Medieval images of crusade preachers reflected contrasting traditions of Christian evangelism: hierophant and demagogue; teacher and pastor; didacticism and charisma; St Paul and John the Baptist; Urban II and Peter the Hermit; Bernard of Clairvaux and Brother Radulph. By the early thirteenth century, stories of Fulk of Neuilly, the Paris-trained populist, or academics and intellectuals such as Gerald of Wales, James of Vitry or Oliver of Paderborn, allied the two strands in vignettes of direct engagement, with the anxieties of individuals set alongside statements of theological stringency. Gerald of Wales described confronting the doubts, obstacles and dilemmas of individual prospective crusaders, the Cross a panacea for private difficulty not just public crisis. During his preaching in Frisia in 1214, Oliver of Paderborn dealt with personal and domestic problems: the skinflint usurer who paid under the odds for his vow redemption; the life-threatening pregnancy of a crusader’s wife; the bullied servant who sought the protection of the devil; the impact on local recruitment of the murder of a Frisian lord.1 Preachers voiced crusaders’ concerns to Innocent III and Honorius III over details of the crusade vow, important for those considering such potentially serious personal or material investments. Attention to the effects of crusading on the lives of ordinary believers suited the didactic and pastoral evangelism devised by the same academic clerical elite who led the crusade publicity campaigns, as theories and conventions were crafted to advise practitioners and combat public indifference or hostility.
Boosted by a growing supply of ecclesiastical careerists eager to prove their pastoral as well as intellectual credentials, from the Third Crusade the preaching industry burgeoned. Theoretical analysis and prescriptive manuals flowed, composed mainly by coteries of Paris-educated scholar priests whose common touch was often more conceptual than actual. Self-congratulation was endemic, a literary trope if not a personality flaw. Just as Oliver of Paderborn boasted of his effectiveness in Frisia, so James of Vitry congratulated himself on charming the matrons of Genoa. In 1224, the provost of Arles circulated a newsletter lauding his recent triumph in Marseilles. He had been told he would be lucky to get one recruit, but his team had netted, he claimed, hundreds each day and more than 30,000 in five weeks. By their own account, their preaching inspired celestial visions and miracles of healing. Impediments raised by partners of crusaders (of both sexes) were overcome. Local women were convulsed by trances during which they saw ‘many secret things of the cross’.2 Ecstatic women apart, these were familiar trappings of crusade evangelism. This hubris was presented as the work of God, success attributed to His immanence.
Reality could be very different. Accounts of preaching are speckled with instances of disruptive behaviour, such as the English mason, a veteran of the Holy Land, who heckled in an attempt to dissuade fellow listeners from taking the Cross.3 Some crusades aroused opposition as being illegitimate or excuses to leach money from the faithful. Preachers might be incompetent or have off days, as Gerald of Wales rather gleefully noted of Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury in 1188.4 The pitfalls for unskilled, poorly prepared or ill-equipped orators were familiar. Audience boredom and inattention vied with outright hostility. One Cistercian abbot, after managing to put his own monks and lay brothers to sleep, only woke them up by a gratuitous reference to King Arthur. An English crusade preaching manual of c. 1216 explained how exciting anecdotes, exempla, were necessary to grab attention and avoid tedium.5 Care was taken to ensure the intellectual consistency and oratorical effectiveness of both message and medium. Difficulties were addressed in a wave of theoretical preaching literature from the late twelfth century onwards, supported by sermon collections from stars of the genre, including crusade preachers such as James of Vitry, Odo of Châteauroux, papal legate for Louis IX’s 1248 crusade, or the Dominicans, Stephen of Bourbon, an expert in anti-heretic oratory, and Humbert of Romans.6
Theoretical prescription was detailed and formulaic. Sermons followed set patterns: an introductory explanation or text, or exordium; the purpose of the sermon or narratio; the arguments and counterarguments or divisio; then the proofs and refutations, confirmatio and confutatio; and ending with the conclusion or epilogue. The model could be adapted to suit different audiences: princes and nobles; soldiers; lawyers; freemen; serfs (no point for crusade preachers as crucesignati technically had to be free); women (with distinctions drawn for widows and the unmarried); clerics; academics; townspeople; young; old; rich; poor. Sermons should be clear and tightly structured. Preachers should avoid patronizing their audiences, speaking over their heads, baffling them with verbiage, using rhetorical tricks, lying or employing irrelevant sophistry. Narratives and exempla should not be prolix but, as one manual put it, ‘brief, lucid and plausible’, advice, to judge from surviving examples, regularly ignored. Words and gestures should match meaning; describing disasters, the voice should tremble in simulated fear. Preachers needed good diction, strong voices, verbal fluency, a capacious memory and competent Latin. Exaggerated expressions and gestures were discouraged; they made preachers look like fools, jesters or actors.7 Here, too, the ideal seems to have been honoured in the breach.
In sermon compendia, those on the crusade were not grouped separately but collected with those on penance. The language of redemption through the Cross and penitential imitation of Christ crucified transferred easily from crusading to other genres of sermons de cruce. Baldwin of Forde, before preaching the crusade in 1188, had composed a sermon ‘de Sancta Cruce’ in which he described the Cross spiritually as a ‘military banner, trophy of victory and sign of triumph’, in context metaphorical but of obvious ambiguity. A century and an half later, in 1333, Archbishop Pierre Roger of Rouen, the future Pope Clement VI, in a crusade address delivered in front of Pope John XXII, recycled verbatim one of his penitential sermons de cruce for his peroration.8 The distinctive radicalism of crusade ideology, lauded as an ultimate expression of the secular Christian life, was polemically subsumed in normal pastoral theology. Humbert of Romans, in his general sermon treatise, compared preachers to ‘soldiers of Christ’, ‘a courageous militia’ like the Maccabees (a familiar parallel with crusaders), for ‘to preach is to fight, for [preachers] make war on the errors against faith and morals’.9
However, crusade preaching was distinctive. Humbert composed separate advice for it, De praedicatione s. Crucis contra Saracenos, in around 1265. As his own surviving crusade sermons display, Humbert was concerned to provide flexible themes adaptable for different audiences and situations rather than a fixed model, although he possibly appended a version of Urban II’s Clermont speech to show how it should best be done.10 The tract is a practical reference book not an archetype. Whether it reached a wide audience is less certain, given a modest manuscript tradition, although, as a former head of the Dominican Order, Humbert enjoyed the widest of contacts. De praedicatione s. Crucis tackled preaching mechanics: when certain specified hymns should be sung; at which point the congregation should be asked to take the Cross; where the Cross should be worn (the right shoulder) and why. Obstacles to taking the Cross are combated: sin; fear or apprehension at the likely hardships and dangers; love of home and family; peer-group hostility, indifference or derision; material incapacity; or doubt. Some of the refutations were laced with homely images. Those who wished to stay at home for love of domesticity are likened to chickens that never leave their hutches, Flemish cows who stayed tethered to houses, or freshwater fish fleeing the salt water of the sea. The advice ends with remarks on the necessary religious acts and spiritual state required to fight Muslims. The key elements are clear: Christian obligation to avenge injuries to God, his Holy Land and fellow Christians in the east; the crusade as the supreme pilgrimage, good employment for Christian knights and the faithful as a whole; the Cross, both a protection and a pledge of grace. The offer of salvation and indulgences was fundamental, captured in the summons to receive the Cross: ‘Come; who desires the blessing of God? Who loves the company of angels? Who yearns for the crown incorruptible? To all who approach, those who come to take the Cross will obtain all these things.’11
Preachers needed to be good salesmen with the necessary oratorical skills. To encourage their audiences, they must take the Cross themselves and explain the details and effects of the indulgences and privileges on offer. Their priestly authority to grant absolution provided a necessary prerequisite for administering the Cross. Humbert made ambitious academic demands on preachers. In addition to relevant Bible passages, they should command a grasp of regional geography and world maps (mappae mundi, then in vogue, like the one preserved at Hereford Cathedral). Along with texts such as the Chanson d’Antioche and William of Tyre, preachers ought to be conversant with the life of Muhammed and the history of Islam, including the Koran. This may have become standard. Oliver of Paderborn, who preached the Fifth Crusade in western Germany, professed knowledge of the Koran’s teaching on Christ and the Virgin Mary. Humbert’s useful texts showed off his academic credentials: they included Eusebius; Cassiodorus; Augustine; Gregory of Tours; Gregory the Great; Bede; Pseudo-Turpin on Charlemagne as a proto-crusader; and a selection of hagiography.12 For all its pragmatic tone, Humbert’s treatise, like the sermon collections, was severely academic, more rarefied than demotic.
