Crusade promotion employed a full range of senses, involving speaking, listening, seeing, singing, reading, performing and touching. The written word was integral. There were official instructions, news-sheets, letters, pamphlets, polemics, hagiographies, treatises, handbooks, chronicles, poems and songs. There were also the records of administration: enrolled lists of recruits; accounts; schedules of pay; contracts; and wills. Oratory and literature were complemented by painting, sculpture, drama, ritual and liturgy. While taste does not seem to have featured, the crosses handed out were touched by giver and receiver, both probably shrouded in clouds of incense. Propaganda knew few boundaries: formal sermons and private chat; newsletters; travelling circuses; hymns; love songs; eloquence; bullying; the bush telegraph of commerce and international religious corporations; local gossips; magnificent public ceremonies; parish harvest festivals; royal courts; great cathedrals; counting houses; marketplaces. Persuasion involved high art and low humour; stained glass and tattoos; orators and mountebanks; saints and stand-ups; intense emotion and cheap bribery; following Christ and follow my leader.
Publicity was not random. The First Crusade set the pattern and exposed the difficulties. Urban II arranged a coherent campaign to promote the call to arms, co-ordinate propaganda and manage the politics and diplomacy of leadership. Yet he failed to control recruitment or conduct. Although his fourteen-month tour of France and wider correspondence suggest he hoped for a substantial response, the eventual size, diversity and nature of recruitment dwarfed expectations, challenging central planning. This administrative gulf remained for most subsequent international crusades. Local circumstances determined responses in each region. Nonetheless, the ambition to present a defined prospectus for war met with considerable and consistent success in what constituted the first practical attempt to implement policy on an international scale in western Europe since the heyday of the Carolingian empire three centuries earlier.1
ASSEMBLIES
Combining promotion, consultation and consent, from the start assemblies provided the most convenient focus for organization, such as the substantial Church councils of Piacenza and Clermont, to which secular lords were invited (although few went), to more overtly secular conferences, such as that held in Paris in February 1096 by Philip I of France.2 Shadowed by smaller regional gatherings, they constituted normal medieval methods of conducting public business. In the absence of rapid communications and subordinate local bureaucracies, compliance with any general political initiative – most obviously decisions to go to war – relied on the authority that only came from direct contact with those most concerned. Although later dressed up in the vestments of Roman Law tags (such as ‘Quod omnes tangit ab omnibus approbetur’, ‘What touches all should be approved by all’), the requirement on rulers to obtain the counsel, consent and assistance of their chief associates was embedded in long custom and practice across Latin Christendom.3 Crusading theoretically transcended customary obligations of lordship and service, so seeking the widest approval and co-operation assumed even greater importance.
Assemblies publicized the cause in ceremonial display and rhetorical exhortation while acting as a stage for diplomacy, political negotiation and fiscal bargaining. Before the Second Crusade, assemblies in 1146 at Vezelay at Easter and Speyer at Christmas provided a platform for Bernard of Clairvaux’s preaching, Cross-taking by the French and German nobilities and opportunities for both Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany to assert political leadership. The same combination of preaching and politics informed the so-called Court of Christ held at Mainz under the auspices of Frederick I Barbarossa in March 1188 at the start of the Third Crusade. The conference held at Gisors in the Vexin between Normandy and the Île-de-France in January 1188 finessed the reconciliation of the kings of France and England and the count of Flanders under the auspices of taking the Cross. Henry II of England used a council at Geddington in Northamptonshire a few weeks later to announce preaching and details of the Saladin Tithe, an income tax on non-crucesignati to pay for the expedition. In a distinct reminder of the 1090s’ pattern, the lack of royal involvement in the Fourth Crusade (only King Imre of Hungary apparently pledged to go in 1200, although never did) was reflected in the succession of regional gatherings, at tournaments or religious festivals, that saw Cross-taking, as at Ecry-sur-Aisne on Advent Sunday 1199 or Bruges on Ash Wednesday 1200, or that forged alliances and planned action, as at Soissons and Compiègne in the summer of 1201. The preaching role of the Cistercians made their General Chapter meetings in 1198 and 1201 natural foci of support for the crusade; on both occasions, in the presence of leading lay crusaders, the charismatic preacher Fulk of Neuilly played a central role.4
While the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 authorized a tax to be levied on Church property and a council held in Paris in March 1215 by Philip II modified crusaders’ legal immunities, with preaching increasingly devolved on to local panels (and, from the 1230s, the friars), the need for grand deliberative assemblies became less urgent. Nonetheless, they persisted as rituals of commitment and common endeavour. The tradition of 1215 was maintained in Church councils of Lyons in 1245 and 1274 and Vienne in 1311–12 providing the framework for propaganda and finance. Lay attendance at these councils could be patchy; only one king, James I of Aragon, attended Lyons in 1274, although ambassadors from other monarchs were there. Cross-taking by great men still provided a ceremonial context for preaching, just as conferences to discuss taxation kept the crusade issues in the public eye. However, the Westminster parliament of 1270, which granted a lay tax for the crusade of the future Edward I, while representing a significant confirmation of the role of the knights in matters of general taxation, appears a long way from the Council of Clermont.5 Stylish and stylized crusade jamborees punctuated the later Middle Ages: the French Cross-taking festivals of Philip IV (1313) or Philip VI ( 1333 ); the papal crusade summit meetings of the 1360s; the Feast and Vow of the Pheasant at Lille and the conference at Frankfurt in 1454 in response to the fall of Constantinople the year before; or Pius II’s conference at Mantua in 1459. These were replicated locally across Latin Christendom, although more as familiar ceremonies of communal identity than as serious precursors to military action.6
Although the famous mid-thirteenth-century crusade preacher Humbert of Romans expressed purist suspicion of declaiming in ‘public places and crossroads where men carry on business’, practice determined otherwise. The friars instructed to preach the Cross in the diocese of York in 1291 were sensibly directed to visit places with crowds.7 Whether watching Bernard of Clairvaux in the shadow of the great church at Vézelay or listening to a Franciscan friar proclaiming the Cross in the parish church at Pocklington in the East Riding of Yorkshire almost a century and a half later, such gatherings continued to be crusading’s public platform.
