Gerald’s account. The concentration on the figure, passion and redemptive nature of Christ Crucified within the mass provided the closest association with the aims of crusade sermons and the rituals for adopting the cross. More precisely, a sermon delivered immediately after the mass invited audiences to choose to follow or reject Christ in the very presence of His body and blood, the consecrated and, as was increasingly believed, transubstantiated elements of the Eucharist. (The doctrine of transubstantiation, insisting on the real presence of Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist, while previously widely accepted by academics and others, only became the official teaching of the Roman Catholic church at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.) Where no mass preceded the preaching, as on Anglesey on 11 April, the General Confession was recited, as it had been at Clermont in 1095. For some recruits, such as a group of criminals – ‘robbers, highwaymen and murderers’ – at Usk, adopting the cross was likened to a form of conversion.40 An aura of sanctity, at least in remembrance, attended the expedition, Gerald recording a number of miracles of healing associated with spots where the cross had been preached as well as littering his narrative with miraculous and uplifting anecdotes.41
Although Gerald omitted any details of the content of his or the archbishop’s sermons, as opposed to their delivery, something of their nature may be drawn from contemporary tracts, such as those by Peter of Blois and the papal legate Henry of Albano. Their form is suggested by Gerald’s description of his address at Haverfordwest, which employed repeated climaxes to stir his audience into successive waves of enthusiasm. A generation later, an English preaching manual, known as the Ordinatio de predicatione Sancti Crucis in Angliae (The Ordinance for Preaching the Holy Cross in England, c.1216), indicated how this effect was achieved. Exempla were used liberally to attract the audience’s attention, sometimes through alarming moral stories, such as the nasty one used by Gerald of the mother who overlay and smothered her beloved little son as God’s punishment for trying to prevent her husband joining the crusade. Complex theology was conveyed through simple images, metaphors and references to familiar cults, such as that of the Virgin Mary, or even parallels with everyday life. In the Ordinatio the cross is portrayed as confirming salvation ‘as if by charter’, just like any ordinary land deal, except that the estate was ‘the inheritance of Christ’. Much of the material for sermons, as for propaganda pamphlets, comprised a series of meditations on the allegorical significance of Christ, the cross, the Crucifixion, the paradox of life though death, the snares of fleshly delight and the spiritual rewards of the crucesignatus. Unlike many later sermon collections, the English Ordinatio includes a model address, ‘the Call to Men to Take the Cross’, clearly designed for a lay audience: the punchlines of some of its exempla, drawn from edifying exploits of earlier crusaders, are in the French vernacular. The sermon is structured around a single, simple message, repeated in a variety of different ways and punctuated by variants on the traditional crusade refrain ‘Arise, therefore, take up my (sic) cross and follow me’ (Matthew 16:24) modified to fit the preceding exemplum. Thus, the dreadful pun of the Englishman Hugh of Beauchamp’s supposed last words on the field of Hattin, ‘Although my name is Beauchamp, I was never in beau champ (i.e. paradise) until today’, is followed by the preacher’s exhortation ‘Arise so that you may come to the beau champ.’42 Gerald of Wales’s Haverfordwest sermon probably employed very similar techniques. Each anecdote and refrain feeds a central message, the repetition of phrases, especially if accompanied by audience responses, inducing an almost trance-like enthusiasm in large congregations.
Another crucesignatus of 1188–9, the English royal official and chronicler Roger of Howden, who, unlike Gerald, actually went to the Holy Land, recorded exactly such a populist poetical sermon- lament devised by a cleric, Berthier of Orleans, who may possibly be identified with a clerk working at the French court in Philip II’s chancery. The verses confirm the ubiquity of the message being drummed into audiences across Christendom. Familiar themes are rehearsed: vengeance for the insult to Christ; an attack on soft-living; the loss of the True Cross, ‘the ark of the New Testament’; the obligation on believers to recover it; the association with the Eucharistic sacrifice; the debt laid up by the Redeemer’s Crucifixion; the call to ‘take up your cross’. At each separate stage in the poem-sermon comes the refrain: ‘The wood of the cross, the banner of the chief, the army follows, which has never given way, but has gone before in the strength of the Holy Spirit.’43 The psychological impact of such relentless propaganda cannot be measured, but was widely felt. The same moral tone of shame, self-sacrifice and chivalry directed on the gaining of paradise, not earthly reward, suffuses a song composed in 1188 or 1189 by Conon of Bethune, an important Picard lord who fought on both the Third and Fourth Crusades.44 Otho of Trazegnies in Hainault, in making a pious donation to his local monastery prior to embarking for the east, declared his journey was ‘to avenge the insult to God’.45 However delivered, the message was received.