Yet a sermon treatise from half a century earlier suggests that the demand for these sophisticated skills was neither unusual nor unique. The Brevis ordinacio de predicatione s. crucis in Angliae, probably dating from 1213 to 1216, may be associated with the team of preachers appointed by Innocent III to preach the Fifth Crusade in England. King John took the Cross at Easter 1215 mainly as a political ploy to cement a papal alliance and wrong-foot his opponents, given the war with France in 1214. But subsequent war with France, rebellion, civil war and the French invasion of 1215–17 made effective preaching for the Holy Land crusade unlikely until hostilities ceased, although some royalists appear to have adopted the language and perhaps the formal status of crusaders against the rebels.13 The Brevis ordinacio may have been simply a scholarly exercise. However, it does indicate how it was thought a popular message should be conveyed. Theological niceties were dressed in crowd-pleasing imagery to confront listeners’ anxieties, chiefly about sin and death. Examples and analogies stressed that, for those bearing the Cross of redemption, death led to life, a fate not to be feared but embraced. The benefits of the crusade indulgence combated the snares of sin for the penitent and contrite, the lynchpin of crusading’s economy of redemption. Striking by its absence was any suggestion that spiritual virtue might reap material gain.
Exposition and communication were bound together. A lengthy discussion of the eucharist and the Real Presence recognized that crusade preaching habitually occurred in the context of the celebration of the Mass, with its appropriate emphasis on Christ crucified, sacrifice, redemption, confession and absolution. The crucifix linked esoteric analogies with a common religious tool. In another homespun image, taking the Cross was said to confirm the crusaders’ reward of heaven ‘as if by a charter’. A final section, ‘On the call of men to the Cross’, provided a model sermon on the redemptive power of the Cross: service to God in heart and deed; and salvation and eternal life through a martyr’s death in battle. Acceptance of eternal life through a crusader’s death is illustrated in two exempla, one involving Godfrey of Bouillon and his brother from the First Crusade, another about the French hero James of Avesnes from the Third. The section is punctuated by oratorical refrains inviting the adoption of the Cross, each beginning ‘Therefore, rise up’ (Surge ergo), based on Matthew 16:24: ‘Therefore arise, take up my cross’. The treatise concludes with six further death and glory exempla, with the same refrains. The anecdotes combined Latin with vernacular punch lines, reflecting live practice and a knightly audience. One, about a crusader urging his horse ‘Morelle’ into battle and thence to Paradise, was also used by James of Vitry. Each describes apparently historical crusading martyrs eagerly embracing a heroic death confident in the reward of everlasting life. One produced a dreadful Anglo-French pun. Hugh of Beauchamp charges the Saracens crying ‘Although my name is Beau Champ, never was I in a good field (bello campo i.e. beau champ) until today.’14 The groans are almost audible.
The liturgical year provided crusade publicity with a calendar of appropriate seasons and feast days to focus on repentance, penance and redemption through Christ and the Cross. The penitential seasons of Advent, leading to Christmas, and Lent, leading to Easter, suited Christ-centred calls to penance, despite inclement weather for travel, let alone outdoor oratory. Urban II preached during Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter in 1095–6. The Second Crusade was first publicly preached at Christmas 1145. Quantum praedecessores was re-issued and Bernard of Clairvaux began his preaching in Lent 1146, culminating in the great Cross-giving festival at Vézelay on Easter Day. Conrad III of Germany took the Cross from Bernard the following Christmas. In 1188, key moments in preaching the Third Crusade coincided with Epiphany and, in Wales and western Germany, Lent. Frederick Barbarossa took the Cross at his ‘Court of Christ’ at Mainz on Laetare Jerusalem – Rejoice Jerusalem – Sunday (the fourth in Lent), the same day that Philip II of France held an assembly in Paris to discuss the crusade. During the Fourth Crusade, the counts of Champagne and Blois received the Cross on Advent Sunday, 28 November 1199, while the count of Flanders followed suit on Ash Wednesday, 23 February 1200. Innocent III issued the bulls Quia Maior during Eastertide 1213, and Ad Liberandam in Advent 1215, the year King John of England took the Cross on Ash Wednesday and Frederick II of Germany at Easter. Examples proliferate. The provost of Arles’s five-week preaching mission to Marseilles in 1223–4 coincided with Advent and Christmas. Henry III of England took the Cross on Laetare Jerusalem Sunday in 1250.15 In 1267, Louis IX of France took the Cross on a date with dual resonance, 25 March, mid-Lent and the Feast of the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary, increasingly the presiding mistress of the crusading spirit.
Rolling preaching campaigns of the sort organized from the Fifth Crusade onwards were less bound to seasonal timetables. However, individual festivals remained important, producing crowds off work, gathered to worship, trade or have fun. Urban II’s visits to Limoges, Poitiers and the Loire valley in the winter of 1095–6 coincided with the feast days of local saints or re-dedications of churches to them. In 1214, Oliver of Paderborn exploited the crowds gathered at Dokkum in the diocese of Utrecht for the Feast Day (5 June) of St Boniface, a local martyr. In early September that year, Oliver’s colleague John of Xanten gate-crashed a harvest festival in the valley of the Meuse.16 He did not wait for the crusaders’ special festival, 14 September, Holy Cross Day, the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. In 1198 and 1201 the traditional Holy Cross Day meetings of the General Chapter of the Cistercians at Cîteaux became focal occasions in the preliminaries of the Fourth Crusade. At the other end of the social scale, the preaching initiative across in Yorkshire in 1291 was orchestrated for 14 September. Philip IV of France, not one to miss a propagandist trick, ordered the arrest of the Templars on the same day in 1307. Continued enthusiasm for the crusade in Tournai into the fourteenth century may be connected with its annual festival of the Holy Cross that culminated on 14 September.17
Festivals supplied occasional opportunities. The Mass provided a regular and familiar ceremonial setting, specified in some surviving rites for taking the Cross. Its imagery and language evoked the main themes of the crusade: the presence of Christ; His sacrifice; the Cross; confession; absolution; the promise of redemption; and the crucifix, employed by crusade preachers rhetorically and as a prop. The Mass and crusade propaganda acted in dialogue. Bernard of Clairvaux, whose Easter Day sermon at Vézelay in 1146 followed the Easter High Mass, wrote with clear Eucharistic overtones of Palestine being made holy by Christ’s blood where ‘the flowers of His resurrection first blossomed’. At Clermont, Urban II’s sermon may have been accompanied by his audience reciting the general confession from the Mass. Thereafter, the Mass regularly provided the preamble and the setting for calls to take the Cross. The great sermon and Cross-giving ceremony at Regensburg in February 1147 was prefaced by a High Mass, ‘as was customary’ noted one crucesignatus. Preachers often acted as celebrant, as at Regensburg. In Flanders and Wales during Lent 1188, crusade sermons were preached after Mass. At Bedum in Frisia in 1214, Oliver of Paderborn’s sermon formed part of a celebration of ‘a high mass of the Holy Cross’ decorated by an alleged apparition of the crucifix in the sky, although the member of the congregation apparently most convinced was an eleven-year-old girl.18
Whatever the occasion, advance warning was essential. Congregations needed to know what to expect; local clergy to incorporate the sermon into their liturgical programmes; preachers to set up their props and apparatus and perhaps rehearse; potential crusaders to settle their determination and overcome any domestic opposition; crowds to plan their day out. Spontaneity was unhelpful and impractical. For long tours, preachers needed to organize itineraries, hospitality and venues. Time was required to gather large assemblies or conferences. Odo of Deuil tells how, after the damp squib of Louis VII’s declaration of his crusading intentions at Christmas 1145, ‘another time was appointed, Eastertide at Vezelay, where all were to assemble on the Sunday before Palm Sunday [i.e. Passion Sunday], and where those who should be divinely inspired were to take up the glorious cross on Easter Sunday’. To add effect, the king obtained a cross from the pope beforehand. Divine inspiration required some assistance.19 Similarly, the impeccably well-connected but religiously austere Bishop Otto of Freising attributed the success of the Regensburg ceremony at which he took the Cross in 1147 not to rhetoric but to preparation:
For there was no need of persuasive words of human wisdom or the ingratiating use of artful circumlocution, in accordance with the precepts of rhetoricians, since all who were present had been aroused by previous report and hurried forward of their own accord to receive the cross.20
Literary insistence on spontaneity concealed reality. According to one of his monks, Abbot Martin of Pairis’s sermon in Basel in 1201 came as no surprise. Those gathered in Basel cathedral,
stimulated by current rumours . . . had heard for quite a while how other regions round about were being summoned to this army of Christ at well-attended sermons . . . Consequently, large numbers of the people of this area, prepared in their hearts to enlist in Christ’s camp, were hungrily anticipating an exhortation of this sort.21
Martin’s sermon adorned a well-understood ritual in which the congregation affirmed decisions already reached elsewhere. Such ceremonies were rarely innovative, and were often conscious re-enactments. The model of Urban II was still referenced two centuries later. Gerald of Wales in 1188 deliberately re-created a famous scene from Bernard of Clairvaux’s preaching tour in 1146–7. Oliver of Paderborn’s celestial visions of 1214 were widely imitated. As preachers were ritualistically playing Christ in calling on his followers to take up crosses, argument could be less important than form and setting.22
PLACE