LEGATES AND PREACHERS
To impose order on the planning process, Urban II and his successors used surrogates – messengers, diplomats and preachers. Urban despatched legates to north Italy, Normandy and England as locals could not always be relied on. During a second wave of recruitment in 1099–1100 Archbishop Anselm of Bovisio in Milan found local clerical leaders reluctant to preach the Cross themselves.8 Some legates and preachers were expected to accompany those they recruited, as did Peter the Hermit in 1096 and archbishops Hugh of Die and Anselm himself in 1101. The model campaign legate was Adhemar, bishop of Le Puy. He had been one of the first French clerics to be consulted by Urban in the summer of 1095, was first to take the Cross at Clermont, and was formally designated by the pope as his representative for the projected campaign. Adhemar was attached to the army of the count of Toulouse.9 Clerics in other contingents appear to have received some sort of papal licence or approval.10 Such delegation provided the only possible means of even notional control.
This could prove elusive. Bernard of Clairvaux did not accompany the Second Crusade, and took it upon himself to appoint others to preach in distant regions such as Brittany, Bohemia and Austria. By contrast, Cardinal Bishop Theodwin of Santa Rufina, a papal insider who had been closely involved in pre-crusade diplomacy, was appointed legate to the German army. Yet he and the legate assigned to the French army, the retiring, donnish Cardinal Guido of San Grisogono, cut somewhat dim figures on the crusade itself, in contrast to the squabbling French bishops Arnulf of Lisieux and the acerbic Godfrey of Langres, who both claimed some sort of legatine authority, according to one gossipy commentator, as an excuse to line their own pockets by fleecing the sick and dying by selling absolutions. Godfrey insisted on his Cistercian credentials and the delegated authority of St Bernard. The different chains of authority and the passive role observers ascribed to Pope Eugenius III suggest an element of improvisation and a fragile chain of command.11 Notoriously, when Radulph, yet another Cistercian, attracted vigorous crowds and golden opinions with his anti-Jewish demagoguery in the Rhineland in 1146, he was disciplined but only for being unlicensed.12
Difficulties of control increased as new fronts for wars of the Cross opened and crusade preaching became endemic. Unlicensed charlatans exploited the new market in preaching. With the proliferation of wars of the Cross, preaching campaigns overlapped in time and place, muddying the separate appeals and attracting profiteering sharks selling crusade vow redemptions, instigated during the Fifth Crusade from 1213.13 These problems arose from a system of increasing regulation developed from the time of the Third Crusade. Alongside the papal legates such as Cardinal Henry of Albano, who died before the expedition embarked, or Joscius, archbishop of Tyre, who had brought the bad news from Palestine, local bishops were recruited to preach the Cross on a regional basis, such as Bishop Henry of Strasburg in Germany or Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury in England and Wales, prefiguring the elaborate preaching networks of the thirteenth century. However, despite the unquestioned success of propaganda in 1187–90, the scale of the operation and response outstripped the meagre administrative resources of the papacy and regional dioceses. Before the arrival of any official legate or preacher, Count Richard of Poitou, the future Richard I of England, took the Cross in November 1187. Judging by his father’s fury, this had not been officially co-ordinated.14 Archbishop Baldwin found his preaching in Wales pre-empted by local initiatives. Surviving rites for taking the Cross show marked regional variations indicating the prevalence and force of local response rather than central direction, such diversity being common in the medieval western Church.15
Launching the Fourth Crusade in 1198, Innocent III addressed some of the difficulties. In addition to two chief legates, he authorized local archbishops and bishops to organize preaching in their regions, even identifying individuals to help them, such as, in the diocese of York, Roger Vacarius, the veteran academic who had introduced Roman Law into the English higher academic curriculum. In each province preachers were to recruit the aid of a Templar and a Hospitaller, living symbols of the Holy Land conflict and, more helpfully, members of international organizations with access to revenues and credit. Innocent recruited the celebrity preacher Fulk of Neuilly, whose explicit terms of his appointment avoided the uncertainties surrounding Bernard of Clairvaux’s powers fifty years earlier.16 Once again co-ordination proved elusive. When Abbot Martin of Pairis preached at Basel early in 1201 he was duplicating the work a year earlier of the local bishop, and his sermon, as recorded, ignored Innocent’s 1198 crusade bull beyond the central offer of eternal salvation.17 Further problems included allegations of embezzlement levelled against Fulk of Neuilly, exposing a tension between preachers’ rejection of materialism and their de facto role as alms-collectors. The charges may have been genuine. Either way, Fulk’s example was soon used to emphasize the need for preachers to live blameless lives.18 The crusade’s puritan dimension, the conversion of the faithful to a more holy life, could obscure the extraction of military and material support. The Cistercian Abbot Eustace of St Germer de Fly in Picardy, recruited by Fulk of Neuilly to preach in England, was chiefly remembered there for his promotion of the need to observe the Sabbath and hostility to commercial malpractice, not his crusade sermons.19 Contradictions between words and deeds haunted Innocent Ill’s instructions to preachers in 1213.20 The theme was echoed in later preaching manuals. ‘Nor should the preacher’s own life be out of harmony with his words’ insisted the Dominican crusade preacher Humbert of Romans (c. 1200–1277). Earlier (c.1221–2), Thomas of Chobham (c.1160–1233/6) condemned financial hypocrisy of the sort insinuated against Fulk of Neuilly. He warned against sermons that solicited donations without explicit spiritual purpose and the consequent ‘suspicion of greed’ (suspicio avarite).21 Legates as well as messages could become confused. Cardinal Peter Capuano provided the classic example. In 1202, he appeasingly acquiesced in the crusaders’ attack on the Christian Dalmatian city of Zara, in the face of papal prohibition. He then contrived to be absent in the Holy Land during the crucial months surrounding the actual capture of Zara and the diversion to Constantinople in 1203–4. A year later, on his own initiative, he absolved the crusaders in Greece of their remaining vows to proceed to Jerusalem, effectively cancelling the crusade. Innocent was incandescent but impotent.22
