21. Louis IX of France captures Damietta, June 1249, from a manuscript produced at Acre
22. Outremer’s nemesis: Mamluk warriors training.
23. Outremer’s nemesis: a Turkish cavalry squadron.
24. The battle of La Forbie, October 1244: a Khwarazmian and Egyptian army annihilate a Frankish- Damascene force; see p. 771.
25. Matthew Paris imagines the Mongols as cannibalistic savages,
26. The fall of Tripoli to the Mamluks, April 1289; see p. 817.
27. Charles V of France entertains Charles IV of Germany during a banquet in Paris in 1378 with a lavish show of the siege of Jerusalem of 1099, possibly stage-managed by Philip of Mezieres, perhaps the figure in black shown in the left foreground; see p. 887.
28. Andrea Bonaiuti’s fresco ‘The Church Militant’ in the Spanish Chapel, St Maria Novella, Florence, portraying the leading lights in crusading at the time (
29. The failed Ottoman Turkish siege of Rhodes, 1480.
30. Mehmed II the Conqueror (1451–81) by Gentile Bellini, 1480/81.
31. The battle of Lepanto, 1571; see pp. 903–4.
Popes today do not summon crusades. There are a number of reasons for this. One part of Christendom decisively rejected the theology behind the medieval wars of the cross in the sixteenth century. The Roman Catholic church itself refined its own teaching to modify its penitential practices in ways that undermined the fiscal and liturgical accoutrements of later medieval crusading. Crusade ideology had hardly developed since Innocent III. Based essentially on patristic and scholastic theology – and loosely at that – its justification looked increasingly awkward in the face of sixteenth-century scriptural theology and attacks founded on the New Testament. The increasing interiorization of faith, shared to some degree by all sides of the major confessional divides, militated against certain of the showier forms of medieval devotion that crusading exemplified, the increasingly controversial sale of indulgences merely being the most notorious. Men could and did still take the cross, perhaps even into the eighteenth century against Turks and Barbary pirates. The war of the Holy League against the Ottomans, 1684–99, was probably the last formal crusade. But these gestures were divorced from the communal round of devotional practices or cultural aesthetics. Although in times of crisis, such as the First World War, over-excited prelates can still urge their congregations to fight the good temporal as well as spiritual fight, and while the secular legalism of just war continues to attract advocates, most non-literalist Christian denominations now shun the tradition of holy war, some even pretending it was a kind of aberration. In the later twentieth century, the Roman Catholic church was careful not to embrace potentially violent (and certainly radical) theologies, such as Liberation Theology. John Paul II even apologized to victims of the crusades. The wars of the cross have become like a lingering bad smell in a lavishly refurbished stately home.
The protean development of the crusade as a weapon of policy and a mechanism of redemption – as was said of a departing crusader in 1197, ‘to fight Saracens visible and invisible’–inevitably created diverse responses. The idea that the crusade ‘declined’ through growing unpopularity makes little conceptual or historical sense. Certain aspects of crusading – for example the sale of indulgences and the Italian wars – attracted criticism. But so did the inaction of western European rulers in the face of the loss of the Holy Land and the advance of the Turks. Neither led to the abandonment of the ideological foundations of wars of the cross. Indulgences continued to be bought. Crusading privileges usually managed to find some takers whatever the cause. Evidence of medieval public opinion is never neutral; to ignore the crusades’ adherents is as absurd as to discount their critics. Crusading certainly did not decay through lack of interest. More damaging to its support as a way of conducting business were changing attitudes conditioned by external forces, such as the decline in the acceptance of the moral authority of the papacy, a phenomenon noticed by popes as much as by their critics in the fifteenth century. As crusading had always stood as part of the edifice of papal pretentions, their fates were intimately bound together. In a secular context, the gradual transformation from the late fifteenth century of military aristocrats from knights to officers, from warriors to gentlemen, a long process contingent on changing educational habits, social conditions, the requirements of the state and the conduct of war, left many of the traditional chivalric impulses redundant. Just as full plate armour became increasingly a matter of social prestige and show in the seventeenth century, so did the paraphernalia of crusading.
The crusade did not disappear from European culture because it was discredited but because the religious and social value systems that had sustained it were abandoned. Pragmatically, as a way of managing international relations it no longer suited the politics, diplomacy and war of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This was not due to a moral failure, still less to any lack of ‘modernity’; the most supposedly ‘advanced’ societies of the fifteenth century, the city states of Italy or the urban commercial communities of Low Countries, were enthusiasts, as were many humanist scholars. Yet, as the secular state captured many of the cultural functions previously centred on a religious vision of the world, in particular attitudes to civic, social and national identity, crusading, distinctive because of its essentially spiritual dimension, could seem misplaced. Even this was not inevitable; Habsburg Spain succeeded in integrating the crusade mentality into the burgeoning of new state power in the sixteenth century. However, by then crusading had increasingly become the preserve of antiquarians and confessional sectarians. Ways of looking at the world changed. Protestant though he was, Richard Hakluyt included a version of Mandeville’s
Fundamentally, the western Christian church lost its attempt to control civil society. In justice as well as government, secular authority emerged as the arbiter, guardian and enforcer of law. The tensions of church and state that had existed throughout the high and later middle ages were resolved by the triumph of the temporal state and the subservience of the Christian churches to lay power. Church jurisdiction remained, distinct yet absorbed into the public polity, in Protestant as well as Roman Catholic states of Europe, for example in the survival of church courts dealing with moral and testamentary issues. Religion hardly ceased to occupy a central, at times determinant, role in society. The Vatican City remains a church state – but it is the only one in Europe. Crusading had always been a public civic activity, a war, not just a prayer or a penance. With the failure of the papacy’s long theocratic experiment, and as regional churches and churchmen lost their hold on the terms of political discourse, warfare became subject to secular rules and laws as well as leadership. By the early seventeenth century, theorists such as Gentili and Grotius elaborated international laws of war that explicitly discounted religion as sufficient just cause. This reflected the sanction of political events; the sixteenth-century French alliance with the Ottomans; the 1555 agreement at Augsburg accepting that the religion of each German principality be determined by that of its