Preachers were advised to operate in towns, large villages and anywhere with an audience, however modest.23 As crusade preachers had to sign up as many volunteers as quickly as possible, maximum popular exposure and geographical coverage were of the essence, hence the restlessness of preaching tours, such as in Wales in 1188 or Frisia in 1214, and their attention to centres of population, nobles’ courts, festivals, churches and cult sites. The main locations were towns. Ecclesiastical centres, the towns (‘civitates’ his successor Paschal II observed) of western France, played host to Urban II in 1095–6. Peter the Hermit was said to have preached in cities and small towns (‘urbs et municipia’).24 The Rhineland cities of Cologne, Mainz, Worms, Speyer and Strasburg repeatedly featured in promotional campaigns. In England, London provided a focus for publicity and recruitment in a long tradition from the Second Crusade onwards. Cardinal Ugolino’s 1221 mission in north Italy revolved around cities: Lucca, Pisa, Padua, Pistoia, Genoa, Bologna and Venice. Florence, like Cologne, Genoa and London, embraced a long crusading inheritance. Lübeck and Bremen were the centres for proselytizing and recruitment for the Livonian crusades after 1200. Major assemblies occurred in towns and cities: Clermont (in 1095), Vézelay (1146), Speyer (1146), Frankfurt (1147), Regensburg (1147), Paris (1096 and 1188) and Mainz (1188). Some of the most vivid accounts of preaching in the early thirteenth century concerned cities: James of Vitry in Genoa in 1216 or the provost of Arles in Marseilles in 1223–4. Oliver of Paderborn and John of Xanten criss-crossed from small town to small town in the archdiocese of Cologne in 1214. Archbishop Baldwin’s troupe did the same in Wales in 1188. The famous Dominican translator of Aristotle, Albert the Great, in Germany in 1263–4 as ‘predictor et promotor crucis’, stuck to major urban centres, using the network of religious houses in them as his bases: Augsburg, Donauworth, Würzburg, Frankfurt-am-Main, Cologne, Strasburg, Speyer, Regensburg, Mainz.25
Secular sites were employed for crusade ceremonies, including castles, as at Usk in Wales in March 1188, tournament fields, as at Ecry in November 1199, and market places, as at La Vieille-Tour in Rouen in 1268, despite worries at such proximity to commerce.26 Gisors, where the kings of France and England took the Cross in January 1188, was the traditional site for summits between French monarchs and the dukes of Normandy. However, just as the diocesan structure supplied preaching circuits, so churches, cathedrals and occasionally monasteries (Marmoutier in 1096, St Denis in 1146, Clerkenwell in 1185, Cîteaux in 1198 and 1201, etc.) provided the grid for their itineraries.27 Churches provided natural meeting places and the largest public buildings. Their staff could prepare the venue, publicize the event and supply hospitality and local information. Preaching followed the growth of towns and cathedral and church building and the establishment of a secure parochial system. In churches, relics in altars or separate shrines created a suitably encompassing religious atmosphere. This could be especially exploited during the translation of relics or church re-dedication, from (for example) St Martial at Limoges in December 1095, St Hilary at Poitiers and St Nicholas at Angers in January 1096 to Mary Magdalen at Rouen in March 1268.28
One cliché of crusading was the open air sermon. Urban II seems to have enjoyed this, perhaps to emphasize Christ-like evangelism. A sense of preacher machismo pervades some accounts. One witness remembered that Urban had to preach in the open air at Clermont because ‘no building was large enough to contain all those present’. Odo of Deuil repeats this trope in his account of Bernard of Clairvaux’s speech at Vézelay: ‘since there was no place within the town which could accommodate such a large crowd, a wooden platform was erected outside in a field, so that the abbot could speak from an elevation to the people standing round about’.29 Acoustically and logistically, as thirteenth-century manuals noted, preaching inside a church was preferable. However, many churches would simply have been too small to house a congregation drawn from beyond the immediate vicinity. Even substantial civic churches could be inadequate. Equally, not all preaching operations possessed the manpower to cover individual parish churches in the way the Yorkshire friars did in 1291, so they organized large gatherings in convenient centres.30 In Wales in 1188, most of the sermons were delivered outside.
Other factors influenced decisions where to hold crusade ceremonies. The special religious processions instituted after 1212–13 in aid of Spain and the Holy Land were sometimes conducted in the open. In England in the spring of 1295, Holy Land processions were to be held outside if the weather were fine; inside if wet.31 Tournaments, as at Ecry in 1199, presented publicized rendezvous for ready-made audiences of fighting men. A field of chivalry offered a highly pointed ceremonial setting for transmuting sinful secular violence into redemptive holy warfare. The contrast between the malitia and militia, especially as tournaments were banned by the Church between 1130 and 1316, could hardly have been missed. The ambivalence of the crusade’s clerical promoters towards knightly culture, embracing it ostensibly to reform or redirect it, was nowhere more manifest. In summer months, open-air picnics provided acceptable ways to listen to the word of the Cross. Oliver of Paderborn paints a relaxed picture of his audience gathered in a meadow outside Bedum in 1214, a family outing with three generations sitting together with their neighbours. At Dokkum that June the open air may have been for preference. Oliver’s claims of celestial visions cannot have diminished the crowds’ enjoyment. His colleague John of Xanten was less fortunate: on one occasion his words were carried away on the wind (conveniently blamed on diabolical intervention). One enterprising Franciscan incorporated a flagpole in his preaching platform so listeners could see where the wind was coming from and position themselves. Audibility exercised preaching experts. Many listeners, perhaps most, would miss exactly what was said, another incentive for theatrical business and props. Oliver of Paderborn admitted that only about a hundred people saw the crosses in the sky at Bedum, presumably those close enough to hear the speaker suggest the clouds’ meaning.32
Promotional success depended on getting audiences. Itinerant preachers, often covering large swathes of territory very rapidly, staying in each place for very short times, often inside a day, had to rely on locals rustling up an audience. James of Vitry recounted a story of Fulk of Neuilly arriving at a French town to preach only to find there was nobody about. So he started to shout: ‘Help! Help! Robbers! Robbers!’ That brought people running, asking where the criminals were. Fulk neatly explained that demonic thieves had come to the town to steal their souls and proceeded to preach as planned, now to a substantial audience.33 No audience; no crusade. From the Fifth Crusade onwards, nervousness over attendance may have lain behind the offer of indulgences for those who simply turned up to listen. On one level, this recognized the spiritual nature of the process, in line with redemption of vows and partial indulgences for other assistance. By the mid-thirteenth century preachers and even collectors of crusade taxes were allowed to enjoy remission of sins. Yet, at the same time, there were worries of sermon fatigue as crusade preaching became almost normative, its conduct by friars more institutional, its causes ever more varied, and its object increasingly financial – concerns openly voiced in the 1270s by the Franciscan Gilbert of Tournai. The tariff for audiences grew from between 10 and 20 days’ remission of the penalties of confessed sin under Honorius III (1216–27) to between 100 and 450 days under Gregory X (1271–6).34
Whether or not this inflation reflected a growing indifference or hostility to non-Holy Land crusades, which some contemporaries identified, or was simply incorporating all aspects of the crusade industry into a comprehensive penitential system, the incentive of spiritual rewards for attending sermons underlined their ritualistic aspect. This generous scattering of indulgences still attracted customers. One (admittedly hostile) observer noted how friars preaching the Cross in England in 1249 announced that those who came to hear them would receive an indulgence of ‘many days’. This drew a crowd across age, gender, wealth and social status. The Cross was given indiscriminately to invalids, the sick and the old who next day redeemed their vows with cash.35 The chronicler may have been scandalized, but the beneficiaries gained free indulgences along with those they bought; a decent bargain. In any case, not all who heard sermons intended to take the Cross or did so, preachers aiming beyond potential crucesignati to their relatives. As with other such commitments – marriage for example – crusading required public approval by those most affected. Only sections of any congregation actually took the Cross, even with cash redemptions increasing the proportion of temporary, non-combatant crucesignati. The rest participated by their witness and acquiescence or, especially if they lived on Church lands, by paying taxes. All needed reassurance of the merits of the enterprise.
Propaganda was crafted to suit different audiences. The bellicose imagery of Urban II and Bernard of Clairvaux set the pattern for the ordo pugnatorum: princes, lords, knights and lesser fighting men. Bernard, when mentioning merchants, presented the crusade offer of salvation in terms of a commercial bargain. Bishop Albert of Riga appealed to the commercial groups (negotiores) in western Baltic and northern German towns.36 In other cities, crusading appealed across social and economic strata, to those with property, however modest, or enjoying wages. Paupers did not queue up to take the Cross, even if some who did subsequently fell on hard times before they fulfilled their vows.37 The alliance between crusading, the apostolic poverty movement and anti-materialist campaigners so apparent in the generations around 1200 was less socially radical than it may seem. The Brevis ordinacio likened the rich to fish wallowing in mud who, stung by the preacher’s words, fled God’s net, i.e. the Cross. Pursuing the aquatic metaphor, large fish got caught in the devil’s nets while small fish – the poor – swam through to the Cross and to God.38 If taken literally, the idea that the wealthy were estranged from crusading was absurd, self-defeating and untrue. Such anti-materialist rhetoric caused difficulties. The crusaders’ exemption from usury and immediate repayment of debts, current at least since the 1140s, awkwardly undermined their creditworthiness just at the moment they were most in need of loans. However, attacks on the wealthy were not quite what they seemed. In a crusade sermon designed for use on Holy Cross Day – 14 September -composed around the time of the Third Crusade, Alan of Lille made it clear that Christ’s favour was bestowed on the humble not the indigent by quoting Matthew 5:3 (rather than Luke 6:20) ‘blessed are the poor in spirit’ (beati pauperes spiritu).39 Carnality not coffers was the target. Preaching poverty to the destitute was not good policy.