By the time a new campaign was proclaimed in 1213, Innocent III had become a veteran of promoting crusades. Papal-sponsored wars against political enemies in Italy and Sicily (in 1199), the Almohads in Spain (1212) and heretics in Languedoc (from 1209) honed both rhetoric and organization. The consequences of undisciplined crusade propaganda were evident in the Children’s Crusade of 1212, a response to the wide publicity given to the general perception of Christendom in danger (from Moors and heretics), to Christian failure in the east, and to the need for social humility and moral reform.23 For Innocent’s new eastern crusade, the mechanisms employed for the Third and Fourth Crusades were expanded and systematized. Legates on the old model were appointed, as in France, or local archbishops or bishops were relied upon, as in Hungary, Denmark and Sweden. The pope himself took responsibility for Italy. Elsewhere, teams of regional clergy, not necessarily bishops, were appointed, empowered to recruit between four and six additional preachers. To avoid scandal, preachers were selected for their supposed honesty, integrity and faith. They were to refuse all gifts, live simply and accept only modest hospitality. All donations were to be directed to a religious house or church. Preaching was to adhere to the 1213 crusading bull Quia Maior. Questions arising from papal instructions or the offered privileges were to be referred directly to the pope.24
Innocent recruited some of the leading intellectuals and publicists of the day. Many, like the pope himself, were alumni of the University of Paris, the leading centre for the study of pastoral theology and of the application of Christian ethics to practical, temporal experience. The influence of Paris-trained experts on thirteenth-century preaching is hard to exaggerate. Some of those available to Innocent, like the Englishman Robert Curzon, the Frenchman James of Vitry or the German Oliver of Paderborn, were teachers and writers who went on to become cardinals. The Italian Cardinal Ugolino, Innocent’s nephew, who preached and raised funds across northern Italy, became Pope Gregory IX (1227–41).25 The presence of these highly educated intellectuals on preaching teams and papal legations pointed to a close association between crusading and prevailing academic developments in western Europe. The so-called Scholastic method of enquiry that had been articulated during the twelfth century, particularly in the cathedral schools and universities of France and Italy, sought to impose a structured approach to understanding God and His creation. Enquiry led to truth through the study and reconciliation of contrasting ideas, explanations and authorities in theology, law and philosophy: reason applied to revelation. The incorporation of Aristotelian philosophy and natural science into the western curriculum from the later twelfth century opened new, wide horizons, not least in logic and natural science. This expansion of the tools of rational enquiry affected crusading and its presentation, at least by and to social and intellectual elites. Crusading’s combination of moral theology, pastoral evangelism, Christian action and providential eschatology rendered it an awkward legal category. The new intellectual fashion, represented by the preachers of the Fifth Crusade, sought to corral the concept of crusade away from free-ranging divinely inspired holy violence into a reasoned structure of legal sanction and natural law. Surviving thirteenth-century crusade sermons were rooted in measured, rational processes of argument.26
However, the ordered thought of academic orators did not always match messy reality. Preaching talent was neither limitless nor evenly spread. Constant referral to the pope for clarification of details imposed unsustainable pressure on the papal curia’s bureaucratic resources, let alone the pope’s stamina. The 1213 bulls had confirmed easier access to the fullest indulgence; instituted a panoply of special liturgical ceremonies; and introduced the element of redemption of vows for money and material assistance. Each generated lengthy correspondence. Letters to the curia by Gervase, abbot of Prémontré in 1216–17 alone showed how almost every aspect of the crusade – privileges, timing, money – incited argument, conflicting advice (including, unhelpfully, from Paris dons) and muddle. Local agents were frequently inadequate: ‘In other provinces I know few men whom I dare to recommend for carrying out this business.’ This problem did not go away. Experienced thirteenth-century operators repeatedly complained of low standards of preaching and preachers’ conduct.27 The diocesan structure failed to cope. Abbot Gervase was reduced to pleading for new instructions and fresh teams of papal agents to be despatched. From such entrenched confusion it is remarkable that crusaders embarked at all.
Crusade promoters assumed a variety of roles in addition to publicists, recruiting officers and fundraisers. During the Fifth Crusade they acted as arbiters in local disputes, the crusade providing a neutral context for resolving conflicts. Robert Curzon and his successor, Archbishop Simon of Tyre, did this in France, as did Cardinal Ugolino in north Italy, James of Vitry in Genoa and Oliver of Paderborn, then scholasticus of Cologne, in western Germany. This arbitration assisted recruitment. The legates who claimed to have recruited 30,000 crucesignati in Marseilles in 1223–4 had gone there to negotiate an end to the city’s excommunication over long-running disputes between the citizens and the local clergy and bishop.28 Such flexibility helped ensure that no decade and almost no region of western Europe failed to see some sort of crusade promotion in the thirteenth century. Preachers received pay and some had their own seals for preaching business.29 As crusading and its promotion developed into a familiar social institution, so it soon became associated with the new active force in thirteenth-century religion, the friars.