RECRUITMENT AND FINANCE
Recruitment and finance formed part of a single process of converting enthusiasm into action. The assemblies at Geddington in February and Paris in March 1188 discussed arrangements for taking the cross and the administration of the Saladin Tithe together. The source of funding influenced the construction of the armies. In Germany, Frederick tried to insist that each crusader should pay his own way, placing the emphasis for organizing recruitment and recruits firmly in the hands of local magnates and urban communities beyond the king’s own extensive military entourage, for which he paid out of his own resources, possibly supplemented by a tax on Jews and a form of hearth tax levied on royal lands.46 However, the bulk of his huge force, which some estimated at 20,000 knights and 80,000 infantry, was not raised or funded directly by the crown, perhaps a factor in its disintegration when Frederick himself died before the Holy Land was reached. Similarly, the failure of Philip II of France to collect the Saladin Tithe and his limited authority outside his own royal lands restricted his personal contingent to the 2,000 knights and squires for whom he negotiated a transport contract with Genoa in 1190. The rest of the large French contribution came from provincial nobles and other lords. By contrast, Richard I’s access to large sums from the Saladin Tithe and his own fundraising ploys in 1189–90 allowed him to command a royal army numbering perhaps 6,000, while subsidizing a fleet of over 100 ships that may have carried almost 9,000 soldiers and sailors, some of whom, at least, were in the king’s direct pay, ‘retained’, as one of Richard’s officials later put it.47 Just as an English expatriate in France, Ralph Niger, noted the difference in the nature and level of fundraising between the German and western monarchs, so a German observer paid tribute to the lavish scale of the English king’s preparations and finances.48 The ability before and during any crusade campaign to convert what in theory constituted a volunteer army into a paid or retained force added enormously to its cohesion and the authority of the paymaster. Philip II increased his hold over the disparate French contingents at Messina at Christmas 1190 when he provided large subsidies to the duke of Burgundy (1,000 marks) and the count of Nevers (600 marks). On arrival in the Holy Land in 1191 Richard I and Philip II competed in offering wages to unattached troops, Richard’s deeper pockets winning the day. This secured Richard’s dominance of the ensuing Palestine campaign, for which he financially bailed out the count of Champagne and slipped 5,000 marks to the commander of the remaining French troops, Duke Hugh of Burgundy.49
The Saladin Tithe exerted another direct impact on patterns of recruitment. As the tax was designed to aid crucesignati, they were exempt. Hearing this, claimed Roger of Howden, himself a crucesignatus, ‘all the rich men of his (Henry II’s) lands, both clergy and laity, rushed in crowds to take the cross’.50 In addition to the now customary crusader privileges, they could expect not just the tax exemption but also the proceeds from their non-crusading vassals and tenants. These could be lucrative and consequently could become subject to legal dispute. An East Anglian crucesignatus, Robert of Cokefield, unsuccessfully tried to appropriate the tithe from two manors he held as a life tenant from the abbey of Bury St Edmunds. The abbot may have been especially alert to the legal niceties as he had been refused permission to take the cross in February 1188 by Henry II despite appearing before the king brandishing a cloth cross, needle and thread.51 For the non-crusader, the Saladin Tithe was bitterly resented, partly because of its unprecedented rate of 10 per cent on movables (i.e. surplus income after essentials had been paid for). Partly, too, because it fell equally on church as on lay lands, challenging vociferous ecclesiastical sensitivities over immunities and separation from the secular state. Given the lack of immediate moves to set off for the east, some taxpayers suspected the eagerness of the habitually rapacious Angevin government to collect the tax; it was no coincidence that the Saladin Tithe provided a model for subsequent lucrative extraordinary taxes. Collectors’ misappropriation and individual peculation left a sour taste.52
In most regions of Europe, no such direct incentive existed. Even in France, Philip II, despite gaining