The wealthy and propertied provided the core audience for crusade promoters. A Genoese crusader noted the attraction of the First Crusade for the ‘better sort’. Over a century later, James of Vitry consorted with Genoese high society.40 Around nobles, lords and prelates were their households, clients and servants. Listeners and future crusaders came from a full array of occupations in what was an increasingly specialized economy: bakers, blacksmiths, bowmen, butchers, carpenters, carters, chaplains, chefs, cobblers, ditchers, dyers, fishmongers, knights, masons, merchants, notaries, physicians, potters, sergeants, skinners, squires, tailors, usurers. Sensitivity was shown to regional interests. Local crusade heroes appeared in exempla and, in one, the Flemish custom of pole-vaulting over canals became a metaphor for the crusader in death vaulting over purgatory ‘as if in one leap they pass into heaven’.41
Women attended sermons – three generations of one family at Bedum in 1214. Although often cast as impediments to male partners taking the Cross, many became crucesignatae. Some chroniclers, as if to highlight the gender divide, portrayed women as urging their men to go on crusade while they kept the home fires burning.42 Holding sermons on feast days made whole family outings easier and more likely. The co-opting of the Virgin Mary as a patron of holy war may also have encouraged the support of women, although it is likely that the gender-blind offer of vow redemptions and indulgences proved more tangibly persuasive. Most crusade preachers probably shared the often virulent institutional misogyny of the academic classes of the time, so their references to women tended to be negative, as in the story of the mother who accidentally smothered her baby in punishment for trying to stop her husband taking the Cross. Even the more cheerful account of how agreeing to allow her husband to go on crusade saved a mother in labour assumed initial wifely opposition. In the imagined world of crusade propaganda, obstructive women invited life-threatening illness or terrible misfortune on themselves. Such anecdotes were clearly pitted against the experience of the real risk to hearth, health and happiness presented by the absence of a husband, and one reason no doubt some wives attended sermons was to keep an eye on feckless spouses. Faced with such difficulties, Innocent III effectively re-wrote canon law to allow male crusaders to depart without their wives’ consent, thereby unilaterally denying them their conjugal rights. Nonetheless, both James of Vitry at Genoa and the provost of Arles and his team at Marseilles used women to further the cause, acknowledging their closet influence. As further incentive, during the first half of the thirteenth century it became established that a crusader’s wife and children shared in his plenary indulgence.43
The physical conditions and attention span of the listeners aroused concern. Unless sprawled across summer meadows, most audiences, like that at Basel in 1201, stood, as they did during church services and as crowds at mass rallies have always done. Preachers had to take account of this. Humbert of Romans warned that any audience could include people who did not want to be there, left early, could not stay still, wandered about disturbing others, were not listening but were doing something else, or were simply bored. In advising how best to capture listeners’ interest, he admitted that not every cleric was up to it, from the ignorant to the over-educated.44 Congregations could be noisy, whistling, interrupting, applauding, talking, or just dozing. From Urban II’s whipping up cries of ‘Deus lo volt!’ at Clermont, vocal reactions were integral to many sermons. This could get out of hand. Heckling was inevitable, sometimes derailing dialectic sophistication, as the smart canon lawyer Hostiensis encountered to his cost when preaching a crusade against the Hohenstaufen in Germany in 1251. Crowds could get out of control. Gerald of Wales recorded a posse of over-excited Welshmen chasing Archbishop Baldwin after his sermon at Hay-on-Wye demanding to receive the Cross.45 Overall numbers drummed up by a preaching tour might have been in the thousands, especially if local lords led their followers into the commitment. However, individual congregations might produce only a few dozen or scores. Even the self-satisfied preachers in Marseilles in the winter of 1223–4 only claimed one or two hundred a day, even though apparently hardly a household failed to produce a crucesignatus. This might imply preachers had gone round door to door, as James of Vitry did in Acre in 1217. Personal canvassing appears in accounts of preaching elsewhere. Although private proselytizing was associated with heretics, supplementing the chance dynamics of mass meetings with private conversations was approved and made sense.46
At large set-piece orations, despite the vocal projection of trained preachers, probably only those at the front heard properly. Details would have been passed to those further away. To achieve any wider coverage, speeches’ content was signalled in advance or circulated subsequently, orally or by newsletter, a common-enough technique for public meetings until the twentieth century. Although written versions of actual live crusade sermons, known as reportationes, were compiled from notes taken at the time, it is unclear if any were deployed for immediate promotional purposes or just reserved as academic models for future use.47 However, precise meaning may have been less important than stage management. Prudent preachers left little to chance or oratory. Apart from setting an example by taking the Cross themselves, some ensured a pre-selected member or members of the congregation would come up first to take the Cross; as one such plant put it, ‘to give strong encouragement to the others and an added incentive to what they had just been told’.48 Preachers travelled with entourages, and local clergy were on hand, so finding stooges would not have presented a problem. Claques could be organized; at Clermont one such reportedly began the chanting of ‘Deus lo volt!’ Community singing could be arranged to heighten the revivalist atmosphere and add peer pressure on the reluctant. Crowds were additionally encouraged to heap insults on the standoffish, a nasty exercise in deliberately contrived mob tyranny.49
Such devices could misfire. Demotic crusade evangelism courted social unrest with its manifesto of violence and equality. If all crucesignati were equally liberated from sin through personal contrition and fighting for the Cross, officially, there could be no social hierarchy in salvation. Encouraging emotions of fear, guilt, violence and revenge, undifferentiated calls to attack the ‘enemies of Christ’ provoked massacres of Jews in Germany in 1096 and 1146 and in England in 1190. Provocation for the so-called Children’s Crusade in 1212 in northern France and western Germany came from devotional crusade processions and overlapping preaching campaigns stressing the threats to Christendom in Spain, Languedoc and the Holy Land.50 Faced by preachers celebrating the divine mission of the faithful poor to succeed where the military elites had failed, audiences were propelled into collective action challenging traditional social discipline. In part, Innocent III’s careful regimentation of preparations for the Fifth Crusade from 1213 sought to counter such unlicensed enthusiasm. However, his offer of indulgences for cash redemptions of vows and other donations still excluded many from crusade action, contradicting the rhetoric of inclusive salvation. Popular demonstrations from excluded crusade enthusiasts, in northern France in 1251 and 1320 or among the urban poor on the streets of London in 1309, showed that audiences could not always be taken for granted.51 One hostile but baffled observer of the First Crusade publicity campaign noted how excitement over the Jerusalem project spread out of control, by word of mouth, one person to another.52 In this detonation of rumour, crusade ceremonies provided the ignition; they could not necessarily confine the combustion.
LANGUAGE
Promotional events offered ritualized engagement, not invitations to public debate; direct but formal communication. While most sermons survive in Latin, they were not necessarily delivered in Latin. A famous story about Bernard of Clairvaux’s preaching the Second Crusade in Germany described how he was understood by people who did not know the language he was preaching in. This suitably miraculous memory was recycled by Gerald of Wales when recalling how he wowed an audience at Haverfordwest in 1188 despite speaking only in Latin and French, languages unknown to his Anglo-Welsh listeners. Gerald noted that Bernard had been speaking French (lingua Gallica) to his German audience, not Latin. Bernard’s own secretary’s recollection of the same event did not explicitly deny this; and he may have been taking notes. Whichever language Bernard spoke, the need for intelligibility dictated the presence of interpreters, even though their efforts reportedly fell completely flat. The story was designed – and repeated – to highlight the superiority of divinely inspired spiritual response over literal understanding. It also exposed a genuine problem.53
In polyglot landscapes regional languages and dialects overlapped and co-existed with elite vernaculars – such as Anglo-Norman French in England – and Latin, the language of learning, the liturgy and the Bible, the language of God. If, as claimed, preachers spoke with the voice of God (vox Dei), it had to be in Latin. Clerical audiences could be expected – sometimes wrongly – to understand Latin. However, given the Latinate culture of courtly life, aristocratic education, financial accounting, contracts and administration, many lay people may also have been able to follow a basic Latin speech, especially one that relied on a few key words – Deus, Christus, crux, redemptio, salvatio, Terra Sancta, milites Christi, diabolus, infideles, ultio, devotio, contritio, remissio, peccatum, peregrinus, accipio, sequor, paradisus – and employed simple repeated tropes, as in the Brevis ordinacio’s ‘Surge ergo’. As Humbert of Romans commented, ‘a good preacher . . . will see to it that he does not say many things, and will say them in few words’.54 Meaning was enhanced with ritual, props, vocal emphasis and gestures. Crusade preaching and Cross-taking shared a lexicon and choreography with the familiar Latin liturgy. In Romance-speaking areas Latin may not have seemed alien or far removed from vernacular speech, for example in Italy where the Frenchman James of Vitry scored a success in 1216. Latin provided an international language, a lingua franca suitable for international publicity and polyglot groups, such as armies. When the Portuguese Bishop Peter Pitões addressed cosmopolitan crusader forces at Oporto in 1147, he used Latin so that interpreters for each individual regional contingent could understand what he was saying. At Llandaff in south Wales on 15 March 1188, Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury and his team were confronted by a segregated audience: on one side the English; the Welsh on the other.55 Using Latin and leaving the rest to interpreters probably seemed the best thing to do.