The two mendicant orders of St Francis and St Dominic were founded in the early years of the thirteenth century in the shadow of crusading.30 Francis of Assisi briefly joined the Fifth Crusade in Egypt in 1219 and was reported as having tried to convert the Sultan al-Kamil. Dominic Guzman had been a member of the papal legation preaching against heretics in Languedoc before and during the Albigensian Crusade. Committed to following the via apostolica in poverty and evangelizing, the friars channelled precisely the spiritual energy crusade planners sought to tap. Dominic’s order was known as the Order of Preachers. The centralized hierarchical structures of the orders and their direct allegiance to the pope fitted neatly with the administrative needs of crusade promotion. Committed to engaging with the secular world, friars became familiar presences in the streets of towns, rural highways and, increasingly, in the courts of the great as confessors and in the lecture halls of the universities as scholars. Since the Second Crusade, the monks of the Cistercian Order had taken the lead, individually and collectively, in providing an international network for crusade propaganda from southern France to the eastern Baltic. Now, the friars offered greater focus and flexibility as, unlike monks, evangelizing the laity was their raison d’etre.
The election of Innocent III’s nephew, veteran crusade recruiter and established patron of the new mendicant orders, Cardinal Ugolino, as Pope Gregory IX in 1227 established the friars as major figures in crusading.31 Starting with Frederick II of Germany’s long-delayed crusade in the mid-1220s, Dominicans, and later Franciscans, were employed to preach the Cross for campaigns across the arc of crusading: Spain (1228–9); the Baltic (from 1230); the Holy Land (from 1234); the Balkans and Greece (from 1234 and 1237); and against others designated enemies of the Church (e.g. the Stedinger peasants near Bremen in 1232–3 and the Hohenstaufen from the 1240s). Apart from the usual perils of preaching, such as audience indifference, scepticism or occasional hostility, the task could be dangerous. According to an admittedly hostile and distant witness, Matthew Paris of St Albans, two Franciscans were hanged by Frederick II in 1243 for fostering opposition to him.32 Paris said they were acting on the orders of superiors. The centralized command and provincial structures of both orders recommended them to organizers impatient with often recalcitrant diocesan clergy. Friars acted as specially commissioned individuals or in local teams. The extent of their annexation of crusade promotion may be gauged by the vitriol heaped on them personally and collectively by a writer such as Matthew Paris, who at some stages in his career regarded them as agents of an alien, grasping and exploitative power – i.e. the papacy – acting to the corporate disadvantage of the faithful in general and of his own Benedictine Order and monastery in particular. Many crusade legates were still drawn from traditional ecclesiastical backgrounds of monastery, university or court, such as Odo of Châteauroux, legate for Louis IX’s first crusade to the eastern Mediterranean (1248–54). However, direction of preaching passed from the Paris-trained secular clerics and future cardinals such as James of Vitry (1160/70–1240) or Oliver of Paderborn (c.1170–1227) or regional religious entrepreneurs such as Bishop Albert Buxhöven of Riga (c.1165–1229) to equally erudite and academically polished friars such as the Dominicans Humbert of Romans or the theologian and translator of Aristotle, Albert the Great (c.1206–80).
Such luminaries provided the vanguard of a preaching army, suitably equipped, and available more or less on demand. In 1252 Henry III of England asked the leaders of the mendicant orders in England to send to him in London a sufficient number of friars ‘who have knowledge of preaching the cross’.33 The friars were now the recognized experts. Humbert of Romans composed a special manual on how to preach the Cross. A generation later, in 1291, Archbishop Romanus of York wrote to all the Dominican priors and Franciscan wardens in his archdiocese requesting they send a certain number of friars to thirty-five named places to preach the Cross on the same day as the archbishop himself intended to deliver a crusade sermon in York Minster, 14 September, Exaltation of the Holy Cross Day, a festival especially suited to crusade appeals. By then it was assumed that general public sermonizing was a job for the friars. However, their near-monopoly did not necessarily produce higher standards of delivery or behaviour. Experts still railed against incompetence, and the image of the ascetic mendicant inspiring by example was rather compromised by the prosperous, well-fed reality. The provisions accounts of the troupe of forty-five preachers in northern France in 1265 reveal a rich, elite diet for men who, besides their gourmet meals, were simultaneously enjoying the temporal reward of pay and the spiritual benefit of the crusade indulgence. Nice work if you could get it.34
The use of the friars consolidated the clergy’s closed-shop control over crusade – as over other – preaching. In the early years, laymen occasionally presented the case. Famously Bohemond of Antioch, dominant figure of the First Crusade, conducted a celebrity lecture tour of France in 1106 to publicize his new crusading venture east. His address at Chartres was vividly recalled. In 1128, Hugh of Payens, founder of the Templars in Jerusalem a decade earlier but not an ordained priest, presented his own publicity for a new crusade tied to advertising his new order. At the Danish king’s Christmas court at Odense in 1187, on receipt of Gregory VIII’s crusade bull, it was left to the nobleman Esbern, brother of the archbishop of Lund, to rouse the assembly to remember the heroism of their Viking ancestors and commit to this new great adventure for God.35 By the early thirteenth century, however, such blurring of functions had become increasingly difficult. Preaching manuals were insistent that preaching could only be conducted by men in holy orders, certainly not by laymen or women. Humbert of Romans argued that preachers required knowledge of scripture, theology, history, hagiography and geography, attainments he reserved to those with formal higher education: male clerics.36
Women played active roles in religious and financial activities associated with crusade preparations and crusading in general: supporting (or, according to a favoured trope of misogynist preachers, hindering) their male partners and kindred; keeping crusaders’ families and lands intact; cherishing the memory of dynastic crusade involvement; taking the Cross; redeeming vows but also joining and even fighting on crusade. In stereotype and reality, women featured as grieving wives or lamenting widows; devout pilgrim crucesignatae; heroic camp followers; distracting sexual partners; and field camp prostitutes. The story of Adela of Blois bullying her husband Stephen into redeeming his desertion of the First Crusade by returning east was well known.37 Crusade preaching manuals specifically challenged love of family, with its obvious association with women, as an impediment to service of the Cross. Innocent III envisaged women as paymasters and even as leaders of troops on crusade. However, with the exception of the famous, well-connected mystic Abbess Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), consulted by the count of Flanders over his proposed crusade of 1176, it is difficult to find much evidence of women being shown as taking prominent parts in crusade planning, even though such politically active figures as Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1189–90 hardly left everything to the men.38 However, public preaching, as opposed to private persuasion, women did not do. They were absent from the crusade hustings, except as decorative or symbolic crucesignata (viz. Eleanor of Aquitaine’s presence on the platform at Vézelay in 1146, reassuring her Aquitainian vassals as much as supporting her husband Louis VII of France). There was more to this than habitual cultural misogyny. Laymen were similarly reduced to attend crusade sermons as clients, witnesses and guarantors, not as orators. Even the passionately committed, such as Louis IX of France, demonstrated their devotion in public but only as largely mute performers in choreographed clerical rituals.
