation they provoked gave rulers added authority. Although the church had in many instances led the way in experimenting with techniques of public taxation and supplying justification for it, lay power benefited most, witnessed across Europe in England, France, Iberia, fifteenth-century Burgundy, the German regional principalities and the Italian city states. Political theory and propaganda followed suit. The fusion of the ruler and the ruled became crucial to developments in political identity, the lay power personifying or representing the people or nation. Two associated phenomena supported this creation of self-sufficient and self-regarding states: the perception of a people as Elect, whose public business was therefore meritorious on a transcendent not just temporal plane; and the assumption by rulers of what has been called a religion of monarchy, which both copied and usurped traditional ecclesiastical presentations of authority.
The scope for crusading to assume a national guise was thus greatly increased. The process could operate in three ways: through national pride in past involvement in crusades; formal crusades fought for national interests; and the elevation of the patria itself into a Holy Land, its defence being sanctioned by God and the Scriptures. Underpinning such a transformation lay the sacralization of war, its destinations and its participants inherent in crusading ideas and practices. Objects of crusading aggression were consistently couched in spiritual terms of the recovery of the lands of Christ (Palestine), His Mother (Livonia) or His disciples, such as James (Iberia) or Peter (any region extended papal protection or lordship, for example Prussia). By extension, the lands whence crusaders came assumed something of the numinous quality of the holy enterprise. As the universal homeland of these New Israelites or Maccabees, Christendom (Christianitas) became fragmented into distinct kingdoms, principalities or cities, patriae, these appropriated to themselves the concept of a Holy Land and the Old Testament images of the Chosen People. The consequent habit of equating national ambition with universal good formed a prominent part of the emergence of the nation state.70
In some instances, the link between traditional crusading and national crusades was immediate and direct. Although an idea that dated back at least to Urban II in the late eleventh century,71 from the fourteenth, the idea of defensive bastions of Christianity (antemurales) standing on the frontier with the infidel was widely adopted along the borders with the Ottomans, from Poland and Hungary to the Adriatic. Apparently engaged in constant holy war, local rulers promoted national exceptionalism – and their own authority – though crusading imagery and the sacralization of their realms. Away from the frontline, myths and rituals of civic or national identity, as in Pisa, Genoa or Venice, proudly proclaiming their involvement in eastern crusades in public art, literature and municipal ceremonial. In Florence, crusading reinforced civic exceptionalism. The banner borne by Florentines at Damietta in 1219 became a revered relic in the church of San Giovanni. Florence repeatedly refurbished its crusade credentials, even responding positively, if cautiously, to Pius II’s crusade appeal in 1463–4. This context of the crusade helping define distinctive civic identity and virtue probably helped the radical evangelist Girolamo Savonarola, who dominated Florence between 1494 and 1498, when he declared the city to be a New Jerusalem.72 Although cities such as Florence or Venice may have been exceptional in the scale of crusade imagery on display, similar attention to their crusading past came from northern cities such as London or Cologne.
A parallel trend can be observed in the parade of canonized crusaders that adorned the royal genealogies of Europe: Charlemagne, universally regarded as a proto-crusader (canonized in 1166); Eric IX of Sweden (d. 1160; canonized 1167); Ladislas of Hungary (d. 1095; canonized 1192); Ferdinand III of Castile (d. 1252, whose cult was apparent soon after his death, even though he was officially canonized only in 1671); and, most famously, Louis IX of France (d. 1270; canonized 1297). Local secular ‘saints’ could be made out of crusader heroes, such as James of Avesnes, killed at Arsuf in 1191, or William Longspee, cut down at Mansourah in 1250.73 In the absence of sanctified crusaders, local saints could be also pressed into service, such as Thomas Becket, whose shade was regularly invoked by Englishmen during the Third Crusade and who gave his name to a religious, briefly military, order at Acre. Such figures appeared as distinctively national or regional figures, the kings among them materially aiding the assertion of local royal dynasticism, all attaching an aura of sanctity to cities, regions or nations, helping mould a collective identity.
This incorporation of public religion, if not necessarily overt crusading, into assumptions of national self-image was reflected in the adoption across Europe of the cross as a national symbol, banner or uniform. It provided the sign of the Florentine popolo. Danish kings adopted the cross for their symbol around 1200. As already seen, at the battle of Evesham in Worcestershire in 1265, facing rebels wearing white crusader crosses, the royalists wore red ones. In the fourteenth century the red cross became the emblem of English troops in France and Spain and the national symbol, branded as the cross of St George. Apparently, some rebels during the so-called Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 wore them. Yet iconographically red crosses remained associated with crusading, worn by crusaders in Prussia, on Despenser’s crusade in 1383 and against the Hussites in the 1420s.74 This elision of reference may not have been accidental. One description of Edward I of England’s 1300 campaign against the Scots to Annandale and Carlaverock talked of him signing himself and his troops ‘with the Lord’s Cross’, an unmistakable gesture in a war that observers on both sides equated with a holy war. In similar vein, Henry Knighton, a canon of Leicester, looking back from the 1390s on the French wars a generation earlier, depicted the English before the battle of Poitiers (1356) signing themselves ‘with the Holy Cross’.75 Overtones of holy war were convenient for Edward III, accused by many as responsible for scuppering the crusade plans of the 1330s and the first English king since Stephen not to take the cross for the Holy Land.
The most consistent hijack of the crusade for national objectives came from the French. By 1300, crusading had been claimed almost as a national prerogative, an enterprise in which the king of France held the major shareholding. A lavish illuminated manuscript produced at Acre c.1280 shows Louis IX attacking Damietta in 1249, the king and his followers emblazoned with the royal emblem of the fleur de lis. There is not a cross in sight.76 Fashioned at the French royal court by a coalition of xenophobic clergy and smooth Roman lawyers, the ideologies of the crusade and the providential destiny of France and its monarch were woven into a legal imperialism backed by a form of apocalyptic royal, hence national, messianism. The argument deployed against the Flemish above was typical. The harnessing of the crusade semiotics of the Old Testament Israelites and Maccabees extended the transformation of a land of crusaders into a Holy Land in its own right. At least diplomatically, some were convinced. In 1311, Pope Clement V – a Frenchman from Gascony – declared: ‘Just as the Israelites are known to have granted the Lord’s inheritance by the election of Heaven, to perform the hidden wishes of God, so the kingdom of France has been chosen as the lord’s special people.’77 This