Nonetheless, to ensure God’s faithful understood His word, preachers employed the vernacular or a mixture of languages. The vernacular made addresses by the laymen Bohemund of Antioch in Chartres Cathedral in 1106 or Esbern at the Danish court at Christmas 1188 especially powerful.56 Innocent III preached in Italian as well as Latin, on one, non-crusading, occasion forced into extempore translation from a Latin text when his memory failed him.57 In medieval Europe the well educated were all at least bilingual in Latin and their own vernacular. Many were polyglot. Abbot Samson of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, Paris-trained but not the most overtly scholarly of monks, reportedly preached in Latin, French and his native Norfolk English dialect.58 Increasingly in the twelfth century the vernaculars themselves were becoming respectable literary languages in verse and prose epic, romance, history and chronicles. By 1200 a bishop of Paris had produced a sizeable compendium of French vernacular sermons. Three generations later, Humbert of Romans insisted that an effective preacher needed ‘to express himself well in the vulgar tongue’.59 While sermons directed at fellow clergy were likely to have been in Latin, crusade preaching was aimed primarily at the laity whose Latinity could not be assumed. This attention to preaching in the vernacular reveals itself in macaronic (i.e. mixed Latin and vernacular) texts, such as the Brevis ordinacio with its French punch lines to Latin exempla. Papal bulls were translated for preachers’ use. Preaching circuits traced linguistic rather than political boundaries: northern or southern French; High or Low German. French-speaking areas of the western empire might be lumped together with dioceses in the kingdom of France; preachers in Germany might be assigned German-speaking parts of Flanders but not French ones. In 1214 Oliver of Paderborn concentrated on Low German-speaking areas of the vast archdiocese of Cologne, while Albert the Great in 1263–4 spent his time in High German-speaking regions. Speaking the local language, they would have expected to use it.60 The use of local diocesan clergy and mendicants confirmed a prudent linguistic sensitivity.
Nonetheless, interpreters were ubiquitous. Gerald of Wales, who preached in Latin and French, noted Archbishop Baldwin’s need for interpreters, not necessarily because he used Latin but because, like Gerald, he did not speak in Welsh. Help came from the local clergy led by the archdeacon of Bangor. The divide between different vernaculars was possibly more of a problem than that with Latin. In Germany, Bernard of Clairvaux could only preach in French, not in German, so he required interpreters, an exact parallel to Archbishop Baldwin in 1188. After preaching in French-speaking Flanders, Cardinal Henry of Albano faced identical difficulties on his arrival in Germany in 1188, one contemporary commenting that, being French, Henry knew no German but managed well enough through interpreters.61 Forging an emotional link with a crowd of strangers was easier if you could speak their language. Foreign grandees operated at a disadvantage. When preaching the Cross at Lincoln in 1267, Cardinal Ottobuono Fieschi (the future Pope Adrian V, July to August 1276, one of the few popes never to have been ordained a priest) needed two friars and the cathedral’s dean to get his message across. Inability to engage in vernacular banter or argument with his German audience may have contributed to the Italian Hostiensis’s problems in Germany in 1251. As the account of the bishop of Oporto’s address in 1147 makes clear, some crowds expected their sermons to be in their own language.62 Crusade organizers obliged.
PROPS, PERFORMANCE AND DRAMA
Crusading became materially embedded in the cultural landscape. Certain saints’ shrines or relics possessed crusade associations (such as that of the Crown of Thorns in Louis IX’s Sainte Chapelle in Paris). So too did tombs of former crusaders or churches constructed in imitation of the Holy Sepulchre or the al-Aqsa mosque (e.g. the late twelfth-century Temple Church in London). Sites recalled crusade connotations (such as Vézelay, site of Bernard of Clairvaux’s iconic sermon in 1146 and the joint departure point for the crusades of Richard I and Philip II in 1190). Memories were decorated and preserved in sculpture (e.g. the well-known portrayal of a crusader and his wife at Beval in Lorraine), stained glass (famously the First Crusade cycle in the mid-twelfth-century glass at St Denis near Paris), murals (e.g. the famous Templar series at Cressac-sur-Charente or scenes of the Passion in the chapel of the Holy Sepulchre in Winchester Cathedral, c.1227, or the scenes of the Third Crusade on the walls of the palaces of Henry III of England) and other church and domestic decoration (e.g. the mosaic commemorating the taking of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204 in Ravenna or Henry III of England’s floor tiles depicting Richard I and Saladin). Crusading was paraded in regular special liturgies and processions instituted by Innocent III; in the chests placed in parish churches for crusade donations; and through prayers and masses for the dead that included the liberation of Jerusalem, regular demands for money, and offers of indulgences. Such presence in the normal social lives of western Europeans provided an increasingly rich private backcloth for public attempts to rouse enthusiasm.63
To secure such active support called for the populism of the circus not the dialectic of the study. Words were complemented by visual and theatrical display. Performance was essential. The rites for taking the Cross, in all their local and regional variety, were intrinsically theatrical: declamatory dramas.64 Unlike the ceremonies of dubbing knights, where the clergy blessed the symbols of knighthood that were then bestowed on initiates by laymen, in granting the Cross the role of the priest was central throughout, from the Mass, to the sermon, to the blessing and actual giving out of the crosses. Tricks were legion. Sermons were carefully staged. Platforms served as more than just pulpits. At Vézelay at Easter 1146 one collapsed under the weight of the grandees on display to support Bernard of Clairvaux. Preachers used pulpits as stages. They employed an array of facial expressions, hand and body gestures and vocal modulations to suit the words, as if taking different parts in a dramatic monologue or play. Experts’ pleas for discretion and moderation suggest more than a few performances went over the top. John of Xanten preached with his eyes shut as if in a divine trance.65 The act could begin with elaborate prayers and holy water being scattered liberally as a prelude to the main show. Histrionics came with props. The most common were crosses or crucifixes, held up to emphasize key points in the argument. In Wales in 1188, a cross was passed to each speaker in turn, almost like a microphone. One late fourteenth-century showman, Bishop Henry Despenser of Norwich, apparently heaved a large life-sized replica cross onto his shoulders, which he later erected on the chancel steps to encourage his congregation. Some claimed their cross contained a relic of the True Cross. Urban II carried samples with him in 1095–6. During the siege of Lisbon a preacher claimed to be brandishing ‘a sacred piece of the wood of the Lord’.66
Such claims could backfire. A possibly apocryphal story circulating in English monastic circles told of a French abbot, during the preaching of the First Crusade, who was struck down with cancer for trying to pass off a cross he had made himself as a gift from God, the dangers of forgery presumably being the point of this story. Whether many preachers went as far as another French abbot, who gave himself a nasty life-long wound by branding or cutting a cross on his forehead at the time of the First Crusade, is unknown. Tattoos of the Cross seemed to have been popular among early crusaders, acts of devotion or, alternatively, literal-mindedness sniffed at by the bien pensant.67 The customary visual aids were, of course, the prefabricated crosses that were handed out. Stories of preachers, such as Bernard at Vézelay, running out of these – they were usually made of cloth, sometimes silk, occasionally metal – reveal preparation. When things went wrong, the desired group hysteria could boil over into riot, as at Rouen in 1096.68
One means of crowd control was to direct audience participation. Repeated refrains (e.g. ‘Surge ergo’ in the Brevis ordinacio) invited joining in. Building to repeated verbal climaxes was a standard rhetorical ploy to excite an audience, employed successfully, so he claimed, by Gerald of Wales in 1188. The manuscript of Humbert of Romans’s De predicatione s. Crucis indicates where in a sermon certain appropriate hymns should be sung. Community singing or chanting were – and are – familiar ways to galvanize and unite a crowd. Archbishop Anselm of Milan got his audiences in 1101 to ‘sing the song of Ultreia Ultreia (Onward! Onward!)’.69 Songs, hymns and verses, sacred and profane, punctuated crusade propagandizing from the Council of Clermont’s Deus lo volt! to the masses for Jerusalem sung by chantry priests in the fifteenth century to the verses of poets and troubadours. Their core messages displayed marked homogeneity: obligation, reward through suffering, the generosity of God, the true worth of spiritual gain against material pleasure. Consistent repetition of these tropes indicate that audiences attended sermons less to be persuaded than to be entertained and given the chance to sign up for the benefits. Novelty could play badly.70
Visual aids added further spice. Two distant Muslim writers, disdainful of iconodule infidels, claimed propagandists for the Third Crusade used pictures to alarm audiences. The chief judge of Saladin’s army, Baha al-Din Ibn Shaddad, in a laudatory biography of his master, recorded that preachers in the west displayed a large image (presumably on wood or canvas) of a Muslim cavalryman trampling the Holy Sepulchre, which his horse was fouling. A contemporary Syrian historian, Ibn al-Athir, described how crusade promoters hawked around a placard of Christ being beaten up by Muhammed: ‘They put blood on the portrait of the Messiah and said to the people: “This is the Messiah with Muhammed, the prophet of the Muslims, beating him. He has wounded and slain him.” ’71 Despite their source, neither story is inherently unlikely. Sermons were delivered in churches covered in frescoes and sculptures showing relevant scenes from the Bible or more directly pertinent crusade stories in stone, glass or paint. Audiences were attuned to reading such visual narratives.