WRITING
The laity was more actively engaged in using the written word. Writing was central to crusading from its inception as a medium of instruction, information, propaganda and memorialization. In the generation before the First Crusade, letters, pamphlets and tracts had provided key polemical weapons in the contest for control over the Church between popes and the German emperor. Now lost networks of written communication underpinned the extensive diplomatic exchanges and the summoning of the papal councils of Piacenza and Clermont in 1095. Although no official version of Pope Urban’s speech has survived, and the Clermont crusade decree boasts a very tenuous manuscript tradition, the other conciliar decrees were circulated in writing. Some of the previous ‘reports’ (relatione) of Muslim outrages Urban II referred to when writing to his supporters in Flanders in December 1095 had taken the form of letters, some to lay rulers.39 Among the earliest surviving groups of non-royal lay correspondence are the two surviving letters from the crusade leader Count Stephen of Blois to his wife Adela and those of another crusader, the Picard knight Anslem of Ribemont.40 Such people inhabited a literate culture.
At least one First Crusade general kept an account book or roll of his expenses to which he referred when arguing his case for a greater share of the spoils.41 It is improbable he was alone. Military commanders were likely to have been very conversant with the existence of written lists of followers, their obligations and their pay; written summonses date from at least Carolingian times at the turn of the eighth and ninth centuries. Detailed written recording in the Anglo-Norman realm, home to numerous crusaders led by Duke Robert of Normandy, survive from precisely the period of the First Crusade. These range from a list of ships and soldiers provided to William of Normandy by his nobles for his attack on England in 1066, probably compiled c. 1067–72 in the Norman abbey of Fécamp, to official government records such as Domesday Book or the Pipe Rolls of the Exchequer.42 The ubiquity of administrative writing at any propertied noble’s court partly explains the large-scale secular employment of clerics, not least on crusade. In the background of any aristocratic or military enterprise clerics compiled accounts and perhaps correspondence, tasks not necessarily demanding very high levels of literary skill.
As well as for record, information or instruction, writing was employed creatively. Urban II used letters to explain the nature, purpose and rewards of his new enterprise; to project a very precise image, to shape ideas and direct opinion. Recipients would be expected to further disseminate the contents in more copies, through oral presentation and, where necessary, translation, thus reaching audiences beyond the formally literate in Latin. Letters could act as propaganda in their own right. Peter the Hermit was said to have brandished one from the patriarch of Jerusalem describing Muslim atrocities in the Holy Places and calling for western aid. Peter’s letters, fictive in fact or fictional in the telling, fitted a pattern. Letters from crusaders were preserved and in at least one case, those of Anselm of Ribemont to Archbishop Manasses of Rheims, were circulated to encourage further recruitment for the crusade of 1100–1101 with their testimony of divine approval and Christian heroism. Manasses also cited letters from Pope Paschal II (1099–1118), Godfrey of Bouillon and the new Latin patriarch of Jerusalem to encourage new recruits and old backsliders to join up.43 Such techniques became standard.
If letters could supply basic texts for crusade evangelism, the role of a distinctive form of writing associated with the crusade is more uncertain. The First Crusade generated a uniquely extensive body of Latin and vernacular narrative accounts, prose histories, travelogues, war stories, gesta (literally ‘deeds’), verse epics, hymns and songs. Through such books, songs and hymns, so one northern French monk insisted in the 1130s, the story of the Jerusalem campaign was so well known that further detailed repetition was unnecessary.44 From an early stage, the First Crusaders realized the need to control the image of what they were doing. In addition to letters home, the earliest ‘official’ version of what had happened was composed under the auspices of the remaining leadership in September 1099, two months after the capture of the Holy City. This briefly related events from the siege of Nicaea in the spring of 1097 to the victory over the Egyptian relief army at Ascalon in August 1099. The message was repetitively clear: God’s hand in victory, without which there could be none; His displeasure at sin; the vindication of God’s retribution and the remission of sins. The crusade is carefully depicted as confirming the most central tenets of Christian polemic and belief; positive, tangible proof of God’s direct immanence, from overcoming numerical odds to booty gained; even the camels, sheep and cows supported God’s army; even the elements. The letter was probably employed to encourage subsequent recruits to help the fragile and vulnerable Latin conquests.45
Less obvious was the use of the equally artfully crafted longer narrative accounts that soon appeared from the pens or dictation of veterans and observers. Arguments that one of the earliest of the immediate accounts, the so-called Gesta Francorum, in some version dating from perhaps as early as 1099/1100, had been actively used to promote Bohemund of Antioch’s projected crusade of 1106, may not convince, but it clearly helped burnish his later reputation.46 As Bohemund himself demonstrated in his publicity tour of 1104–6, immediate public impact was best achieved theatrically, through speeches, sermons and ceremonies. Unlike letters, long texts such as the Gesta, even if subdivided, were unwieldy for direct publicity purposes. Their function was more to memorialize past heroics and to mould and move future opinion. The manuscript transmission, both of the earliest by self-styled veterans and of the more upmarket, re-fashioned versions that quickly followed, indicates their audience was far from demotic. Networks of transmission were courtly and monastic, initially Benedictine and later Cistercian, an order especially linked with promoting holy war at least from the 1120s onwards.47 These texts helped establish an elite vision of crusading to which laymen and clerics alike could and did refer. A knight from Vélay in the Auvergne, a veteran of the First Crusade, presented Louis VII of France, probably in 1137, with a de luxe illustrated copy of three Holy Land chronicles, including two by fellow witnesses to the Jerusalem journey, Fulcher of Chartres and Raymond of Aguilers. His intent was clear:
the countless eminent deeds and saying of our ancestors need to be committed with a worthy pen to an honourable memory . . . in this way you might look in this book with the eye of reason (rationis oculis) as if in a mirror at the images of your ancestors and you might follow their footsteps on the path of virtue.48
The written message of these texts – stressing Jerusalem and knightly piety – combined with visual and oral memorializing to create the cultural context within which subsequent crusade decisions were reached. In Louis’s case he took the Cross eight years later and, arguably, tried to conform to these ambient stereotypes. His chaplain, the monk Odo of Deuil, who wrote a detailed account of the first stage of the Second Crusade, certainly prepared for his task by reading narratives of 1095–9, taking one of them with him on the expedition.49
This targeted use of crusade chronicles as mines of information, sources for exhortation and models for emulation lent the practice of crusading a veneer of intellectual and ideological unity, precisely what organizers sought to achieve. Eugenius III couched his appeal for the Second Crusade in the context of the glorious memory of the First. The abbot of Schäftlarn in Bavaria presented Frederick Barbarossa with a very grand copy of Robert of Rheims’s account of the First Crusade, possibly in the context of the ‘court of Christ’ in March 1188 at which Frederick took the Cross for the Third Crusade. Robert of Rheims’s book was by far the most copied account of the First Crusade in the twelfth century and production of many of the surviving manuscripts appear to cluster around the recruiting and preaching campaigns of 1145–7 and 1188–90.50 Crusade sermons were saturated with references to crusade history. The influence of these first written chronicles on the crusade mentality of the time was evanescent, but on subsequent accounts of later expeditions it was profound. Thus James of Vitry, an eyewitness, described the misery in the crusade camp at Damietta in Egypt during the Fifth Crusade (1217–21) in the words of the twelfth-century writer William of Tyre’s account of the deprivations suffered on the First Crusade. William had borrowed his material from Albert of Aachen’s chronicle complied in the early twelfth century from the memories of veterans.51 The self-referential nature of the crusade enterprise was inescapable. This was as true for the increasing bulk of vernacular epics, poems and songs which coalesced into written versions in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as with the impressive corpus of Latin chronicles. Thirteenth-century crusade preachers were advised to play on the memory of heroic ancestors and to use stories from historical texts to enthuse their audiences.52 As well as being lived experiences, the crusades were defined through literature, some motifs of which were popularized through preaching and the emergence of a specific crusade liturgy. Whatever else, crusade literature provided a resource of ideology and moral example, a bank of selective, tendentious memories that framed responses of successive generations by providing a rationale for action: the deeds of ancestors; the favour of God.
The more immediate use of writing remained administrative. Papal bulls provided consistent direction. Eugenius III’s Quantum praede-cessores initiating the Second Crusade required two editions, the first having flopped. It served as a model for Eugenius’s successors Alexander III (in 1165, 1169 and 1181) and Lucius III (in 1184/5). The convenience of a pre-existing written template for the temporal and spiritual crusade privileges was confirmed in the following century when the crusade decree of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 (no. 71 Ad Liberandam) was copied by the councils of Lyons in 1245 and 1274. These bulls were intended to supply the core message. In 1181, Alexander III ordered the clergy, whom he hoped would promote the crusade, to publicize his letters. In 1213, Innocent III insisted that the details of his bull Quia Maior be transmitted ‘carefully and effectively’.53 In the thirteenth century, if not earlier, the texts were translated into local vernaculars. Chroniclers recognized the importance of papal letters by incorporating copies sent to their regions; before 1198 these are often the only versions that survive. Authorization of legates and preachers, as well as attempts to answer queries and control the course of preaching, relied on the exchange of letters. Legates in the field fired off written enquiries on matters from transferring vows to one theatre of conflict from another, dispensing with the need for wives’ permission for a crusader to take the Cross and the precise circumstances for Cross redemption to the size of a preacher’s entourage (Bishop Conrad of Regensberg requesting a larger one). The abbot of Rommersdorf in Austria collected Quia Maior and other relevant papal letters in a dossier for future reference and preachers were enjoined to record their activities and recruits.54 By the mid-thirteenth century, and probably earlier, friars preaching the Cross in France and Germany were issued with portfolios of relevant papal bulls – in one surviving case with a German translation.55