Elements of drama added to the impression of popular entertainment. According to Ibn al-Athir the placard of Christ and Muhammed was accompanied by clerics, nobles and knights from Outremer dressed in mourning black. What better advocates than penitent sufferers of the disasters that needed avenging? Although letters from Outremer veterans were circulated, public guest appearances by them, with one exception, have largely escaped record. Archbishop Joscius of Tyre brought the bad news of the Hattin disaster to Italy and then preached in France. His witness lent authority to his appeals to the kings of France and England and the count of Flanders at Gisors in January 1188. He also could speak northern French. Joscius cannot have come alone. He did not sail the black-sailed ship he travelled in from Tyre to Sicily by himself and he would have been supported by an entourage. Joscius’s mission may in fact have provided the inspiration for Ibn al-Athir’s story, although he put Patriarch Heraclius at its head instead, an understandable error.72 The use of veterans and victims was not exclusive to 1188. In 1106 Bohemund, whose own reputation guaranteed a sympathetic audience, trailed in tow his pet claimant to the Byzantine throne.
The drama of preaching expanded into actual theatre. In 1207, Innocent III seemed to acknowledge the legitimacy of devotional plays, provided clerical actors did not overdo the theatricality. This recognized the parallel development of Easter, Christmas and other theatrical presentations designed to flesh out and explain biblical stories and Christian teaching. In many of these, the cross would literally have taken centre stage.73 One of the more eccentric devotional dramas was performed one winter, probably that of 1205/6, at Riga, newly built command centre of the missionary crusade to Livonia. Appropriately, this ludus magnus portrayed biblical warriors smiting infidel foes. Interpreters were on hand to explain the moral of the show to the apparently disconcerted and probably bemused audience of recently (and forcibly) converted ex-pagans.74 Given their intrinsic showiness and devotional context, staged crusade presentations could slide easily into overt theatricality. Taking the Cross was itself a dramatic performance. The reported scenes of religious fervour at Speyer at Christmas 1146 when, with carefully prepared ceremony, Bernard of Clairvaux gave the Cross to Conrad III of Germany are unmistakably theatrical. Bernard presided over the Mass and then preached the Cross, adopting the role of God: ‘O man, what is there that I should have done for you and did not?’ Conrad assumed the part of the penitent convert, replying ‘I am ready to serve’ before taking the Cross and a military banner that was lying on the altar: ritual as drama.75
Few sermons, prayer meetings, processions or other crusade ceremonies competed in dramatic impact with that in Venice in 1258 recorded by the Franciscan writer Salimbene de Adam. In order to inflame his audience to take the Cross to fight the Hohenstaufen-supporting ruler of Treviso, Alberigo of Romano, Cardinal Ottaviano degli Ubaldini, the papal legate, produced thirty noblewomen Alberigo had allegedly sadistically abused. They had been stripped naked in public and forced to watch their husbands, sons, brothers and fathers being hanged. Apparently Cardinal Ottaviano milked their plight for all it was worth: ‘in order to anger the people more against Alberigo . . . the cardinal . . . had the women come forth in the same shameful and nude condition that the wicked Alberigo had reduced them to’. This macabre display worked. The crowd was roused into a suitable frenzy of outraged self-righteous fury, complete with chants of ‘So be it! So be it!’, before taking the Cross en masse. Salimbene attributed the success of this operation to the cardinal’s skill, revulsion at Alberigo’s atrocities, the plenary indulgence and ‘because [the people] saw the shameful dishonour that those ladies suffered’. Despite his reputation as a tough partisan in the messy papal/Hohenstaufen conflicts in Italy, it may be doubted whether the cardinal actually paraded a troupe of naked well-born ladies in front of the Venetian populace. He may have used actors. Or Salimbene, who enjoyed gossip, exaggeration and a good story, may be an untrustworthy witness. Nonetheless, this improbable alliance of sado-erotic drama with liturgical ceremony only stands at one extreme of a system of persuasion by performance that characterized all crusade appeals.76
If profane theatricals provided one means to grab attention, divine intervention remained even more sensational. Stories of miracles were a normal accompaniment to preaching tours, even clustering around the less than charismatic Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury. They emphasized the redemptive and curative power of the Cross and the role of preachers as mediators of God’s grace. Miracle propaganda aimed to convince its audience of the temporal as well as spiritual efficacy of the enterprise. Miracles of healing and pain relief addressed matters of immediate, universal and daily concern. Crusade miracles were no exception, healing the blind, lame, deaf, dumb and deranged. Bernard of Clairvaux was reported to have performed well over four hundred cures of the sick and, in one case, the dead. Rumours of thaumaturgy worked as illustrations of God’s immanence and were highly popular. Miracles were consumer-led; clients sought out the miracle worker. After his tour of Germany, Bernard of Clairvaux had to turn away crowds who sought his healing.77 In the drama of giving and receiving the Cross, the miraculous confirmed the preacher’s Christ-like role.
More evanescent, celestial visions, conjured up on cue, visible to all, not just the halt and the sick, provided some of the most enduring copy for crusade commentators. Matthew Paris placed Oliver of Paderborn’s apparitions in his list of most memorable events between 1200 and 1250. Paris also noted how the story had been carefully circulated in official letters read out publicly.78 Imaginative interpretations of meteorological activity had provided a usefully apocalyptic dimension to the preaching of the First Crusade. Heavenly signs appeared to order. A 1096 charter of the Poitevin abbey of St Maixent was dated ‘when Pope Urban was at Saintes [13 April] and the sign of the cross appeared in the sky’.79 Not all were persuaded. The suspicion lingered that believing was seeing, not vice versa. Guibert of Nogent, a fierce critic of phoney relics and what he called ‘vulgar fables’, noted with contempt the wishful thinking of a crowd he was in at Beauvais who imagined the clouds overhead formed a cross; he only saw what looked a bit like a stork or a crane. Guibert was also deeply sceptical about claims of miraculous signs of the Cross appearing on crusaders’ bodies; he attributed them to self-mutilation or tattoos.80 Yet crosses – in the sky, on bodies, on stage, in the pulpit – became adhesive companions to the publicity of words. At about the same time as crosses were appearing over Frisia in 1214, the Cistercian abbot of Bonneval conjured one up to coincide with his call to take the Cross against the Albigensian heretics. According to the abbot, who helpfully spread the story, the cross usefully pointed towards Toulouse, the alleged centre of heresy.81
The abbot’s care in passing on the story was significant. By themselves, visions served as transitory coups de théâtre. To be effective propaganda, they required publicity. Chroniclers, like the one who recorded the abbot of Bonneval’s account, necessarily exerted a narrow and delayed influence. The letters circulated by Oliver of Paderborn wielded a greater immediate impact. A stack of references to his visions appeared in near-contemporary chronicles across northern Europe. Visions became a staple. Occasionally, drama outstripped theology, as with the heavenly dragons over Cologne that accompanied preaching a crusade to resist the Mongols in 1241. Some accounts reached exempla collections, such as that of a vision of the Virgin and Christ-child accompanying cross-taking included in Stephen of Bourbon’s (d.1261) preaching manual.82 The laity became complicit, accustomed to expect such miraculous signs and accordingly seeing them apparently without prompting. Roger of Wendover, a monk of St Albans, recorded how the preaching campaign during the summer of 1227 was accompanied across southern England by numerous visions of Christ crucified. A fishmonger and his son saw one in the sky on their way to market near Uxbridge in north-west Middlesex, later regaling their customers with the story. Not all believed them until further apparitions overcame the doubters. Wendover summed up the point of these stories: ‘in these [visions] the Crucified One himself deigned to open the heavens and to show the incredulous his wonderful glory with immense splendour’.83 For the clerical elites involved in crusade preparations, that was precisely the effect they strove for.
TWO PREACHERS AT WORK
Although crusade propaganda campaigns were fully systematized only after 1200, a taste of the complex methods of inducement can be sampled through the activities of two very different agents of the Third Crusade, Henry of Marcy, cardinal bishop of Albano, and Gerald of Barry, usually known as Gerald of Wales.