Although administrative correspondence was almost exclusively conducted in Latin this did not necessarily exclude the laity. Knights and clerics shared a social milieu, which for some included education; witness Richard I’s correction of Archbishop Hubert Walter’s Latin.56 As already seen, lesser nobles and aristocrats could also be well educated.57 Knightly virtue embraced the liberal arts, and learning was not a dirty word but a social adornment.58 Various types of literate skill can be identified among crusaders: the mercurial Waleran of Meulan, a crusader in 1147, the precocious philosophy student, who composed letters in Latin and may even have dabbled in Latin verse, or Ranulf Glanvill, from East Anglian lesser nobility, who ran the Latin-based English royal bureaucracy, presided over the compilation of a Latin law book and oversaw the successful academic (if not political) training of the future King John.59 As already seen, other lettered knights composed vernacular verses or prose histories, suggesting a partial education in Latin at least, and a definite facility in literary technique, men such as Gregory Bechada, Geoffrey of Villehardouin, Robert of Clari and John of Joinville.60 In the thirteenth century, functional literacy – the ability to read at the very least -would have been expected and hardly worthy of mention, although still the concept and presence of the miles literatus could arouse clerical resentment, as a moral example of superficially antithetical talents. A third group were those whose own education may have been very limited but who acted as interested patrons, such as, according to William of Tyre, Raymond of Poitiers, Prince of Antioch (1136–49).61
Written correspondence facilitated preparations for the Second Crusade, following precedents displayed in papal bulls for campaigns against Muslims in Spain and the Balearics in the 1110s and 1120s. In 1146–7, Bernard of Clairvaux orchestrated his preaching tours and those of his surrogates through letters, for example to England, Franconia and Bavaria. Accompanying such letters were copies of the papal bull. Bernard’s delegate Abbot Adam of Ebrach read both the bull and Bernard’s letter before preaching and giving the Cross at an assembly at Regensburg in February 1147. Bernard assumed that some at least of his lay recipients required help with translation or comprehension.62 During the Third Crusade the papal call to arms was circulated from the Atlantic to the Baltic, providing the blueprint for preaching. Letters and short narratives of events in the east were circulated, some, if not all of those claiming to be from eyewitnesses, rewritten or freshly composed to suit the official lines of propaganda. Their consistency of content and language in copies across Europe suggests careful construction, probably in the circles around the papal curia and the crusade legates.63 From the same or similar groups of publicists came recruiting tracts in deliberately contrasting registers, aimed at those promoting recruitment, some by seasoned controversialists. Peter of Blois, scholar, poet, writer, legal adviser, seasoned polemicist and administrator whose public experience stretched from Sicily to England, was at the papal court when news of the disaster at Hattin had arrived. He composed three pamphlets in 1188–9 using different approaches – hagiography on Christian martyrdom, reasoned debate and passionate invective – to urge concerted and immediate retaliation against Saladin and challenging backsliders and the fainthearted. Peter was not just an armchair pundit. He accompanied his employer, Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury, to the desperate siege of Acre in 1190.64
Like its predecessors, the Third Crusade inspired literary narratives that were used to inspire subsequent expeditions. Some commemorative accounts were planned even before the crusade embarked. Archbishop Baldwin optimistically commissioned prose and verse accounts from writers in his entourage (who never wrote them).65 As well as Latin descriptions, one lengthy history was composed in the 1190S in French verse by one veteran, Ambroise. Stories of the heroism of figures such as James of Avesnes, killed at Arsuf in 1191, entered the stock of standard moral tales prescribed for use by crusade preachers. Literary underpinning of crusade efforts began to assume an air of solid familiarity. The Fourth and Fifth Crusades, as well as those directed against heretics in Languedoc, attracted their crop of histories in Latin and the vernacular. None were neutral or disinterested. Geoffrey of Villehardouin’s vernacular account of the diversion to Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade presented a highly tendentious lionizing of great deeds of arms. Writers on the Albigensian Crusades wrote as partisan exponents for or against the contentious events being described. Oliver of Paderborn’s history of the Fifth Crusade, based on his letters as a preacher and subsequent leader of crusaders from Cologne, sought to explain the providence of God in the context of later repeated calls of the Cross.66
Written news also played a dynamic role in publicity. Oliver of Paderborn, one of the team of preachers in the diocese of Cologne, circulated to fellow preachers and others, including the legate to France, Robert Curzon, and the count of Namur, descriptions of visions and miracles that had accompanied crusade sermons, including his own, in Frisia in 1214. This form of ‘live’ news informing fellow publicists and their audiences of miraculous events occurring during a current preaching campaign added immediacy to preachers’ ammunition. These circulated stories informed subsequent chronicles, in the Rhineland and beyond, including as far afield as St Albans in England. Oliver himself included an edited version of the miracles in his history of the Fifth Crusade, a compilation of his newsletters from before and during the expedition. As recruiter, publicist and crusader, Oliver demonstrated the interdependency of written and oral language and, in the instance of the Frisian celestial signs, visual aids as well. Oliver’s preaching supplied the raw material for a raft of uplifting, quasi-miraculous stories that were soon preserved in writing, for example at the Rhineland Cistercian monastery of Heisterbach where the abbot and monks were closely involved in Oliver’s preaching campaign.67 Memory was not left to oral recitation but deliberately given almost instantaneous literary permanence.