Henry of Albano 1188–9
Cardinal Bishop Henry of Albano was an energetic, doctrinally muscular prelate and former abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Clairvaux whose career had been marked by militant activism in promoting orthodoxy. Between 1178 and 1181, he had led preaching and armed repression against supposed heretics in southern France. His reward was to be made a cardinal in 1179. Henry represented a new sort of career cleric. Not content with the abbacy of one of the most famous religious houses in Europe, Henry attached himself to the international authority of the papacy, giving him the freedom to act as a roving agent of Church discipline and reform. His effectiveness was recognized in a later, possibly spurious story that on the death of Pope Urban III in October 1187 Henry had been offered the papal throne. In the event, the new pope, Gregory VIII, appointed him papal legate to France and Germany to preach the Cross and exercise authority over the whole process of diplomacy, propaganda and recruitment. Between November 1187 and March 1188, Henry travelled from Ferrara in north-east Italy to eastern France and western Germany. At some point he met Frederick Barbarossa of Germany and with him summoned the ‘court of Jesus Christ’ at Mainz on 27 March 1188. Henry may have shared in negotiations between the German emperor and the French king in December 1187 and either he or another legate assisted at a recruitment rally at Strasburg the same month. Henry meanwhile travelled in a great arc through Hainault to Mons, Nivelles, Louvain and Liège before reaching the Rhineland in time for the assembly at Mainz. There the German emperor took the Cross with large sections of the German nobility. Cardinal Henry continued his evangelizing efforts until his death at Arras in January1189.84
During this period, Henry’s role was as much administrative as propagandist. His activities engaged a variety of media: performance, spectacle, spoken word, written text, possibly visual display. There were ceremonies, at Strasburg and Mainz, and sermons, as in Hainault. Papal letters, primarily Gregory VIII’s bull Audita Tremendi, provided the central theme on which preachers could extemporise. The verbal images of desecration of the Holy Places may have inspired or copied posters of atrocities. While private diplomacy, such as the deliberations with Frederick I, was crucial to the adherence of rulers and their followers, publicity reached beyond personal engagement through correspondence, newsletters and pamphlets. The dissemination of Audita Tremendi and other related bulls, such as that sent to the Danes, Quum divina patientia, can be traced through the copies in contemporary chronicles, particularly those associated with royal courts. For all its importance, Audita Tremendi survives only in two English and one German chronicle, emphasizing papal dependence on local acceptance.85 The bull’s puritanically penitential moral and sumptuary injunctions only received currency through publication by Henry of Albano in Germany and Henry II in England. Propaganda spread effectively along the interlaced networks of the lay and ecclesiastical elites, central crusade messages being carried in diverse strata of exhortatory literature, including vernacular verses by a French civil servant, Berthier of Orleans, or the noble Picard literatus Conon of Béthune, with his call to arms masquerading as love poetry.86
In this operation, Henry performed a variety of roles. He preached, although not at the grand state occasions at Strasburg and Mainz, deferring to locals such as the bishops of Strasburg and Würzburg. During Lent in Hainault, Limbourg and at Liège, Henry encountered mixed success. Although the sermons do not survive, during these months he wrote letters and a substantial exhortatory tract, which may indicate something of what he said. The letter summoning the Mainz assembly, probably written before Christmas 1187, owed a general debt to Audita Tremendi of late October and early November, which Henry may have helped compose: loss of the Holy Land and the Cross; desecration of Holy Places; the sins of Christians redeemed by Christ’s offer of repentance through avenging the insult to God. The Mainz summons struck a more personal note by incorporating the language used by Henry’s Cistercian predecessor, Bernard of Clairvaux, promoter not only of the Second Crusade but also the Order of the Templars. Henry addressed the Germans as ‘knights of Christ’ adopting, like the Templars, the ‘breastplate of faith and the helmet of salvation’. He borrowed Bernard’s famous punning contrast between bad and good knighthood, malitia and militia, proclaiming the Cross as the ‘banner of Christian knighthood’. Such inter-textual wordplay may have escaped the letter’s recipients, but it shows the care taken in constructing a message specifically designed to attract fighting men.87
A more extended advocacy was contained in Henry’s lengthy meditation on the spiritual journey to the City of God, i.e. Heaven, De peregrinante civitate Dei, addressed to the Cistercian monks at Clairvaux and probably completed in the second half of 1188. In Tract 13, ‘А Lament on Jerusalem captured by the infidel’, Henry turned from the spiritual to the political.88 The Cistercians, in Bernardine tradition, remained closely associated with crusading, providing international support as well as recruiting agents. Cistercian liturgy included regular prayers for crucesignati. Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury, who led the Church’s crusade effort in England and Wales, was another former Cistercian abbot and used at least two Cistercian abbots to assist him. In France, the Cistercians’ role was recognized in their exemption from the Saladin Tithe.89 Henry’s intended audience was therefore likely to be wider than just his confrères.
The De peregrinante picked up a theme in his letter to the Germans, one only briefly mentioned in Audita Tremendi, the loss and desecration at Hattin of the True Cross. This was one of the many splinters or fragments believed to be from the wood of the cross of the Crucifixion that the Franks of Jerusalem carried with them into battle as a talisman of God’s favour and protection. Throughout the 1188–90 recruitment drive, the symbol of the Cross dominated, the term crucesignatus to describe a crusader now becoming standard. In his tract, Henry echoed the Mainz summons, describing the Cross as ‘the medicine for sins, the care of the wounded, the restorer of health’, and, more grandly, the ‘ark of the vassal of God, the ark of the New Testament’. Henry’s stock phrases were copied, at times verbatim, by other crusade publicists, such as Peter of Blois, then Latin secretary and legal adviser to Archbishop Baldwin. Peter had travelled with the papal court in the autumn of 1187; the language he uses in his own pamphlets lamenting the disaster of Hattin, the loss of the Holy Land and the sluggishness of the Christian response, closely echo Henry’s.90 Such similarities were hardly random. The propaganda tone was set by a small circle; both Henry and Baldwin were ex-Cistercian abbots; Baldwin employed Peter of Blois; Peter could well have encountered Henry at the papal curia; both Baldwin and Peter had been pupils at Bologna under Uberto Crivelli who, as Pope Urban III, had received the news of Hattin. In the following months, Henry, Baldwin and Peter all spent considerable time with the secular rulers of Germany and the Angevin empire respectively. Personal contact was supplemented by the written word, especially letters that framed crisis and response. The propaganda campaign was thus orchestrated by a close circle of clerical writers, academics, administrators and diplomats. At its inception, the crusade appeared as much a contrived intellectual concept as a populist call to arms. The trick was to translate the one into the other. Judged by the massive numbers who signed up, it worked.
Weaving the metaphorical with the political, the De peregrinante demonstrated a range of publicity techniques. Muslim desecration of the Holy Places (and in particular the True Cross) appeared as a sort of second crucifixion, the Cross ‘captured, mocked, dishonoured with the filth of all its enemies’.91 Baha al-Din Ibn Shaddad’s and Ibn al-Athir’s posters come to mind. The latter’s description of a placard showing Christ being beaten up by Muhammed mirrors a passage in Henry’s tract in which Muhammed glorifies Christ’s ignominy at the loss of the Cross, a triumph over Christ himself. Desecration, defilement and insult supplied emotional bite to crusade propaganda, ultimate atrocities demanding redress. Christ had willed this to test His faithful. Moral reform was essential; so too military action. To drive the point home, Henry drew a comparison with soldiers fighting for their temporal lords: in the Heavenly Lord’s war, the reward is immortality, a familiar crusading trope. The choice lay between the followers of God and a demonized Saladin, an instrument of the devil, a combat of right versus wrong. Using the history of the True Cross from its discovery by St Helena in the fourth century, Henry cited successive heroes who had confronted the infidel: Heraclius, restorer of the Cross to Jerusalem in 630 after its capture by the Persians; Charlemagne; the First Crusade. Academic flashiness then gave way to immediate politics in a final diatribe against delay and backsliders, of whom there were many. In constructing a coherent programme of propaganda and persuasion offering possibilities for oral, written or pictorial presentation, Henry’s language could appeal to separate audiences on different levels. Complex theological issues were arrestingly summarized – and, in phrases such as ‘Christi martyres’, glossed over. Many of the polemical motifs foreshadowed the more extensive preaching of the following century. Anxiety at the progress of preparations pointed to perennial obstacles to translating preaching into crusaders. Henry himself had encountered recidivist local banditry among those he had signed with the Cross in Limbourg in early 1188.92 Before his death in January 1189, he would have witnessed much more.
Gerald of Wales 1188
Henry’s experiences exposed an asymmetry between intellectual endeavour and the untidiness of practical organization, a contrast that similarly haunted the preaching of Baldwin of Canterbury in Wales. One dimension of this was speed of response. However, medieval communications were not necessarily as sclerotic as post-industrial observers sometimes imagine. News of the defeat at Hattin (4 July 1187) reached Sicily perhaps in September and the papal court at Ferrara by mid-October. Immediately letters were sent out warning of the catastrophe. Despite the difficulties of an itinerant court and the sudden death of Urban III, his successor Gregory VIII’s papal bull was drafted and despatched in late October and early November. Individuals, such as Richard of Poitou, the future Richard I, were taking the Cross north of the Alps as early as November, while the pope’s representatives, armed with Audita Tremendi, fanned out across Europe. They reached the German court at Strasburg in December, Denmark by Christmas and Gisors on the borders of Normandy and the Île de France on 21 January 1188. Although the Danish court was apparently stunned by the news, elsewhere it had been anticipated. Before Christmas, Henry II of England had tried to commandeer the profits of the Becket pilgrim trade at Canterbury for the crusade and Henry of Albano had conducted preliminary talks with Frederick Barbarossa.93 The German nobility had been signed up by the end of March, less than six months after the Cross had begun to be preached. Official preaching began in England at Geddington in Northamptonshire on 11 February 1188. By 4 March, Archbishop Baldwin had left Hereford on the road into Wales. At the same time diocesan bishops were at work. By the time the archbishop reached the northern Welsh marches in mid-April, the local bishop, Reiner of St Asaph’s, had already scooped the pool of recruits.94
Almost everywhere Baldwin went he encountered audiences waiting and primed. Details of his itinerary evidently circulated in advance. At the start, he was met by the prince of south Wales, Rhys ap Gruffydd, who later chaperoned the archbishop for some of his journey. At Cardigan Rhys was waiting for the archbishop to arrive. At one time or another, Baldwin encountered all the major princes of the region, bar one, who was excommunicated. These prior arrangements were necessary to secure audiences and recruits, but not sufficient. Without the involvement of lords, crusade vows were easily, probably necessarily, left unfulfilled by their dependants, as happened when Rhys abandoned his commitment (which had not in the event extended to actually taking the Cross himself). Without a lord’s approval, the Cross might not be adopted in the first place. Rhys’s son-in-law asked his permission before taking the Cross at Radnor.95 No leadership; no crusade. Only two minor princes actually took the Cross. Eagerness to greet the archbishop probably owed as much to the need to keep Henry II sweet as to a desire to avenge the insult to Christ.
The significance of securing noble support was reflected in the strenuous efforts made to obtain it. One lord took the Cross one evening after private persuasion by the archbishop.96 For the social elite, adopting the Cross was not solely a matter of conviction or piety. The bishop of Bangor was publicly bullied into becoming a crucesignatus, compliance implying he acknowledged the authority of Canterbury over the Welsh church and Henry II over the Welsh princes.97 Baldwin’s masses in every Welsh cathedral united the political and the pious. The secular agenda of Baldwin’s tour compares with that of the king of France’s attempt to tax his kingdom for the crusade, or Frederick Barbarossa’s use of the court of Jesus Christ to consolidate imperial power within Germany. Baldwin’s contact with local nobility and clergy conformed to experiences elsewhere. Only local leaders could provide the necessary audiences in an overwhelmingly rural setting with only small towns and villages. Not all Baldwin’s large setpiece gatherings occurred in cathedrals, some of the largest being held at Radnor, Cardigan and Haverfordwest (Rhys being in attendance on two of these occasions). Taking the Cross required the approval, not always forthcoming, of close family, kindred and lords, all of whom Baldwin encountered. Crosses were given out in a variety of settings and circumstances: during or after public High Mass; as a result of apparently impromptu petitioning; at an improvised service on an Anglesey beach; after individual discussions following sermons; or even at nocturnal conversations in the archbishop’s lodgings. A decision often represented a conclusion as much as a beginning – for the crowds at the big preaching performances as for those convinced in private discussion – each one involving careful calculation and preparation. However, this was not how it was presented.
Baldwin’s Welsh trip yields such detail about the mechanics of crusade publicity because of the presence of the archdeacon of St David’s, Gerald of Barry, or Gerald of Wales. A fluent, vivid, engaged if by no means entirely reliable narrator or witness, Gerald wrote a detailed account of Baldwin’s Welsh tour, the Itinerarium Cambriae (Journey Through Wales, first redaction c.1191) and referred to the trip in other works. Prone to prejudice and self-aggrandizement, Gerald possessed an alert eye, sharp pen and an analytical mind. From the outset, deliberation and planning emerge clearly. In recalling that he had been the first to take the Cross from the archbishop at Radnor after the initial sermon of the tour, he explained the circumstances:
I threw myself at the holy man’s feet and devoutly took the sign of the cross. It was the urgent admonition given some time before by the king [Henry II] which inspired me to give this example to the others, and the persuasion and oft-repeated promises of the archbishop and Chief Justiciar [Ranulf Glanvill, who was present at the Radnor sermon], who never tired of repeating the king’s words. I acted of my own free will, after anxiously talking the matter over time and time again, in view of the insult and injury being done at this moment to the Cross of Christ. In doing so I gave strong encouragement to the others and an added incentive to what they had just been told.98
Successful ritual depends on efficient choreography. By showing the native audience (Baldwin’s sermon had been translated into Welsh) what to do, Gerald was providing important non-verbal guidance in demonstrating how to receive the Cross. However, Gerald was more than a necessary extra in not-so-amateur theatricals. He had been ordered to take the Cross by his masters because of his political status. A well-connected Anglo-Welshman, Gerald’s relatives were spread among the powerbrokers of Church and state in south Wales and Ireland. Rhys ap Gruffydd was his first cousin once removed. Gerald’s example was thus political as much as it was pious. Neither Gerald nor Rhys actually went on crusade. Yet Gerald’s retrospective insistence that he was moved to avenge the insult to the Cross of Christ, even if literary embellishment, linked his account of Cross-taking in rural Wales with Henry of Albano’s elevated rhetoric to the monks of Clairvaux in southern Champagne.
Gerald’s commentary exposes many of the techniques that sustained crusade preaching across generations. Aristocratic and ecclesiastical affinities provided congregations and settings. Baldwin summoned an audience to Haverfordwest ‘as being in the centre of the province’, accessible.99 Context was carefully contrived. Preaching and Crossgiving usually followed the Mass. The two religious acts shared being essentially spectator performances, communion rarely being taken by laymen at the time, participation in both being largely passive and occasionally vocal. The miracle of the real presence of Christ appropriately framed the call to defend His name and Cross. The memory was reinforced by stories of miracles associated with Baldwin’s preaching recorded by Gerald only three or four years later. An array of preaching devices, props and techniques were described. Preachers brandished a cross to illustrate the twin themes of revenge and repentance. Style mattered. Gerald – at his most vain – later noted how he succeeded in lighting up a curmudgeonly audience at Haverfordwest where the archbishop had signally failed. Speaking first in Latin, then French, he divided his address into three parts, probably following the pattern of the papal bull: the casus belli; the obligation; the remedy. Each was rounded off with a rousing, possibly repetitive refrain, perhaps in the manner of the later English Brevis ordinacio. Apparently, at the end of each section, Gerald was interrupted and forced to pause as the crowds pressed forward to take the Cross. Gerald’s artful performance conformed to standard rhetorical models.100 There was nothing random about any part of it.
Positive responses could not be taken for granted. Gerald’s account is peppered with stories of preaching failure and audience reluctance. Although resistance to the crusade message, often misogynistically attributed to the malign influence of women, was, in Gerald’s triumphalist account, repeatedly overcome by eloquence or quasi-miraculous conversion, even the best-planned campaign met opposition or indifference. Baldwin and his team’s reliance on local interpreters led by Archdeacon Alexander of Bangor posed performance difficulties. Near-simultaneous translation interrupted the flow of the ritual, especially if speeches in Latin or French required more than one translation to cater for segregated English- and Welsh-speaking audiences, as at Llandaff. In his aping the famous story of Bernard of Clairvaux, Gerald cast doubt on the efficacy of translation altogether.101 In a replay at St David’s, Gerald recalled, the translated Welsh version of his sermon actually repelled those who had just been moved to take the Cross by his own incomprehensible address.102 To provide a respectable theoretical gloss, Gerald emphasized the transcendent rather than rational nature of the conversion to the Cross, the internal working of the Holy Spirit, as he called it, which operated beyond words. By contrast, at exactly the same time, the perhaps more practical Henry of Albano, a native Frenchman, was content to use German speakers in Germany, preaching himself only in largely French-speaking areas.
Despite the insistent literary and propagandist pretence of spontaneity, Gerald’s experience matched Henry of Albano’s in revealing how the crusade preaching carefully and deliberately harnessed the senses. The spoken words were heard, seen, written about, and even physically commemorated, as in the chapel erected on the site of Baldwin’s sermon at Cardigan.103 Cardinal Henry and Archdeacon Gerald carried papal letters that informed the sermons they staged and created visual and aural impressions both immediate and lasting. Descriptions were soon disseminated: Henry’s treatise to the monks of Clairvaux; Gerald’s compendious account of the Welsh tour. Each element connected and enhanced the others. Letters, pamphlets, written versions of sermons and descriptions of preaching were integral to the process of crusade evangelism. For future edification, Archbishop Baldwin planned to commission a prose history of the anti-Saladin crusade from Gerald himself, while a verse edition would be produced by the archbishop’s nephew, Joseph. Across Europe, others were preparing to do precisely the same.104 Yet, despite all the effort, many, possibly most, who signed up in Wales failed, like Gerald himself, to fulfil their vows. A different set of tactics and techniques was required to translate promises into action.