Gathering men and money further consolidated the importance of writing. A detailed register of crucesignati and payments survives from Cardinal Ugolino’s activities in northern Italy, as do some papal accounts regarding the 1215 clerical tax.68 However, keeping records of muster and accounts was no novelty. Nor was the habit restricted to the papal bureaucracy. Bohemund’s accounts, his compotus of expenses during the First Crusade indicates as much.69 Any fundraising by putative crusade commanders of whatever status probably entailed some form of accounting: the crusade tax in England in 1096 or those levied on their lands by Louis VII in 1146 or Frederick Barbarossa in 1188. Henry II established a separate accounting office at Salisbury for the Saladin Tithe in England in 1188. The precocious archival tradition in England reveals careful accounting of men, payments, supplies, requisitioned ships and other accoutrements of crusading for Richard I‘s grand expedition in 1190.70 However, half a century earlier, the confraternity established by the crusader fleet at Dartmouth in 1147 with oversight of monetary distribution, discipline and legal judgments probably possessed the means to verify past decisions and record new ones, if only to prevent or mitigate disagreements within a fractious polyglot force.71
Chroniclers were fond of listing crusaders. Their information came from somewhere, not necessarily by word of mouth. The most obvious need for written records was to inform commanders and the community at home. Lords mustering troops, churchmen trying to enforce oaths, courts eager to prosecute felonies or adjudicate civil disputes, or creditors seeking debtors: all needed to know. As the records of secular courts in England and France in the thirteenth century reveal, the implications of a crusader’s vow extended to the furthest reaches of social activity. While it might be presumed that military officials such as constables would have found lists of those under their command useful, tangible examples are hard to discern from the earlier expeditions.72 Governments, such as those of England and Sicily, were compiling lists of obligations by the mid-twelfth century, largely for fiscal reasons. The technology was available; scribes were at hand and the cultural acceptance of written records gaining prominence. Numbers in medieval chronicles are notoriously inventive. However, when Gerald of Wales estimated that ‘roughly’ 3,000 Welshmen had taken the Cross during Archbishop Baldwin’s preaching tour in Lent 1188, this was a far from ridiculous figure and may have been based on written records. In the late 1190s or early 1200s, Archbishop Hubert Walter of Canterbury compiled lists of crucesignati in Cornwall and Lincolnshire, hangovers from the Third Crusade who had failed to fulfil their vows. These may have been new, but equally he may have simply checked them against existing records. The records of the English Exchequer for 1190, 1191 and 1192 list fifty-nine knights exempt, as crusaders, from a tax levied to fight the Welsh. The same accounts for 1207 and 1208 appear to list eighty crusaders (cruisiati) from Yorkshire being fined for reasons that are not at all clear. Their names, however, are.73 The St Albans historian Roger of Wendover described how a crusade preacher in 1227, Master Hubert, kept a roll of the names of those he had signed with the Cross, improbably estimated by Wendover at 40,000. Given the size of the educated teams of preachers sent out during and after the Fifth Crusade, such a practice was probably standard. Oliver of Paderborn, in his circular recounting the celestial visions that accompanied his preaching in Frisia in 1214, estimated not only overall numbers but attempted to identify different categories – knights, sergeants and squires. While he gave different figures in the various versions of this letter, the scale – a few thousand – was not incredible. He assumed that counting crusaders was part of his brief. A well-informed contemporary close to the Fifth Crusade recruiting operation in his area noted that ‘up to eighty’ took the Cross as a result of a preaching coup by a priest from Mainz, a wholly realistic number.74
Other lists would have concerned pay or other rewards, fundamental recruiting techniques from the First Crusade onwards. Yet written archival evidence for them only surfaces during the Third Crusade.75 The unusual terms for crusaders signing up for the Albigensian Crusade – forty days – operating as they did outside customary lordship obligations, would have been suitable for written confirmation; still more so those who decided to extend their service. In seeking a metaphor for the way taking the Cross guaranteed a crusader’s enjoyment of the heavenly inheritance of Christ, an early thirteenth-century preaching manual likened it to a written charter (‘quasi per cartam’), while one version of the Cross-taking rite used the technical term for a certain type of written contract ‘by cyrograph’ (de cyrographo).76 While contracts for crusade service probably existed as far back as the eleventh century, the earliest surviving draft of a written contract for service between one crusader and another dates from 1239–40, with further examples emerging from the archives of the French and English royal administrations in the late 1240s and early 1250s.77 Centralized command structures, whether papal or royal, as in the 1190s or 1240s, may have been more likely to keep detailed written records as crusading constituted merely an extension of their normal governmental and bureaucratic practices. Yet it would be misleading to assume that earlier or humbler networks of crusade planning relied any less on writing because they did not consistently collect or retain copies that were then preserved by their heirs and successors. The importance of writing at a local level is witnessed in the records of monasteries preserving the fundraising expedients of wealthy crusaders, or in the regional variants for the rite of taking the Cross in diocesan registers. The bureaucratic culture of institutions inclined to systematic long-term record retention more than private individuals or families. However, crusade organizers had employed writing in almost every aspect of their activities long before the prominence of the culture of archives.
The legend that Peter the Hermit began the crusade tradition with a letter from the patriarch of Jerusalem is not inappropriate. Newsletters, genuine or doctored, continued to provide information and incitement to action. The friars’ centralized hierarchy, international contacts and chapter assemblies supplied fresh channels of written communication. The seals carried by crusade preachers in the mid-thirteenth century must have been used to authenticate documents, not just for securing bags of donations or redemption money.78 Increasingly, self-consciously bureaucratic secular and ecclesiastical regimes extended their refined archival procedures to the mechanics of crusading. Writing, from the very beginning an active element in long-distance and large-scale mobilization of public opinion, diplomacy, military planning, finance and recruitment, continued to occupy a central place in crusade preparations. The weapons of persuasion – excitatoria, letters, tracts, pamphlets, model sermons, chronicles, hymns and poems – complemented the tools of business – charters of land deals, lists of crusaders, contracts of service, diplomatic correspondence and financial accounts. However, writing played only one part. The local worthy’s property deal with neighbouring monks may have been recorded in writing but was likely to have been contracted in a public ceremonial exchange of objects – a dagger, a clod of earth -symbolizing the transfer of rights. Diocesan officials may have transcribed the neighbourhood liturgy for taking the Cross, but the act of becoming a crucesignatus or crucesignata involved a liturgical rite acted out in front of a congregation. Mobilizing support for a crusade depended on writing and systems of delegated authority, but also on performance.